by S. T. Joshi
Wanda and Gina turned the tables on the men and demonstrated their superior barbequing skills. Everyone ate hot dogs and drank Löwenbräu and avoided gloomy conversation until Elgin’s girlfriend Sarah commented that his cabin would be “a great place to wait out the apocalypse” and received nervous chuckles in response.
Pershing smiled to cover the prickle along the back of his neck. He stared into the night and wondered what kind of apocalypse a kid like Sarah imagined when she used that word. Probably she visualized the polar icecaps melting, or the world as a desert. Pershing’s generation had lived in fear of the Reds, nuclear holocaust, and being invaded by little green men from Mars.
Wind sighed in the trees and sent a swirl of sparks tumbling skyward. He trembled. God, I hate the woods. Who thought the day would come? Star fields twinkled across the millions of light years. He didn’t like the looks of them either. Wanda patted his arm and laid her head against his shoulder while Elgin told an old story about the time he and his college dorm mates replaced the school flag with a pair of giant pink bloomers.
Pershing didn’t find the story amusing this time. The laughter sounded canned and made him consider the artificiality of the entire situation, man’s supposed mastery of nature and darkness. Beyond this feeble bubble of light yawned a chasm. He’d drunk more than his share these past few days; had helped himself to Wanda’s Valium. None of these measures did the trick of allowing him to forget where he’d gone or what he’d seen; it hadn’t convinced him that his worst memories were the products of nightmare. Wanda’s touch repulsed him, confined him. He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide beneath the covers until everything bad went away.
It grew chilly and the bonfire died to coals. The others drifted off to sleep. The cabin had two bedrooms—Elgin claimed one, and as the other married couple, Mel and Gina were awarded the second. Pershing and Wanda settled for an air mattress near the fireplace. When the last of the beer was gone, he extricated himself from her and rose to stretch. “I’m going inside,” he said. She smiled and said she’d be along soon. She wanted to watch the stars a bit longer.
Pershing stripped to his boxers and lay on the air mattress. He pulled the blanket to his chin and stared blankly at the rafters. His skin was clammy and it itched fiercely. Sharp, throbbing pains radiated from his knees and shoulders. Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He remembered the day he’d talked to Mark Ordbecker, the incredible heat, young Eric’s terrified expression as he skulked behind his father. Little pitchers and big ears. The boy heard the voices crooning from below, hadn’t he?
A purple ring of light flickered on the rough-hewn beam directly overhead. It pulsed and blurred with each thud of his heart. The ring shivered like water and changed. His face was damp, but not from tears, not from sweat. He felt his knuckle joints split, the skin and meat popping and peeling like an overripe banana. What had Terry said about eating the young and immortality?
How does our species propagate, you may ask. Cultural assimilation, my friend. We chop out the things that make you lesser life forms weak and then pump you full of love. You’ll be part of the family soon; you’ll understand everything.
A mental switch clicked and he smiled at the memory of creeping into Eric’s room and plucking him from his bed; later, the child’s hands fluttering, nerveless, the approving croaks and cries of his new kin. He shuddered in ecstasy and burst crude seams in a dozen places. He threw off the blanket and stood, swaying, drunk with revelation. His flesh was a chrysalis, leaking gore.
Terry and Gloria watched him from the doorways of the bedrooms—naked and ghostly, and smiling like devils. Behind them, the rooms were silent. He looked at their bodies, contemptuous that anyone could be fooled for two seconds by these distorted forms, or by his own.
Then he was outside under the cold, cold stars.
Wanda huddled in her shawl, wan and small in the firelight. Finally she noticed him, tilting her head so she could meet his eyes. “Sweetie, are you waiting for me?” She gave him a concerned smile. The recent days of worry and doubt had deepened the lines of her brow.
He regarded her from the shadows, speechless as his mouth filled with blood. He touched his face, probing a moist delineation just beneath the hairline; a fissure, a fleshy zipper. Near his elbow, Terry said, “The first time, it’s easier if you just snatch it off.”
Pershing gripped a flap of skin. He swept his hand down and ripped away all the frailties of humanity.
Usurped
WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER
William Browning Spencer is the author of the innovative Lovecraftian novel Résumé with Monsters (White Wolf, 1995) as well as the novels Maybe I’ll Call Anna (Permanent Press, 1990), Zod Wallop (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and Irrational Fears (White Wolf, 1998) and the short story collections The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories (Permanent Press, 1993) and The Ocean and All Its Devices (Subterranean Press, 2006).
THEY WERE DRIVING BACK FROM EL PASO, WHERE THEY had been visiting Meta’s parents, when Brad saw something shimmering on the road, a heat mirage or, perhaps, some internal aberration, those writhing, silver amoebae that were the harbingers of one of his murderous migraines.
Meta had insisted that they turn the air off and roll the windows down. “I love this desert air,” she had said, inhaling dramatically.
“Nothing like the smell of diesel fumes at dusk,” Brad had responded, only he hadn’t. He was thirty-six years old, and he had been married for almost half his life, and he loved his wife, loved her enthusiasm for the flawed world, and understood how easily, how unthinkingly, he could curdle her good mood with his reflexive cynicism. Besides, the trucks that had heaved by earlier were gone, as was their stink, and the two-lane highway he presently followed was devoid of all vehicles and had been ever since he’d abandoned the more straightforward eastbound path.
Having satisfied himself that the cloud was illusion, a trick of nature or his mind, he no longer saw it. Such is the power of reason.
And then, like that, the wasps filled the cab. Incredibly, amid the pandemonium and his panic, he knew them instantly for what they were, saw one, red-black and vile, arc its abdomen and plunge its stinger into his bare forearm, a revolting, indelible mental snapshot. A whirring of wings, wind buffeting his ears, thwack of bodies, one crawling on his neck, another igniting his cheek with bright pain, and Meta shrieking—and he made a sound of his own, an aaaaaaaaghaaah of disgust—as he wrenched the steering wheel, and the Ford Ranger leapt up, surprised by his urgency, and twisted, exploded, a series of jolting explosions, with the sky and the earth tumbling in ungainly combat.
HE BLINKED AND A HUNDRED THOUSAND STARS regarded him. He lay on his back, unable to summon full consciousness, resistant to what its return might mean. Breathing was not easy; the air was full of razors. He rolled onto his side, slowly. Mesquite and cacti and unruly juniper threw tortured shadows across a flat, moonlit expanse that stretched toward distant mountains.
He raised himself on his elbows; a knife-thrust of pain took his breath away, and he was still, waiting, as a deer might freeze at the sound of a predator. He slid his right hand under his T-shirt, and he found the source of the pain, more than he wanted to find, ragged bloody flesh and the broken spike of a rib.
He stood and might have thought to rejoice that he had no greater injuries, that he had, miraculously, survived the wreck, but he couldn’t imagine more pain; he had a plenitude of pain, a surfeit. Meta might say—
Meta!
He saw the Ranger then, lying on its side, the passenger door gone and the windshield gone, a bright spume of pebbled glass vomited into the sand in front of its sprung hood. “Meta!” he shouted. “Meta!”
He limped toward the vehicle. There was something wrong with his left knee, too, as though his knee cap had been replaced with a water-filled balloon.
She wasn’t in the Ranger, wasn’t under it either.
Moonlight painted everything in pale silver, revealing
detail in every shadow, a hallucinatory world, too precisely rendered to be real. Brad moved in slow, widening circles, calling her name. Finally, he turned toward the road, approaching a thick-trunked live oak, solitary and massive, its thousand gnarled branches festooned with small, glittering leaves. The tree, he saw, had claimed the passenger door, which lay, like a fallen warrior’s shield, close to the oak’s gashed trunk.
And here, Brad thought, is where she was thrown.
Maybe he would discover her on the other side of that thick trunk, her body hidden in some declivity, invisible until you stumbled on its very edge.
But there was no hollow to hide her body, nothing. And after he had climbed to the road, looked up and down it, and crossed to gaze at another stark vista that revealed no trace of her, he accepted what he’d already known. She wasn’t here. He would have known if she were nearby—because he was connected to her, more than ever since the onset of her illness. He had always had this psychic compass, this inexplicable but inarguable ability to know just where she was in the world.
In their house in Austin, he always knew what room she was in. If she was down the street visiting a neighbor, Brad knew that, too—and knew which neighbor. If her car was gone, he knew where she had driven to (the library, the grocery store, the YMCA at Town Lake, wherever), and he realized, one day, that he knew this whether or not she had told him.
Once, when they were kids, nine-year-olds, Meta had gone missing. It was dark outside, and Meta had failed to come home.
The neighborhood went looking. Brad set off on his own. Under the luminous summer moon, he ran past the elementary school, past the creek where they hunted frogs and crayfish, across old man Halder’s field. He found her at the abandoned barn. She lay next to a rusted-out wheelbarrow, one of her legs crimped oddly under her. That she was alive filled him with wild relief and the terrible knowledge that he could have lost her forever, that the world was a monstrous machine, and anyone in its path could come to mortal grief. She frowned at him, pale blue eyes under tangled red hair, and said, “You were right about that rope,” and they both gazed at the tire, on its side in the dust. Until recently, the tire had been an integral part of a swing.
“Why did you do something so stupid?” he had shouted, and she had begun to cry, silently, tears falling from her eyes, her lips parted, lower lip trembling, and he thought, I’m an idiot, and he realized that he would marry her one day, if only to keep an eye on her, to protect her (from evil, which ranged across the world, and from his own desperate love, half-mad and hiding in his heart).
Standing on the road, he remembered that he had a cell phone and, after retrieving it from his pocket and turning it on, he remembered why the cell phone was no cause for rejoicing: no signal, no help.
He turned away from the empty road and studied the mountains. They were purple and black and seemed closer now. Could she have walked to the mountains? And why would she do such a thing? Surely the road was more likely to bring rescue.
He thought of Meta, conjured her, carefully visualizing her blue eyes, curly red hair, and high cheekbones (sown with a constellation of freckles that refused to fade, a last vestige of her tomboy childhood). Ordinarily, imagining her calmed him, relieved the stress of a bad day at the office, an unhappy client, the black dog of depression, of fear, but now, with Meta missing, her image failed to console, only exacerbated his dread. Her face shimmered, faded, was gone, and he realized that the mountains were glowing, exuding a pulsing light, a mottled purple hue that filled him with inexplicable disgust and panic and despair.
He felt consciousness receding like a tide. He leaned into oblivion, seeking refuge from the horror that assaulted him.
HE WOKE TO WHITE LIGHT IN A WHITE ROOM. HE WAS propped up in a hospital bed, his left leg encased in an elaborate cast and suspended artfully from stainless steel scaffolding. A large, ridiculous bolt pierced the cast in the vicinity of his knee, like an elaborate magic trick. Breathing, he discovered, was difficult—although not, he decided, impossible, not worthy of panic—and gazing down at his chest, he saw what looked like duct tape, yards of it, binding swathes of surgical gauze and cotton around his ribs.
He remembered the damage then, remembered the wasps.
A woman stepped into the room and said, “Where’s Meta?”
It was Gladys, Meta’s mother, dressed in khaki pants and a white blouse, filling the room with willed energy.
Where is—Before Brad could speak, someone to his right spoke.
“She went to the cafeteria to get some coffee.” It was Buddy, Gladys’s husband. He had been sitting silently in a chair, dozing perhaps. He was a stern, formal old man (much older than his wife), bald with tufts of grey hair sprouting above each ear. Querulous, nobody’s buddy: Buddy.
Before Brad could assimilate Buddy’s statement, Meta appeared in the doorway, behind her mother. She was holding a cardboard carton containing three styrofoam cups with plastic lids. Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “Brad.”
Gladys turned. “Oh my,” she said.
Meta put the carton down on a dresser top and came to him. There were tears in her eyes, and she was smiling. Brad felt as light as dust, mystified, out of context. Wasn’t Meta the one in hospital beds? Wasn’t he her visitor, her caretaker, her terrified lover?
“Where have you been?” she said, laughing, running her hand through his hair.
And wasn’t that his question?
META TOLD HIM HE HAD BEEN UNCONSCIOUS FOR TWO days. They sorted it out, or rather, they did their best to make sense of what had happened. Wayne County’s sheriff came by the hospital, and Brad and Meta told him what they could remember.
The sheriff was a big man with a broad face and a mournful mustache. He was slow, his bearing solemn and stoical, as though he’d seen too much that ended badly. He introduced himself by taking his hat off and saying, “Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, my name is Dale Winslow, and I’m the sheriff in these parts, and I’m sorry for your misadventure,” and he pulled up a chair and produced a small notebook and a ball-point pen from his breast pocket.
He told them what he already knew. A local named Gary Birch had been driving back from a visit to his ex in Owl Creek when he’d seen a woman out on the road. He stopped and got out of his car. He could see she was bleeding, blood on her face, her blouse, and, when he came up to her, he could see the Ford Ranger on its side maybe fifty yards from the road. It didn’t take any great deductive powers to figure out what had happened. Here was a woman who had flipped her truck; she was in shock, couldn’t make a sound. Gary told her to hang on, and he went down and looked at the Ranger, checked to see that there wasn’t a gas leak, took the keys out of the ignition. He didn’t see anyone else, but he wasn’t looking. A fool thing, not to look, but it didn’t even enter his mind. He wanted to get her over to the hospital in Silo. For all he knew she might already be as good as dead and just not know it. That happened sometimes. Gary had heard about such things from his dad, a Nam vet. A fellow could say, “I’m okay,” when he was nothing but a disembodied head, although maybe that one was just a story.
Meta, it turned out, had sustained no serious injuries. She didn’t remember anything about the accident. She didn’t remember the wasps in the truck, didn’t remember Gary stopping for her and taking her to the hospital. At some point, in the ER, she’d started screaming for Brad, and a nurse, Eunice Wells, who’d worked the ER for twenty-some years, put two and two together, got Sheriff Winslow on the phone, and hollered Gary Birch out of the waiting room. “This is Eunice Wells,” she told Winslow. “Gary Birch just brought a woman in here for treatment. He found her on Old Nine where she’d flipped her truck. Sounds like there’s someone still out there. I’m gonna give the phone to Gary, and he’s gonna tell you just where you gotta go.”
Which Gary did. Sheriff Winslow found Brad lying by the side of the highway, as inert as yesterday’s roadkill, a dark lump next to a creosote bush. He might have been a sideswiped deer or a sack of tras
h that fell off someone’s pickup on the way out to the Owl Creek dump. Likely Winslow wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t known where to look.
Brad asked about the wasp swarm. Was that sort of thing common around here?
Brad thought he saw something flicker in Winslow’s eyes, something furtive. The sheriff closed his eyes, and when he opened them, whatever had been there was gone. The man just looked tired. He said, “It’s hard to say what an insect will do. I haven’t heard of anyone running through a patch of wasps, but termites will swarm. And you can get locusts out of nowhere, like a judgment.” He shrugged. “I’d thank the good Lord you’re alive and put it behind you.”
Good advice, but not easy to follow. He was in the hospital four more days, foggy time, nurses in and out of the room, Meta sitting in a chair, sometimes holding his hand in hers. He would wake as though falling into freezing water, his heart clenching like a fist, nightmares leaving a coppery sediment in the back of his throat. He had no memory of the dreams, only a sense of diminishment and hopelessness. He would look down and see his hand resting in that other’s hand, and his eyes would trace the route of that hand to arm, to shoulder, to neck, to that lovely face, and slow seconds would fill with disquiet before he realized he was looking at his wife, at Meta. He, who had always been able to find her wherever she was in the world, could no longer sense her presence when she sat beside him holding his hand. He said nothing of this to Meta; it frightened him too much. This disoriented state might, he reasoned, be the result of the pain medications they gave him, and as he tapered off, his sense of his darling’s spiritual weight, her certainty in his world, would return.