by Nick Cutter
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1.
THE OLD MAN’S HEAD was covered in mantises.
At first Luke thought it was a wig or some weird toupee—but he was at the southern tip of Guam, a few miles from the Pacific, and the man was wearing tattered clothes and what looked like strips of old radial tires lashed to his feet. Why bother with a toupee?
The driver saw the old man, too. He hissed between his teeth—an uneasy tssshk! He said something under his breath: a curse, maybe a prayer? Luke didn’t speak the local dialect.
“I’ll do it,” Luke told the driver. “You wait here.”
He elbowed the Jeep’s door open. Sweet Jesus, the heat. It’d hit him like a fist when he stepped onto the runway at the Agana airport. It hit him again now—the tropical air, laden with the nectar of heliotropes, caused beads of sweat to pop along his brow.
The old man stood facing the wall of a one-story workshop. The ground was strewn with hubcaps and crankcases snarled in rusted wiring. Wrist-thick vines snaked out of the greenery to twine around the industrial junk; with nobody around to hack it back, the jungle would reclaim this spot in a matter of months.
The old man was walking into the wall—his sandals made a gentle whush-whush as they brushed the yellowing adobe. The spotting was pronounced on his bare arms and his throat. The scabs were dime-sized, bigger than what Luke was used to seeing. Some of them had cracked open and were leaking grayish pus.
Luke had no clue what had drawn the mantises. Maybe they’d dropped from the creeping ivy snarled across the shop’s roof. Or maybe something on the man’s scalp, or leaching out of it, had attracted them.
They were the largest insects Luke had ever seen. Each mantis was the length of his thumb, and muscular-looking. They had swollen, cantilevered abdomens that curved above their sharp, considering faces. A baker’s dozen or so carpeted the man’s skull.
Luke got the sense of them turning to stare at him, all at once.
Luke retreated to the ditch. His feet sank into the muck. He didn’t like the way it sucked at his boots—greedy, a lipless brown mouth.
He found a stick and went back. The insects squirmed quarrelsomely on the man’s head, which was covered with wispy white hairs as downy as those on a baby’s skull. Their exoskeletons made a brittle chitter. What the hell were they doing?
Luke watched their choreographed manner. The stink of burned diesel mixed with the heliotropes to create a sticky vapor that coated his throat. Distantly, he heard the driver repeat what he’d said before—that breathless curse or prayer—and Luke was worried he’d set the Jeep in gear and take off, leaving him with the old man and the mantises, the heat and the crawling jungle.
What in God’s name were those bugs doing?
One mantis pinned another in a violent vise grip, then widened its jaws and bit down, cleaving the other’s head in half. Their abdomens were wed. What was clearly the female continued to eat the male’s head while his antenna whipped about frantically.
Using the stick, Luke brushed the mantises off the man’s skull. A decapitated male skittered wildly across Luke’s fingers; he shook it into the mud with the rest of them. The urge arose to step on them. Squash them all to paste.
Instead, Luke set his hands on the old man’s shoulders to turn him around. His expression was familiar: The Big Blank. His eyes gone milky, the edges of his eyelids pebbled with nodules of acne that gave his skin the look of an orange rind. His mouth wide open, his tongue coated in white film. He may not have drunk water in days. He’d forgotten to, probably.
That’s how it went with the ’Gets: you forgot the little things first, then the not-so-little things, then the big ones. Next, the critical ones. In time, your heart forgot how to beat, your lungs how to breathe. You die knowing nothing at all.
As soon as Luke pointed him in a new direction, the old man started to walk. He’d go on until he fell down or stepped off a cliff or stumbled into a leopard’s den, if they had those around here. And Luke couldn’t do a damn thing about that.
He climbed back into the Jeep. The driver eased past the old man as he tottered down the road, that clingy mud sucking up past his ankles already. Luke watched as they pulled away, the old man’s body becoming indistinct through the stinging fumes.
2.
A VISTA OF HEAT-STOOPED PALMS gave way to the town of Inarajan. The buildings were pueblo-rustic and had a worn but functional look, with whitewashed tin roofs.
A fan of red grit rose in the Jeep’s wake; it appeared to hover in the intense heat, refusing to settle. The Jeep’s vents blasted humid air. The creased skin at the back of Luke’s neck was grimy with sweat and dirt.
The Pacific rolled out to the south. The water deepened to an icy blue. Two old women sat on a buckled porch smoking cheroot cigars. None of the villagers looked worried. None of the shops had been looted. That had occurred in other places, but for the most part, humanity had simply carried on. If this was the apocalypse, it was to be an orderly and complacent one.
The village children watched the Jeep rumble past. One of them, a girl of about eight, smiled at Luke. A cluster of dark specks dappled her elbows, like the bruises on a banana as it turns overripe.
The Spots. They would get bigger, cover her body, turn crusty then pustulant . . . then she’d begin to forget. Minor stuff at first. Where she’d left her dolly or how to tell the time of day. Then she wouldn’t know how to tie her shoelaces; she might spend hours bent over her feet, trying to lace however she’d been taught—the bunny ears method? Loop, swoop, and pull? She’d laugh at first—I’m being such a silly-billy!—but she would soon become frustrated, as children do, and start to cry.
Next, she’d forget her brother’s name and the smell of her father’s pipe tobacco, and soon enough, her own face in the mirror. She’d forget what hot or cold should feel like, and then even the concepts of heat and cold. That would have to be the worst part, Luke figured: forgetting those elemental assurances everyone is born with. She’d look at the nut tree in her yard and forget the sensation of its leaves brushing her skin; soon she’d forget what leaves were to begin with, and how vital they are to that tree, the same way our veins are vital to our bodies (she’ll have forgotten about veins by that point, too). She’d forget how wonderful those nuts taste—after that, she’d forget why eating mattered much at all.
The tree would make no sense to her. Nothing would, actually.
3.
THE YACHT WAS MOORED five hundred yards off the Inarajan wharf.
Its original owner was a Vegas casino magnate. Its home dock was in Okinawa, Japan, but Uncle Sam had recently conscripted it in the service of science. Its owner didn’t argue its seizure, Luke had been told, due to the fact that he’d forgotten he’d ever bought a yacht. The ’Gets had a way of loosening prior rights of ownership.
Luke grabbed his duffel and nodded good-bye to the driver. The sun-bleached planks squealed under his boots. Fiddleback crabs skittered around the pilings, raising puffs of sand. An eel—a black, sinuous ribbon—darted out, plucking up a crab before vanishing beneath the wharf.
Animals were unaffected, for whatever reason. No spotting, no ’Gets. All except honeybees, which had been the first and only.
A few skiffs were moored at the end of the wharf, their rusted bottoms spread with mildewed nets. A haze of flies boiled up at Luke’s approach. One landed on his forearm. A horsefly, its compound eyes reflecting the sunlight like disco balls.
Luke slapped it. The horsefly buzzed, trapped between his palm and the flesh of his arm, a sensation so off-putting that Luke lifted his hand. The fly escaped with cool indifference.
The yacht wasn’t too far off. Luke could swim it—wanted to, in fact. It was goddamn hot, he was dirty, and a weird hum had settled into his bones. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he squinted toward the vessel. He could barely make out a figure on it.
He dropped his duffel into a Zodiac boat. He yanked the engine’s ripcord and steered away from the village’s squat buildings, away from the girl with those terrible specks.
The water was a chilly blue—it reminded Luke of Barbicide, the disinfectant solution the old barbers in Iowa City used to soak their combs in. That stuff’ll kill you dead if you drink it, one of the barbers told Luke when he was a boy, as if suspecting Luke had harbored that very desire.
His gaze trailed north over the crested hills. He spied a church. It must’ve been centuries old, perhaps the very first thing the area settlers had built. It was burned. The spire must have gone up first, the roof beams reduced to cinders until what remained of the steeple had come crashing through the narthex.
Nothing else had been torched in the entire village. Only the church.
4.
THE YACHT WAS ANCHORED at the edge of a half-moon bay. A man stood on deck. Tall and thin with articulate limbs that reminded Luke, however unfairly, of the mantises on that old man’s skull.
“Dr. Nelson.” The man extended his hand. “I’m Leo Bathgate. So glad you made it safely.”
Luke inspected Bathgate’s outstretched arm—Luke’s eyes strayed toward people’s hands and arms habitually, a reflex action. Research showed that the ’Gets wasn’t spread through physical contact, the transmission of bodily fluids, or as an airborne pathogen. But it had taken a while to discover this, and sadly, several tragedies had occurred before it was fully understood. Men had been shot in cold blood as they had struggled to recall some hard-to-remember fact. The phrase It’s on the tip of my tongue had become the basis for justifiable homicide for a while there.
The yacht was luxurious, everything gleaming. Luke felt as though he was floating on a pile of cold currency.
Bathgate read his face. “I’ve never set foot on anything like it, either.”
A bottle of champagne sat in a bucket. Bathgate shrugged.
“I found it onboard. Figured it’d just go to waste,” he said.
Krug Brut 1988. Pricey suds. Bathgate poured the bubbly into crystal flutes and handed one to him. Luke tipped the glass to his lips, the champagne sending a tickle up his sinuses.
Bathgate said: “How was your trip?”
Endless, Luke wanted to tell him.
Roughly eight thousand miles separated Chicago, where he’d caught the first flight, and Agana, the capital city of Guam. Those eight thousand miles had unfurled like a strange waking nightmare.
On his way out of Iowa City, Luke had stopped at an Exxon off the interstate. The highway wasn’t snarled with stalled or abandoned cars, the way it always is in stories about the apocalypse. Because this wasn’t exactly the apocalypse, Luke had to constantly remind himself. It was just something awful that was happening.
For that reason, or maybe just out of old habit, the important things went along as they had. Ideas of ownership prevailed. The dead were still being buried—not always in cemeteries, but the bodies certainly went into the ground. Rituals were still being observed. And that was good.
The gas station had been empty. The pumps were shut off. The door to the convenience store was open. The aisles were shadowy in the late afternoon. Muggy, seeing as the A/C wasn’t working. Ants trooped up the glass of a cooler case.
Luke could’ve done anything. Unwrapped a Twinkie and wolfed it down. Stripped the plastic off a Penthouse and flipped out the gatefold. There was something very freeing about that—but scary, too.
He’d pulled back onto the interstate. The gas gauge needle had nudged past E when he found a Cenex station . . . which was bustling. People were gassing up, paying for chips and sodas, blissfully unaware or pretending to be. It had been good to see the lights on. Good to pay for things. That feeling of normalcy returned. The world was still spinning as it always had, right?
That troublesome kind of stuff happened a lot now. You couldn’t find gas, or a new tire if you got a flat. You could set off for a destination and never reach it. A thousand new roadblocks popped up—not always physical or jurisdictional ones, either. Just the system breaking down in little ways.
O’Hare Airport had been surreal. Most of his terminal’s kiosks and shops were closed, the shelves picked over, restaurants offering a reduced menu.
Luke had passed through security without incident; he carried a notarized document that eased his passage. The plane was a twin-prop puddle jumper. It was so full that two U.S. Marines had to sit in the aisle. That would’ve made life tough on the flight attendants, had there been any.
The plane touched down in Denver. After he disembarked, Luke stood before the airport’s windows watching the flights taxi in. He could make out a man at the edge of the landing strip, propped against a chain-link fence. Motionless, with his arms outspread.
A plane roared down the runway; as it rose, it flew directly above the man. His clothes fluttered with the terrific force of the jet’s engines. His body jerked, his head snapping back and forth. Did the pilots have to look at the man every time they took off?
“Somebody should do something about it.”
The woman standing beside Luke was fiftyish, with salt-and-pepper hair and a faint British accent. She tapped the huge window with her knuckles, a fussy rap-rap-rap, as if in expectation someone—a butler?—would appear to deal with her complaint.
“They should bloody well do something about that poor sod, wouldn’t you think?”
She seemed the sort of woman who was used to getting things done. But things didn’t always get done nowadays. People just got on with things the way they were.
Luke’s connecting flight landed at San Francisco International, where he was met by a pair of unsmiling soldiers. They led him to a private airstrip, where a C-23 Sherpa cargo plane waited. Luke was its sole passenger. Resting against the bulkhead, he let the hum of the engine fill his skull. He fell into a black sucking vacuum of sleep—dreamless, joyless. When he awoke, his plane was circling Agana.
“Long,” Luke said, finally answering Bathgate’s question. “A long goddamn trip.”
Bathgate gave a sympathetic nod. “You must be exhausted.”
Luke’s watch was still set to Iowa time. His body clock was reading 5:00 a.m. as Guam’s midafternoon sun beat down on his skull. The champagne mainlined straight into his veins, making him swoon.
“Your berth is down below,” Bathgate said. “Why don’t you get settled?”
As Luke made his way to the sleeping quarters, Bathgate called out: “Dr. Nelson?”
Luke turned to see Bathgate wringing his ballcap in his hard-knuckled hands.
“Your brother . . .” he said falteringly. “They say he might have the answer to all this. Whatever he’s doing down there in the deep. You think that’s possible?”
“I really don’t know, Leo. I guess we’re gonna see.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“I’m hopeful. We all are.”
“Right.” Bathgate offered an uncertain smile. “Hopeful, absolutely hopeful.”
Wasn’t that why Luke had been brought here at great expense, after all? To talk to his brother? To rekindle the tiniest shred of hope?
Luke’s brother, who was eight miles deep in the Pacific Ocean.
Luke’s bizarre and brilliant brother, whom nobody had heard from in days.
5.
LUKE DREAMED of his mother.
It was a familiar dream that came in times of stress. In it, his mother entered his bedroom. Luke was seven or eight years old. His mother was enormous, as she’d been at that point in his
life. Over four hundred pounds.
She slipped into bed with him. Threw back his Star Wars bedcovers and slid under them with chilling dexterity. Her body was warm and soft as bread dough, perfumed with the excretions that leaked from her skin. Her breath feathered the hairs inside his ear canal. She began to whisper. Luke could never quite make out what she said. Her voice hit a subaudible pitch that crawled directly into his brain.
Luke awoke, his breath coming in leaden rasps. The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup. He checked his watch; he’d slept less than two hours. Goddamn. His mother. All these years later she was still there, haunting the corridors of his mind like a hungry ghost. He closed his eyes and she bloomed in his mind’s eye again: Bethany Ronnicks—she had forsaken her husband’s family name, preferring her maiden one. Battle-ax Beth.
She was a huge presence in every way: her room-filling personality, her booming laugh, and in time, her vast physical bulk. She’d always been a large woman: broad shoulders, wide hips, over six feet tall. A lady skyscraper, as Luke had heard her spoken of around town. She held an imposing beauty, or she had before her “bad years,” and the two hundred pounds they had packed onto her frame. She walked with a regal bearing, her chest thrust out as if in the expectation that a visiting dignitary would affix a medal to it.
She worked at the Second Chance Ranch, a “home” for mentally troubled male youths—No Chance Ranch, as she referred to it in her poisonous moods. She had been hired as the duty nurse but soon transferred to orderly, the first female in the state hired for that position. She preferred the hands-on aspect. Better than doling out pills and sanitizing bedpans.
“It stinks,” Luke overheard her say once in conversation with Edie Emmons, one of her few friends. “The piss of those mad boys. There’s a chemical they produce—a compound specific to crazies. Trans-3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid.”
