Love at First Sting

by David Benton

  Mr. Walker rarely lost control of his emotions, but moments like this were an exception.

  He had worked up a sweat by the time he climaxed, almost lifting her carcass off the ground and then collapsing into her yawning cavity again, none too lightly. He gave Mrs. Fenning’s earthly remains an incongruous peck on the marble-cold cheek, staring into her wide-eyed blank gaze.

  “Well, darlin’, now I have to get back to work.” Mr. Walker stepped into his pants. “Looks to me like that old prince isn’t going to make it.”

  Her carcass didn’t answer.

  But then his eyes settled on his open duffel and a knot started to grow in Mr. Walker’s stomach. A deep sickening feeling. It wasn’t guilt over what he’d done, or any kind of guilt. It was the realization he’d let his animal side rule the human side (or was it the other way around?). He’d forgotten the condom, the package of which he saw in the duffel, unopened. For a few minutes of fleshy pleasure he’d slipped badly and allowed himself to leave damning DNA behind. Now he’d have to take extra precautions in disposing of the body.

  Something caught his ear.

  Mr. Walker surveyed the surrounding forest. He couldn’t see anything. He strained his auditory senses and picked up on… buzzing.

  Damn hornets again.

  For a moment he could have sworn he’d heard a human voice, too, in tune with the buzzing.

  Crying.

  .5.

  Now

  The front door was locked and Mr. Walker ventured around to the rear, where a leaf-clogged pool shone in the dappled afternoon sun. A Tums was turning to chalk on his tongue.

  There was a wall around the entire property, and trees obscured sight lines to nearby homes. He blinked and surveyed the neglected lawn, wondering…

  It felt like a trap.

  “I thought you killed her!”

  Well, fuck, he had.

  It played out in his mind, almost giving him an erection.

  He checked the back door and found it locked, too. Decisions. Should he break in? This whole job was skittering off the tracks anyway, so maybe an old-fashioned B&E fit right in. On the other hand, how did he know Mr. Fenning wasn’t barricaded behind a table with a cannon pointed at the door?

  There was a buzzing at the edge of his field of vision, but when he turned his head he heard it switch to the other side. There were hornets hovering over the pool. He squinted. There were a lot of hornets hovering over the scum-covered water. He approached the edge slowly, still squinting. The insects seemed to be buzzing in tight little orbits. He lowered his gaze and thought he saw an air bubble burst on the surface. No, there was another. As if someone breathed out underwater…

  Mr. Walker examined his dilemma. Leave, break in, or investigate the damn pool?

  All right. Let’s see the water.

  Slowly, ignoring the crazed hornets, he crouched on the tiles.

  Another bubble burst on the scummy surface. Closer to the edge. He looked up.

  Aren’t those damn hornets closer?

  Another bubble, a bigger one. He heard the splash. The buzzing increased its intensity.

  Mr. Walker squinted again. There was something going on here… and suddenly he felt somebody’s eyes on his back.

  Even from a crouch, Mr. Walker whirled and faced the rear of the house, the compact Sig 9mm in his hand.

  Windows and door stared at him blankly. The afternoon sun reflected glare at him, and he squinted again.

  Another splash from the pool made him turn. This time the bubble had burst just a few feet from the edge. He stepped back, the pistol extended. Hornets buzzed in some kind of insect frenzy. Now he could see a shadow under the layer of scum. As if something below the surface were approaching, crawling on the bottom or something.

  He backed away.

  .6.

  Then

  He had planned on just burying the body in a shallow grave, then planting the bike and shredded clothes ten or twenty miles away, along the bike path but in the opposite direction from where Mrs. Fenning had parked. It would throw search parties off the trail for weeks, if not months. But now he wanted to move her even farther from the scene. He seemed to remember seeing a sign for a nearby marsh, probably right near the marker where he’d read about the native mounds.

  Again he heard something. Whirling around he found nothing, nothing but an insect hum and the pounding of his own heart. He was spooking himself. Then bury the body, plant the evidence, and get the fuck out.

  He bent over and started to throw spadefuls of loose dirt back over the woman’s guts.

  But there, in the pile, something was moving.

  Impossible.

  But something did move. And make a mewling sound.

  With his knife, Mr. Walker dug around the squishy mess and lanced something that twitched beneath a fold of small intestine. He held up the thing to investigate.

  It was a fetus.

  Certainly it couldn’t be moving – or crying, either – but blood bubbled up from around the wound like frothy pink foam.

  A very tiny, barely formed fetus.

  Mr. Walker wondered if this was why Mr. Fenning had wanted his wife killed. Or maybe he hadn’t even known. Either way, he’d just gotten a two-for-one deal. Maybe Mr. Walker could renegotiate. He wiped the tiny body from his knife’s blade, leaving it on the pile of gore, and finished covering it with loose soil.

  .7.

  Now

  He could still see the pool’s surface under the cloud of hornets, and something shadowy was rising to the top like a fisherman’s bobber. He stared at the shape, recognizing it.

  The damn thing was a body. A headless body. It gushed upward, surging out of the water as if it were about to climb out, leaves and muck sticking to its skin in clumps. It was a naked body, recently shaved or waxed. There was a tattoo on the right shoulder.

  Mr. Fenning, the loose end, had already been snipped.

  His neck ended with a bloody stump sticking out of a ragged wound that immediately put Mr. Walker in mind of a doll dismembered by a destructive child.

  Still backing away, Mr. Walker swung the pistol around. Whoever had done the jerk in the pool might be looking for him.

  Looked like a mob thing. Didn’t they used to use blowtorches and such? However they’d decapitated the guy, there was now an acid injection into his throat and esophagus. Mr. and Mrs. Fenning, both fucked up, and the only connection he knew was… Mr. Walker himself. Leave and take a chance that no one had seen him? Stay and… what? Clean up?

  Hell, he had that chainsaw in the car…

  The corpse bobbed closer. The cloud of hornets followed it, and he realized it was getting denser. It was growing in size, in number of flying insects. It was buzzing like an electrical transformer, hovering over the headless carcass like a pulsating balloon.

  Mr. Walker stared at it, amazed to see it taking on a shape.

  A familiar shape.

  Jesus.

  It was Mrs. Fenning, the way she’d looked when he first saw her on her bicycle. Then the hornets rearranged themselves in the cloud and she looked the way he’d left her, a gutted hulk, mouth open and staring. How in the fuck could he be seeing her?

  He lowered the pistol, staring, not quite sure what he was seeing.

  It was like… no, it was their multi-faceted eyes, reflecting or making the picture like winged pixels…

  The picture was 3D, though, and he found himself stepping back because it was reaching the edge of the pool. The image formed out of hovering, buzzing hornets raised its arms and they spread out looking like a shimmery victim of crucifixion.

  Fuck this, Mr. Walker said or thought. As someone who was more accustomed to causing fear in others than experiencing it himself, the sudden nausea that churned in the depths of his bowels and the hammering pulse that pounded his temples was an alien sensation. He raised his pistol and fired a round into what appeared to be Mrs. Fenning’s head. The shot was dead-on but absolutely futile as it passed throu
gh the swarm and left the insect horde unscathed. He fired again and again, hot brass tinkling on the tiles below. His slide locked, the gun empty.

  No result…

  The buzzing increased to a high-pitched crescendo and the Mrs. Fenning-figure’s arms folded down and the holographic hands reached into the yawning body cavity and rummaged around, finally emerging with…something. It took Mr. Walker a moment to realize that the insect-formed fingers had pulled a real solid object from the belly of the illusion of Mrs. Fenning. It was the salt and pepper hair that made Mr. Walker’s reeling mind conclude that the red lumpy mass was Mr. Fenning’s head, deformed by massive amounts of venom from untold numbers of hornet stings. Mr. Walker stared into the dead eyes and felt some kinship with what he saw there…

  The insect cloud forming the hovering Mrs. Fenning now brought the head up to its gaping chest and rocked it like a baby, and the buzzing sounded like an atonal lullaby.

  Mr. Walker’s brain overloaded. That was what it felt like, the buzzing lullaby piercing his ears and what his eyes processed finally reaching the point at which his feet took control and, mission forgotten, he whirled to run as far from the pool as he could.

  But he tripped over something — the diving board apparatus? — and felt his legs go in one direction and, strangely, his body in another, and then he was flailing his arms, his useless pistol tumbling end over end into space. There was a loud crack, then the world was washed away with the din of buzzing wings, countless bodies blacked out the sun, and then there was nothing.

  .8.

  After

  There was so much blood. The bottom of the dry pool, paint peeling and cracking, was coated with it. The crime scene investigators were on their way. The DNA would match the two victims, who lay splayed out on the concrete as if they’d fallen a hundred stories instead of ten feet. One was the owner of the fancy house. The other was unidentified, but they’d marked and photographed where the pistol had landed.

  How had those wounds produced so much blood?

  The uniformed officer who stood there surveying the scene had seen it all, but this was… different.

  He swatted at a particularly stubborn hornet that had been hovering over the corpses. It flew straight up and disappeared.

  He shook his head. Fuckin’ hornet.

  END

  * *

  If you enjoyed “Love at First Sting,” don’t forget to check out

  MYSTERIES & MAYHEM, also by D. Benton and W.D. Gagliani.

  * *

  About the Authors

  David Benton is a published short horror story author and also the touring bass player for the heavy metal parody band Beatallica. His collaborations with Bram Stoker award-nominated author W.D. Gagliani can be found in the e-book collection: Mysteries & Mayhem, as well as anthologies such as Malpractice: An Anthology of Bedside Terror. Current projects include a zombie novel (co-written with W.D. Gagliani and Bram Stoker award-winning author John Everson) and a battle of the classic monsters (co-written with Gagliani and rising star Mark Zirbel).

  W.D. Gagliani is the author of the horror-thrillers Wolf’s Trap (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in 2004), Wolf’s Gambit, Wolf’s Bluff, Wolf’s Edge (Samhain Publishing), and the hard-noir thriller Savage Nights. Samhain has also recently reissued Wolf’s Trap as both ebook and trade paperback. He has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous anthologies, magazines, and online publications, and he has been an active book reviewer since 1986. With collaborator David Benton he has published the adult horror, suspense, mystery, and erotica story collection, Mysteries & Mayhem, and short stories in various anthologies including Dark Passions: Hot Blood 13. Recent publications include an article on Wilbur Smith in the book Thrillers: 100 Must Reads (edited by Morrell & Wagner), an article on writing zombies in Writing Zombies! (Rymfire Books), and an article on writing werewolf fiction in the October 2011 issue of The Writer magazine. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Authors Guild. He has just sold a 5th Nick Lupo horror-thriller, WOLF’S CUT, to Samhain Publishing.