by Rob Heinze
He had no way to know that, of course, but the connection was clear as day to him, clear as the dark, hair-growing ass-crack of Mrs. Yvonne Ryan, whose breath sometimes smelled like old shoes and fresh rubber, with a hint of Listerine struggling to find purchase against the more powerful odors.
He got to his feet. Yvonne Ryan looked to him, but there was no recognition on her face. Quentin ignored her. He scanned the beach for his clothes, which he quickly realized he wouldn’t find, for there were tons of clothes tossed scattered across the beach. He picked among them until he found a T-shirt and boxer shorts. The thought of putting on someone else’s underwear might have troubled him in another place (and another time), but with the question of where his penis had been unanswered, he supposed it didn’t matter. He was still, absurdly, wearing his shoes.
How’d I get my pants off? He wondered.
Once clothed, he rushed down the boardwalk access. Soon he was running. He had to get home. He had to take a real long drink. He might drink for days, like he had after Cole, and maybe then he would be able to make sense of what had happened to him—and everyone else in The Swarm—and how it connected to his special plot of land.
By the time he got home, running fifteen blocks down the empty streets, with children peeping out the windows at him, he was sure that something worse was still to come.
###
Paul Thompson, who had left his wife worried just hours ago, found himself standing on the beach. He was naked with the retreating urgency of blood-filled genitals…and absolutely, totally confused. He blinked and looked around. There were naked people everywhere. He spun quickly around, in each directly, just to make sure that he was not imagining this.
He wasn’t.
“What happened?” He whispered.
“Sleep walking,” someone said.
He looked up and saw a gray-bearded man. He looked like a fisherman, or guy who might work on the wharf.
“Huh?”
“We were all sleep-walking.”
“Why?”
“Ain’t that obvious, pal?”
Paul almost apologized, but no; it was not obvious. He shook his head.
“Goddamn poison from those factories pollutin’ the bay. Fucking State supposed to put tougher permits, then they furlough half their staff cause of budget, now we all get fucked into some sleep-walking fiasco.”
Paul had no response to it. He didn’t see how that could have been obvious. What was even more startling was that, in their nakedness, no one seemed to care or realize they were laid bare.
It’s the confusion; everyone’s too confused. They’ll realize soon…
Paul was one of the lucky few whose sleep-walking half had decided not to fully take his pants off. They were down by his ankles like a child’s deflated raft. Paul bent, grabbed them, and pulled them back up, sand and all. The man who purported environmental pollution as the reason for them standing nude stalked up the beach, grabbed some clothes, and stumbled into them. After that, he started stalking towards an egress to exit the scene.
Paul watched him go. Then he saw other people starting to do the same, although a lot of people were just standing there, just like Paul Thomspon, hazed and dazed—wondering, in the simplest of human questions: what now?
And really: now what?
Dawn.
Oh…
Dawn.
The thought of Dawn waking on the beach…well, it dawned on him. If all these people where here, then there was a chance that she might have been a part of it too. If she had been a part of it, God please he hoped not…
The God Google told us no intercourse in the first six-to-eight weeks after conception, but we would have waited longer in our case.
If she’s part of this…
The fear for his seed, which had only a tentative hold on life, was so powerful that he broke into a sprint, heading up the beach, stepping on discarded clothes and shoes as he ran, his heels casting sand in his wake.
He was panting and nauseas by the time he got to the solid ground of the boardwalks.
Dawn, be okay, please…
If Dawn had been part of it, then he knew that another miscarriage was certain.
###
Dawn was with Chief Ruggiero, who was struggling to speak to the people emerging from The Swarm trance. Besides their nakedness, the Chief couldn’t tell them anything. They were asking the usual question: why, what and how? The Chief kept telling them that the government was on their way and we, Bay Isle, are looking into it. The Chief advised the people that they should go home, take a shower, get some rest and—
Take the morning after pill, he thought.
He thought it but didn’t say it. He wished he wasn’t Chief. He just wanted to find his wife and kids. Everyone seemed to be physically okay, for the most part, and what might come after this…well, that would come after. The immediate horror and threat seemed to be over. His speech seemed to have at least gotten the people into motion. Many of them started by covering themselves and then shuffling around, in search for clothes cast on the sand. A lot of them just walked naked past the Chief and Dawn Thompson off the beach. A few people stopped by them and—with squinting eyes—asked why they had clothes on? In other words, why were they not part of The Swarm?
“I don’t know,” the Chief had said. “I really have no idea.”
“Kids,” Dawn said suddenly. “All the kids are okay.”
There were a few grateful moans and sobs, from moms and dads on the beach, and with that statement the people seemed more anxious to leave—and to leave without questioning the two clothed people. The Chief and Dawn stayed to the side of the access and watched them go, the Chief assuring them that there would be updates, and the police force (all of whom were either naked or trapped off-island) would be back soon. He urged them all to return to their homes so that this could be sorted out.
It took about forty minutes for the beach to empty, save for a few stragglers who seemed confused. Eventually, they too left the beach and headed back to their homes. Dawn stayed with the Chief for a long time, until the last of the people were gone.
“Would you like a ride home?” He asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.”
The cruiser was still parked in the same spot. People from the beach were still scattering. The Island of Bay Isle City seemed to be slowly regaining its sanity.
The Chief found himself thinking how a coin could spin on a table top for a long, long time with a perfect rotation, the edges blurring together so that one observes the illusion of a ball. And if that rotating coin should touch a single crumb, the whole rotation collapses and the coin is launched into a wild, ill-formed lurch before finally settling still on the cold table. It was impossible to predict the direction that a coin hitting a crumb in mid-spin would go, wasn’t it? He suddenly found that thought very disturbing.
He had no idea where this was going to go.
Dawn gave the Chief directions to her house, which was on the opposite side of the island. There were three more blocks to her house, driving among the Swarm people (who were now using sidewalks), when she saw the figure moving up the walk. Not only had marriage given them the grace to understand or decode each other’s actions, it had given them the skill of knowing the other’s physicality, like the way they walked, or the sound only they made on the stairs, or the distinct timbre of their cough.
“Stop the car,” Dawn said.
“What? Everything okay?”
“That’s Paul.”
The Chief pulled up alongside the walking person, who didn’t notice the car. They continued to trek up sidewalk.
“Thank you,” Dawn said.
“We’ll keep you posted, okay? We’ll all get through this thing.”
“I know,” she said, having no idea what was to come. Then, for some absurd reason, she said: “I’m pregnant.”
The Chief looked at her, startled and not sure how to respond. He had no idea why this wom
an was telling him this.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“It’s still very early, only six weeks, but we had a miscarriage before. We’re excited.”
“That’s great. Kids are the best gift we can have, until their teenagers.”
Dawn smiled, then looked up at the receding figure of her husband. She thanked the Chief again, got out of the car, closed the door, and ran after Paul. The Chief watched her go, wondering what would come from the mass-mating event.
“Paul!”
The figure didn’t answer, just kept moving. Maybe I made a mistake, she wondered.
“Paul!!!”
Then the walking man turned, still in mid-step, and saw her. It was Paul. It was him. He stopped completely, turned around, and ran towards her. She ran too, half-skipping, and they hugged each other and it was like the movies except she was one of the actors and damn did it feel good.
“Are you okay, Dawn? The baby…are you okay?
“I’m okay,” she said.
He was shaking his head. “No, if you were a part of it, Dawn, you’re going to lose the baby. No intercourse for 6-8 weeks. We need to get you to the hospital.”
“Paul, I wasn’t a part of it.”
His eyes seemed to search her eyes were signs of betrayal. She shook her head.
“I wasn’t.”
Despite his relief, and innocence, guilt came to him strongly. He said: “I’m sorry, Dawn. I’m sorry. I don’t remember anything, none of it. I’m sorry, I wouldn't do that to you.”
“I know. I know. I saw…the whole beach. Everyone was affected. Except me, the Chief, and the kids.”
“What happened? What did you see, I mean? What was it like?”
“Let’s go home,” she said. “Okay? You can shower and…let’s just go home.”
They started walking up the street to their small house where just hours before she had seen that car caddy-corner on the neighbor’s lawn. That had started it all. That was the first thing she had seen. Now the car was still there, its owner probably not back yet. But the car would stay there for days, as its owner had been trampled to death by The Swarm, after twisting his ankle and falling on the boardwalk access. There would be several deaths from trampling, a couple from dehydration and several more from struck cars.
Before Dawn shut the door to their house, she thought about Paul’s last question. What was it like?
The answer, which had come to her mind immediately but which she had held back, was this:
HELL.
It was like HELL.
It was watching people stripped of humanity and then jerked around by a soulless puppeteer.
She closed the door and the spun coin, having struck the bread crumb, began its wild spin the end of which no one could predict.
###
Lynn Rice and Derrick Clinton sat for a moment outside of Lynn’s house. Her mom hadn’t come back yet, but she would: Lynn knew she would. There were just too many people making their way back home. It wasn’t likely she was one of the dead ones on the street…
“You okay?” Derrick asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ll never be okay. That wasn’t human.”
“I know.”
Derrick, who was an avid watcher of Internet porn, didn’t think he’d watch it for a while. Probably he would never watch it again. His mom was in the back seat, not saying much, and Derrick didn’t like the way her eyes looked. He kept thinking of an ant trying to emerge from a drain into which you poured water. He didn’t know if she’d make it out.
Lynn looked back to Derrick’s mom, cautiously, then smiled weakly and left the car. Derrick drove his mom home, hoping that his brothers would be back. They were sitting on the front stoop, looking very small and startled, like cats that had fallen into water. Derrick cried when he saw them, and then they cried too, but his mom didn’t cry, only hugged the boys absently.
Lynn’s mom came home shortly after Lynn got inside, the front door banging shut. Lynn rushed downstairs.
“Mom? Mommy?”
She hadn’t called her Mommy since she was nine. Her mom was standing by the front door, casting the same shadow as always, and when she saw Lynn, she collapsed to the ground, sobbing, a parent’s protective, overpowering love engulfing her. She didn’t know what had happened to her exactly, but it had happened to everyone, the whole island, and so Lynn had gone through it too. Lynn mumbled, no, no, no, in rapid succession, the noise like the quick firing of a gun, and then she ran and slid to her mom, hugging her and crying too.
“I’m sorry, Linny! I’m sorry you were part of that!”
“I wasn’t mommy! I wasn’t part of it!”
Mrs. Rice regained her composure, unable to believe it, but there was something on Lynn’s face that told her, yes, she hadn’t been a part of it.
“Okay,” she said, holding her daughter, who had not yet had her period. “It’s okay.”
###
Rex Torres was one of the few people not to see the final act of The Swarm, though he would eventually see it on the cycling news footage. He was using his Beamer as an ambulance as best he could, despite Linda Davis’s vomit still solidifying in the back. He laid people on the back-seat and drove them to the Medi-Merge. He found only three people in salvageable condition, each one having been injured in The Swarm. Anyone struck by a car had been killed. He wondered, in his rush of work, how many of these people Linda Davis had hit. And there was still a matter of what to do with the bodies, but Rex decided that was not his job. He wasn’t an undertaker. He would leave them for the town.
He found Linda Allen dead on the Medi-Merge floor on his first trip back and the old man from the bridge (Calvin?) gone. He had covered her body with a sheet from one of the rooms.
As he was recovering another injured person on the side-walk, he saw that The Swarm people were walking back from the beach.
They looked ragged and drawn, scared; like people awaking from a nightmare. He had not seen how they had looked during The Swarm, or what they had done, but he didn’t need to: their battle-worn faces told him everything. He kept picking up hurt people and bringing them back to the Medi-Merge with a diligence and determination that had earned him the nick-name T-Rex back in high school.
###
Calvin and Helena Wrigley watched the news in their house, but gleaned no useful information. They were starting to hear the steady throb of helicopters over their house bringing—what? People? Supplies? Experts? Testing equipment? They were engaged with the news, because they were part of it. There was a camera shot from a helicopter which showed the south bridge raised and the long line of cars snaking back in the other direction. Calvin caught a glimpse of his car parked on the other side, and further down, the deceased Linda Allen’s car. He hoped they wouldn’t show the body of the man she’d hit, and thankfully they didn’t. There were helicopter views of the people moving off the beach, The Swarm dispersing, and though there was some relief, both Helena and Calvin knew it wasn’t over: for overhead the dull beat of helicopters.
They stayed together and waited while the coin spun the last of its hapless energy.
###
The last person to see his family that day was Chief Ruggiero. He had first gotten on the phone to call Leslie Griffith, the Cape May County Sheriff, to see what was happening. The Sheriff had been in touch with the “Higher-Ups”, and they would be sending people over via the air. The Sheriff also told Chief Ruggiero something that was off-setting. That he, the Chief, should anticipate the Guard setting up a blockage on the north island bridge. “We have blockades up,” the Chief had said. “They want something more certain,” the Sherriff had replied. “Want to make sure everyone’s okay before letting them out, I guess. I think it will be okay, just try to pass that sentiment on to everyone else.” The Chief put calls to his men. Slowly they started to respond back to him as they found their cars. He told them to first find their families, be with them for the next hour or so, then report to the station
for briefing. Then, after that was done, Chief Ruggiero drove home to find his wife and sons sitting mutely at the kitchen table. He came into the front door, put his keys down and looked at them. They looked up at him blankly.
“Hi, dad,” his son Walter croaked. He was fifteen. The Chief had no clue if he had been a virgin, but he damn well better have been.
“Hey, pal.”
He glanced to his wife, whose face was sun-burned from her time on the beach. He knew they had all been part of The Swarm. She looked up at him, studied his expressions, and knew immediately: “It didn’t affect you?”
He shook his head. He felt guilt, horribly guilty, and wanted to run into a room and hide. His boys were looking at him. The older, Nick, was eighteen. He had almost surely not been a virgin, though Chief couldn’t be sure.
“I know why,” his wife said.
“Why what?”
“Why you weren’t affected.”
“Why’s that?”
“Your vasectomy.”
He had forgotten about it. Hell, that was fifteen years ago after Walt was born. But what the hell did that have to do with what happened?
“What relevance does that have?” He asked her.
“We went up there to procreate. Those who can’t, they didn’t go.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, but didn’t it? What other reason had they gone up there for, other than to procreate? That woman Dawn had told him she was pregnant. That certainly precluded her from procreating.
“It makes perfect sense. You’ll see. When other people not part of it come out…you’ll see.”
The Chief didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. He liked the family crowds on Bay Isle, not the rowdy, bar-hopping, fist-pumping nimrods that came to literally piss on the town and leave. He didn’t like that at all. He liked calm and serene, with the occasional blip, that he could easily handle.