by Douglas Draa
Rosy shook her head.
“I know your mother has been very sick. I want to help her get better.” Yates swallowed back the rising gorge in his throat. “Can you let us in to see her?”
Rhonda reached Yates’ side, her hand unconsciously covering her nose and mouth against the stench emanating from the interior. “It’s all right, Rosy. We’re just here to help.”
After a moment’s consideration, Rosy opened the door. “My momma’s room is over there.” She pointed the way.
As they made their way across the room, Rhonda kept close to Mr. Yates’ heels, carefully dodging the obstacles of toys and books. She glanced in the direction of the open kitchen, counters mounded with soured baby bottles, empty cans, and dirty dishes. The sink overflowed with various utensils cemented with moldy remains of food and piles of dirty diapers peeked out from a white trash bag against the wall. Everything was crawling with flies.
Yates sniffed the air curiously, and then knocked upon the bedroom door. “Mrs. Kendall? Maggie, are you awake?”
There was no response. He tried again, then turned back to Rhonda. “Please, keep the children back.” He opened the bedroom door just enough to slip inside, closing it behind him.
The urgency in his tone made Rhonda’s heart race. Her stomach churned as she fought to keep her breakfast down. Except for the wail of the baby, still in its crib, the house became shrouded in silence and her flesh burned beneath the curious eyes of the three older children. She should have stayed out of this as Yates had insisted.
His face the color of ash, Mr. Yates quickly slipped back out of Maggie’s bedroom, pulling his phone from his pocket. “It’s just as I feared.”
“What? What is it?”
“Please, can you try to get the children gathered together?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And for God’s sake, keep them away from their mother’s room.”
“Why?”
“Mrs. Kendall is dead.”
Rhonda stiffened.
Yates swiftly dialed his phone. “From all appearances, she’s been dead for several days.”
Rhonda’s face drained as she tried not to stumble. “But I just saw…” She looked toward the front door. “…her yesterday.”
But Yates was no longer listening as he spoke quietly into the phone. Rhonda stared over at the trio of grubby faces that returned her stare in stoic silence. An unearthly chill embraced her then, for within the pause of the baby’s cries, from behind the closed bedroom door Rhonda heard the distinct creak of bedsprings.
* * * *
The children must be hungry. Maggie opened her eyes. With all her effort, she pulled the sheet off her face and forced her body to MOVE.
▲
THE ROAD TO HELL, by Kevin L. O’Brien
The oldster looked up as a small, thin, bedraggled man appeared at the edge of the firelight. He tensed, and tightened his grip on the forty-four magnum revolver in his lap, then realized the stranger meant him no harm. He had the look of an absent-minded professor, complete with balding, disheveled gray hair, thick-lensed glasses, and a filthy lab coat.
“May I join you?” he asked, in a fine, educated voice. “My name is Marley.”
“I’m Casper.” He gestured across the small fire. “Please, I’d enjoy the company.”
Marley sat cross-legged. “I wasn’t sure if I should at first. I mean, I had no way of knowing if you were dangerous. That is—”
“That’s quite alright, I wondered the same about you, until I got a good look at you.”
Marley flashed an embarrassed smile as he shrugged. “Well, anyway, your fire stood out as a bit of light and warmth in the darkness, so I decided to take a chance.”
“I understand. I’d have done the same.”
Marley stared into the flames. “Besides, when it comes right down to it, I find I don’t want to die alone.”
“I know exactly how you feel. Have you made provisions yet?”
“I was going to prepare some cyanide capsules, but I ran out of time, and all the drug stores around here have been cleaned out of sleeping pills.”
Casper lifted his pistol. “I can take care of you, if you don’t mind.”
Marley looked up and nodded. “I would appreciate it.”
The conversation lapsed as both men stared into the fire. Beyond the tiny sphere of light caste by the flames, Casper could see nothing, but he heard a faint, steady murmur, almost like a low hum.
Marley chuckled. “You know, only a month ago we’d be insane to sit outside like this; now it doesn’t matter.”
“Yah, things were pretty messed up for awhile. Say, would you like a snort?”
Marley looked up in surprise as Casper pulled a bottle from a rucksack, and he grinned as soon as he saw it. “I’d love one, thank you.”
Casper passed the bottle to him and watched as he read the label. He almost laughed when the professor’s eyes grew big around and his jaw dropped open.
“My God! This is twenty-five year old single malt Scotch! Wherever did you find it, man?”
“I’ve had it for a number of years; been saving it for a special occasion.”
Marley pulled the stopper and hefted the bottle in salute. “May you be in Heaven an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.” He then took a swig. He nearly chocked, but he managed to swallow.
“God, that’s smooth,” he said in a horse voice. He offered the bottle back.
Casper waved him off. “Keep it for now, I’ll get my share later.” Then he studied him for a few minutes.
“You look familiar somehow.” He cocked his head. When the other didn’t reply, he muttered, “Marley…Marley—”
Suddenly the light dawned. “Land o’ Goshen, you wouldn’t be him, would you?”
Marley saluted with the bottle. “Afraid so.” Then he took another sip.
“Well, butter my biscuits, Momma, I’m honored to make your acquaintance!”
For once Marley looked shocked. “You really mean that?”
“Damn right! It’s not every day you get to share a drink with the Savior of Humanity!”
Marley barked a laugh, but it contained no humor. “Some savior I turned out to be.”
“Now, you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. I mean, it really wasn’t your fault.”
Marley cradled the bottle against his chest like a baby. “No, it wasn’t my fault at all.” He spoke in a subdued voice and took a swig.
“I mean, you had the best of intentions.”
Marley eyed him with a mischievous smile. “You know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
“Still, you had to take the chance. I mean, it was a good idea. How were you to know things would turn out the way they did?”
Marley stared into the fire again. “Katherine knew. Or at least she suspected.”
“Who?”
Marley grimaced, as if the memory of her carried a secret pain he had borne for some time. “My wife. She was my research partner as well as my life partner.” He took another swig as if to wash it away. “She warned me that once out in the world, they might evolve. They were engineered to breed very quickly, and they were being introduced into a niche where they would have no competitors or predators. Both are conducive to rapid evolution.”
“How likely did she think it might happen?”
Marley shrugged, and raised the bottle to his lips, but paused and stared at it. He grimaced again, but from distaste, and passed it back. “Maybe forty percent.”
Casper took a drink. “And what were our chances of survival if you hadn’t released the swarm?”
Marley looked up at him across the fire. “Practically nill.”
“So you gambled, and lost.” Casper took another drink. “I’d have done the same.”
The conversation lagged agai
n, and he noted the hum had gotten louder.
“By the way, did anyone ever figure out what caused the plague in the first place?”
Marley shook his head. “No.”
“I heard it was some kind of man-made virus, a bioweapon released by accident, or by a terrorist mole in the military somewhere.”
Marley snorted in derision. “Ridiculous! Viruses can’t raise the dead.”
“Then, what do you think happened?”
“Personally? I believe it was a fungus of some kind. That at least has some credibility, but it’s outside my area of expertise, and I have no proof.” He sighed and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now anyways. The zombies may be gone, but we’re all just as good as dead, what’s left of us.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Casper took a swig. “It was worth a try in any event. Think of how it was back then. It started off with only a few, in isolated pockets around the world, but then they became dozens, then hundreds, thousands, millions! All within a few months. And nothing we did could stop them. Oh sure, we could shot them in the head, burn them, even nuke them, but we couldn’t stop them.” He then paused and pointed at Marley. “You found a way.”
Marley made no reply; he just sighed and cocked his head to listen to the hum, now louder still.
Casper took another drink. “Yes, sir, you had a stroke of genius. Maggots, you said. They eat dead tissue, devour it like candy, but they don’t touch living tissue. All you had to do was change a few genes in the common housefly, add one here, take out one there, mutate a few others, and presto: you had a weapon that would destroy every zombie throughout the world in a matter of weeks.”
He paused and shook his head. “Too bad once the zombies were gone, they had acquired a taste for human flesh, and came after us next.”
Marley sighed again. “Yeah, too bad.”
“Just one thing I don’t understand.”
Marley lifted his head. “What?”
“Well, I know the flies swarm all over people, and each can lay dozens of eggs, and that they hatch after only a few minutes. But why can’t you just wash them off?”
Marley flashed a weak smile. “That was part of the ‘genius’. It wouldn’t work if a good rain storm or a dunking in a river could remove the eggs, so we engineered the flies to use a stinging ovipositor. The eggs were injected into the skin, through the outer epidermis into the underlying dermal layer.”
Casper nodded. “Okay, I get you. Of course, that means you’d have to just about skin a man to remove all the eggs.”
“Yes, but the sting is virtually painless. A single fly could infect you and you’d never know it until the maggots hatched. Once they get into the muscle there’s nothing that can be done. They’d still kill you; it would just take longer.”
“Unless you got stung in the arm or leg; those can be amputated.”
Marley shrugged in a listless manner. “Where there’s one fly, there’s more. Chances are good you’ll be stung multiple times.”
“Yeah. Any chance some people might survive?”
“I don’t know. They might, if they live in extremely cold climes, or can seal their habitat off completely. But the flies can get in almost anywhere; they can drift on the wind or be carried inside containers. If they do get in, they can breed prodigiously. And like I said, it only takes one sting.”
“Yeah.”
The conversation lapsed yet again. The hum had grown loud enough to make talking difficult.
“How much time we got left?” Casper asked.
Marley checked his watch. “The swarm should be here momentarily.”
Casper nodded. He put the bottle aside and picked up the revolver. He held it in his lap for a moment, then lifted it and shot Marley through the head.
“Damn shame, really, it was such a good idea.” He raised the barrel to his chin. Beyond the fire, the hum rose to a crescendo as the first flies came into view.
▲
MAGGOT COFFEE, by Roy C. Booth and Axel Kohagen
I upended the Styrofoam cup of coffee and felt something wriggle to the back of my throat. It lodged up behind the rough of my mouth and stayed there, no matter how hard I gagged to dislodge it.
Two maggots squirmed in the bottom of my cup. After the gorge settled, I stalked about the funeral home, looking for someone to sue. All I saw were empty folding chairs and pews in the other rooms. My family, small as it was, stayed clumped together in the smallest viewing room. Tact dictated I couldn’t bother them at the viewing, so I made my apologies to my great-aunt and went home.
The maggot in the back of my mouth squirmed the whole ride home. Not continuously, but regularly. It would lie dormant for just long enough for me to feel it had, perhaps, slipped out of where it was lodged. Then it would writhe again, with a new found ferocity.
Once home, I dove onto my knees in front of my toilet and retched until I thought I had nothing at all left inside me, but the damn worm still squirmed. I dug my index finger back until the webbing between my fingers tore a bit, but nothing. I even got out a coat hanger and worked at it, jabbing bloody, coppery tasting gashes into my throat. The worm hung on and did not go away.
At least, not until the next morning. I felt silly about the whole thing, especially considering the tenderness of my throat. I went to work as if nothing had happened.
The first vision hit me about mid-day. I envisioned a corpse clawing at a wall of dirt. Oddly, the dirt gave way far too quickly. It felt so real, I had to check my fingernails for dirt and grime.
I blinked a few times, then I ignored it and went about my day, doing the usual things. I did feel a little scummier as the day wore on, like I was desperately in need of a shower. When I got home, I took one right away. It didn’t help any.
I took a sick day from work and went to the doctor. He didn’t find anything. Oh, sure, he saw where I had immolated myself and all, but the maggot? Somehow it eluded him. I thought about getting a second opinion but realized if I got the same result I might find myself in a 72 hour hold, “for my own protection.”
After that, things became a blur.
Blah days passed me by. Food lost its flavor. Days and nights, they seemed all the same. I still made it to work, but it became tougher each day to do so. My co-workers commented that I lost weight and asked if I were ill or having personal problems.
Heh. If they only knew.
The visions were the worst. Sometimes I saw just one corpse, sometimes I saw many. Always they were digging, and they were getting closer to something each time.
The corpses were a ragged bunch, dead for a very long time. They looked nothing like the movies. They hissed as they dug, like cats in a spat. Maggots flaked off of them like dandruff. Maggots, like the ones in my coffee cup.
One night, after an awful dream, I awoke to find myself in a freshly dug grave. I was merely sleeping there; there was no dirt under my fingernails. I managed to scramble out of the grave before anyone noticed me. Well, almost anyone. A lone woman drove into the cemetery and she saw me, wearing sleep pants and a T-shirt, walking through the dewy grass with clods of dirt in my hair.
I could have seen a shrink then, but I chose not to make the call. Probably be as useless as seeing the doctor. I figured anything a shrink had to say about waking up in a graveyard, I did not want to hear. Besides, I wasn’t hurting anyone. Yet.
The next night, in my dream, one of the corpses broke through the dirt wall and I got a brief glimpse of what was behind. Very brief. Just the impression of a lot of heat and motion.
The dreams continued, but I never got a good look at the goal of the corpses’ frenzied clawing. Then, one day, I woke up in a sewer. Curled up peacefully in sewage, my head next to half of a dead rat. I resisted the urge to wipe my face, fearing this would make everything worse. I stumbled about for an hour before I found a way out, and when I did, I was hor
rified to discover I was right next to the funeral home where I had first swallowed the maggot.
I came back later that day, after a shower and a fairly decent night’s rest. I knocked on the door. I wanted to look around, to find out where that goddamned maggot came from.
When the elderly man who, I assumed, owned the home, opened the door. He was not sad to see me.
“We were hoping,” he said, gesturing for me to come in.
I went straight to the coffee pot and saw three maggots on the floor, near the coffee. I looked at the wall behind it and saw a portion of it that looked both damp and new. Frustrated, sick from the sewer smell I still couldn’t get out of my nostrils, I punched the wall and peeled until I could see what was behind it.
“We’ve been looking for suitable hosts,” the elderly man said, unphased by my behavior. “Very few let the maggots into them, let them take control.”
I was still gagging because of what I saw behind the drywall.
“You are blessed.”
“Because I gave up and let a maggot get in my head?” I asked.
“Yes,” the man said. He smiled, his lips wet with drool.
Behind the drywall was a woman’s head. I knew it had been there when I drank the coffee. The whole thing was rotted, filled with maggots. The little white worms spilled out of nostrils and lips and eye sockets. They tumbled with chunks of nearly liquid flesh. It was here that the maggot in my head was born.
“Is this what’s gonna happen to me?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Oh no. No, of course not. She gave up. You’re still around. Come with me,” he said. “Please.”
I followed him to a back room where two men, who looked like his sons, were feeding a nasty, flesh-eating thing they kept in a cast-iron pot on an altar. They were taking these chunks out of a body and, through my disgust, I noticed they were careful to pick places the bereaved would not see were missing. The wet, red, angry-looking thing was lunging, trying to escape.
“It’s beautiful,” the man said. “It will serve you well.”
