by Rob Heinze
fucked…this:
It was Pete’s voice from far away, far below and ten minutes later, after a series of violent seizures, Rex awoke on the kitchen floor of Reagan’s house. Pete, Reagan and two other men were standing over him, looking concerned.
“Are you okay, Doctor?” Reagan asked.
Rex sat up. His head ached. He had seen the outcome. He had seen what awaited Bay Isle from the birth of The Swarm.
“I’m okay,” he said shakily. “I’m going to go home and lay down for a bit.”
“You just had a seizure,” Pete said. “A bad one. You should stay here.”
“No, I’m going to go home.”
With that, before anyone could stop him, he left the front door of the house.
###
Lynn Rice and Derrick Clinton were walking past the house, when they saw the small Asian guy stumble out the front door.
Since that night when they’d seen Reagan collecting sand, they always came back to the house. Once, they had seen this vibrant pink glow streaming out the vents along the roof, brief but real, and they had increased the frequencies of their visits. During the day, it was just walks past it, trying to see who went in or out. Once they saw Chief Ruggiero go inside, and this had intrigued them: something was happening inside that house.
Now as the man emerged with something like iodine-like stains on his face, Derrick and Lynn were convinced the house had a secret.
“Hey!” Derrick said.
The man was turning the other way, not registering their presence. At the sound of the voices, he turned to see the two people—kids—standing there. He stopped dead, as if struck by lightning, and then stalked over to them.
“What’s going on in that house?” Derrick asked.
Lynn saw Rex coming and unconsciously took a step backwards.
“You live in the island?” Rex asked.
They both nodded.
“Get your families, and get off it as soon as you can.”
With that, he turned and started to leave again. He had a lot to do, and if these two kids didn’t listen to him, that was their problem. Then something occurred to him. He stopped, turned, saw the two staring after him mutely, and said: “Do you remember The Swarm?”
How could they have forgotten? They nodded.
“The result of it is ready to be born in that house. Get off the island, now.”
Then he got in his car, and sped away. They watched him go for a moment longer, remembering the lights they had seen streaming out the vents along the roof. They finally decided it was time to get moving. They started to run, moving quickly up the street, huffing and puffing the entire way home.
Chapter 11
Dawn Thompson sat nervously on the chair in the warm attic. Paul was at her side. They were watching the woman who carried the progeny of The Swarm.
She was lying flat, asleep or comatose, her belly rising like a great mountain from under her. Reagan sat cross-legged at her side. He appeared to be in some trance, eyes open but not seeing.
“I want to leave,” Dawn said. “I want to leave now.”
“We should wait,” Paul said. “Wait for Doctor Rex to come back.”
“What happened to him?”
They had seen the woman charge him, pulling him to the ground and injecting that breast fluid into his mouth. Christ, they knew The Swarm and its aftermath would be with them forever…they would tell their baby stories of it when they were older, how they had barely survived it. She supposed this was how pregnant women in wars must feel.
It hasn’t survived yet, she told herself.
It seemed like a hundred years ago that she had been in her house, giving her daily offering to the God Google.
“Pete said he looked possessed,” Paul said, looking up.
Pete was hunkered down near his wife. He saw Paul looking at him, his face grave. Paul motioned him over. Pete came across the floor, standing carefully on the wood planks, and picked his way over to them. He hunkered down.
“What’s up?”
“Where did Rex go?” Paul asked.
Pete shrugged. “Don’t know. Guy had a fucking seizure, got up, and left. Said he was going home to rest.”
Dawn looked over to the glowing bulb that was Kelly’s belly. Reagan hovered beside it.
“Do you think he meant it?” She asked Paul.
“What do you mean?”
“If…if it was just you there, with Rex, without anyone else, do you think he would have said something else?”
Pete thought about it, letting the question sink in, not understanding that which she was asking. Finally it made sense to him: was he being vague because of Reagan? He hadn’t thought about that.
“Maybe,” he said, “I don’t really know.”
“He saw something,” Paul said. “He figured something out and he’s going to come back soon.”
“Do you think we should leave?” Dawn asked Pete this time.
Pete glanced back at Reagan. The pistol he carried was on the floor at his side. He kept in close like some people kept their cell phones with them wherever they went.
“I don’t think he’ll let us,” Pete said.
“Me either,” Paul agreed. “Let’s wait for Rex to come back.”
They stayed with the other “Apostles” in the attic and waited for Doctor Rex Torres to return.
###
Rex went immediately to the place that had been his temporary home during The Swarm beyond the Medi-Merge: the Wrigley’s house. He found Calvin sitting on the front stoop with Helena, drinking iced tea in the spring day. Calvin saw the Beamer pulling around the corner, and stood up. Rex had not told the man, who had become something of a fatherly presence to him, that he had been helping treat the women in Reagan’s house. Despite his confiding in the man about the sand, and his belief that it had a role to play in The Swarm, he had made a decision not to tell him about his moon-lighting operation.
Now he looked up and saw Calvin wave to him. Helena smiled, glancing up from her book, then went back to reading.
They have no idea, Rex thought, taking a minute to breathe. No one on the island has any clue.
We made a mistake, Rex thought. We shouldn’t have let her carry it to term.
Perhaps there’s still time. Perhaps you could still stop it.
He could. He could stop it. He was, after all, T-Fucking-Rex. He got out of the car and went quickly up the walk.
“Rex, your face…?” Helena began.
“What’s up?” Calvin asked.
“You both have to get off the island. Now. Everyone has to get off the island.”
“Rex, what’s going on?”
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t tell you…I don’t know why. I…I let a woman pregnant from The Swarm carry the baby to term. She’s still carrying it, I mean, and she won’t be found.”
“What? The patrols said they were nearly all terminated,” Calvin asked.
“They won’t find this one, unless I can help it,” Rex said. “I don’t think I can.” Suddenly the putrid smell came to him—the one that had haunted his pre-med and med-school dreams.
“Get off the island. Don’t fuck around.”
The curse shifted something in Calvin and Helena, who had not heard the young man curse before.
He started to get back into his car, stopped, then said: “Thanks for everything.”
“No,” Calvin said. “Thank you. I wouldn’t have made it out of The Swarm without you.”
Rex said, “You’re not out yet.”
Then he drove away, his Beamer peeling out.
###
Chief Ruggiero was sitting in his office, doing administrative work, when he heard the knock on his door. He looked up and saw the Department’s receptionist peaking in at him.
“A Rex Torres is here to see you?”
“Send him back,” Chief said, wondering why he had come.
The receptionist left and moments later Rex came into his of
fice. On Rex’s face were strange, ink-like stains; his face was paler than bone; he moved with the urgency of someone on methampthemines.
“What’s wrong?”
Rex shook his head. “We made a mistake. I kept something from you.”
Rex told the Chief about Kelly, about how she had attacked him, and then about what he had seen as the metallic taste had grown stronger.
###
Reagan had a vision. In the vision he was standing on a giant pillar above a molten sea of lava. Below him, arising from the magma, giant charred and knotted hands were clawing at the base of the pillar, trying to knock it over.
He was not alone.
Next to him was Rex Torres. Rex was knitting a wool sweater.
“I’m cold, so cold,” Rex intoned.
The pillar rocked, badly, nearly spilling him to a searing death below. He screamed and called out to Rex for help, but the doctor kept working at his sweater.
Reagan awoke from the dream, sweating, and sat up. His pulse was hammering up his throat, forcing blood into his brain.
Rex had betrayed him. He stood up, got his gun, and waited for the next time they would come.
###
Rex Torres pulled back in front of the house sometime later. He glanced once to the back seat, then reached to the passenger side and took the bag with the Pitocin. The Pitocin, to induce labor in the twelve women cramped into the attic, would convince Reagan that the women had to leave and it would also prevent any interference from people fearing Swarm babies during the birth. The Chief had used his power to convince a nurse assisting at the government warehouse on Grand Avenue to swipe the bags. It had taken a gruelingly long time—two hours—a time during which Rex had urinated four times from nerves.
The Chief and Rex believed that Reagan would not suspect anything. If they could just get the others out without anyone getting hurt, then they could direct the dying efforts of the government patrols towards the house.
All Rex had to do was start the Pitocin in each woman, secretly, so that Reagan didn’t notice. Then they’d get the women out.
He went up the walk to the front stoop, knocked on the door, and waited. He saw the shadowy figure of Reagan moving towards the door.
This is it, he told himself. This is it. Just be calm.
There had been a moment after he had seized and seen the ending that he thought simply swimming off the island would have worked. He’d swim up the coast, and come ashore on the next beach off Bay Isle. Then what? Hell, he might just head West. West was always the way to go. West was freedom. West was hope. West was life, man. West was coming home. But there was part of him that knew he could never live with the guilt, of knowing he might have stopped it. It was a slippery part of him, sometimes he held it firm and sometimes it slid away, but it was always there.
So he had decided to take action, as he had decided almost instantly that he was to bite that man-breast back in high school. It was the sort of impulse decision, made in haste out of need—a decision that could make or break you.
The front door opened, and Rex Torres stepped into the house.
This decision ended up doing the latter.
###
Reagan opened the door and saw Rex Torres standing there. The stains of Kelly’s breast’s colostrum were still on his face like some map of alien roads. On his back was a backpack. His face, seemingly pulled tight, was dry and bare.
“Hi,” Rex said.
“Hello,” Reagan said.
How’s your sweater, doctor? Warm enough?
“How is Kelly?”
“She’s the Mother of God,” Reagan said. “She’s Eternal.”
There was a knowing tone to his sentence—a somehow mocking or teasing lilt.
Stop it, he told himself. You have to be calm. He doesn’t know…
Unless he imbibed some of his wife’s fluids, Rex.
“I meant was she still in the trance?”
“You know she’s in it almost constantly,” Reagan said. “She won’t come out now, not until the life inside is born.”
Oh, Reagan, if you only knew, Rex thought.
And there was a moment when he thought: yes, I should tell him. I should tell him what I saw.
But that moment was fleeting, for in Reagan’s mind there was a disease and that disease was called insanity.
He would not believe in anything but the Second Coming.
“I want to finish checking the others,” Rex said. “I didn’t finish after what happened.”
“Okay,” Reagan said, and stepped aside.
Rex saw the man look outside. Suspiciously? Rex wasn’t sure, but he didn’t notice anything or anyone and Rex continued to move forward as if in a dream. In times of great mental strain, under fear, all things beyond movement—and even partially that—become distant and strange. Memories of events of physical danger—immediate physical danger—were almost always remembered without background sensation. This was how Rex moved, aware only of his body’s heightened vitals and how many steps were left to the attic stairs. He went through the living room and into the bedroom—the very bedroom on which Reagan and Kelly had conceived their boy. Then up the stairs, each one cracking, into the fetid attic air: faces looked at him, and visual relief was apparent as the muscles on their faces dropped as they beheld the face of Rex.
Rex stood, took the backpack off, and looked to the women to figure out where he had left off. He started to walk forward, then collapsed to the attic floor as the bullet penetrated his head. The backpack he had been carrying fell to the floor in a heap. He lay there, and the eyes of the refugees in the attic stared at him in consternation.
Then they looked up to see a rail-thin Reagan holding the gun straight out, like some sort of odd Halloween decoration. Trick or Treaters Welcome!
He lowered the gun; it had been done.
Rex, the Judas, had been shot and killed.
###
Chief Ruggiero heard the gunshot, and his stomach sank.
“He knew,” he said, then jumped out of the backseat of Rex’s car. He pulled the shotgun up with him, grunting the whole way, then rushed quickly across the lawn.
Oh, Christ he knew! How did he figure it out?
It occurred to the Chief that he was dealing with something way beyond his skill-level: something supernatural was happening here. He, too, felt a moment when he thought he’d just leave the scene. Hell, no one but Rex knew that he had come. And Rex was probably dead now. But he, like Rex, couldn’t do that, couldn’t live with himself.
He went in the front door, which had been left unlocked by a distant-minded Reagan. He moved quietly, as quietly as the old floor allowed him. He heard the whimpering upstairs, coming down through the open attic door. He heard the shouting too.
“Shut-up! Shut-up, all of you! No one is to move, understand, no one?”
It was Reagan’s voice. Then Rex Torres was dead.
It occurred to the Chief that he had dug himself into a grave here, allowing these women to gestate up in the attic. It occurred to the Chief that rules and laws—even police procedurals—existed for general protection. And he had broken all those procedurals by allowing this to happen. Hell, he could have brought his whole force here, and when this whole thing passed, he would’ve been out of a job.
I also don’t want any hostages, he told himself. No hostages, and no innocent people killed.
He crept across the living room, holding the shotgun up, aiming it towards the back bedroom now. Moving slowly, he entered the bedroom. The closet door was open, and he could see the light from the attic spilling down. Now he heard Rex threatening all of them, telling them that they were to be his Son’s Apostles, followers, and that he shouldn’t have to kill them. The Chief’s heart was beating hard, and he felt dizzy. He shook it off, training the shotgun on the door to the attic, waiting for Reagan’s head to appear. He would wait as long as it took, despite the strain of holding the shotgun in position, despite the wobbly way his head felt.
He would wait, and wait…
His cell phone vibrated.
The room seemed to expand, the walls rushing away from him like in a movie. He let the shotgun come down, frantically fumbling in his pocket for the vibrating phone. He had turned the ringer off (always left it off as a matter of habit), but in their mad rush and anxiety to get back to the house, he had forgotten to turn the fucking thing OFF! He fumbled for the button to stop the vibration, telling himself that Reagan was yelling, that he wouldn’t hear it, wouldn’t know about it, that it was okay, and when he looked again, preparing to raise the shotgun, he saw the crazed zealot at the bottom of the attic stairs, saw the flash of the gun appear from the black hole of the gun, somehow heard the bullet that struck him in the upper chest, and then he staggered back, the shotgun falling.
Reagan moved at him and released four more rounds into the Chief’s torso, forcing the man back against the wall.
The Chief watched him come to stand above him.
“Wrong,” the Chief said, “You’re wrong.”
“Lo,” Reagan said, “and the Non-Believers will cry out to an earless God as they are Blinded by their lack of Faith.”
Just before the bullet struck the Chief’s forehead, he saw the figure coming down the steps of the attic and hoped for the best.
###
Reagan had been in a fit of screaming, threatening rage, pointing the gun at them and telling them to stay put, stay still.
He must have sensed Paul and Pete’s growing survival instinct, and the other twelve men in the attic, who could have easily overtaken the skimpy man…had he been unarmed. In pure logistics, the twelve could have probably eventually overpowered the man, but surely a couple of them would get shot, and none of them had gotten to that suicidal point…not yet, anyway.
When Reagan stopped shouting—stopped dead—and turned his head towards the stairs, Paul Thompson almost charged him, for he knew that others would join, if he led the way. But some neural pathways in Reagan’s mind must have sharpened; he immediately placed the noise as that of a cell phone.