by John Everson
He ran to where the tents had been, and grabbed the canister that he had brought from the hut. When he got back, he could barely make out the writhing body of Jess beneath the shifting mass of black and violet flies that covered her, thousands of them fighting for sustenance.
Mark didn’t think twice before opening the nozzle of the pesticide on the bugs.
The creatures stiffened and fell from Jess’s body as he sprayed them, until he could see her skin again through the gaps they left behind.
Nearby, Billy fought his way back up from the ground, swatting and twisting until the purple cloud writhed in the air around him but did not settle.
Jess vaulted to her own feet as the flies fell to the ground, instantly killed by the poison of the spray. Her skin already welted with a hundred poison bites, but she smiled and held out her arms to Mark in thanks.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Thank you.”
But then her mouth changed from happy to pain. And Mark witnessed the pale surface of her skin change from tan to crimson.
“Mark?” she said, her voice rising strangely.
Her skin melted as the flesh beneath brought itself to the fore, hemorrhaging its life onto the sand in a broken stream that didn’t stop. Jess screamed as her body seemed to dissolve, and then she collapsed in a lifeless heap to the sand at her boyfriend’s feet. While some of the top half of her remained recognizable, the other half dissolved from the bones in a slurry of blood, until her legbones lay bare on the sand as if they’d been bleached by a hundred summer days of sun.
All told, her death took less than 3 minutes.
“What the hell?” Billy gasped, struggling to come closer while still swatting and twisting to break through the wall of flies that engulfed him.
But when Mark turned the nozzle of the spray gun at him, Billy knew better.
He punched his friend and the spray of the gun let loose nearby, but not on, Billy.
“Did you not see what that just did?” Billy demanded and pointed at the jelly remains of Jess, which were dissolving into the sand as they spoke. “You’re not spraying me with that shit.” As he said it, flies poured over his lips and into his mouth, and Billy coughed so hard he almost puked.
Mark simply looked dazed, as he held the nozzle of the pesticide sprayer. He shifted the nozzle from pointing at Jess’s body to aim at Billy.
Meanwhile, Billy shook his arms and legs like a madman, and then screamed a howl of rage as he suddenly ran away from his friend and towards the ocean. He dove into the cool green water and almost breathed in the ocean with relief as he felt the horde of flies leave his skin. The sting of their bites made him want to jump out of his skin.
Billy swam for a minute beneath the ocean, reveling in the feeling of having his skin freed; he rubbed his hands against his chest and thighs, ensuring that he no longer carried any unwanted passengers, before he rose out of the water and walked again towards the beach.
The swarm didn’t wait before they attacked again. The cloud converged on Mark, who stood on the beach watching the water for Billy to resurface. And then suddenly Mark dropped the cylinder and began to swat madly at his neck and sides and back. And then he began to yell and dance, twisting across the beach as the bites grew more intense. The cloud of flies surrounded him until there wasn’t a remnant of humanity still visible. Mark became a shimmery hoard of insects, pulsing and moving in a shape that sort of approximated human.
“Help me,” he cried, as Billy came running from the water.
“Help me,” Mark cried again, and Billy reached him and began to swat at the angry flies that shimmered with violet hunger but didn’t leave Mark’s body. The more he tried to swat the flies off Mark, the more they began to gather around and attack him again.
“Get up,” Billy urged, but his friend only moaned, and somewhere beneath the flies, he moaned a vague, “I can’t.”
Billy stepped back and looked at the solid mass of flies that moved with insect energy around a six-foot space on the sand. He thought “space” because there was no indication that his friend lived there, beneath the flies.
“Mark?” he called out.
From deep beneath the bugs, he heard the faintest, horrible plea. “Get them off,” Mark begged, his voice gagging with the bites of insects streaming into his mouth.
Billy bent and began to swat at the bugs that covered his friend… but as he did, and the flies broke above him to swarm around his head, he looked at his hands.
Where they’d touched the legs of his friend, they’d come back wet with blood. Mark’s blood.
Billy stepped back from the swarm and reached out to pick up the pesticide canister.
He turned the nozzle toward his friend and considered the result of not pulling the trigger. It wasn’t good either way.
“I love you, man,” he murmured. And the death of the spray encircled Mark.
“I’m sorry.”
Mark cried out for a moment, and then was quiet as around them the buzz of flies filled the air with excitement and anger and death. The swarm lifted briefly and then abortedly fell again to the sand, in a ray of glimmering violet. In moments, the air had grown quiet, and Billy could see the half-eaten body of his friend, laying exposed and bleeding on the sand. One flap of Mark’s cheek hung down to reveal the white of skull beneath.
Billy felt tears roll down his cheeks, but he didn’t let himself stop to think about what had just happened. Instead he dragged the bloody remains of Billy and Jess toward the boat, carefully loading them onto the deck next to Casey’s. The air still sang in the distance with the call of strangely purple flies, but they seemed to have retreated temporarily from the death doled out by his canister.
He didn’t wait around to let them reconsider. Billy released the boat from shore and headed out, away from the island, towards the mainland.
The sky looked blue and welcoming ahead. Behind, it was wreathed in an angry purple glow. Billy didn’t look back. He couldn’t. His eyes wouldn’t stop crying.
VIII. At Home
illy was a hero. And a victim. The papers painted it both ways. He didn’t think much about it. Instead, he stared at his coffee every morning in his apartment, and wondered when his headache was going to go away.
Wondered, until one day, he felt it shift and move. And his eyes exploded into tears from the pressure.
“Damnit,” he complained, and hung his head into his hands.
When he pulled his head back up, his palms were glistening.
Tears had escaped from his eyes, and as he looked at the white of his hand, he saw the remains of something purple fragmented across his skin. He pressed his hands to his forehead and brought them back, There was another tear left behind.
And another purple glimmer. As he looked closer, the legs of the glimmer moved.
The legs of his new cargo.
The legs that made his headache grow deeper. The legs of spiders with violet eyes.
He thought of the flies, and their bites. And he thought of the maggots that flies normally left behind. These flies, perhaps, left something else. Something that hatched with eight legs.
He remembered the blown-out hole in the back of the skull they had found on the island and groaned.
Maybe this time, they would be gentler, kinder.
But when Billy laid back in his bed, he really didn’t think so.
Instead, he waited for the explosion to build at the back of his skull. He waited for the inevitable.
And he cried purple tears.
About The Author
John Everson has developed a deep fascination with the culinary joys of jalapenos and New Mexican chiles over the past 13 years since his first book, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions, was published. His favorite band remains The Cure, but he was first in line to buy the new Ke$ha CD. Over the past decade, he has authored seven horror novels and dozens of short stories.
His short work, ranging from light fantasy to erotic horror, has appeared in anthologi
es like Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. II), Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. I) The Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror, The Green Hornet Case Files and many more. His fiction has also appeared in a variety of magazines, including Dark Discoveries, Grue, Literary Mayhem, Doorways, Bloodsongs, Dead of Night, Terminal Fright and Sirius Visions.
In October of 2000, many of his erotic horror tales were collected and published in hardcover by Delirium Books as Cage of Bones and Other Deadly Obsessions. Another collection, Vigilantes of Love, followed three years later. His more recent fiction collections include Needles & Sins, Creeptych and Deadly Nightlusts.
Over the past decade, Everson has written seven novels — Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13th, Siren, The Pumpkin Man, NightWhere and Violet Eyes. His first novel, Covenant, won a Bram Stoker Award upon its original limited edition release through Delirium Books in 2004. It was later reissued in mass market paperback by Leisure Books. NightWhere, his sixth novel and first for Samhain Publishing, was a 2012 Bram Stoker Award Finalist.
Everson is the publisher of Dark Arts Books (www.darkartsbooks.com), a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), a past participant and publications director for the Twilight Tales Reading Series and has served as a longtime copyeditor for Necro Publications and Cemetery Dance. From 1999-2002, he served as a fiction editor for Dark Regions magazine.
Despite an omnipresent nagging dream of relocating to warmer climes, John still lives in the west ‘burbs of Chicago with his wife Geri, his son Shaun, and three petulant birds.
Find out more about his fiction, art and music at www.johneverson.com.
Table of Contents
Praise for John Everson
Other Books
Title Page
Copyright Information
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
I. Setting Sail
II. The Island
III. A Path Through The Shadows
IV. In The Air
V. Gool
VI. The Out-doors
VII. Time To Go
VIII. At Home
About The Author