by Rob Heinze
They had put the lamp from the den on the attic floor, and now he went and turned it on. He left the bucket of sand on the floor.
The lack of strong lighting in the room somehow amplified the distortion of the scene that unfolded. He watched as his wife shed her panties, walked to stand over the bucket of sand, crouched (leaking, she’s leaking), and began to shovel the grainy sand into her vagina. She moved in quick, short bursts, her right hand cupped into a spade, her other hand holding the tuft of her pubic hair flat so that she could see. Then, apparently satisfied, she dipped both hands into the sand as if they were shovels and pulled them out as sand ran off them. She patted them onto her breasts. Then she went back to her sleeping bag, casting sand showers off as she walked. She lay down and fell to sleep, eventually falling to one of the trances.
It was the single most disturbing thing Reagan had ever seen.
It took him a long time to move from his spot near the lamp, unable to shake that image, and when he finally did, the sun was already peaking over the horizon.
###
Lynn Rice and Derrick Clinton had begun to see each other, mostly just to talk and share their fears. They had shared the experience of seeing The Swarm together, and it would bind them together for their lives.
On the night that Reagan gathered sand for his hemorrhaging wife, Lynn and Derrick had walked the dark streets until finally settling on a bench on the deserted mini-golf course. It was a part of the island mostly frequented by vacationers, but it seemed the safest to them. They had to slip out without telling their parents. There was a sensation from their parents—and the rest of Bay Isle—that the Swarm and the chaos it had brought to the island was nearing its end. Still, as far as they knew, the potential of vigilante attacks loomed and thus there was danger. So they snuck out, and so when they saw the man coming up the street, they froze, silent, and watched as he disappeared behind the high grasses. When he emerged, he was carrying a bucket full of sand. They wouldn’t have known this, except for the lopsided way he walked. They waited until he was out of hearing range, and Derrick said:
“That was strange.”
“What was he doing?”
“Maybe he’s building a sand castle,” Derrick said, half-joking.
“Should we follow him?”
“Why?”
“I just feel like we should follow him.”
“I don’t know why you’d want to do that.”
“Who comes out this late at night to get a bucket of sand?”
“That’s true,” Derrick agreed.
“Let’s just follow him.”
“Okay, but I’m telling you he’s just building a sand-castle.”
They started up the street after the man with the bucket. They watched him go inside. Then nothing happened. They saw no lights in the windows, no movement in the house. He just got a bucket of sand, went into a dark house, and that was it.
They watched the house for a long time. When it grew late and nothing happened, they left and went back home.
Chapter 10
Rex had first come to the attic a couple days after the patrols had started. The Chief had assured him they were all “normal” pregnancies, and though Rex had wondered how the Chief might know that, he did not say it. Instead, the Chief left him in the attic after a quick introduction and went on his way. With the patrols he could not linger long lest give their position away.
Though he would never know how the sand had played into The Swarm and what happened (no one on Bay Isle would ever know), he found in Kelly a startling mirror of his strange dream on the beach.
Kelly had been the third woman he had assessed.
He had been conducting the exams in the spare bedroom, one at a time, and the woman had come down with her husband. He had shut the door, locked it, and they stood facing Rex. Rex, a small Asian man who had once been teasingly called T-Rex, looked up at them. It was a strange moment for him, in a year that had been filled with strange moments: these two people whom he was helping voluntarily standing there, as if measuring him. The man kept his right hand behind his back, which was something that Rex had noticed fleetingly. The woman looked to her husband, who had nodded, and then she had begun to take off her clothes. Then she had stood in bra and panties and Rex had nearly screamed. Her stomach had been pulsing with pink, brilliant flashes of light. The veins and arteries had stood out on her skin like a bright colored anatomy book. He remembered the way the blood moved within them, each wobbling under the contained pressure of her heart…beating, beating…and alone in the room (for then he had been very alone) Dr. Rex Torres felt very small…smaller than he indeed was. In his fright, he had not been able to piece together what had happened. It had finally come upon him like a dusting of snow on a cold day: she had gotten pregnant during The Swarm.
“Now treat her,” the man had said, taking his hand from behind his back and holding a gun at Rex.
She had gotten onto the bed and looked at him. Rex’s hands had been shaking badly.
“Lay back,” he had said, hoping his voice hadn’t quivered too badly.
He had checked her vitals, all of which were fine. He tentatively, cautiously palpated her belly. He felt occasional lumps, like tumors, but nothing resembling that of a human fetus. He noticed, of course, the sand grains across her body. He could see a more dense concentration around her underwear and bra, over-spilling the top. He had dreamed of this woman, hadn’t he? Dreamed of her patting sand onto her vagina like a baker patting powder into dough? Her and hundreds of other women doing the same thing up the night beach.
“Underwear?” He had asked, suggesting she remove them.
“I don’t think there’s any need,” the man, whose name was Reagan, had said. “She’s leaking and the sand’s packed in tight to stop it.”
“Okay,” Rex had said, looking at them. He had thought to mention that the sand wasn’t good, but what was the point? He had known that, bizarrely as it sounded, the sand was good for her in this condition.
“Help her,” Reagan had said.
“How?”
“She goes to these traces,” Reagan had said. “They’re getting worse. The people up there are getting scared of her…I think they know.”
“I can’t help that,” Rex had said. “I don’t know what’s happening to her.”
“She’s giving birth to God’s Son,” Reagan had said.
“Okay,” Rex had replied. He had waited, as if for more guidance.
“Can’t you give her morphine or something, to prevent her from going bat-shit?”
“That would harm the…the baby,” he had said, hesitating because he hadn’t felt a baby. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You’re a doctor, can’t you think of something?”
“Have you thought of just telling them?” Rex had asked.
Reagan hadn’t. Hadn’t even considered it.
“They would be too afraid.”
“I’m not sure,” Rex had said. “They might be curious too.”
He had looked to the otherworldly highlights along Kelly’s body.
“They might want to know why The Swarm happened,” he had added. “I know I do.”
He had his theory that the sand on Bay Isle had entered all the islanders’ genitals over time, somehow preparing them to receive a signal to Swarm, possibly causing a sudden surge in sex hormones or something, and he would always stick to that theory, no matter what came of it all.
“They’ll be afraid,” Kelly had said. “Of me. Of what I’m carrying.”
From the way that Kelly looked, despite her normal vitals, Rex was certain that the thing (things?) growing inside of her would kill her at birth.
“Maybe,” Rex had said, “But they have their own worries. They’ll worry about their babies, and if they’ll be born okay…or if they’ll be…be like...”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were supposed to be alone,” Reagan said.
“Why did you bring these people here, t
hen?”
“The Chief found out about it…that we were hiding.”
“Does he know about…” Rex had begun.
“No! No,” Reagan had said. “He believes her pregnancy is normal.”
“So where did the other women come from?” Rex had asked.
“The Chief said he wanted to save more of the women who were pregnant before The Swarm. So he brought six, and I brought six. Then their spouses. I remembered some from the store I work at, remembered them buying pregnancy tests before The Swarm. And God shall let the Chosen recall All, to see and drink of Their Origin.”
Rex had wanted to ask why only twelve women, but he knew it was due to the limiting attic; it was small and cramped, with little room to move. What he didn’t know, and what Rex had bent his manic mind to, was that there were a total of twelve. Twelve was the number of Apostles, who had been Jesus’s constant companions. So, too, these children would follow the Christ Child that came forth from his wife’s womb. It was the only way that he had been able to convince himself to allow these people into the attic. Then he had thought about it, and the story began to layer itself beautifully and naturally, as it had thus far for Reagan: they would tell the people. They would tell the people in the attic because it would begin their destiny as His followers. They had done just that, climbing back up to the attic with Rex in tow. Then they had stood there, Rex still on the ladder but his torso in the attic (he gazing around and see the faces looking back at them and he had thought…they already know), and told the people that Kelly was carrying a Swarm pregnancy.
For a long time there had been silence, and then the arguing had begun.
“You should kill it! It’s not safe for you!” One of the women had yelled, and Reagan stormed towards her, threatening, but how was he to kill the mother of one of his Son’s Apostles?
Finally, after tense minutes, one of the men had said, “Let us see. Let us see your stomach without a cover.”
Kelly had looked back to her husband, who nodded, and then she had lifted the shirt. Her belly had been exposed, brilliant and strange: lights shown within, pulsing and fading, swimming, darting in quick movements and then going out. Women had gasped, shuddering, and men had stared wide-eyed at the movements in her belly.
“We hear you talking at night,” one of the women had said. “It’s scary.”
“What’s happening to you? In…in those dreams?” Her partner had asked.
“They’re trances,” Reagan had said. “She’s seeing God, and He is telling her of her Duties.”
It had ended up better than they could have thought. The twelve women and their partners accepted Kelly’s pregnancy. What choice did they have? Surely none of them could have expected what eventually happened, not on such a grand level from just one pregnancy. They were all near the end, perhaps only four weeks or so away from giving birth, and though the days and nights were long in the low attic, they passed the time by talking, giving voice to their fears, some writing in journals, some speculating on what Kelly carried inside her. Others talked about their babies, and all shared a tale similar to Paul and Dawn Thompson, whom the Chief had brought to the attic on the day the patrols started. They had conception problems, or miscarried, and then they had gotten pregnant just before The Swarm. There were some good, strong talks and debates about The Swarm, of which Reagan did not participate, for his knowledge of the purpose of The Swarm was far different. Dawn Thompson kept a journal and wrote small entries to help pass the last few weeks.
And what could have fused together inside her, from just a sperm and an egg, to make colors like that? Something else was working in The Swarm…something that no one could see. She wrote in one page.
She’s talking a lot about connecting, in her trances, but I can never understand the context of it, she wrote in another one.
I can’t take this attic anymore. I want the patrols to end, I want to go home, I want to talk to my friends and family to tell them I’m okay.
Rex came up into the attic, looking at the make-shift quarters, and remembered the T-Rex shuffle he used to do. Kelly was up there, somewhere. He was starting to become afraid. The woman, Kelly, was growing more and more erratic and insane.
He took a deep breath and went about checking the women. It was his third time examining them, quickly, without the formality of going into the spare bedroom downstairs. He heard the moans and abnormal, guttural sounds coming from the other side of the attic.
Don’t look, don’t look, he told himself.
He went to the next woman, feeling along her belly, bringing out his sonogram to listen to the heartbeat, which was very hard to hear over the noise from Kelly. He glanced out the corner of his eyes, and there he saw her ballooning belly. She was sitting against the slanting wall of the attic, amidst the nails and splinters, some of which probably stabbed her back. Her legs were spread slightly, her belly an impossible mass above it, and she was in the throes of a trance. She was stammering words together into a fluid stream, and the lights inside her belly pulsed, died, pulsed, died, hypnotic and beautiful and terrible.
He turned back to his job at hand, focusing on the woman in front of him. Her name was Gale Wrightson, and her husband was Pete. She was making nice progress. Rex checked the baby’s heartbeat with the sonogram he’d borrowed from a nurse-friend of Chief Ruggeiro (Rex hadn’t asked how she had gotten it). A solid 155 beats per minutes.
“Sounds great,” he said, trying to talk over the mingle words spewing from Kelly’s lips.
She started to utter the word home home home home in a mad, rapid repetition.
You forgot phone, Rex thought randomly.
He quickly checked Gale for dilation, found it around 1 centimeter, and thought she would go early. He relayed all this to them.
“Any questions?” He asked.
Pete and Gale looked at him. They had questions, he knew, but they did not relate to themselves.
“Well, I gues—”
A loud yell cut him off. He spun and saw Kelly. She was moving drunkenly across the attic, moving in a waddle that would have been cutely funny in other pregnant women but was somehow grotesque here. Her stomach, twice the size it should have been, held too much fluid: it was a weebling, warbling monstrosity. She ran to the corner, crouched, mumbled incoherent words, and then began to sing something that was haunting, halting. Rex watched in horrid fascination. He could see the pink glow along the seat of her pants, evidence of some continuous discharge. He wondered if he had made a mistake, if they had screwed up letting this pregnancy continue. When it came out, it would come out…whatever it was.
“Is she okay?” Rex heard.
He turned and saw Gale, wide-eyed, looking at the crouched figure in the corner. He swallowed and turned back to her.
“Kelly?” He croaked.
No answer. Her hands were moving in front of her, out of sight, and she reminded Rex of one of those movies about Exorcism.
“Kelly!”
No response. Kelly hadn’t become a danger to herself, or anyone else, but the people were starting to feel that it would happen. She was becoming more erratic, more often gone than here. Her husband, Reagan, had grown so slender that Rex was sure a gust of wind would carry him away. Rex would often see him loitering by the attic stairs, staring dreamily into the cramped quarters as if deep in some world he had created. Now he was not in the attic, having gone downstairs to use the bathroom.
Damn, Rex thought.
Suddenly he was back in the high school cafeteria, deciding whether he was going to make his mock, T-Rex mouth munch on the hockey player’s man-boobs.
He stood and started to walk towards Kelly. He couldn’t tell what she was doing there, moving her hands rhythmically in front of her, somehow reminding him of a guy masturbating. The floor creaked as he drew closer to her.
“Kelly?”
She turned and rushed at him. He stumbled backwards in his confusion, tripping and going down hard on the attic floor.
&nbs
p; (In the bathroom, Reagan heard and felt the entire ceiling shake)
Kelly was on top of him, pressing her gelatinous belly against him: she had taken her breasts out and had been squeezing the pseudo-colostrum from them, which formed an iridescent mess on her hands and chest, running in wavy lines down her forearms. Her weight was great, and Rex could not move. She leaned over him, eyes wide but she not seeing. She squeezed her breast with a quick, violent pulse. At the center of that breast was a nipple and from that nipple rushed the alien liquid. It had all happened too fast, and before he knew her purpose, it was too late: the glowing fluid splattered his face, entering his mouth, its warmness horrible, its slimy viciousness worse. She leaned over him and squeezed more of the monstrous fluid onto him. Rex screamed.
“Get her off me! Please, help!”
The stuff was like metal in his mouth, how he would imagine licking an old brass door-handle might taste. He gagged and spit it out. Reagan, who had come upstairs immediately upon hearing the bang, pulled Kelly off him. It didn’t seem difficult, and it wasn’t, for she had finished her task—whatever that task had been.
She mumbled and intoned some odd, non-human words, then sank to the floor of the attic while Reagan tried to tend to her.
“Are you okay?”
It was Gale’s husband, Pete, standing over Rex. Rex sat up, his face covered with the warm fluid. Pete handed him a towel, and Rex rubbed it off. The metallic taste in his mouth was growing stronger somehow, amplified, like the sour taste of a candy that grew progressively worse as saliva destroyed the layers of it.
Something’s breaking down, he thought, horrified.
“Let’s go downstairs,” Pete said to Rex.
Rex nodded and got slowly to his feet. Reagan watched Rex leave with a mixture of concern and fear. He knew that he was losing his wife, that much was obvious. He feared intervention of any kind, and he wasn’t sure what Rex might have done to her that had caused her to flip.
Downstairs Pete led Rex to the bathroom, where Rex washed his face as best he could, rinsing his mouth out and spitting into the sink. The metallic taste only strengthened. He went with Pete into the kitchen, his feet somehow growing further away from his head; he looked down and saw them thirty stories below him….something was happening…that fluid…”I don’t know how much longer we can stay in hiding; we have to get out of here…Rex? Doc? Rex?”