The Swarm

by Rob Heinze

  “I can’t. I can’t see that…that flock again.”

  “They might be gone by now.”

  “They probably are,” Calvin added.

  The lady seemed on the fence about deciding, and soon enough Calvin, whose wife was back in town, grew impatient. He wanted to get into town, see what was happening. He wanted to just see Helena again, in all her aging grace.

  “We’re going to go back,” he said finally. “You can come with us, or you can stay here.”

  He didn’t need to remind her of the body, which was what he had hoped. She looked at them, holding her eyes very steady; they could see her eyelids twitching. She refused to look beyond them and to the right at the body on the ground—the one that had pin-wheeled over her car.

  “I’ll come,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  With that they helped her to her feet and she got into the back. Calvin got into the front and Rex into the driver’s side after putting his ER bag back in the trunk.

  “Okay?” Rex asked her.

  She nodded weakly. She felt slightly dizzy, but thought it was just from the intensity of what had happened in such a short time. Rex looked to Calvin, nodded, and they drove towards the town.

  Then it happened: in Linda Davis’s face were eyes and those eyes, under demonic influence, glanced quickly to the left. On the ground was a body and that body, tangled, had flown over her car. She had struck that body. That body had a brain, which was now loosed all over the ground like so much red oatmeal.

  Linda turned her head and vomited onto the floor of Rex’s BMW.

  Ah, shit, he thought.

  He hadn’t told her not to look.

  ###

  Derrick Clinton was following The Swarm up the side-street, towards the beach. Lynn Rice squirmed in the seat.

  “I don’t like this,” Lynn whispered.

  “They won’t hurt us,” Derrick said.

  “I don’t like them, I mean.”

  Derrick continued to tail what was the last straggler moving towards the beach to mate. Neither teenager knew this. They were curious, and scared, and neither one had thought to go to the police or anything.

  “Hey!” Lynn said.

  Her exclamation startled Derrick, almost causing him to jam on his brakes.

  “What? What!”

  “Look up at the balconies!” She said.

  Derrick leaned forward so that he could have a better view. They were passing alongside a multi-story condo building and outside each condo was a balcony and on several balconies were clusters of kids. They were all different ages. Then, with dawning recognition, she started to see faces in houses peeping cautiously out windows. All children, all small. They had been left alone by detracted parents.

  “All the kids,” Derrick said. “Shit, I didn’t even think about that.”

  Lynn had horrible, terrible visions of infants left alone in houses, their cries absorbed into the walls and floors and nothing more; crying toddlers following their parents out of the house, exposing themselves to the threats and dangers of the world. She couldn’t allow her mind to go down that road. She hadn’t begun to menstruate yet, but there was some part of the female collective unconscious rooted in her programming that was mothering: she wanted to save them all.

  “We have to do something,” she said. “For those kids.”

  Derrick had continued to drive up the street. On occasion, harried faces looked out at them.

  “What? What can we do? The whole town’s filled with parentless kids.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “What?”

  “This…this thing people are doing. How long have they been weird?”

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “Not that long,” she said. “Go back to that condo with all the kids.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to show them that an adult is okay.”

  “We’re not adults.”

  “But we’re the closest thing. Just go back, okay?”

  “I want to follow them,” Derrick said, indicating The Swarm.

  “They’re going to the beach. Can’t you see? You have at least ten minutes before they get there. Just go back.”

  Sighed, Derrick stopped the car, popped the gear shift into reverse, and plowed backwards down the street. No more of The Swarm was behind them. Lynn could see the kids nervous on the balconies. She wasn’t sure of their age, but guessed no older than ten. She wondered why they were not part of The Swarm. The thought occurred to her randomly and with no provocation: it’s because they haven’t had their periods yet either. She had no idea if it was true, why something like that might matter…also the fact of Derrick riding next to her made that assumption invalid—at least partially. When the car reached the general “front” of the condo, Derrick jammed on the brakes.

  “Now what?”

  “Hold on,” Lynn said.

  She got out of the car and moved towards the sidewalk. She could sense the kids backing cautiously away from her.

  She waved. “Hi, my name’s Lynn.”

  The eyes watched her. She counted maybe thirty kids in total, probably kids of vacationers.

  “We don’t know what’s happening, okay, but your mom and dad are going to be okay. We’re fine.”

  She pointed back to the car from which Derrick now produced his hat-clad head. He gave a weak smile, feeling like half an ass.

  “So I don’t want anyone to be scared. We’re going to make sure everyone’s okay, and soon you’ll be able to see your parents again. Just stay inside.”

  She waited for a moment, not sure if she expected any of the kids to say anything. The sound of The Swarm moving up the street grew faint, the swish-swosh sound of footsteps now like that of a muffled clock four rooms down the hall, and she heard whimpering somewhere on the balconies. She smiled—half-smiled, anyway—and waved. She got back into the car with Derrick, who said nothing but found himself in quiet admiration of the girl. He put the car in drive and continued to follow The Swarm. They came onto Ocean Avenue further south than Chief Ruggiero and Dawn Thompson, and they parked in front of a large house only after the last of The Swarm had funneled onto the two beach accessways.

  “What now?” Lynn asked.

  “I guess we follow them onto the beach.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “I don’t know,” Derrick admitted.

  Lynn thought about it. She did not have the same thought as Dawn Thompson, who at this time raced after the Chief. So far as she knew, they would stop on the beach, sit down, and have a conversation about the weather: no mass suicides in her mind’s scope. They got out of the car to the quiet stillness and waited. Derrick moved to gaze up the beach access. It inclined along the dunes slightly, and he could see the backs of the remaining people cresting the end-point of his vision.

  And were they…undressing?

  Suddenly he didn’t want to go on the beach. Suddenly he thought it would be a life-alerting, mind-fucking experience.

  “Should we go?” Lynn asked.

  “I don’t know,” Derrick said, his legs heavy. “I have a bad feeling…”

  “Of course, Derrick. So do I!”

  You didn’t see them undressing, he told himself.

  “Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Let’s go.”

  They moved at a brisk pace up the walk towards the beach, not sure what they would find beyond.

  ###

  The phone in the Rodriquez house rang just as Derrick and Lynn stepped onto the beach. The phone identified the caller as R Rodriquez, and Angelica looked at it for a long time. She had become a captive in her bedroom. She was unable to move, for at the bottom of the stairs was a blood splatter and spilled coffee and a goddamn human tooth.

  “Hello?”

  “Ang, are you okay?”

  It was Robert’s voice. She started to cry. Sobbing, chest-retching moans.

  “Jesus, Ang, what’s going on?”

  Control yourself, talk to hi
m so he knows you’re okay.

  She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes, and managed to slow her hysterics. All the while Robert was bleating in her ear, the panic and urgency in his voice mounting.

  “I’m okay,” she managed.

  “What’s going on?”

  Still on the bed with her eyes closed: “I don’t know.” She thought about the tooth on the floor. “People are acting weird, on the street.”

  “What do you mean? What’s weird?”

  “Just heading up it, into traffic, in the middle of the street.”

  “Is it a parade? Is there a parade today?”

  That question brought a little anger out, surpassing her fear, and she answered with her normally sharp attitude: “No, Robert, it’s not a fucking parade! Don’t you think I’d know a parade?”

  “Okay, then what is it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know!”

  “Okay, calm down. I’m coming home, alright? You have to wait a few hours. Are you safe?”

  “I’m safe, I won’t leave the house.”

  “Were the people…hurting anyone, Ang?”

  “No, at least not that I could see. They were just like zombies, Robert, moving up the street with some place to go.”

  “You call the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they come yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Hang tight, okay? Don’t leave the house.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a moment of long silence, and then Robert appeared to have a revelation. “I am going to call Joey to tell him to come get you.”

  “Don’t bother him,” she said. “He’s working.” Then she thought about the blood, the tooth, the mess she hadn’t cleaned up. “Really, don’t bother him.”

  “No, I’ll call him. He’s my brother. He’ll be down there in half-an-hour, at least stay with you till I get back.”

  “No, Robert, don’t bother him.”

  “It’s too bad. I can’t drive thinking you’re there by yourself. I will call him and get back to you.”

  “Robert! I said no.”

  “I don’t care, Angelica! I want my wife fucking safe, okay?”

  The fight went out of her, and she relented. She hung the phone up and sat on the bed, knowing she would have to clean the tooth, blood, coffee and hide the remnants. Then, she remembered something that was just a tiny give-away of her infidelity: Ant’s car was still in the small driveway.

  “Oh, shit! His car!”

  When Robert called back to say that Joey, his brother, agreed to come down and check things out Angelica tried to argue with him. It was pointless; he telling her that his brother had already left. She hung up the phone, pissed, scared: now forced to leave the house and move the car. Where would she put it? She wasn’t sure, maybe just drive it up the street and leave it there. That might work…until Ant came back. Then she’d just give him the keys and tell him to leave.

  Then another troubling thought occurred to her: what if Ant came back when Joey was there?

  What if Ant never came back?

  A horrid, selfish part of her thought it would be okay if he didn’t…certainly it would save her a lot of trouble.

  Now she got off the bed, cursing and kicking her foot at nothing. Why had she called Robert? She had been a weak, panicked baby girl for a moment, and now she had dug her hole deeper.

  “Fuck me.”

  She got dressed, strung her hair up in a pony-tail and went towards the stairs. She saw the blood stain at the bottom, a fervent reminded of the insanity of an otherwise sane day. She started down the stairs, careful not to step on the coffee, which had stopped pooling to the floor. She tip-toed away from the stairs and went towards the kitchen. In the kitchen she got the bleach spray, a plastic bag, gloves and paper towels. Then she went into the foyer and cleaned up the mess, picking up the tooth gingerly like someone holding a poisonous snake, and dropping all of it into the bag. When she was done, she was sweating and surprised at how smeary and hard blood was to clean. But it was clean: there was no trace of the incident that had happened there. She decided not to leave the garbage bag in her house, or even in the trash-can in the garage. That was too obvious. Instead, she took Ant’s keys and brought the trash-bag with her. There was a convenience store up the street, with a dumpster, and she would stop there to throw it in. Then it occurred to her to that she would leave Ant’s car there, parking right in the food market. It couldn’t get any easier than that. If—when—he came back, he could just go up there to get it.

  Outside the stilled air brought little comfort. There was no noise save for the labored thud of her heart. She got into the car, started it, and backed it shakily down the driveway and into the street. Living on a side-street, she had a long view of the empty street, until it nearly came to the beach on the east of the island. The street was empty and motionless, somehow reminding her of gazing down a dry waterslide that had been closed for the season. She drove the car carefully, turning onto the Avenue, amazed at the vastness of the street. Cars, cockeyed, stood at irregular intervals down the street. She saw at least three cars that had crashed. One had gone into the front of a single-story realtor’s office, but had not penetrated through at its slow speed. Another had rear-ended a parked car. Yet another had driven onto the lawn of someone’s home, running over flowerbeds and tiny, decorative white fence.

  “I can’t believe all this shit,” she said to no one.

  The convenience store was where it should have been, and the parking lot was mostly empty. She drove into it and pulled into a spot. She got out and took the bag with her, the bottom of it catching on the gear-shift and in her haste almost ripping and spilling the bloodied contents. Cursing, she walked the bag over to the dumpster, which looked like a sleeping green monster. A seagull was perched on the roof of the convenience store, watching her curiously; it might have been the same one to startle Colin Redman with its brashness. She got to the dumpster, hoisted up the heavy top, and tossed the bag in. Then she let the top clang closed, the noise of which made the seagull take flight. She started walking back towards the car, then stopped. She glanced to the glass door of the store. She felt a burning, pulling desire to enter the convenience store. She didn’t know why. Perhaps it was just to see if someone—anyone—was inside. The lights inside were on. The sunlight, which had lathered her body in sweat, glinted off the front windows.

  She went to the doors carefully. As she got closer, the glare of the sun faded and she saw further inside.

  No one was there.

  She opened the door, a chime dinging somewhere in the electric nerves of the store, and then she stepped inside. Behind the counter was empty. She could hear the low hum of the refrigerators in the back. A very quiet, not-quite-real sound of music played through the ceiling speakers.

  “Hello?”

  No answer. Everyone just fucking left.

  She saw the flashing screens of the self-order sandwich console, the screens of which were always smeared with finger grease. She took a few more steps inside, thinking she might find someone hunkered down behind them. No one was there. She had a horrible and stupid impulse then, which was something she had always struggled with controlling (see Affair: Antonio for further reading). She would just take a pack of cigarettes, that was all. She hadn’t smoked in two years, but she could really use one now. No one would catch her. She didn’t even think about the cameras, closed-circuit loops of the merchandise in the story, mostly to catch employees ripping the store off. She checked behind her again, store empty, then went to the counter.

  The cigarettes were hung above the counter in a cage-like contraption. She took one, paused, then grabbed a few more. Hell, why not take a bag and fill it? She grappled with a plastic bag hanging near the cashier’s station. She put about twelve packs in, then she stopped herself.

  The whole town was a cluster-fuck, and you want to steal? Are you for real?

  “Okay,” she said.
/>   She turned around, and screamed.

  Someone was standing in small alcove that led to the staff only portion of the store. He was a young man with tightly-cut hair and a receding hair line shown by a dark crescent. On his face was a goatee, mustache and beard, all of which were interconnected with a precious so refined that, to Angelica Rodriquez, it looked as if the disintegration or loss of integrity in any spot of the system one would cause the man’s face to fall apart.

  “You scared me!” She said, holding her hand to her chest.

  The man stared at her. His eyes, not sane, questioned her with their intrusive wanderings. “Are you part of The Swarm?”

  “No,” she said.

  The man’s cheeks were quivering ever-so-slightly and Angelica knew his careful crafted facial hair couldn’t hold his insanity within.

  “You’re a spic?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A spic…filthy and cock-sucking, whores and trashy mouthed, et cetera? A disease upon whom the wraith of a righteous God shall fall?”

  Time to leave, girl. Time to leave fast!

  She started to back up, and the monstrosity sensed it. Insane, yes, but no fool: he knew the cameras were filming, and though the apocalypse had finally come upon them, the center was still holding and the chance of a switch-back—however remote—was possible.

  “You may leave,” he said casually.

  “Thank you,” she said oddly.

  Then she turned and ran, crashing through the door and out into the parking lot. She glanced back, knowing he would be after her, but he was not there. He was not following her. She fumbled nervously with the keys, got into the car, and went in drive instead of reverse but not caring as she plowed over the plant-bed and mulch, the car banging irreverently onto the curb and crashing down onto the side-walk, and finally turning into the street. She was almost crying when she turned onto her side-street. Now she was back to her house with Ant’s car. Now she was sobbing in the driveway.

  She didn’t know for how long she was parked in the car…ten minutes, fifteen minutes? She turned the ignition and sat in silence, closing her eyes. She wished that Joey was here. She supposed he would be there any minute, unaware of the blocked bridges. She got out of the car, glancing along the empty street, the memory of that crazed dude blazing in her mind. She had almost been glad to see a person—a person not under the hypnosis of The Swarm. Now she wasn’t sure, couldn’t imagine: what if everyone in town was dead and she was alone with that manic? She almost got into the car to drive away, head towards the bridge, but the terror of what she might see on the roads was too powerful. She would wait for Joey to come to her.