by Martin Rose
I thought I had closed that door behind me when I passed through; I motioned for Owen to stop with a gauntlet fist raised in the air. Owen’s footsteps halted behind me. I sensed his questions, his concerns, his building anxiety bubbling beneath his calm.
The door creaked in the draft.
Human nature desires flight in panic, often at the moment when it stands to help you the least. What I felt in the space of that silence was hard to define. I was so removed from humanity, reduced to nothing but bones, a human coat hanger for a suit of armor, that it was hard to express without taut muscle, sweating skin, heaving flesh, the taste and shape of my fear. Even without all the trappings of solid flesh, left with only my decayed eyes and my grinding teeth and the ghost of an infrastructure, the sensation of being observed and expected intensified.
I drew my gun. Owen’s motions echoed behind me, dark with purpose.
I took a breath and led us through the inviting door.
*
Before, when I had first begun the long journey through the dark halls, through the destruction of the altar room, there had been nothing but bodies thrown about like dolls knocked from a display case, in different poses and wretched faces as they died and breathed their last on the stone floor. At first glance, it was impossible to say what had killed them.
Perhaps Jessica, sensing the end at hand, had poisoned them. Their communal feasting setup made distribution easy. The children had never had a chance—the end destination had always been this point in time, this pitiful destiny. They’d had a brief stay of execution from the moment Jessica had snatched them from the streets and raised them in her perverse network of Rogers followers, but after I’d left, the moment of truth had arrived. My coming heralded their personal End Times.
My greatest fear had been that the children would be infected; but in a strange moment of conscience, Jessica had refused to expose her surrogate children to the same disease that had destroyed her real child. I had to give her that much respect—she died a monster, but she had refused to make another in her place. There were no zombie children here.
Imagine our surprise then as we stood in the doorway and, one by one, each prostrate child on the floor slowly rose to his feet.
*
They were not alive.
“Vitus?” Owen whispered.
All over the room, the sounds of broken chairs being cast aside as bodies struggled to stand, groping for objects to assist them, filled the air, groans and whispering fabric, hands clenching and pulling at each other like children in the midst of delayed tantrums.
“Their eyes are empty, Vitus,” Owen hissed, and I could hear the hysteria creeping into his voice as he bit panic back into his mouth and swallowed it down. “They’re not zombies.”
“They look like zombies.”
“Flies infest and consume. They’re inside their skin, Vitus! They’re eaten-through with her!”
In an instant, I turned on him with the Glock in my hand, using the other to thrust against his chest and send him flying backward, Mossberg and all, back through the door and into the hall.
I couldn’t allow him to risk himself.
“Vitus!”
I ignored him, slamming the door in his face and jamming the lock as he struggled to gain entrance. He pounded on the door with force until the wood shuddered, as though inhaling and exhaling beneath his fury. His muffled voice called my name and, as much as I regretted to leave him there, I turned back to face the room
“I can’t talk right now, Owen. I’ve got to kill my children.”
Sluggishly, they were still trying to find their feet. Their eyes remained empty and half-lidded, eaten through by maggots and decomposition; they trailed stains on the floor where their bodies had sat and marinated in the damp, leaking fluids onto the concrete and fermenting there. Fingers groped at the air and where there was no furniture they used each other to climb up, leaning against each other’s bodies, dragging their red, stained robes along the floor. They were not zombies; their behavior was not so well-defined. They were a new breed of monster riddled through with maggot and worm and the howling grief of a woman scorned.
No sooner did I think it when their mouths opened, one by one, like blood flowers bursting in bloom, and from their open throats—
ZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTT
The buzzing persisted in a bone-deep electric hum, shaking down through my cartilage and every vertebrae that made my spine behind the metal. Blackness glimmered behind their lips. A thousand flies animating their shambling corpses and pulling at their strings like marionettes.
I assessed the situation in seconds, too busy with the business of murder to waste time on fear, on panic, on questions of right and wrong. In the back of my mind, the protests of my higher-functioning self became a gigahertz din—the part of me that cared about children, about desecrating the bodies, their most unholy murders. I did not think, however, that the flies would care so much about my tender sensibilities. Their intent was clear, in their open mouths, their bared teeth—
Kill Vitus.
And they had every intention of turning my bones to dust, armed only with child-size molars and incisors.
They outnumbered me by a hundred to one—all that stood between me and their outstretched hands was my suit of armor, a Glock, and a sword.
I dashed across the floor. Metal clanging as I rushed the stage at the center of the room. All the children turned in unison, their hair stained with droplets of congealed blood, to track me with needy clenchings and their outstretched hands like urchins begging for food. The humming reverberated from deep inside them where the flies frothed and foamed and worked through them with the force of an F5 twister.
“Oh Jessica, I never meant to hurt you so,” I whispered as I turned to face the horde that threatened to close in on me from all sides. Indeed, the crystallization of her hate, her wounds distilled into one frozen moment of time I alone was responsible for, carried her forth even through the consciousness of a fly, never letting go, never giving up. A tenacity to be admired; a tragedy to be mourned; a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The humming increased in volume. How could I appeal to her consciousness, locked in the bodies of a thousand and one flies? If I spoke, might she hear me?
“Jessica,” I called out.
The bodies, shambling from the outer reaches of the room toward the stage center, paused. The name registered, but then dismissed and fell out of memory as they continued forward with their greedy, open mouths full of writhing flies that nestled and ate at their tongues.
“Jessica, I’m sorry,” I said.
Has there ever been so hated a word in the universe as sorry? What could sorry buy me now but time enough to regret that I ever been born, ever loved her, ever stood by her side, and at least, ever betrayed her?
The words had no effect.
“Fuck it,” I hissed, and started firing.
*
One had managed to crawl onto the stage, pulling himself up with his raw fingers, the tips bloody and oozing pus as he wrenched his way to the surface. I kicked him back with an armored foot and he reeled in a flurry of awkward pinwheels as though he could gain purchase from the air itself. Metal jangled against my bones, from my toe to my spine, causing my breath to explode in a shudder. Flies ejected from his mouth, escaping their host and reforming with energy, searching for the next one.
A round fired, the gun disposing of an enterprising young undead lad who found the stairs and trudged up them, only to stumble back down, his head blowing out the back in a mass of brain matter and bug guts. Black flies swirled out of the starfish hole like cigarette smoke, ejecting from his body and seeking a haven in one of the other puppets, climbing greedily through their ears, their nostrils, licking at their eyes, maggots writhing in their flesh.
“Too many,” I gasped, pushing against a child’s chest with the muzzle of the gun. He had attempted to sneak up on me from my blind spot, where the horizontal slit failed to reveal the
periphery, and he nearly made it before the sound of a footstep squelching blood alerted me. He fell off the edge of the stage with a disconsolate wail. I closed my eyes for a split second, processing a shudder of revulsion.
I would do whatever I had to do—though they were monsters, they were monsters in the bodies of children. Each blow, each gunshot, each strike was accompanied by a sympathetic pain response for flesh I no longer had, and a blind desire to comfort the children who had not brought this on themselves.
“They aren’t children anymore,” I said aloud between gritted teeth, and fired into the seething crowd forming below. Moments ago they had been scattered all across the room, but they were congregating quickly, swarming like their counterparts with one focus: tear me to shreds at any cost. I was their sole target, explaining why Owen was still intact after all this time here. As surrogate child, he was not the focus of their rage; he was but a misguided lost boy.
I felled one. The body collapsed with a slaughterhouse floor thump, opening the space up for his companion who trampled over him without hesitation, breaking bones with his eager steps. He opened his mouth, squirming with white larvae. Hair spiked and matted with blood. One open hand seized the air where he wanted me to be. I lifted the gun and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
I’d been waiting for this moment.
The Glock displayed the empty chamber, like a dealer at a casino holding his hands out. No luck there. I hooked the muzzle into my holster, because unlike in the movies, weapons are expensive. You don’t just throw them away when you run out.
I unsheathed the sword.
*
I’ll admit to a certain, boyish satisfaction in that moment alone. Amid the sound of their seething hatred, their churning saliva running down their jagged teeth and eye-fucking me with red-rimmed intensity, the metal divided the air and cut through the growling murmur.
Even the constant, maddening buzzzzz of the flies diminished for a split second before resonating once more with furious purpose. I felt the weight of the hilt, wrapping my hands around it the same way I would a gun, heel of my palm on the bottom, my guiding hand toward the top. I didn’t know how to work this weapon, but I was ready for my on-the-job training.
I swept with a wide arc outward, kneeling so I could come in low enough to take the heads of the first two gathered at the lip of the stage. A wet separation of flesh and blood. The sword jangled against their spinal columns for an instant before slicing cleanly through the joints, exploding synovial fluid and cartilage in its passage. Their bodies fell like empty clothes and suddenly deflated and, without force, were reduced to broken dolls with the menace rooted out and cast aside from them.
Through their red-rimmed wounds the flies found egress, rose up into the air like frenzied smoke and flitted into the next host, through nostrils, mouth, and ears, crowding their faces until they were absorbed through their openings and left only the buzzing sound, the occasional flickering of their wings through their mouths.
Killing the children was one thing. How was I going to kill the flies?
*
Math class was in session.
I subtracted their numbers, graduating them to six feet under. I felled them like a lumberjack, heaving with each massive stroke of the sword. My bones trembled with the weight. I registered the breaking of my left hand when I struck a rib, the blade bouncing back into the air with rejection. The break echoed through the rest of my body, grinding against their defunct parts. Small pieces of bones escaped the main fracture like grains of sand inside a wet suit; they ground against the metal of the armor and fell into the main carriage to sprinkle across my ribs.
I cursed, my left hand falling useless. The tip of the sword fell to the stage and I struggled to lift it one-handed, where it wavered uncertainly in the hot, stinking air. I did not have the weight and the mass of a human man to drive the blows. Without my other hand to help guide and force the strike of the sword, it had all the utility of a butter knife. I could only swat at them, like . . . flies.
I backed away from the stage. Their vacant and ventilated eyes rested on the lowered sword and this sign of weakness reinforced their ambition. They surged forward, like fans at a concert where I was the main event, struggling to pull themselves to the top. Their brothers behind them helped to force them up so they could get their chance. I had reduced their numbers to half. It wasn’t enough, I realized. They were going to have me.
Their bloody hands wavered in the air, overcoming the stage itself and standing upon the wooden boards. Remnants of the stage curtain rippled as they stumbled against the fabric, pulling at the old velvet and shredding it. They trailed their crimson robes behind them like pools of blood, the buzzing behind their eyes, in their flesh. I imagined that if I touched them, they would vibrate beneath my fingers like an engine beneath a car hood, powered by turbo-charged flies.
I backed farther away before their onslaught but I was running out of stage. I brandished the sword once more, hoping to buy myself an out, buy a little more time, buy a second chance, anything, please . . .
“Vitus!”
Through the narrow slit of the visor and the darkness of the altar room, I saw Owen. He’d found access through a side door, giving up on the main entrance once he knew I would never open it.
“Fucking kids,” I snorted.
He stopped several feet in, staring open-mouthed at the seething horde. He did not take long to recover before reaching into his pockets like a man who could not recall where he kept his car keys, just at the moment he needed them the most. The expression on his face was near comical in its urgency.
“Get out of here!” I yelled. “Go, dammit!”
I turned away from him. I had nowhere left to run, and the kid closest to me had opened his mouth to reveal a great, black scribble of buzzing flies that oozed along his tongue. One nestled in the bone of his molar, tasting the tooth there with eagerness. He hoped to taste me there, as well. He snapped his teeth and licked his fly swollen lips in anticipation.
“Vitus!” he cried again.
This time, instead of his first greeting call, there was a note of command, of urgency the first had lacked. Reluctantly, I turned away from the first several children who were closing the distance with their shuffling gait, mopping up blood and dust as they came. I did not even waste the time to reprimand Owen for the distraction. I hoped whatever he needed my attention for was well worth it.
A taser appeared in his hand. He met my gaze with fierce acknowledgment and lobbed it into the air in one great, underhand stroke, his mouth a thin line, his jaw set and his teeth grinding. He looked as I imagined my son might, the way I’d pictured days on a high school field, playing sports with his teammates or taking him camping. The sort of things I would have done with him if I could, the sort of things I wanted to carry on . . .
And it’s not too late.
I raised my hand into the air, whistling a breath through my teeth. I felt a child’s hand strike at my armor, hands against my back, weaving spidery fingers into the metal to tear the plates apart and get to the bones inside. In the next second, metal jangled up my arm with the connection of the taser against my leather palm plates, knocking against my skeleton.
I opened my fingers in disbelief and whirled on my heel to face the horde. They stumbled back and laughter issued from my mouth in long peals. I had lost my reason, my sense; had I lost it at the sight of Owen, at all those years of subdued desire for family and home and meaning, galvanizing me? Infected with the excitement of second chances? I rounded on the closest snot-nosed, fly-humming brat in my circle.
“Science class, children,” I croaked.
I slapped the sword against his shoulder in an ineffectual blow, but the desire was not to stab or slice or dispel. The child snarled, a single angry fly dipping out of his mouth before entering again, and he reached for the tip with a child-chubby hand lacerated along the knuckles. He gripped the blade without feeling, while his hu
ngry companions pushed up against him, extending their hands outward toward me.
I pushed the slotted nose of the taser gun against the blade of the sword and zapped it.
I cried out. Everything inside me seized as though a great fist had crushed me, then released me again. Somewhere in the guts and viscera of my rib cage, a remnant of my old heart remained, and it beat weakly against the electrical pulse, awakened before dying again. It was like having a star bloom inside your chest and then wink back into void.
I shook my head, dazed; electricity flowing back from the taser through every plate of metal that lined my arms, my legs, my chest, and my body, down through the sword, into the children beyond. They likewise struggled with it; but they were more parts flesh than I was. This was a force I had the power to withstand, but the children were not alive. They were puppets maneuvered by flies—and their small, black bodies could not suffer such a blow of energy without dire consequence.
The electricity jumped the sword and ate into the skin of the first child, and each one behind that one was linked by a touch to another, and his fellow in turn was touching another, and that one another, and so on. Blue veins of electrical fire encircled and then disappeared into their clothes, absorbed into their flesh while the sword vibrated and hummed with the energy.
And suddenly, the buzzing dimmed.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzztttt.
The first child collapsed, weak muscles and red robes twitching to the floor, breaking the contact with his fellows. From his open mouth, dead flies rolled out like round beads of onyx, a broken necklace shattered apart into a thousand pieces and scattered over concrete.
There it is, I realized. The last remains of Jessica. The last of her will, her love, her all-consuming suffering.
The next child that had been linked to him fell to the floor, dragging another with him. Flies tumbled from their open mouths, their nostrils, and their ears, as though they were filled to overflowing with them, their dead bodies resting at last without the living insects to animate them. Children shambled behind them who had not been in contact with the electrical current, mindless and purpose-driven. I wondered if they could feel or sense their diminished numbers, that the divided soul of Jessica Adamson, carried in every fly, was dying by the thousands.