by Rob Heinze
The single color that fought against the darkness was pink, from the TV that Quentin barely realized was on. All he saw was his room outlined in pink hues. It was a familiar color. It was the color of meat.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
He pulled himself off the couch and staggered into the kitchen. The bottle of scotch that had been drinking was empty, and he found another one. He opened it, drank from the bottle (the first time in his life he ever drank straight from a bottle of scotch, thanks), and then let it hang at his side.
He glanced back to the TV and saw Cole Kensington standing in the kitchen doorway.
Quentin, eyes widening, felt the blood go out of his legs. He nearly tumbled to the floor, but managed to keep his feet.
“I was the one that roused it, and you were the one that woke it up,” the ghost of Cole said. “We brought it around together.”
Quentin moaned and then ran to the kitchen sliding doors that went onto the deck. It was a small deck and it over looked the wetlands beyond. He slid the doors shut and hid behind the house, away from windows lest he glimpse Cole’s ghost moving in the kitchen.
I’m drunk, he told himself. Very fucking drunk.
His heart was scaring him: it was beating in a way that was unfamiliar to him, with off-beam, out-of-sync lubs and dubs. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then risked a glanced back into the kitchen. It was empty, dark, and the pinkish glow from the TV in the living room beyond was all he saw.
“Okay,” he breathed. “Okay.”
He knew why Cole had come. Cole had come from his mind, lubricated by alcohol, to simply give voice to that which Cole knew.
The secret place had made The Swarm, he thought.
He still had the bottle of booze in his hand. He guzzled it. Then he slumped into the chair and looked out across the wetlands and bay. Beyond, miles away, he could see lights of civilization. He never saw Cole’s apparition again, but would see another soon. He passed out in the deck chair, and when he awoke the next morning, welts the size of golf-balls were across his legs and arms from the mosquitoes that had feasted on him. He vomited off the deck to the sandy ground below, the sand swallowing the liquid immediately and eagerly like something hungry, and Quentin groaned.
He went inside, drank more, and prayed that the spot would be found by someone else so he wouldn’t have to feel the burden of it anymore.
###
The next morning, Chief Ruggiero drove his cruiser down Bay Avenue. It was an overcast day with a light wind blowing off the Bay. Usually that meant bad green-head flies for beach-goers, who would spend most of the day smacking at the pinching pests biting their shins. On a normal summer day like this, the beach would be filling up now and by noon there would be little open space. It was testament to the amount of people that could bloat the population of the summer town.
The Chief went early to the Rite Aid, upon receiving a harried, shaky call from Carol, the Pharmacist who had given him the Plan-B kit last night. As he approached, he felt his stomach tighten.
Just like I predicted.
A huge line had formed. It snaked a path from the front doors of the pharmacy into the parking lot and down the street.
The EC kits that Carol had put outside of the doors had vanished as soon as the first people showed up in the pre-dawn hours, and with the doors locked, they had begun to bang on the glass, despite the sign she had hand-written that read: there are no more emergency contraception kits. More are in route. As the banging grew more intense, Carol had crouched down in one of the aisles, asking why she had to be only employee that had the loyalty and sense of duty to actually come into work after The Swarm. She had called the Chief as soon as the banging had started. The Chief saw the mob hitting at the door as he pulled up.
They’ll be inside in a few more minutes, he told himself.
He pulled the cruiser along the curb, grabbed the bullhorn, and stepped out. He felt the eyes of the Bay Islanders fall upon him.
“There are no more emergency kits left,” he said through the bullhorn.
“Then let us off the island to go get more!” Someone yelled.
“I can’t,” he said. “I want to, but I can’t. We don’t know what caused…what caused this event, and until we know that everyone is okay, then we can’t open the bridges.”
“The fuck you can’t! My fourteen year old daughter was raped! Raped! She needs one of these kits!”
“I know you’re all scared, and mad. We all are.”
“How’s your wife, Chief? How is she?”
The Chief felt a small stab of guilt. “My wife and sons have gone through the same trauma as all of you.”
The crowd, who did not yet know that The Chief hadn’t been affected, seemed to let the arguing go.
“We have orders from every pharmacy in the area. They are sending all the kits they have to us. They should be arriving soon. We also have, with help of the National Guard, approximately 1,000 units en route direct from the manufacturers. They’re being flown here as we speak. They’ll be distributed on the north bridge as they arrive. I suggest you go there.”
“Is that enough? For everyone?” Someone yelled.
“I don’t know,” the Chief admitted. “We haven’t been able to inventory all the victims. This has all been happening very fast.”
There was a general mummer of doubt and frustration. Then people started to leave, many of them running back down the street to parked cars and speeding off towards the north bridge. The Chief stayed until they were all gone. The Chief saw Carol standing on the other side of the doors to the pharmacy, looking thankful. He motioned to her. She came out, unlocking the door.
“I thought they were going to break in,” she said.
“They were close to it,” the Chief admitted.
“Thank you.”
“Why don’t you go home, Carol?”
“I have to stay here in case anyone…needs medicine.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Did your wife take the pill?”
He nodded. “Feeling a little sick from it.”
“That will pass.”
“I hope she’s one of the 75% it works on.”
Carol nodded, then went back into the store. The Chief ordered one car to stay at the pharmacy in case anyone else came looking for the EC Kits; they should be redirected to the north bridge. The other two he ordered on patrol.
“What about the north bridge?” One of them asked.
“The Guard’s set up there,” he said. “They can handle it.”
The Chief got back into his car and thought about what to do. The complexity of it was far too difficult for him to approach, and he only wanted to go home and sleep. The coin was spinning in a wobbling, loose formation and he couldn’t grasp it.
###
The extra EC kits arrived in the late evening the day after The Swarm, and they were quickly distributed.
Already almost 48 hours had passed since the Swarm intercourse.
When the new supply of kits were gone, the people remaining and in want of kits began to shout when word trickled back that no more were left. Among those people was Derrick Clinton, who had come for his mother. His mother had fallen into a state of immobility, which scared him. He wondered if his presence on the beach, when she had awoken, had somehow amplified the shock, violation and mortification of the situation. She would not have come to get the kit, so he had taken it upon himself. But at this rate, it looked as if he would never get one.
“Come on!” A man yelled next to him. “I got two teenage girls at home!”
“I have three!” Someone else yelled.
“My wife has cancer! She needs a kit!”
Derrick swallowed. The Swarm had ended, but its impact had not. Bay Isle streets still didn’t feel right, and the mob gathered on the North Bridge didn’t help.
A guy in an army uniform started talking through a bull-horn. Derrick didn’t know what division he was: Army, Navy, Marines, Guard
. He only knew he had fatigues on.
“The rest are coming directly from manufacturers!” The guard said.
“How many?”
The guard didn’t know. “We don’t have a count.”
There were general grumbles throughout the crowd. Then someone shouted: “Let me out and I’ll go get my own!”
Others rallied behind them, and for a moment Derrick was certain that they would charge the barricade. Perhaps it was the sight of the guns on the army people that stopped them, Derrick wondered. He would continue to wait for the next round of supplies, which they had been told would not come until the next morning.
###
The rioting started early the next morning, when it became clear that no extra emergency contraception kits were coming. Derrick, who was still waiting in the crowd, sent a text message to Lynn Rice.
People are getting pissed now.
He got a text back: U should leave.
He texted back: I need a kit for my mom. She’s been a zombie…
He got a text back: My parents weird too, but getting back to normal. Noticed they haven’t, like, hugged each other in a while or whatever.
Ahead someone started to shout. He glanced up from the phone. Up the bridge he saw that people were trying to rush past the barricade. The faces of the army people (army people was a generality: Derrick had no idea what branch of the armed forces they were) looked uncertain of how to proceed. The crowd of which he was a part started to grow more volatile, and soon he was getting shoved. His phone vibrated with a text message from Lynn (U there?), but he couldn’t reply to it now.
The army people started to shoot something into the crowd—smoking cans that Derrick assumed was tear gas. He took off running, snaking his way between the people around him: fathers, husbands, women desperately trying to stop what The Swarm had started. He was off the bridge and the crowd was running off the bridge too as the milky smoke clouds grew larger. He had no idea what to do now. He looked at his phone and texted Lynn back.
Guards shot off tear gas.
Text back: OMG, r u ok?
He texted back: yes, but not sure how to help my mom?
He got a text back: make her drink a lot of liquor or something, to stop whatever could have happened.
He texted back: that won’t work!
He got a text back: I don’t know.
Annoyed, he texted back: I’ll talk to you later.
He got a text back: K.
He walked until he got to an empty bench and sat on it. The bench was situated on a large body of water on which he had ridden rented jet-skis in the past. Now there were patrol boats floating in it and the bay beyond. He knew that the “lake” connected to the rest of the wetlands and eventually the Atlantic. He supposed they didn’t want people to escape the island. How long were they going to keep everyone captive?
He didn’t know why. The President had come on TV and said that they were evaluating the causes of the events on Bay Isle, and that they were temporarily going to block access to and from the island, until they were certain that the island was safe for people to leave and to enter.
Derrick Clinton just wanted to help his mother, who was not the only person from The Swarm who had gone into shock.
Just talk to her, he told himself. Just go talk to her so she doesn’t go crazy.
He walked the rest of the way back to his house and found his mom curled up in bed. He brought her hot tea and asked if she wanted anything else. She mumbled a negative, offering little as far as interaction, and then Derrick sat with her and just talked to her about what was happening outside and what had happened on the bridge.
“It’s okay, Mom, there are hundreds of other women too…hundreds just like you.”
###
Derrick Clinton’s estimate of hundreds of other women was not accurate. Rex Torres, who did not live on the island, found himself laying in the spare cot at the Medi-Merge. He had been volunteering for almost three days straight, and there was no part of his body that did not hurt. He had saved a few lives, including one horrific woman who had tried to give herself an abortion with a wire hanger. She had ruptured something and nearly bled to death. He was not an ER or trauma doctor, just a general practitioner, and this was wearing on him. He was so tired as he lay on the cot in the Medi-Merge break room, yet sleep would not come: his thoughts were raving and intense.
What are they going to do? Let all the women carry these bastard children to term?
And forget that, Rex, but what about the cause of The Swarm? It wasn’t normal, was it? I mean, people don’t generally swarm towards the beach to reproduce in a massive effort, do they? Nope. No, they don’t.
So what had caused it…and why?
He spent some time on the internet in the employee lounge. He found news suggesting that as many as 5,000 women and girls could get pregnant as a result of The Swarm. And wasn’t that odd, too, Rex? Because no act of intercourse is a 100% chance of conception. It was somewhere around 25%, wasn’t it? He found himself turning that concept over and over in his mind: how many of the women would get pregnant? They wouldn’t know for a few weeks, at least, and then what?
“Then what?”
He was very interested to know what those numbers would say. He fell asleep eventually and dreamed that he was part of The Swarm, except his Swarm was moving towards a cliff beyond which he knew was only a steep drop and certain death. Yet he followed along, mind-numb and sensation-dulled, all the while aware of the masses around him and the approaching edge.
###
It was now four days after The Swarm, and the time for emergency contraception had passed.
The Chief had no idea how many women were part of The Swarm. But something had to be provided for the women and girls.
Christ, the girls…young girls part of this and if they get pregnant from it, then what?
He supposed that at least the girls had no memory of the actual Swarm.
But if they caught a baby from it?
They would have a reminder for the rest of their lives. There had to be a way to stop that from happening, and of course there was…there always was. He had been briefed in the warehouse structure on Grand Avenue. It had once been a cold storage facility, but in the failing economy the business had gone bankrupt and the building had stood empty for two years, its white façade chipping to reveal gray and black. Potholes and cracks had appeared as if by magic shortly after the place went vacant and weeds, God’s nose hairs, had poked through the degradation. The government had come and taken it over in the past four days, he receiving a call shortly after The Swarm from the County Sheriff Griffith, asking where the feds could setup their facilities. For what? The Chief had asked, and the Sheriff had told him to study the events and help the people.
In his house, trying to clear his mind in the shower, his wife came in and started to talk to him while brushing her teeth.
“What are they doing, then?” She asked.
He was in the middle of shampooing his hair. “What?”
“What are they planning to do, now that the chance for emergency contraception is passed?”
“Log everyone, and monitor. Once they pregnancies are confirmed, if any are, then you know what they’ll do.”
“Abortions?”
“Yeah,” the Chief said, rinsing the shampoo from his head.
“Are they going to give people a choice?” His wife asked.
“They have to,” the Chief said. “They can’t force people into it. But do you think anyone will actually keep any pregnancies from what happened?”
“I don’t know,” she said, then left him alone.
So much for a chance to clear my mind, he thought, soaping up his body.
The government reps who had briefed the Chief in the warehouse on Grand Avenue had told him they planned to canvas the neighborhood and distribute pregnancy test kits, informational packets on STDS, and provide “abortion” pills to each women that had been part of The Swarm. The Chi
ef had asked when the pills could be used, and the reps had told him that the pregnancy had to be confirmed first, hence the pregnancy test kits. The Chief had asked when they, the kits, could be used. The reps had told him around 5-6 weeks after intercourse.
Convincing the frantic women to hold on swallowing the pills until the pregnancies could be confirmed was going to be hard work.
###
Calvin Wrigley was sitting with his wife, Helena, watching the news. The President had come on for a special announcement. He discussed the strange events of Bay Isle and suggested that nothing had been ruled out as far as a cause. The best scientists will be studying the island, the people and the events. Clinics will be open to provide grief counseling, trauma counseling, as well as testing for STDs and HIV. The population is estimated at about 12,000 people on the island. He assured them that the bridges needed to remain closed until they could isolate the cause of The Swarm and document those that were affected, to protect the American people and the people of Bay Isle.
“What would you do?” Calvin asked his wife.
“What?”
“If you were part of it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it must feel like.”
“How many people do you think will get pregnant?” He asked.
“I can’t think about it,” she said.
“Me either,” Calvin admitted.
But soon it would be all that they could think about.
###
Paul was browsing the internet when the phone rang. It was his mother. They—his parents and Dawn’s—had been calling incessantly since The Swarm became public knowledge. Paul had been reading the various theories popping up on internet boards and websites, Facebook pages and Twitter. There was government conspiracy, water problems, beams from aliens: the typical paranoid shit. Paul thought it might have been something in the environment, something that caused everyone to loose themselves for a moment. Through his browsing, he had found a website blog that posted a link to a National Geographic page that had an article and video on something called the Christmas Island Crab, which was a species in Australia that “swarmed” towards the ocean to reproduce once per year. The blog likened the crabs to The Swarm on Bay Isle. The blogger went so far as to say that the crabs went heedless of the danger to their lives, indicating the importance of their procreation. Maybe that was what happened on Bay Isle? Maybe humans were instinctively trying to strengthen humanities numbers in face of some unseen Armageddon? 2012 is almost here...if other “swarm” events appear elsewhere, I’ll be sure to say my prayers, the blogger had written.