Sacrificing Virgins

by John Everson

  Jayce was crying before he found the bodies.

  The blood led him on. It stopped sometimes, and then pooled heavily where she’d fallen to rest before forcing herself up and onward, up the formerly white carpeted stairs and down the hall. He knew as soon as he hit the landing where that blood would lead. Her palm and fingerprints scratched and smeared in long digs against the hallway carpet. The tears were already to Jayce’s chin when he stepped into the nursery.

  Becky lay nude and still at the foot of Danny’s crib. The carpet around her had darkened. Her hands clutched at the rails of the baby’s bed, but it looked as if she had been unable to make it that final three feet. Her face was wet with tears, but it was the blood that Jayce couldn’t stop seeing. Because the blood didn’t come from just a stab, or gunshot wound.

  It came from two letters and three numbers carved deep into Becky’s back. Jayce could see the white of bone shining through the oozing gore around her spine.

  AS032.

  That was all that her back said. But the numbers were fatal.

  Jayce moved closer, forcing his eyes away from his wife to look into the bed where she almost, but couldn’t quite, reach.

  “Jesus,” he cried aloud, when he saw the still form of his little boy. The crib bars were coated with blood, and the sheep and cows on the bedsheets appeared slaughtered in the sea of red. How could one baby have held so much life?

  “Oh God, Danny,” Jayce had cried, barely seeing, but not stopping until he held the still form of his sticky, lifeless boy against his chest. After a moment, he crumbled to the floor with the tiny corpse to sob beside the body of his wife.

  His fingers traced the wound that was already almost dry on his son’s back. From the amount of blood smeared on the baby’s hands and across the bars of the crib, he knew that Danny had been carved alive, just as Becky had been. The fuckers had left him their living note, and coldly walked away. Jayce had not killed his wife or son, Lethe was right in the literal sense. But they were condemned by his actions.

  AS032.

  Danny’s back bled the code just as Becky’s did.

  AS032 was the last sequence in the passcode to the account that Jayce had been siphoning from for the past six months. And someone had, apparently, gotten wise. Someone who could never go to the police to complain.

  “You lived in fear for months,” Lethe whispered to him, kissing his earlobe gently. “You were paralyzed with it. Nothing worked. There was only one way.”

  Jayce nodded. The memories all came back. The agony of his unconfessed guilt. The fear that at any moment, from any corner, they would finally step out of the darkness to end his life. The insomnia. The jumping at every creak and crack. The horrible, racking tears that came without warning at work, in the car, as he made breakfast…

  In a flash he saw the flyer again that he’d found at the back of the free weekly paper. In Memoryum, read the headline. Let us remove those troublesome memories inside your brain with a kiss. What we give you here, you’ll want to remember…but we’ll make you forget. Ask for Mistress Lethe to receive a $20 discount.

  The address was in the city’s red light district, but Jayce had called anyway, and quizzed the woman who answered about whether they could really make a person forget. In the end, he set up the appointment.

  “You’re a hooker,” he whispered.

  Lethe raised one eyebrow, shrugged. “And you’re a thief. You hired me to take away your memories. I did.”

  “But you…” He pointed at her stockings, her discarded corset.

  “The only way out is back in.” She smiled. “My gift is forgetfulness. But you must be close to receive it.”

  Jayce slumped on the bed, pulling his arms around his knees in a fetal hug. The images of his wife and baby, carved with the code of his trespass, was now overlaid on everything he looked at. He closed his eyes, and the blood still was there. He remembered now, why he’d lost his friends, and his job after the murders. The picture wouldn’t leave. AS032. Carved in his family’s flesh. In his mind’s eye forever.

  “Why did you take the money?” Lethe asked.

  “For them,” he said. “For Becky, Danny. I didn’t think a little bit here and there over time, would be missed. I wanted to give Becky a new house, a place where Danny could run…” His voice trailed off.

  “And now?” she asked.

  The tears came again, hot and fast, raining down his cheeks to drip across his thighs. Jayce rocked on the bed, crying without restraint, his voice gasping in tortured hitches as he begged the air for forgiveness. “I’m sorry,” he moaned. “So, so sorry.”

  “You didn’t mean it,” Lethe said.

  “I miss them so bad,” he cried. “I don’t want to forget them. But all I can see is their blood.”

  “Sometimes, you have to be reborn to go on,” Lethe said. She stretched her arms out to him, and lay back on the bed, slowly spreading her legs for him to move between.

  “The only way out is in,” she said once more.

  Jayce rubbed the tears from his cheeks, and looked through the bloody memory of AS032 to see the beautiful woman who offered herself before him.

  “I have to forget,” he said, gritting his teeth against the sobs. “I need to forget.”

  He took Lethe in his arms, and pressed himself desperately against her, inhaling her scent and drowning his guilt in the warmth of her touch. She kissed his tears, and then his lips. Through the window, the dull red glow of the neon sign that blazed In Memoryum to anyone on Clandestine Road, lit his way to her.

  Everything blurred, and Jayce pulled away, just for a moment, to stare down into the dark pools of Lethe’s eyes. She did not blink.

  “Goodbye, Becky,” he said. A tear fell to wet Lethe’s cheek. “Goodbye, Danny.”

  The earthy scent of vanilla teased him forward, and he kissed Lethe once more, as the room slipped away.

  Bad Day

  I can remember the very first time I heard the news report on them. A commentator made a joke of it. “Paul Hughes,” he said, “had a bad day today.”

  That was something of an understatement, to say the least. Paul Hughes had just been fired from pushing paper literally the day after his wife filed for divorce. He made the news because in the aftermath of this personal implosion, he was walking, no doubt somewhat disconsolately, in the forest near Brave River. As he moped along a walking trail some kind of insect attacked him. The commentator speculated that the buzzing sound of the creature at the back of Hughes’s earlobe led him to jump, slap at the back of his head and consequently lose his balance to fall to the concrete walking path below. He ended up in the hospital after a cardiac arrest left him thrashing on the riverbank with said insect crushed in a chitinous orange paste to the back of his head.

  It wasn’t really funny, but I laughed. The poor guy lost his wife, lost his job, and now, might lose his life because a hornet or something “took advantage” of him at the wrong moment.

  That was the last time I laughed.

  In the beginning, everyone thought they were some strange, exotic breed of roaches. They measured about two inches long, and like the roaches or palmetto bugs of the Deep South, were bronze-tinged, dark as well-cured tobacco. They were quickly dubbed Luna Roaches, because they flew in clouds on the wind at twilight and descended on the city in a swarm that blotted out the light of the moon. What bugs flew at night? Nobody really asked that.

  The warnings went out quickly. Don’t stay out after dark. Don’t let your children stay out playing after school. Don’t leave your windows open.

  Don’t, don’t, don’t.

  The media told us to hunker down and hide, cuz the killer roaches had come to town.

  Of course, they didn’t say it that way. But while some of us laughed at the story of Paul Hughes flailing about and ending up in a coma because a bug dive-bombed him, we lost
our sense of humor really quick when swarms of them began to attack people on the streets at night.

  We didn’t know what they could do, at first. Didn’t know what they wanted. Initially, the concern was that they could carry some kind of virus or disease.

  Who would have guessed that what they brought us was so much more? And so much worse?

  “Kara, come inside,” my wife shouted. Our little girl was only five, but already she was a handful. Sometimes I was glad that I had to go to work every day and sit in an office. While I lived for the hours that we played together, and she giggled and kicked and fought against my tickle bombs, I knew I could never spend the day with my baby and keep up with the girl. She was a handful of laughter and energy, while I felt like a slow-moving anchor of molasses shellacked in tar. I was tired after lofting her in the air a few times like a rocket and rolling about on the floor with her before pronouncing bedtime. I played with her an hour or two a day, while Jenna had her for the other twelve.

  The city was under alert now; for the past few nights swarms of the Luna Roaches had descended on the streets in a bizarre attack of buzz and wings and biting venom. Those who fell prey to the things were taken to hospital, but couldn’t be revived. Neither did they die. The doctors quickly learned not to try to pry the roaches from the flesh of the bodies they brought in. While the victims were comatose when they came in to the hospitals with the bugs on their necks or skulls, when the insects were removed, the low level of neural activity dropped to virtually none. If you removed the bugs, you turned the patient into a human vegetable. But if you left them attached to the host, the victim lay in the hospital in a coma. The difference seemed negligible, but as we soon learned, the difference was great.

  Jenna slammed the sliding door like a shotgun behind Kara and my little girl ran right into my arms.

  “How’s my baby?” I asked, lofting Kara in the air like a juggler’s bag. She giggled and screeched, kinked bronze hair flying in the air like her mother’s had once, when I’d had the energy to lift and twirl Jenna around like so much paper. Now, I’d be lucky to dance around her mother, let alone lift her. A combination of her own gain in “stature” and my own declining energy. We’d had Kara late in life, and frankly, the kid wasn’t making me feel younger, as people had promised. I felt every strain in my back these days as I twirled her in the air and when I looked in the mirror in the morning I saw every age line darkened by another night of worry when she was sick.

  I’m getting too old for this, I told myself more and more often. I didn’t dare broach those thoughts to Jenna, whose pallid complexion and dark bags beneath her eyes spoke for themselves. She lived in the trenches of child-rearing. I only dabbled.

  Kara giggled as I twirled her in the air and asked again, “How’s my baby?”

  “Good, Daddy,” she said, throwing her arms around me, and then pushing off my shoulders to raise moon eyes at me. Knowing she had my attention, she said seriously, “Daddy, there were bugs by the swing set!”

  In another time, such a statement from a child would have raised an eyebrow with a smile. But now, today, in an age of Luna Roaches that rendered their victims either comatose or vegetable, I spun my daughter in the air and ran my fingers up under her hair, praying with every pounding beat of my heart that I would find nothing beneath those copper locks.

  My hand met only the cool skin of a child and I set her to the floor before slumping myself into a chair, exhausted from the onset of panic. My wife hadn’t moved an inch during our conversation. She held her breath. And when I nodded that everything was okay, she closed her eyes and put a palm to her chest.

  “What kind of bugs?” I said, as Kara’s moon eyes stared up, smiling at mine.

  “Ladybugs!” she proclaimed and ran into the living room laughing and singing, “Ladybug, ladybug fly away home…”

  If only the Luna Roaches had been ladybugs. If only they had flown away home. But they hadn’t.

  Paul Hughes was one of the lucky ones. Apparently, as he’d slapped and fallen, he’d killed the bug before it set its hooks in him. He was shaken. He was physically injured. He was depressed by the disaster of his life.

  But he recovered from the bug’s bite. Thinking about his situation, I bet he was later sorry for that. Then again, he never really had the chance. The news reported that he died of a heart attack just a couple days after regaining consciousness from his ordeal. His bad-luck streak could have been legendary.

  The hospitals were quickly growing overcrowded with those who had not recovered. Instead, bed after bed filled with bodies that were neither dead, nor, in a rational sense, alive. Oh, they lay there breathing. Their hearts beat out a predictable circadian rhythm, but behind their eyes…nothing stirred.

  Within a week of the first Luna Roach swarm sighting, the hospitals were out of beds, and emergency wards began forming in the gymnasiums of high schools and colleges.

  Nobody liked roaches…but few people were so afraid of the things that they wouldn’t go out after dark.

  They should have been.

  The Luna Roaches were legion. The true meaning of that struck me on a Tuesday night as I walked the five blocks from our house to the library. Kara had forgotten to return The Book of Five Cows that day after school, and was distraught that if I didn’t get it back to the library she’d have a fine. Welcoming the opportunity to stroll through the neighborhood on a warm summer night, I took the heavily illustrated volume and started down the sidewalk. I was passing the park just a couple blocks down from my house when I saw them.

  A silver-white cloud rose like a mist from thousands of blades of darkened grass, and a sibilant hiss filled the air. In a moment, the sky was a mass of pinwheeling, shimmering dust motes. They ascended like a flock of startled pigeons, and then after gaining their bearings in the sky, momentarily blocking the light of the moon from which they took their name, they turned their shivering antennae on me.

  I saw the shift; one moment, the swarm drifted aloft startled and unsettled. The next, they had a direction. And that direction was my head. As they began to shimmer towards me, a million Luna Roaches on the trail of a new victim, I looked around for a safe place. I’d seen plenty of the creatures over the past few days, but never so many in one place. They turned the sky a slithering arm of silver, and its fingers were reaching for my head. When I saw the shadowed house not too far away, on the corner lot near the park, I nodded to myself. And ran. Where else could I find shelter?

  My ears cringed at the chittering sound that grew louder behind me as I shot up the flagstone walkway to the weathered old colonial like a bloodhound, determined to nab my quarry before the things behind me nabbed my back. And my quarry, in this instance, was safety. When I got to the doorway of the house, I found its entryway unlocked. I didn’t hesitate in throwing open the screen door and diving in, as a flurry of shimmering wings beat the air in a hungry hiss behind me. Many of them crashed into the screen as it slammed shut, unable to turn, and I breathed a sigh of relief on the floor as the soft crashes echoed in the air behind me.

  “Wow,” I whispered, tossing the thin hardcover book on the floor in front of me. “That was close.”

  I lay on the floor for a couple minutes, breathing heavily and occasionally glancing back at the cloud of angry bugs still slamming against the door behind me. Finally, I pulled up my legs and pulled myself into a crouch to see where I’d ended up.

  That was when I saw her.

  The owner of the house, or at least that was what I assumed she was, sat as still as a statue on the couch facing the foyer where I’d landed.

  “Did you see that?” I asked. “The damn things came at me like a swarm of killer bees!”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry I let myself into your house like that, but I didn’t know where else to go,” I apologized.

  Behind me, the soft flutterings and keenin
g insectoid cries and smacks against the screen of the door were abating. In front of me, the woman stood, still saying nothing.

  She stepped forward.

  “Just let me wait here a second, until I’m sure they’re gone,” I said, picking the library book up. “Then I’ll get out of your house.”

  She stepped forward again. Her eyes didn’t blink.

  “Um, ma’am?” I said. Fear began to grip at my bowels. What had I walked into?

  She put another foot forward, and now I began to panic. She moved with the halting stiltedness of a robot still discovering its joints. And she hadn’t blinked since the moment I’d looked up and noticed her staring blindly ahead from her seat on the couch. How long had she sat there, waiting for me to fall into her house? What would she do when she reached me? She was only feet away.

  I jumped towards the door and she changed direction to follow. There were still a few Luna Roaches circling in the halo of light like moths outside the screen, but I didn’t hesitate. I launched my way into the twilight and ran back up the street towards my home.

  Kara’s library book could be late. I’d be happy to pay the fine.

  That was the night the hospitals emptied. And the churches. And the school gymnasiums. All of the places where the volunteers from the Red Cross and a wide range of other medical saviors had stacked the comatose victims on cots and blankets in hopes that someday they would awake again.

  That was the night that they did.

  When I got home, breathless and confused at what had just happened, Jenna didn’t give me time to speak. When I dove into the family room, she instantly pointed at the TV and whispered, “Look.” The news anchors were raving.

  “Around 7 p.m. tonight, the victims of the Luna Roaches began to walk. But it’s as if they are walking in their sleep. They don’t speak, and they won’t stop, no matter what gets in front of them. We’ve had reports from every part of the city; it’s happening everywhere, all at once. The scene is like something out of a movie. An hour ago, there were thousands of victims, all in a mass coma, and now…now…”