by Neil Clarke
“How come it didn’t get you, too?” I asked.
Johnny shook his head. “I turned on the radio. I kept my eyes on the road.”
“And Joan?”
“Joan looked.”
I reached over and switched on the radio, turned it up loud, so I couldn’t hear that music chiming in my head.
“How are we going to find her?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
But in the end it didn’t matter. She found us.
She was waiting on the porch of a house—or what had been a house—midway down the next street over. She stood tall and unafraid at the top step, the one unmoving point in that undulant landscape, her face softly illumined by the slow-pulsing colors. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, and those succulent vines twined around her calves, like snakes tasting of the air. She looked serene, like a goddess or a saint, indifferent to mere human affairs. Yet she smiled when the Merc coasted to a stop at the curb. She smiled when she saw me, and the smile was her old smile, welcoming and warm and faintly mischievous. Just looking at it, I felt a surge of hope that she might yet be saved.
Then Johnny silenced the radio.
That strange, cruel music rang once again inside my head.
“Go get her, Nancy,” he said, and when I didn’t move, too mesmerized by the terrible beauty of Bug Town, he reached past me to the glove box and took out a revolver. I gasped—I’d never seen one, not in real life—and I thought once again that he was nothing but a fraud, a child playacting at something he could never be. But the next thing he did made me realize that it was infinitely worse than that. He shoved the muzzle of the gun into my ribs, hissing, “The fucking bug can’t have her. Not after what he did to my car,” and I saw that Johnny Fabriano was crazy.
Maybe he always had been. Or maybe it was the mutilation of his car that drove him to it—the humiliation of the thing, the exposure of his cowardice, and the consequent fear, jealousy, and fury. Or maybe it was Bug Town itself. Maybe it affected different people in different ways. I can’t know for sure. But when he dug the business end of the pistol into my ribs for the second time, I stepped out of the car, and started up the walk.
It was the single most terrifying moment of my life. The fleshy yellow stalks of grass bent their attention upon me, and I saw that each one terminated in a black unblinking eye. The snaky vines coiled around my ankles. I felt the gentle sussurance of the tentacled trees upon my face.
The car door slammed as Johnny scooted out to follow me. When I looked back, he was maybe five feet behind me, pacing me, the pistol extended in one shaking hand. His face was strained and pale, and his eyes were terrified, and as that alien music sang out inside my head, I felt the full peril of the moment bear down upon us all.
Then Joan started down the stairs. We met halfway down the walk, embraced, and stepped away.
“How did you know we were coming?” I asked.
“The music,” she said. “Everything sings, and everything speaks. We all knew you were coming. Don’t you feel it?”
And I did. It was like she’d flipped a switch at the base of my brain. My nerve endings shot out the tips of my fingers, all the way to the limits of Bug Town, where those first stalks of yellow grass sprang up from the October earth. A torrent of unfiltered imagery swept me under. I caught flashes of aliens nailing up studs in those half-renovated houses, of aliens sweeping off porches and taking dinner out of the oven and changing the oil in their cars, of aliens—of Eloieth!—bending to their homework and tossing frisbees in the dusk. Panic seized me. For a single flailing moment, I thought I would drown, and then—
“Breathe, Nancy,” Joan said.
—I got it. It was a matter of focusing the attention, of surfing the wave—and once I mastered it, I came crashing back into my own moment with a new 360° clarity. I saw Johnny at my back, brandishing his pistol, saw Joan smiling before me, saw Tham descending the porch steps behind her. He strode down the walk to stand at her shoulder. The central artery that clove his skull pulsed with color, pink and blue and yellow, each in turn. “Hello, Nanthy,” he said.
“Hi, Sam,” I said. “I came to see if Joan wanted to come home.”
“Thath up to Joan.”
Joan didn’t even hesitate. “No, Nancy,” she said. “This is my home now. I’m free here.”
And what I saw then was the most terrible thing of all: Joan had not been seduced by the aliens. She had chosen them.
Chosen them. Bug Town might have been catching strange, but our teenage neighbors from outer space had not ensnared her. The era itself had induced her to seek another path. I understand that now. The ’50s weren’t an ideal time to be a woman (has there ever been one?). Factor in an abusive father and an oppressive religion, and lots of alternatives might seem preferable. She had made a choice when she’d taken Tham home and introduced him as her boyfriend, when she’d allowed him to walk her back to my house from school, when she’d kissed him good-bye there on my porch. She had chosen Bug Town, and given her particular set of circumstances who wouldn’t have? In striving to escape everything her father represented, she’d run straight into the teeth of a decade that was almost as bad.
Wasn’t Bug Town a better option? Wasn’t Tham a better man? Who else would have left her to decide her own fate? Not even my father, and he was the most loving man I’ve ever known. He could see only one path for Joan in the end, and that was to return her to her father’s keeping.
“Stay with me,” Joan said.
“We would welcome you, Nanthy,” Tham said. “Come with uth. Everyone ith welcome.” Then, looking at, Johnny: “Put athide your weapon. Join uth.”
“Never,” Johnny said.
“Nanthy?”
Oh, I was tempted. The world had little use for a plain girl like me, even if she did make good grades. What future lay before me? A career as a nurse or a teacher? Or, God help me, a homemaker, a fate worse than death?
But there was that music in my skull, that maddening itch that I could not scratch, that flood of images to be processed. Maybe I’d have gotten used to it in time. I don’t know. But in that moment I could not abide that sentient, serpentine world, endlessly interconnected. I was me. I was Nancy and no one else and didn’t want to be. I would face whatever was to come alone, no matter the cost.
I was free.
“I can’t, Joan,” I said.
She nodded. “I’ll miss you,” she said, reaching out to squeeze my hands.
I never got a chance to reply.
“You can’t have her!” Johnny screamed. I staggered away from her, tapping into that network one last time. I saw everything that followed with that same 360° clarity, languorous and slow. I saw it all. Saw Johnny swing the gun toward Tham, his hands still shaking. Saw his finger white upon the trigger, saw the hammer fall, and the cylinder turn in its casing. I heard the concussion of the shot.
Tham lifted his hand too late. Joan had already hurled herself in front of him. She took the bullet in the stomach. I saw that too. Saw the force of it carry her backward. Saw the blood. There was so much blood.
Tham caught her in one arm. In the same instant, the ropy artery that wound down between his eyes flared red, and a bolt of crimson light erupted from the outstretched talons of his other hand. Johnny never had a chance. A burst of flame engulfed him. The stench of charred flesh filled the air. His blasted bones tumbled to the ground.
Then time kicked back into gear.
Tham had already swung Joan up into his arms. He cradled her like a man carrying his bride across the threshold. “Lath chanth, Nanthy,” he said.
I shook my head and stumbled backward toward the car. Tham carried Joan up the porch stairs and through the door of the slithery, vine-grown house. I never saw either one of them again.
The rest of that night is hazy in my memory. I stumbled back to the Merc, I know that, and scrambled across the bench to the wheel. Johnny’d left the key in the ignition, and when I twisted it, the engi
ne roared to life. Johnny—or more likely the Brookton gearhead he’d won the car from—must have modified the engine, because I barely touched the gas and the car lunged forward, like a Doberman breaking its chain.
I nearly lost control on the first corner. On the second one, I did. The car veered across the oncoming lane and careened over the sidewalk. I can still see the fleshy tree it struck. It was stouter than it looked, that tree. The hood of the car folded up like an accordion when I smashed into it. The steering wheel hurtled up to meet me. I remember nothing of the blackness that followed.
When I woke, Bug Town was dying. The slithery vines lashed around as if in agony, and the tentacled trees had begun to droop. When I crawled out of the car, the stalky yellow grass barely turned to look at me. And in the slow, dimming pulse of colors, I could see that their shark-black eyes had begun to film over.
As for the music, it had died away altogether. There was a profound relief in the silence, and a sadness, too, I guess, though the sadness wouldn’t really hit until I understood fully the magnitude of our loss. Joan was gone—maybe dead—and the aliens had disappeared. The high school football team’s run at the state title had been derailed. The lunchroom seemed strangely empty.
That was later, of course. In the moment, I gave this no thought at all. My brow was tacky with blood, and my head felt as if someone had split it with an ax. It was all I could do to lurch off toward home. I made it maybe half a block before I collapsed in the street. I was still there when the police found me the next morning.
I spent the next night in the hospital, and the morning after that I really was home, headachy and exhausted. My parents couldn’t seem to decide whether to baby me or scold me, so they did both by turns, but the babying predominated. Privately, my father even told me that I’d acquitted myself admirably, though I couldn’t see much to admire about my complicity, however unintended, in Johnny Fabriano’s madness and all the damage it had wrought.
Good intentions, right?
A few days later I felt well enough to go back to school. Everyone was bursting with questions—for a week or so, I was suddenly the most popular girl at Milledgeville High—but Chatty Cathy had fallen silent at last. My grades plummeted that semester. I groped through a fog of guilt and sorrow. The solicitous looks of my teachers were almost unbearable. The last thing I wanted was kindness. I thought of almost nothing but Joan as I had seen her last, cradled in Tham’s arms, those strange lights playing on her face. And the blood. So much blood.
I made a comeback in the spring. The fog began to lift, my grades to improve. But Bug Town never recovered. I suppose the bank wrote off the unpaid mortgages. The neighborhood itself fell into ruin.
My father drove me through it—at my insistence and over my mother’s objections—a week or so after I went back to school. The place was no longer catching strange. It was hard to believe it ever had been. The yellow stalks of grass lay wilted on the earth, and the ropy vines had withered, leaving houses bearded in brown streamers. In places, the streets were virtually impassable. The meaty trees had begun to collapse. We wound through them, crushing limp tentacles beneath our tires. We slipped in silence by the wreckage of Johnny’s treasured Merc, its nose crumpled, adding to the indignity Tham had already inflicted upon it. I guess the police must have towed it out of there eventually. I never heard. I did hear that all they ever found of Johnny was his bones. His funeral was sparsely attended. I was there. His mother—though she didn’t speak to me—looked perfectly healthy.
In retrospect, I suppose that the aliens must have opened some kind of portal from their home world, and that the things that grew there were seeping slowly out into ours. People don’t talk about it much these days, but occasionally you’ll hear someone speculate that Bug Town was the vanguard of a slow invasion and that its transformation presaged that of the entire planet—that Johnny was a hero who’d saved humanity from the ascension of triumphant alien overlords.
But Johnny Fabriano was no hero. I have no doubt that the aliens were fundamentally benign. I think they’d come to Milledgeville in search of a better life, that in transforming Bug Town they were simply making the neighborhood feel a little more like home. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just can’t bring myself to believe that you shop at the A&P, picnic in the park, and send your kids to the local high school when you are bent on genocide. If they’d had any interest in crushing us they could have done so without a second thought. They could open doorways between stars, tear the roofs off cars barehanded, and shoot death rays out of their fingers. Why mess around by taking out mortgages and renovating old houses?
In the end, I believe, they retreated in the face of Johnny’s madness. When they slammed that interstellar doorway behind them, they choked off the source of all that catching strange and Bug Town died.
I miss them. Miss Eloieth and Theven and all the rest of them. I miss Tham, whose good intentions came to naught in the end. I miss Joan most of all. Not a day passes that I don’t wonder what happened to her.
I like to think they saved her. I like to think she’s free.
About the Author
A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, both out in 2015, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award, and has been adapted for Showtime Television’s Masters of Horror. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
Now is the Hour
Emily Devenport
We never had good luck with money, except for that one time. And that didn’t end well, so you could say we had no good luck with it at all. But we had plenty of hope. Or I did, anyway, and I was good at talking other people into having it.
“Don’t be ashamed of having hope,” says Furby. He holds me in his arms to comfort me. I’m very grateful he got rid of the pain for me. And I’m glad there’s someone to hear my story. I have lost everyone else. Yet even after all that’s happened, I think I still would have made the decision that brought us all here.
When I won ten thousand credits in the lottery I looked at it as our ticket off Hardcase, the Planet of Chronic Losers. If we had stayed put, that money could have set my family up comfortably for several years, and Lono knows we needed some good times.
But good times on Hardcase don’t last. We were all working ourselves to death trying to keep our heads above the water. I heard there were more opportunities on Oceana, and I had been eyeing Rent-A-Spaceship for years, with no hope of scraping together the cash for me and six other people (plus one tiny cat who was easily smuggled). Then boom, the exact amount we needed to get to Oceana falls right into my lap.
Laamaomao was sending a wind to us from Molokai. How could we fail to catch it?
“Careful about evoking those Hawaiian gods, Maybie,” Bro said. “Sometimes they listen, and they don’t always answer the way you would like them to.” Bro is my step-brother, and he only has a little Hawaiian blood, but I’m just 50% myself, so who am I to argue with his advice?
Besides, Bro was usually dead on with his warnings. Yet he let me talk him into immigrating. They all did. And our neighbors got together and threw a big Farewell party for us, and my adopted brothers Creole and Cajun cooked up a feast, because they were the best chefs in town. My little nephew Spicy showed us how well he had learned the hula. We danced and partied to all our favorite songs, from “Little Grass Shack” to “Now is the Hour,” the Maori song about saying goodbye.
Goodbye to good neighbors. Goodbye to No Hope. Goodbye to the virus that was just beginning to sweep the poor neighborhoods where most of us lived, so new it didn’t have a name, so deadly it killed before you could make one up.
Let’s just call it the Goodbye Virus. Only it had already said Hello to us, and we didn’t know it yet.
Bro was right about how the gods listen. Sometimes they don’t answer the way you want. And sometimes the god who answers is not the one you thought you were talking to.
I woke up from deepsleep feeling awful. They had warned us we would feel that way while the hibernation drugs wore off, but this was worse than I thought it would be. And I was scared—as soon as the lid to my unit popped, I crawled out and looked at the Health Display.
Mabel Aweau it identified me. I checked all the readings that would indicate whether the unit had performed as it was supposed to. I worked as a nurse’s aid for over twenty years, so I knew what to look for. What I found made me heartsick.
The readings that I hoped would be OPTIMAL all read ADEQUATE. So that pissed me off. But under GENERAL HEALTH it said: POOR; DISEASE OR PATHOGEN DETECTED.
The Goodbye Virus . . .
No one else was awake yet. I wondered if any of them would get that far. I wondered if I wanted them to, considering what we all probably had. I stumbled to the unit across from mine and looked in on my nephew. The information display on his unit said Douglas Aweau.
All of the readings were the same as mine—including the last.
He was my sister’s boy, just six years old. We lost her to kidney disease, not long after he was born, and I still miss her, every day. But he was my sweet reminder of everything I loved about her. He had hair the color of paprika, skin the color of cinnamon, and freckles the color of chocolate, so you know we had to called him Spicy. Wherever you found Spicy you would also find Tig, because that little cat was his best buddy.
They loved each other dearly. Tig was curled up under Spicy’s chin, the two of them hibernating like bears through the long winter of interstellar space.
I wish they could have stayed there. I wish they hadn’t been forced out of that hibernation. They would have died without ever feeling the pain, or the sadness. But the company that sold us passage on this bucket of bolts they called a spaceship just wanted us to stay asleep long enough to be out of reach for any kind of help. Sent us out here with no food, no medicine, and a bunch of systems that only worked well enough to get us so far.