by John Everson
Wes did not want to live like this.
He pulled out the bottle of pills and read its contents again. He could swallow the whole thing with a couple glasses of water, and then the buzzing would go away. Everything would go away. He closed his eyes, and thought about going to the top of an office building instead, and jumping. He would fly for just a moment, like the bugs he swore he heard, before the sound would be gone for good.
He shook both thoughts away, and walked on.
* * *
On Friday, Wes couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down his face. He cried as he bought his newspaper, and cried again as he tripped and fell over a crack in the pavement, scattering his pages to the wind and the trample of commuter feet.
“I can’t stand it,” he moaned, writhing on the ground as if he were being bitten by a thousand fire ants. He shivered and jittered, and put both hands to his ears. “No more.”
Hands grabbed at his arms, and pulled, tugging under his armpits until he had staggered to his feet. His eyes were swollen and blurry, but he could still make out the faces of his rescuers.
Goth-skank Jen. And the scraggly guy.
“Can you hear them?” he whispered.
Jen nodded. “You’re the vessel of the swarm to come,” she said. “And this is their time.”
She reached a hand then to her own ear, and tugged hard on her lobe. When she poked a long, black-painted fingernail into her ear to itch and clear the channel, Wes swore he saw a winged thing fly out, as if a beetle or a fly had been feasting on the wax inside.
“Where are we going?” he asked feebly, as they escorted him to a beat-up Volkswagen, and shoved him into the back seat.
“For help,” the man answered.
* * *
The car followed a winding road out of the city and past the docks and the warehouse district. Then, it shivered off onto a gravel road that led to a small shack within spitting distance of the bay. As the woman helped him from the car, Wes complained, “I haven’t slept, it’s so loud.”
She nodded and pointed up at the trees around them. “They never sleep.”
It was then that Wes realized the trees all around them were alive with the sound in his head.
“I tried to take sleeping pills,” he began, but she only laughed and pulled him towards the gray-boarded shack.
“They never sleep,” she repeated.
“Will I ever have my hearing back right?” he asked. “I just want to go back to normal again.”
Metallica man laughed at that. “You’re chosen,” he said. “You’ll never know normal again. Just the swarm.”
With that, the man grabbed him around the throat and whispered, “Lie down” into his right ear.
“Why?” was all he could say.
“Eardrum Buzz.”
They pushed him onto a cot, and as he lay there, face buried in a dusty pillow, Wes could hear the sound in his head chime and chitter, rise and fall like the whir of an engine. It called to the noise in the trees and as it received an answer, its buzz grew more excited. The nagging pain in the back of Wes’s head grew from dull to ice-sharp, and spread to pound like a nail gun into his forehead, hammering just behind his eyes.
I’m going to die, he thought. And the thought was good.
* * *
Wes woke from a droning doze to the sound of boots. They clomped hard on the wooden floor and paced back and forth nearby.
“It’s almost time,” he heard a voice growl.
Wes opened his eyes and rolled to see the thin, saturnine features of Arachnid pacing near the cot. The singer wore his usual black leather pants and boots, and a tight, ripped T-shirt. On its black cloth surface, the white fangs of a spider opened hopefully.
“You did this to me,” Wes accused, struggling to sit up.
Arachnid shook his head. “Not me,” he grinned and pointed to Jen. “She did it. I just told her what to do.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“You want the buzz to stop, yes?”
Wes looked into Arachnid’s too-black eyes and nodded.
“Then we must release the swarm.” He lifted a pair of gardening shears from a small table and ran a finger down the sharp side of the blade. A bead of blood collected almost instantly on the tip.
It occurred to Wes that “releasing the swarm” was not a procedure that he was likely to live through.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, stalling.
“You were drawn to our music, right?” the singer said. His voice was almost, gentle.
“Yeah.”
“They are our music,” Arachnid said. “They live within each of us; it is their sound that makes Eardrum Buzz.”
“How do you live with it?” Wes whispered.
Arachnid leaned down, until Wes could smell the faint licorice and hay scent of his breath. As Wes stared at the singer’s discolored brown and gold-flecked eyes, a small black form crawled from the man’s ear. Its antennae shifted back and forth quickly, like the nervous jitter of a roach. Then, with a spread of brown and clear chitinous wings, the bug launched itself from the lobe of Arachnid’s ear and flew up in a lazy circle to land somewhere in the shadow of the pitched roof.
“They’re our children,” Arachnid grinned. “We love them.”
Wes’s stomach churned as he realized that it hadn’t been her tongue that he’d felt in his ear that night after all. Thanks to Jen’s false kisses at the party, those same bugs were inside him right now. Growing inside his ears. Rubbing tiny hairlike legs together to sing in the center of his brain.
“Bugs don’t live inside humans,” he whispered. Hoping perhaps, that by saying it, the statement would be true. But he’d seen the evidence proving his theorem false, just seconds ago.
“These do,” Arachnid smiled. “They feed off of us, just a little at a time. They can’t live without us. That’s why we’re helping them find new hosts. Soon the swarm will be strong enough to fend for itself, and find its own hosts. But right now…only one in a million survive.”
“What do they eat?” Wes whispered.
“Brains.” The singer laughed and pointed the shears at Wes’s forehead. “Right now they’re in there nibbling. Before long, if you incubated a few nests of them, you’d have a hole in your head as big as a baseball. Like our drummer, Cicada. He found them a couple years ago, when he went on a rainforest trip. But he’s hosted so many, that he’s not much there anymore, ya know? That’s why he never does interviews.”
Arachnid drew a cold steel line from Wes’s forehead to his ear.
“But you won’t have to go through that. I know you haven’t enjoyed our children. Jen and Orin have told me their song is driving you a little nuts. So we’ll just set your brood free.”
“Set them free?”
“Outpatient surgery,” Arachnid laughed brandishing the pruning shears. “Won’t take but a moment. And when we’re done…your babies will be free and the swarm will have a fresh dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Your brains.” Arachnid shoved downward with the shears like a spear thrust. But Wes had seen the tensing of his arms, and rolled just in time. He jumped to his feet as Jen and Orin grabbed him from behind.
Kicking backwards, he heard a grunt of anguish from Orin, and as one set of hands released, he spun hard to his left, catching Jen in the breast with his elbow. Like a dancer he spun in a slow circle away from the three. He lost his balance in the momentum, and staggered into the rough-hewn wall in the corner of the shack. Something rattled, as he hit the wall, and Wes grinned when he darted a glance to see what. There was a rack of old rusted gardening tools screwed to the wall.
“Just what I needed,” he whispered, and reached past a rake to nab a long, pointed spade from its hook.
Arachnid was on him before he had it fully in hand.
“Drop it,” the singer hissed. Wes felt the bite of cold metal at his throat, and he twisted backwards a step before letting his body crumple. The shovel
thumped to the floor as he released it. Before Arachnid could follow through with a stab, Wes rolled into the singer’s shins, knocking him off balance. Wes grabbed the shovel again and from a crouch on the floor, he brought it around hard to finish the job his body had started. The edge of the steel connected with Arachnid’s shins and the singer went down hard as Wes leapt up.
Orin and Jen were waiting.
They circled him, hands outstretched to grab for his shovel, to disarm him. Arachnid moaned on the floor and clutched his leg in a fetal curl.
Orin came for him. Without thinking, Wes brought the spade up and around, catching the grizzled man in the side of his shiny head with the back of the rusted blade. The man went down with a low “whoof.”
Something scratched at his neck, and Wes gasped. Jen brought her fingernails around to claw at his eyes. Wes couldn’t go forward without driving her nails into his brain, so he shoved hard in reverse, throwing his weight against her. She didn’t expect the motion and fell back, as he piledrove her into the wall. Her body slammed hard enough to rattle the window.
Jen screamed. Not a little “there’s a mouse” squeal of fear. Jen screamed a horrible, long, wrenching cry of anguish.
Wes turned to see why, and the reason fell to the floor as Jen staggered to the center of the room grabbing at her back. The rake rattled to rest, and Jen fell forward, five blooms of blood already seeping through the puncture marks in the back of her shirt. She was gasping for air, her screams cut short by a gurgle of fluid filling her lungs.
Wes backed away to the other side of the room. Orin lay where he’d fallen. A gory gash split the skin along his forehead leading to his ear. And around that ear clustered a handful of small, black, antenna-ed bugs. They buzzed, quietly, as more emerged from the black, bloody hole of Orin’s ear. They shook the crimson free as they met the air and gathered on the man’s cheek.
“Fuck,” Wes gasped, and held a hand up to his own ear. The noise in his brain escalated as he covered the canal.
Jen was shuddering on the floor, trying to crawl toward Orin. But Arachnid was no longer on the ground with them.
Arachnid was back on his feet, and moving slowly towards Wes with the shears. He was not smiling.
“It would have been painless,” the singer growled.
“For you, maybe.”
Arachnid launched forward and cut at Wes, who recoiled and tried to bring the shovel around. Too late. The blade slashed against his chest, cutting through the shirt and drawing a line of blood. He screamed and ducked as Arachnid brought the shears down again, this time aiming for his neck.
Wes threw himself sideways, and rolled over the dead weight of Orin, disturbing the small swarm that had gathered on the man’s face. Wes came to his feet in front of the door, and with one hand felt behind him for the knob. It turned as Arachnid rushed at him. Wes pushed the door as the lock released, and fell back, stumbling down the step to the ground outside.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the singer yelled, limping after him.
Wes leapt to his feet and ran around the shack, waiting for Arachnid. He didn’t wait long. The singer turned the corner, brandishing the shears.
But Wes’s reach was longer. He held the shovel like a baseball bat, and as Arachnid lunged, he brought the heavy side around, and all those years of little league paid off—in a spade. The metal tip of the garden implement connected dead-on with a clang against Arachnid’s skull. But this time, the singer didn’t just go down.
This time, the shovel cleaved his skull just above the ear. Maybe it was because the generations of Brood he’d fed had weakened his skull, or maybe it was because Wes swung that shovel damned hard.
But the top of Arachnid’s head came off as clean as a Tupperware lid. With a slight pop.
As it did, a cloud of black wings filled the air, and the world was alive with the drone of an angry, surprised hive.
The Brood.
As the droning black bugs swirled into the air, a cloud of larger insects poured like smoke from the trees all around and Wes was pummeled by legs and wings and chittering, buzzing smacks of bug.
The Swarm.
Wes dropped the shovel and ran.
He’d only gone a few yards when he realized…the swarm wasn’t after him. They hadn’t followed. The yard sounded like the inside of a beehive, but when he looked back, he saw the center of activity. Arachnid’s head.
More precisely, Arachnid’s brain. The swarm…was feeding.
There was a pain then, in his own head, and Wes felt dozens of tiny teeth pull at the inner part of his ear. Something pushed through his ear canal, and legs pricked at the lobe of his ear as it crawled out. He swatted the side of his head.
His hand came away bloody and black.
“Oh god,” he cried and slipped down to his knees. His stomach threatened to puke. These things were really alive in his head! Then he felt the creepy plucking feeling again, and this time he didn’t swat. There was a piercing cicada buzz and a small black bug flew past his face. And then another. And another. They were leaving!
His brood were going to join the swarm. For dinner.
He stifled the gorge in his throat, and his whole body shook with horror as he forced himself to remain still, kneeling, and let them go.
* * *
When he got home that night, Wes took his Eardrum Buzz CD and threw it in the garbage. Then he reached for something older. Safer. He popped in a The The disc, and sat down on the couch.
“Infected with your love,” Matt Johnson began to sing.
“Uh-uh,” Wes said, and hit the power button on the remote. The stereo went dead.
“No more infected with your anything,” he said.
As he lay back on the pillow, he realized that the drone in his head was finally gone. Mostly.
It was actually so quiet, he could hear the silence.
It buzzed.
VIOLET LAGOON
Setting Sail
“You’re sure Jess is coming?” Billy asked pointedly. “You didn’t scare her off with that Blue Lagoon shit?”
Mark shook his head and grinned. “My gal ain’t shy. She’ll be here.”
Casey nodded and popped the top on a Lite. She took a swig and then gave Billy a long kiss. When it broke, her boyfriend could barely hide a gasp. “Wow…” he said. “I could get drunk on that!”
“Jess was all into it,” Casey smiled. “Just like me. We could all use a total break from reality.”
“Well, I’d like to start that break this week,” Billy grumbled, toying with the “Captain’s wheel” of the speedboat. “I only borrowed this for three days you know.”
“We’ll get it back in time,” Mark promised. “Knowing your clients, I think you could get away with being a little late if it came to it.”
“Knowing my clients, I could be at the bottom of the bay if it’s back an hour late,” Billy answered. “Anyway, I’m reformed.”
Mark pointed to the red cooler sitting in the rear of the craft and grinned. “And I suppose you’ll tell me that there’s no secret compartment filled with Mexico’s finest beneath the false floor right about there?”
“I said reformed, not no fun,” Billy said. “And how do you know so much about drug smuggling, hmmm?”
“Well for starters, I’ve been your friend since Freshman year.”
Casey laughed and ran her hand up Mark’s shoulder. “Hey that’s right…You know, I bet you could give me a lot of good dirt on our friend here. For instance, that girl he was seeing last semester, Beth? Did he ever…”
Just then, the slim blur of a brunette came running down the dock yelling, “OK, OK, I’m late! You can make me walk the plank later. But look what I got!”
From a bulging canvass bag, Jess pulled out a few scraps of tan fabric, cut with irregular triangles. One piece was clearly meant as a loincloth, the other could have been a bikini top. Both looked like stage costumes meant for extremely scantily clad prehistoric island dwellers.
“Of course not, silly! That’s for Casey.” She reached into her sack and pulled an almost equally small loincloth and tossed it in his lap. “This one’s for you.”
Mark cocked an eyebrow and looked skeptically at her. “I know we said ‘Blue Lagoon’ and all, but do you really think we’re all going to parade around in these?”
“Well not here,” she grinned, waving at the dock, crowded with sailboats and speedboats and people milling about. It was a gorgeous summer Friday morning, and plenty of people were playing hooky and heading out to sea. On many of the decks, small groups of people were kicked back in easy chairs, taking in the sun, drinking beer for brunch and talking with friends. “But Billy promised that nobody goes to this island, it’s off the map. Totally empty. So if we’re going to ‘get away from it all’ and play Blue Lagoon for the weekend, let’s do it. We can change once we’re out near the island.”
“I don’t think you girls will stay in those outfits for long, anyway,” Billy said with an evil grin. Then he turned the key in the ignition and the motor sputtered to life. “All hands on deck,” he called, and after releasing the dock ties, they slowly began to move out into the crystal blue ocean.
The Island
Billy McAllister drove the boat borrowed from one of his former “customers” due south, navigating between various small keys, some of which were barely larger than a dune of sand with a frosting of scrub grass. He was really looking forward to this weekend, and not just for the obvious, expected benefits. After being busted for drug peddling and spending a couple years out of circulation, he’d decided to clean up his act and go back to the U of Miami to earn his botany degree. He wanted to erase all of the black marks of his last couple years of high school, and aborted first couple years of college from his mind. This Blue Lagoon trip celebrated the end of his first term back, and things were really starting to look up. He still had some connections with the people of his past, hence the boat, but he didn’t deal. And people had finally stopped asking him to. Now he had Casey, who he liked to say, put the blo in blonde (though he never said it to her face). And more importantly, semester finals had ended for all of them yesterday afternoon, and Billy felt good about his scores. This weekend, he really had a good reason to party. While it had played him poorly in the end, his checkered past had given him the ability to play tour guide for his friends. If he got nothing else out of three years of serving as the pickup man for shipments of pot, he now had a cartographer’s knowledge of all the lesser known keys south of Florida. And the one they were heading to had once been a favorite spot, since it was large enough to boast trees and an expansive beach, but remote enough to be unfrequented. In all the times he’d stopped there, he’d never seen evidence of another human being. He and his connection may have been the only two ever to set foot on the island, for all he knew.
