The Dark Above

by Jeremy Finley

  The fence prevented anyone, except for Lynn and the few she allowed to enter, to reach the site. Upon learning its history, tied to the disappearances of so many, Roxy understood her friend’s fierce commitment to conceal it. Privately, she worried how often Lynn returned.

  “Why did you say you were right to be worried?” Roxy prodded.

  Lynn did not respond at first, careful, as always, to mask her reasons. “I didn’t even like Tom going there. I fought for so long to keep him from even stepping foot there. But Tom gave up so much … and was such an asset to my work … that it was unfair to stop him. And when I’m lost, or frustrated with my own deep failings, I can’t help but go there, to see if I’ve missed something. And I was right to go there today. We have to leave. Right now.”

  Roxy allowed Lynn to drag her away. “I know you enjoy keeping me in the dark, but if there’s truly something dangerous—”

  “I have to find William. I have to.”

  “Lynn, we all want to know where he is. I’ve told you time and time again that he’s a grown man now, and he’s just working his way through this—”

  “He’s not. He’s hiding. And I understand why. But he can’t hide anymore. I have to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?” Roxy planted her feet. “Even though I am in desperate need of air-conditioning right now, I need an explanation.”

  Lynn once again touched her arm. “Then come and see.”

  Moving around the boxwoods and across the lawn, Lynn led her out into the sun that hit them with the ferocity of a Tennessee summer morning. Roxy winced, pulling her “I ♥ PBS” T-shirt loose from her chest. “Can we stand in the shade at least?”

  “No. Right here.” Lynn took off her binoculars and thrust them into Roxy’s hands. “Hold them up. Follow where I point.”

  “Can I go get my sunglasses?”

  “No.”

  Roxy sighed and lifted the binoculars to her eyes. “Great. I see leaves.”

  “Look up higher,” Lynn said, gently lifting the binoculars. “Follow my finger.”

  “All I can see is white. I can’t see your finger through these things. Wonderful, more white. Wait. Is that a rain cloud? If I’m lucky, it will burst open and drench us and complete this marvelous morning.”

  “That’s not a cloud.”

  “Of course it is,” Roxy lowered the binoculars, squinting. The sky was piercingly white, awash in thin cirrus clouds. The strip of razor-thin dark could have been easily missed. “What is that? Birds?”

  “No,” Lynn said, the pitch of her voice dropping. “Ladybugs.”

  The dread that hit Roxy was like suddenly realizing there was a semi truck in her blind spot. While she knew little about her friend’s research, Lynn had explained to her the swarming of the beetles at the time of William’s disappearance, and how even the government kept them in canisters at the hospital in Argentum to serve as a warning of what was to come.

  “Are you sure? They’re so far above trees. I didn’t think insects could fly that high.”

  “Neither did I,” Lynn said, walking towards the house. “But once I saw them again in the sky this morning, I knew there was a reason I feel that awful … foreboding. It’s so much stronger this time … I feared it was finally happening.”

  “You mean you’ve seen them in the sky like that before?”

  “Just once.” Lynn was quickening her step. “Not long after William left. I thought at the time it was just the anxiety of realizing he was gone again, even if it was of his own choosing. I wasn’t surprised that I woke up the next day a bundle of nerves and ended up in the woods again, looking for something to help me understand what happened to us. Here, watch the stairs. They’re wet from the sprinklers.”

  “At least you finally are worrying that I’m going to wipe out. But I’m fine. Go on.”

  “It wasn’t even cloudy that morning,” Lynn said, holding open the screen door. “But when I entered the clearing, I immediately noticed something was casting shadows on the ground. That’s when I looked up and saw it. So many of them … far above … so thick that I didn’t understand, at first, what I was seeing. Then, I saw the ladybugs everywhere, thousands of them. I ran inside to get my phone to document it, and thankfully also grabbed Tom’s old Canon.”

  Lynn ushered them through the kitchen, down the hall, and into the study. “Sit at the computer.”

  “At long last.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t. I probably shouldn’t.…”

  “Because you think it might shock me? I think we’re past that point.”

  Lynn’s hand hovered over the mouse. “I’m sorry, Roxy. Just in case I haven’t said it lately. I’m sorry for dragging you into all this.”

  Roxy placed her hand on top of Lynn’s. “If you recall, I shoved and pushed and corralled my way in. You would have left me back at the train station fifteen years ago if you’d had your way. I chose this. I’ve held back on demanding answers to what you’ve been up to because I know you worry that it could end up harming me. But I want to know. So get that mouse moving.”

  Lynn sighed. She reached into her pocket, withdrawing a flash drive.

  “Do you routinely walk around with those in your pockets these days?”

  “I keep them in Tom’s gun safe. It was the first thing I grabbed before I headed outside. I wanted it on me just in case.…”

  Just in case you died. That whatever is in you was activated and your ears bled and you died or went into a coma, like all those people in that terrible hospital. We would have found your body and ultimately that flash drive. Your last secret to reveal.

  Roxy patted her hand. “Show me.”

  Lynn plugged in the flash drive and typed a long security code. A series of folders emerged on the screen.

  The cursor moved to one labeled “SWARM.”

  Inside were dozens of photographs, and Lynn scrolled through them, clicking on one.

  “These are from Tom’s camera. The lens is much better than my phone’s camera.”

  Roxy put her glasses on and leaned in. A tree in the photo looked as if an infection had overtaken it; a red mass covered every inch of its trunk.

  “Those are all ladybugs?”

  “Yes. Look at this next picture. They swarmed up the tree. Covering every inch of it. Now, look at this.”

  She closed the folder and opened another labeled, “IN THE SKY.”

  Even taken with the excellent lens, the photograph just showed a mass of black dots against a blue sky.

  “I don’t get it.”

  Lynn pointed to the photograph. “They started to move, like a wind had blown them off the tree. They just kept drifting upward. Now, this is the picture I took when they resettled.”

  She opened another photograph that showed the beetles had begun to make a formation, moving into clear curves.

  “How can they do that? I know birds know how to fly in formation, but bugs? But it’s not like they’re forming an arrow pointing to the grove or anything. What is it?” Roxy asked. “And what are these other folders? Michigan, London, Argentum—”

  Lynn opened another folder. It was an illustration, clearly taken from a scientific journal. She moved the graphic to sit directly beside the photo of the formation the beetles had made in the sky.

  “My God,” Roxy said, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “It’s what they did to us,” Lynn said. “It’s why I have to find William.”

  TWO

  Sweat surged down his face, soaking his T-shirt, despite the best efforts of the box fan from Walmart pointed directly on him. It was a fairly new purchase, given that he’d run the last one from Goodwill so consistently at night that it ultimately burned out.

  With a temporal vein bulging across his forehead, he could not move, paralyzed by the kind of fear usually reserved for children caught in the throes of nightmares, crying out for their parents.

  He, however, was twenty-two years old.

  Rubbing his aching shoulders,
he sat up. It was not uncommon for him to be unable to stand after the dreams, his calves burning and even his feet throbbing from his fiercely curled toes. When he woke, there was no part of his body that wasn’t tense.

  He swung his long legs over the bed and gingerly touched the floor, anticipating pain. Instead his legs only trembled, which meant he could get the ibuprofen without feeling like he was walking on nails.

  The distance to the bathroom was a short walk across carpet that twenty years ago was a stylish shade of deep red. In the dark, the stains from coffee and God knows what else were blessedly hidden.

  Even in dim, filtered light, the pill bottle was easily found, for it was always in the same place on the corner of the sink. He had considered moving it permanently to his nightstand, but stashing it in the bathroom meant he would have no choice but to get up after the dreams. And if he’d learned anything, it was the importance of not lying in bed in a state of shock. It was better to move, to remind himself that what he dreamt was not real, that his subconscious was simply reacting to nagging fears, that there was a difference between worry and reality. It was why, even knowing exactly where the bottle rested in the dark, he turned on the light.

  His reflection appeared in the mirror, revealing hair so ridiculously unkempt that he almost laughed. His brothers certainly would if they could see it. The higher the hair, the closer to God, their mother would say, running her fingers through his churning locks, which grew like crabgrass in a wet spring. Jabs would be made about pulling the WeedWacker out from the shed, and certainly the ruler stashed in the junk drawer would be seized to see if the height had reached a new record. His dad would wrap his arms around him, pretending to hold him in place while the ruler rested on his scalp, his brothers and mother delighting in counting the centimeters, cheering if the height stretched past seven. One summer, it reached to twelve, which was noted with a red Sharpie on the ruler, an exclamation mark drawn next to it.

  He wished he could dream of them.

  Twisting open the pill bottle cap, he tossed back three pills. Then he turned off the light and lumbered across the bedroom, rotating his shoulders to increase the blood circulation. He leaned his six-foot-two form against the frame of the room’s solitary window, parting blinds to squint at the early morning light.

  You are surrounded by cotton in the middle of nowhere. You are not even close to what you’re dreaming about. What’s irrefutable is that you need to get your butt ready for work.

  But it always felt so real. He could practically taste it.

  And this time, there was something more.

  As always, the nightmare had started in a storm. The blistering rain had barreled around him, beating him with stinging winds. Torrential rain soaked him, making his clothes a second skin.

  Raging waters rushed like an army towards the city in the distance, crashing into levees, seeking crevices, cracks, anything to slip through to further erode the stone. What it couldn’t break it would bypass altogether, to pummel the electricity-stripped buildings and homes beyond.

  He tried to look away from the bodies in the mud-clogged waters, knowing they hadn’t anticipated the storm would arrive so fast, or with such fury. But on this night, when he wrenched his gaze away, he saw them: two specks of white in the swallowed city, tiny stars in the engulfed night. In all the hundreds of times the dream had come, he’d never seen them. They felt like a stare, a gaze, directed at him.

  Then the dream shifted. He was surrounded by people, shoving and shouting. The anger from the crowd seeped into him; their heat like an iron an inch from his skin.

  Many held signs that blurred in the fight, some crashing down in the swirl of bodies, others pounded against the pavement as if intended to stab through the very earth.

  When the bullets started whizzing past, it was as if a shock wave rolled over the crowd; people covered their heads or ducked. And he saw them again: eyes, watching the massacre, then turning to him.

  Overwhelming heat came next. Not anger, but embers and ash and flame. Trees fully engulfed, like a city of skyscrapers on fire. Yet someone was there, someone was surviving all this, and their eyes watched from beyond the flames.

  The smell of the hospital came a moment later, both fetid and sanitized. Bleach applied over and over again across tiled floors on which gurneys rushed, carrying people covered in plastic.

  It wasn’t just the doctors and nurses wearing masks, but the attendants at the help desk, and the panicked family members trying to find their loved ones. Some covered their mouths with scarves or their hands.

  He heard the high-pitched beeping of the sinking heart rates, the suctions pumping stomachs.

  Once again were eyes. But this time, they didn’t watch from behind the doctors, the hospital walls, or even the windows. They were in the far distance, almost miniscule amongst the towering stones that lined the horizon.

  Suddenly, those eyes were right in front of him.

  He was in the rock itself, encased in the dark, unable to move or to breathe, trapped, with something slithering across his skin—

  He snapped the blinds shut.

  He could still feel the wretched smoothness of the scales, the sensation of being encapsulated within the rock. It was always what ended the nightmares, his mind unable to stand the feeling of the encompassing swirling of the snakes around him.

  But this time, those eyes—those different, haunted eyes—felt like someone stabbed through his chest to his heart.

  His hand drifted from rubbing his forehead to his closely cropped beard. A necessity, now, if he were to be unrecognizable.

  If there was any doubt, the dreams reminded him of the reason why he had to run. Why he had to stay away.

  He knew he wasn’t supposed to know about it; he had eavesdropped on a conversation he was never supposed to hear, made in the worst of circumstances. But he’d heard it, there was no denying it, even if he didn’t truly understand what was said. He’d made the decision that any man who loved his family would make.

  After all, she’d risked everything for him. Her reputation, her marriage, the exposure of her secrets, all to find him. To save him.

  His grandmother, who went from mildly famous to internationally infamous, faced the kind of scrutiny that would make most people turn away from the world. But not his grandmother. She was stronger than anyone he’d ever known.

  I’m trying to be brave like you. To risk everything for my family. It’s why I can’t tell you where I am.

  He hated causing her to once again relive the pain that she—and all of his family—endured more than a decade ago. Despite everything they’d gone through since then, he knew all they wanted was for him to be home.

  But you are alive. Without me, Nanna isn’t a danger to anyone. But if I return, you could all die.

  From now on, his memories would have to suffice—of the family that loved him and that he loved so much in return.

  William Chance had no choice but to never see them again.

  * * *

  The most famous boy in the world was dead.

  William repeated the words in his head like an invocation. He’d waited in the Jeep in the parking lot until the kid, dragging his mother in a faded Razorback tank top and balancing a cigarette and a toothpick in her mouth with the skill of a juggler, emerged with a grape slushy. When they got into their Mini Cooper and pulled out, only a rusted Honda Civic with the bumper sticker, “I Miss Bill,” remained.

  The stifling air, void of a trace of a breeze, propelled through the vents in the Wrangler. He’d taken the doors off in the absence of air conditioning that had cut off about three months ago. When the Jeep came to a halt, even at a stoplight, the summer heat rushed in, threatening to drown him in his own sweat.

  This was his chance.

  The most famous boy in the world was dead.

  He turned off the engine and slid out, pulling the rim of his St. Louis Cardinals ball cap down low, and walked through the doors.

  “W
elcome to Uncle Steve’s Food Mart,” a girl at the checkout said with the enthusiasm of a deflating balloon. William imagined a manager sending out a memo, maybe stapling it to the paychecks: Every customer must receive a greeting at the door—a warm greeting means hot business! William nodded in sympathy.

  The entire back wall was beer, waving at him like a teenager seeing her boyfriend for the first time since he left for college, his texts and calls dwindling by the day. I’ve been waiting for you! the Corona panted in the cooler. William snatched up a twelve-pack of Dr Pepper instead, practically hearing the coolers whine in outrage.

  The pleasant door chime announced the arrival of three people, all heading directly for the counter.

  Are you kidding me?

  An older man pointed outside and proclaimed loudly, “Pump one!”

  “We only take cash, machine’s down,” the girl responded.

  Holding out a credit card, the man tilted his right ear towards her. “You said what, hon?”

  “We. Only. Take. Cash.”

  “Still don’t understand you,” he said, touching his hearing aid.

  “You don’t take credit cards?” the woman next in line demanded.

  “Only cash.”

  “Don’t nobody carry cash anymore.” The woman jutted out her hip.

  “What did you say?” the old man practically leaned across the counter.

  Scratching underneath his hat, William scanned the room. The aisles faced the front, allowing whomever was working to keep an eye out for shoplifters. Only one row was positioned horizontally to the checkout counter.

  He slid over to the aisle and peered over the top. The old man was slowly pulling out his wallet. He could hear the woman on her phone, calling her sister to bring some cash. The last man in line was intently reading whatever was on his phone.

  One side of the aisle was peanut butter and chocolate bars masquerading as protein bars, and the other was lined with magazines. William set down the Dr Pepper and reached for one of the magazines. A headline in red letters on a black cover stood out among the rest, just as its designers intended it to do, knowing their magazine would be surrounded by an actress’s seventeenth pregnancy announcement; an exclusive on the luxury fallout shelter hidden in the Hollywood Hills for a family of reality stars; and a lifestyle guru, whose name William couldn’t remember, leaning forward thoughtfully, her glasses resting on the tip of her nose, encouraging meditation.