by John Everson
Instead, George screamed.
Because on the other side of Betty Anne’s nose, her face was gone. The wrinkles and sagging jowls and discolored skin spots that she used to spend an hour every morning in the mirror trying to cover up?
All gone.
George could see the bones of her jaw and the white of her skull beneath the few curdled bits of red flesh that still stuck to her bone.
It was awful. Ghastly. And what was worse? All around the edges of the ragged crater that was half of his wife’s face, a line of black spiders were gathered. As George bent over in horror to stare at the remains of Betty Anne’s face, he saw that the spiders were busily cutting and chewing more segments of her skin by the second. Every few seconds, one of them would dart away from the gore, run down her arm, and crawl quickly down the edge of the chair to the floor.
From there, it scurried across the carpet, heading to the kitchen. Where they were going?
“Jesus,” was all George could say.
That’s when he became aware of the buzzing sound again. It seemed to be growing louder. He looked up at the ceiling. Dozens of small dark flies darted back and forth across it, throwing shadows across the white paint. They avoided the corners, which were completely obscured in spider webs so thick they looked like cotton.
“Looks like you’ve been dodging your cleaning chores,” he murmured at Betty Anne’s corpse. That’s when he felt a pinch on his arm, and looked down to see a black fly with a violet streak across its back biting at his skin with two tiny pincers. He slapped the thing, and his forearm was instantly red with blood, and small glob of something that looked like queso dip. Fly guts.
“What the hell is drawing these flies?” he asked, and shook his head. If he didn’t do something, they’d all be settling on and laying maggot eggs in his wife. “Jesus,” he breathed again. “What the hell am I supposed to do here?”
George wanted to go back to the den, sit back in his chair, and go back to sleep. Maybe then he would wake up in a place that wasn’t a nightmare. But then he looked down at Betty Anne’s face, what was left of it, and knew there was no way back. He stared at the spiders crawling around on her half-eaten face, and felt nausea grow as the reality struck. His wife was gone. She would never yell at him to come kill a spider again. How ironic was that? She’d been killed by spiders.
A depression rolled over him, as he stared at the open wounds. This was what a lifetime boiled down to? Being eaten by bugs? Wasn’t it supposed to be worms?
The buzzing above him grew louder, and he slapped at another bite on his shoulder as he looked up. The fly swarm had thickened, and now as he watched more carefully, he realized where they were coming from.
The webbing in the corners of the room.
But wasn’t that impossible? Shouldn’t they be getting trapped in the webs? He stepped across the carpet and looked up at the huge web that spanned from the trim of the doorframe up and across the two corners of the wall and the ceiling. On the edges, the web was thin, almost transparent. But in the center it was too thick to see through. The core of the web was gray and stormy, like the middle of a thundercloud.
All across the strands of web on the outside of the center were the bodies of dozens of spiders. Only, unlike the ones along the fringes, busily spinning new web, these were completely still. Some, he realized, were almost transparent—only the shells of an arachnid long gone.
Others were shaking and shifting on the web like bugs who were trapped and trying to escape before being eaten. But as he watched, he realized that they were not avoiding death…they were engendering new life. From the backs of each shell, right across the violet lightning bolt, the feelers of tiny flies were emerging. The things crawled out onto the backs of their parents’ bodies, preened their heads and wings for a few seconds, and then launched into the air to join the rest of the swarm. George watched six or eight of the things hatch and fly and then he knew why the sound in the room was growing. There were going to be hundreds of these things within the hour at the rate they were hatching.
He slapped another one off of him, and then another. They seemed to be dive bombing him now, as if he were an intruder.
Damnit, this was his home. But when he looked down to see nine of the things crawling along the thick gray hair of his right arm, he knew that this was not where he needed to make his stand. He needed to get out of this house. Then he needed to find a way to come back and get them out.
He shook the creatures off his skin and walked to the front door. He pulled the heavy wood inner door open, and bent down to slip the latch across the steel rod on the bottom of the screen door. He was locking this open, so hopefully the damn bugs would smell the outside and begin to head there. His next step was going to be to call the exterminators. Scratch that. His next step would be to call the funeral home, then the exterminators. Deal with death and cause death.
But George never got to the phone to make those calls. Death had its own agenda.
As he stood up from locking the door open, he realized he couldn’t see his lawn. He couldn’t see much of anything, in fact. The world all around his doorstep was cloaked in white, as if his house had landed in the middle of a giant cloud. There was light getting through, but through an opaque filter…and that filter was crawling with spiders. Above his head, a hundred of them dropped on strands of silk to land on George’s head and shoulders. From the side of the stoop another wave of them crawled up from the ground towards his bare feet.
Before he could react, George was covered in pincers and feet. The bite of one spider meant nothing. The bite of five was a nuisance. The poison in the bites of a hundred brought stars to George’s eyes before he completed his pivot to go back into the house. He tried to slap and shake the things from his body. But they only held on and bit harder.
His eyes opened wide, as he realized why Betty Anne had looked at him so blankly yesterday. The world was on fire in his mind. Colors were obscuring his vision, and his limbs felt leaden. Not his own.
George Haidan trembled on the threshold, part of him struggling to remain standing, part giving up all control. The latter part won out and he fell to the floor of his foyer, awake, yet unable to move a muscle. He thought of hunters with elephant darts. And in this scenario, he was the elephant, not the hunter.
He knew what happened to the elephants after they were dropped.
They were carved up for ivory and meat.
He didn’t feel the legs of a spider as it walked up his cheek, but he saw it as it stepped right across the center of his eyeball. It stopped at the edge of his eye and reached down with two black pincers to bite down on the soft skin of his lower lid. George didn’t blink or move, as the thing began to dismantle his flesh literally right before his eyes.
George couldn’t feel a thing. But he could see it all…
Chapter Thirty
Friday, May 17. 5:18 p.m.
Rachel pulled over at the corner and picked up one of their homemade Missing signs from the passenger seat. Eric had been absolutely despondent this morning. He’d cried himself to sleep, and had picked up again as soon as he sat down to breakfast.
“C’mon, buddy,” Rachel had said, stroking his head. “He couldn’t have gotten that far. Someone around here took him in, and when they see the signs, they’ll call us. He’s obviously a pet and they’ll be wanting to get him back to his owner. Now finish up and get ready for school so I can get the signs out there. The sooner we do that…”
She had taped up some signs this morning, and now on her way home from work, was taping up the rest. She hoped that the signs were going to do some good. But when she walked up to the light post with her paper and tape, her heart sank.
There were five other signs on the pole, all of them with photos of lost dogs and cats. And none of them looked old.
“What the fuck?” she whispered. Then she stepped around the pole, searching for a good visible place to tape the picture of Feral where it would be seen, but without o
bliterating any of the other Missing signs. When she finally taped it down, she hurried back to the car to drive to the next block. She had to get as many of these up as she could and then get home to relieve Jeremy. She wanted to do this herself, instead of reminding Eric at every block that his puppy was gone.
She had problems on every block.
There were a lot of pets missing in Passanattee. Or at least in the Green Gardens subdivision. But the thing that disturbed her the most was the last lamppost she stopped at, just before heading home.
Next to the photos of Binky, Cuddles, Boomer and the cute calico Mr. Wiggles, was a picture of Sarah Jane.
But Sarah Jane wasn’t a pet.
Sarah was a five-year-old blonde waif of a little girl. And Kate learned as she read the short paragraph next to the picture that Sarah Jane had disappeared from her backyard while her mom thought she was playing on the swing set.
“What is going on here?” Rachel whispered. Her heart felt cold as she got back in the car and pulled out onto the street. Terry had warned her to keep Eric in, but she really hadn’t listened.
But something was going on in Passanattee.
Something bad.
Something deadly.
Something wasn’t right. Susan knew it as soon as she walked into the Windsor. The nurse’s desk was empty, and from down the long main hallway, she heard a lot of voices. Anxious chatter. Someone crying. An old woman was yelling; her voice sounded far away, as if she was all the way at the end of the hall, with her door closed.
She frowned and walked into the lounge.
Her group awaited her, as they always did. Some sat in wheelchairs with Afghans thrown over their laps, others lounged on the old brown couch. Mrs. Moskowicz was knitting something in the rocking chair, though Susan couldn’t quite tell what it was.
But only half of the group was there tonight.
“Where’s Mr. Schmitt?” Susan asked, after doing a mental roll call.
“He’s not well,” Mrs. Moskowicz said. Susan thought the old woman was shrugging. But then Mrs. Moskowicz did it again. And again. Her shoulders kept trembling. And then she dropped her knitting needle and slapped at her arm.
The liver-spotted flesh was covered in angry red dots. “Damn flies,” Mrs. Moskowicz said. “Got us all under the weather.”
Susan frowned, and sat down in her usual chair. She opened her bag and handed out the Krystal’s. Mrs. Emilio reached out to snatch a bag away from Mr. Everett, but as soon as her hand closed on the paper, her arm shook, and she lost her grip. The bag spilled fries and a hamburger across the carpet.
“Oh dear,” Susan said. “We’re going to get in trouble if we’re not careful!” She knelt down and righted the bag. Then she quickly scooped the fries back in, and wiped up the grease spot and picked bits of lettuce from the floor.
“They aren’t going to be paying any attention to us,” Mrs. Moskowicz said. She slapped at her arm again. “They have their hands full.”
“What’s the matter?” Susan asked, sitting back in her chair after setting up Mrs. Emilio with a burger on a napkin.
“Darned bugs are everywhere,” Mrs. Moskowicz said. Her normally quiet voice was filled with disgust. “Exterminators been here three times this week and it don’t do no good. People are getting sick.”
Susan sighed. She didn’t know what to say. Something bit her on the shoulder and absently, she slapped at it.
“Let’s pick up where we left off, okay?” she asked, and flipped the novel to the bookmarked chapter from last Friday.
But as she was reading, she kept hearing commotion from down the hallway. Footsteps moving quickly. Tearful shouts. Someone answering with a faint, “It’s okay, you’re okay now.”
Susan’s eyes flicked up and around her Krystal’s group, noting who was missing. And noting the demeanor of those who were there. The old people couldn’t seem to sit still. They twitched and slapped. Their eyes looked sunken and dark, as if nobody had slept the past few nights. And all of them were marked with the red blossoms of bug bites.
She rushed to get through a couple chapters of reading, and then closed the book and said she had to go. Nobody begged her to keep going. Instead, the group all creaked to their feet. Even Mr. Everett’s hugs were only half there.
“See you next week,” she said.
“Next week,” they repeated. But as she watched Mrs. Moskowicz limp and slap her way down the long hallway, Susan wondered just what she would find here next week.
She grabbed a couple empty Krystal’s bags, crumpled them up quickly and stuffed them into her bag. She didn’t even look to see if she was getting grease or ketchup on her things. And she didn’t look for the head nurse as she normally did before she hurried down the short hall and into the outer foyer.
For the first time in the five years since her father’s death, Susan couldn’t wait to leave the old folks’ home. It was creeping her out.
Part Two
Eyes Revealed
Swarm behavior in insects is often related to an important biological impetus in the species’ life cycle. Sometimes the collective movement of a species can be related to the season—a migration to a warmer climate preserves the health of the hive. But sometimes swarm behavior relates to a key biological change in the organism—it is the visible indication of impending physiological change.
—“Stigmergy Understood” Insect Intelligence,
Volume 23, Issue 5, (2003) page 93-99.
The largest organized army in the world exists right beneath our feet. It is immense and able to act in a coordinated fashion without concern for individual loss of life. Insects serve the hive first. If we can harness the power of this army and use it to further the goals of democracy.
— Excerpt from the “Engagement Letter” between the U.S. Department of Special Forces and Innovative Industries, dated July 9, 2008.
Chapter Thirty-One
Friday, May 17. 8:21 p.m.
Genny was pretty sure that this was going to be the first time. It was Friday night, and they could stay out late. And there was just something in the air. Or in her heart. They had been easing up to it for weeks now, and she could feel a difference, a tension between them today. A good tension. Here, in their special “secret place”, tucked just inside the wilds beyond the tree line, it could be perfect. They came here often after school, slipping off the sun-beaten sidewalks to stroll inside the cooler moist air of the swampy forest. Tonight they had met up to go out after dinner, but instead of going downtown to get ice cream or see a movie, Todd had asked her if she wanted to take a walk.
A “walk” meant more than walking to them. A walk meant hands beneath shirts and inside pants. A walk meant Todd’s tongue between her lips, and sometimes on the sensitive tips of her breasts. They could pick up the walking trail that led into the depths of the Everglades just a couple blocks from their houses, right behind the baseball diamond. Genny loved holding Todd’s hand as they walked at first slowly, and then faster. Their hands grew sweaty, whether it was from the exertion or nervousness, she didn’t know. But their feet always moved faster and faster the farther they got from home, and the shelter of the trees closed over their heads.
They always stepped off the normal walking trail in the same place. Near the large gray rock and the fallen old pine trunk. It was a perfect make-out spot—just a little ways down the walking trail and not far from the neighborhood, but seemingly miles from another living soul…unless you counted the crocodiles and snakes. And the steady drone of insects in the air. She found the quiet living sound of the swamp strangely comforting, and to be there with Todd? Well, she couldn’t describe the feeling, really, but it made something in her just want to pop.
Todd’s fingers kept slipping up and down her spine, circling each smooth knob of her vertebrae. Then they slipped under the back strap of her bra, and traced the skin that the strap hid before fingering the hook clasps. He had been teasing that area for several minutes now, touching the strap, and
then moving away. She couldn’t tell if he was waiting to see if she would say no, or if he really just couldn’t figure out how to release the bra.
Genny pulled him closer to her, opening her mouth wider to his tongue, as if to say, “Here, I’m yours, I’m open.”
He responded with a more urgent hand along her bra that then slipped down her spine to move under the waistband of her shorts and her underwear. She shifted so he could explore more, and his hand cupped her buttock and kneaded in time to the motions of his mouth. Genny could feel her thighs flush, and the space between…she was suddenly dying of the Florida heat, desperate to throw all of her clothes off to breathe free…and open herself completely to accept Todd’s advances.
“Yes,” she whispered, as his finger traced the cleft of her ass and slipped into the wet. She shifted to give him more room to explore, and he kissed her neck and shoulder. Then his mouth touched her earlobe and he whispered, “I love you.”
Genny could hardly breathe. She turned her face to meet his lips and pushed herself forward, nearly toppling him in her eagerness. Her tongue pressed past his own and his eyes widened as he saw the look in hers.
He realized that this was the time; that she was giving him the green light. She could see the things that passed in his eyes in that moment. Sudden fear, then excitement, then fear, then longing. They had been dating now for six months, and had flirted with this moment many times. But today, here among the trees outside of the park—before the sun had even set—today felt right. They had waited long enough.
Genny pushed back from him for a moment and slipped her thumbs beneath her T-shirt. Then she pulled upwards and slipped it over her chest and head. Her bra was exposed to the dusk of the swamp, and to the instant warmth of Todd’s hands. He didn’t bother to undo the clasp behind, instead he pressed the cups down and leaned in to take the pink of her exposed right nipple between his lips. It grew instantly thick beneath his lips and tongue, and Genny moaned at the sensations of wet and warm on the tingling nerves that seemed to be straining to leap out of her breast. She put a hand on the rough bark of the tree and began to roll back on the mossy earth. Her fingers moved around the bark of the tree, and as they did, they grabbed four other fingers. She rubbed her forefinger around the hand, and gave it a squeeze. She wanted to encourage Todd, to let him take the lead. She was giving herself to him. Part of her felt like he should be the one to make the moves.