Violet Eyes

by John Everson

  “Only good thing you ever did in your life,” she retorted.

  “That’s not what you said when you were down on your knees with your mouth on my…”

  “Enough,” Terry said. “Eric doesn’t need to hear that kind of crap.”

  “Nope,” Anders said, nodding his head slowly. He began to raise himself out of the tub. “Nope, he doesn’t. And I’m glad you reminded me.”

  Anders stood up, water sluicing off his barrel chest to splash in the tub. He stood five eleven and two hundred forty pounds, and looked as if he’d been attacked by an army of mosquitoes…or wasps. His broad belly and legs were as covered by red marks and swellings as his arms. “I didn’t come here to argue with my family,” he said. “I came here to take them home. And it looks like I did just in time; this place is not safe for a kid. It almost killed me!”

  “That’s what you get for peeping in people’s windows,” Rachel said. She stepped back as Anders threatened to advance. But Terry didn’t move. Instead he put a hand on the wet man’s chest.

  “Far enough,” he said quietly. “Let’s keep this friendly.”

  Anders slapped Terry’s hand away and laughed. “If I let you hang around long enough, you’d learn that little Rachel here doesn’t need it friendly so much. She likes it mean and dirty.”

  Terry pulled a towel off the wall and threw it at Anders. “Get dried off,” he said. “Your clothes are on the bed in the first room down the hall. You look like you’ve recovered enough to get right back out there on the road. I’d suggest you have a doctor look at those bites.”

  Anders shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere without Rachel and Eric,” he said. “So butt the hell out. I hope you had a good time with my wife, cuz that’s the last time you’re laying a finger on her.”

  “I’m not your wife anymore,” Rachel said.

  Anders pushed Terry back to the wall and began to step towards her. But Terry didn’t let him by. He grabbed the larger man’s arms from behind. “Cut this shit out now or I’m calling the police,” Terry warned.

  Anders swung his body to the right, and smashed Terry’s shoulder into the wall. Then he flipped around as Terry lost his grip, and reached out with his freed hand to clench Terry’s shirt. “Yer gonna get hurt, asshole,” he warned.

  “Dad, stop it!” Eric yelled. He’d been standing quiet in the hallway. His eyes were wide; he looked about to cry. “Please,” he pleaded.

  Anders scrunched his nose, looking Terry up and down. Then he released him and bent to pick up his towel from where it had fallen on the floor. “I’m gonna get dressed, and then we’re going to have a little talk,” he said, pushing past Rachel to step into the hallway. He put a hand on Eric’s head and ruffled his son’s hair before bending down to kiss the boy on the cheek. “Not the way I wanted you to see me,” he said. His voice was tender towards the boy; he sounded like a different man entirely. “Let me get my clothes and you can tell me about what you’ve been doin’.”

  Rachel put her hand on Eric’s back and urged him towards the front room. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”

  She and Eric sat down on the couch while Terry sat down on the edge of a cushioned easy chair. He didn’t lean back however, crouching on the edge, ready to leap up. He’d stashed Anders’s gun in Rachel’s room, but who knew what the Neanderthal would try once he was back in his old skin.

  “You’ve got somethin’ of mine,” Anders said, when he stepped into the front room.

  Terry nodded. “And you’ll get it back as soon as you’re out of this house.”

  Anders shrugged. “I don’t need it to deal with the likes of you.”

  “What do you want?” Rachel asked.

  “I told you that. I’m taking you and Eric back home, where you belong.”

  Rachel stood up and put her hands on the big man’s shoulders. “Anders, you have to let me go. I don’t want to be with you anymore, I really don’t.”

  Anders nodded. His face said he didn’t believe her one bit. “I made you the happiest you’d ever been,” he said, reminding her of something she’d once said to him.

  “That was then,” she answered. “I’ve been happier these past few weeks than I was for the past few years with you. I’m sorry but…things are different now.”

  “Are they?” Anders grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her down in one motion to the floor. Her knees thumped, and Anders grabbed her by the hair and pushed her face to his crotch and held it there. “You like this,” he said. “You’ve always liked it just like this.”

  She struggled against him, pounding at his thighs with her fists. Terry stood up.

  “Don’t do this in front of your son,” Terry said. His voice was cold. “This isn’t how you want him to remember you.”

  Anders grinned. “Eric knows I’m a good dad. What’s between me and his ma is our business. And I happen to know that while she pretends that she wants to get away, she is getting off on this. Trust me.”

  “Let her go.”

  Anders laughed, and pulled Rachel up from the floor. But he didn’t release her. He kept one burly arm locked around her waist. He leaned his face close to hers from behind, and she grimaced and tried to move her cheek away from the stubble of his.

  “You were getting excited down there, weren’t you?” he said.

  “No,” she said through gritted teeth. “Get your hands off of me, now!”

  Anders stared directly at Terry. “You don’t know what you’ve got here, I’m bettin’. You might think she wants the doors all opened for her. You probably brought her roses or some shit. That’s nice for a little bit, but she’ll get bored, I’m tellin’ you. She needs it the way I can give it. She wants it.”

  “I do not!” Rachel yelled, struggling to escape.

  Anders laughed and in a quick motion, thrust his hand beneath the waistband of her sweat shorts to finger her sex. He quickly drew that finger back out and held it up for Terry to see. The tip glistened faintly with moisture.

  “I know you better than you know yourself,” Anders laughed. “You like it on your knees. You need it.”

  “You are a pig!” Rachel screamed as he released her. “Eric and I are not going anywhere with you.”

  “Stop it!” Terry yelled. On the couch, Eric had curled up into a ball, his arms holding his legs folded up to his chest. His cheeks were wet.

  “Look at what you’re doing to your son,” Terry said. His voice was quiet, but demanded attention. “If you care about him or Rachel, you’ve got to stop this. Sit down and act like a real man, not an imbecile.”

  “You’ve got no part of this,” Anders said.

  “You’ve got no hold on Rachel anymore,” Terry said. “And if you want to be allowed to see your son again, you’d better get it together.”

  “My finger says I do have a hold on my wife,” Anders said.

  “Ex-wife,” Rachel corrected.

  “And I came here to take them both home. You’ve got nothing to say about it, so get the hell out of here before I really do have to hurt you.”

  “Nobody’s going anywhere right now,” Terry warned. “Just take a look out there. We’ve got bigger problems right now than your wounded pride.”

  He pointed to the window, and watched the color change on Anders’s face as he stared outside. The swarm that Eric had been watching continued to flood the air just a few feet away. The flies almost looked like a solid wave as they moved in a tornado spiral across the yard. The air was dirty and violet. The buzz of the swarm sent a low hum through the house.

  “None of us are leaving here,” Terry said quietly. “We’d get stung to death before we got five steps out there.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Anders said, stepping towards the window. “What kind of a place did you bring our son to?”

  “This isn’t the way it normally is,” Rachel said. “Something horrible has happened.”

  “We thought it was a migration at first,” Terry said.
“But now I don’t think so. I work for the conservation department and I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this.”

  “Conservation department?” Anders said. “What does that mean?”

  “I work in the Everglades,” Terry said.

  “He rescues alligators sometimes,” Eric volunteered.

  Anders grinned and looked at Rachel. “So you got yourself a Crocodile Dundee, didja?” He nodded. “Does he wrestle you like a ’gator?”

  Rachel glared at him, and Terry interrupted. “The news reported at first that these things were coming out of the ’glades, but I’ve never seen a spider or fly quite like these before. If it’s a migration, I don’t know where they are migrating from.”

  “This isn’t a migration, it’s a fuckin’ plague,” Anders said.

  Terry nodded. “That’s kind of what I was thinking.”

  “Well, I can tell you, it’s not like this outside of this shithole town,” Anders said. “Everything was normal until I got off the Interstate. I’m taking my family out of here.”

  “I’m not your family anymore,” Rachel said, but Anders ignored her.

  “It’s safer inside right now,” Terry insisted. “Let’s see what they’re saying on the news. They’ve got to be doing something about this by now.”

  He picked up the TV remote, and hit the power button. The Sanyo flat screen came to life in a barrage of snow. Terry clicked the channel changer over and over again, but the green LED numbers ascended from 2 to 15 without running into an operating channel.

  “Let me see,” Eric said, and grabbed the remote. He hit his favorite channels—32, 57, 122—and the results were the same.

  Terry took the remote back and thumbed off the power. The sound of static was replaced again with the low buzz of a million wings.

  “Cable must be out,” he said. “Do you have a radio?”

  Rachel nodded and walked into the kitchen. She kept a clock radio there with an iPod dock for when she was cooking. Terry followed her, with Anders and Eric close behind.

  The sounds of static again filled the house. The growl of the sonic fuzz rose and twisted as she scrolled down the dial from 87.9 to 107. But no music or voices emerged from any spot on the dial.

  When Rachel looked up from the radio, her face was pale. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  Terry shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Let me call Brian up at headquarters and see if he knows anything.”

  He pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket and thumbed it on. His fingers punched across the buttons, and then he raised the phone to his ear. After a minute, he brought it back down, and hit the buttons again. This time, he didn’t lift the phone to his face; he stared at the screen. Finally, without changing expression, he clicked the phone back to standby, and shoved it back into his pocket. Then he looked first at Rachel and then at Anders.

  “No signal at all,” he said.

  “How can that be?” Rachel said. Panic rose in her voice. “How can the TV, the radio and the cell phones be out at once, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Somehow the swarm is disrupting radio transmissions?” Terry said, shrugging. “I don’t know.”

  Rachel picked up the phone from the kitchen counter and turned it on. Instead of a dial tone, the speaker emitted the now-familiar sound of static.

  “We’re all alone here,” she said.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Tuesday, May 21. 7:20 a.m.

  “Mom, I’m scared,” Eric said.

  Rachel put her arm around him, and Eric hugged her tight. Tighter than he’d hugged her since before the divorce, she thought. And they’d had some pretty emotional times in the interim.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” she promised. “We’re safe here inside the house.”

  “Oh yeah?” Anders said. His palm slapped the kitchen counter, and came back a black-and-violet smear. “They can get in.”

  “I think we can handle a few strays,” Terry said.

  “Yeah, well, once they get on our scent…” Anders said.

  “They’re not dogs,” Terry answered.

  “Maybe not,” Anders said. “But bugs can follow a scent. You ever watch an ant trail? They talk. And these things are hungry.” He held out his arm to show the bites. And as he did, he grimaced. Anders put a hand across his forehead, and rubbed for a minute.

  “What’s the matter?” Rachel asked.

  “I was bit by a hundred spiders, that’s what’s the matter,” he said. His voice sounded less sure of himself than he had just a few moments before. The fire was gone. “I’ve gotta sit down.”

  Anders walked back to the front room. As he turned to sit on the couch, his legs gave way, and he fell to the cushions. Eric didn’t miss the stumble.

  “Dad?” he said, and ran to the couch. “Are you okay?”

  Anders nodded, but didn’t take his hand from his forehead. A moment later, his head rolled back on the cushion, and his hand fell to his lap.

  “Mom, come here!” Eric screamed. Terry and Rachel ran to him. Terry put his head to Anders’s chest for a second, and then put a finger to the man’s throat. When he looked up, he smiled thinly. “He’s fine,” he said. “Heart’s strong, breathing’s easy. His body’s just in rebellion. He needs to rest to work through the poison.”

  “Is he going to be okay?” Eric asked. The panic in his voice grew with each word. “Is my dad going to be okay?” The boy held his father’s limp hand.

  Terry put a hand on Eric’s shoulder. “He’ll be fine,” he said. “He just needs to sleep awhile.”

  Eric crawled up onto the couch next to Anders and put his head on the big man’s chest. He didn’t say anything, but it was easy to read the expression on his face.

  “Eric,” Rachel said, leaning in to stroke her son’s head. He shrugged her away, not looking up from Anders.

  Terry tapped Rachel’s arm, and silently gestured to the kitchen. She followed him there, leaving Eric alone with his dad.

  “What should we do?” Rachel looked up at Terry’s face, as if expecting him to have a solution to the whole mess.

  “Let them be,” he said. “Right now, Anders needs to sleep. And Eric needs…his father.”

  “He’s an asshole,” she hissed.

  “But he’s Eric’s dad. Nothing you say about him can ever change that. Eric will eventually need to make his own decisions there. But this isn’t the time to call the question.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Terry looked at the swarm outside the window, and at the boy clutching his unconscious father on the couch. Then he looked down at Rachel’s expectant eyes and shrugged. He didn’t have much of an answer.

  “We wait.”

  Part Three

  Eyes Opened

  The advancing science of genetic engineering makes it possible for us to no longer be controlled by or at the mercy of mutation, but rather to drive organisms down an evolutionary path of our own design. While the interaction of genomic sequences of DNA are complex and multi-faceted, with proper research and molecular design, the life cycle of an organism can be completely altered to suit a new environment, without waiting generations for natural selection to create adaptation. There are a variety of uses for such science—from the mundane (life extension via elimination of genetic weakness)—to the visionary (the creation of completely new life forms designed to perform in a specific way in a particular environment). While the ethics of designing mutation are open to debate, the science offers humanity the ability to truly conquer its world.

  — “Playing God or Growing Up? Owning Our Genome”

  Journal of Evolutionary Genetics, Volume 7, Issue 3, (2009) page 354-378.

  What do you want to create? We’ll bring it to life!

  — Mission Statement, Innovative Industries

  Chapter Fifty

  Tuesday, May 21. 8:37 a.m.

  “The fascinating part of it all is that these are two completely different life cycles,
” the genetic biologist explained. Lawrence David was a thin little man with unnaturally brown skin who seemed lost inside of his long white lab coat. Peter Skiles thought the man might have been Egyptian, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t seem to have much of an accent, and he couldn’t identify the derivation of the faint one he could discern. When the scientist spoke, it seemed to always be in an energetic rush.

  Regardless of origin, the scientist’s brown eyes were absolutely his most prominent feature, and they flared with energy behind wire-framed silver glasses as the man talked. Clearly the guy was more excited by the theory behind it all than with any potential deadly consequences of putting that theory into action. Which is what had brought Skiles here. Like it or not, David’s theory had become reality. And he needed to know how to cram David’s genie back into the bottle.

  Skiles followed the researcher down a long sterile hall until they reached a steel door. Lawrence David pressed a finger to a scanner to the right of the door, and in a second the steel barrier slid inward with a faint whoosh, opening to allow them access.

  “This is the government lab,” David explained. “We don’t let anyone in here if they don’t have clearance. And the only way to get clearance is through the Department of Special Ops in D.C. There are not many people in this building who can walk through these doors. We have employees who don’t even know this hallway exists.”

  “How big is Innovative Industries?” Skiles asked idly. He couldn’t imagine working in a place and not knowing where every elevator and hallway led. But of course, his job was to grasp the big picture…and to understand every thread that led to it.

  “We opened our first bioengineering lab in Denver back in 1982,” David said. “Since then, we’ve opened thirteen satellite labs, each of them with their own independent projects. It helps keep things quiet—none of the different installations have any idea what the others are doing, even if the work happens to be connected. And sometimes, if we are working on something really top secret, we set up a temporary installation in a completely remote area, as we did on Sheila Key. We can assign a couple researchers there, and put it completely off the map of everyone else.”