by John Everson
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 PM 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…”
The co-anchor lost it: “…now the dead walk!” she exclaimed.
“What do you think it means?” Jenna said. She put an arm protectively around our daughter.
“I think that this is a really bad day.”
I was only partly right; it was actually a bad night. And a strange one. By morning, after frantic eyewitness news reports flooded the television stations and people barricaded themselves in their homes in panic, it had gotten even stranger.
You wouldn’t think that thousands of people could get up one night, walk out into the streets all at once and then disappear, while the eyes of millions were upon them. But that’s what happened that night. The coma victims got up from wherever they lay, walked out into the street, and as the rest of us ran inside and panicked at their single-minded, staggering gaits and blank, black gazes, they kept on walking. By the next morning, nobody could quite answer exactly where they’d gone.
On my way to work that next day, I drove by the house I’d hidden in the night before near the park. The front door was wide open. I bet to myself that nobody was at home. But I didn’t stop to find out.
The chatter went on for days. The networks played an endless cycle of footage of blank-eyed men and women and creepily vacant children staggering out of hospitals and churches and walking down the center of the street, feet padding along strangely straight as they strode the dotted yellow lines out of town.
There was one image that haunted me, especially. They played it again and again, and every time, inexplicably, I began to well up. There was nothing inherently wrong with the picture. It was just a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old. She wore a red T-shirt that had a giant thumbprint stenciled on it. And she walked down the street, on the way out of town. Her hair was long and ratty brown, and tousled in so many knots, the father in me knew they’d take hours to comb out, and many yelps of hurt. I don’t know exactly what it was about her. Maybe the way her big brown eyes drooped and looked hopelessly tired. Maybe it was the way she walked, listless and slow, but with a horrible, unrelenting purpose. Or maybe it was the way she dragged her ragged brown teddy on the asphalt as she walked. The stuffed animal had probably been her favorite toy days before, something she tried to feed and cuddle and hug. And now its head bumped on the ground, silently thumping, thumping, thumping with each small step she took. Her hand didn’t let go of its leg, but neither did she care that she was dragging the toy to death.
Tears filled my eyes at the image and I looked away. At that moment, a thrumming sound filled the house, as if it had begun to hail. Something was pounding on the shingles and the windows all around the house.
“Daddy,” Kara said, running into the room. “There’s a bug on my bed.”
I scooped her up in my arms and took her back to the room, the noise still echoing overhead and all around. Somewhere I heard glass shatter.
“There” she pointed, and on the middle of the pink “Hello Kitty” bedspread sat an abomination. At least two inches long, the Luna Roach sat still, smack in the center of my baby’s bed. Its wings shimmered in the yellow light like a gold haze, and it crept forward as I entered the room, heading for the shelter of her pillow. I set Kara on the floor, pulled a tissue from my pants pocket and brought my hand down on the bug. With a scoop I enclosed it in the tissue and squeezed. The crunch of the thing’s body was audible, and the warm wetness of its insides bled through the tissue to squish against my hand. I threw the mess into the toilet in the hall bathroom and flushed, rinsing my hand as if I’d touched poison in the sink.
From the other side of the house, my wife screamed. Wiping my hand on my jeans, again I scooped up Kara and ran. When we got there, Jenna lay on the floor, arms clenched around herself in a desperate hug. When she saw me, she pointed to the living room window. “They’re getting in,” she whispered.
Sure enough, on the floor near the windows and streaming around the coffee table were dozens of Luna Roaches.
“Stay here, don’t move,” I told Kara and set her on the couch.
Then I started stomping.
When the room was a glistening mess of bug guts and broken wings, I finally reached the window and pulled the drapes aside. The glass on one of the side windows had broken, and insects were still crawling up and over the jagged glass to drop into the room. The room hummed with their high-pitched, ululating trills. I reached back and grabbed a throw pillow from the couch, stuffing it roughly into the hole that had been my window. Its threads caught on the edges of the glass, and when I was certain the room was airtight again, I continued my stamping campaign until I felt sure that every keening bug was dead. The carpet was a mess of orange goo, and Jenna still hadn’t moved from the floor.
“Mommy’s asleep” Kara pronounced, and I realized my wife had fainted.
“Let’s put her to bed,” I said, and with Kara holding onto my leg, I grunted, groaned and eventually staggered aloft again with her mother in my arms. I tucked Jenna under the covers as carefully as she normally tucked Kara, and checked to make sure she was still alive. Her slow, steady breath whispered gently in my ear, telling me that shock had sent her into more peaceful dreams than I was wont to have. When I looked up, my daughter stood at the edge of the bed, brown eyes brimming with salty concern. Her cheeks glistened, and I could see her tiny chest shivering with fright.
“Will mommy be OK?” she whispered.
“She’ll be fine,” I promised. “She’s just scared and tired. Let’s climb in with her and get some sleep, too, OK?”
Kara nodded. I scooped her up and slid her into the center of the bed and climbed in beside her. Once beneath the sheets, it didn’t take long before I heard the long slow rhythm of my baby’s deep sleep breathing kick in as she clung to her mother’s back. I thought about waking Jenna to make sure she was OK, but then decided she was better off to just sleep, while she could. Lord knows I couldn’t. I wished that I could join the two of them, but instead I lay awake listening to the light rain of bugs battering against the roof and windows of my house for what seemed like hours. My ears magnified every creak of the house into the echo of an imaginary phalanx of roaches advancing on my bed. I kept itching at phantom touches on my head and legs and hands, driving myself crazy with the idea that a new attack of insects would descend to smother us there in the bed at any moment. At some point, long past midnight, the sound finally quieted and the house grew quiet. I put a hand on my baby’s shoulder, and eventually fell asleep myself.
It was the last good sleep I would have.
* * *
“Daddy,” Kara said, pushing tiny hands against my shoulder. “Daddy, I’m hungry and mommy won’t get up.”
I blinked heavy lids open and squinted against the glare. The sun was fully up in the sky and the room glowed with the searchlight of morning. Kara sat in the middle of the bed in her Candykids nightgown, dark hair tousled, but eyes bright as the sun.
“Daddy?” she said again.
; I rolled over and hugged her, and then prodded Jenna. Nothing happened.
I pushed against her back again, and then pressed my head to her side. She was breathing.
“She won’t wake up, Daddy. I’m scared.”
“Let her sleep,” I said, slipping out of the bed and grabbing Kara in my arms. “Let’s go have some cereal and let her sleep.”
I tried to sound boisterous as I said it, but inside, my heart was dissolving like ice on the beach. I knew why Jenna wouldn’t get up. A chill went through me as I thought about it. God, we’d slept right next to her. But I knew if I moved her hair aside, I’d find the shell of a Luna Roach attached to her neck.
I choked back a tear as I reached for a box of breakfast cereal in the cabinet and Kara settled herself on a chair at the kitchen table.
Jenna was not going to be waking up. Kara would probably never have her mom make her breakfast again.
* * *
The TV was playing snow. Snow on almost every channel. There was one local access channel still broadcasting, with a wide-eyed, disheveled man screaming into the microphone. “They’ve come back,” he kept saying. “They’ve come back and there’s only one way to stop them: aim for the head. It’s the roaches, you’ve got to smash the roaches…”
As I watched him babble, the door behind him opened, and a stream of people entered the studio. They surrounded the man, who leapt up on a chair and grabbed a microphone stand, holding it out like a cattle prod. Then he began swinging it wildly, like a bat, again and again until he finally connected with someone. The stand hit a woman right in the back of the head, right where the Luna Roaches loved to fasten. The woman went down. But then so did the man. There were hands all over him suddenly, and a buzzing sound slowly filled the room. I heard him scream just before a hand covered the lens of the camera, and then that station turned to snow, too.
There were still cable stations playing old sitcoms, but none of the local networks were broadcasting. The same with radio. At last I understood what they meant now by corporate “canned” radio. Only the FM channel programmed by someone a thousand miles away on the left coast still played the latest singles from U2 and Green Day. And I knew it was because they had programmed the schedule days before. Nobody was working the boards right now.
For the first time since I’d seen the news story about Paul Hughes, I truly panicked. I felt the ice in my belly, and struggled not to fall to my knees and tremble like a baby in front of my baby, who was holding my hand and counting on me to be strong, to make things all right.
Except that I couldn’t.
Not even close.
In the other room, Kara’s mom was turning into some kind of a zombie in her sleep, and outside, the world was awash with buzzing, swarming death.
There was no way out.
“Daddy, can I have more milk?”
Blinking back tears, I opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a carton. I wouldn’t look at the missing person picture on its side. Soon, we might all be missing.
* * *
“We’re just going to take a little ride,” I said, as I buckled Kara into the seatbelt.
“But what about mommy?” She quailed.
“Mommy needs her sleep. We’ll bring her back some dinner later.”
It killed me to lie, but I had to get her out of here. I had to get Kara out of the city.
As we pulled out of the garage, I saw the door from the house open, and Jenna stepped out onto the concrete behind us. Thank god Kara was buckled in and couldn’t look in the rear view mirror. Her mother looked ghastly.
Her eyes were vacant.
I hit the gas and squealed out onto the street. I don’t know where I thought we were going to go. Somehow it seemed like this was a local problem; if we could just get out of the city and into the country, everything would be normal again.
We never left the neighborhood.
I pulled out on Highland and turned on to Norfolk to get out of the subdivision…but just before I reached the main road, the way was blocked.
They moved slow, but they were moving. And they were moving inward, a barricade of bodies 10 and 20 deep. They strode towards us, honing in. When one turned, all of the others followed, as if driven by a single mind. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw they were behind us as well. Surrounded.
I stopped the car to think. The bodies didn’t stop. They came forward, slowly, inexorably. Their eyes were dark, and unblinking. I could see the tan shadow of Luna Roaches trembling on the necks of some of them as they stepped forward, one shambling shoe at a time.
“Daddy,” Kara said. “They’re getting closer.”
Her hand gripped my shirtsleeve and my heart crawled into my throat. I had to do something…but what? I had no idea. I could try to plow the car through a phalanx of still seemingly human bodies but I had no faith that I would get that far. If we left the car, we were doomed for sure. The mob stretched as far as I could see, in every direction. Were we the only regular humans left in the neighborhood?
“Daddy,” Kara repeated. “They want to come in.”
The first one had finally reached the car. He was an older man, I’d guess 65 or 70. His hair was white as salt on his head and his lips thin as parchment. He leaned his pale, too-slack face into Kara’s window and leered, teeth exposed and rotten.
The pounding began then. And from all around us a hum began to wail.
First the old man began to smack his head against her window. And then from the back window an answering echo, as one of the other Luna Roach automatons began to slap slack fists against the glass. An answering thud joined from my side of the car. One old woman threw her body onto the hood of the car and tried to claw her way up to the windshield. When a gnarled finger grasped at the windshield wiper, I turned the control to full and watched the steel and rubber arm bat her tentative grasp away again and again.
But nothing was going to keep them away for long. Kara held on to my arm tighter and tighter as the car began to shake.
“Daddy, what are we going to do?”
The metal of the passenger door suddenly creaked and squealed. The golf pin of a door lock snapped, the plastic vanished to the floor.
“I don’t know what to do,” I finally admitted, as the door wrenched open and six arms reached through the breach towards my baby girl.
“Daddddddy!” she screamed.
I pulled her closer, but the hands gripped the fabric of her shirt and pants and then, next to my ear, the glass exploded. Another hand reached through the broken glass to bat at my head.
“Kara, hold on,” I begged, grasping for her.
But she was gone.
From outside the car I heard her screams. I dove after her to follow, but before I had my feet on the ground a dozen fists pounded into my neck and back and shoved me to the asphalt. Through a field of swaying bodies and limbs I saw Kara raised above the mob, and then Jenna appeared, arms held out to take her.
“Mommy!” Kara cried, arms outstretched.
My wife scooped my baby up, and Kara hugged her tight. Jenna stared at me over our little girl’s shoulders, and a look of victory flickered in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I was sickened by seeing my wife smile. But then, strangely, that smile grew confused, uncertain. It turned to a frown. Her eyes squinted like they did when she got migraines. I could see the muscles on the backs of her arms begin to tense and shiver as she gripped Kara tighter. Then she opened her mouth, not to kiss our baby, but to scream. I heard it clearly over the cacophony of the mob.
That’s when the Luna Roach slid out from the wet cavity between her eyeball and eyelid. Kara saw the bug and recoiled from her mother, but Jenna only held our baby tighter, as the roach walked to the edge of Jenna’s nose and poised there to stretch its wings. Then my wife’s whole face convulsed and began to change. Her skin crawled and swelled; her whole body began to visibly tremble. Jenna’s face exploded at that moment, as the hive of Luna Roaches nesting and gestating in her brai
n finally clawed their way free of her flesh and bone and took to the air. A cloud of blood sprayed the sky as her eyes and flesh caved in like undermined sand to the angry mandibles of a thousand trapped and buzzing bugs. As the first spurts of blood misted, a black and tan cloud of buzzing wings instantly hid the sudden ruin of her features. Luna Roaches lit from her exposed flesh to swarm around the bloody mess of her eyes and the sticky, shredded cartilage of her nose, which hung by a thread down her face.
I launched myself forward to save Kara, but the arms and feet of the mob held me down as my baby beat tiny hands against Jenna’s gore-streaked shoulders, trying to escape. Against all sanity, her blinded, broken mother did not fall or let go. A buzz of wings multiplied in the air, and a cloud of Luna Roaches hovered like a bee swarm around my baby’s screaming, horrified face. I screamed for her, holding out a helpless hand that was quickly stomped to the ground. Something in my arm snapped as it met the asphalt, but louder than my own cry was Kara’s shriek. I swear that she called for me, but the street was alive in screaming and calls for help. Whether she called my name, or something else, in seconds, it was all over. Kara lay quiet and still, limp and blood-spattered in what had been her mother’s arms. But I knew, even if my baby never really did, that those were not Jenna’s arms any longer. Luna Roaches darted across my baby’s face, sampling her innocence with their nervous, hairy feelers.
The crowd drew back from me, setting me free from where they’d pinned me to the pavement and I stood up outside the car, cradling my arm and staring at the crowd of blank eyes that glittered like obsidian in the descending night. Silence fell like midnight fog around us, as the mob grew still, and the moment pregnant.
“What are you?” I whispered. “What do you want?”
One of the men stepped forward, and tentatively opened its mouth. A growling sound came out, and then a word. “Jeessst.” It said in a voice like shifting gravel. Its unblinking eyes fluttered at the sound and it seemed to smile. Understanding dawning.
