Violet Eyes

by John Everson

  “Well…” she began.

  The puppy turned away from Eric at the sound of her voice and shimmied over to sniff excitedly at the cuffs of her capris. The warmth of his breath on her bare calf tickled.

  “All right,” Rachel laughed, bending down to pet the small head that bobbed even more frantically at her touch. “He can stay overnight. After that…we’ll have to see. Having a dog is a big responsibility.”

  Eric’s hopeful grin spread wide and he threw his arms around her. “You’ll love him, I know you will.”

  Rachel nodded with a sad smile. Loving someone didn’t always mean you wanted to live with them. But, she supposed, Eric would have to learn that lesson soon enough. It seemed that everybody did, sooner or later.

  “So, tell me about your day,” Rachel urged, as she moved back and forth from the stove to the refrigerator, trying to pull together a makeshift dinner in record time.

  Eric cooed over the puppy in the corner, scratching its head and belly. “It was fine,” he said.

  “Fine?” she laughed. “That’s all you can say about it?”

  “Well, what do you want?” he answered. His voice was sterner now. “Do you want to hear about how Mr. Verger gave me a C on our pop quiz in Earth Science because I didn’t know that paleontologists study dinosaurs? Or that this bitch Jamie Ketch…”

  “Language!”

  “Okay, this jerk Jamie Ketch flipped my lunch onto the cafeteria floor for a joke?”

  “So you’re not liking the new school so far?” Rachel said quietly, cracking an egg over the mix of breadcrumbs and hamburger meat on the plate in front of her. She’d been afraid of the adjustment he was going to have to make, transferring into a school at the end of the term. And that he might not make it, just because he didn’t want to be here.

  “It’s not all bad.” He shrugged. “I met Tracie. And her dogs.”

  “Hmmm.” Rachel nodded. “So you like her?”

  “She’s cool,” Eric agreed. “She plays DS a lot, so she was giving me some good cheats.”

  “Great,” Rachel said. “As if you need to spend more time on video games.”

  Eric raised one falsely innocent eye. “Well, if we can keep the puppy, I’ll have to spend a lot more time with him.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rachel said. “I’m not cleaning up dog crap from the backyard every day. I’ve already got to clean the dishes and your laundry.”

  Eric bent down and cradled the pup in his arms, and was quickly rewarded by a wet, pink tongue in the face. “I’ll take care of him, Mom, just like you take care of me.”

  Something in Rachel’s chest melted, and she found she couldn’t say a word. Instead, she just blinked back tears as she smashed the hamburger mix into meatballs and dropped them into the hot grease of the pan.

  She knew in her heart that no matter what she said, the dog wasn’t going back to Tracie’s tomorrow. And maybe that was okay. Life was moving on. And new life moving in. That’s why she’d come here, right?

  To start fresh.

  After dinner, Rachel cleared the table and led them to the front room to the couch. “C’mon,” she called. “It’s been a long day.”

  As she sank into the cushions with a deep sigh, Eric grinned and hopped up beside her. The dachshund struggled to join them, paws up on the cushions, but not quite able to leap high enough to complete the jump. Rachel smiled at the anxiousness of its gaze as its tiny back feet pushed up and up and up…until Eric reached down, slipped his small hands beneath the dog’s equally small front legs and pulled the puppy up to join them. The dachshund settled its head on Eric’s thigh, tongue lolling out with gasping breaths.

  Rachel flicked the TV on to the news. Allie Keblancas, a young blonde reporter, was standing on a beach, the ocean behind her. Despite the business jacket, she looked like the kind of girl you’d find sipping rum and playing volleyball out there on the sand. But instead of looking ready to slip into a bikini, her eyes were stern, her voice deadly serious.

  “We’re here with Billy McAllister,” she announced, as the camera swung to the right to reveal a well-tanned young guy with a curly mane of sun-blond hair. “Last Friday, he and three friends got on a boat and headed out on the water in what was intended to be a private vacation on one of the tiny Keys just behind me. But when that boat returned, Billy was the only one of the four left alive. He brought home the bodies of his friends, and a horrible story.”

  The camera flashed on the sad face of the tanned man before Allie continued.

  “On Friday, the four friends landed on an empty island, set up their tents and got ready for their own private weekend of fun in the sun.” She paused for dramatic effect, looking straight into the camera before saying, “But things didn’t end up going quite as they planned. On Sunday, Billy McAllister returned from their weekend vacation alone. His friends had been killed on Sheila Key, the victims of some kind of mutant, deadly swarm of flies. Billy, can you tell us, what happened back there on that island?”

  The camera focused on Billy McAllister, who shook his mane of gold curls and rolled his eyes. “It was horrible,” he said. “There were flies everywhere. They came out of the trees and the grass and they literally just covered Mark and Jess…”

  “Did the flies poison them?” the reporter asked, and the camera focused in perfectly on McAllister’s pained face.

  “No,” he said. “They ate them alive.”

  “Gross,” Eric said. “His friends were eaten by flies?”

  “See, that’s why I’m always telling you to keep the door closed,” Rachel said. “We don’t want the bugs getting in.” She reached over and tickled her son with spider-crawling fingers. “They’ll chew you up and spit you out!”

  Eric laughed and dodged her touch. “Seriously? I don’t think bugs can really eat people!”

  Rachel raised both eyebrows and gestured at the TV. “That’s not what he says!”

  On the TV, Billy McAllister was talking about how they’d initially been attacked on the far side of the island by swarms of flies, before hiding out in an abandoned hut.

  “Why were you so far away from your boat and supplies?” Allie Keblancas asked.

  Billy shook his head. “We were trying to get away from the spiders.”

  “I thought you were attacked by flies,” Keblancas said, tilting her head in mimed confusion.

  “That was after we ran from the spiders.”

  Chapter Four

  Passanattee

  Wednesday, May 8. 4:30 a.m.

  A faint, but persistent whine stabbed through the silence of the small bungalow. Rachel stirred from a dream that she instantly could not remember…yet her spine was still tight with the tension of whatever imagined stressful situation her unconscious had been spinning.

  She had a vague memory of running. And the smell of alcohol. And the feeling of knuckles pressed against her lips.

  She did not feel rested.

  And as she strained to decipher what the source of the sound was that had awakened her, she realized that rested or not, she was going to have to get out of bed. Something much smaller than herself called. Something helpless.

  She’d told Eric that if they kept the dog, he was going to have to look after it, but she knew how deeply her son slept. He wouldn’t be stumbling from his bed to the kitchen at 4:30 a.m. to let the dachshund out.

  That was her job. And no matter what promises she’d elicited from Eric, she’d known it would be from the moment the warm brush of fur had slipped around her ankles last night. Stifling a yawn with her fist, Rachel shambled down the short hall to the kitchen. The dachshund’s eyes glimmered in the faint light of not-quite-dawn. She could barely see anything in the room, but she could see the spark in the dog’s eyes. The electricity of life. The urgency of life caged and desperate.

  Rachel flipped the overhead light on and then could see that the dog’s snout was pressed up against the cage she’d set him up in for the night. Someone had told her that a dog would b
e less likely to pee in its own bed; the trick was in keeping its bed small and answering its first notes of discomfort quickly. Manage to answer that call and get the animal outside a few times, and it would form the habit of “hold-it until master comes to let me out”.

  Rachel didn’t know how long the dog had been whining, but when she opened the cage and clipped the leash onto its collar, she didn’t notice any wet spots. She raised an eyebrow in surprise at that. She was not normally that light of a sleeper, and figured the dog might have let go before she’d awoken. But good. One thing had gone right before dawn… She took a deep breath.

  “C’mon, boy, let’s get the lead out. Or something.”

  She pulled him to the back door and in a few seconds, they were both outside. She was barefoot, but didn’t really care enough to put shoes on. She’d been warned about fire ants, but Rachel figured that the only creatures awake right now were those who were too stupid to say no to having a dog join the household.

  Unlike her.

  The dog pulled her down the steps from the back porch and into the damp grass. It only took seconds for it to “assume the position” and then it was doing its business. Rachel took a deep breath and leaned her head back to stare up at the sky. The stars were out in force. In another hour or so they’d be fading, but at this moment…the world was still pregnant with a day unborn. A dark, still place, with just a whisper of a breeze slipping inland from the ocean not so very far away. The air smelled moist and rich with life.

  In that moment before dawn, Rachel felt a flood of true hope in her bones. She and Eric hadn’t moved across the country to come here, but she thought it was far enough to separate her from Anders, and the horrible decade of her life that she wanted to forget.

  She stared at the faint outlines of the cypress trees that marked the divide between her subdivision and the Everglades. Trees that had sheltered secrets for decades. Trees that marked the exit of civilization, and the entrance to the ancient wilds.

  She hoped those silent trees would accept her secrets, that she could bury her history and hide them forever beneath those sheltering branches in the coming weeks. Maybe here, in the shadows of the borderlands, she could shed her old skin of pathetic dependency and grow new wings of independence. Certainly she had a good start, just by packing her things and moving. But now that she’d stopped, and set up house, she had to make sure she didn’t backslide.

  Rachel had never done well with being alone. And while she knew that about herself, it had never stopped her from falling into one destructive relationship after another.

  The movement of the leash brought her awareness back from the sky to the shadows closer to the ground. Responsibilities now at hand. A cold nose pressed against her shin and Rachel couldn’t help but smile at the contact. She bent down to run her fingers across the tight fur between the needy dachshund’s ears. This little life depended on her now. Along with the life of that little boy sleeping just a few yards away, inside. Oblivious to the fact that his mom had gotten up to take his dog out.

  She had to change the habits that had brought her here. She had to stand up for herself, learn to depend only on herself. She had to be strong.

  Rachel lifted the pup into her arms and held him close beneath the light of the distant stars. “Don’t worry, bud,” she whispered, brushing her lips against his fur. “I won’t screw it up this time. I’ll take care of you.”

  The dachshund turned its tiny head to face hers and made a faint whimper. Then a warm pink tongue slipped across her lips.

  Rachel wiped off the canine kiss with the back of her hand and set the dog on the steps back to the house.

  “Figures,” she said. “Best kiss I get in a month and it’s from a dog.”

  The happy mewl of the dachshund didn’t really improve her mood. “I’m going back to bed,” she warned, as she set the dog back down on the blanket, inside its cage. “Don’t make 4 a.m. a habit.”

  Across the street, Billy McAllister stirred in his bed. He wasn’t awoken by the whine of a dog or the demands of responsibility.

  He was awoken by a dull pain behind his eyes.

  He shifted on his pillow, first resting his head one way, and then the other. He fluffed the pillow with his hand and pressed it back and forth beneath his head.

  No matter how he lay, it didn’t matter.

  Instead of feeling comfortable, he felt like he wanted to explode.

  Billy pressed his eyes shut, as if by closing them hard, he could shut out the images that plagued his brain from his last hours on Sheila Key. Images of his friends, lying in the sand, covered in thousands of creeping, eager legs. Screaming as those eager legs propelled a thousand hungry mouths. Screaming as the silver cloud from the pesticide canister they’d found in the Quonset hut had covered them, and brought an even worse fate than being eaten.

  “I didn’t know,” he whispered to the darkness of his room. “I swear I didn’t know.”

  But the ache in his head and the vision of Casey’s half-eaten corpse lying there broken, in the jungle, didn’t bring him any comfort.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he whispered, as he tried to rub away the throbbing pain in his forehead.

  Eventually, as the hum of the insects outside greeted the rising sun, he slipped back into a troubled sleep.

  Chapter Five

  Sheila Key

  Wednesday, May 8. 6:47 a.m.

  Two hours ago, Special Agent Peter Skiles had been asleep in his bed, dreaming of things best not described in mixed company. That was before the red phone secreted in his headboard rang. That was before he’d listened to the story from the other end of the line, taking no notes that could be discovered, but memorizing every word. And it all boiled down to one word, really: Containment.

  Twenty minutes later he’d met and taken a helicopter down the coast to meet Gordon James at the dock. They’d worked together on reconnaissance and cleanup before, and Peter knew that the boat would be ready to go as soon as he arrived.

  It was.

  Gordon shook his hand and Peter flashed a short smile. “Been a while,” he said. They’d worked together on “dirty” missions before. Such missions weren’t complete until both men pronounced the situation “clean”.

  Gordon shrugged. “Time is relative.”

  “Let’s see what all the fuss is about this time,” Peter murmured, and dropped his duffel bag inside the small captain’s hut. Moments later the seemingly innocuous craft had slipped away from shore. When they were far enough out to escape any prying eyes, Gordon reached up to the controls and warned, “Hold on to your hats.”

  “I don’t wear a hat.” Peter shrugged.

  “Hold on to anything you want to keep,” Gordon qualified. He pulled the throttle down and hit a button, and the boat shot forward; it nearly leapt out of the water.

  Peter said nothing, but grinned and nodded as the knuckles of his hands turned white from the effort of holding on to the railing.

  They pulled up to a small dock just as dawn was breaking on the island. The place appeared empty, but Peter took no chances. Gordon stayed on the boat, in radio contact, while Peter pulled on a special protective jumpsuit, and holstered a mini flamethrower. Then he walked down a path into the island’s lush greenery. He’d studied a map of the installation while Gordon navigated to the small Key.

  The place was silent…there was no noise but the distant rush of the surf. He found the silver Quonset hut set back in the forest, and tried the door. It fell open easily, not even fully closed. The smell hit him as soon as he stepped inside. He found the researcher lying on the floor, a cascade of glass vials shattered near his body. His mouth was locked open in a scream of pain, but Peter couldn’t see the expression of his eyes…because they were gone. Black sockets looked back at him from the man’s skull, and a puddle of blood or brains or…something spread around his head. Peter kicked the door all the way open and dragged the man’s body out of the hut. He laid it near the side of the hut before goin
g back inside to search the place more thoroughly…wasn’t going to do that with a body staring back at him.

  The scientific team from Innovative Industries had been sent back to the island on Monday after the reports that some college kids had been eaten alive here by a strange breed of flies. This covert double I. installation had been shut down two years ago. Cleaned out.

  Abandoned.

  Apparently someone had missed something the first time around. Because the things that Innovative Industries had been experimenting with clearly weren’t dead. Apparently the team had tried to validate and address the situation on their own, but when radio contact with the research team had suddenly ceased last night, I.I. had finally had to come clean and inform the government that there “might be” a problem.

  Remembering that data point, he checked to see that his own radio still worked, looked at the logs and then pulled out a bag from the case on his shoulder. He set it on the lab’s long counter and carefully filled his bag with a series of bottles that the I.I. team had apparently gathered. Inside the glass were dozens of insects. Specimen after specimen of strange-looking spiders and flies. Specimens collected by the research team over the past two days since the reports had surfaced on the news about the college kids. The news story had already run its course; by the time the government was aware of a possible connection between a “Spring Break gone wrong” and the abandoned I.I. installation, the media had moved on to other stories.

  He slipped a notebook and a series of chemical flasks, labeled simply G102, G126, G187 into a carrying case and walked out of the hut. He stopped at the body to give it one last look, and noticed a dried stream of blood down a clenched fist. Peter bent down and carefully pried open the fingers until fragments of a glass test tube fell out, He lifted the one piece with a black marker label on it and read it out loud. H1, it said.

  Something moved in the brush behind him, and Peter looked up to see something flash down the trail. He leapt to follow, and chased a flash of white across the small island until the figure stumbled and fell to the sand. When he caught up with the man, he saw a trail of something faintly purple moving across the man’s cheek. Blood dripped from the man’s ear to the sand, and his eyes were bugged out and manic. The guy looked ready to pop.