Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  I crouched down, looking under the beds. For a moment I thought I saw something hanging from the far corner of the one nearest the closet, but I blinked and it was gone.

  I stood up again, on full alert, every nerve in my body screaming at me, breathing fast and hard. The bathroom, maybe? The door was closed, and I couldn’t see any light coming from underneath it. The feeling that I wasn’t thinking this through correctly remained, that something was wrong.

  “Tessa?” I said. Then, a little louder: “Tessa!” No answer. I took a step into the room, then one more. I felt a kind of doubling, as if seeing everything through two sets of eyes from two different locations. It made me light-headed and dizzy, and I had to steady myself for a moment before continuing.

  The thing, when it attacked, was incredibly fast. It came out of nowhere. I heard the buzzing from somewhere to my right, and a split second later I saw it darting at my head. I raised the extinguisher hose and let loose with a shot of foam, but the creature swerved neatly around it and hummed right by my ear, close enough for me to feel the air from its wings.

  I swung the extinguisher in a wild arc, but only served to excite the thing even more. It increased its speed, swerving around and dive-bombing me again. It was moving so fast now I could barely track it with my eyes. I shot a blast of foam that splattered across the right bunk and the wall, missing again by a good three feet.

  As it came around again, I tried to anticipate its flight pattern, but it darted sharply left and avoided the spray easily before buzzing by me again even closer than before, so close its wings brushed my face. I thought of summers in our home with the windows open to the breeze, when hornets would sneak into rooms and buzz around bumping into ceilings, then land in a corner lying in wait for someone to disturb them. I remembered how my father seemed to look forward to those moments, entering the room with a rolled-up magazine or newspaper in one hand, and closing the door on us while we waited in the hallway. Then he would come out a minute or two later, oddly defeated, with the crushed body of the hornet cupped in his palm. Perhaps it hadn’t offered enough of a challenge, but I always had the feeling he wanted to get stung, excited by the hunt but let down by the end of it.

  This was no hornet. I glanced up as the creature passed. It turned and hovered for a moment about five feet away, its abdomen engorged and pulsing, stinger dripping a clear fluid.

  Panic rose up in me. This wasn’t working. I had to out-smart it somehow. Otherwise it would sting me, and for all I knew that might be a death sentence.

  I could hear Dan shouting through the door at me, but didn’t have time to answer him. As the thing came at me again, I shot high, intentionally driving it downward, and then let loose with a horizontal sweep of foam directly into its flight path.

  This time the creature dove directly into the foam and was driven backward, into the wall, where it hit with a wet thud and slid to the floor, wings twitching.

  I crossed the room in three quick strides and slammed the metal bottom of the extinguisher directly down onto it with a satisfying crunch.

  The thing’s abdomen popped and dark, clotted blood splattered across the wall. Its legs twitched twice and it was still.

  I stood in the silence, breathing hard, a thrill running through me as I stifled the urge to shout in triumph. I lifted the extinguisher and stared down at the crushed body. Christ, the thing was ugly. It was very much like a giant mosquito, and it had clearly been sucking at Sue; the blood that spurted from its belly was much more than it would have held otherwise. It had a proboscis like a mosquito, but the stinger on its rear end was not like any mosquito I’d ever seen. It was close to half an inch long and still oozed a clear fluid. I didn’t know for sure, but I could bet that it would hurt like a son of a bitch if you got hit with something like that.

  The bullet ant…an inch long with the most powerful stinger on earth…they say it feels like getting shot.

  Jay’s words came drifting back to me, sounding more and more prophetic. The thrill I’d felt in crushing the creature was dying fast. I’d beaten one of these things in here, sure, but what about the larger picture? Had Jay been right all along, was this some kind of engineered killer insect? What was it like aboveground, were they all over the place?

  Or were there worse things than giant mosquitoes out there?

  Dan was hammering on the door with his fists. “It’s okay,” I shouted. “It’s dead. Hold on.” I opened the closet, looking for Tessa. Nothing but tangled sheets and shelves full of boxes. I tried the bathroom, nothing there either.

  Dan and Sue were both calling to me now. When I finally unlocked the door and swung it open, Dan barreled in holding a wooden mop handle in one hand, his finger in my face. “Are you fucking crazy?” he said, glancing around the room at the foamy mess. “We don’t need that cowboy bullshit in here.”

  Then his gaze found the mangled body of the insect against the wall. “I’ll be damned. You did kill it,” he said.

  “What, you think I didn’t have it in me?”

  “Maybe. I guess you proved me wrong. Crazy son of a bitch.” He walked over and nudged the remains with his foot in grudging admiration. “Nice work. But Jesus. Why’d you lock the door? I was about to break it down.”

  I didn’t answer him. I was too busy staring at Tessa, who stood just behind Sue in the open doorway. She smiled slightly and shrugged. How the hell she’d gotten behind me and out that door, I didn’t know. I was just glad she was okay.

  “Pete,” Dan said. His voice had gone quiet, but tense.

  I realized Sue and Tessa’s gaze had shifted. They were staring at something back in the room, and their expressions had changed. I turned. Dan was standing there, absolutely still, looking down at what had been Jimmie’s bunk.

  Long, many-jointed legs had appeared from underneath the bed and wrapped themselves around the mattress. As we all stood and watched, another giant mosquito pulled itself up, clung to the edge and fluttered its wings. This one was even bigger than the last. The humming noise started and stopped as it cleaned itself with its front legs, cocking its head and rubbing along the length of its antennae with a soft rasping sound. Then it turned to look at us, its alien eyes gleaming in the light.

  “Now,” Dan said. “Do it.”

  I let loose with a spray from the extinguisher, hitting it dead-on and knocking it to the floor. The thing’s wings buzzed angrily as it landed on its back, stuck for just a moment in the foam.

  That was long enough. Dan swung the wooden handle down like a lumberjack splitting wood, the shock of the impact vibrating up his arms with such force I could hear his teeth snap together. The blow nearly cut the creature in half and sent body parts flying everywhere. Greenish fluid spattered Dan’s arms and face. Two amputated legs continued to twitch where they landed two feet away.

  Dan made a strangled, coughing sound, rubbing at his face with a shirt already damp with bug guts. Some of it had gotten into his mouth, and he kept spitting onto the floor, grimacing and spitting again. I wondered how it tasted, but didn’t ask. Not exactly filet mignon, that much was clear.

  I crouched down and peered under the bed. In the far corner of the mattress, the same place I thought I’d seen something when I first entered the room, was a hole about two inches across.

  I saw a hairy leg poke out of the hole, then disappear back inside.

  “They’re in the mattress,” I said. “Those fuckers ate a hole into the bottom of it and hollowed it out and made a nest.”

  How long had they been there? What were they waiting for all this time? Had they been sucking at the rest of us during the night, undetected? I remembered reading about how regular mosquitoes had something in their saliva that made the blood keep running and kept you from feeling their bite. Christ, they could have been sucking at Jimmie right through the mattress as he slept, and we would have never known it.

  I felt my own neck and shoulders, looking for a wound, but there was nothing. I couldn’t see or feel my own
back, of course. We would have to check each other over from head to foot to be sure.

  I shook my head, unable to think clearly. There was another possibility, some other reason they might have been holed up in there, sneaking out to feed. Something that hovered just out of my reach. But for the life of me, I couldn’t seem to grasp it.

  Without waiting another second, afraid of giving them the chance to get at us again, I set the extinguisher down and grabbed Jimmie’s mattress with both hands, yanking it out of its frame and onto the floor, covering the hole and trapping them inside. I jumped up on it and stomped as hard as I could on the area where I’d seen that leg poking out.

  Crunch.

  Dan climbed up and started stomping with me, and we began at the head of the mattress and moved down together, section by section, covering every square inch. I could feel the crunch and pop of their bodies as we landed on them; there must have been half a dozen more in there.

  It went on and on. Dark, wet stains began to appear in the mattress’s surface as blood and bug guts bled through the fabric. Sue and Tessa watched us from the doorway, their eyes wide. I saw Sue’s hand going to her neck again, rubbing at the place where she’d been bitten. We kept stomping long after they would have all been dead, getting out our own anger and frustration, until my legs started to burn with fatigue and the mattress looked like a crime scene.

  Finally I stepped down, breathing hard, goose bumps running across my arms and legs. I felt sick to my stomach and vaguely light-headed again.

  “We need to check the other beds,” Dan said. “And anywhere else they might be holed up too. Every inch of this place—”

  At that moment, a hollow, booming sound echoed through the shelter. Once, twice, three times. The sound sent fresh chills down my spine. It sounded like the clanging bells of doom, a symbol of death, of destruction, of hopelessness, bringing with it the Grim Reaper, come to carry us home.

  We all stared at each other, nobody willing or able to move, the significance of that sound registering on four faces at once. Nobody spoke; nobody could say a word in the awkwardly normal brightness of that room. I couldn’t tell if the expressions were of hope or fear.

  Someone was knocking on the hatch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Check the other mattresses,” Dan said. He was already shrugging into a hazmat suit. “Make sure they’re clean. I want you all locked away in here, safe. You hear me? I’ll go open the hatch and see what that is.”

  “Bad idea,” I said. “We don’t know what you’ll be facing. And that suit won’t protect you from much.”

  “That’s not up to you,” he said. “It’s my call. It could be the military, some kind of help.”

  “Or a band of thieves and murderers.” Or worse.

  “We can’t just ignore it, Pete.”

  “At least try to talk to them, see if they can hear you before you open it up.”

  Dan hesitated, the hazmat hood still unzipped and hanging down his back, mask around his neck by its strap. “Fine,” he said. “But if I have to act fast, I don’t want any argument from you. They don’t answer, you and Sue get in that room and lock the door and don’t come out until you hear me call the all clear. Understood?”

  I nodded, swallowing my frustration, and we followed him out to the foot of the steps, where he climbed halfway up the ladder to the hatch, listening. I could feel Tessa’s warm hand on my back, and it felt good. The energy in the room had skyrocketed; I think the rest of us were desperately hoping for good news, but nobody wanted to say anything out loud for fear of jinxing it. My own adrenaline was pumping and I was both exhilarated and terrified. We’d been attacked by creatures we couldn’t have imagined existed just a few short weeks ago, so it wasn’t difficult to see some pretty terrible possibilities if that hatch came open.

  “Hello?” Dan called out from the ladder. “Identify yourself, please.”

  Silence. “Maybe they can’t hear you,” Sue said. “The walls are pretty thick.”

  “Hey!” Dan shouted, cords standing out in his neck. “Who’s out there?” The sound echoed off the concrete and wood paneling, ringing in my ears and sounding somehow obscene before dying away into silence.

  Nothing for thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes, as we stood and waited.

  And then: boom…boom…boom.

  It was so much louder out here, directly below the hatch. We should have been thrilled; someone was alive out there, and they had found us. They were going to get us out.

  But nobody said a word. I don’t know why, but I didn’t like that sound. I didn’t like it at all. And apparently I wasn’t alone.

  “Get back in the bedroom,” Dan said. He still gripped the wooden handle in one hand, the muscles of his forearm standing out as he squeezed it tightly.

  As we turned to go, Dan grabbed my arm. “Hang back a second,” he said quietly.

  I waited until the girls had entered the bedroom, then turned back to him.

  “I don’t know if whoever’s out there is friendly or not,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s even human. We’re going to need to be careful and use any advantage we have.”

  He stood the mop handle against the wall, secured the mask over his mouth and nose and pulled the hood over his head. He looked like an astronaut with the hood and mask over his face.

  When he spoke again, his voice was slightly muffled by the suit, but I could hear it clearly enough.

  “Get the gun,” he said. “Right now. Quickly.”

  I opened the closet door and reached up to the top shelf to push the blankets out of the way, my arms trembling so badly I could barely grasp the box where the gun was kept. It was pretty far back there, and as I stood up on tiptoes I hit the box and knocked it into the back panel of the closet. I heard a click and felt something give.

  I stepped up onto the bed frame for a better look. There, at the back of the shelf, a panel had opened up a crack. Blackness loomed from inside.

  “What are you doing?” Sue said. She was standing with Tessa in the middle of the room, arms crossed over her chest, still in her bra and underwear. She was shivering from cold or fear, or maybe both. Tessa rubbed her shoulders as if to try to warm them.

  I tossed her a blanket. “I’ll be right back,” I said, hopping down and holding the box in my hands, trying to appear as calm as possible. Everything seemed to have speeded up; my voice, the movement in the room, the way my eyes ticked over every detail and back again, even the flickering of the light. I set the box on the bed frame, grabbed a hazmat suit off the garment rack and began to step into it, just in case.

  “Pete,” Sue said, her voice breaking, “what if it’s—”

  “Stay here,” I said as I pulled up the suit and zipped the front, then grabbed the box with the gun. “Check the mattresses, lock the door and wait for me to knock.”

  I didn’t have time to explain anything more, and she didn’t say anything, just wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and watched me leave.

  I pulled the door shut and heard the lock click. Dan was waiting for me at the foot of the steps in full hazmat gear. “What do you think you’re doing with that suit?” he said.

  “I lied before. I’m going with you.”

  “No,” he said, unzipping the hood, pulling the mask off again and shaking his head. “No way.”

  In response, I set the box on the floor, pulled out the .38 and casually checked the chamber. Then I slipped in the bullets, one by one. “Ever fired one of these?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, watching me. “You?”

  “My mother taught me,” I said. “Thought I might need to know how one day. Pretty smart, huh?” I didn’t tell him the real reason why, just slapped the chamber shut and looked at him. “You ready?”

  “Aw, hell.” He shrugged. “I guess I do need you. Let’s do it.”

  I tried to smile at him, slipped the mask over my face and pulled up the hood. It was hot and smelled like rubber. I might have been putt
ing on a brave front, but inside, I was terrified. I knew that the suit wouldn’t stop one of those bug stingers for a second. I kept imagining what kind of creatures we might encounter out there, what the earth might look like after such a devastating attack. Most importantly, who was knocking on that hatch. I began to be aware of that familiar feeling, my back against the wall and fighting for my life, and the red-tinged cloud started to descend across my vision as the blood-thump increased in my ears.

  It was time, the situation had its own momentum, the seconds were continuing to march along, and the decision to act had been made for us. Whatever was outside had to be met and dealt with, whether we were ready or not.

  Come and get me, I thought, gripping that gun. Give it your best shot.

  We were going to open up the hatch, after all this time, finally open it and see what was waiting for us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  When I realized there was no turning back, a strange sort of hyperfocus consumed me. I felt reenergized, wildly confident and reckless. The red-tinged cloud disappeared as Dan settled the hood and mask over his own head and climbed back up the ladder.

  I heard him start cranking the wheel, and the alarm began to sound and the red light came on. Dan punched the code into the keypad, and the alarm stopped. Then he reached up and kept turning the wheel on the hatch until the seal broke with a soft hiss.

  As he lifted the hatch up and away and it clanged open against its supports, I heard the humming noise I’d heard before when Jay and Jimmie broke out, and this time it held a deeper and more sinister meaning. I stood directly below Dan in my insulated suit, gun up, legs planted firmly. I was waiting for more of those bugs to dart inside.

  But nothing happened. I could just see a glimpse of the sky from where I stood. It was low and mean, silvery gray, and I could hear the wind whipping across the hatch opening. Bits of gray slush drifted down toward my up-turned face and settled on the clear plastic shield of my hood. I wiped them away.