Bottle Full Of Scorpions

by John Dominick

  Red liquid splattered everywhere as the raw sticks of muscle that were her legs fell to the ground. When they hit, several bugs got knocked off by the impact.

  A long, thin, loopy strand of guts spooled out from inside her upper body, sliding out of her rib cage like an unwinding string of meat.

  None of the others saw this. I was the only who wasn’t directly over her.

  But now that half her body was gone, so was half her weight.

  Craig and Jon fell backwards as the top half of her body came flying up onto the roof.

  Jon slammed down on his side, but he was laughing and crying, he was so happy he’d rescued her.

  From where he was lying, he couldn’t see over her head and shoulders.

  But I think he realized something was horribly wrong when he saw the puddle of blood spread across the top of the RV.

  Kristin blinked and looked over at him.

  She was still alive.

  Jon stared into her eyes. He didn’t stop laughing, though. His laughs just turned into screams, that’s all. He was laughing and screaming at the same time as he still clutched her hand.

  Craig saw what was happening as soon as the upper half of her body hit the roof. He still hung onto her hand for a second, then he skittered away as fast as he could, his legs and arms going like a little kid’s pull toy as he flopped backwards across the roof.

  Noelle dug her fingers into her face and screamed and screamed and screamed.

  I looked down.

  The bugs were swarming over the bloody guts like crabs on rotten fish. They were all over the place, black maggots covering the meat –

  Except there was still a line of guts that stretched from the bottom of her ribcage all the way down to the ground, like the anchor line from a ship into the water.

  I saw on some television show once that everybody has 30 feet of intestines inside them. Well, Kristin’s were stretched out straight from her ribcage down to the ground, where they joined a whole bunch of other dark-looking shapes. Her kidneys? Her liver? I couldn’t tell. But what I could tell was that this rope of meat was a chain connecting the top of the RV to the ground –

  And a bug was climbing it like a spider up a web.

  And then another one followed it.

  And another.

  “THEY’RE COMING UP HERE!” I screamed.

  The others didn’t look at me. They were all screaming on their own, or too shocked to make out what I was saying.

  “THEY’RE CLIMBING UP HERE ON HER GUTS!” I screamed.

  Jon looked over at me, but he was still laughing and screaming at the same time.

  Craig stared like he could hear me, but couldn’t understand me – like I was speaking Chinese or Greek or something.

  “THE BUGS, THE FUCKING BUGS ARE CLIMBING UP HERE ON HER GUTS!” I shrieked.

  The first one reached the top. Its black legs hooked over the broken tip of her spine, which stuck out of her like a bloody spear.

  Craig saw the bug and freaked.

  His feet were already facing her body.

  He just pulled back his legs, then kicked. Hard.

  One shoe caught her in the shoulder, and she skidded backwards through the blood on the RV roof.

  Jon’s fingers were so sweaty that his grip broke right away. Kristin’s hand just slipped out of his.

  She was still conscious, because she tried to grab the plastic roof, but her broken nails just scratched along the surface.

  The bug crawled up into her tangled blond hair, smearing it red with its blood-soaked legs.

  Jon screamed and lunged for her hand. He had just barely latched on when Craig kicked again.

  This time his shoe hit her square in the face.

  There was a wet crunching sound as her nose broke, like a person biting through a piece of gristly meat. Then she slipped over the side, her fingers sliding out of Jon’s, her body wiping a clean path through the blood on the roof.

  The bug disappeared over the side with her.

  Kristin’s body thudded onto the ground, and the bugs fled from her half-eaten legs to her untouched shoulders and head.

  They snapped at her face, pulling skin off like strips of lunch meat. They ripped at her chest, and through all the red I saw globs of slimy yellow that reminded me of the fat on raw chicken.

  When they started squirming into the hole where her insides had been, I turned away, trying hard not to vomit.

  Up on the roof, Jon was still screaming. Tears streamed down his face. Thank God he was far enough back that he couldn’t see what was happening on the ground.

  He turned and launched himself at Craig. Jon got in a few punches before Craig overpowered him and pinned his arms. Jon just kept screaming and crying, kicking his legs and smearing blood across the roof.

  Craig was screaming, too: “I’m sorry, I had to do it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I had to do it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he shouted over and over.

  Noelle was behind them. She was kneeling down and doubled over, her face in her hands, her forehead just inches away from the roof. She rocked back and forth, back and forth. If she was making any noise, I couldn’t hear it over Jon and Craig.

  The part of the roof that had been wiped clean when Kristin slid off didn’t stay that way. The blood slowly oozed in from the sides again, until there was nothing left but one big red puddle.

  44

  Jon’s voice eventually gave out, and he just cried instead.

  I wished he was still screaming. As bad as the screaming was, at least it drowned out the wet chewing noises from the ground.

  I sat there for ten minutes, not saying anything. Noelle still knelt on the top of the RV with her forehead on the roof. Jon was curled up on his side. Craig wasn’t on top of him anymore. He had moved a few feet away and was holding his head in his hands.

  I sat there watching them for ten minutes before Craig finally raised his head and touched Jon’s foot.

  Jon pulled his leg away like Craig had poked him with a red-hot wire. “Don’t you touch me, you fucking murderer.”

  Craig stared at him. “Dude, she was already dead. I couldn’t save her, you couldn’t sa– ”

  “LIAR!” Jon screamed, his voice hoarse.

  “She was already dead, Jon – ”

  “SHE WAS STILL ALIVE WHEN YOU KICKED HER OVER THE SIDE!”

  “She was fucking cut in half, Jon! There was no way she was going to – ”

  “SO YOU KICKED HER OVER THE SIDE!”

  “YEAH, TO SAVE ALL OUR LIVES! They were using her to crawl up and get us! There was already one on her, you saw it – ”

  “MURDERER!” Jon screamed as he scrambled across the roof and attacked Craig again.

  This time Craig got around Jon and grabbed him from the back, around his arms, and crushed him in his grip. They rolled back and forth, smearing themselves in the puddle of Kristin’s blood.

  “Do you think I wanted to do that?” Craig yelled. “Do you think I wanted to – Jesus, Jon, I’m sorry! I wish I didn’t have to do that, but I did, and I’m sorry, but FUCKING – CUT IT – OUT!”

  Craig pinned Jon so that he was facedown in the puddle of blood. Jon turned his head, the side of his face smeared with red, and started crying again.

  Craig let go of him and backed away. He tried wiping himself off, but the blood was sticky now. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered, then looked up and saw me.

  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU STARING AT?!” he screamed.

  I looked away.

  The wet chomping sounds from the ground were horrible.

  “You wouldn’t have done it if it was Noelle,” Jon said, his voice all hoarse. He was still lying in the puddle of blood.

  Craig didn’t answer him. He just got the gun and put it on the far end of the RV roof, as far away from me and Jon as he could get.

  “You wouldn’t have done it if it was Noelle,” Jon repeated, angrier this time.

  “If she was already dead I would have,” Craig sa
id.

  “Bullshit,” Jon said. “Bullshit. Bullshit.”

  That’s all he said for a whole minute. “Bullshit,” over and over again.

  I wanted out of there so bad, but I knew we couldn’t get off the roof. Not with the bugs down there eating Kristin.

  I wondered how long it would take. Four hours? Five?

  Turned out we had to spend the night.

  45

  Not much else happened. Jon didn’t attack Craig again. In fact, he barely even talked. The only time he said anything was later, when the sun was starting to go down and Craig said we probably shouldn’t try to make it to the bunker.

  That was pretty obvious. We could still hear the bugs down below, snapping at each other and fighting over Kristin’s bones.

  “Can they get up here, Ben?” Jon asked dully from where he laid on his side.

  For a horrible second I flashed back on the three bugs climbing Kristin’s guts.

  “No,” I said. “They can’t…climb up the RV on their own.”

  Jon just nodded and didn’t move.

  Noelle finally sat up. She’d been lying facedown forever. Now she sat cross-legged and hugged her arms like she was cold, though it was still blazing hot. Craig went over and whispered in her ear, and she let him hug her, even though he was covered with Kristin’s drying blood. Then she dropped her head on his shoulder and cried some more.

  No food, no water. After two days of pigging out, it was amazing how hard it was to go back to being hungry again.

  Though the noises from the ground made me not want to eat.

  46

  Night fell. I laid on the roof of the RV and watched the stars. That was the only good thing about the whole day. I hadn’t seen the night sky since It happened. For the first time in months, I got to see the stars again, and it was amazing.

  We had always had a good show since there wasn’t much light around. Some from Edwards Air Force base, some from Lancaster over on the horizon. L.A. was too far away to see anything. So mostly it was pretty dark, especially if you got up on the roof of the RV, or you walked out a few hundred yards from the trailer park.

  It’s funny to remember that. Sometimes I would walk a few hundred yards out from the trailer park at night and look up at the sky. Back then, I wasn’t afraid of anything being out in the scrub brush – not if I went out at winter, when all the snakes were underground and hibernating.

  I wouldn’t walk out in the desert at night anymore, not for a million bucks.

  Not that a million bucks meant jack shit anymore.

  What was even better now was there was no light anywhere. Edwards Air Force Base had gone dark weeks and weeks ago. Lancaster, too.

  And it was dark. There wasn’t much of a moon out, just a sliver, so you could see all of the Milky Way. Millions and millions of stars, a lot of it just a blurry glow.

  I had a few bad minutes when I remembered how I’d been out here when the meteors fell. How I’d laid up here in exactly the same place, not knowing that the world was about to end.

  But I calmed down after a few minutes. That was then, this was now. It couldn’t get any worse than it already was…and at least I got to look at the stars again.

  They were so beautiful up there.

  And everything was so horrible down here.

  47

  I woke up stiff and hurting from the hard roof. I hadn’t slept good all night.

  I raised my head and looked around.

  Jon was already awake. He was sitting cross-legged on the edge of the roof, right in the dried puddle of blood, staring down at the ground.

  I knew what he was looking at.

  I slowly got up and went over to the edge.

  The blood had dried pretty good on the RV roof, but it still stuck to your skin like drying paint. I tried to keep to the edge of the dried puddle.

  Kristin’s bones were lying scattered everywhere on the ground. I could see some of them lying forty, fifty feet away. Everything was picked totally clean. No blood was left – even the sand underneath her had been eaten up and sucked dry.

  I looked over at Jon. He was just staring at the ground, his face blank.

  “Do you think it’s safe to go down?” he asked.

  I looked over at the other end of the roof. Craig and Noelle were still sleeping, their bodies spooned together.

  My rifle was under Craig’s arm. The strap still crisscrossed his body.

  “I think maybe we should wait for the others,” I said.

  “I didn’t ask you that. I asked you if you think it’s safe.”

  “I don’t know.”

  And I didn’t, not for sure. If I had to guess, I would have said that yeah, it was safe. The bugs weren’t exactly smart. They didn’t have much of a brain, or they would have figured out that every time I went in the bunker, I was going to come out the next morning. But after 2 months, they still abandoned their post by morning.

  None of them ever tried to ambush me. None of them ever tried to track me and wait me out. They basically only attacked if they stumbled across you, or if they thought you weren’t paying attention.

  So yeah, it made sense that once they finished their meal, they didn’t figure out that four more were up on top of the RV. They should have been driven crazy by the blood up on the roof, but who knows? They might have been driven crazy by my blood when Craig beat me up

  (I wanted to kill that fucker)

  but they still didn’t stick around the bunker till morning.

  “Well…only one way to know for sure, huh?” he said, and started down the ladder.

  “Jon – wait – jeez!” I whispered as I watched him go.

  He jumped the last few feet and landed as far away from the RV as he could. He stumbled back a few steps, his tennis shoes knocking against one of Kristin’s leg bones.

  No bugs came out from under the trailer.

  He looked up at me with his dead eyes, then he turned around and started off towards the bunker.

  I looked back over at Craig and Noelle still sleeping…and then I climbed down the ladder myself.

  48

  It was maybe 15 minutes later when Craig swung open the doors to the bunker. Me and Jon were already on our second helping, and each of us had polished off 2 liters of water each.

  20 cans of soup. 33 cans of vegetables. 3 cans of fruit. 5 cans of tuna fish. 71 liters of water.

  “Thanks for waiting, fuckers,” Craig grumbled as he hustled Noelle inside and then closed the doors behind him.

  Noelle gulped down a liter of water, letting it spill over her cracked lips. Craig did the same, then sat down and opened up a can. He didn’t give it to her, but instead dug in himself.

  He eyed both of us. “Why didn’t you wake us up?”

  “You were sleeping,” Jon said. He still had Kristin’s dried blood on his face and clothes. He hadn’t made any effort to wash it off.

  “Then why didn’t you wait.”

  “Because I was hungry.”

  “What if something had gotten you? Huh? If you’d waited, I could have covered you with the rifle – ”

  “What, like you ‘covered’ Kristin?” Jon asked. He didn’t sound angry, just…cold.

  Craig straightened up. “That’s not fucking fair, man. What happened to Kristin was just…bad luck, it wasn’t anybody’s – ”

  “I think we should give the gun back to Ben,” Jon said matter-of-factly.

  I looked at Jon. I was pretty shocked.

  Craig stared at Jon, then looked at me. “Oh, so that’s why you left early, huh? You two assholes wanted to talk behind my back.”

  I threw my hands up in the air like hold it. “I didn’t – this is the first time he’s said – ”

  “It’s obvious you can’t shoot or aim the fucking gun, Craig,” Jon continued.

  “Fuck you.”

  “If Ben’d had the gun, Kristin would still be alive.”

  Now, that wasn’t necessarily true. In fact, it probably wasn
’t true. If I’d been lying on the roof, covering her when the first bug got to her? Maybe. But maybe I would have shot her, too, when I tried to kill the bug. And what about the second and the third one? She might have made it to the roof in one piece, maybe, but she probably still would have died from losing too much blood.

  However, I wasn’t about to say that right now.

  Craig wasn’t buying it, either. “Jon, you didn’t see what happened to her, man – you don’t know how bad it got. There was no way in hell that – ”

  “Okay, how about this: if Ben had had the gun, then Kristin would have at least had a chance,” Jon interrupted in that calm, cold voice.

  Craig shook his head. “No. No, unh-unh. I’m not giving the rifle to a guy who just two nights ago was jacking off to my girlfriend – ”

  “What you really mean is you’re not giving the rifle to a guy you beat the shit out of two nights ago. Isn’t that right?”

  Craig glared at Jon, but didn’t say anything.

  “This isn’t about you being a control freak anymore, Craig. It’s about you don’t know how to fucking handle that thing. Ben is the one guy here who does.”

  Shut UP, man, I kept thinking. He’s going to kill us BOTH if you don’t SHUT UP.

  “He didn’t save Violet!” Craig yelled. “He didn’t save Will!”

  “Violet committed suicide. You know it and I know it. She just wanted out. And Ben didn’t even have a chance to save Will, he was a hundred yards away when Will fell down. But Kristin was right there. Right there, Craig, and you sure as fuck didn’t save her. So give Ben the rifle. Cause if it’s me that gets in trouble next time, I want the gun in his hands, not yours.”

  Craig stood up. “I’m sick and tired of this bullshit – ”

  “And I’m sick and tired of you using the gun so you can be a bully and lord it over anybody who looks at your piece of ass girlfriend the wrong way. Give him the gun.”

  Craig whipped the gun up and fired.

  Not at Jon, mind you, but pretty fucking close – a few feet above his head.

  The sound was like a cannon going off.

  “JESUS CHRIST!” I screamed, but I could hardly hear myself over the ringing in my ears.