Sacrificing Virgins (4 page)

Everything blurred, and Jayce pulled away, just for a moment, to stare down into the dark pools of Lethe's eyes. She did not blink.

“Goodbye, Becky,” he said. A tear fell to wet Lethe's cheek. “Goodbye, Danny.”

The earthy scent of vanilla teased him forward, and he kissed Lethe once more, as the room slipped away.

Bad Day

I can remember the very first time I heard the news report on them. A commentator made a joke of it. “Paul Hughes,” he said, “had a bad day today.”

That was something of an understatement, to say the least. Paul Hughes had just been fired from pushing paper literally the day after his wife filed for divorce. He made the news because in the aftermath of this personal implosion, he was walking, no doubt somewhat disconsolately, in the forest near Brave River. As he moped along a walking trail some kind of insect attacked him. The commentator speculated that the buzzing sound of the creature at the back of Hughes's earlobe led him to jump, slap at the back of his head and consequently lose his balance to fall to the concrete walking path below. He ended up in the hospital after a cardiac arrest left him thrashing on the riverbank with said insect crushed in a chitinous orange paste to the back of his head.

It wasn't really funny, but I laughed. The poor guy lost his wife, lost his job, and now, might lose his life because a hornet or something “took advantage” of him at the wrong moment.

That was the last time I laughed.

In the beginning, everyone thought they were some strange, exotic breed of roaches. They measured about two inches long, and like the roaches or palmetto bugs of the Deep South, were bronze-tinged, dark as well-cured tobacco. They were quickly dubbed Luna Roaches, because they flew in clouds on the wind at twilight and descended on the city in a swarm that blotted out the light of the moon. What bugs flew at night? Nobody really asked that.

The warnings went out quickly. Don't stay out after dark. Don't let your children stay out playing after school. Don't leave your windows open.

Don't, don't,
don't
.

The media told us to hunker down and hide, cuz the killer roaches had come to town.

Of course, they didn't say it that way. But while some of us laughed at the story of Paul Hughes flailing about and ending up in a coma because a bug dive-bombed him, we lost our sense of humor really quick when swarms of them began to attack people on the streets at night.

We didn't know what they could do, at first. Didn't know what they wanted. Initially, the concern was that they could carry some kind of virus or disease.

Who would have guessed that what they brought us was so much more? And so much worse?

“Kara, come inside,” my wife shouted. Our little girl was only five, but already she was a handful. Sometimes I was glad that I had to go to work every day and sit in an office. While I lived for the hours that we played together, and she giggled and kicked and fought against my tickle bombs, I knew I could never spend the day with my baby and keep up with the girl. She was a handful of laughter and energy, while I felt like a slow-moving anchor of molasses shellacked in tar. I was tired after lofting her in the air a few times like a rocket and rolling about on the floor with her before pronouncing bedtime. I played with her an hour or two a day, while Jenna had her for the other twelve.

The city was under alert now; for the past few nights swarms of the Luna Roaches had descended on the streets in a bizarre attack of buzz and wings and biting venom. Those who fell prey to the things were taken to hospital, but couldn't be revived. Neither did they die. The doctors quickly learned not to try to pry the roaches from the flesh of the bodies they brought in. While the victims were comatose when they came in to the hospitals with the bugs on their necks or skulls, when the insects were removed, the low level of neural activity dropped to virtually none. If you removed the bugs, you turned the patient into a human vegetable. But if you left them attached to the host, the victim lay in the hospital in a coma. The difference seemed negligible, but as we soon learned, the difference was great.

Jenna slammed the sliding door like a shotgun behind Kara and my little girl ran right into my arms.

“How's my baby?” I asked, lofting Kara in the air like a juggler's bag. She giggled and screeched, kinked bronze hair flying in the air like her mother's had once, when I'd had the energy to lift and twirl Jenna around like so much paper. Now, I'd be lucky to dance around her mother, let alone lift her. A combination of her own gain in “stature” and my own declining energy. We'd had Kara late in life, and frankly, the kid wasn't making me feel younger, as people had promised. I felt every strain in my back these days as I twirled her in the air and when I looked in the mirror in the morning I saw every age line darkened by another night of worry when she was sick.

I'm getting too old for this
, I told myself more and more often. I didn't dare broach those thoughts to Jenna, whose pallid complexion and dark bags beneath her eyes spoke for themselves. She lived in the trenches of child-rearing. I only dabbled.

Kara giggled as I twirled her in the air and asked again, “How's my baby?”

“Good, Daddy,” she said, throwing her arms around me, and then pushing off my shoulders to raise moon eyes at me. Knowing she had my attention, she said seriously, “Daddy, there were bugs by the swing set!”

In another time, such a statement from a child would have raised an eyebrow with a smile. But now, today, in an age of Luna Roaches that rendered their victims either comatose or vegetable, I spun my daughter in the air and ran my fingers up under her hair, praying with every pounding beat of my heart that I would find nothing beneath those copper locks.

My hand met only the cool skin of a child and I set her to the floor before slumping myself into a chair, exhausted from the onset of panic. My wife hadn't moved an inch during our conversation. She held her breath. And when I nodded that everything was okay, she closed her eyes and put a palm to her chest.

“What kind of bugs?” I said, as Kara's moon eyes stared up, smiling at mine.

“Ladybugs!” she proclaimed and ran into the living room laughing and singing, “Ladybug, ladybug fly away home…”

If only the Luna Roaches had been ladybugs. If only they had flown away home. But they hadn't.

Paul Hughes was one of the lucky ones. Apparently, as he'd slapped and fallen, he'd killed the bug before it set its hooks in him. He was shaken. He was physically injured. He was depressed by the disaster of his life.

But he recovered from the bug's bite. Thinking about his situation, I bet he was later sorry for that. Then again, he never really had the chance. The news reported that he died of a heart attack just a couple days after regaining consciousness from his ordeal. His bad-luck streak could have been legendary.

The hospitals were quickly growing overcrowded with those who had not recovered. Instead, bed after bed filled with bodies that were neither dead, nor, in a rational sense, alive. Oh, they lay there breathing. Their hearts beat out a predictable circadian rhythm, but behind their eyes…nothing stirred.

Within a week of the first Luna Roach swarm sighting, the hospitals were out of beds, and emergency wards began forming in the gymnasiums of high schools and colleges.

Nobody liked roaches…but few people were so afraid of the things that they wouldn't go out after dark.

They should have been.

The Luna Roaches were legion. The true meaning of that struck me on a Tuesday night as I walked the five blocks from our house to the library. Kara had forgotten to return
The Book of Five Cows
that day after school, and was distraught that if I didn't get it back to the library she'd have a fine. Welcoming the opportunity to stroll through the neighborhood on a warm summer night, I took the heavily illustrated volume and started down the sidewalk. I was passing the park just a couple blocks down from my house when I saw them.

A silver-white cloud rose like a mist from thousands of blades of darkened grass, and a sibilant hiss filled the air. In a moment, the sky was a mass of pinwheeling, shimmering dust motes. They ascended like a flock of startled pigeons, and then after gaining their bearings in the sky, momentarily blocking the light of the moon from which they took their name, they turned their shivering antennae on me.

I saw the shift; one moment, the swarm drifted aloft startled and unsettled. The next, they had a direction. And that direction was my head. As they began to shimmer towards me, a million Luna Roaches on the trail of a new victim, I looked around for a safe place. I'd seen plenty of the creatures over the past few days, but never so many in one place. They turned the sky a slithering arm of silver, and its fingers were reaching for my head. When I saw the shadowed house not too far away, on the corner lot near the park, I nodded to myself. And ran. Where else could I find shelter?

My ears cringed at the chittering sound that grew louder behind me as I shot up the flagstone walkway to the weathered old colonial like a bloodhound, determined to nab my quarry before the things behind me nabbed my back. And my quarry, in this instance, was safety. When I got to the doorway of the house, I found its entryway unlocked. I didn't hesitate in throwing open the screen door and diving in, as a flurry of shimmering wings beat the air in a hungry hiss behind me. Many of them crashed into the screen as it slammed shut, unable to turn, and I breathed a sigh of relief on the floor as the soft crashes echoed in the air behind me.

“Wow,” I whispered, tossing the thin hardcover book on the floor in front of me. “That was close.”

I lay on the floor for a couple minutes, breathing heavily and occasionally glancing back at the cloud of angry bugs still slamming against the door behind me. Finally, I pulled up my legs and pulled myself into a crouch to see where I'd ended up.

That was when I saw her.

The owner of the house, or at least that was what I assumed she was, sat as still as a statue on the couch facing the foyer where I'd landed.

“Did you see that?” I asked. “The damn things came at me like a swarm of killer bees!”

She didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry I let myself into your house like that, but I didn't know where else to go,” I apologized.

Behind me, the soft flutterings and keening insectoid cries and smacks against the screen of the door were abating. In front of me, the woman stood, still saying nothing.

She stepped forward.

“Just let me wait here a second, until I'm sure they're gone,” I said, picking the library book up. “Then I'll get out of your house.”

She stepped forward again. Her eyes didn't blink.

“Um, ma'am?” I said. Fear began to grip at my bowels. What had I walked into?

She put another foot forward, and now I began to panic. She moved with the halting stiltedness of a robot still discovering its joints. And she hadn't blinked since the moment I'd looked up and noticed her staring blindly ahead from her seat on the couch. How long had she sat there, waiting for me to fall into her house? What would she do when she reached me? She was only feet away.

I jumped towards the door and she changed direction to follow. There were still a few Luna Roaches circling in the halo of light like moths outside the screen, but I didn't hesitate. I launched my way into the twilight and ran back up the street towards my home.

Kara's library book could be late. I'd be happy to pay the fine.

That was the night the hospitals emptied. And the churches. And the school gymnasiums. All of the places where the volunteers from the Red Cross and a wide range of other medical saviors had stacked the comatose victims on cots and blankets in hopes that someday they would awake again.

That was the night that they did.

When I got home, breathless and confused at what had just happened, Jenna didn't give me time to speak. When I dove into the family room, she instantly pointed at the TV and whispered, “Look.” The news anchors were raving.

“Around 7 p.m. tonight, the victims of the Luna Roaches began to walk. But it's as if they are walking in their sleep. They don't speak, and they won't stop, no matter what gets in front of them. We've had reports from every part of the city; it's happening everywhere, all at once. The scene is like something out of a movie. An hour ago, there were thousands of victims, all in a mass coma, and now…now…”

The co-anchor lost it. “Now the dead walk!” she exclaimed.

“What do you think it means?” Jenna said. She put an arm protectively around our daughter.

“I think that this is a really bad day.”

I was only partly right; it was actually a bad night. And a strange one. By morning, after frantic eyewitness news reports flooded the television stations and people barricaded themselves in their homes in panic, it had gotten even stranger.

You wouldn't think that thousands of people could get up one night, walk out into the streets all at once and then disappear, while the eyes of millions were upon them. But that was what happened that night. The coma victims got up from wherever they lay, walked out into the street, and as the rest of us ran inside and panicked at their single-minded, staggering gaits and blank, black gazes, they kept on walking. By the next morning, nobody could quite answer exactly where they'd gone.

On my way to work that next day, I drove by the house I'd hidden in the night before near the park. The front door was wide open. I bet to myself, that nobody was at home. But I didn't stop to find out.

The chatter went on for days. The networks played an endless cycle of footage of blank-eyed men and women and creepily vacant children staggering out of hospitals and churches and walking down the center of the street, feet padding along strangely straight as they strode the dotted yellow lines out of town.

There was one image that haunted me, especially. They played it again and again, and every time, inexplicably, I began to well up. There was nothing inherently wrong with the picture. It was just a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old. She wore a red T-shirt that had a giant thumbprint stenciled on it. And she walked down the street, on the way out of town. Her hair was long and ratty brown, and tousled in so many knots, the father in me knew they'd be hours to comb out, and many yelps of hurt. I don't know exactly what it was about her. Maybe the way her big brown eyes drooped and looked hopelessly tired. Maybe it was the way she walked, listless and slow, but with a horrible, unrelenting purpose ahead. Or maybe it was the way she dragged her ragged brown teddy on the asphalt as she walked. The stuffed animal had probably been her favorite toy days before, something she tried to feed and cuddle and hug. And now its head bumped on the ground, silently thumping, thumping, thumping with each small step she took. Her hand didn't let go of its leg, but neither did she care that she was dragging the toy to death.