His stomach roiled. Again he managed to quell the revolt of his last meal. Not because of what he saw, but because he knew what he would have to do soon enough and it was tearing him up inside. He was going to have to tell his big sister that her child was dead. He was going to mercilessly crush her hopes, destroy the only thing that gave her a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And then he was going to have to watch her slowly die of a broken heart. The only thing he would be able to offer her was retribution, which wouldn't forestall her eventual deterioration.
The techs had excavated the scene like archaeologists. They had carefully used trowels to clear the mud from the bones. The decomposed tissue formed a black corona where the flesh had once been, a process that had been expedited by the larvae that teemed in the soil. The corpse had been buried facedown. Not laid to rest, but hurled down into a shallow grave. The techs estimated the grave had maybe been two feet deep based upon the erosion patterns of the surrounding bayou. A rush job, they had called it. But it hadn't been for fear of being caught in the act. Not out here. It had been the final insult to injury, of which there had been more than any child should have to bear. There were multiple fractures of the tibias and fibulae and the femora. One of the knees was deformed. A portion of the bone had broken away to reveal a coarse black crater. The entire pelvis was shattered. The spinal column was crooked and broken, the rib cage cracked along the lateral margins so that it collapsed in upon itself, the jagged ends clasped like interlaced fingers. The humeri were fractured in multiple places, the forearms snapped through and through in such a way that the hands were no longer attached.
They had photographed, documented, and removed the intact sections one by one until all that remained was a child-size indentation in the earth that would soon enough be washed away by the elements until there was nothing left of her at all. The worst had been when they extracted the cranium. It had come away like half of a broken vase, leaving the fragmented remains of the face behind. The facial bones had been destroyed, broken into hundreds of pieces that would be nearly impossible to reconstruct. Chipped teeth pocked the sludge. Despite the obliteration of the maxillae and the mandible, the techs were confident they would be able to mold the teeth into a cast to compare against dental records. They would also be able to extract DNA from the long black hair they had teased out of the mud. They understood the personal nature of the situation and promised to expedite matters from their end. The law enforcement community took care of its own.
Trey didn't have to ask how the body had come to be in such a state. It was obvious to all. Whether peri- or postmortem, the child had been kicked repeatedly. Over and over with such ferocity that the bones had snapped. Children's bones are designed for resilience, to bend significantly before breaking, almost like rubber. For them to have snapped like this, an inordinate amount of force would have to have been applied, the kind of force that can only be generated in the heat of a blinding rage.
He wandered away from the site, trying to appear nonchalant, and vomited into a shrub once he was out of sight. His eyes blurred with tears and he fought the urge to scream at the top of his lungs. He had never felt so helpless, so useless. So victimized. So furious.
They had interviewed everyone in attendance at the carnival that night two years ago. They had funneled them through an interview bottleneck that had kept all of the deputies busy until the first hint of dawn graced the sky. Those that remembered seeing Emma hadn't witnessed any signs of duress. No one had seen a struggle or heard her scream. The only detail that had stood out was the mention of a giant sucker that her mother had insisted they hadn't bought for her, but they had raised Emma not to be lured away by strangers with candy, which could mean only one thing.
Emma had been abducted by someone she knew, someone she trusted.
And it was his fault. He had been on duty and he had failed the only family he had.
He imagined the expression of horror and betrayal on his niece's face as an unknown man with a familiar face set upon her, kicking and kicking, until there was nothing left of her but a ruined sack of bruised flesh filled with jagged bone fragments like broken glass.
* * *
The setting sun bled the sky crimson behind her, casting her shadow over the barely perceptible hump at the foot of the plain marble headstone. Vanessa imagined herself lying in the shadow's stead, six feet---as close as she would ever again be---from the only man she had ever loved. The grass had filled in nicely. For a time, there had been patches of dirt that had refused to accept the lawn, as though to do so was to forgive its violation. Now it was impossible to tell that the sod had ever been slashed and rolled away, the ground impregnated with a husband and father for whom the end had come too soon.
She swept the accumulated debris from the foot of the headstone and wiped away the grime with a handful of tissues, carefully tracing each of the engraved letters.
Warren Francis Snow
April 19, 1977 -- August 2, 2011
Loving Husband and Father
His Memory Still Endures
Through the Lives He Touched
To allow the paltry monument to lose its luster, she feared, was the first step in the process of forgetting. And while remembering hurt, she couldn't let that happen. It was the pain that kept her going. All she had now were her memories. To lose them would be to lose herself. And whatever hope she clung to that Emma would one day return to her.
There were still no leads in the case, no clues to identify the person who had killed her husband and stolen her daughter, who had robbed her of her entire life. There was no one to be held accountable. Except for her. She had let Emma out of her sight and she had been the one who sent Warren to his demise. It should be her down there in the darkness. It still would be...soon enough. In one of the two vacant plots to her right, where her family would eventually be reunited, if only in death.
"I'm sorry," she whispered for the thousandth time.
She held out the single yellow rose she had brought with her. It was the same kind that Warren had surprised her with on their first date. He had been a first-year resident at the University of Texas Hospital in San Antonio. She'd been an elementary-level substitute teacher who'd been clumsy enough to slam her finger in her car door. They'd talked while he splinted her injury, and she had fallen in love with him right then and there. He had appeared as if by magic after school two days later, holding a single yellow rose behind his back. And her life had never been the same again.
There was a crunching sound, like the crackle of dead leaves under an invisible tread, and then the breeze blew it away.
She surveyed the area around her. As usual, she was alone in a sea of emerald with cresting waves of granite and marble, some foamy with moss, at the rear of the cemetery where it met with a wall of cypresses.
The shadows grew longer on a day that would end like every other, with the same whispered promise under the same lonely twilight.
"I will find her."
The crunching sound resumed. It was close, and yet far away at the same time. All around her.
She leaned forward and tossed the rose at the foot of the headstone.
The noise grew louder. It was coming from the trees, from the embankment ahead that bordered the bayou and the manicured knolls between the rows of gravesites. Not a single branch moved, and yet the sound continued.
She stood, turned away from her husband's grave, and walked alone back toward the setting sun with the crackling sound of unseen footsteps all around her.
* * *
Trey waited in his office through the evening and into the night. It seemed as though all he ever did was wait. The Sheriff was long gone. Travers was the only deputy formally on the clock, and he was out on a call. Lorna was up at the desk with the dispatch radio and computer, drinking coffee and watching reruns of the day's soaps, giving him a wide berth. They all knew about the child's body. About the condition in which it had been discovered. They knew what it meant and figured
it best to give him his space. There were no stock platitudes or Hallmark cards for Sorry your niece was kicked to death and dumped in the bayou. He didn't blame them. He had no idea what he was supposed to say either.
Emma's dental records and her x-rays had been couriered to the Crime Scene Response Section in Dallas nearly ten hours ago now. Dr. Carlton Matthews, the town dentist, had been more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all, he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at home. Last Trey knew, the evidence technicians were in the process of creating a plaster mold using the teeth they found at the site under the direct supervision of a forensic odontologist. The teeth would be aligned by the observed wear in the enamel and then radiographed and evaluated for existing caries and previous fillings. According to Vanessa, Emma had three separate silver fillings toward the back of her mouth, two on the top and one on the bottom. The comparison with existing records would be able to conclusively determine whether or not they had been Emma's teeth. If not, they would have to begin attacking the database of missing children in hopes of generating a match. If so, he was going to have to deliver the worst news imaginable to his sister. He prayed the news that they had found a child's corpse didn't leak before then.
A polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test of the hair they removed from the shallow grave would allow them to create a kind of DNA fingerprint they could compare against the samples obtained from Emma's old hairbrush, but that would just be the icing on the cake. The dental records alone would hold up in a court of law. Of course, fingerprints would have made all of this irrelevant, but there hadn't been a scrap of tissue left. There were enough insects in that swamp, especially now, to clean the remains as efficiently as a school of piranhas.
Trey's desk phone rang. He snatched it from the cradle before the second ring.
"Walden," he answered.
"This is Packard at the CSRS."
Trey's heartbeat accelerated. He realized he was holding his breath and made a conscious effort to regulate his respirations.
"What do you have for me?"
"I just emailed the test results to you. Feel free to call back if you have any questions, but I think the files speak for themselves."
"Conclusive?"
"See for yourself." Packard released a long sigh. "You have our sympathies. Let us know if there's anything else we can do for you."
Packard terminated the call with a click.
Trey held the phone against his ear and stared blankly at his computer screen until the dial tone startled him. He hung up and opened his inbox folder. The file from the CSRS was already waiting for him. He opened it with a tap of the mouse and perused the attachments. They had scanned in the dental x-rays. Even a layman like him could see they were nearly identical. Maybe the alignment was slightly skewed as a result of the reassembly, but the filled cavities were in the right places and there were small, dark unfilled caries on the same surfaces of the same teeth. The PCR results looked like side-by-side, out-of-focus bar codes. They matched perfectly. Lines had been drawn between them to denote specific points of comparison along the genomes. Notes in technical jargon filled the margins.
He buried his face in his hands. His palms became wet and his shoulders shuddered.
First thing in the morning, he was going to have to break the news to Vanessa.
He might as well shove the barrel of his pistol in her mouth and pull the trigger for her.
* * *
Vanessa woke with a start. Or had she even been asleep at all? Time lost all meaning in the dark and she had grown accustomed to drifting in and out of consciousness all night. Her waking thoughts and sleeping dreams were the same anyway. A curious little girl wandering just a little too far ahead of her through a crowd. A man collapsed on his chest in a field of his own blood. Throwing a handful of dirt over a velvet rope onto a maple box six feet below her. A man made of shadows doing inexplicable things to a much smaller figure. A child crying for her mommy in the darkness.
An arc of moonlight bisected her bedroom from the gap in the curtains, alive with swirling motes of dust, blurred by her tears. The digital clock produced a weak red glare. Buddy's collar jangled from the foot of the bed when he perked up his head.
There was a soft crunching sound above her head.
She listened to it in the still room. The droning noise was almost comforting.
The sound grew louder.
Buddy poked his gray muzzle up over the end of the bed and whined.
Vanessa reluctantly sat up and turned around. There was no doubt that the sound was coming from inside the glass case. The decayed bear stared back at her through lifeless stone eyes that glinted with moonlight.
The crackling, skritching noise grew louder still.
She reached up and pressed her fingertips against the glass. It vibrated almost imperceptibly.
The slightest hint of movement caught her eye.
She leaned closer, until the tip of her nose touched the small pane. Surely the shadows had conspired against her. They shifted in such a way as to mimic motion. The dirt bear's chest swelled as though it were taking a deep, slow breath. Fine grains of sand shivered loose and dusted the surface of the wooden base. One of the dried grass bindings snapped and unraveled. More dirt crumbled away, revealing thin, dark tunnels. She turned the case around. The back of the bear was covered with trembling brown insect exoskeletons. Wingless nymph carcasses. As she watched, they split like baked potatoes and small white bodies emerged.
Vanessa recoiled. They appeared to grow as they molted. The crisp exoskeletons stayed attached to the dirt while thick albino insects clung to them, testing long, clear wings fringed with gold. They had blazing scarlet eyes with black splotches where the head met the thorax. Spindly, articulated legs barely long enough to support the weight of their bodies.
Several more bands of the grass that held the bear together broke. Clods of packed earth calved away. One of the bear's ears fell off with half of its head. There was a clatter as the pebble-eye bounced on the base. A dozen pale bugs crawled over what was left of her daughter's creation before dropping onto the mounds of dirt and coiled blue fescue blades on the bottom.
The crunching sound faded to a dull clicking.
Had those insects been in the bear this entire time? Growing? Molting?
The remainder of the bear broke apart and fell to ruin, leaving only the metal post and the bracket that had been rigged to hold the construct upright.
She reached out and pressed her palm against the glass.
Her heart rate accelerated. Her breathing slowed. Was it possible she was still asleep and dreaming?
The white bugs scurried toward the front of the enclosure and scaled the glass. They aligned their bodies with her hand so that she could no longer see them.
A loud noise filled the room. A combination of the crackling sound of high voltage run through overhead power lines and the chirping of so many crickets.
She recognized it immediately and withdrew her hand.
The insects stayed where they were in a perfect imitation of her palm print, a spectral hand reaching for her, unable to pass through the clear barrier.
Vanessa scooted away from the display case.
Buddy whimpered.
And the cicadas continued to sing.
* * *
Vanessa sat at the kitchen table with the rising sun streaming through the window behind her. The glass enclosure was centered right in front of her. She'd been staring at it for hours now, watching as the white imagines darkened to their formal adult coloration. Tomato-red eyes. Thick black bodies ribbed with timbals. Long membranous wings like cellophane stretched between bright yellow veins. Short antennae. Legs reminiscent of those of a crab. They clung to the glass and the center apparatus that had once held the now-crumbled bear, their abdomens alternately swelling and contracting as they produced an amazing high-pitched clicking sound as loud in the room as a tea kettle come to boil.
&nb
sp; She remembered them from her childhood. As a girl of about four years old, swinging in a park as a cloud of them descended into the surrounding trees. Their bodies had been nearly the size of her palm, their song deafening. Her father had called them Magicicada, which was one of the reasons she remembered them so well. She had interpreted it at the time as magic cicada, and they truly had seemed magical. They appeared again the summer before she left for college. Hundreds of them clinging to the screens over the windows and the front door. Their frenetic song coming from the depths of every tree. They'd been everywhere for several weeks, and then they'd vanished almost overnight.
There must have been larvae in the mud Emma had exhumed to form the bear. She must have packed them right in there. And after two years they had wriggled out of the dried earth as nymphs and molted for the final stage of their life cycles. As adults. Imago.
A few minutes on the internet had taught her that these individuals were part of one of thirty distinct North American broods, Brood XIX specifically, colloquially termed The Great Southern Brood. They emerged from deep in the soil every thirteen years for a mating frenzy that lasted less than a month. The females would carve shallow grooves in tree branches in which to lay their eggs. When they hatched, the larvae fell to the ground and burrowed more than a foot down, where they survived on the roots of plants for exactly thirteen years before all of them erupted in a synchronized uprising, climbed into the canopy, and molted into the terminal stage of their development.
It was as though Emma had somehow breathed life into her creation. She had left a parting gift that proved that a miracle could be birthed from decomposition and apparent death. There was no way the nymphs should have survived. And yet they had.
Brood XIX Page 3
