Creeptych (3 page)

I choked back a tear as I reached for a box of breakfast cereal in the cabinet and Kara settled herself on a chair at the kitchen table.

Jenna was not going to be waking up. Kara would probably never have her mom make her breakfast again.

*   *   *

The TV was playing snow. Snow on almost every channel. There was one local access channel still broadcasting, with a wide-eyed, disheveled man screaming into the microphone. “They’ve come back,” he kept saying.  “They’ve come back and there’s only one way to stop them: aim for the head. It’s the roaches, you’ve got to smash the roaches…”

As I watched him babble, the door behind him opened, and a stream of people entered the studio. They surrounded the man, who leapt up on a chair and grabbed a microphone stand, holding it out like a cattle prod. Then he began swinging it wildly, like a bat, again and again until he finally connected with someone. The stand hit a woman right in the back of the head, right where the Luna Roaches loved to fasten. The woman went down. But then so did the man. There were hands all over him suddenly, and a buzzing sound slowly filled the room. I heard him scream just before a hand covered the lens of the camera, and then that station turned to snow, too.

There were still cable stations playing old sitcoms, but none of the local networks were broadcasting. The same with radio. At last I understood what they meant now by corporate “canned” radio. Only the FM channel programmed by someone a thousand miles away on the left coast still played the latest singles from U2 and Green Day. And I knew it was because they had programmed the schedule days before. Nobody was working the boards right now.

For the first time since I’d seen the news story about Paul Hughes, I truly panicked. I felt the ice in my belly, and struggled not to fall to my knees and tremble like a baby
in front of
my baby, who was holding my hand and counting on me to be strong, to make things all right.

Except that I couldn’t.

Not even close.

In the other room, Kara’s mom was turning into some kind of a zombie in her sleep, and outside, the world was awash with buzzing, swarming death.

There was no way out.

“Daddy, can I have more milk?”

Blinking back tears, I opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a carton. I wouldn’t look at the missing person picture on its side. Soon, we might all be missing.

*   *   *

“We’re just going to take a little ride,” I said, as I buckled Kara into the seatbelt.

“But what about mommy?” She quailed.

“Mommy needs her sleep. We’ll bring her back some dinner later.”

It killed me to lie, but I had to get her out of here. I had to get Kara out of the city.

As we pulled out of the garage, I saw the door from the house open, and Jenna stepped out onto the concrete behind us. Thank god Kara was buckled in and couldn’t look in the rear view mirror. Her mother looked ghastly.

Her eyes were vacant.

I hit the gas and squealed out onto the street.  I don’t know where I thought we were going to go. Somehow it seemed like this was a local problem; if we could just get out of the city and into the country, everything would be normal again.

We never left the neighborhood.

I pulled out on Highland and turned on to Norfolk to get out of the subdivision…but just before I reached the main road, the way was blocked.

They moved slow, but they were moving. And they were moving inward, a barricade of bodies 10 and 20 deep. They strode towards us, honing in. When one turned, all of the others followed, as if driven by a single mind. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw they were behind us as well. Surrounded.

I stopped the car to think. The bodies didn’t stop. They came forward, slowly, inexorably. Their eyes were dark, and unblinking. I could see the tan shadow of Luna Roaches trembling on the necks of some of them as they stepped forward, one shambling shoe at a time.

“Daddy,” Kara said. “They’re getting closer.”

Her hand gripped my shirtsleeve and my heart crawled into my throat. I had to do something…but what? I had no idea. I could try to plow the car through a phalanx of still seemingly human bodies but I had no faith that I would get that far. If we left the car, we were doomed for sure. The mob stretched as far as I could see, in every direction. Were we the only regular humans left in the neighborhood?

“Daddy,” Kara repeated. “They want to come in.”

The first one had finally reached the car. He was an older man, I’d guess 65 or 70. His hair was white as salt on his head and his lips thin as parchment. He leaned his pale, too-slack face into Kara’s window and leered, teeth exposed and rotten.

The pounding began then. And from all around us a hum began to wail.

First the old man began to smack his head against her window. And then from the back window an answering echo, as one of the other Luna Roach automatons began to slap slack fists against the glass. An answering thud joined from my side of the car. One old woman threw her body onto the hood of the car and tried to claw her way up to the windshield. When a gnarled finger grasped at the windshield wiper, I turned the control to full and watched the steel and rubber arm bat her tentative grasp away again and again.

But nothing was going to keep them away for long.  Kara held on to my arm tighter and tighter as the car began to shake.

“Daddy, what are we going to do?”

The metal of the passenger door suddenly creaked and squealed. The golf pin of a door lock snapped, the plastic vanished to the floor.

“I don’t know what to do,” I finally admitted, as the door wrenched open and six arms reached through the breach towards my baby girl.

“Daddddddy!” she screamed.

I pulled her closer, but the hands gripped the fabric of her shirt and pants and then, next to my ear, the glass exploded. Another hand reached through the broken glass to bat at my head.

“Kara, hold on,” I begged, grasping for her.

But she was gone.

From outside the car I heard her screams. I dove after her to follow, but before I had my feet on the ground a dozen fists pounded into my neck and back and shoved me to the asphalt. Through a field of swaying bodies and limbs I saw Kara raised above the mob, and then Jenna appeared, arms held out to take her.

“Mommy!” Kara cried, arms outstretched.

My wife scooped my baby up, and Kara hugged her tight. Jenna stared at me over our little girl’s shoulders, and a look of victory flickered in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I was sickened by seeing my wife smile. But then, strangely, that smile grew confused, uncertain. It turned to a frown. Her eyes squinted like they did when she got migraines. I could see the muscles on the backs of her arms begin to tense and shiver as she gripped Kara tighter. Then she opened her mouth, not to kiss our baby, but to scream. I heard it clearly over the cacophony of the mob.

That’s when the Luna Roach slid out from the wet cavity between her eyeball and eyelid. Kara saw the bug and recoiled from her mother, but Jenna only held our baby tighter, as the roach walked to the edge of Jenna’s nose and poised there to stretch its wings. Then my wife’s whole face convulsed and began to change. Her skin crawled and swelled; her whole body began to visibly tremble.  Jenna’s face exploded at that moment, as the hive of Luna Roaches nesting and gestating in her brain finally clawed their way free of her flesh and bone and took to the air. A cloud of blood sprayed the sky as her eyes and flesh caved in like undermined sand to the angry mandibles of a thousand trapped and buzzing bugs.  As the first spurts of blood misted, a black and tan cloud of buzzing wings instantly hid the sudden ruin of her features. Luna Roaches lit from her exposed flesh to swarm around the bloody mess of her eyes and the sticky, shredded cartilage of her nose, which hung by a thread down her face.

I launched myself forward to save Kara, but the arms and feet of the mob held me down as my baby beat tiny hands against Jenna’s gore-streaked shoulders, trying to escape. Against all sanity, her blinded, broken mother did not fall or let go. A buzz of wings multiplied in the air, and a cloud of Luna Roaches hovered like a bee swarm around my baby’s screaming, horrified face. I screamed for her, holding out a helpless hand that was quickly stomped to the ground. Something in my arm snapped as it met the asphalt, but louder than my own cry was Kara’s shriek. I swear that she called for me, but the street was alive in screaming and calls for help. Whether she called my name, or something else, in seconds, it was all over. Kara lay quiet and still, limp and blood-spattered in what had been her mother’s arms. But I knew, even if my baby never really did, that those were not Jenna’s arms any longer. Luna Roaches darted across my baby’s face, sampling her innocence with their nervous, hairy feelers.

The crowd drew back from me, setting me free from where they’d pinned me to the pavement and I stood up outside the car, cradling my arm and staring at the crowd of blank eyes that glittered like obsidian in the descending night. Silence fell like midnight fog around us, as the mob grew still, and the moment pregnant.

“What
are
you?” I whispered. “What do you
want
?”

One of the men stepped forward, and tentatively opened its mouth. A growling sound came out, and then a word. “Jeessst.” It said in a voice like shifting gravel. Its unblinking eyes fluttered at the sound and it seemed to smile. Understanding dawning.

“Jeessst yur legs,” the man said, the words coming out slowly before it stepped forward. Its face looked pleased. “Jeesst your arms.”

“And what do I get in return?” I asked.

“Us,” someone else growled.

From above I heard the fluttering drone of thousands of translucent wings.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“The places you have never gone,” came my only answer, a whisper from the crowd. And then the cool teeth of a Luna Roach settled onto my spine. For a moment I struggled, hoping to throw it off. But then the ice slid through my brain, and I felt the world go quiet.

As I slid back to the ground, I wondered what would become of my body. And of all the bodies that surrounded me. Normally in a symbiosis, the predator used the host to serve as a nest for its offspring.

Oh God
, I cried, as my body went numb. What would gestate and grow inside of Kara. What would hatch from my poor, sweet baby?

What would climb out of my own swollen belly after I had been used…and used up? Or would they use me like Jenna?

I prayed that the chittering sounds I heard in my brain would take any knowledge of that away. Already, I could almost understand what the keening, droning noises I’d been hearing now during the nights meant.

Eat. Eat.

Kill. Eat.

Spawn.

Paul Hughes was lucky. His bad day had ended a long time ago now, before things really did get bad.

Mine was only just beginning.

EARDRUM BUZZ

“Join the
Misery Machine
Street Team!” the ad in the back of the music magazine read. “Inseminate the masses with Eardrum Buzz!”

Wes ripped the page out and filled in the coupon in seconds. The first Eardrum Buzz disc,
Misery Machine,
 had permanently bonded to his car CD player a few weeks earlier. He didn’t leave the driveway without the machine gun attack of their bass drum rattling the dashboard. They remained anything but a household name, but Wes couldn’t get enough of the power saw drone of their guitars, or the manic fever squeals of their singer, Arachnid.

Yeah, they were a gimmicky band—all the members named themselves after bugs. But the fierce mind-drill power of their music was as insidious as a horde of marauding Carpenter ants. And let’s face it—nobody had designed a cooler looking homage to insect life than Eardrum Buzz’s
Misery Machine
 CD cover’s locust orgy—at least not since Journey had celebrated the scarab on multiple LP covers in garish reds, blues and golds. Wes was hooked.

Join their street team and help bring the music of Eardrum Buzz to others? There was nobody more suited to that than Wes. At least, that’s how he felt about it. So he sent in the coupon and waited to hear. Rushed home from work to check the mailbox every day for a week.  The ad had only said that “a few would be chosen” in each city, and that the band would be in touch soon with those who were to be “The Swarm.”

Every day he tossed catalogues and junk mail over his head as he rifled through the pile of mail looking for something that would anoint him a “chosen” one.

And then the call came—but not through the U.S. Post—it was on his e-mail. He almost deleted it as spam. It said Eardrum Buzz was playing a show in a week at the Paranoid Lounge. He was invited to a meet-and-greet party beforehand.

He was in! And he was going to meet the band. Wes ran out to his car, cranked up the volume and peeled his tires with a smokin’ scream as he headed up the street to Rudie’s Tap to share his luck with his friends.

He was “chosen.”

*   *   *

 “It’s not that I don’t like you,” the goth girl said, as she pushed him back two steps. “It’s just that I don’t want to know you.”

With that, a swipe of black hair licked at Wes’s nose and the mini-skirted tramp faded back towards the bar.

It was a swank bar. It was a private bar. The room was barely 20 feet wide…Wes had known friends with bedrooms this big (Not many admittedly. But a couple.) Tucked in the back of the Paranoid Lounge, it put the front, for-business bar to shame. This was clearly the private party portion of the Paranoid, and Wes was at a very private party. There were about a dozen other people in the room, and all of them had shown up within a few minutes of his arrival at the unmarked door behind the club. All of them holding slips of paper that announced “bring this with you for admittance.”

Wes had brought his, and now he stood, watching the black-haired skank walk away, in the low light of the golden-wood bar. He waited to meet the band.