by David Coy
She wanted a seizure. She wanted one that would be so strong she would never wake up from it. She would make it come. By the strength of her will alone she would force open those doors of chaos and seek refuge there. She clamped her eyes tight and rolled her mind backwards over itself again and again. But when she needed it most, oblivion escaped her. Reality held her down, pressed her to the soiled floor of this horrid place like a damp and giant foot.
“You bastards!” John yelled. “What are you doing!”
“Please don’t . . . ” Rachel said weakly. “Please don’t do this . . . ”
“It won’t be that bad,” Erhlich said. “You’ll still be alive. I’ve got it all worked out. It’s magic. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want this . . . ” she said.
“But you dooo . . . ”
“I don’t.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Erhlich said. “Hold her down. I’ve got work to do.”
Rachel felt herself bent backwards and pressed down like the limb of a weak plant.
“Stop,” a voice said. “Not yet.”
Rachel knew the voice; one made soft and gentle by practice—a voice designed to fool you.
“Release her,” Jacob said. “Take off those restraints. Give her some air. She looks like she can’t breathe.”
She couldn’t see him, but she could feel him. When he was close enough, she turned to face him. He was naked, and the sight of his body made her reel with disgust. The flesh looked as if it had been poured on him and dripped from his arms and chest and legs like thick, pale goo.
“That one tried to kill me,” Jacob said, nodding slowly at John, “just when we were going to consummate our love once more. The good doctor brought me back. He’s a good, good man.”
“Thank you, Jacob,” Erhlich said.
“I should have put that bullet in your head when I had the chance,” John said.
“God stayed your hand,” Jacob intoned. “It was His will. I will not die until God’s will is done.” He turned to Rachel and leaned in toward her, his arms hanging down like weak ropes, his neck stretched out. Rachel heard him sniff the air.
“You have the same scent,” he said. “You have the same scent as her.”
“As who?” Rachel asked. “As Bailey Hall?”
“Yes,” Jacob said and swallowed with his mouth open. “You have her scent.”
“But I’m not her, Gilbert,” Rachel said. “I’m not Bailey Hall.” At the use of his real name, Jacob blinked. “Gilbert,” he said. “How did you know my name?”
“I read Bailey’s journal. I read all about you and what happened to you.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must know who you are? You must know that.”
“My name is Rachel Sanders. I am not Bailey Hall!”
Jacob studied her with his drooping eyes. “You are her as surely as I am he.”
“But I’m not her!” Rachel cried. “Leave me alone!”
“What is this?” John said. “What are you talking about?”
“He thinks I’m Bailey Hall,” Rachel whimpered. “He thinks I’m that girl who betrayed him . . . ”
Jacob’s thin hand reached up and caressed her face. The clammy touch of his fingers made her pull back and shake her head to rid herself of it. The hand pursued her until it caught her again. With nowhere to go, she let the spider crawl over her face and neck. “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you.”
“You are the first and the mother to many,” Jacob said. “We shall populate this planet, you and I. Our seed will find root here and flourish in this good soil.”
“No!” she cried.
“We shall inherit this rich heath and fill it with our flesh. We shall grow and multiply like the wheat of the field.”
“You’ll ruin it,” she whimpered. “You’ll ruin this sweet place.”
“Ruin?” he asked, smiling his madman's smile.
“You’ll spoil it.”
“God’s plan cannot ruin . . . anything.”
“No, God’s plan can’t destroy it,” she said. “Only you can do that.”
Jacob raised his twisted head toward Heaven and extended his arms. The flesh hung from them as if the thin bones had been dipped in gray tar. “Glory to God! Glory to God Almighty! He has delivered me to this place to save it!”
Rachel stood helplessly and looked at the creature in front of her and began to sob. Her shoulders shook, as she wept openly, without restraint. From deep inside her the wails came and gushed out, swirling, mixing hatred, fear, grief and frustration with Gilbert’s words.
“Glory be! Glory be! I am the one! I am come into this place to deliver it to the Lord, our God!”
“You’ll kill it!” she gasped.
“I will fill it with the word of God! I will give it as a sweet fruit to my God!”
“No!”
“Get away from her, you bastard!” John screamed.
“I am the one blessed!” Gilbert raved. “I and no other!”
“No!” Rachel screamed.
“You are mine!”
“No!”
“You are my field!”
“You’re evil!” she cried. “Your God is evil!”
Jacob’s hand came across in a straight line and slapped her, nearly knocking her down. “I will save you from yourself! I will deliver you from yourself!”
“Stop it!” she begged.
“You are mine to fill!”
“Please, stop.” Her voice was exhausted.
“Mine!”
“No. ”
Rachel wailed and sobbed. Then she sank slowly to the floor in a heap. “No . . . no . . . ” she whimpered.
Gilbert looked down at her and smiled, his slack mouth drawn loosely away from his teeth.
Suddenly, Gilbert cocked his head as if he’d heard something curious. Back and forth, he cocked it. Then he turned in a circle, trying to locate the source of the inaudible sound.
“Jacob?” Erhlich said. “Is something wrong?”
“Can’t you hear it?” Gilbert asked, smiling stiffly. “Can’t you? Are you deaf? Can’t you hear it?”
“I don’t hear anything,” a guard said.
“Me, neither,” another said, confused.
Gilbert hobbled over and quickly put his robe on. Then he pinched it tight at the neck. “I have to get out of here! I have to get in . . . side something! I have to hide!” He turned in a staggering circle, searching the room.
“What is it?” Erhlich cried out, thinking Jacob had slipped into madness.
“It’s closer!” Gilbert screamed. “Put me in something, goddamn you! Hide me!”
“From what?”
Gilbert’s face went blank and seemed to droop even more. He looked up and closed his eyes. The words seemed to fall out of his mouth.
“From the worms . . . of God . . . ”
The first of a million wasps flew into the room, stopped and hovered. The sound of its buzzing wings filled the space like something solid. Then it zipped here, there—a flash of black and white. It sampled the air. When it came to Rachel, it moved slowly to within an arm’s length. It hovered. Rachel looked up at the insect’s iridescent form, and smiled at its perfection.
The wasp zipped away.
“What . . . ?” Erhlich said.
The wasp moved like a shot and hit Erhlich in the face with a loud smack! Erhlich jumped back, blinked, and then felt the spot with his hand, leaving a smear of blood where his fingers touched. He shook his head as if clearing it, then staggered against the table. He slumped to the floor and rolled onto his back.
Then the wasps swarmed into the room by the hundreds, filling the air with a fury of buzzing wings. One of the guards ran for the door, waving his arms around his head, but was hit time and time again. John was knocked to the floor as the guards holding him ran. Waving their arms, they ran, screaming, out of the room and down the tube. Erhlich’s assistants backed against the wall an
d froze. The insects slapped into their faces and arms.
Rachel crawled through the cloud of buzzing wings. When she got to John, she covered his body with her own. “I’ll protect you,” she said. “I’ll protect you.”
Moment’s later, the virulent buzzing began to diminish. Soon it died to the sound of just a few, then none.
They found Gilbert on the floor with his blue robe splayed open. His naked body was crawling with dozens of silent wasps, many with ovipositors buried deep in his gray flesh. His face stared up sightless and blank.
“Is he dead?” John asked.
Rachel looked down at Gilbert and felt no pity. None.
“No,” she replied with no feeling in her voice. Then one corner of her mouth turned slightly up. “Not yet. But soon.”
20
Rachel said she thought it was best to bury Jacob’s body deep in the jungle where no one would ever find it. John had offered a less forgiving twist on the idea. “Burials are for people you want to remember,” he’d said. “I’ll drop it in the green. It’ll be bug crap in a few hours.”
Donna had echoed a similar sentiment and the decision to provide absolutely nothing in the form of ritual remembrance for Gilbert Keefer, known of late as Jacob No Name, was made firm in their minds—if not in the minds of the group as a whole.
Rachel, Donna and John were not the only contributors to the decision. Just over four hundred people had survived the wasp storm, a good half of them Bondsmen with a sentimental or emotional attachment to the memory of their stumbling, lopsided leader.
The issue would clearly take time to work out. When someone suggested just keeping the body in a cooler, under guard, until a resolution could be reached, a few in the room echoed the wisdom of it. Others, however, wanted to organize the funeral right then and railed with discontent. Soon the meeting was out of control.
To Paul Kominski, the decision about what to do with Jacob’s corpse was just another line item on a growing list of things to do. As the President Pro Temp of what was left of the colony, he calmly and dutifully made a note of it on his pad, then tapped on the table with his pistol to call the meeting back to order.
“Okay,” he said. “There’s a motion on the table to keep Jacob’s body on ice until we can look at the issue closer in committee. With no further discussion, I’ll call for the vote. All in favor of keeping Jacob’s body on ice for the time being, vote with a show of hands.”
Seven of the nine members of the new council raised their hands. Paul counted them.
“All opposed?” he asked.
The remaining two raised their hands.
“The motion carries,” Paul said firmly. “We keep the body on ice. And we’ll form a committee to figure out what to do about the, uh, burial, and when it will take place. The council will act on the decision of the committee. End of discussion.”
“Who’ll be on that committee?” a portly Bondsman named Jones asked with a sneer in his voice.
“I’ll make sure the committee has fair representation from all interests concerned. End of discussion,” Paul replied and tapped the table with his lethal gavel once more. The room went dead quiet. “Let’s move on,” he said. “We have a full agenda and a lot of ground to cover. Next, Rachel Sanders will report to you on her research about the wasp attack—if she’s ready.” He looked over at Rachel.
Rachel stood up. “How much time do I have?” she asked.
“As much as you need,” Paul said.
Rachel cleared her throat. “I don’t have all the answers yet,” she said. “But I think I’ve got enough to give us all a good idea about where the wasps came from and how they operate, biologically speaking. More importantly, I think I understand enough to give us all a good idea about the future threat.”
“Okay,” Paul said. “You’ve got the floor.”
Rachel moved to the front of the gathering with her pad, turned around and scanned the worried faces in front of her.
She smiled at them and tried to push aside the sobering thought that before her eyes were perhaps the single last remaining cluster of the species Homo sapiens. And try as she might to suppress it, the thought persisted.
She cleared her throat again and got ready to tell them all about the little wasps that had killed eight hundred of their numbers more swiftly than an army. She would tell them that in so doing, the little wasps had decimated their remaining human gene pool, reduced it to a marginally sustainable number of breeding contributors, in a matter of just a few minutes. She would take them back a thousand years and tell them about the Verdian witches and how they had come to Earth to condition the wasps for a very special and heinous task. She would tell them about some very special people a thousand years ago—Phil Lynch, Bailey Hall, Mary Pope, Tom Moon—and Gilbert Keefer.
She would tell them everything.
We’ve probably lost, she thought. We’ve had our chance. We won’t be able to survive here. Nature, in the end, will not favor Homo sapiens.
* * *
When the wasps had done their job and laid their eggs in the human hosts and when the last of them had buzzed away into the green, all but four hundred and eleven of the colonists on Verde’s Revenge were left standing. The others lay paralyzed where they fell, their bodies slack and pliable; rag-doll imitations of humans slumped and splayed on the ground, in tubes, in shelters or in containers that weren’t completely closed when the buzzing pestilence came.
Within hours of the attack, those who had been stung regained some control of their limbs, rose to their feet and ambled dumbly here and there, shaking off the effects of the sting-induced coma the wasps had put them in.
And hours after that, they started to scream.
They screamed and trembled in place or ran aimlessly in a futile attempt to get away from the hundreds of tiny mincing jaws eating them alive from the inside out.
Unable to understand, let alone help the ones infected, the ones spared were helpless observers of the suffering of their family members and friends. By nightfall on the day of the attack, all eight hundred stung were dead, their bodies roiling with the twisting, chewing wasp larva, as they fed and grew. Loved ones watched, tortured by helplessness, and offered desperate and frantic comfort as the victims died.
Paul Kominski and a handful of other mercenaries had been quick to mobilize themselves into the semblance of an organizing force. Assembled by Rachel, with hasty instructions about how to deal with the infection, Paul’s team directed the clean up work that buried all eight hundred dead and infected victims six meters down in a long trench hurriedly machine-etched out of a patch of jungle a few hundred meters off the side of the road. Buried deep enough that the emerging larva would never survive the climb up out of the pit on hatching, the plague was quickly contained.
Some looked on in numb denial. Those prone to prayer, did so and wept.
Following the attack, Paul and his enforcers then organized an interim governing council comprised of a handful of representatives chosen at random from the ranks of the survivors. Those who complained that their presence on the council would be far more beneficial than those just chosen were warned off with a look and the wave of a rifle muzzle. It was not an elected body, but it had the advantage of quickly providing an approximation of a governing body. It would stand, Paul had said, until a proper election could be conducted and a real council installed with a proper mandate.
One of the first actions of the council was to establish a police force. The mercenaries, guns always at the ready, were the logical choices for the duty. Deployed throughout the compound, the patrol had soon established itself as the de facto power in the colony, responsible to the new council only, with Paul Kominski as the interim authority over all. In the span of a single day, new control, though not yet operating under an official charter and the rule of law, was nonetheless established in the truncated colony. Peace was once more at hand, and newfound harmony was each colonist’s rifle-enforced right.
It was good
enough for the time being.
The attack had left the colony enough goods, supplies and equipment for decades of sustenance for a thousand or more people—but now available for consumption by a mere fraction of that number. The relative wealth of this material, all new and neatly packaged, stored in watertight containers and stacked relatively neatly, was the lifeline for the remnants of the colony. With food and medicine, communications gear, heavy transport trucks, lifts, weapons, and self-contained shelters, all in excess, most of the survivors believed they had more than an even chance of relatively good health on the jungle planet for years to come. They could build roads, plant crops if need be, fix cuts and bruises and bites and, even worse, if it came to it. They had two medical doctors; a nurse; a dentist; a certified biologist with biohazard training; riggers; engineers; two shuttle pilots; mechanics and systems technicians. There was a wealth of tools for cutting, digging, building and fixing, as well as diagnostic equipment and a dozen new shuttles. And with the new Handford generators stacked in crates yet unopened, power enough to run it all for hundreds of years to come.
But the wasps had reminded them that they were likely the most vulnerable of species on the planet—in spite of the wealth of goods they had dragged there with them. In the days following the attack, still numbed and shaken with grief, most would flinch cold at the imagined sound of a buzzing wasp. With vigilance raised to hyper-levels, they watched the leaves and air for any shape or sound that might reveal the virulent signature of another killing swarm of thumb-sized predatory wasps.
* * *
“The wasps are a weapon,” Rachel began. “They are a biological weapon in the control of a secretive, advanced race of alien beings living somewhere on this planet.” The comment started worried murmuring throughout the assembly.
