We surge up over a final slope, and there it is. One eye, closed forever in final repose.
Or not.
I sing out orders to my troops, and we bend to our task. Six of us crawl up to the eyelid of that one eye. The other six hurry over a sharp ridge to the other eye.
I whistle a signal, and we get to work. Six of us squirm up under the lid of each eye.
Just as we get in position, the thunderous booming approaches overhead. Gets closer and closer, until it's almost as loud as the pounding of my heart.
Then, the Beast clomps down the staggered hillside again. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. Across the great gray plain. Coming closer, ever
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
closer.
And then he stops. I hear his boots scuff the plain beside the pile of meat where we're waiting.
He shakes something, and it clatters like rattling bones. "Come out, come out, maggots! Time for a bug spray party!" There's a hissing sound, and more clattering. "Time for you to die! Then I can get back to getting this body out of my basement."
The tiniest maggot twitches beside me under the eyelid. I press against her, holding her still. Waiting for just the right moment.
"I know there're more of you down here." The Beast clomps away from us. I hear more clattering and hissing. "I'm gonna kill every last one of you."
There's more clattering, far away this time. More hissing, too.
My five brothers and sisters and I huddle close together under the eyelid. Our survival is uncertain. Sooner or later, he'll come back around...and the future's murky after that. It's hard to imagine that such tiny creatures as we could somehow vanquish someone so enormous. So relentless.
Sure enough, after a few minutes, the Beast works his way back to us. The clattering and hissing that come with him grow louder.
Almost time now, I think. I nudge the rigid form of the tiniest maggot beside me, priming her for action. She grunts, then chirp-whistles a little tune of eager readiness.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. He's almost upon us. I tense, preparing to move.
"This cellar isn't big enough for all of us." The Beast howls with laughter, his voice blasting directly above us. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
I hold my breath. It's time. Everything in my life has been leading up to this.
It's time.
"Say, Pop." The Beast's voice grows louder as he drops down to our level. "Have you seen 'em? Those freakin' maggots that got in here and came after us?"
It's time! I let out a whistle, loud enough to carry from one eye to the next. My family on the other side of the ridge will know what they need to do now.
Which starts with counting to three right after the whistle. And ends with all of us, everyone, moving at once.
One. Two. I stretch my body, and the others alongside me do the same. I hope against hope that this will work, that it will have the desired effect.
Three. All together now.
Squeeze.
The six of us squirm over the sticky eyeball, dragging the eyelid on our backs. The six maggots under the other eyelid do the same thing.
Together, we pull up the lids. We open his eyes.
For a moment, nothing else happens. The Beast falls silent. I think my plan has failed.
But the moment passes. And that's when I hear it.
A sharp intake of air. One last clatter as something metallic falls to the ground. Then a cry from the Great Beast himself. "YAAAAAHHH!"
My fellow maggots and I keep moving, pressing the eyelids higher. Opening the eyes wider.
Making the Beast scream louder. "YAAAAAAHHH!"
I poke my head out from under the eyelid just in time to see the Beast fumbling backward, wailing. His eyes are as wide as puff balls, his skin as pasty white as mine.
"Omigod omigod omigod!" He scuttles away from us, unable to see my tiny form peeking out from under the eyelid. "It can't be!" He scrambles to his feet, giving off an odor of urine and feces.
And then it happens. A surprise.
The Beast skids backward, howling. "But I killed you! I killed you myself!" Then, suddenly, one of his boots lands in a puddle of water mixed with blood.
And it slips.
As his boot flies out from under him, his towering form swoops backward. His arms flail as his enormous bulk crashes toward the vast gray plain.
He just misses catching hold of a wooden post, his last chance of stopping his fall. Both boots leave the ground, and his upper body hits hard. Hardest of all, one part of him whips back and down to strike the plain with an echoing crack.
His head. It bounces back up as I watch, spraying blood. It hits again, springs up one more time, then drops for good.
A pool of gleaming dark crimson flows from underneath that head, spreading slowly. A strangled cry gurgles up from his throat, then fades in a long, rattling sigh. And chokes off forever.
As the twelve of us maggots squirm out from under the eyelids we've been tending, we watch the Beast's final few twitches. Sniffing his scent in the air, we know the truth before he stops moving. Before his body goes limp and his bowels pour out their contents on the gray plain.
The Great Beast is not-dead no longer.
*****
You'd think all the death and destruction might kill our appetites. But it doesn't.
The Beast's body is still warm when we wriggle over to it. When the twelve of us begin our great feast.
Climbing the slopes of his monstrous form, we nibble and gulp and digest. We devour him, but not as retribution. Not because it is just.
We do it because we're hungry. Because each bite makes us grow a little more and takes us one step closer to soaring.
How long will it take to consume this massive Beast we've killed? How long until the twelve surviving maggots of our clan strip the flesh from his bones?
More than ten days, that's for sure. That's how long we feast, barely making a dent in our meal, before I lose my appetite.
*****
Just as I'm stuffing myself on pungent morsels of rotten meat, I feel the hunger draining out of me. I try to force myself to take one more bite, but I can't do it.
The tiniest maggot, who's gorging herself nearby, notices I've run out of steam and asks what's wrong. Nothing to worry about, I tell her. I just need to take a little rest.
Bloated from weeks of nonstop feasting, I drag myself down from the mountain of Beast meat. I trundle across the gray plain, moving at a slow crawl because I'm overstuffed.
I feel a twinge of sadness as I creep past the shriveled rinds of my long-dead brothers and sisters. If only they could have shared this incredible feast with us.
Or is the feast itself a danger? I feel sluggish and sick; my guts are churning, my skin parched. Did the Great Beast's flesh poison me?
I feel like I just want to crawl under a rock and hide. With no rocks in sight, I head for the giant white cliff instead. I find the hole at the base of the cliff, the hole where the tiniest maggot and I once planned to hide from the Beast. I crawl inside, push as far back into the dank darkness as I can, and curl up into a ball.
Then, shivering, I drift off to sleep.
*****
Two weeks later, I awaken in the hole at the base of the cliff...and I'm a new person. Completely transformed.
Clambering out of the hole into the light, I stretch my spindly new legs and sniff the cool, humid air. I take a look around with my multifaceted eyes, catching every detail of the world in all directions.
The Great Beast's body lies in the same place I left it, sprawled on the plain. More of his flesh has been nibbled away by my family, leaving him pockmarked from the work of a dozen tiny jaws. What hasn't been chewed by maggots has been eaten away by the unseen hordes of the bringers of rot.
The other corpse, our original meal before the coming of the Beast, has been eaten away, too. There isn't much meat left on that one at all; he's little more than a pile of gristle and bones.
The Beast's metal po
t, the one he carried the boiling water in, still lies on its side near the white cliff. The metal spray can he once brandished lies near his body.
But nowhere do I see a living maggot. No glistening pale worms wriggling through rotting flesh or squirming along a scarlet blood trail. My magnificent new vision catches not a trace of my brothers and sisters anywhere.
Then, suddenly, something catches my eye. A dark object hurtling through the air above the dead meat on the plain.
And I laugh. Of course! I should've known!
Another dark object zips past the first, and then another and another and another. I count five, then six, then seven, every one of them making a soft buzzing sound that's music to my ears.
I count eleven of them. I should've known.
If I've changed, then they must've changed, too. All my brothers and sisters, radically transforming as their lifelong dreams came true.
Like them, I've been getting ready for this for as long as I can remember. Rehearsing it in my dreams.
I shake out the wings on my back and set them flickering faster and faster. My black body lifts from the plain, just a little...then a little more.
Then a lot. Leaping up into the air, I swoop across the world and join my brothers and sisters. Laughing, they do loop-de-loops around me, swirling and zigging and zagging with the greatest of ease.
One of them brushes me with the tips of her wings, then swoops around in front of me. Her tubelike new proboscis curls up in what I know is a loving smile. I can tell from her chirping whistle that she's the tiniest maggot, reborn.
Pure joy surges within me, and I dance with her in midair. My family and I have made it through the nightmare, defeated the Beast, and become stronger by feasting on his flesh. We, the proud survivors, have made it through the crucible and become what we were born to become, doing what we have always longed to do.
We are soaring.
*****
Special Preview: Bloodliner
By Robert T. Jeschonek
Now on sale!
Jonah was drunk, pissed at the world, fresh from his mom and dad's viewing at the funeral home...and he was playing what might have been his best gig ever.
He had always been good, but he was great that night. He ripped through every song with unusual precision and ferocity. Instead of note-perfect renditions, he brought each solo alive with newfound fire and surprise. He pushed the whole band to a new level, and he could tell they loved it.
As they drove through one Jethro Tull classic after another, from "Locomotive Breath" to "Thick as a Brick," all four musicians grinned with rare and predatory intensity. It wasn't just a run-of-the-mill gig.
Too bad hardly anyone was there to see it.
The bar, a downtown Tucson dive joint called Halcyon, was tiny...and nowhere near full. Not counting the bartender, Jonah didn't see more than ten people in the room at the same time that night.
But he played for those ten people like he was playing for a full house. Like he was playing with something to prove.
Something to forget.
The audience, small as it was, definitely caught the vibe and egged on the band. It was the kind of give-and-take that Jonah thrived on, with band and audience equally focused and serious and unified.
And some were more focused than others. One, in particular, was focused hard on Jonah.
She looked twenty-something, with shoulder-length blonde hair and impossibly bright blue eyes. A tight-fitting white tank top and black leather skirt hugged the curves of her perfectly sloped and rounded body.
If she ever took her eyes off Jonah, he didn't see it happen. She watched every move he made and locked eyes with him every time he looked out at her.
She didn't seem to be with anyone. She just stood with a bottle of beer in her hand, six feet away from Jonah, dancing to every single song with supple, undulating movements.
Which, naturally, made him play with even more fire. He had a pretty good idea what might be coming next.
Sure enough, at the end of the first set, the girl made a beeline for him. With a silent, knowing smile, she wrapped his hand in her own and led him out the back door into the alley outside.
Then, she closed the door behind them and pinned him against the wall.
Jonah's heart pounded as she flexed her body against his. Her hands, where they locked his wrists to the wall, were cold, but her gaze was filled with heat.
"You were amazing in there." Her throaty voice was a purr. "I am so turned on right now."
"I know the feeling." Jonah grinned. Playing with the band had taken his mind off his troubles a little. Maybe the blonde would take his mind the rest of the way off, if only for a while.
Without another word, the girl moved in for a kiss. Jonah's heart beat even faster as he finally made the contact he'd been anticipating for so long.
But the kiss was not quite what he'd expected.
The girl's lips were freezing cold, as if she'd just eaten ice cream or gone swimming. There wasn't the slightest trace of warmth anywhere in her kiss.
Jonah pulled back. "Are you chilly?" Even as he asked the question, he couldn't imagine that she could possibly feel cold in that alley. It was a hot desert night in Tucson, probably in the nineties...plus which, heat was rolling off an air conditioning unit in the window a few yards away.
"Low blood pressure. But we can fix that." The girl moved in for another kiss. Her fingers latched onto his belt buckle.
"We need you," said the girl.
We? That was when Jonah realized something wasn't right.
He suddenly felt much hotter than he thought he should. His lower body, in fact, was quickly becoming uncomfortable, as if he were standing too close to a hot stove.
Jonah looked down...and immediately wished he hadn't.
He'd never seen anything like it. Thin streams of blood projected from the tops of his legs--a dozen streams per leg punching right through his clothing. They met in a glistening red veil that hung suspended in midair, rippling mere inches from the girl's face. As Jonah watched, new streams burst from his legs and added their crimson liquid to the veil.
"What the hell?" said Jonah. "What are you doing?"
But the girl did not answer.
Get out of here. Now.
Jonah was in for another shock when he tried to escape: his hands were stuck to the wall, and his feet were locked to the floor of the alley.
He couldn't move.
What's going on here?
Then, it got worse.
The girl opened her mouth wide, and red filaments reached toward her from the veil. The sinuous filaments twisted and writhed as they flowed between her scarlet lips and over her jet black tongue.
Black tongue? Black tongue?!? Why didn't I notice that before?
The girl spoke without closing her mouth. The red filaments splashed against the tip of her tongue when it moved. "How delicious," she said. "I love you."
She's a vampire! Vampires are real!
"I'll blow you a kiss," she said, and then she puckered her lips and squirted a flume of blood toward Jonah's face.
The blood stopped in front of his nose and hung in midair. It curled and contorted and rotated, forming into a gleaming red shape.
A throbbing cartoon heart the size of a quarter.
Since when can vampires do this kind of crazy stuff?
The girl giggled. "Happy birthday, baby," she said. "Wait'll you see what comes next."
Jonah couldn't take his eyes off the floating cartoon heart. It changed as he watched, twisting and kneading itself into a new shape.
A skull and crossbones.
That was when Jonah finally tried to scream. He tried with all his strength to scream as loud as he could.
And when no sound emerged from his throat, he tried to scream even louder.
*****
It was as if someone had heard Jonah's silent cry. Seconds after he tried in vain to scream his head off, the sound of gunfire crackled in the all
ey.
Multiple impacts shook the blood-drinking girl and pitched her from her knees to the dusty floor of the alley. As she dropped, so did the veil and filaments of blood. So did the floating skull and crossbones. All of it lost shape immediately and plunged down in one big splatter on the pavement.
In the same instant, Jonah regained some of the movement in his extremities. His arms and legs still felt heavy and stiff, but at least he could finally change position.
Now, if he could just avoid getting shot.
As Jonah stepped away from the wall, a figure moved out of the shadows. The first thing Jonah saw coming toward him was the smoking barrel of a gun.
A machine gun. Pointed right at him.
Then, he heard a familiar voice. "This is what it's all about." A female voice. "Protection."
Jonah was kind of shell-shocked, but he realized who was doing the talking just before she stepped fully into view.
"Stanza." Jonah didn't rush to her side right away. For one thing, he hardly knew her. For another, as relieved as he was to see a fellow non-vampire...
How do I know she isn't a vampire, too?
"What's going on here?" said Jonah as he buckled his belt.
"Did you know I get a bonus every time I save your life?" Stanza grabbed him by the arm and yanked him around to stand behind her. "And if you die, I get nothing."
"Nothing?" said Jonah.
"Not one red cent. So stay here." With that, Stanza moved forward, keeping the machine gun pointed at the blood-spattered blonde on the alley pavement.
The blonde lifted her head and glared. "Bitch." She hissed the word through clenched teeth. "You just became my main course."
Stanza fired more rounds into the vampire's chest, flinging her back and bouncing her off the pavement. "I've got three words for you," she said, waving the machine gun. "Black ironwood points."
The vampire howled in pain and clutched at the seeping red blossom over her heart. She suddenly lunged forward, clawing with one taloned hand at Stanza...but another burst from the machine gun threw her back again.
Diary of a Maggot Page 2
