In Constant Fear

by Peter Liney

  “I’m fine.”

  “Only we were saying, we haven’t seen much of you this afternoon,” she said, smirking away, and I realized she was teasing me again.

  “Yeah—thanks, Delilah.”

  “Not like we did this morning . . . Now I know why they call you ‘Big Guy.’”

  “You can stop that,” I said forcefully. “There was nothing to see.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Delilah commented, the kids giggling, though more, I suspected, out of embarrassment than any other reason.

  “Any wheat left?” I asked, making it pretty plain I had no time for her notions of humor.

  “Not really,” Hanna answered, taking pity on me, opening her sack to show me what she’d collected, which sure as hell wasn’t a lot.

  “Not gonna make much flour outta that,” I commented.

  “No,” she said, holding out a handful of chaff and a few seeds in her open hand. She was just about to let it fall back into her sack when suddenly she gave this startled little cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Gordie asked.

  “It moved.”

  “What?”

  “One of those seeds moved . . . ! Ohhh!” she cried, dropping the sack and backing away. “That was creepy.”

  “Jesus Christ!” sneered Gigi, swooping on the opportunity to project some bile Hanna’s way.

  “It moved, I tell you!”

  Gigi turned away in disgust, but Gordie, as loyal as ever, rushed to defend Hanna, which only ramped things up further as Gigi immediately took the opportunity to turn on him, as if he was the real source of her bitterness.

  Tell the truth, I couldn’t be bothered; it was just the kids squabbling over stupid stuff as usual. I walked away, leaving them to it—in fact, I must’ve covered almost fifty yards or more before it finally hit me . . . Jesus! Of course!

  I ran back, grabbed the sack off the ground and took it over to the barn, bursting in on Jimmy, not allowing the little guy a moment to ignore me.

  “I know where they come from!” I announced.

  He paused for a moment and looked at me, but his thoughts were plainly miles away. “Big Guy, I’m a little busy—”

  “I know where they come from!” I repeated. “They don’t eat the wheat,” I announced, “they come out of it.”

  I put my hand in Hanna’s sack, pulled out the largest and liveliest-looking seed I could find and gave it to him. “Cut it open . . . Do it!” I said, when he looked like he was about to dismiss me.

  Jimmy shrugged as if indulging an oversized madman, then dissected it—sure enough, the moment he sliced through the husk the seed started moving and there was a weevil inside.

  “Whoa . . . Whoa!” he cried. I reckoned as much shocked by the fact that I’d come up with the answer as anything else.

  “Maybe that was what happened with Nick?” I suggested. “Their fields were five or six times the size of ours. They would’ve been knee-deep in them.”

  Jimmy sifted through the sack, found a few more likely seeds, plump and almost pulsating, and cut them open, and again there were weevils inside, one of them almost managing to scramble away before he squashed it, those familiar oily green insides squirting out everywhere.

  He poked and prodded the corpse, putting it under his screen, bringing up the image again. “You sure you never swallowed one?”

  “As sure as I can be,” I said, leveling with him.

  He returned to the insect, turning up the magnification as far as it would go, going disturbingly quiet.

  After a while it hit me that I was being dismissed again and I left him to it, walking slowly back to the house, looking all around me as I went, taking in the view—the mountains, the hills, the endless forest: my family and friends’ home, our little piece of paradise. And yet, under that most peaceful of open skies, I swear I could hear the sound of sirens starting their shrill warning.

  We didn’t see Jimmy again that day. Lile took him down some food, but he never touched it, which was a really bad sign. He finally returned just as the light was starting to fade—I guessed concerned the weevils might come again, but he didn’t have a lot to say, which we concluded meant he hadn’t discovered anything.

  We sealed the house up really carefully. Nothing was gonna get in there, no matter how small or determined. We also imposed a watch rotation: two people to patrol from room to room and make sure there were no breaches while the others slept.

  Gigi sneered when Hanna volunteered her and Gordie for first watch; saying she wouldn’t feel safe with the lovebirds looking out for her, that they might get distracted. Jesus, I tell ya, I could’ve done without it—teenage love triangles threatening to erupt at any moment. I made a point of agreeing, trying to settle things down, saying how I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

  It’s funny, when you first sleep with someone you wrap your arms around them all night as if it’s everything that you wake up in exactly the same positions—as if to signal a commitment that nothing changed while you were sleeping. Then after a while you start sneaking off on your own a little, to what becomes known as “your side of the bed.” It don’t mean nothing bad—you’re not cooling off, maybe just getting more comfortable with each other. Lena and me are far more territorial these days, though I guess that space in between us is a reminder of where Thomas used to lie. But if it’s a special night, if we gotta problem, maybe feeling threatened in some way, we still tend to lock our arms about each other. That night it was no surprise that we clung on until one of my arms had lost all feeling, and probably the same for her.

  Not that we said a lot—well, no, that’s not strictly true; we said everything, the Big Three, that harmonious trio we all believe will change the world and cure all its ills.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  I tried to give Jimmy plenty of space the following day, to maybe pretend that what he was engaged in wasn’t that much of a concern, but when he didn’t come back for lunch, well, that was it. I had to find out exactly what was going on.

  The moment I walked in to the barn and he glanced up, I knew it wasn’t good news.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He gave a long sigh. “I accelerated the action of one of the weevils when introduced to a host environment, ten times real-life speed.”

  “And?”

  “It died.”

  I stared at him; that wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. “Yeah?” I said, allowing a little hope to stray into my voice. “That’s it?”

  “I thought so. Last night. This morning . . .”

  He gestured for me to look at his screen. There were a few scraps of what was obviously a weevil in some liquid—I didn’t know what it was, some kind of human synthesis, I guessed, but like I’ve said many times before, this wasn’t my area of expertise and my brain never did travel that well.

  “It’s gone,” he told me.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Again he sighed, this time even heavier, and I felt my apprehension writhing away like a pinned worm. Normally this would be the moment when he’d start to gloat, to tell me that only someone of his intelligence would understand, but on this occasion he was far too preoccupied.

  “When I first got out here, saw it had gone, I thought it must’ve dissolved somehow—that it was one of those quirks of nature where a species seeks out its own demise.” He stopped almost as if he’d unexpectedly run out of breath, and I knew we’d reach detonation point. “But it hasn’t dissolved . . . it’s metamorphosed.”

  I stared at him, waiting for more, knowing it had to come.

  “It’s still doing it. Sometimes you can actually see it with the naked eye.”

  I turned to the screen, watching as he brought up the magnification, but I couldn’t see a thing.

  “You remember what the Doc told you?” he asked. “About Nora Jagger trying to find a way of getting implants into everyone?”

  “Yeah.”

&n
bsp; He paused, like he was hoping I’d say it for him, but I couldn’t bear to put into words what was going through my head.

  “I think this is it: the Big Idea. These things get inside you, find their way to where they can do most damage, then die. What’s left then metamorphoses into an implant that continues to metamorphose so it can travel around every part of your body.”

  “Jesus!” I gasped.

  “I don’t know what its purpose is exactly, but you don’t have to think too hard to come up with possibilities. They could be used to locate someone, keep an eye on them, maybe even exert control over them.”

  For a few moments we both fell to an aching silence. All our fears, our instincts, had been right: the Bitch was closing in—but never in our most paranoid of moments, our worst nightmares, had we imagined an invasion like this.

  “I’ve made this scanner,” Jimmy told me, pointing to the makeshift device he’d been working on when I entered. “It’s real basic, but I think it’ll do the job. I’m gonna have to scan everyone.”

  “Why?” I asked, though of course I knew.

  “Just in case,” he said, plainly trying hard not to sound too worried.

  “But . . . we’d know, surely?”

  Jimmy paused for a moment, looking that bit squeamish. “You know that stuff that oozes outta them?”

  “The green slime?”

  “I think it’s a kinda lubricant.”

  Yet again I was reduced to staring at him, wondering what the hell he was gonna say next.

  “It’s also got anesthetizing properties,” he continued. “They could slide in anywhere in your body and you wouldn’t know a thing about it.”

  “Oh Jeez!” I groaned.

  He went quiet for a few moments, maybe giving me time to absorb what he’d said, and to tell the truth, I was kinda overwhelmed by the immensity—and yeah, I’ll admit it—even the damn ingenuity of it. What chance did we have up against something like that?

  We had to go and tell the others, gather them around the kitchen table and explain it to them and, let’s be honest, break their damn hearts for them. It was all over. Our utopia was hopelessly compromised. Nora Jagger was probably on her way at that very moment.

  Delilah was more horrified by how a weevil might’ve got inside her than if she had one or not. “You mean that thing might’ve crawled up—”

  “Lile!” Jimmy interrupted. “That ain’t helping.”

  “While I was sleeping!” she continued, refusing to be silenced.

  “Stop it, will you?”

  “Yeah, right!” she sneered, “typical man. Don’t give a damn we girls’ve got more openings to worry about.”

  This time general howls of protest, sheer weight of numbers, made her reluctantly give way.

  Lena was quietly sitting at the table with Thomas in her arms. “Clancy?” she called, like she was cutting through a storm or bobbing over waves.

  “He’s fine,” I reassured her, immediately knowing what was on her mind.

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What happens if one of us has got a weevil inside them?” Hanna asked.

  “It turns into an implant, stupid,” Gigi sneered. “Weren’t you listening?”

  “No, I mean, what happens to the person who’s got it?”

  Yep, damned if she hadn’t done it again: that girl always came up with the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question that no one wanted to try to answer. I turned to Jimmy and the little guy made this helpless face, like that was a whole other subject.

  “No one has,” I declared confidently.

  “But if they do,” Hanna persisted. “If it can do what Jimmy says—track people, influence them, make them do stuff—are they going to stay here?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” I muttered to Jimmy.

  “Clancy,” Lena interrupted, “we’ve got no choice.”

  I turned and, as always, she felt my eyes on her and gave this slight shake of the head. She was a mother now, and protection of her child was her prime concern. It also went through my mind again about when I woke up with those things in my mouth—did I really manage to spit them all out?

  We all traipsed over to the barn, Gigi and Gordie bickering about which one of them was going to go first, both trying to prove they were the toughest and meanest of us, that nothing worried them, ’til finally Jimmy decided we’d do it in alphabetical order, which of course meant me going first.

  I had to take my shirt off, and despite the situation that was an invitation Lile simply couldn’t resist, asking me if I was “just gonna leave it at that?” Thankfully there was little other appetite for humor, and Jimmy told the others to go and wait at the far end of the barn.

  He ran this thing over me, a kind of a metal pad, studying his screen while I just silently looked away and treated it as if I was having a jab or something.

  “Okay, Big Guy,” he eventually said, indicating I could put my shirt back on.

  I waited but he didn’t say any more.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I’m just gonna scan first,” he replied. “The computer’ll interpret it afterward.”

  “Right,” I grunted, discreetly withdrawing when I saw it was Delilah’s turn next.

  Gigi followed, complaining she wasn’t stripping off in front of no old man, not for any reason, so Jimmy had to erect a curtain and instruct Delilah what to do while he checked the images on his screen.

  One by one we went through the process ’til eventually we were left with the final person: our son, our little miracle, Thomas.

  I could barely stand to watch it felt so wrong, so damned invasive, but I had to explain to Lena what was going on. Our baby son was lying there looking so small and vulnerable, threatening to cry at the coldness of the pad, the sternest of frowns on his bewildered little face. Jimmy went over him really carefully, I guessed for that reason—’cuz he was so defenseless. Or maybe it was ’cuz it was that much more difficult to scan such a tiny body.

  When he finally finished, Delilah complained that he hadn’t done himself, but Jimmy told her he had earlier; that that was how he’d tested the equipment.

  He immediately started switching things around, unplugging this, sliding in that, ’til finally he had his computer set up to read the scans. No one said a word, just stood there watching as he tapped and swiped, working his favorite arena like a pro, bringing up file after file.

  “Come on, Jimmy!” Delilah complained.

  “Okay, okay,” he replied, obviously having seen all he needed. “I’m not enjoying this, Lile.”

  “Has anyone got an implant?” she persisted.

  “’Course they haven’t!” I growled. “Come on, Jimmy, stop milking it, man.”

  But instead of giving us the all-clear, of assuring us that it’d just been a false alarm, he’d got that look about him, embarrassed and shifty, and I knew he had some bad news for someone, and I had a fair idea who it might be.

  “Sorry, Big Guy,” he muttered.

  There was a momentary silence, Lena gave this little moan and came and put an arm around me, holding Thomas with the other.

  “I got one?” I asked Jimmy. “You sure?”

  “It’s pretty clear once you know what you’re looking for.”

  “One of those things is inside me?”

  This time he didn’t say anything—and nor did anyone else.

  “It won’t change anything,” Lena said in little more than a whisper. “It’s always going to be you and me.”

  I turned and looked into her face, those sightless eyes imploring me the way they sometimes do. The only thing was, she was wrong and had to know it. It did change things—it changed everything. If what Jimmy had said was true, that it could be used to track me down or dictate my behavior, I was gonna be one helluva liability around here.

  “Thing is,” Jimmy said, trying to dispense a few odd crumbs of comfort, “they can’t track you, can’t do anything, without some k
ind of monitoring source. It’s too far out for a Dragonfly, a fixed-wing ain’t sufficiently maneuverable in the mountains—we haven’t seen anything else.”

  I paused for a moment, not wanting to say anything but feeling I had no choice. “You sure?”

  He knew immediately what I was talking about. “Come on!” he scoffed. “What did ya see?”

  “Something was there,” I insisted.

  He shook his head, like he wasn’t prepared to even consider it, that it had no part in this discussion, and turned his attention back to the screen. “Tell you what, as much as it hurts to say it . . . it’s damn smart.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “This,” he said, with reluctant admiration.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Think about it,” he said. “A lotta people have gone missing in the country. She could spend forever hunting them down—a few here, a few there—why would she bother? But once people get established, once there’s a decent-sized group—enough to be a threat—they’re gonna get organized, and what’s the first thing they’re gonna need? . . . Food! So they develop this seed with its own built-in parasite: an implant weevil. People think they’re building a new future, becoming self-sufficient, when in fact, they’re implanting themselves and dedicating their future to her . . . Not cool, I know, but shit, it’s damn smart.”

  “What about the animals that got burned?” Delilah asked, not fully following. “George’s dog, the wolves—where do they fit in?”

  “And those two guys,” Gigi added.

  “I guess the weevils were implanting all living creatures. Maybe it was a prototype that went wrong,” Jimmy suggested, but Hanna had other ideas.

  “They were all killers,” she said, her voice so soft we almost missed it.

  I turned to her, at first thinking it was a little out there even for her, but then began to see what she was saying, and that she was right. “Jesus, yeah!” I gasped. “That dog of George’s was forever killing rats, the wolves were about to kill the deer, and those guys had been about to kill me. Even the bird was some kinda hunter—that was the connection. All of them must’ve had punishment implants.”

  “What about Clancy?” Lena asked Jimmy. “Is his implant functioning?”