by Nate Kenyon
Jimmie kicked the top bunk so hard one of the slats snapped.
“Jesus, Pete,” Dan said. “What’s the goddamned problem? Get his legs.”
I shook my head and scooted backward on the floor. All I wanted to do was get away from whatever that thing was under Jimmie’s skin, the slick flesh against my hands and the clumps of hair on his pillow. Jesus Christ. I felt like I might be sick.
Jay stepped forward, as if to help, and I shook my head again. “You don’t want to touch him,” I said. “There’s something…inside.”
Jay looked at me oddly. Then he reached out and grabbed Jimmie’s foot, yanking it toward him. Jay’s not a strong guy, scrawny and pasty white, actually—your prototypical nerd. I was afraid he might get a heel right in the face and break his glasses. But he surprised me, wrestling both of Jimmie’s legs down quickly, using his own body’s leverage well. Sue moved in to help with the white belt, and before long they had him tied by the ankles to the cross piece at the end of the bunk.
I realized I was still in boxers and a thin shirt, and I glanced at Tessa, but she hadn’t moved or taken her eyes off what was happening in the bed. Jimmie was contained now, but he had enough slack to keep thrusting his body up off the mattress and pull at the bindings on his wrists and feet. They wouldn’t last long.
Since we’d entered the room he had kept his eyes mostly squeezed shut, but now he opened them, lifted his head from the pillow and stared right at me. “Help…me, Pete,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse, as if it took every ounce of energy he had. Tendons stood out in his neck, and spittle flecked his lips. “It itches…my leg…so bad.”
I stood up and inched closer to him, ready to bolt if he made any kind of move. My skin was crawling, thinking about touching him again. But we had been friends for so long. No matter what he’d done recently, he didn’t deserve this. Jimmie had never been particularly brave, and he was lousy under pressure. But he was great at picking you up when you were feeling down, and he’d stuck by me when I was at my darkest point.
A lot of things had changed, but he was still the same Jimmie in so many ways. I remembered building tree forts in the pine woods behind my house, pulling crawfish out of the stream in the ravine, tossing a ball in the field near the school, or just watching TV. Normal kid stuff. He always got the best toys for Christmas—Star Wars figures and long-range radios and iPods and video games—and he never hesitated in sharing all of them with me.
And on those days when my father got too drunk and violent and my mother couldn’t stop him, Jimmie would be there, ready to slip me out the back door to safety.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Cut it,” he said. He closed his eyes and moaned. “Crawling. Get it out, please!”
My stomach did a slow, lazy flip, and I looked around at the others. “No way,” Tessa said, stepping forward. “No, uh uh. Bad idea.”
Jimmie went berserk, yanking his wrists against the belts and trying to kick his legs free. He screamed again, and the sound was so loud inside the confines of the shelter I thought my ears might pop. I could see him straining with every muscle to reach down and scratch his wound, his hands stretched out like claws.
The belts had begun to cut into his wrists. Blood seeped from underneath and began to spatter the bedsheets as he twisted back and forth.
Dan shook his head. “The fever’s made him nuts.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I stepped even closer, keeping my eye on that area of his thigh just above the wound in his knee. There were more hives now, bright red and angry-looking against his skin. Some of them were as big around as a baseball.
“Jimmie, wait. Can you hear me? Just stop a minute.”
Incredibly enough, he did. I could tell the amount of effort it required by the way his muscles remained taut and trembled slightly. Imagine that unbearable itch between your shoulder blades that you just can’t reach. Imagine that, only a hundred times worse. And it just goes on and on…
Just when I thought I must have been mistaken, there it was: a bulging line under his flesh, running from about two inches above the wound, under several of the largest hives along his thigh, to his boxer shorts.
As if something alive was moving around inside him.
“There’s something under his skin,” I said. “There. Right there.” I pointed at the spot.
The keening began low in his throat, and grew until it was a constant, high-pitched squeal. I was reminded of a documentary I’d seen on Egyptian wailing women at funerals, only this was worse. There was so much pain in the sound.
Jimmie started thrashing again and the blood from his wrists started to flow faster. “Get it out get it out getitout-getitoutgetitout—”
“Sue, get me a knife from the kitchen,” Dan said. His face was set and grim.
“I—”
“Just do it.” He walked over and put his hand on Jimmie’s forehead. “Easy, buddy. Hang in there. We’re going to help you.”
“I can’t do this,” Jay said abruptly. He was sweating too, and breathing hard. I knew how he felt.
“Then don’t,” Dan said. “Go wait in the other room.”
Jay nodded and backed out. Sue returned a moment later with a serrated kitchen knife with a black plastic handle, the kind you use to cut steak. She handed it to Dan, then looked around for Jay. I pointed to the other room. “You better check on him,” I said. “Besides, you might not want to be in here either.”
I turned back to where Dan stood. Tessa came forward to stand next to me. I thought about asking her to leave too, but she was the closest thing we had to a doctor in this place, so I kept my mouth shut.
The two of us approached the bed. “This is going to be bad,” I muttered. Dan shot me a look.
“Jimmie,” he said. “I want you to try to listen to me. I don’t know what that is in your leg, but we’re going to try to get it out. You have to be absolutely still. Do you understand?”
Jimmie nodded violently. Blood was running freely down his arms now, and I winced at the raw, angry lines the belts had dug into his skin. He clenched his teeth. “Please, just do it. Do it.”
Dan nodded. I rarely saw him looking indecisive, but he did now. He swallowed hard and bent over Jimmie’s leg.
I took Jimmie’s ankle in both hands, trying to ignore the crawling, itching sensation I got when touching him. Together we held him still against the mattress. “I’m going to do this as fast as I can,” Dan said. “Pete, we might need a tourniquet or something. You can use one of the belts when we’re done.”
Then he set the blade of the knife against one of the big hives and sliced down.
Yellow pus spurted up and splashed his hands, followed by a reddish brown fluid. Jimmie screamed and his leg jerked against my grip. I felt the sickness rise up in me, and I gagged. The smell was intense. It reminded me of the rats in the tunnel, and I flashed back to the weight of them falling on top of me, their slippery tails against my face and hands, their matted fur and coarse whiskers.
Tessa put her hand on my back. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said thickly.
“Stay with me,” Dan said. “Jimmie, I’m going to—”
All at once Dan leaped backward, the knife clattering to the floor. I looked at the wound he’d made and I stumbled back too, unable to tear my eyes away, my chest getting tight and my breath coming faster.
Some kind of insects were crawling out of the deep slice in Jimmie’s leg. I watched as they emerged one by one, their antennae poking through and wiggling before they forced their way out in a perfect line. They looked like small black ants, the kind you see in every backyard and at every picnic in the country.
Except these ants had just burrowed a hole in my friend’s body, chewed him up from the inside.
“What the fuck is that?” Dan said. He had his hand cupped to his mouth and spoke through his fingers. “Jesus Christ, Pete, are you seeing this?”
Jimmie picked his head up enough to get a l
ook, and when he did he started screaming again and yanking so hard against the belts I thought his wrists might break. The line of ants ran down his leg and over the mattress to the floor.
Insects. They make the best disease carriers.
I turned and threw up. My stomach convulsed again and again, as if it were trying to rip itself from my body. The smell of my puke mixed with the smell of rot coming from Jimmie’s wound made me heave again, this time coming up with strings of mucus. My eyes watered and my nose stung, but it helped clear my head.
When I wiped my mouth and turned back again, I resumed my position next to Tessa by Jimmie’s side. Quickly she used the top blanket to wipe away the pus and blood and remaining ants from the cut, then picked up the knife and sliced lightly along the bulging line up his thigh.
His skin parted and more ants poured out, wriggling and dropping to the floor. There must have been hundreds of them. Jimmie’s screams went on and on, filling the room until I thought I might start screaming myself. I couldn’t register what I saw with reality anymore; it was as if I had stepped outside myself and into a dream where anything and everything could happen.
One of the belts snapped. Jimmie reached down with his free hand and ripped at his own skin with his nails, opening up the wound and causing fresh blood to pulse out. He dug at himself furiously, seemingly unaware of the damage he was causing.
That unbearable itch…I swallowed hard and went to help, grabbing his arm and holding it down. He fought me, but I was determined this time not to let him go. Everything was slippery and sticky with blood and pus. Dan came around and helped too, as Tessa pressed the blanket to his wound to stop the bleeding. Ants were crawling everywhere now, over the bed and the bloody blanket, across the slats of the headboard, on the floor. I watched them return to eerie formation, drawing back into a single line as if pulled there by invisible strings, and marching over the bed and down to the floor.
My stomach heaved again, but I swallowed it down.
Slowly Jimmie began to lose strength. I felt him go limp, and his head lolled to one side. I didn’t know if he had passed out or was simply playing possum. “Get his arm tied again,” Dan said. I took the other belt from around his wrist and used it to tie both hands together. Then I felt for a pulse in his neck. It was erratic and faint.
“Shock,” Tessa said. “We have to clean him up and get him warm. Hold this.” She put Dan’s hand in place over the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”
A moment later she returned with a bottle of iodine and cotton pads from the first-aid kit. She pulled away the bloody blanket to expose the ugly wound, then poured iodine all over it. Jimmie didn’t move, even though it must have hurt like a son of a bitch. Gently she patted the wound clean with the cotton pads. It still bled, but more slowly now, and the ants were gone.
I looked around the bed and the floor again. They had all vanished.
“This should have stitches,” she said. “There’s a needle and thread in the kit. Anyone know how to sew?”
I swallowed hard. “I think Sue took a quilting class once,” I said. “I bet she could stitch it up.” Dan nodded, and I went to go get her.
She and Jay were in the kitchen, sitting on the tile. Big Sue had her arms around Jay and was rocking him like a baby in her lap. She looked up at me, the pain in her eyes obvious.
“Is it done?” she asked.
If I hadn’t been so distracted I might have found that odd; no what happened or I heard him screaming. But I just shrugged.
“We need your help,” I said.
“I can’t leave him,” she said, looking down at Jay. His eyes were squeezed shut and he might have been asleep, except for the way his right foot kept jittering against the floor.
“You’re going to have to,” I said. “Just for a couple of minutes.”
Sue sighed. Then she hugged him close. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “I promise.”
When we left him he was curled up on a ball on his side, eyes closed, that foot still jiggling against the kitchen tile.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sue did a pretty decent job sewing Jimmie up, considering the circumstances. He never regained consciousness, even as the needle was being threaded into his flesh. After it was done we dressed the wound, wrapping it with layers of tape so he couldn’t get it off easily. Then we released his arms and legs and wrapped him in a blanket. He seemed to be breathing pretty evenly and his pulse was stronger. There was nothing else we could do at the moment.
The room smelled like puke and rot, but nobody was up for a good scrubbing, and I doubted we could get it all clean anyway.
“Group meeting,” Dan said. “Dining room.”
We filed in and took seats around the table. Sue went into the kitchen and helped Jay come out to join us, where he huddled in a chair, clutching his knees to his chest and rocking. Then she disappeared back into the kitchen and came out with the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a stack of cups, and poured a round for everyone.
The alcohol burned my throat and stomach going down, but it felt good. Every muscle in my body was shaking with exhaustion and I didn’t know if I’d be able to get up again.
“Okay,” Dan said, standing at the head of the table. He threw down a shot of Jack and grimaced. “That was weird.”
“Understatement of the century,” I said.
Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. Dan scrubbed his face with his hand. I noticed for the first time how much older he looked, stubble on his chin, a hollowness to his cheeks and a slump to his shoulders. He had always prided himself on keeping in perfect shape, eating well and getting enough sleep. If you were on the outside looking in, he never seemed to fit in quite right with the rest of us. We were certainly closer to nerds than jocks; even if I had played some ball way back before high school, I was no ringer. And yet he’d never made fun of us, never put us down in front of his other friends, had remained steadfast in the face of steadily increasing peer pressure. Eventually we had become more popular simply by association. The rest of the jocks left us alone.
Sports had been his life, or so I thought. What was he going to do now?
Leaders lead. I wondered about that. It made sense that he would become the head of our little pack, but Dan could have hung out with any social group he wanted to in White Falls. Why had he chosen us? Was it because we were weaker than the rest, and he felt safe enough to let his guard down? Or was it something else?
“Tell me what happened,” Jay said. “No, wait, don’t. Ants, was it? Burrowing under his skin?”
We all looked at him. He was even more of a mess, pale as death with black circles under his eyes, thin as a rail, his hair all matted and greasy. That red patch on his arm had gotten worse. He’d been quiet up until then, but now he took the shot of Jack from the table and drank it down. Then he reached for the bottle. Sue went to stop him, but he waved her off and poured another shot. “Did you get them all?” he asked.
“How the fuck should I know,” Dan said.
“If we don’t, it’ll happen again,” Jay said. “Hell, it’ll probably happen again anyway.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Dan said. “They must have gone after the wound, the smell maybe, I don’t know. We didn’t clean it well and it got infected, and somehow they got in there.”
Jay laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. It sent chills down my spine. “It’s all planned,” he said. “All of it.” His leg had started jumping again. He looked like a guy who needed to go into detox, all jittery and twitching. “The world’s gone to hell, and we’re the last ones left standing.”
Dan stared at Jay, then at Sue and back again. “What’s going on?” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Sue said. “He’s just exhausted. We all are.” She moved around to stand behind Jay and put her hands on his shoulders, kneading lightly. When she touched him, he jumped. “Maybe we should just try to get some sleep, and regroup in the morning.”
&nb
sp; “They were inside the rats too,” Jay said. “You guys weren’t paying attention, but I saw them, little tiny ones. Don’t you get it? That rat in the kitchen was dead. They all were. But they attacked us. How do you think they did that?” He looked around at everyone.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
“Like pilots of an airplane, Pete. The rats’ bodies became a means to an end, an inanimate object, nothing more. Puppets getting their strings pulled.”
“That’s impossible.”
Jay shook his head. “They’re smarter than you think. Honeybees fly in formation, one by one, obeying precise commands and able to find their targets hundreds of yards away. Ants can build these amazing palaces underground, moving one piece of dirt at a time, all working together in the most complex kind of dance anyone has ever seen. They have social roles. Some take other ant species into slavery for their entire lives. How do they do these things? Nobody knows for sure. But if we could somehow find a way to harness that, the hive mind, use it for our own ends…” He shook his head. “Little armies of super soldiers, going places and doing things humans can’t do.”
“I thought you said they were carrying a plague.”
“In a way, that’s exactly right.”
“But they’re not big enough to do any real damage—”
“There are over a billion insects for every single person on earth,” Jay said. “You like those odds? How about throwing together some of the most dangerous ones, like the Japanese giant hornet? Three inches long, vicious and deadly to humans? The army ant swarm that’ll shred anything in its path? Or the bullet ant, an inch long with the most powerful stinger on earth? They say it feels like getting shot. Oh, and did I mention they live in trees and drop on top of you when you walk by? Try running across a few hundred of those.”
His voice had raised in pitch and intensity, and he was sitting up ramrod straight now. Sue took her hands from his shoulders and took a step back.
