by Alan Ryker
* * *
More than a quarter of a century earlier, Pete was a stocky little boy trying to keep up with his older brother. At ten, Victor was five years older than Pete, but he always included his younger brother anyway. And he seemed to do it because he enjoyed Pete’s company. Nothing in the world was as important to Pete as that.
During the summer days, they each had a lot of chores to do. Victor helped Dad the most, because he could work almost like a grownup. Pete helped Mom more. He was slower moving and more prone to both accidents and distraction.
In the evenings, the boys played in the pastures. They often met Roger, the neighbor boy, at the creek, near where it crossed from his property to theirs. Roger was eleven, a year older than Victor. He was taller, too, because he was large for his age while Victor was quite small for his. But like many kids in the area, Roger looked up to Victor because of his smarts, his bravery and his ferocity. So, though Roger obviously thought of Pete as a pest, he couldn’t say anything because Victor had given him a pounding on more than one occasion for his brother’s sake.
For the previous couple of days, it had rained nonstop. Their mother kept them in the house for fear of them catching a cold, even in summer. It was misery. With neither work nor play, the energy built up in them until they felt like balloons about to burst. Victor read to Pete from books he couldn’t manage himself yet. They weren’t like his stupid baby books, but full of pirates and cowboys and boy detectives.
That was certainly better than nothing, but reading was for when you’d already spent the day running your legs off and you were too tired to do anything else.
So when the staccato of rain on the roof slowed and then finally stopped, Victor bolted from the house, and Pete followed after.
They played hide and seek out in the pastures. Before the cattle grazed down the tall grass, it changed the game, made it more mobile. Even with the abundant hiding places, Pete was not as good as the older boys. He couldn’t climb most of the trees that lined the creek like Victor and Roger could, but when he hid on the ground, he couldn’t stop fidgeting. Bugs would crawl up his pant legs, or the grass would tickle his face, and he would shift and shift to get comfortable and inevitably someone saw the wiggling grass.
The someone was usually Roger. At the time, Pete wondered how that idiot Roger could find him so much more easily than his brother could. Later on, he understood that Victor didn’t find him as quickly as he could have.
In the wet grass, the itching was even worse. Pete tried his hardest to stay still, but between the itchy shards of grass covering his arms and the mosquitoes constantly buzzing in his ears, Roger found him easily every time.
Finally, Pete started crying, and Roger started laughing, and Victor chased the older boy off.
“It’s okay, Petey, Roger’s just a jerk. He’s a hiney-head.”
Victor knew exactly what to say to get Pete laughing: anything to do with butts or poop or farts. And it worked again.
“I’m getting bit up, and it’s getting dark. We should get back.”
Pete snuffled. His nose had started running. “Not yet. Let’s play one more round.” With Roger gone, he finally had his brother to himself. He didn’t want to give that up quite yet.
A light came into Victor’s eyes. Pete had seen that look a thousand times, and it always meant something exciting. Victor’s imagination was always getting him into trouble in the most fun ways.
“Okay, one more round. I found a great new hiding spot. But first, you have to promise that you won’t tell Mom or Dad about it.”
“I promise!” Pete was almost breathless with excitement.
“That means you can’t slip up like you do sometimes and mention it.”
“I would never,” Pete said. He looked insulted, but he knew Victor was right. Sometimes the words came out before he could think about them.
“Cross your heart and hope to die,” Victor said.
“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in each eye, eat a cow manure pie.” Pete laughed.
“Start counting then,” Victor said with a smile.
Pete covered his eyes and slowly counted to twenty.
“Ready or not, here I come!” he shouted, and the search was on.
He looked in all the usual places, but Victor had said he’d found a new place. But what did that mean? Pete figured they’d explored about every inch of the farm together. He bounded back and forth across the pastures on his stocky little legs, looking behind all the thickest clumps of grass. He peered up into the trees, thinking maybe Victor had figured a way to get higher into one than he’d gotten before, or that maybe he’d found a way up into the big one in the front yard that neither of them could climb because the branches started so high and were so thick.
But before long it got too dark to see through the foliage.
And the farm was so big. He checked out of their usual bounds. The barns and the sheds.
Then their mother called for them to come in.
Pete hid behind a tree and watched. He wanted to catch Victor going home. The game supposedly ended when Momma called, but Pete would try to tag Victor before he got to the house. It was an unofficial part of the game, and one that Pete liked best. Victor would juke and run circles around Pete, showing off, but if Pete caught him, he won.
But Victor didn’t come. Their mom stepped out onto the back stoop again and shouted, hands on hips. She didn’t like them playing outside in the dark, and she didn’t like to be disobeyed.
Pete came out from behind the tree, already fearing that he might catch a swat on the butt. Then he ducked back behind the tree.
If he went in before Victor, he’d have to explain where Victor was. He promised that he wouldn’t, and Victor had been very serious about the promise. Pete thought that he still must want Pete to find him. He didn’t know the reason, but that wasn’t unusual. He never could think ahead of Victor. Victor was just too clever.
So Pete kept looking. Even when his father’s deep, Polish-accented voice joined his mother’s shrill one.
Then they had flashlights. It was totally dark. Pete hid in a little copse of trees along the fence line. He was so tired. And so scared. He wished that he’d come in the first time his mother called, because now he’d definitely get a spanking. Maybe with a belt.
It was too much. He started crying. But he didn’t call out. He couldn’t. Before long, exhaustion overtook him.
He awoke being yanked to his feet by one arm with a flashlight beam in his face. “Peter Michael Grish!” his mother shouted. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing out here? Do you know how worried we were? Where’s your brother?”
Pete stared silently for just a moment then began to sob so hard he could barely breathe. He wrapped his arms around his mother’s waist and held on tight.
“Wiktor, I found Peter!” she shouted.
“Peter, where’s your brother? Where’s Victor Junior?”
It took several minutes of his father’s soothing before Pete could speak again. Wiktor rubbed the boy’s shaking back, pressed his face into his flannel shirt and mumbled quietly to him in his deep, rumbling voice.
Eventually, without taking his face from his father’s chest, Pete said, “I don’t know where Victor is.”
His mother spun him around. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
“He’s hiding,” Pete wailed. “We were playing hide-and-seek.”
He tried to tear away from his mother, to turn back to his father, but she held an upper arm in each hand. “Where is he hiding, Peter?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He barely got it out before he started blubbering again.
She let him go, and he spun back to his father, who hugged him.
“I’ll get the neighbors,” she said to his father. “You keep looking.”
For a long time, Pete’s father carried him around their property, asking him quietly where their usual hiding places were. Without his mother yelling at
him, Pete was soon able to speak again. He showed his father all of their best hiding spots. He explained that he’d looked nearly everywhere, but that Victor had said he’d found a great new hiding spot.
“He made me promise that I wouldn’t tell about it. You won’t tell on me, will you?”
“Of course not.”
Neighbors began to arrive, and with flashlights combed the property. The neighbor boy Roger explained that they’d been playing along the creek when he left.
Once the group focused their searching there, it didn’t take long before they found a washout with an unusually narrow entrance, a gap between some large stones. The creek had run very deep that spring, as they’d had a lot of rain, and a lot of snow the winter before. It had climbed much farther up the bank than usual, and cleared out a small cavern.
They shouted for Victor down it. Though they received no reply, because Pete had never seen the small cave and Victor had said he’d found a new hiding place, he knew that Victor was down there.
Roger’s mother took Pete home and put him to bed. The next day, he learned that Victor had indeed been down in that cave.
It had likely been dry when he found it, but the previous two-day deluge had turned the shaft to slick mud, at the bottom of which sat a deep pool of water. For hours, Victor had tried repeatedly to climb out, and slid back down. Eventually, he wasn’t strong enough to keep out of the pool, or to keep his head above the water.
They packed the entrance to the small cave with dirt, but knowing that it would wash away again, also covered it with large slabs of stone that had been cut from the hills during road construction. Within a few years the rains had risen again and Pete had found that the hole did indeed wash away again, though it was only visible in the thin gaps where the rocks didn’t lie flush.
* * *
The memories weren’t exactly welcome, though Pete wallowed in them. He buried himself in the guilt, gave himself over to it. It seemed like a pointless return to the way he’d felt so long ago, until he understood why he’d so vividly remembered the past.
Because a family member was dying in a hole, and once again he was allowing it to happen with his fearful silence. He would give his mother the evening to calm down, because he wanted to try one more time to convince her to leave. But if he couldn’t, tomorrow he wouldn’t accept no. He’d drag her out of there if need be.
* * *
Pete hadn’t any idea that that game of hide-and-seek would be the last interaction he’d ever have with his beloved older brother. At least his final memory of Victor was a happy one. He’d learned younger than most that you never knew when someone would be taken from you. Maybe that’s why he’d always clung so hard to his parents.
With all the recent troubles with the drought and his mom, he’d been too preoccupied to enjoy his own family. He realized that was a mistake. That night, he went and got carry-out burgers and fries from the Branding Iron Café. After supper, he and the boys played some video games. They even managed to convince Kathy to play, though she was so bad at video games that her turns never lasted long. She always ended up jumping right into a pit, which got her laughing as hard as any of them.
She also reminded him that she was open to a game of cards at any time. He never beat her at cards.
It was a good night, and despite everything, Pete went to bed happy. He knew that somehow, his brother had helped him again. He no longer felt like he was floating out at sea with nothing but water in every direction. He saw land, and he was headed for it.
CHAPTER 19
Again they hunted, but this time the new hosts joined them. They swept as a pack across the countryside, splitting up to carry the newly captured back to the nest, but then re-gathering in effortless synchronicity. As nestmates, they found each other as easily in the darkness as a right hand finds the left.
Despite the endless drought, the night air was thick, wrapping them in a blanket of moist warmth. They would take what they needed from it, and then hide from the scouring eye of the sun in the comfort of their nest.
Behind a dilapidated, storm-damaged old farmhouse stood an RV propped up on blocks. They tipped the RV first, then reached down through the door and snatched the couple out by the scruffs of their necks like mewling kittens from a cardboard box. The chickens in the coop nearby clucked in annoyance at the noise before settling back into their straw.
In a squat, ranch-style house they found a man too large to carry. He would have made quite a host, but he wouldn’t have survived the rough transport, so they killed him. But though his wife was thin, his children were on their way to his proportions. Wrapped up and buried, they would grow ripe with life.
They swarmed so quickly that they faced no opposition. Even when the people awoke, they sat in their beds in stunned silence, trying to blink away the nightmare around them.
In a house that was more of a shack they found their first real resistance. Creeping around the exterior, the place appeared to be the easiest target they’d come across yet. Without an air conditioner, the resident had left all the windows open. They stole in without breaking glass or bursting doors. But in the bedroom, a man who’d spent a restless night tossing, sweat-soaked and angry, met them staring down the sights of a revolver. He shot two of them before they overwhelmed him with numbers.
One of them died with a hole in the head. They held his skull together as best they could until they got him back to the nest and tore him open over the heaps. Long stick limbs unfolded from arteries and slid into piles of filth, as the colony of tiny gods within him searched for safe places to lay their eggs before dying.
The other was gut shot, and made it to the nest with both hands pressed over a hole in her abdomen through which her viscera threatened to slide out. She sat with her back in a corner, watching as her subjects bound and buried their catches. The loss of the man who’d been shot in the face was a blessing, as the emergence of his parasites meant no one needed to be sacrificed to provide for the arrival of so many new hosts.
But they were running out of space. Their increasing numbers had at first felt comforting, but now felt claustrophobic.
* * *
“There’s no room,” Bryce said to Anna. “Go start a new nest.”
Anna bared her gums in menace. Her dentures had fallen out long ago. She stood, but she had to keep her hands clamped over the hole her stomach. “This is mine. You’re mine. I made you.”
“I appreciate it.”
Bryce kicked her hands, and any ability to fight back she thought she had drained out of her. She slumped to the ground. He bashed at her head and back as she curled up. He spiked his elbows into her ribs. She tried to burrow beneath the hoard with one hand, the other clamped over her wound, but Bryce dragged her out and continued to beat her.
“They won’t let him kill you if you agree to leave,” Victor said. He groaned in pain alongside her, knelt down in the heap.
“This is mine. This is all mine.”
“We can start again. We’ll find a place where you can be queen again.”
“No!”
“Please, Momma. It hurts so bad.” She turned her head and peeked at him. Where ever Bryce hit her, a bruise came up on Victor.
“I’ll go,” she said.
Bryce hit her again, but then jerked upright.
Anna slowly uncurled and looked up at him. Muscles stood out like cords all over his body, transforming his neck into a suspension bridge of tendon strung from a grinding jaw. She knew that he wanted nothing more than to rip her open. But besides him, she was the only one strong enough to start a new nest.
The others watched her with poisonous gazes; ready to pounce at the slightest hint of aggression. The loyalty of the nest went to the strongest. She was no longer it.
Anna crawled over her precious belongings. She ran her fingers over the silky head of her favorite doll. Beneath the piles, new hosts squirmed and cried.
She wanted to die there. If it had to be right then, she’d sti
ll prefer it to cowering beneath the huge, heavy sky. There were worse things than to be ripped apart and strewn across the home she loved so much, to become part of it forever.
But then Victor would die, too. And she wouldn’t let him die again. This time, she’d protect him.
Anna had almost made it to the door when she sensed something coming through the air at her. She turned and Bryce drove her to the ground. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to make the horrible choice to leave. Perhaps Bryce would defy the fire in his veins and end her there.
He dragged her back across the piles into the kitchen by one arm. She held her other across her stomach and tumbled and rolled in a losing struggle to keep her feet beneath her.
Bryce hurled Anna to the ground and sat on her chest. Out of confusion and curiosity, she stopped struggling when she saw that he held the kitchen phone in his hand. He pulled a small card from his briefs and, squinting back and forth from it to the phone, slowly punched the buttons.
“Tell her to come. Tell her it’s…an emergency.” He smiled.
* * *
Anna stumbled through the pasture towards the only inviting place she could think of: Peter’s shop. Rebecca would try to come to her aid, and Rebecca would die. Then Bryce’s only remaining problem would be Peter.
She had to protect him.
At this thought, pain exploded through her brain and sent her limbs rigid. If they could stay hidden for a few weeks longer, they could spread. But just then they were vulnerable. Peter had to go.
But she couldn’t let him die. If only she could scare him away. But how could she explain?
She writhed in the dust. They wanted him dead.
She couldn’t warn him, and she didn’t know if she could defend him, either. But she could stay close.
