The Swarm

by Rob Heinze

  “You mean, am I on the beach having sex? No. I’m at the Medi-Merge with the lady that hit the man by the bridge.”

  “Why? Why are you there? Come home to me, please. I am scared. The news said both bridges to the Island are closed off.”

  “I told you that was happening.”

  “But why is everyone doing that? Why?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure someone’s going to figure it out.”

  “Calvin, just come home.”

  “Okay,” he said, glancing back to the Medi-Merge. “I’ll just tell this lady I’m coming back…but I’ll have to walk. Car’s back at the bridge.”

  “I’ll come get you. Stay there.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Okay.”

  They hung up and Calvin looked towards the beach. He couldn’t imagine a scene that his wife described to him. The people he saw everyday passing through the toll, handing him the dirty wrinkled dollar, out on the beach fucking like animals. He went back towards the Medi-Merge entrance and into the sliding doors.

  On the floor was a body and that body was Linda Davis. Doctor Rex had been correct: the small bang to her head had released a sub-dermal hematoma, spiking the pressure in her brain and killing her. She had been thinking about a peppers and egg omelet when she died, and she had even started to smell the frying peppers when she had slumped forward and to the right, falling out of the seat and striking the floor face-first. Her purse, miraculously, never left her grip and was buried protectively under her.

  Calvin froze. He stood looking at her for a long, long time. Finally, he went towards her and checked for pulse like Doctor Rex. There was none. There was no breathing. He got the smelling salts out of his pocket, desperate to try it but knowing it was pointless. He decided not to bother: she was gone. He stood up, stood above her for several minutes, then went out to the parking lot.

  His wife came a few minutes later. Seeing her graying hair and face, the contours of which had become a part of him and his earthly experience, was like a mirage. She, too, felt relief and joy upon seeing her big, lumbering man—the man whom she knew had been taking a thermos filled with booze to work for the past several months. All that seemed not to matter now.

  Calvin went to the passenger’s side and got in. Helena’s face, time-carved wrinkles and all, smiled. Then she looked to the Medi-Merge.

  “Is that lady okay in there?”

  Calvin lied, “She should be. Anyway, there was a doctor who checked her out.”

  “In the hospital?”

  “Well, he went back out to help someone else. I want to see that news.”

  She pulled away from the Medi-Merge, commenting on the unease of the empty town, and soon thereafter they reached their home safely.

  ###

  Colin Redman watched as The Swarm started to end. He had forwarded his iPhone recording to his PR rep, telling her to get it to a news channels now. Which one? She had asked. All of them, he had said. She had done just that, with an ease that had always amazed Colin. She had, after all, helped him raise the initial investments to launch his company within two weeks.

  He had watched the Coast Guard copter move up and down the stretch of beach twice, and each time, it banked and turned just in front of his mansion. Now he could see that his neighbors, Mrs. Parks and her daughter, had come to some realization of what was happening. But still they seemed stunned, and confused, and they stood there in their nudity. The male who had engaged them likewise seemed unable to take action. They were like dolls given humanity for the first time.

  They’ve come awake, he thought. They were under a spell and they’ve come awake.

  He suddenly felt it very important to bring them clothes, something to cover the nudity. He quickly went off the balcony, the seagull poop now having dried to a hard scab, and went to his walk-in closet. He took out two bathrobes, and then went to the closet in the hallway. There he grabbed a laundry basket (surprising himself that he even had a laundry basket: the housekeeper did the laundry) and filled it with towels. He had only ten towels and two robes, and he supposed there were at least fifty people down on the beach.

  Doesn’t matter: he had to give at least Mrs. Parks and her daughter the robes.

  He went bumbling down the stairs with the laundry basket and into the hot sun. He was in such a rush he forgot shoes, but he wasn’t going up his high steps again: all the houses in this street were built up on pilings, so that they wouldn’t be swept away in a hurricane. He winced at rocks pinching his soft feet, and was grateful when he got to the beach access, which was just fifteen feet away from his steps. He jogged and walked at alternating intervals up the walkway, the towels nearly falling out; he brought the basket down and tucked them under his chin. He got the crest of the walk, and the people came into view. He slowed, panting, and walked towards them. He was wearing his boxer shorts and T-shirt, but didn’t even realize or care. Mrs. Parks was looking at him with something like recognition. Her breasts were saggy and drooping. Her skin was wrinkled. The nipples were cracked and dried. He tried not to notice these details—tried to train his eyes upon her eyes—but it had failed: a fleeting moment and all this had registered in his mind. He smiled at her, but there was no response.

  “Mrs. Parks?”

  “Colin?”

  He dropped the basket to the sand, the towels now spilling. He reached inside and got the bathrobe.

  “Here, okay? Put this on.”

  She looked at it in confusion, and then he helped her to get it over her sweaty skin, lynching the cord tightly so that she was covered. There was something so needy and sad about the action that Colin wanted to cry.

  “Okay. Is that okay?”

  “What happened?” She asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  He looked to her daughter, whose body was tanned and firm and sensual and yet the same sorrow came to him. He touched Mrs. Parks gently on the shoulder, then went to the girl. She looked at him with little recognition.

  “Hi, I’m Colin, your neighbor?” A question. “Let’s put this on, okay?”

  As he was helping her arms into the robe, she said: “I’m a virgin. I’m a virgin, though.”

  Colin looked down and saw the small amount of blood on the sand below her feet.

  “Okay,” he said, feeling his stomach roll. “How’s that?”

  She looked at him, confused, then said: “I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember what happened.”

  “I know,” he said. “No one does. There are a lot…a lot of people. It’s over, though.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Colin smiled. He wanted to cry. Once he had dropped two-thousand dollars at a strip club, getting lap dance after lap dance, groping and feeling along the dancers’ bodies. Once, he had fired two people from his company because he wanted to free up their yearly salaries for an investment. Now he only wanted to heal. It was so strong at that moment in him that he wondered why it had never come to him before.

  He ran back to the laundry basket, took towels, and brought them to whomever he could. A black man with tinted-glasses, wearing only his argyle socks. An over-weight woman with a horrible red sun-burn. A younger man with no hair on his chest. These were all people, with a story and a soul, and they had been turned soulless for a moment. He had given out the ten towels, and he saw all the people still gaping at each other, themselves, and now him.

  What do I do? What do I do?

  He ran back to Mrs. Park’s daughter, trying hard not to notice the blood below her.

  She’s still a virgin, it doesn’t count, damnit! It doesn’t count.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She looked at him.

  “Can you take your mom into my house? Just go into my house, okay? It’s that one.”

  He pointed to it rising from the dunes. She nodded. “I know.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I am going to try to get everyone to come in, for clothes, okay?”
>
  “Okay,” she said.

  Colin admired her strength. She started her first tentative steps towards her mother, who was shivering despite the sun. After a few moments of cajoling, they started walking down the access slowly. Colin watched them go for a minute. He could hear their crying, which had just started. He turned and went to a black guy with the glasses and socks. He told him that he could go into his house. He noticed that there were clothes on the sand—clothes they had shed. Some of the people were moving towards them now, trying to find what might have been theirs.

  “I’ll go home,” he said. “I need to go home.”

  “Do you know where you live?”

  “Up…two blocks up.”

  “Okay,” Colin said. “Okay.”

  The man started walking up the access. People were coming around. They were remembering who they were, where they lived, what they had been—

  I’m a virgin

  —and the screaming started. He saw that women were finding that which had been left inside them, and the realization of what had happened struck them, as it had not yet struck Mrs. Parks’s daughter.

  I’m a virgin, though.

  Colin knew that there was no God. Once, there might have been a God, but he had left humanity in the wrong hand: its own. He went to each person, urging them towards his house for clothing, pointing to it; the women were far more traumatized than the men and who could blame them? A few people started running, as if in response to the realization of their nudity. Colin watched them go with his heart breaking for them.

  What if I had been a part of this? What if I just came awake on the beach with my pecker drooping and used and not knowing where it had been?

  He couldn’t imagine how they felt.

  He had it easy.

  In the end, he was able to convince a lot of people into his house. When his beach was empty, he went inside and started to divvy out the clothes: he also grabbed sheets and blankets to cover people with. He handed out water to people, most of whom were lathered in sweat and pale from the dehydration. People were crying everywhere. The din of his house grew louder, as people became more animated. As rationality returned, Colin could hear people speculating on what had happened. Government, war…people were crying. Sleep walked bad as a kid, he heard someone saying, according to my parents. Don’t remember a damn thing.

  Eventually, someone suggested loudly a very simple question—it was a question that could be heard in the almanacs of human history, the tone by which it had been spoken like the deep grumble of time-lost thunderstorms. For a moment, Colin hadn’t heard it—at least in the sense that he should have heard it.

  Why wasn’t he affected?

  And in Colin’s experience, which was more of an inherited knowledge sowed into his core by humanity’s instinct, he knew that the questioner had been talking about him.

  He turned to see a man sitting on a chair in the kitchen and pointing at him. The noise in the house went silent, and Colin stood in his kitchen under the inquiring eyes of the survivors of The Swarm. He squirmed under their gaze, the pressure from each eye somehow able to press him backwards, and he did take a small step.

  “Yeah, why weren’t you affected?”

  Now it was a new person—a man—who had repeated the question. Colin looked at him. Then he shook his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did you see?”

  Colin looked to the person who had asked the question. It was a forty-something man with two-chins and a bald head. His eyes, like cold coal, stared at him.

  “I…I saw people coming up to the beach. Like zombies…”

  “Then?” Someone else asked. Colin turned to see an Asian man with two days of beard on his face.

  Colin felt something tightening inside his stomach. It was the same feeling that he had felt, not more than two hours ago, upon discovering that his Fidelity account had been locked. Now in his huge house that coveted the view of the ocean, with the eyes of people who had instantly become part of a historical event, he knew that he had made another mistake. And perhaps it was right, the way this had turned out? He had once slept with three girls in one night, at separate times and loving his success.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I still want to know why the fuck you weren’t part of it,” someone said.

  Colin barely heard him, but he managed to turn and see a short, stout guy with a crop-dusting of black hair. He was standing now, wearing Colin’s Armani T-shirt that was too small for him. Other people were standing too.

  “What do you know?” Someone asked.

  Colin turned. It was a woman, young, probably a mother and now possibly a mother-to-be-again. Which led to a question, dear Colin: what about all the possible pregnancies, huh? What about that?

  “I don’t know anything,” Colin said numbly.

  “He probably doesn’t know,” someone, a man, said. “How would he?”

  “So you just stayed up on your balcony? You didn’t try to stop us? That to me sounds like you fucking knew something, or that you didn’t care all these women were getting raped…maybe you liked watching it?”

  It was the Armani shirt guy again. He was pumping everyone up. Why not? His goddamn wife—his wife!—was with him and had been screwed by these filthy mongrels! This fucking punk should have stopped them!

  “I…I…”

  He had no words. He hadn’t tried to stop them, hadn’t even called to Mrs. Parks and her daughter, though he had thought to.

  Why hadn’t I?

  He looked for Mrs. Parks and her daughter, but couldn’t find them in the confusion. They had actually gone back home, slipping out among the crowd to weep and heal in the comfort of their own house. Colin didn’t know that.

  “I don’t know.”

  They were moving towards him now. How could this be happening? How? I helped them! They’re in my house, wearing my clothes! I fucking helped them!

  “I helped you,” he mumbled. “I brought you clothes.”

  “You watched it happen. You didn’t try to stop it.”

  They were surrounding him now. He was in his kitchen but his kitchen was far away. He was thinking about his childhood home. He was thinking about how a brisk snow-fall would slowly dim the natural light in the basement. He was thinking about how, with each hour, the shadows in his bedroom would change and how, with unfailing certainty, he would awake the next morning to relive the cycle.

  “This isn’t over,” he said.

  Then the first fist struck him. It cracked his nose and sent a sound-vibration like rolling thunder plowing through his mind. His head struck the refrigerator. The fists came at him from everywhere. One of The Swarm survivors, a young girl, took a knife from the block on Colin Redman’s counter and stabbed him in the stomach, just once, and then dropped the knife and backed away. It was a stab at the inexplicable, a revenge to the single person who seemed unaffected by The Swarm—the single person who had been lucky. The rage-filled survivors beat on him until his floor started collecting the blood, and then they stopped. The instigator, who had boiled everyone into a frenzy, mumbled something and then went back to his wife, who appeared to have barely noticed what he had done.

  “Come on,” he said to her. “Let’s go home.”

  Then, one by one, the people wearing Colin Redman’s clothes left the huge mansion and walked back to their homes. Some of them stopped at crooked, idling cars, got in, and drove away. Within fifteen minutes, Colin’s house was empty save for his body, dripping blood onto the floor. The Parks never went back to thank Colin for the bathrobes, which they threw out days later, and it took police a while to find his body as they began their recognizance. About forty-minutes after he was killed, the phone rang in his house and when the answering machine came on, a raspy voice said, “Colin, this is your mother, are you there? I know that you said you were okay, I saw the news and your video, oh God, just call me again, please.” The message ended and on the other side of the ph
one Colin’s mother mumbled to herself how certain she had been that Colin was home again, just laying up in his bed like he used to do when he was a child, which was why she had felt compelled to call him.

  ###

  Quentin Warsaw awoke and saw a hairy ass. The hair emerged from a dark crack and spread outwards across the cheeks a short distance like weeds growing from an earthly crevice. On the right buttock was a red pimple.

  “What in the hell?”

  He was sitting down, and the roughness of the seat alerted him. He looked down. He was sitting in sand. He was naked. His testicles where pressed to the sand. His penis, half-erect, hung down. In wonderment he lifted it and saw the mat of sand stuck to the top. Wet…it was wet…why? He tried to brush it off, and realized that the wetness was semen. He looked up at the hairy ass again, then up to the face that belonged to the hairy ass. It was a middle-aged woman with a round moon face and long, curly hair. She was standing at a slightly off-set angle, so that he could see her profile, but with a perfect view of her backside.

  He tried to remember the last thing he had been doing? What had that been? He had been at work, right? In the office, doing paperwork, with his co-workers…his eyes went wide and he looked again at the woman.

  A lead weight suddenly descended into his stomach. The woman with the hairy ass was Yvonne Ryan, who was a bookkeeper with the Public Works Department. She was standing fully naked in front of him. He looked to the right, to see what she was staring at. Horror, like air, filled his lungs. He clasped his mouth shut, staring at the people heaped along the beach. They were all naked.

  This is some sort of fucked up dream, he told himself. Let’s wake up now.

  But then he knew: he knew it wasn’t a dream.

  He remembered where he had been, just before he had become part of The Swarm. He had been back near that strange tract of land in the dump—the land in which he had disposed of bodies for his good friend Damiano Richardelli. And don’t forget Cole! Cole, Cole, A Lonely Soul, lost forever to the pink-filled hole!

  The pink liquid always came up before it digested. It aided digestion, didn’t it? That stuff? Whatever it was? It aided the digestion. That tract of land that had become part of him—a place he felt was home—had been the same for years, producing its shimmery saliva shortly after sensing the stuff Quentin had left for it. That tract of land—the haunting tract of land: hadn’t it recently changed? Oh, oh yes it had! It had sunken, Quentin you Merry Old Fella, and what did you see? But a giant red clitoris, rhymes with Deloris, poking absurd from the bottom of that hole? It has changed, you sick fuck, and somehow this is a part of it. All these naked, confused people on the beach are part of it.