by Rob Heinze
Someone was in the house.
He went fast down the stairs, before they had a chance to charge, almost before the thought had formed in their mind. Paul, Pete and the other men looked at each other. The women felt Braxton-hicks contractions tighten their bellies as they responded to the stress of the situation. Kelly, a hulking shape on the floor, lay in oblivion and unaware.
When Reagan fired the first shot at the Chief, Pete got to his feet and rushed to the stairs, practically leaping down them. Paul followed, despite Dawn’s exclamation of concern. The other men followed.
Pete crashed into Reagan’s bone-sharp back just as he shot the Chief in the head. Reagan, yelping, flew into the wall, his head striking it hard. He clung to the gun, bringing it around and firing wildly, screaming, but the shots only hitting the ceiling or walls. Strong arms pinned him down. Someone sat on his chest; he heard something within him crack. He gasped, unable to breathe. The gun he had been firing left his grasp as someone took it.
Then he lost the fight.
###
Pete was holding Reagan’s right arm down, while Paul sat on his chest. Another man held Reagan’s left arm down and two others sat on his chest. They all stared in horror at the Chief’s body sitting against the wall, and the blood-shadow behind his head.
“What now?” Pete asked, huffing.
There was a brief thought that passed in their minds to kill Reagan, but they were not killers. They were normal people trapped in some horrible nightmare, which they wanted to be awake from.
“Tie him,” one of the men said. “Tie him, call the police, and we can get the hell out of here before they come.”
“What about the patrols? Grabbing us?” Pete said.
“We’ll just have to hope the Chief is wrong. We’ll have to hope that the government will see the difference in the pregnancies,” Paul said. He thought about Kelly, upstairs, with whom they had spent far too much time in close quarters. “I don’t think it will be hard to see.”
They finally agreed that they would just go home, and let fate run its course. So they searched around the house as desperately as they could, and in the garage someone found zip-ties and newspaper twine. They used both around Reagan’s ankles and wrists, and then they tied his hands to the footing of the bed. They taped his mouth, because he had begun to speak his biblical gibberish. When finished they looked down at him, a wry worm on his side, eyes sightless and gazing at only dust balls under the bed.
Upstairs they found their women, all of whom were ghost white and trembling. When the women saw that none of the men were hurt, they began to cry. They all decided it was time to leave.
“What about her?” Dawn asked Paul.
She was looking at the shape of Kelly. The woman was mumbling in her trance, making no sense, distant and detached. They had no idea what Rex Torres had seen. They had no idea that he had been determined to get them off the island. They did not know what had yet to come forth from Kelly’s womb.
Rex Torres had seen, and he had told Chief Ruggiero. But now they were both dead.
“It’s not her fault. We’ll leave her here.”
“Should we tell the police there is one Swarm pregnancy left?”
They all agreed that they should. They looked once more to the dark shape on the attic floor, and wondered if they would ever know what had been growing inside her. Then they left the attic one by one, shielding their minds against the ghastly image of Chief Ruggiero’s body and not looking to Reagan on the floor. Paul Thompson looked once to the body of Rex Torres, whom he had grown to like in their three brief meetings and whose courage he had admired. Then he followed his wife out of the attic.
Reagan did not look to them as they left. They had betrayed him and God would punish them.
Upstairs he worried about his wife, alone, struggling with the holy phenomenon. He tugged feverishly at the bed post, causing the bed to jump and move. He twisted his arms until the zip-ties cut the circulation in his hands off. Then he lay, defeated, and prayed for his wife. He hadn’t even thought about the police coming.
###
Kelly had visions of things to which her reality paled: always a strange thing that bloomed in from her eyes, water that flowed vertically in contained streams or smells that seemed to create new olfactory cells as the vapor touched her nasal lining in a domino effect, giving her mind olfactory power not ever realized: and visions, visions: great gaping holes the size of earth from which crawled radioactive larvae like ancient beetles and: beyond reason: not seeing but feeling a deep, thick band of gaseous energy deep below that opening which hummed and vibrated and contained a collective unconscious not that of humanity, a roving river, the core of alien experience…ebbing and flowing, this sensation, allowing a little more and taking some away and all the while Kelly knowing this (receiving this) and seeing more strange, bizarre things, some of which—most of which—could not be decoded by her human brain and so she was shown, frustratingly, a dark mass—featureless and without analogy—often, so often she was left with nothing but the sensation of alien and wondering how this information was being shown to her, given to her, becoming a part of her: these experiences.
Her contractions had started shortly after she had lunged, unwittingly, at Rex Torres to cast her colostrum onto him.
She had labored in her trance, the pain like that of a fluttering fly at which she swatted. Her trance did not dull but grew sharper, and suddenly her thought train converged to that of a single image and sensation: a rushing sensation, a plummeting sensation, bringing her to the place of her death, her deposit, her scattering and to the input point by which rebirth was possible—freedom, flight, and finality.
She saw that spot now. She saw the place unto which she would deliver this brood that had consumed her.
In the attic she stood. Her stomach was alight with glows: strange and wonderful, pink and blue, each flash or moving streak a little variation in hue of that which had come before. Her breasts had ballooned to a horrific, cancerous size. Each blood vessel in her body had become a living highway, energy flowing through them like the core of which she was now a part. She walked towards the stairs and started down.
In the bedroom, feeble on the floor, Reagan stared up at her.
And he knew horror.
She was not Kelly. She had become a light-show: a twinkling, flashing, horrifically resplendent light-show.
She walked past him, a zombie, unaware of his muffled cries and wild bucking, hoping that she would release him. He had only wanted to protect her. He had no idea where she was going, what she was doing: he had envisioned her giving birth to the Boy Child in their attic. Perhaps that would not be God’s plan, then.
What was God’s plan for him, then?
To moan, pathetic, on the floor while he missed the birth of the Second Coming of Christ?
All his rage compressed to a pin-prick of mental energy, which he focused on the goddamn hands bound to the bed. He let the energy explode, hoping to break the fucking bed’s leg by jerking his arms: but that didn’t happen. Crying, sobbing, bemoaning his situation, he wrestled with the zip-ties until the plastic had nearly dug into his wrist bones.
Then he stopped struggling and waited, waited, not sure what God’s plan for him was.
When he saw the light shining into his room some time later, he knew that the Glory of God had come.
Chapter 12
There was no clear light on the road.
Inside, in Kelly’s mind and body, there was only light. The Light was good. But the Light was more than just Light; it was the downloading of experiences that humanity did not know, a knowing of perpetually strangeness. And inside her, the malformation of cells contorted by the parasites continued at an exponential rate.
She was moving at a good clip despite her bulk. She went up the block in the dark night. She crossed the street. People saw her, did a double-take, and called the police. Each time witnesses saw the moving mass that had once been Kelly, they los
t sight of her as she vanished around a building or into bushes.
She would reach the Public Works facility fifteen minutes after walking out of her house, complete an impossible fence climb with her heavy bulk (catching and tearing her forearm skin at the top), and scale down the opposite side to head towards the waiting circle.
Oh, how it had waited…
###
Dawn and Paul Thompson went home. Their loved ones had come repeatedly looking for them, talking to police, leaving messages. Paul and Dawn had only been gone a couple weeks, but the house felt distant and strange.
They weren’t home for more than twenty minutes, not sure what to do or whom to call, when they saw the light in the sky.
They could see it out the front, just a soft orange light that reminded them of creamsicles.
“What is that?” Paul asked.
They went to the front door and stepped onto the stoop. From some point in the night sky, there descended an orange band of light, brighter in the center and dimmer at the edges like the light of a gas stove-top flame, that was apparently pegged to the ground. From their position, they couldn’t tell from what part of Bay Isle the light came from, but it was north of them.
The light cycled now, changing to blue, red…
Pink…
Now it was pink…pink like the colostrum and lights and monstrous discharge from Kelly.
Paul felt a hand grasp his forearm. He turned to see his wife’s hand, eyes watching in the light with mute terror. She didn’t need to tell him. For in his mind was a memory and that memory, vivid, was of the pink whirls and twists of luminance in Kelly’s belly. In his mind was another memory, likewise as vivid, of Rex Torres coming awake from a seizure and rushing, wildly, out of the house as if he had seen…had seen…a nuclear bomb going off.
“We have to go,” he said.
They got into their car, sped out of the driveway, and raced away towards the south bridge. The bridges were still closed, they knew, but at this point they had decided they would plow right through the barricade if the guards were too stupid to see the light in the sky.
###
Calvin Wrigley drove with his wife to the south bridge, where he had collected tolls for eight years. He had spent many lonely yet beautiful hours with his eyes hypnotized by the flux of the inlet’s water. He had thought a lot about death there: namely, his. He knew that the bridge was still up. He hoped to put it down. As it came into view, Calvin saw that there were less guards here. With the bridge up, the guards were only there to stop anyone from accessing the controls at which Calvin had spent many hours.
“They won’t let us through,” Helena said, touching a necklace hanging at her chest.
“We can try,” Calvin said.
Rex had told them to get off the island, but seemed to have forgotten that the bridges were raised? And maybe he had believed that their plan would have worked; that they would have gotten the women out of the attic safely and the Chief would have sent the government back to collect Kelly, stop the birth, and then the island would be safe. Or maybe they had made some plan for the Chief to order the government to open the bridges. Calvin and Helena would never know.
Calvin pulled up to the bridge’s bottom where the barricades were and got out. There were three military trucks there, and a servicewoman got out. Two men came out behind her, fully loaded with guns that looked big and imposing to Calvin.
“Can we help you?”
“You have to lower the bridge,” Calvin said.
The woman ran through the same speech she had given for the past eight and a half months. It was government orders that the bridge remained closed.
“Something’s going to happen to this island,” Calvin said. “Someone I know said there’s a swarm baby being born now, and that when it’s born, anyone on the island will be in trouble.”
The woman ran through the same speech. There was nothing she could do. The orange light appeared in the sky, clear and stark from the south part of the island. The other guards swore and drew everyone’s attention to the light. It was pillar, bright but growing brighter, like the base of a nuclear bomb mushroom cloud. The colors changed. The orange became blue and green and red and pink and orange again, cycling, brain-overloading, and thing of terrible beauty.
“It’s been born,” Calvin said. “You have to open the bridge and start letting people off.”
The woman guard was quiet. She was watching the growing light column in awe. She had no idea what it was doing, couldn’t assess how quickly or slowly it was growing. She only knew that it was not something she had ever seen.
“I-I can’t,” she said.
The guards behind her—all of them on the bridge—came out and watched the light. Helena had come out of the car and was practically crying at Calvin’s side. Their death would be together, then. On the bridge. Not in a shower, dead of a secret stroke, but in full cognizance of their impending mortality as shown in the ever-expanding light column. The guards of lesser rang started to argue with the female guard, who looked back at them, unsure, shaking her head. Up along the long dark road headlights were streaming away from the center of Bay Isle, fleeing the growing light.
“Forget it!” One of the guards yelled. “I’m going to open it.”
The female guard did not stop him. Calvin started to go with him, knowing the bridge controls by heart, but the guard held a gun up to him. Her face was pale white, even with a hint of the orange glow shown in the shimmery reflection of her eyes.
“I worked this bridge for eight years. I’ll open it in a second.”
The woman looked again to the light, to the approaching cars, and let him go. Calvin went up the bridge, huffing, and hoped everyone could move fast enough. The guards on the north bridge, closer to the orange light pillar, were much faster to open the bridge and escape themselves. The people who had been trapped for nearly nine months on Bay Isle started to flee.
The mass exodus had started.
###
Derrick Clinton received a text as he was driving over the north bridge. He looked down at his phone. It was from Lynn.
Do you see it?
Derrick looked out the window to his left. The band of brilliant light was wedged between the ground on Bay Isle and the sky like some impossible support beam. There appeared to be some…some flow to it and it was moving up, towards the sky. As he watched, the colors began to cycle from orange to red to blue to pink. It expanded, albeit slightly, and that illusion of flow became more apparent.
I see it, he texted back.
He received a text: it’s beautiful.
He texted back: it’s scary too.
He received a text: it’s The Swarm birth.
He texted back: Are you off the island?
He received a text: a few miles from the bridge but can see the light still. U?
He texted back: Mom was stubborn, but we’re over the bridge.
He received a text: what do you think will happen?
He didn’t text back right away; rather he stared at the light column rising into the sky, glowing, marvelous. He focused his eyes on the appearance of flow in the column. After a moment, he texted back:
I think Bay Isle is going up in pieces.
It was a long time before he received a text. Then his phone buzzed in his hand.
OMG, I hope everyone gets out.
He texted back: me too.
###
Just before the light column shown forth into the sky, a determined and blinded woman walked down the strange tract of land on which Quentin Warsaw had conducted his nightly disposal business for at least ten years, bringing the place unwittingly to life. She did not notice the air, the wind, the heaviness: the way the grasses and trees seemed to lean away from her as she walked. There was an eager, anxious energy of the place, an energy built of tremendous pressure and waiting.
God, it had waited so long.
To be free. To go home. To rejoin its core. To grab just one link in the
chain and then pull itself along.
Now Kelly came to the place in which Quentin had disposed of bodies, the strange circle that had since collapsed into a small hole with a tiny, pink protuberance at the bottom. It had waited, constructing its shell piece by piece, and through what people called nature it had worked, and worked, spreading its essence like human’s spread skin in dust, to sand, to trees, to water: the entire island a part of it. It had released billions, billions of spores into the air, nature—it was nature—knowing that only one was needed and that a higher count lead to an increased chance, and now it, the culmination of all its efforts and waiting, had come—this conscious, thinking being’s release cultivating for nine months: a being that knew everything (the entire universe was linked) and thus it needing just one link to touch its collective unconscious, link to links, and the roused being would use the single link and that single link was the malformed energy growing inside Kelly.
Kelly stopped at the edge of the slight depression in the land. The sands shifted, exposing the bulbous shape that protruded at the center of the hole. Kelly’s contractions were tearing at her now. She yelled and staggered into the pit, falling face first into the sand rolling down it. She gathered herself to her feet, inched closer, closer to the shape in the center of the circle.
Then, Birth:
The last pregnancy of The Swarm, in the warm spring night, came forth in a tidal rush of light and energy into the round protuberance at which Quentin had shot (it now opening like the petals of a flower), Kelly’s mouth and eyes slowly dissolving into a vivid, sun-bright orange glow that spread, ink-like, across her body and down her legs, growing brighter and brighter: and from above a column of orange light raced down towards her and she looked up, marveling—for a moment human again she thought:
I have delivered God—
And then the last of the energy-cells or batteries or parasites that had been produced during The Swarm fell into the earth between her legs, into the open waiting receptacle and Kelly’s body was engulfed in orange energy. The ground light linked to the descending light. Sand grains from around the hole began to, one by one, take flight up and into the orange column, and more and more pieces went up. Trees were uprooted; a wood piling previously jammed into the sand was sucked into it. There was no sound from the energy, the column: just sound from the physicality of the things shifting around it. More and more sand was pulled up into the light, fattening it, and underneath the ground the roused consciousness began its ascent, for which it had awaited since—long ago—an explosion had blown its single part into millions of separate parts in the scattering, far and wide. Now something was happening that it had planned, and it was reconnecting to them all, knew their place, linked to them and then to the great core of which it had once been a part.