by Nate Kenyon
“Hello?” Dan shouted. He was still standing on the ladder, his head about two feet below the hatch. His muffled voice seemed to be immediately diminished and then disappear entirely, swallowed by the angry wind.
I felt my skin prickle. I could hear my own breathing through the mask, a whistled sucking in and a pop and hiss as the valve released on exhale.
I didn’t know why whoever was out there hadn’t appeared by now. Something felt very wrong.
Dan tilted his head back toward me, the shiny expanse of his plastic hood catching the light from below, so I couldn’t see his eyes. “I’m going up,” he said.
“Dan, don’t,” I said. “You know those dumb movies where you’re shouting at the screen, telling them not to leave the room? We’re there. I don’t like this.”
He reached down. “Give me the gun,” he said. “It’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know how to shoot,” I said. “It’s not like you see on TV. It’s not something you just pick up and do. There’s the right grip, and remembering not to jerk the trigger, and recoil, and wind shear—”
“Just give it to me,” he said.
When the hand appeared through the hatch opening, Dan was still looking down at me, and didn’t see it at first. But I did. I shouted a warning as it snaked down toward him, moving fast, an entire arm exposed now, bare to the shoulder and covered with blisters like a third-degree burn.
I could see the silhouette of a head, black against the sky. Someone was kneeling outside and reaching into the shelter, trying to get at us.
Dan turned as the hand grabbed hold of his suit and yanked. Whoever it was, he was strong; I could see Dan’s weight begin to shift upward before he tightened his grip on the rungs of the ladder. Then he reached up with his free hand, grabbed the person’s arm and yanked back.
All this happened in the blink of an eye. I was still raising the gun, debating whether I had a clean shot, when Dan’s grip slipped, his fingers sliding through skin that came loose in twin furrows of blood. Still the arm pulled at him, the suit now stretching and dangerously close to tearing a hole. Dan grabbed the arm again, around the wrist this time, and he used his weight to pull the attacker headfirst over the edge of the hatch opening.
I jumped out of the way as the attacker’s body slammed into Dan’s shoulders, knocking him free, and the two of them tumbled down the ladder and hit the floor hard. I heard a grunt as the air was driven from Dan’s lungs, and he lay there gasping, his mask half off his face behind his hood.
The attacker was completely naked. His skin was blistered and raw from head to foot. He lay motionless across Dan’s body for a long moment, facedown, and a glint of recognition made me step back and shake my head, as if an act of simple denial would make it all go away.
Oh my God.
Jay raised his head, his movements stiff, strangely robotic. His trademark glasses were missing, the white of his right eye so filled with blood that I could barely make out the pupil. His hair was mostly gone, showing blistered scalp and patches of skull.
He climbed off Dan, who was still writhing in pain, and stood up.
He was an abomination. His bony torso and limbs were covered with sores the size of saucers, his shriveled penis hanging limply in a nest of pubic hair. His entire body vibrated like a dog trembling with cold.
His skin rippled everywhere, a seething, moving carpet of raw flesh, things moving underneath the surface.
And yet he was still there, still inside. I could see this in his face, or what was left of him. I could still see something of Jay in the way he looked at me, the way he raised an arm toward me, as if pleading for help.
The sight of Jay was horrible. I gagged, stumbled backward down the steps and then pointed the gun at him, my hands trembling so much I couldn’t line up the barrel with his chest.
“R-r-uu-unnnnn,” he said, straining for every syllable, his neck rigid, his mouth a raw, weeping hole. “I c-c-c-aann’t—”
Then his expression changed, his face losing all emotion. Jay was gone, even as his body remained standing. He looked at Dan between his feet, reached down in a jerking, awkward way and grasped him by the front of his suit. Dan must have weighed at least 200 pounds, but Jay lifted him as if he were a rag doll. I heard a tearing sound as Dan’s feet left the ground and one of the arms of his suit came loose. Then he grabbed the hood and mask and ripped them off Dan’s head.
Jay brought his face close, as if waiting for a gentle kiss.
“Let him go,” I said through the mask.
Jay didn’t appear to hear me. He went rigid, his mouth opening wide, wider, until I heard the tendons crack. Then something began to spill out of him.
I could not register what was happening with reality. I knew what I’d seen the past few weeks, knew that we were not only dealing with nuclear devastation but with something far worse and more inhuman, something that crept damn close to insanity. And yet my mind had refused to acknowledge that fact deep down in the places where these things really mattered, the places that allowed you to act without thinking, to accept something as truth and common natural law.
I saw, and yet I did not; my mind erased the fringe elements from my memory as soon as they appeared, and I was left with the futile hope that maybe I’d seen things wrong; maybe there was a reasonable explanation; maybe we would find out that this was all an elaborate practical joke. Jay was badly injured and mentally unstable, but soon help would come. Soon we would be rescued, and the government would explain to us what had really happened, and how they were going to rebuild and make the world right again. My mother would be found at a local shelter, tired and worn and hungry, but alive. Our home would be damaged, but repairable. We would begin to put our lives back together piece by piece, transformed by the experience but alive and able to hope for a better future.
What I was seeing now did not conform to that vision. The thin black cloud that swirled from Jay’s mouth, a cloud that was alive, that moved and seethed and changed direction with purpose, did not fit into any neat, natural pattern. It was an aberration of nature, a man-made virulent monster. It was insatiable, a single-minded entity with endless segments, impossible to stop, impossible to destroy.
And it wanted us all dead.
The gun shook in my gloved hand, and I slapped my other hand on it in a shooter’s grip, trying to steady myself. Even seeing what was happening, I could not pull the trigger. I could not fire at Jay, even in this state, even knowing that whatever had control of his body was trying to kill Dan. My mind returned to a familiar mantra, repeated again and again, a prayer for the faithful: Someone will come. Someone will help us. It’s not too late. Someone will come.
The black cloud hovered for a moment between them, pulsing and bulging with thousands of tiny specks of dust all spinning at once. I was reminded of the swarms of black flies in the woods back home in spring, the boyhood memory of emerging from a trail into a clearing and running into them and getting bugs in my mouth and ears and eyes, ducking under and through, waving my arms and watching them swirl apart and then back together again, some unknown communication enabling them to regroup in a way that was both fascinating and strangely unsettling.
Watching this now, I knew why. It was the implication of group intelligence in such an act, the idea that these things had a purpose, a goal, and knew exactly what they were doing.
Dan saw the cloud too. His dazed look vanished, and I saw fear wash across his features. He clenched his mouth shut and tried to lean his face away from it. Still dangling a foot off the ground, his left arm hanging useless at his side, he swept his right arm up, trying to dislodge Jay’s grip.
It looked like he’d hit a stone wall, for all the good it did. I remembered how Dan had described the impact of Jay barreling into him in the kitchen as he tried for his escape.
Like getting hit by a 250-pound linebacker.
Whatever had hold of Jay now, it was inhumanly strong.
Dan redoubled his efforts, throwing
his knees up against Jay’s stomach and clawing at his fingers as the black cloud enveloped his face. He twisted away in panic, turning his shoulders, and this time Jay’s hands slipped, the skin sliding away from muscle and bone and leaving him with bloody, raw mitts of flesh.
Dan’s suit tore loose and he fell heavily to the floor, rolling backward down the steps with a brief cry until he stopped at my feet.
He stood up coughing and choking, holding his left arm tightly against his side. I knew immediately that whatever he’d done to himself when he landed on the floor, it was bad; the grimace of pain and the look in his eyes were enough. His shoulder was either dislocated or shattered, and any normal person would probably have been screaming by now.
He wiped black flecks from his eyes and nose with his right hand. I could still see the remnants of the cloud whirling around his head. I didn’t know what they might do to him, but I could guess. I shivered at the idea of those things swarming down my throat, entering my lungs and bowels, opening me up to something else none of us could understand. Not yet.
Swarms of black flies…
“Shoot him,” Dan said, gritting his teeth. “Pull the fucking trigger, Pete, damn it! Do it now!”
I turned back to Jay. He was tottering down the steps at us, raw, skinless fingers dripping blood, his mouth still stretched impossibly wide, his nakedness only serving to magnify the threat of him. Being nude can make someone appear more vulnerable, but that was not the case here. He looked like an escaped homicidal mental patient, like he wanted to eat us alive, and I suppose that was close to the truth. Mental illness or not, shooting him would clearly be self-defense, and I wanted to be strong enough to pull that trigger, put a bullet into his brain and end it all right now.
Life ain’t civilized. That’s a human creation, rules and order and compassion. Nature doesn’t care about any of that. Things kill…or they die.
The red tinge began to descend over me as the hiss-pop of my breathing through the mask intensified. It was impossibly hot inside my suit. Sounds grew fainter as the world retreated into a fun house-mirrored version of itself, shrinking into a pinpoint focused on the strange human-like creature before us.
I don’t remember actually squeezing the trigger, or the pop the gun must have made when it fired. I don’t remember the smell of the smoke or the sound of a bullet smacking muscle and bone. I remember only the way Jay’s forward momentum suddenly stopped no more than five feet away from us, and the red flower that bloomed in the center of his chest, as if his flesh had opened up and begun to weep.
I sensed, rather than saw, a ripple pass across his skin, beginning at his feet and moving in a wave up his legs and torso to his face.
The second bullet hit him in the neck. I had closed my eyes by then, and the barrel must have begun to float upward before I fired, because when I opened them again a glistening red fountain was pumping from this second wound, and he was looking at me, bewildered, the real Jay back again, if only for a few precious moments. It broke my heart, that look, probing my face for an answer I could not provide: why?
Looking back on it later, I thought that might not have been the question at all, that perhaps the look was more one of forgiveness, or even relief. I chose to believe that he was thanking me for his release, the firing of the gun a gift I’d given him to end his pain.
But at that moment, I thought only of the fawn in a clearing from my distant memory, running in circles and crying for its mama, who lay dead at its feet.
My father’s voice: this one’s yours.
The rippling in Jay’s flesh grew faster, more agitated, until his entire body seemed to be vibrating at a high frequency. A chattering sound came from his teeth clicking together. His eyes overflowed with blood-tinged tears, and blood dripped from his nose and mouth and ears. The hives that covered his body began to weep a yellowish brown fluid and his skin took on a flush of heat.
I could not tear my gaze away from the insanity standing before me, as desperately as I wanted to, as badly as I wanted to run and hide in a corner somewhere as far away from this place as I could get. I had to see it to try to understand the truth. What I was watching was real, and there was no avoiding it, no way of erasing this from my mind.
He let out another strange sound, similar to the one he’d made days before in the kitchen, but this time the answering sound from directly behind us was very human, and full of undisguised pain.
I turned to find Sue, framed in the open doorway to the bedroom, an expression of despair and terrible agony on her face as she looked from the gun in my gloved hands to Jay’s ravaged body, and screamed his name. The sound of the shots must have brought her out. Tessa tried to pull her back into the room, but she wouldn’t move.
There was nothing we could do to stop her seeing everything. She did not try to run to him this time, just stood there screaming.
When I turned back I understood why. Jay had begun to come apart. Fissures appeared across the flesh of his naked chest, quickly spreading and swallowing more and more of his unbroken skin. The largest of the hives burst open and seething black waves of insects poured out of the wounds, chewing in ever-widening circles and exposing yellow pockets of fat, strips of muscle and white bone.
He was being eaten from the inside out, the flesh of his face falling away as more ants swarmed from his nose and mouth and ears. Already half his jaw was exposed, giving him a lopsided rictus grin, and the blood on his teeth shone in the light as he continued to dissolve.
As his eyes went with a soft, liquid pop, I heard Sue fall to her knees, begging for it to just please stop, praying to a god who was not there and never would be. I thought of my own mother and what might have happened to her alone in our home, and the rest of my friends and neighbors, children and dogs and occupants of nursing homes and hospitals, all taken this way. I wondered what kind of god would allow such a thing.
The end happened incredibly fast; Jay’s skin was gone in moments, and shortly after that he was little more than a skeleton held together with strips of flesh. Still they swarmed over him, chewing until what was left of him collapsed to the floor in a pile of white bone.
And then there was nothing but the sound of Sue’s anguish, the whipping of the wind from above, and the emptiness we were left with in the aftermath of his passing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The ants were everywhere. They spread out in coordinated patterns across the floor, as if intent on searching every square inch of open space. They looked for all the world like a miniature army marching in perfect formation, and I supposed that was exactly what they were. Killing machines, built from the cellular level and engineered to do what they were doing right now. No conscience, no hesitation. Total and complete annihilation.
Somehow we all made it back into the bedroom and locked it, and I took off my mask and hood and breathed gulps of cool air while Dan grabbed blankets and sheets from the closet with his good arm and stuffed them up against the cracks around the door. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how futile it all was; if those things wanted to get in here, they would. It seemed like the end game to me, and now all that was left was for us to wait until we were consumed like Jay had been.
But nothing happened for several minutes. We all sat huddled together in the middle of the room, rocking, watching for signs of attack, all of us deathly silent and so paralyzed with shock and fear we would have given in without a fight. There were no more tears, no more hysterics or begging for mercy from some god who did not listen. Maybe it was because we’d already let Jay go when he first escaped up that ladder, and the fact that he’d returned did not change the uncoupling of emotion that we had all gone through over the past few days. He had returned, yes, but it wasn’t really him; his body had no longer been his. Or so we told ourselves, even as we waited for the same thing to happen to us.
“The hatch,” Dan said finally. “It’s still open.”
Sue made a moaning sound like a trapped animal. I pictured the op
en hatch, dark, menacing clouds racing by far above, icy ash flakes drifting down to cover the concrete steps with a gray film. I imagined things climbing into the shelter, one at a time, creatures that walked upright but were no longer human, moving with purpose to search and destroy.
I shivered, and Tessa snuggled closer to me, the warmth of her body bringing an ache deeper and more profound. If I died, she would surely die with me. I could not let that happen.
“I can’t climb the ladder,” Dan whispered, gritting his teeth. He turned to me, the look in his eyes a far cry from what it had been the past few weeks. “My arm…you’ll have to do it, Pete.”
I stared at him. I saw fear and uncertainty and a lack of conviction. What I saw angered me, as if he’d let us all down, selling us a bill of goods he could not deliver. I felt like Toto had exposed the man behind the curtain, the real Dan, wracked by the same insecurities and weaknesses as everyone else. Maybe I was being unfair, and the damage to his shoulder was far more painful than he was letting on, and he simply could not act. But whatever the reason, our fearless leader was scared to death, and maybe, I thought, that explained everything. Maybe that was his secret, that he chose us as a peer group simply because we were easily led, easily dominated, and it offered him a way to continue the illusion of control.
“Sue and I will check the mattresses in here, make sure it’s safe,” he said. “We can barricade the door and hold them off if we have to, if that’s what it takes.”
He blinked, once, twice. Tiny black flecks floated in the corners of his eyes and had settled in the cracks of his lips. I did not want to think about what that meant.
I nodded. Tessa held my arm, pulled me close. I thought she might ask me not to go. But she kissed me gently on the cheek. “I’ll come with you,” she said.
I didn’t argue the point. If we were going to die, I’d rather she be there with me. We left the room together holding hands, and it felt like walking toward an execution.