by Alan Spencer
“Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhh!”
The sheriff raced from the burning woman, her teeth enlarging as she shrieked, burning to death.
He clutched the shotgun when new shadows from above the trees threatened him.
He had no choice but to keep moving.
Chapter Eleven
1
Ned sped home, picturing Pricilla’s face unraveling and spilling to the floor. The unnerving tone of her voice, the words that were spoken by his brother’s spirit through the woman’s lips… He couldn’t think of them without growing queasy. He tore into the fifth of gin in his top kitchen cabinet and hammered a mouthful. It stung his throat, and it did shit to clear his head.
The greasy feel of his skin made him want to bathe. He felt like a criminal with blood on his hands. He’d witnessed the old woman literally come apart. Pricilla knew of his brother’s death and the secrets he kept beyond the grave. It was a lot to believe, but he couldn’t deny what he witnessed. The demands from his brother were clear: destroy the film projector and the house.
Now he was worried about Andy.
He’s up in that house all alone.
If something happens to him, nobody will know.
“It’s nonsense,” he muttered to himself, falling back to the safe place called denial. He chugged another mouthful of gin, the sides of his mouth trickling with the liquor. “It can’t be true. But I, I have to be sure.”
He clenched his fists, closed his eyes and shook his head. Nothing that had happened tonight was simple to grasp. He debated whether to phone the police or not, but what would he tell them? It was magic and crystals talk, psychic babble, but flesh and blood didn’t lie, and the words that spouted from Pricilla’s mouth were from his brother—it even sounded like him!
Ned rushed into his backyard shed and gathered a metal container of gasoline and an axe. The idea of burning the house down was comforting—yes, it was arson, but long before the visit to Pricilla’s, he imagined torching the fucking thing down anyway. But clutching the axe strangely defeated his confidence. If Angie could see him now, her reasons for divorcing him would’ve been validated. It wasn’t completely about him, but she claimed he was obsessed with his brother. But Angie had no right to judge him or his brother. He refused to believe his brother was responsible for those deaths, and Angie disagreed, and the arguments drove a wedge between them. Their lives weren’t the same, and until Ned finished what James asked of him now, nothing would ever change.
I can’t deny the truth anymore. I always knew something deeper was behind James’s final performance, and now I know what it was.
Would an axe and a drum of gasoline be sufficient to battle the spirits? Ned loaded his truck with the supplies and, unable to answer his own question, he checked his pocket for a lighter. Then he returned to the house for the bottle of gin. Part of him wished the police would stumble upon the situation and help him through this. But he was alone, and he understood it had to remain that way.
He checked his wallet for Andy’s cell phone number. He called it from inside the house, and the phone kept ringing without an answer. Ned accepted that he had no choice but to return to Anderson Mills and destroy his brother’s house.
2
The brilliant green glow above the water didn’t falter. The locusts wouldn’t leave. Andy was on the verge of choking. Mary-Sue’s body convulsed next to him, her body trying to force her to take a breath. Her grip on him was loosening; she was working to the surface, but he held her back down.
His garbled voice gave off panic, though it did nothing to convince her to stay with him.
She thrashed upward and escaped him, despite his attempted warning.
Shortly after, Mary-Sue stole a breath and didn’t come back down. He waited for screams and the water’s surface to be disturbed. Those moments were drawn out, and the mounting pressure in his skull and chest finally drove him to the top. He swam hard with every limb numb and bogged down. Andy expected to find Mary-Sue’s blood staining the water around her, but instead, she reached down and lifted him to air.
He raucously gulped in breath after breath. She dragged him to the water’s edge, and they collapsed together with a clop of mud against the bank. “Where are they? Where did the locusts go?”
The faint din of chirping dispersed. The locusts were headed in the direction of town, toward Silver Lake. He couldn’t say anymore until he caught his breath. The headache didn’t ease, but the building tension in his skull disappeared. Mary-Sue seemed to be in the same condition, but she’d landed on her side and half her face was covered in black mud.
He traced the circular wound where the locusts bit his face earlier. Mary-Sue’s back was covered in the bites, mere flesh wounds.
“Those things are radioactive or something,” she gasped. “Why would they attack us? Those bastards wanted us dead. I mean, they’re insects, for God’s sake!”
The images of the two bodies in the woods earlier assured Andy many others were in danger as well. “We have to alert the police. Wherever those locusts are flying off to, they’re surely going to attack people in town. They were headed in that direction.”
Mary-Sue said, “This pond is not even a half a mile from my house. We can call the police from there.”
He helped her up, and together they raced to the house. They kept their ears and eyes open for the glowing swarm with each step. His breaths were shallow. He was out of shape, his lungs aching and overworked during the quarter of a mile they’d run. They stopped together and leaned against a tree for a break.
She asked, “Why is this happening?”
He didn’t know how to answer her question, but the way Mary-Sue’s eyes searched the sky and didn’t meet his, she didn’t seem to expect a response. Seconds later, they heard an explosion and a buzzing rip the night. The buzz wasn’t from the locusts; it was louder, and almost like a crackling. They spotted a series of sparks from the left and followed the source.
“Should we be checking it out?” she asked. “What if it’s something else we don’t know about that wants to kill us?”
Golden sparks cascaded across the black canvas of the sky, and Andy closed in on the source. “Stay here, I’ll check it out. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
He leaped over a fallen maple tree and caught sight of the road and an electrical pole. At the top of it, an electric box was on fire. Sparks shot from its core, the metal riddled with holes and divots. Yards deeper from the other end of the woods, he couldn’t help but catch the green haze fade into the deeper shadows of the trees. Somehow, the locusts had done this—but why? Locusts didn’t understand what an electrical pole was or how it could work. It reminded him of Night of the Locusts, but he dismissed the connection as a crazy idea.
He said to Mary-Sue, flustered, “They’ve done something to the electrical boxes. The locusts are gone, thank goodness, but why they’d attack the pole like that, I’m fucked if I know.”
“What’s really happening?” she demanded. “My father’s caught up in this somehow. God, I’m so afraid, Andy. I know he’s dead. How couldn’t he be?”
“Let’s just get to your house and call the police. There’s nothing else we can do for anyone in the meantime. It’s not safe to be outside anymore, especially in the woods.”
She accepted his hand.
“This way.”
They sprinted the rest of the distance to her house, and when they arrived, locusts and Jimmy Jennings were the least of their problems.
3
Crystal Lowell relaxed on the lawn chair in her back yard. She shared a bottle of Southern Comfort with her husband, Eric, as they watched the stars. The air had cooled considerably in the last half hour. The thermometer read sixty degrees and falling. Together, the two engaged in a pissing contest; who could drink the most whiskey without emptying their bladder? Crystal was on her fourth swig in less than fifteen minutes, the same as her husband.
Eric’s face was soft in the shadow
s. He was two-hundred and thirty pounds with a marshmallow puff neck and a black beard and hair that trailed down to his chest. He kept his head-banger haircut after his garage band, Pentagram Slut, disbanded when the drummer’s wife got knocked up and his bassist was arrested for selling heroin.
Crystal pinched her gut beneath the lime green tank top with both hands. She was close to one hundred and eighty pounds, a kind of woman Stephanie Handerman—her best friend since high school—called “A Harley-Davidson chick.”
“Why are you checking yer gut again, huh?” Eric belched. “You’re not worried about your weight, are you?”
“So what if I am? I keep gaining weight.”
“This is my best advice.” He slurred his words, taking a hit of the whiskey without numbering it for the contest. “The skinny girls poop too.”
Crystal didn’t know what “the skinny girls poop too” meant, but she supposed it was his way of saying everyone’s the same no matter what their weight. He changed the meanings to his words of wisdom every other day; now, it meant “you’re beautiful,” and tomorrow it could mean “Crystal, you’re as much of a bitch as the rest of the women out there.”
The porch light went out. The living room and kitchen lights also went black along with the rest of the houses on the block.
“Huh?” Eric grunted, fumbling with the bottle to stick it between his lips. “What was that?”
“Great, the whole block lost power. I’m going to miss Roseanne.”
“They’re all re-runs, and you’ve seen them before. Jesus Christ.” He struggled out of his lawn chair and almost tripped over himself. “I’ll check the circuit box.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll fry your dick off.” She smiled. “Ain’t much I can do with it then.”
She rose to block the screen door when an awesome sight floated in the sky. A magnificent green the size of distant stars formed, but it was countered by the grating churn of locusts. She stared in awe, and Eric was taken by the sight as well.
“Wow. What are they?”
The sky shimmered and blinked with increasing specks of green, ridding the night of its darkness. She closed her eyes to slits to handle the magnificent and electric pulses of neon. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual lights darted about the sky. The specks towered above the neighborhood, the four consecutive blocks of housing set in a semi-circle two miles from Silver Lake.
Before Crystal could comment on the beauty of the sight, the specks flew down as if to land, but then they disbanded. The harsh buzzing rose to a new height, roaring too loud to take without screaming out in pain. She covered her ears and fled into the house, frightened. She kept the door open for Eric, but he wasn’t behind her.
He was frozen in place, his neck craned up to the sky, dazed like the drunken fool he was. After a few more seconds, the green specks suddenly engulfed him, and as spinning green circles turned into streaks and forks of light, he howled in wrenching pain, calling out to her. He was lifted up from the ground and disappeared beneath the neon motion, the swirls advancing into a tornado funnel. Her husband couldn’t be seen, but she knew he was dead when blood splashed the backyard in pelting sheets.
She ducked for cover, throwing the door shut, her heart a double bass drum pounding beats of impending doom. She screamed when an object crashed through the window.
Eric’s head!
Ricocheting off a wall, it landed underneath the dinner table. It was eaten through and through and barely recognizable except for the black mane of a beard.
The din of the locusts drowned out any point of crying for help. The smash of glass and the cries of panic rang throughout the neighborhood, as every house was invaded. She watched as the green circles bundled together, using their collective force to break through windows and rip the doors from hinges.
She tried the phone.
Dead.
She wept after catching another glimpse of Eric’s head.
Benny Rangle, the retired foreman of the box factory in Hickman, Kansas, was watering his petunias in the yard when the green swarm hoisted him up into the sky. Seconds later parts of him were spit back out of the spinning cycle of insects. An arm was rocketed into the road and both legs were launched across the street and shattered through a neighbor's second-story window, and then the torso and head were slammed back down into Benny’s yard. The swarm crashed through each house to remove the inhabitants. The locusts were eating their victims.
The green swarm shifted to Crystal's front yard and pounded the glass windows. Insect faces glared in at her hauntingly. The glass cracked in webs and then they shattered in unison. The fragments struck her back and pieces impaled themselves centimeters deep into the skin. The jolt shook her from the horror of the event, and she retreated into the basement, every inch of her in tremors. She slammed the door closed behind her and locked it. She limped down the steps and furiously picked at the glass fragments lodged into her back.
How long the door would hold, she didn’t know.
The basement was a dark recess, but the phosphorous green leaked through and coated the walls. Everything breathed on the walls and floor, bathed in the motion of color. Hundreds of that, that, that, that, that sounds marked their battle to reach her as slivers of wood were sent out from the door.
She scrambled for an escape, knowing it wouldn’t hold.
The window well’s your only way out!
Crystal pulled back the handle and the window came open. She struggled to slide through, but her pudgy midsection wedged her in place. Stuck.
“NO!”
Another swarm from next door careened into the window well at her helpless body, and in seconds she was killed, the bugs stripping her of her flesh.
Chapter Twelve
1
Five corpses stumbled out the back door of the Ryerson house to guard the outside. The single corpse remained sedentary at the film projector and unloaded The Freezer. The next reel the putrid digits inserted was The Hospice Massacre.
“Dr. Graham sure did a number on these folks,” Dr. Gregory Hansen remarked to his colleague, Dr. Sarah Coleman, as they walked down the unoccupied wing of Bur Oak Hospice. “The doctor got tangled up in his compassion for these drool-heads. I’ll shoot straight with you, Sarah, since I’ve worked with you for ten years fixing up these hospice dives that fail to meet federal regulations. This isn’t a fix-up job where the hospice workers weren’t changing the bed sheets or the bedpans. The quality of care was too good in this place. Dr. Graham lost sight of professionalism and how to keep this place profitable. The government pays out big time on places like these, and Dr. Graham tried to fuck over the system. The insurance companies were pissed off as well. Profits are down. The service is too…exemplary.”
Dr. Coleman, a tall and slim blonde with double-D breasts, licked her lips, stared and nodded in her bimbo way. “I’ve heard things about Dr. Graham, but what’s exaggerated and what’s the truth? You were there when they denied him his license to practice and forced him into early retirement. Tell me what he really did to get let go.”
“Dr. Graham was too attached to his patients. He had a breakdown of ethics. He wanted everything for these people. If an old fart wanted tapioca pudding five times a day, he’d make the food service runners give it to them. If they wanted air-conditioning twenty-four seven, he did it. If families asked to stay beyond visiting hours, Dr. Graham approved it. And the biggest mistake he made, if they wanted narcotics, he gave them to them without restraint. This is our first day correcting Dr. Graham’s mistakes and we’ve got a hospice filled with drug addicts. The morphine drips were louder than the television sets, for God’s sake. Nobody in this place knows about Dr. Graham’s dismissal yet, but it’s our job to get these people on track regardless of what it takes.
“Sure, these people deserve compassion, but so what? We can’t afford for our hospice members to be constantly on a drug binge, even if half of these people are terminally ill. Yes, every man and woman in this place was
climbing up the analgesic ladder ingesting Paracetamal to Codeine. Every geezer and old bag was higher than a kite. Dr. Graham was at the point he was carrying Percocet in his lab coat while he made his evening rounds. That’s unacceptable.”
Dr. Coleman sighed. “I guess our work starts here in room 105. That’s Joey Spinelli. He served many tours in World War II and lost half his left leg and right arm from infected bullet wounds.”
“Whatever,” Dr. Hanson scoffed. “This guy’s been on Morphine for two months straight. Dr. Graham set it up so he could press a button and inject it into himself. He just sits in that wheelchair and reads back issues of Time and Mad magazine and watches the evening news with glazed eyes. One of the orderlies even found Hershey bars stockpiled under his bed and baggies of marijuana.”
“We’ve got to put a stop to it,” Dr. Coleman agreed, marking her chart. “We’ll run blood work nightly, the nightshift nurses will check his room, and we’ll get him clean again.”
The two entered the room; the clock read 8:30 p.m. The television hanging from the wall played Hogan’s Heroes.
“Mr. Spinelli,” Dr. Hanson began. Joey looked away from the television, though he seemed hesitant to hear what the doctor had to say. “Hello, Mr. Spinelli, can you hear me?”
“Where’s Dr. Graham?” he demanded sternly. “Nobody’s come with my evening meds. Where the hell is Nurse McTevish with my evening meds?”
“There will be no more of that,” Dr. Hanson advised. “The problem is, Dr. Graham wrote all your prescriptions, yet on your records, there is no evidence that you should’ve been allowed these drugs. I’m sorry, but you can’t have anymore. There’s no real medically sound reason you require them.”
Mr. Spinelli sneered hard, released an audible breath, and rolled and popped his neck. “Where’s Dr. Graham?”
“He was fired. But it’s okay now, we’re going to solve your drug dependency. You’ll get the expert care you deserve.”
