The Swarm

by Rob Heinze

  “God help me,” he whispered, “Please God help me.”

  “Everyone okay in there?”

  It was a male’s voice from outside, the person who had rung the door. He had startled upon hearing the crash against the door. Quentin closed his eyes.

  “Yeah, just a little drunk!”

  Why did I say that?

  Because you’re drunk, you whore-killing mo-mo!

  The person on the other side did not comment. Quentin grappled blindly for the door-handle without looking up at it. His hand found the cold metal, and he turned it. It clicked. Then, with a tremendous amount of concentration, he pulled himself to his feet and opened the door.

  The man standing there looked at him with a mixture of concern and curiosity. It was the first person he had found drunk on Bay Isle, and what it was only 1:30 pm.

  “Hullo!” Quentin said, weaving. “I apologize for my condition.”

  “Okay,” the man said. “I don’t care.”

  He put the man’s drunkenness as a factor of stress. He was surprised that the liquor store hadn’t run out of booze yet, though he supposed that it soon might. He made a mental note to ask the other people covering other parts of the island if they had encountered anyone drunk or drugged.

  The man decided that he would stay outside, right on the stoop, and ask the questions. He tried to run through them, but each answer Quentin gave was a lumbering, rambling response that made little sense beyond the initial answer. When the man finally got to the point of telling Quentin to get tested for STDS at the building on Grand Avenue, Quentin’s mouth curled into a smile, the process of which seemed to last about five minutes.

  “You know what, I should get tested. I should. Fuck The Swarm…” He paused, then cackled at his own unintentional pun. “You get that…Fuck The Swarm?” Here he laughed some more, while the man shifted uncomfortably on the stairs. Quentin stopped laughing, then continued on, “One time I…I did this girl anal-like, you know? Is that something I should get tested after?”

  “Probably,” the man said, “Okay, sir…”

  “I caused this whole thing, know that?” Quentin said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The Swarm. It was all me, my doing.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I fed the earth, woke it up.”

  “Okay,” the man said. “Thanks for the information.”

  “Do you think Junk-It, Inc. is a good name for a waste hauling company?”

  “Sure.”

  “I tried to think of something clever, you know? Like there’s this septic pumping company up in north jersey called Stinky’s Septic…can you believe that? Junk-It isn’t nearly…nearly as clever…but I…I thought it was pre-tty good.”

  Quentin felt something happening in his stomach.

  “Sir, I am sorry to be rude, but I really have a lot of houses to get to,” the man said. “Thanks for your time.”

  Quentin waved the man away. “Okay, okay…I understand you dumb moron.”

  “I’m sorry?” The man asked, stopping and looking back.

  “I didn’t do it alone. Go find Cash Richardelli. Damiano Richardelli. Cash is only a nickname. He’s the fuh-fuh-fucking criminal. He’s got all these young girls, just rolls right through them like their commodities…he gave…gave me the bah-bah…bodies…”

  Quentin was going to hurl. He burped deeply.

  “Okay, sir, okay. Good bye.”

  The man had enough. He waved and left the house, the drunken man not making any sense. Quentin couldn’t stay to watch him go. He shut the door and lurched to the bathroom, but he was only in the kitchen when the vomit came out in a bloated gush. It splattered like oatmeal to the kitchen floor, and when he finally got to the bathroom, there was nothing left to empty, but he continued to gag for a long time.

  He passed out eventually on the bathroom floor.

  ###

  The iPhone video taken by Colin Redman (whose body had not yet been discovered) became the most watched video on YouTube, surpassing Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. It would hold that position for many, many years, especially after it was all over. Upon viewing the video, most people had nightmares of waking to find they were naked in a strange place with a horde of other people.

  The existence of this video, running at just over half-an-hour, probably led to the fervor that engulfed Bay Isle—and the world—in the coming months.

  By the sixth week after The Swarm, approximately 6,123 women on Bay Isle between the ages of 14 and 47 used the pregnancy test kits handed out by the government. Of this count, around 1,000 had used the emergency contraception kits, so their tests came back negative. That left approximately 5,123 women to stare, numbly, at the test strip and the “positive” symbol that shown therein. The government reps had informed the women that they would need to wait until there was a positive pregnancy test before using the “abortion” pills. They had also requested that any positive pregnancies be recorded and reported for the purpose of analysis. They had provided a website and information on how to login and report the data.

  Of the 5,123 women with “positive” pregnancy tests as a result of The Swarm, approximately 5,025 swallowed the “abortion” pills and let it destroy the ill-conceived fetuses. The pills failed to stop the fetal growth in 10% (or around 500 women) of the swallowers.

  Not every woman or girl tested exactly on the sixth week. Some spilled into the seventh and the eighth weeks of gestation.

  The data had not been compiled on the staggering amount of conceptions as a result of The Swarm until almost the tenth week. At that time, the President gave a public broadcast on prime time across all TV channels. He reported the figures on the pregnancies (later in the questions and answers, someone asked what the percentage of conceptions during The Swarm was, and the President said it wasn’t 100%, but very close). He encouraged everyone on Bay Isle to take the provided pills. He also indicated that the government was providing a clinic for Bay Isle patients on whom the abortion pills “failed” as an emergency backup.

  The President’s speech and the indication of “abortions” provided by the Government finally created some tension among the Pro-Life movement. The picketing began early the next morning after the President’s speech. The protestors lined the North Bridge barricade opposite side, raising signs that read Pro-Life and Human at Conception, The Swarm was God’s Will. A tremendous, world-wide debate ignited, and there was no clear divide. Some religious zealots, horrified of the scene on the beach, decried the incident as demonic—a work of the Devil. All conceptions should be aborted to avoid the birth of the Anti-Christ. Others argued that reproduction was designed only for pro-creation and the conditions under which it took place matter not: God was in the motivation and therefore the end result was an Act of God. These two beliefs would clash against each other. One of the main catalysts (there were plenty more, of course) for the debate was the President’s suggestion that the rate of conception was near 100%. It represented a nearly impossible statistic. Reproduction was not that accurate. Even the poorly educated man that did his wife (or girlfriend) knew she didn’t catch pregnant each time. The highly educated people, who considered the failure rate of infertility treatments like in utero and in vitro, knew 100% was not likely.

  The top trend on Twitter was #BayIsleSwarm.

  It’s the Government messing with air chemicals, bio-warfare. They should be held responsible, tweeted DavidSky342.

  Another tweet: it was rape. Everyone was raped! Pro-life fundamentalists are just fundamental morons! Pro-choice!

  Tweet: All those pregnancies should be destroyed now! They can’t be borne! They can’t even reach the second trimester!

  Tweet: Those embryos are babies! Please give them a chance!

  Tweet: Where can I get air or water from Bay Isle? I want to bring it to a strip-club!

  (Tweet later deleted by Moderators)

  There were so many tweets that following them all was impossible. Facebook pages appe
ared almost over-night. One of them was called Abort_Bay_Isle. Another was called Bay_Isle_Phenomenon. There was one calling for all Bay Isle residents to post, updating their progress, to detail their experience. A Christian page sprang up, calling for all people considering abortion of the Swarm Babies to join them, at which time they would pitch their Pro-Life, through providing links to videos on abortion procedures specifics and other discouraging, purposely visceral media. Another short-lived Facebook page called “Bomb Bay Isle” sprang up and encouraged everyone to rally behind the government destroying the island; Facebook later deleted it and reported the creator’s IP information to the government.

  One deranged man strapped himself with a homemade bomb and rushed towards the north bridge barricade, shoving through the protestors, trying to get access onto the island. He was claiming to be doing God’s work. He was half-way across the barricade when he was shot in the head by the guards, his bomb a dud. It was defused and no one was hurt. One of the protestors filmed it and posted it on YouTube, gathering more support for the Pro-Life Movement and Swarm-was-God Argument.

  The summer had passed into the fall, and the vacationers who had come for a week or two were still trapped on the island. The government remained stern in their absolution to keep Bay Isle secure, until they knew what had caused The Swarm. Perhaps, somewhere in the superstitious part of the collective unconscious that humans share, a seed began to grow in the minds of the Higher Ups. Perhaps, in some long and secret meeting room, there were conversations on whether a Swarm pregnancy should be allowed to be birthed. Certainly, there was the why, the how and again the why. Always the why? Perhaps, in that same room, someone suggested that each pregnancy from The Swarm must absolutely be aborted. Why? Don’t know, just a “bad” feeling and old superstition that lives in us all. But whether this back room meeting occurred was all speculation, and for the people on Bay Isle, they watched as their island descended into chaos.

  Chapter 7

  On the sixteenth week, a low-flying, single engine plane puttered over Bay Isle, banking hard to the left. People came out to watch it. It was the first non-news, non-government air-craft. It was a single-engine deal, a one-seater, and in the bright blue sky it looked like a falcon resplendent on cool currents. As it teetered left and right in the air, as if unsure of which way to turn, residents grew nervous.

  It was heading towards the Medi-Merge. The pilot, whose name was Robert Pasteur, had lost his wife to sleeping pill overdose after she had carried (to term) their second still-born child. To Robert Pasteur, an abortion was publishable by death. He had seen the terror and unreality of a still-born child, and how that image had degenerated his entire life and belief system. Now he meant to bring justice to the people of Bay Isle, who thought they could abort life. He had been on Bay Isle before for vacation, and knew the island well. He had circled the Medi-Merge on the Google Map posted on the dashboard, and was closing in on its physical location, the plane dropping as he prepared to crash into it.

  Rex Torres had been stuck on Bay Isle for a month. He had been offering his help at the Medi-Merge, alternating his sleep between the hospital and Calvin Wrigley’s house. He had looked up Calvin’s address in the phonebook and driven over about a week or two after The Swarm. When not “on call” (as a general practitioner, the least noble of medical specialties in med student minds, Rex had not been on-call since his training ten years earlier), sleeping on the small cot in the Medi-Merge was not very restful and his sleep deprivation was disconnecting him from reality. If this was a reality, he had thought. He had vivid, startling dreams as his sleeplessness bred confusion, again bringing him back to his days as a wide-eyed, pre-med hopeful and then as a bona fide med-school student.

  And what brought him back to those days was that smell, once again entering his dreams.

  One of his most powerful dreams had been as a pre-med hopeful, before he had worked on the orangey, stringy and soft cadavers (his first cadaver had been a male, and he remembered the brown earth color of the cadaver’s penis…he remembered it because one of the jack-holes working with him lifted with a scalpel, then let it flop back down, mumbling “not bad, for a cadaver, not bad” and he, Rex, getting so irritated at the kid that he told him to grow-the-fuck-up and be an adult, to which the other kid had replied, Christ, I’m just joking and later Rex was more annoyed to learn that the kid had staggering grades and ended up becoming a renowned heart surgeon), was of him in a cold, large operating room imbued with a constant air flow. In college, he had volunteered on weekends in the OR of a local hospital, mostly stocking shelves and working with the orderlies, changing in their locker-room which somehow smelled of hospital soup and fresh vinyl gloves (that was the smell of every hospital, wasn’t it?). He hadn’t liked the orderlies, though one black guy was pretty chill and had convinced some of the nurses with this charm he had to let Rex look at some surgeries. You want to be a doctor? The guy had asked him, and Rex had said Yes, and the guy had called him a crazy mothafucker, fucking T-Rex. Rex had shrugged, and said, “Guess so.” He could remember in startling detail the first surgery he had seen in which an elderly woman was having a screw driven into her fractured hip. The drill had been a long device, like something a contractor should have been using instead of a surgeon. He had watched it penetrate the woman’s skin, and that had been fine, and he had watched the screw on the x-ray scanner as it approached the hip, and that had been fine, and it had been really, really hot in there—and even that had been fine—and he, Rex, would have been fine except for that smell. There was no joking: it had come from between the woman’s legs. How did Rex know that? Well, he had been in the room when they prepped her. She had been elderly, in the throes of bad Alzheimer (about which he grudgingly and sickly had to listen to the doctors make jokes), and as part of the prep, they had spread her knees on an elevated table and latched her into something like a stirrup. Shortly thereafter, the smell had come to him. It was beyond his descriptive powers. He supposed the poor lady, in her dementia, probably never cleaned herself, and though he had felt sympathy for her, he had just wanted her legs closed. That smell had worked its way into him—become a part of his memory—and in the dreams that followed he was always trying to operate or learn in an OR while that smell, like so many drugs, kept working its way into his mind though nasal openings and distracting him. He had never been able to operate or do any procedures in those pre-med and med-school dreams because of that goddamn smell. In the operating room, at the source of the smell and memory, Rex Torres had left in the middle of the surgery to which he had been fortunately allowed, going quickly to the locker-room with that warm, poisoned smell of soup and vinyl, and in the toilet stall he had vomited up his lunch, his body growing extremely hot and clammy. When he had finally come out, his orderly pal—the only one whom he had liked—was sitting on the bench fixing his shoes. What happened? He had asked and Rex had told him about the smell. He hadn’t even told the guy from where the smell had come, but the guy knew, said, lady needs some serious Celestial Showers to which Rex had smiled and the guy never said anything else, never questioned the reality of Rex’s dream of medicine.

  It had been nearly 10 years since Rex had doubted himself, or dreamed of that smell.

  Now it had come back, and he thought about the dream as he drove to the Medi-Merge in his BMW.

  In the dream he was on a night beach and on the beach were women and those women—all nude—were enacting one of the most bizarre images he had ever seen: crouched in the sand against a radioactively pink sky and sea, the women scooped up sand, then stuffed and patted the grits into their open vaginas reminding Rex of a baker patting powder onto dough. And that smell, of putrid uncleanliness, permeated the air of the dream.

  He, Calvin and Helena Wrigley had spent quite some time speculating on The Swarm. Most notably, Calvin asked Rex what the odds of 100% of conception was. Very low, Rex had said. Rex had told them about the dream. They had tried to speculate on its origins. Rex ultimately sugg
ested that he feared failure again, what with the smell, but he had no idea what he could fail at. And he had no idea what the deal with the sand into vaginas meant.

  He was four blocks from the Medi-Merge when the plane’s shadow passed over him. He leaned forward and looked up, catching sight of the plane. It was very low now. He knew the pilot’s intention immediately, though he did not know its destination.

  It’s going to crash.

  It struck the Medi-Merge full-on, plowing into the small, three-story structure and exploding outwards. Over 125 people were killed, though no abortions were halted and no swarm-pregnancies were terminated or saved. The pilot had blindly focused on the Medi-Merge, not the warehouse on Grand Avenue in which the emergency abortions took place for those women who did not want them. The two fire trucks on the island rushed to the scene, and Rex was there to assist with triaging and medical treatment.

  He didn’t cry until later, after two beers with Calvin Wrigley in the man’s living room.

  ###

  Dawn and Paul Thompson were sleeping when they heard the explosion outside. They leapt out of bed and rushed to the windows on front of the house. There was bright orange light down the street, flashing and moving as if alive.

  “What is that?” Dawn asked.

  Paul wasn’t sure. The source of the light was too far down, and he could not see it from window. He suggested that Dawn stay where she was, he going downstairs to the front door; she decided to follow him outside despite his suggestion. Outside the light was bright and there was something…clicking? Crackling? He went down the walk to see the source of the light, and when he finally saw the source, he felt clammy and weak.

  A house was on fire down the street. The fire was pouring out of the windows and doors. Other people had come out around him, concerned neighbors already “on edge” from the closed bridges and military presence, as well as the visits from the government taking inventory. Now a fucking house burning rapidly on their street. The news would later report that ten houses had been set ablaze that night, in the first of the terrorist attacks.