Violet Eyes

by John Everson

  The conversation devolved to updates on people that both of them knew, but Rachel had no clue. She zoned out, until the career lifeguard decided to take her offensively bronzed body elsewhere. But as she smiled and waved and turned away, Rachel couldn’t help but focus on the red dots that spotted the woman’s shoulder blades like the worst mosquito bites ever.

  She couldn’t help but think of Billy, and the flies that had attacked him and his friends on Sheila Key.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tuesday, May 14. 7:17 a.m.

  The Passanattee Times didn’t normally have a lot of local news to trumpet on its front page. Usually it was a political intrigue surrounding the zoning of a parking lot or fast food restaurant. But this morning, when Rachel pulled its thin weight from the orange plastic bag it came delivered in, the first thing that she saw was the word Bite.

  Beware the Bite the headline said.

  Beneath that was a second headline, and a story that gave Rachel’s stomach a chill.

  Passanattee Battles Scourge of Biting Flies

  Residents of Southern Florida are no stranger to bugs, but recently, there’s been a particularly intrusive insect that has gotten under the skin of residents and kept the phones ringing “off the hook” according to workers at Ants to Zygaena Exterminators. The perpetrator is a species of small black fly that has been announcing its presence with a great deal of fervor—and leaving behind hundreds of red bumps in its wake.

  “We first started getting calls three or four days ago,” said Arthur Helden, an exterminator for Ants to Zygaena. There were a handful of calls in the west end, but today, we actually heard from people in almost every part of town.”

  Helden says the perpetrator is a type of swamp fly that has a purple streak down its back. It’s strongly aggressive and tends to fly in swarms like bees, rather than solo, which is unusual for flies, and contributes to their perceived level of “peskiness”. Several people have reported being attacked by the flies while walking down the street—one moment, they’re walking along the sidewalk and the next, a cloud of hungry flies is all around them.

  “And their bites are nasty!” Helden noted. “We’ve sprayed at a few people’s houses where the customers looked like human pincushions—their faces and arms and legs were just covered in red bumps.”

  Nicole Verdeyson, an entomologist at the Soriento Science Center, which maintains an exhibit on indigenous South Florida bugs, notes that the violet-marked fly appears to exhibit some of the same characteristics as the tsetse fly. While smaller than the tsetse, the flies invading Passanattee exhibit a long proboscis, and seem to have a need to feed on the blood of vertebrate animals. That said, she acknowledged that the species does not appear to be represented in the Soriento’s regular exhibits.

  “I suspect this is a type of fly that has existed in the swamps for a thousand years, but for whatever reason is migrating across our area this week,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll get a sample for our collection, but so far, I only have descriptions of what they look like to go by.”

  Want to avoid the bites?

  “Stay inside,” Verdeyson suggests. “The flies are clearly in a migratory pattern, flying in clusters and descending to feed. I’d guess in a few days they’ll be back amid another section of the Everglades, where they belong.”

  The Passanattee County Hospital reports that more than a dozen people have come for treatment of bug bites this week, several of them demonstrating severe nausea due to the severity of the bites.

  “We’ve been prescribing a lot of ice and Hydrocortisone and Benadryl,” a hospital employee said. “The sad truth of it is, the bites itch and if you itch them, they’re going to hurt. And they’re going to keep hurting until you stop itching them. Eventually, the impact of the bites will diminish on their own, but we try to help by applying creams and prescribing antihistamines. The less you scratch, the faster the bites will go away.”

  Passanattee Mayor Jack Bernard advised residents to stay inside whenever possible for the next couple days, until the odd threat passes.

  Rachel set the newspaper down on the couch and shook her head. Did none of them get it? They’d had Billy McAllistair on the freakin’ news talking about watching his friends get eaten alive on an island by flies…and now there were aggressive flies suddenly descending on their town? His town? That was not a coincidence.

  Rachel stood up and picked up the newspaper to take with her. She was walking across the street to see what her neighbor thought of this whole thing. He’d been MIA the past couple days, but she figured he’d be there first thing in the a.m.

  “Hey, Mom!”

  Rachel’s determination to walk across the street suddenly diminished when Eric walked into the living room, still wearing his PJs.

  “What’s for breakfast?” he asked, plopping down on the couch and pulling out the Wii remote.

  “I dunno,” Rachel said. “Why don’t you look in the kitchen yourself?”

  Then she shook her head.

  “No, scratch that. Why don’t you go get your dog and take him for a walk? If I remember right, that was going to be your job, and it seems like I’ve been doing it pretty much every day!”

  “But, Mom,” he complained.

  She cut him off. “We can still send him back to that girl…or I’ll just take him to the pound.”

  “But you love Feral,” he said. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “I do and I would. When I agreed to take in a pet, it was with the understanding that you were going to take care of him. I already have a pet to take care of. And one’s enough.”

  “What pet?” he asked. One eyebrow crinkled as if he was racking his brain.

  “You!” she laughed. “And dogs actually make less of a mess. Now go!”

  Eric stomped to the kitchen and pulled the dachshund’s leash off the wall by the kitchen door. “C’mere, boy,” he said. A minute later, the back door slammed.

  Rachel let out a long sigh, and sat down to five minutes of peace with her cup of coffee. How the hell was she going to survive this working mom thing? Then she looked at the phone, sitting silent on the counter near the flour canister.

  It could be worse, she admitted. She could still be dealing with Anders. That was like having two kids, and one of them was a horrible bully. As she thought of their conversation the other night, she willed the phone to stay silent, and sipped her cup.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Wednesday, May 15. 11:03 a.m.

  It had been a helluva week and it was still only Wednesday. Sam Newcastle pulled up in the fourth driveway of the day, though it was still only 11 a.m. Wherever these flies had come from, there had sure been a lot of ’em. Passanattee was drowning in them. And it wasn’t just flies. People were flaking out about spiders too. Every couple minutes, Linda on switchboard was fielding another call for help. And that meant that every five minutes she was calling and sending him from one job to the next. His appointment list for the day was jammed until 6 p.m. No rest for the wicked, indeed.

  Before he stepped out of the cab, he picked a clipboard off the passenger seat, slipped in a standard invoice, and wrote the name of the customer at the top. Bladich. That’s all Linda had given him. An address and a last name was generally enough. Sam pulled his spray can out of the back of the truck and, clipboard in hand, walked up the custom-laid brick drive to the dark wood door of the latest.

  “Ants to Zygaena Exterminators,” he said to the old man who answered the door. The guy looked as if he already had been exterminated. His face was gray, and there were bags under his eyes.

  “Hi, Mr. Bladich,” he added when the man said nothing. “We had a call that you needed some bugs taken care of?”

  The old guy motioned Sam inside, and as Bladich closed the door behind them, Sam couldn’t help but notice the bites on the codger’s wrists and neck—even some on his face. The bumps were red and angry, and there were a lot of them. His hands looked like a case of the Chicken Pox gone epide
mic. Bite mark after bite mark, one literally on top of the other. Some were bleeding, some looked scabbed. No wonder the guy’s face was gray.

  Sam followed the man down a short hallway to the kitchen. On their way, they passed a sitting room, and Sam gasped involuntarily as he passed it. The place was an exterminator’s dream…or nightmare.

  The room was apparently never used. And the man apparently never cleaned. There were spider webs stretching from floor to ceiling throughout.

  “Did you want me to start in there?” Sam asked. Bladich just shook his head and kept walking. Sam followed him into a long kitchen that clearly had not been updated since The Brady Bunch was still airing original episodes. The countertops were Formica, brilliant red flecked with black. The stove was white with an actual clock built into it—a clock with hour and minute hands. No digital here.

  Above their heads, the air moved.

  Sam felt it before he saw the cause. And then he looked up. The ceiling moved. Or, more precisely, something black crept and undulated along its dingy white surface, obscuring most of it at all times.

  “Holy shit,” Sam exclaimed and reached for the wand that connected via thin hose to the spray canister on his back. He pulled it like a gunfighter in an old Western, but before he could let loose the deadly spray, the claw of the old man’s hand was on him. The scabbed and swollen hand still had surprising strength.

  “No!” Bladich yelled. “You can’t spray that while she’s in here!”

  Sam followed the grip of the hand on his arm and looked toward the small round kitchen table in the corner of the room.

  An old woman sat there. Well, not exactly sat. Her butt was in the chair, but her head lay on the white tile of the table, cradled in her hands. Her eyes were open, but Sam wasn’t sure if she was alive or dead. Either way, she stared straight forward, and didn’t make a sound or a move as they approached. The air moved with them, and from above, a couple dozen flies descended and landed on the pink, flower-patterned housedress that the old woman wore.

  Sam passed a hand over her, shooing the flies until they took off. As soon as he did so, however, a new wave of them swarmed down. But then he realized something that made his stomach churn.

  It wasn’t just flies landing on her.

  A spider crawled out of her mouth, delicately feeling its way along the edge of her lip, until it reached her cheek. Then it stopped, rubbed two front mouth “legs” together and then scurried down her neck and arm to crawl across the table. As Sam watched, another spider emerged from the woman’s ear. The thing had twin violet eyes that glowed almost florescent in the low yellowed light of the kitchen. This arachnid stopped on her earlobe for a moment before darting towards the table. Behind it, another pair of electric purple eyes shone as a new bug emerged from her audio canal. And behind it, another. As he watched, a dozen spiders crawled out of her ear and joined the ones on the table.

  Sam swallowed. Hard.

  “Mr. Bladich, sir…” he said. He wasn’t sure how to begin. “There are spiders coming from Mrs. Bladich.”

  The silver head next to him nodded, and Mr. Bladich turned to face him. “Yes, and I need you to get the flies out of this house so I can deal with getting the spiders out of her. As long as they’re here, they won’t let me touch her.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked.

  “Just watch.” Bladich stepped towards the table. He put one hand on the back of a chair, and before he made his next step, a swarm of flies surrounded him, swirling around him like a cyclone. Bladich swore and staggered backwards into Sam, who grabbed the man and pulled them both out of the room. The buzzing of endless wings grew quieter.

  “See? I can’t get near her.”

  “Sir,” Sam said gently. “I don’t think you can help her now. I think…I think she’s dead.”

  Bladich shook his head. “She’s just resting right now. I fed her breakfast just a couple hours ago. I got a lot of bites, but I needed to get some food in her.”

  Jesus, Sam thought. He pictured the man forcing food down a dead woman’s throat, all the while being stung by a cloud of angry swamp flies that seemed to act more like a hive of bees than carrion flies.

  “I need to spray that room,” Sam said.

  “We need to get her out of there first,” Bladich insisted. “Don’t you have a suit or something you wear for protection?”

  Sam nodded. He did have a hazard suit in the truck. It was something designed for true emergencies, like entering a swarm of hornets, or dropping into the cellar of a house infested with black widows.

  After what he’d just seen in the kitchen, he supposed this situation called for it.

  Sam motioned for Bladich to sit on the plastic-covered couch in the small front room. “I’ll be right back,” he promised.

  He walked quickly to the truck and opened the back. His heart was pounding. He’d never seen a house infested like that. And he’d never seen flies that swarmed like that. He spent his life killing bugs, and rarely gave them a second thought. But right now…his hand was shaking as he zipped the suit up.

  “I am freaked,” he mumbled to himself. “That is some serious shit in there.”

  He finished the last fastenings, and picked up the spray canister from where he’d set it next to the truck. “But nothing a little airborne poison can’t handle,” he added, as he walked back into the house. Mr. Bladich stood as soon as he entered, but Sam waved him back. “You don’t have a suit,” he told the older man. “Let me bring her back here. Then I’ll clear the room.”

  Sam stepped back into the kitchen and stared through the Plexiglas hood at the thousands of flies buzzing lazily back and forth across the ceiling. Just as many clung to the surface, awaiting a reason to drop from their perch. Awaiting food, Sam thought grimly.

  He walked to the kitchen table and pulled the old woman’s chair back. The motion dragged her face along the table from where it lay, but otherwise, she didn’t move.

  Shit, Sam thought. I do not want to touch a dead person!

  Of course, he considered, if he was going to have to touch a spider-ridden corpse, best to do so with a suit on. As he slid an arm across her back, he realized that the flies were attacking. He couldn’t feel them through his suit, but he could see that his suited arm was black with angry insects.

  “What the fuck,” he said. Then he pulled her limp body up from the seat, and half carried, half dragged her from the room. She was light, but it was difficult navigating with her down the narrow hall.

  When he reached the front room, he eased her down on the couch, and then turned to look back at the kitchen.

  The flies weren’t staying put. They were all over the front room now, buzzing angrily and swirling like mini black tornadoes in the small space.

  “Fuck it,” Sam said, and pulled the nozzle out. Then he let loose and began to spray as he walked back toward the kitchen, where the bulk of the swarm remained.

  Something touched his back, but Sam ignored it and kept walking. This was out of hand. He sprayed a plume of silver in the air, and as he did, black dripped like rain from the air. Thousands of small flies fell from the ceiling to litter the floor, table, stove and counters. He hit all corners of the room and then moved back toward the front room. What he didn’t see was that the flies in the kitchen began to move again, as soon as he turned away.

  Sam walked to where he’d left Mr. and Mrs. Bladich. The room was alive with flies.

  Mr. Bladich wasn’t on the couch anymore. He lay on the carpet, one arm reaching towards the kitchen. Sam sent a couple of quick targeted puffs of poison into the air where the worst of the flies were swarming, and then knelt at the old man’s side.

  “Mr. Bladich,” he called softly. “Can you hear me?”

  Sam pulled the suit helmet off, and then bent to put his ear to Mr. Bladich’s chest. The heart was still beating, faintly.

  That’s when he saw the black feeler touching the edge of Bladich’s earlobe, tentatively, exploring. A momen
t later, the arachnid pulled itself up to the tip of the earlobe, and then disappeared into the man’s silver hair. Seconds later, another clawlike leg tapped and touched all around the edge of the hole that led into Bladich’s head.

  The old man had spiders crawling out of his head too.

  “Absolutely fucked,” Sam whispered. He started to rise, intending to leave. There was no way A to Z was getting paid for this job. There wasn’t going to be anything left of Mr. and Mrs. Bladich in short order. They were as infested as the damn house.

  Sam never finished rising though, because he’d never finished wiping out the flies. As he turned away from the silent Mr. Bladich, a black cloud hit him full in the face, and he fell back to one knee, flailing hands in all directions as he tried to scare the flies away with his motion. It worked for a few seconds, but then they simply slipped under and around his guard. They landed on his unprotected eyes and lips and nose and he slapped and rolled, trying to escape the bites that were now sinking into every millimeter of his face. They were not gentle. He could feel his face swelling even before he’d finished rolling away from Mr. Bladich and his own personal infestation.

  Tiny feet tickled his chin and neck and slipped inside his ears, and when he opened his mouth to scream, it was instantly filled with the legs and wings of a horde.

  Sam tried to rise, intending to run out of the house to the open air, but he had only staggered a couple of feet towards the door when he felt something strange in his gut. He was nauseous, but also lethargic. He spit the bugs from his mouth, and smashed them against his cheeks with his hand, though still more came. Finally he remembered the helmet, and pulled it down across his face, trying not to trap any of the evil creatures inside with him.

  But it didn’t matter. The helmet closed, and five flies buzzed inside, trapped by the half-inch of space between his eyes and the visor. They landed on his cheeks, and bit down.

  “Fuck,” Sam complained, but then he sank to one knee as he tried to walk to the door. The effects of the first wave of bites had hit him hard. “No, up,” he gasped to himself. But he didn’t answer himself. Though maybe it would have been better if he had. The sound of his words might have helped keep him awake. As it was, some poison secreted by the hundreds of flies was drawing a veil across his vision. He knew the fog for what it was, and thought of the poison kit in the back of the truck. They said its anti-venom was good for almost any bite.