by Rob Heinze
Thirty-years later and he was facing an old man on a bridge, on an otherwise perfect summer morning.
“You have to go back,” Calvin repeated again.
“Back where?”
“Over the bridge. I have to raise it, Chief’s orders.”
“Why, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know, son, please you have to come with me and get back!”
Calvin was already starting up the bridge, but Rex did not move. He looked back to the woman.
“Is she okay?” He ventured.
“I don’t know,” Calvin huffed, backing away. “Now, sir, I’m putting the bridge up now!”
“Has anyone looked at her?” Rex asked.
“Just me…let’s go!”
“She needs medical help,” Rex said. “I’m a doctor.”
Calvin hesitated a moment. The Chief had said to raise the bridge and send this guy back, but the Chief had left Calvin alone with the man leaking brain matter onto the street and the comatose woman. She probably did need a doctor, medical help, and then there was this dogged fucking pain in his shoulder, dull but not leaving, that scared him a bit. He wasn’t in the shower, true, and he always thought he’d die in the shower, but he suddenly felt it very important that he not die. That was very, very important, because he wanted to know what was happening and because Helena was in town.
“I have an emergency kit in my car,” he said. “Should I get it?”
He took a step towards Calvin, as if awaiting his response. Calvin looked up the road towards Bay Isle. No cars were coming down, no flashing lights, no help: he would be alone without this small Asian man.
“Okay, but move your car down off the bridge. I have to put it up.”
Together the two moved up the bridge. At the top, miraculously, there were no cars behind Rex’s BMW waiting to get through. But looking across the bridge to the winding road coming off the Garden State Parkway, Calvin could see the silvery wink of sunlight playing off a car. It was heading their way. He quickly went into the booth, raised the guard so Rex could get through, then pulled the lever to raise the bridge. There was the familiar shake as the bridge went into motion and a short grinding noise as the bridge rose. Calvin watched it go up, moving slowly, its passage symbolic and somehow terrible. He wished it would hurry up. Rex, meanwhile, waited in the BMW for Calvin, whom he knew would be coming back down. Calvin picked up the pager, which was connected to the central administration building. He tried to call there, got no response, and grabbed his cell phone.
He opened it, saw no missed calls or voicemails, and called Helena.
He knew the answer already. She wouldn’t pick up, would be gone into the…what had the Chief said? They’re like crabs just heading for water?
“Hello?”
For a long time he couldn’t speak. He hadn’t heard her voice; it wasn’t real.
“Calvin, are you there?”
“Helena?”
“What’s wrong?” The concern in her voice.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, why?”
“Nothing…nothing’s happening there?”
“What? What’s happening?”
Calvin wasn’t sure, didn’t know what to tell her. “I don’t know. Chief made me put the bridge up.”
“Put it up?”
“Keep it up.”
“Why?”
“Something’s happening in town, I was worried about you.”
“I don’t see…” There was a pause. On the other end of the phone in a small, unassuming house, Helena Wrigley went to the front door and opened it up. In the street there were cars. Those cars, empty, sat silent along the curbs. In the sky was sun and that sun poured its warmth onto that which she beheld: an empty street. “I don’t see anything.”
“Well, good, stay inside, okay? Just stay inside.”
“You’re scaring me,” she said.
“I know. I’m scared too. I don’t think…I don’t think it’s harmful if you’re not part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“The Chief said people were walking towards the beach, confused-like and distant.”
“What people?”
“Everyone.”
“But not us,” Helena said.
Calvin thought of the young Oriental man, which was how his mind perceived all Asian people. “No, not everyone. Listen, I have to go. There was an accident near the bridge.”
“Oh, God, is anyone hurt?”
He thought about the walker and his head. “Yes.”
“Jesus…”
“I have my phone with me. Stay inside near the phone, okay?”
“Okay. Calvin…”
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He hung the phone up, swallowing, and then put it in his pant’s pocket. The bridge had reached its zenith, a hung black limb against the blue sky, and he went out of the booth and around the guard-rail, which had come back down. The BMW was idling there, waiting. For a moment, Calvin forgot why it was there. Then he saw the young man’s face in the driver side mirror, looking back for him. He went quicker then to the passenger’s side and got it.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Let’s check the woman out.”
The BMW went down the bridge. The traffic trying to enter the island started to build. People got out of cars to see what large ship was passing through the inlet and warranting the raised bridge. But the inlet was empty save for fat seagulls, who likewise seemed confused as to the lack of ships.
Chapter 3
Lynn Rice was doing three things at once: Tweeting, Posting on Facebook and instant messaging her friends. The latter was only for private chatting. Twitter was to show how clever she was. Facebook was just to post stuff about her life for other people to see. She never posted stuff that she didn’t want everyone to know about. This one kid in school had a Facebook page and he had accidentally “liked” some gay porn video, which showed up on his wall, and he had been tormented for an entire year…the next year he had transferred to some private school.
Ten minutes had passed, and the instant message screen hadn’t dinged, her Twitter feed didn’t show any new Tweets, and her Facebook page (on which she had posted a picture of her and two friends just fifteen minutes ago) had no comments.
Something was wrong.
She got her cell and texted Christina, her best friend.
Are you there?
She looked at the iPhone screen, waiting for a return reply to display in the fancy green pop-up box.
Nothing came.
She thought maybe Christina had left the bedroom to go to the bathroom or downstairs or something. So she picked up the land-line phone and called Christina’s room. She let it ring, knowing that Christina would hear it, knowing that she would come running back up the stairs and down the small hallway. Any second, any second Christina would pick it up…but the answering machine picked up on the sixth ring.
“Hey, where are you?”
Lynn hung up. She went back to Twitter. New Tweets were coming in, mostly from celebrities she followed, but none from her friends. Her new Facebook post had a comment, but it was from her cousin who lived in Pennsylvania.
She left the computer and went downstairs. Her mother, who was a school teacher during the year, had been watching TV and she could hear the TV still. She went down the stairs slowly, and the further down she got, the more wrong it felt in the house.
Stop it, you’re just flipping because Christina’s not answering.
In the living room the TV was on but her mother was not there.
“Mom?”
No answer. Lynn went to the other rooms in the house, checking each one. She saw that the front door was standing wide open.
She’s outside, good.
Except she wasn’t: Lynn saw only the day-empty street with light heat wavering off the blacktop. No one was
outside. She went onto the front stoop, inhaling the soon to be stifling heat. She glanced up and down their street but saw no one.
“This is fucked,” she whispered. Then, louder: “Mom?”
She went back inside, not liking the way the outside air felt—charged, somehow, like the static that builds on your hair after coming in from a windy, frosty day. She closed the front door, not sure why, then went to the back of the house and peeped out the sliding glass doors. The small stone patio was empty and the yard was too. It was funny how computers had a way of demanding your whole attention, transfixing you so that the outside world did not exist. Lynn hadn’t heard her mother leave. Nor had she heard the screeching car tires that plowed into five of the flocking people crossing Bay Avenue, just up the block.
She went to the garage door and opened it up. Her mother’s SUV was still in the garage.
She went back upstairs quickly, her breathing faster than normal and her heart beating a way in which she had never felt.
A message had to be on her computer.
There must be a message from one of her friends.
Then, salvation: there was a flashing message on her IM.
Thank GOD! She thought.
She went to the computer, tripping and nearly falling over a pair of boots she had left on the floor. When she got there, her relief vanished: it was a message indicating that her session had been inactive for too long and was closed. She had forgotten about that stupid setting! She checked Tweeter and Facebook. No posts from Bay Isle High students. She wasn’t sure how she made that connection so quickly, almost instinctually, but she had. She sat for a long time at the computer, a slim 14-year-old girl who hadn’t gotten her period yet, and wondered what was happening.
She got up then and went to call her mom. She used the land-line in her room and called her mom’s cell phone, which she heard ringing in the kitchen downstairs.
“Fuck,” she breathed, hanging up. “She left her phone.”
Her dad was an attorney and she rarely called him at work. It was something that his mom also did not do, knowing always how busy he was, but now Lynn didn’t care. She had to scroll in her cell phone for his number, and just called it from the cell. It rang, rang, and the general message came on, asking her for an extension, company directory, and it occurred to Lynn’s subconscious how much time people spent listening to stupid robot voices and always the same ones! She dialed his extension, waited, got voicemail and told him to call her. Then she hung up.
Okay, this wasn’t funny. This was a fucked joke. She didn’t like being scared, not like for real and everything. Just pretend, in movies and books and stuff. For-real scared sucked.
There was a buzz on her iPhone. There was a new email indicating someone sent her a direct message on Facebook. She saw the name in the email subject line as “Derrick Clinton”. Derrick Clinton? She had to think for a moment, then remembered who Derrick Clinton was: a slacker who had almost failed every class this year. Except the year before he had Aced all his accelerated classes. He was in her science class. And that he was…was around was huge: it was someone from Bay Isle High.
She opened Facebook and read the message.
“Hi, are you there? Call me, something’s happening in town.”
He left his number in the message. The profile picture was of him with a hat on slightly off-center. There was a tiny shadow of mustache and hair on his chin. She had barely said three words to him this year at school. She hesitated for a moment, feeling strange calling him and wondering how it would impact her social setting.
Something’s happening in town? What was happening?
She decided that she felt even stranger alone in the house. So she used her cell and called the number. He answered after two rings.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Who is this?”
Now she felt stupid a little. “Lynn. You just PM’ed me on Facebook.”
“Oh yeah. You’re the only one on it from Bay Isle.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Heading to the beach,” he said, casually.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re acting weird. Like my brother was here and we were playing Wii, then all of a sudden, he sat back in the chair and started to do this little…like…seizure or something and it scared me. But then he stopped and sat staring for a while at nothing. I asked him was he okay, but he didn’t answer me. I was about to call to my mom when he got up, left the room, and walked out of the house. Didn’t even put his shoes on or anything. Then I get to the door and I see my mom moving with him, right next to him, going up the street. But, Lynn, everyone was on the street—everyone on my block.”
“Okay,” she said, shaking.
“Something happened to them.”
“My mom’s not here.”
“She got it to,” Derrick said.
“What is…it?”
“I don’t know. Somnambulism or something.”
“What’s that?”
“Really deep sleep walking.”
“Why are they going to the beach?”
“I don’t know. I’ll come get you, we’ll go together and see.”
Lynn hesitated. “You can’t drive.”
“I can drive, I’m just not supposed to.”
“You’ll get arrested.”
“No one’s around,” he said. “No one will know; they’re all going towards the beach.”
She wasn’t sure, didn’t really know Derrick. Even in a situation like this, she thought long and hard about all her actions, which is something her mom and dad always praised her on. Finally she agreed and gave him her address. She hung up the phone, checked the computer again (nothing from local people), and then called her dad’s office, no answer, and then his cell phone. She left messages on each, telling him that she had gone up towards the beach with a kid from school (and left his full name) because something was happening. In the kitchen she left her mom a note too.
Shortly later, there was a horn honk outside. She went to the front door and looked out. There was a blue Honda idling in front of her house. She saw Derrick’s slightly off-center hat and slid her feet into flip-flops. She took her cell, keys and shut the door. Derrick’s window was down and his face looked ashen.
“You won’t believe it,” he said.
“What?”
“There are bodies, on the street.”
“Dead? They’re dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Suddenly Lynn didn’t want to go. Suddenly she wanted to go back inside. Suddenly she wanted to be under her covers. Oh, God, what if one of them was her mom?
“Why are they dead?”
Derrick shook his head and swallowed. “I don’t know. They’re in the street. From the way I seen all those people on my street moving, like sleep-walking, I think maybe they got hit by a car.”
“God…”
“Come on, I want to see what’s happening,” he said. “Maybe we can stop them, if they’re just going to walk into the ocean.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know, Lynn! I don’t know! But my mom and brother are there, so I want to go!”
“Okay!” She said, moving to the car and almost twisting her ankle on the street because she was so shaky.
She got inside, shut the door, and Derrick slammed the gas petal. The car sped away, Lynn holding on to the door handle, and when they saw the first few bodies on the street, she almost started crying.
###
Quentin Warsaw was employed by the Bay Isle City Public Works Department. He had been employed for twenty years, since coming right out of high school. It was a cushy job: he got all the benefits that had put New Jersey into its financial crisis and he was guaranteed a pension for the rest of his life and worked thirty hours a week—rather, clocked thirty hours and actually worked about half that amount.
The Public Works Department had a decent plot of
land on the bay-side (west-side) of the island, where residents could bring recyclables and other trash that wasn’t standard garbage. They had a small administrative building, a huge silo in which they stored the salt for the winter, half-dozen 30 yard dumpsters and a fleet of heavy machinery (back-hoes, dump trucks, excavators) in the back, which reminded him of great big dogs as they lay lazily in the hot sun.
Just before The Swarm started, Quentin had walked past the silo and the sleeping machines. From a bird’s eye view, the Public Works property consisted of a rough circle of cleared land (that active, developed part of the property) that was surrounded by reeds and high grasses. The area immediately surrounding the property were official Wetlands, the permits for which were in his office somewhere: he remembered when the State Department of Environmental Protection had come out in the 1980s, when he was still new in the position. That was about the time when all the environmental stuff started to come to light in the country, and holy shit had all his co-workers scrambled! The director of the public works had come in one morning, telling him that all the crap they had dumped back in the spot—Quentin’s spot—had to go. The State passed new regulations and fuck it if they weren’t going to enforce them. An inspector had been scheduled to visit in the next month or so. We are an official municipality, Quentin, and we cannot get fined or handed violations for the heap back there. Quentin had not been worried, for only he had actually dumped the trash on the property and only he knew of its secret.