by Ryan Notch
“Where are the babies?”
In the nest were the two full grown pigeons. Or maybe not, because near the nest were two other pigeons which might be the “mommy and daddy” from before. It looked like nothing more than annoying in-laws come to visit.
Seth got online and found out that in just a couple weeks pigeons grow to their adult size, to confuse predators. Only they are still reliant on their parents, and can’t fly. These then, thought Seth, were the teenage pigeons, neither cute nor useful. He discovered something else, too. Pigeons waste no time in starting the next phase of their family. Within a week he could expect more eggs in that nest, one boy and one girl, no more and no less.
Seth told his daughter he would move the nest to the roof, so it didn’t dirty up his window ledge and they could still go visit them. But she begged him not to.
“Because dad, pigeons can’t find their nest if you move it, even a little ways away. The babies will starve, and I’ll never get to see the new ones.”
Seth was beginning to feel a bit trapped by his disgusting little neighbors. It was then he first spotted the little black bugs. Artifacts of the pigeons ever growing pile of filth (fuckers must be shy, he thought, never crap anywhere but home). The bugs crawled over it, must be feeding off it. The teenagers were covered with them, when you looked close. And soon, so were the new eggs, packed into the ever more crowded nest.
Like clockwork, the eggs hatched the day after his daughters next visit. His rage at this, at her disappointment, was obscene. He didn’t look again at the pigeons for a whole week, afraid of what he would do to them. He didn’t look at them again until his daughters next visit, something with proved a terrible mistake.
When they looked out they didn’t see half grown babies or even gangly teenagers stretching their wings, but tiny skeletons. The newest babies had died in the nest days ago. The remains of their skin was stretched over their bones, dusty and gray. The bugs swarmed over them. The teenagers must have flown away some time during the week, and the parents maybe eaten by a cat, or crushed by a car while scrounging for enough extra food to feed an ever growing family. Seth felt no sympathy for them, and would have felt no guilt, only that it was cast upon him by his daughters tearful eyes.
“Their parents and big brother and sister left them all alone, why didn’t you feed them daddy?”
Seth was never quick with a lie, or with the right thing to say to make a situation better. She cried and said she wanted to go home, and he took her. When his ex-wife began to criticize him in the way she always did, her new husband stopped her. He saw something in Seth’s eyes he had seen before.
An hour later Seth’s home was a mess of broken chairs, broken glass. When, in the middle of a rampage, he had spotted the picture of the pigeons on the fridge he had punched it so hard his knuckles had split, spraying blood across the paper. The refrigerator door itself was dented half an inch deep, and now hung loosely off it’s hinges.
Seth, his rage still bubbling if not boiling over, set to work removing all signs that the pigeons were ever there. It was harder than he thought. Picking up the baby skeletons (you couldn’t pick up the whole nest, it was all one with the mound of crap) brought up a wave of pity and revulsion that could be felt even through his rage. He had gloves on, but the second he grabbed them they burst into a cloud of dust, one he breathed in as he gasped in surprise.
Cleaning the shit off the ledge took hours. It was like scraping at cement. By the time he was done his rubber gloves were shredded and the black insects crawled on his bare arms, biting and digging.
Later Seth lay in the bath, trying to soak off the sweat and shit and chlorine cleaner. He lay there staring at nothing, thinking nothing, like a machine turned off. It was something he did often when his rage was exhausted and the dark melancholy set in. Something he would have been surprised to learn most other people did not do.
That night, as he lay in bed, after sleeping only a couple hours, he became very sick. He woke up with the sense that he’d been growing steadily more nauseous for a long time, but hadn’t been fully aware of it because he’d been asleep. He rushed to the bathroom and threw up so violently his throat seized up, he almost passed out from being unable to breathe. Even as he slowly recovered he couldn’t shed the sensation that his mouth was thick somehow. Like the dead flesh of the baby birds he’d breathed in had somehow coated his tongue, his throat, his lungs. At the thought of it he threw up again, then drank for a long while directly from the tap to try and wash away the sensation.
He remained sick for days, straying from bed only to throw up and drink water. Cup after cup, until it got to the point he’d keep a few by his bed, drinking constantly to stave off an increasing feeling of dehydration.
On the fourth day of this, after a record eight hours of keeping his stomach contents actually in his stomach, he dragged himself out of bed. Not far, just to the TV. He turned it on not so much from boredom, though there was that, but for the company. Being laid up like that had, for the first time since his divorce, made him realize just how alone a person could be with other people just a few feet away in the apartment next door. He could lie there and die, and it wouldn’t be until the landlord came to forcibly get the rent that anyone would know it. If he went missing no one would come to check on him, not for a long time. His parents lived far away and his ex would be all too happy to assume he was on a binge or something and tell his daughter the same. Sure he had friends, but did it really matter? When you thought about it, friends will spend more time worrying about what they’re having for dinner than not being able to get a hold of you for two weeks.
Maybe it was his fault for being a loner, for being an introvert. For trying hard not to depend on people.
Or maybe he just lived in a world full of selfish pricks.
And so he dragged himself to the living room and lay on a blanket on the floor next to his easy chair and lamp. The easy chair itself was broken and busted after the last rampage, as well as the table the lamp used to sit on (the lamp itself, miraculously, was fine). He turned on the TV and flipped for awhile through several prime examples of inanity. Even with his modest fifty channel selection (the cable companies cheapest option) there wasn’t anything worthwhile on. Every real hour equaled fifty hours of terrible programming, twenty four hours a day. It would seem that just by chance something good would have to be on at any given time. Then again, after all the crap that the entertainment industry had inundated him with, he wasn’t sure if he’d know the difference between Citizen Kane and Survivor without being told by the Entertainment Channel. A high price to avoid loneliness.
He watched, then dozed, then slept.
Seth awoke to a pain, like a bite, on his forehead. He swatted at his head and looked at his hand, expecting to find a mosquito or ant. When he didn’t and didn’t see any around, he lay his head back down in the pool of light cast by the lamp. But before he could doze again, his eyes caught movement. Infinitely small black specks, moving from the darkness under the wall to the light of the lamp, congregating around its base.
The bugs the pigeons had been infested with. They were in his house.
“Fuck,” he said with the little vehemence he could manage in his weakened state. He dragged himself to his feet and to the bathroom mirror to see if there were any on him. There were a few.
He searched the apartment for them, but they were in none of the usual places. Not in the bathroom like silverfish or amidst the food like roaches (at first he thought maybe they were baby cockroaches, but he realized by now some of them would have grown). He only found them under the lamp he had left on, and on the TV screen.
They’re attracted to the light, he mused. And here I thought only flying bugs were attracted to the light.
So he shut off the light and the TV and went back to bed, waking once or twice to swat at pains.
The next morning Seth no longer felt nauseous, but didn’t feel well either. He called work again, and not for the first t
ime heard the insinuation that there might not be a job waiting for him when he came back. Checking over by the lamp he found no sign of the bugs in the morning light. But he found them soon afterward while looking for them on the internet.
He didn’t find them actually on the internet. It turns out that looking up “tiny black bugs” is pretty much worthless in any search engine you pick. Where he found them is crawling over a patch of sunlight on a white piece of paper next to his keyboard. They seemed to like anything bright, even if only reflected light. It was only a couple minutes later they found their way onto the brightly lit computer screen.
For the first time in days he left the apartment, heading straight to the hardware store for poison.
Getting to the store hadn’t been easy. He was surprised at how weak you can get in just a few days. Even the act of driving seemed like a big effort, and walking around the store was enough to make him dizzy. The bright sun had stung his eyes and he felt like it was stabbing through him. He’d had hangovers that made him want to hide from the sun many times, but this wasn’t like that. The sun dazzled him, bullied him.
Inside the giant hardware store was a positively medieval array of poisons. He reflected briefly that some of them seemed incredibly cruel considering most of the things they targeted did nothing worse to humans than creeping them out. But this reflection carried no true emotional weight. Seth didn’t mind hurting things. Not bugs, not animals, not people. It wasn’t that he liked to hurt things, or craved to, he just didn’t mind it.
None of the poisons had a description on the box for “little black bugs.” He bought a few different ones, though he balked at the price.
Seth spent the next few days getting stronger. His daughters day to visit came and went without her, she was off visiting her grandparents instead.
Maybe for the best, he thought. I’d hate for those things to come home with her.
The poisons did nothing, they didn’t seem the least bit interested in them. Smashing the buggers just brought more out from the endless supply. Cleaning with Clorox brought less than two hours respite, and when he caulked up all the cracks under the walls they just came from other places he couldn’t find.
He tried putting lamps in other parts of the apartment (he had extras in storage from when he lived in a much bigger place before the divorce). The bugs found them wherever they were, even the ceiling lights. He was becoming obsessed with watching them. He missed sleep to stare at them (and couldn’t sleep well for the bites anyway). He hated them, but at the same time couldn’t tear himself away from them. In a way it was like having a rat in your kitchen. Even if it disgusts you too much to grab it, you can’t just go and watch TV and ignore it either. So you watch it.
And so he watched them. And wondered what the fuck to do about them.
Seth started keeping a lamp lit on the floor at all times, to distract them from him. And it helped, at first anyway. But one lamp wasn’t enough for very long. Soon it took two, then three, then four. He moved his bed on the opposite side of the apartment from the lamps, to put as much sleeping distance between him and them as possible. He was afraid to try any more poisons, and somehow too ashamed to call an exterminator. He wouldn’t let his daughter come over for her visits. He couldn’t risk them getting to her. And he couldn’t leave the apartment to see her either, though he missed her dearly. But he couldn’t risk leaving them alone, couldn’t risk not watching them for that long. Every time he left he was obsessed with visions of them, wondering if they were still there even when he wasn’t, and could only stay away a short time before coming back and checking.
Soon everything he owned that could produce light was in that corner. All the lamps, the television and computer, even the clock radio. And he’d moved past the bed all the way into the closet. He slept in a corner in there, curled up so as not to get burned by the hot water pipes, which were exposed in a way one only found in truly old construction. He took some comfort from them though, from the way they sang. He could almost hear words in that song, or at least a kind of sense. Though he had to drink water almost constantly to replace what he sweated out from the heat of the pipes.
He curled up in there night after night, and watched them day after day, and wondered if there was any escape for him.
And then there it was, a knock at the door in the middle of the night, which he didn’t want to answer but found himself answering anyway. It was someone he thought he knew, one of his neighbors.
“Hello Seth,” Collin said. “I’ve come to help you.”
Chapter 24
********************
Through his binoculars Jack could just barely make out the shambling thing leaning against the street light. It had just disgorged the contents of its stomach onto the sidewalk and now hung its head, either resting or contemplating what had just come out of it, Jack couldn’t tell which. He wanted to say something comforting about the whole scene to Terra, who no doubt saw the same thing through her own binoculars. Only he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound stupid, and she didn’t seem to need it anyway. She never did.
It wasn’t until the shambling thing that used to be their landlord moved off down the street that she broke the silence.
“Come on, lets keep following.”
Following Mr. Cooper wasn’t easy, as this third night’s attempt evidenced, despite the slow and difficult way he moved. He had a habit of getting lost in shadows, and you wouldn’t see him again until he stumbled back into a patch of light. The shadows weren’t actually that dark, not in the brightly lit city. Except that when he walked into them suddenly it was like he had fallen into a tar pit, no sign of movement inside. The moment he moved out of one you’d wonder how you could have ever missed him.
It reminded Jack of sixteen years ago as a child when he had had night blindness for a few months. His family’s attempt at a fad diet had led to vitamin A deficiency. It was the kind of thing you didn’t even notice you had until you started bumping into things, because the brain just isn’t wired to see the things you aren’t seeing. The way Mr. Cooper moved through those shadows was so much like it that Jack had actually wondered if he was vitamin A deficient again, except that Terra said it was the same with her.
As they moved past the puddle of vomit, Jack, almost against his will, stopped to take a closer look. Tiny white things were squirming amidst the mess.
“Are those…are those maggots he threw up? Did he eat living maggots?” Jack’s British accent didn’t disguise the fact that he couldn’t keep his voice level.
“It might be worse than that,” Terra replied. “They might be eating him. Hurry, or we’ll lose him again.”
And indeed they almost already had. It was only Jack spotting him moving through the neon light of a bar sign that kept them from loosing him altogether. The way the red glow lit Mr. Cooper gave him a briefly hellish aspect. Jack shivered and realized he was covered with cold sweat, as if it had been him that had just thrown up.
Even moving fast, they’d lost him again by the time they rounded the corner. After looking for him for several moments, while at the same time trying to stay hidden themselves, Jack was about to suggest they try the next block over.
A sound boomed out from a nearby alley, abnormally loud in what was an abnormally quiet night. Even a half block away, the clanking of metal was loud enough to be made out clearly. Jack glanced towards Terra for confirmation, but she was already on the move.
They followed the echoes of the sound to a nearby alley. It was the kind of Boston alley that you never go into at night, and generally avoid during the day. Jack was going to tell her to stay at the street, to let him check it out alone, even though that was something he definitely didn’t want to do. But she never gave him the chance, walking in ahead of him, carefully sticking to the shadows herself.
Jack followed, as he usually did with Terra. But after a few minutes of this they stopped bothering to be careful. Mr. Cooper was gone. They searched
every inch of the alley, including the dumpsters, without finding any sign of him.
“I guess we can try and follow him again tommo…” Jack started to say, then spotted something out of place. It was a manhole cover, lifted away from the sewer entrance.
“You see this?” he asked Terra.
“How did he lift this?” she wondered aloud. “He isn’t very young, or healthy for that matter.”
Jack wondered too. And wondered what he would do to them if he knew they were following him. What had seemed like a fun and slightly impulsive adventure a couple days ago was now beginning to seem genuinely dangerous.
“I’ll go first,” Terra said.”
Jesus, Jack thought. Seriously? He’d never felt the need to be the big, tough, alpha male type but this was beginning to be an affront to his manhood.
“No,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “Terra, we don’t even have flashlights. I know you don’t scare easy, but following him down there would be reckless.”
“What if we just go to the bottom and peek around? We couldn’t get lost that way.”
“And what if he’s down at the bottom, just waiting for us? We wouldn’t see him, you know.”
Terra thought about this for a while, as if trying to find an alternative. Finally she shrugged her shoulders in defeat.
“Ok,” she said.
“Hey,” he said encouragingly. “Next time we’ll bring flashlights, ok?”
She nodded.
“And a bloodhound,” he added, smiling at her smile.
Jack woke suddenly, the next morning, on a couch. But not, he realized immediately, his couch. He’d been having a terrible nightmare, which he couldn’t remember, and which had left him disoriented. He looked around, trying to stay still and calm while he figured out where he was and how he got there.
