by Rob Heinze
Perhaps the God in which Quentin did not believe was merciful, for the screams ended in a garbed, choking noise as the liquid flowed into the open mouths of the spot’s first human sacrifices. Quentin had tried to breathe, had tried to gather his composure, but the screams had destroyed his sanity and he had closed the van and sped away from the circle as the garbage (and people) slowly disappeared into the Earth.
Blessed are the meek, Quentin thought randomly.
He remembered that he had gone home, drank incredible amounts of liquor and stayed indoors for a week. He had eaten unwieldy, insane amounts of food, unable to understand in his drunken haze where his hunger had come from…it was insatiable. Then, on the fourth day, he absently felt the tiny nipple-like protrusions under his tongue, felt how he could pull saliva (digestive, the liquid digested them) out of them at will and he instantly doubled over and vomited onto the kitchen floor. He had eaten so much that he had not stopped vomiting for two days. His extended absence at work had even raised red flags and he had been question by the police in the missing person’s cases for Cole Kensington and his girl. It was weeks later that he had seen Mayor Kensington give his resignation speech, and for a moment redemption was within reach and guilt squirmed under his skin ready to burst forth, but Quentin said nothing and weeks turned to months, then months turned to years and everyone forgot about Cole and the girl except for Quentin Warsaw and the young people’s parents.
Cole had started it all; Quentin Warsaw knew that.
With the exception of Cole and his girlfriend—the girl who had asked him why was he hiding—Quentin had never killed anyone.
He was just the garbage man.
He had met Damiano “Cash” Richardelli about two years after Cole had vanished. He had been in a bar off the island, getting shit-faced and eating a nice meal. Damiano had been sitting next to him, also drinking; they had been talking about the Phillies and whether they had any shot that year to make it to the World Series. The two had clicked, and eventually Quentin had said something about how they had made a mock “Yankee’s Player” and set it up at the end in the Public Work’s yard, so that people could throw bottles at it. They had spent much more time together, first at the bar, and Damiano suggested one night while they were shit-faced that they hit this strip-club. Quentin, not married and with no female connections except with this lady he sometimes laid, thought it sound like a great idea. Normally, Quentin was not a fan of strip clubs, as he had always thought it a waste of money and a sure way to go home with a case of aching testicles. With Damiano, everything was free and the girls did far more than just tease. Quentin did things with these strippers that he hadn’t known existed, and when his friendship with Damiano was solidified, Quentin did something he almost regretted: he told Damiano that if he…if he ever needed to “get rid” of something, Quentin could do it, no questions asked. Damiano’s face had gone dark, blank, and he had grabbed Quentin by the wrist, as if to hold him in place, and he had said, “I don’t like what you’re insinuating. I’m a business man.” Quentin had just shaken his head, unable to talk. “I don’t like what you’re insinuating,” Damiano had repeated. “Okay,” had been all Quentin managed.
About two months after that, Quentin had been at the strip club and Damiano had come into the bar. He had walked to Quentin and whispered, “I want to talk to you,” in his ear. Quentin had followed Damiano into a back office. Damiano had sat at a round table, and motioned for Quentin to sit. Quentin, now feeling a little nervous by Damiano’s serious demeanor, sat and asked if everything was okay. “You tell me,” Damiano had said. “What?” Quentin had replied, and Damiano reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a handful of photographs. He laid them on the table, and for a moment Quentin was stunned mute.
They were pictures of his family: his mother, elderly, walking into her house, his only brother with his wife and two kids—his niece and nephew—playing on their front lawn. His mother lived in North Jersey. His brother lived in fucking Indiana. The photos were taken recently, of that he had no doubt.
“How?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Damiano had said. “What matters is, are we okay?”
“Cash, I have no clue what you’re talking about…”
“Come with me.”
He had led Quentin outside to the back of the club. There was a car parked, which was not Damiano’s car. Damiano opened the truck. There was a white sheet with blood seeping through. Quentin didn’t need to know more.
“Get rid of it,” Damiano had said.
“Okay,” Quentin said.
“I don’t want to know when, or how, but I wanted to make sure you saw the pictures. Did you see them?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Damiano said. “Get rid of him.”
“What about the car?”
“Oh, yeah, that too.”
Quentin had driven the car towards the Public Work’s department in the dark night, wondering about the body that was in the car’s trunk, what business dealings had he messed up and whom had Damiano shot. He drove the car right onto the circle in the clearing, his circle, and left the body in the trunk. He came out and stood watching it, smoking a cigarette, feeling as if he had come home. The reeds around him had whispered in the light breeze, the smoke curling away from his face and scattering. When the pink liquid began appear, glinting like rubies in the sand, Quentin knew he had come home.
Who Wields Me, Wields the World, he had thought randomly.
After that there were more bodies, a steady supply for more than a decade, and once Quentin had asked Damiano if they were selling them wholesale. Damiano had not laughed. Quentin had never joked again. Quentin was never paid for those disposals, and he never asked: he was happy to stand in the pale light of the moon, smoking a cigarette and watching his discovery swallow the world. He was also happy with the wild, unheard of sexual experiences Damiano’s girls (many of whom overdosed or ended up missing) offered him.
Somehow Quentin had stumbled his way to a very dark place, it happening with him almost completely unaware. He had gone on with his life, haunted occasionally by nightmares, and things had been good.
But the land had changed.
It started happening just a couple weeks before The Swarm.
Now Quentin stared at it on the morning of The Swarm. The soggy tract of mostly bare land into which Quentin had fed bodies had shifted so that there was a slight hole in the center of the spot. It was roughly 10 feet by 10 feet. Whenever Quentin came close to it, the sand within the convexity would fall downwards more and these two mounds of sand would appear on either side of the hole and oddly it made Quentin think of a Hamster filling its cheeks with food.
At the bottom of the hole was a curved…what? Quentin wasn’t sure. It looked like an eye, or orb, or clitoris, exposing only its tip. There was motion underneath that peeping shape, whatever it was, and the red radiance that shown therein was bright, so bright: it appeared to be contained by a film or screen, which looked as though it were textured differently than that which it covered.
Quentin was not sure what to make of this new development. He had tried to toss stuff into the opening, but it either landed in the sand around the living thing or struck the living thing and bounced off.
It’s not hungry anymore, Quentin thought. For some reason, it’s not hungry and it has changed.
He was not afraid, not yet, for he had taken care of his place for a long time. He believed it would take care of him, as it had in the past.
“What do you want?” He asked it.
No response. He backed away from the hole, and the sand that had mounded on the left and right receded—Hamster cheeks, he thought. He could see the sand pouring into the hole and soon the secret tip was covered and all that remained was a hole in the sandy soil, which was oddly dry.
It’s waiting for something, he thought. Something very specific.
He had no idea what.
He finished his cigarette, tossed the butt to the ground, and wal
ked back to administration building.
Shortly later, he was sitting at his desk, looking through papers, when he got a brutal erection that felt as if it would tear through his pants. An instant later, a very simple thought occurred to him:
Beach.
“Beach.”
He got up, left the building with his fellow co-workers (none of whom seemed to notice each other), and headed towards the beach with the rest of The Swarm.
Chapter 4
“I can’t believe this shit,” Colin Redman said to the computer.
He was in the office of his huge beach-house that rose, obscene, from the dunes of Bay Isle. From each room in his house the view of the ocean was unbroken. The dunes that preempted the beach were small hills speckled with small growths of grass like green highlights added by painter. He and a few other wealthy people lived on the only section of private beach on Bay Isle. For the first year with his second home, Colin would stand on the house-wide balcony and smell the sea air and hear the sound of the washing waves that seemed to whisper to him, welcome home, my love, welcome home.
That sensation of “new” and “different” passed as quickly as most things in Colin’s life did. Now things were happening outside of him, several things at once, and these happenings were pressing in against him. For instance, the fucking economy. It had tumbled his goddamn net worth. He had pulled a lot of equity out of his stocks. Like the rest of the world, he was unsure of what to do with it. Unlike the rest of the world, he was unsure when he would need millions in liquidity. There was some question as to whether he had used a capital investment into his software company for private purposes: like the six million dollar home on Bay Isle. As the company started to devalue, One World Investments filed suit against him and liens were placed on his townhouse in Manhattan and his beach house in Bay Isle. He could not flip them now, until this was settled, and he wasn’t sure that it would be settled easily.
He picked the phone up and called his attorney, Richard Dagnall, who was in his Manhattan office on Fifth Avenue.
Richard picked up on the third ring, and for a moment, Colin had thought that Richard was going to screen the call.
“Hello, Colin.”
“What is this shit, Richard?”
“What shit?”
“They froze my Fidelity account. I can’t pull anything out.”
“I told you that would happen soon,” Richard said.
“You told me it would happen soon, Richard,” Colin said. “Not to-day!”
“I am sorry.”
“I can’t get anything out.”
“They want to make sure it’s accounted for.”
“It will be.”
“Will it?”
Colin was silent for a long time. He sat back in his chair, gazing out over the still Atlantic. A boat rode the front-side of the horizon, leave a white line of foam in its wake. A seagull landed on his balcony and perched there, watching him. It was big fucker: the sort that eats rats or small children. Its eyes were black ink drops, soulless and questioning. Colin stood from the chair and moved towards the sliding door, which was open. A breeze, warm, coasted past him. He stepped out onto the balcony, feeling the smooth concrete against his bare feet. The seagull did the trademark Seagull Shuffle, moving slightly away from Colin along the rail. It also turned, so that now its head was facing off the balcony rather than towards the house.
It had already planned its escape, which was something that Colin Redman had not thought about before getting himself into this whole mess, and something that would prove even more troublesome in the near future.
“Colin?”
“I’m here.”
“I have a meeting in twenty min—“
“It won’t be there,” Colin said.
Richard Dagnall, Attorney-at-Law, paused on the other end. “Where will it be?”
“In my house here…on Bay Isle. And in other investments…bad investments.”
“How much?”
“Most of it,” he said. “Fuck, Richard, this goddamn economy! Those funds were supposed to triple my money.”
“But it didn’t,” Richard said.
“I can see that.”
“They are not going to be happy.”
“I know,” Colin said.
The seagull stared at him with its pitiless, blank eyes. It let loose a large, meaty crap that splattered on the concrete and steamed there for him to later clean. Then it looked at him as if to say: what now, bitch? Colin suddenly smiled and started to chuckle.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” he whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“Not you, Richard,” he said. “See what you can do. What do they want? My goddamn house here? They can have it. I’ll get another one.”
“There might be a criminal case…”
“Okay.” He barely heard it, couldn’t hear it: the seagull was mesmerizing in its size and brashness. “Do what you can.”
And bill me, you money-eating whore.
“I will get back later today,” Richard said.
“Okay.”
He hung the phone up and held it in his hand. The sun was up over the water now, and to Colin the muted din of the breaking waves was like the sound of children laughing.
“What do you want? What to come in for a beer?”
The seagull watched him. One of its back feathers was ruffled slightly, trembling in the wind off the ocean, but otherwise it was a startling thing.
“How many kids have you eaten?”
The seagull said nothing.
“You’re alone, pal. But that’s okay with you, huh? You do better alone, and you seek company only when you want it.”
Colin stood up and the seagull shuffled away slightly.
“I’ll get you something,” Colin said. “I’ll grab something inside.”
The seagull said nothing.
“Stay here.”
Colin went back into the house and down the open, atrium-style staircase to the first floor kitchen. He thought not about his legal issues but his home in north jersey where he had grown up. He often thought about it in times of great stress, about how the natural light in the basement grew dim during a heavy snowfall while he sat and played video games, how they would watch the accumulation and his father cycling through the news channels as he tracked “The Nor’easter”, he touting a Nor’easter’s mythic power, and his mother rolling her eyes and they eating (Christmas, it was after Christmas) a whole chocolate cake and watching Star Wars all day and his father yelling at him to put boots on, goddamn it, but he not listening and going outside in sneakers and forgetting his brother was there shoveling (with a secret snowball) and his brother not really wanting to play but just to throw snowballs at Colin while the neighborhood grew into something new and strange as the snow transformed it. He thought about the way the sunlight fell into his bedroom, and how the light of the room changed with each passing hour: it against his closed eyes in the early morning; the deep, tree-shadows in late afternoon that curled and danced along his walls; and at night the certainty that he would awake tomorrow to experience it all over again.
He had done some stupid things, blinded by money and that which it falsely promised: the security of coming home, and knowing that you would awake the next day to do it all over again.
Now he had to regroup and go forward. What other choices were there?
He went to the counter and grabbed a bag of white bread. He opened it and saw a few moldy spots. He didn’t think the seagull would mind. He took the bag back upstairs. Feeding seagulls was not something that he generally did, for they did not generally fly near the house. But this guy had fascinated him.
He was walking towards the door when he spoke to it:
“You should like this, pal.”
He stepped onto the balcony and seagull was gone. The only evidence of its existence was the slowly hardening glob of white poop on the balcony.
“Damn,” he said, the bread bag dangling from his gri
p.
He went to the balcony and glanced around, trying to catch sight of the huge, lumbering seagull. He wondered how it could even fly; it didn’t seem economical—
There was a man moving up the board on the left of his house.
There was an access on their dead-end road to the beach, which had been carved between the dunes and covered with wood boards. But there were plenty of signs along the way, indicating that the beach was private and violators would be prosecuted.
Unless they can’t read English, Colin thought.
There was something odd about the way the man was walking. His back was straight, but he was bent forward at the waist slightly. His head did not move from its face-forward position: it was the pose of someone determined to reach a goal.
I hope he goes the other way, Colin thought, looking northward and up the beach.
He saw other people now, coming onto the beach further north. A lot of them. Some of them were already near the water’s edge, just standing there, or doing something…what were they doing?
Are they…?
“No way,” Colin thought.
He looked back towards the man near his beach, who was half-way up the boardwalk. Now he saw two women and a man coming up the beach. He recognized the women as Mrs. Parks and her daughter, Clare, and Mrs. Parks’s daughter. They owned the mansion to the left of Colin.
For a moment Colin almost called out to them, and then decided not to. He glanced up the beach and in the distance could see the growing number of people pouring onto the beach like so many ants onto a picnic blanket.
“What the fuck is this…”
He was almost certain that he hadn’t seen what he had thought. He quickly went back into his house, dropping the bread-bag and running to the coffee table. He kept a pair of binoculars near the couch, sometimes liking to watch the boats on the horizon, and he grabbed them and hustled back to the balcony. He stepped on the beard in his rush, barely noticing, mashing it to the floor. Outside he put the binoculars to his eyes and looked up the beach.
On his face were lips and those lips, numb, said:
“What the fuck?”