by Joe Hill
In the next moment, Francis heard—no, sensed—his father entering the living room. Each step Buddy Kay took set off a subtle vibration Francis could feel in the iron frame of his cot, and humming in the dry hot air around his head. The stucco walls of the filling station were relatively thick, and absorbed sounds well. He had never before been able to clearly hear a conversation going on in the next room. Now, though, he felt, rather than heard, what Ella was saying and how his father answered her; felt their voices as a series of low reverberations, which stirred the exquisitely sensitive antennae at the top of his head. Their voices were distorted, and deeper than normal—as if their conversation were taking place underwater—but perfectly understandable.
She said, “You know he never went to school.”
“What are you talking about?” Buddy asked.
“He never went to school is what. He’s been in there all mornin’.”
“Is he awake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Din’t you look?”
“You know I don’t like to put no weight on my laig.”
“You fuckin’ lazy cow,” his father said, and began to stride towards Francis’s door. Each step sent another shivering jolt of pleasure and alarm through Francis’s antennae.
By then, Francis had reached the edge of the bed. The skin of his old body, however, hadn’t come along with him, and lay in a knotted mess in the center of the mattress, a boneless canoe filled with blood. Francis balanced on the iron rail that ran along the outside of his cot. He tried to shuffle another inch or two closer to the side, not sure yet how to get down, and turned over. His old skin yanked at his limbs, the weight of it pulling him back. He heard his father’s boot heels ringing on the other side of the door, and he heaved himself forward, alarmed at the thought of being found helpless on his back. His father might not recognize him and go for the gun—which was on the wall in the living room, only a few steps away—and blow open his segmented belly in a whitish-green gush of bug innards.
When Francis threw himself at the edge of the bed, the rags of his old flesh came apart, with a ripping sound like someone tearing a bedsheet; he fell; flipped at the same time; and landed with a springy lightness on all six feet, with a grace he had never known in his days as a human.
His back was to the bedroom door. He didn’t have time to think, and for that reason, perhaps, his legs did just what they were supposed to. He spun around, his rear legs running to the right while his front legs scrabbled to the left, turning the low, narrow five-foot length of him. He felt the microthin plates or shields on his back flutter strangely, and had just an instant to wonder again what they were. Then his father was braying at the door.
“What the fuck you doin’ in there, you asshole? Get the fuck to school—”
The door banged open. Francis reared back, lifting his front two legs off the floor. His mandibles made a rapid clattering sound, like a fast typist giving a manual typewriter a workout. Buddy hung in the open door, one hand still gripping the doorknob. His gaze fell upon the crouched figure of his transformed son. The color drained from his starved, whiskery face, until he looked like a waxwork of himself.
Then he shrieked, a shrill piercing sound that sent a white electric throb of pure stimulation shooting down Francis’s antennae. Francis shrieked himself, although what came out in no way resembled a human cry. It was the sound instead of someone shaking a thin sheet of aluminum, an undulating, inhuman warble.
He looked for a way out. There were windows high in the wall above his bed, but they weren’t big enough, just a series of wide slots barely a foot tall. His glance fell upon his bed and held there for a startled instant. He had thrown his sheets off in the night, kicking them to the far end of the mattress. Now they were lathered in some kind of white spittle, and they were dissolving in it…had liquefied and blackened at the same time, becoming a mass of fizzing organic sludge.
The bed sagged deeply in the center. The castoff raiment of his flesh was there, a one-piece boy costume that had been ripped apart up the middle. He didn’t get a look at his face, but he did see one hand, a crinkly flesh-colored glove with nothing in it, fingers curling inwards. The foam that had melted the sheets was trickling down towards his former skin, and where it touched it, the tissue blistered and smoked. Francis remembered farting, and the feeling of liquid trickling between his hind legs. He had done this somehow.
The air shuddered with a sudden heavy crash. He looked back and saw his father on the floor, his toes pointing out- wards. Stared past him into the living room, where Ella was struggling to sit up from the couch. Instead of turning gray and grabbing her chest, she stiffened at the sight of him, her expression going fixed and blank. She had a bottle of Coke in one hand—it wasn’t yet ten in the morning—and she sat frozen with it raised halfway to her lips.
“Oh God,” she said, in a dazed, but relatively normal tone of voice. “Just look at you.”
Coke began to spill out of the bottle, drizzling down her breasts. She didn’t notice.
He would have to go, and there was only one way out. He jogged forward, erratically at first—he zagged a little too hard to the right on his way through the doorway and clouted his side, although he barely felt it—and climbed over the body of his unconscious father. He continued on, squeezing between the couch and the coffee table, aiming himself at the screen door. Ella daintily lifted her feet onto the couch to let him pass. She was whispering to herself now, so softly a person sitting right next to her might not have been aware she was doing it. Francis, however, didn’t miss a word, his antennae trembling at every syllable.
“Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth, and they were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree—” He was at the door now; he paused, listening. “—but only those of mankind who have not the seal of God upon their foreheads; they were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion, when it stings a man. And in those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will long to die, and death flies from them.”
He shivered, although he could not have said why; her words stirred and thrilled him. He lifted his front legs to the door and shoved it open, and clambered out into the blinding white heat of the day.
2.
The culvert was filled with garbage for half a mile, the combined trash of five towns. Garbage collection was Calliphora’s main industry. Two of every five grown men in town had a job in trash; one out of five was in the army’s radiological division and stationed at Camp Calliphora, a mile to the north; the other two stayed home to watch television, scratch lottery tickets, and eat the frozen dinners they bought with their food stamps. Francis’s father was the rare exception, someone who owned his own business. Buddy called himself an entrepreneur. He had had an idea which he thought might revolutionize the filling station business. It was called self-serve. It meant you let the customer fill his own Goddamn tank, and you charged them just the same as they did at the full-service place.
Down in the culvert, it was difficult to see anything of Calliphora on the shelf of rock above. When Francis peered up the steep incline, he could make out just a single identifiable landmark, the top of the great flagpole in front of his father’s gas station. The flag itself was reckoned to be the biggest in the state. It was easily large enough to drape over the cab of an eighteen-wheeler, and too heavy to move even in very strong winds. Francis had seen it rippling only once—in the gales that boomed across Calliphora after they dropped The Bomb.
His father got a lot of army business. Whenever he had to come out of his office for some reason, say, to look at someone’s overheated Jeep, he usually threw the top half of his fatigues on over his T-shirt. Medals bounced and flashed on the left breast. None of them were his—he had bought them one afternoon at the pawn—but the uniform he had at least come by honestly, in World W
ar II. His father had liked the war.
“There isn’t any pussy like what you get in a country you just shelled into the dirt,” he said one night, lifting a can of Buckhorn as if in a toast, his rheumy eyes glistening with fond memories.
Francis hid in the garbage, squeezing himself into a soft depression between bulging plastic bags, and waited fearfully for police cruisers, listening for the dreadful, thunderous beat of helicopters, his antennae twitching and erect. But there were no cruisers, and there were no helicopters. Once or twice a pick-up came rattling down the dirt road winding between the trash heaps, and he’d squirm desperately backwards, burrowing so far into the garbage that only his antennae stuck out. But that was all. There was little traffic at this end of the dump, which was almost half a mile from the processing center where the real work was done.
Later, he scuttled up onto one of the great mounds of garbage, to make sure he wasn’t quietly being encircled. He wasn’t, and he didn’t remain in the open for long. He didn’t like the direct glare of the sun. After only a moment in it, he felt a numbing lassitude creeping over him, as if he had been pumped full of novocaine. In the very back of the dump, though, where the culvert narrowed, he spied a trailer on cement blocks. He climbed down and waddled over to it. He had thought it looked abandoned and it was. The space beneath it was filled with deliciously cool shadows. Climbing under the trailer was as refreshing as a dip into a lake.
He rested. It was Eric Hickman who woke him; not that Francis had been asleep in the literal sense. He had settled instead into a state of intensely felt stillness, in which he knew nothing and yet was completely alert. He heard the scrape and drag of Eric’s feet from forty feet away, and lifted his head. Eric was squinting through his glasses in the afternoon sunlight. He was always squinting—to read things, or just when he was thinking hard—a habit which never failed to put a kind of simian grimace on his face. It was such an unpleasant expression, it just naturally made other people want to give him something to grimace about.
“Francis,” Eric whispered loudly. He carried a grease-spattered brown paper bag that might’ve contained his lunch, and at the sight Francis felt a sharp twinge of hunger, but he didn’t come out.
“Francis, are you down here somewhere?” Eric whisper-shouted one more time before he tracked on out of sight.
Francis had wanted to show himself, but couldn’t. What had stopped him was the idea that Eric was only there to lure him out in the open. Francis imagined a team of snipers crouched on the hills of garbage, watching the road through their rifle sights for some sign of the giant killer cricket. He held his ground, crouched and tense, monitoring the mounds of trash for movement. He held his breath. A can fell clanking. It was only a crow.
Eventually, he had to admit he had let anxiety get the better of him. Eric had come alone. This was followed a moment later by the understanding that no one was looking for him, because no one would believe his father when Buddy said what he had seen. If he tried to tell them he had discovered a giant insect in his son’s bedroom, crouched beside the eviscerated body of his boy, he’d be lucky not to wind up in the back of a police car, on his way to the psychiatric ward in Tucson. They would not even believe him when he said his son was dead. After all, there was no body, and no discarded skin either. The milky excretion that had bubbled out of Francis’s rear would’ve melted it away.
Only last Halloween, his father had sweated out the DTs in the county jail, and could hardly be considered a credible witness. Ella might back up his story, but her word was worth no more than his, and possibly less. She called the offices of the Calliphora Happenings, sometimes as often as once a month, to report seeing clouds that looked like Jesus. She had a whole photo album of clouds she said bore the face of Her Savior. Francis had flipped through it, but was unable to recognize any religious notables, although he was willing to admit there was one cloud that might’ve been a fat man in a fez.
The local police would be on the lookout for Francis himself, of course, but he wasn’t sure how hard they’d actively search. He was eighteen—free to do as he chose—and often missed school without explanation. There were just four law enforcement officers in Calliphora: Sheriff George Walker, and three part-timers. That allowed for only a very limited search party, and besides, there were other things to do on a pretty, windless day like this one: hassle wetbacks for example, or sit in the speed-trap and wait for teenagers to burn by on their way to Phoenix.
It was getting hard, anyway, to worry much about whether anyone was looking for him. He was daydreaming about Little Debbie snacks again. He could not remember the last time he had been so hungry.
Although the sky was bright and hard, a blue enameled surface, afternoon shadows had eased out across the culvert, as the sun slipped behind the shelf of red rock to the west. He scuttled out from under the trailer, and picked through the litter, stopping at a bag that had split open and spilled its contents. He prodded the leavings with his antennae. Amidst the crushed papers, exploded Styrofoam cups, and balled-up diapers, he discovered a dirt-speckled red lollipop. He leaned forward and clumsily took the whole thing into his mouth, bent cardboard stick and all, grasping at it with his mandibles, drool spattering into the dust.
For an instant, the inside of his mouth was filled with an overpowering burst of sugary sweetness, and he felt blood rush to his heart. But an instant later he became conscious of an awful tickling in the thorax, and his throat seemed to close. His stomach lurched. He spat the lollipop out in disgust. It was no better with the half-eaten chicken wings he discovered. The few scraps of meat and fat on the bones tasted rancid and he gagged reflexively.
Bluebottle flies buzzed greedily around the pile of waste. He glared at them resentfully, considered snapping them up. Some bugs ate other bugs—but he didn’t know how to catch them with no hands (although he sensed he was quick enough), and he could hardly ease his suffering with a half dozen bluebottles. Headachy and edgy with hunger, he thought of the candied crickets and all the other bugs he had eaten. It was because of them this had happened to him, he supposed, and his mind leaped to the sun rising at two A.M., and the way the wind came at the filling station in superheated blasts, slamming into the building so hard, dust trickled from the ceiling.
Huey Chester’s father, Vern, had hit a rabbit in his driveway once, got out and discovered a thing with unnatural pink eyes—four of them. He brought it into town to show it off, but then a biologist, accompanied by a corporal and two privates with machine guns, turned up to claim it, and they paid Vern five hundred dollars to sign a statement agreeing he wouldn’t talk about it. Then once, just a week after one of the tests in the desert, a dense, moist fog that smelled horribly of bacon had billowed over the entire town. It was so thick they cancelled school, and closed the supermarket and the post office. Owls flew in the daytime, and low booms and rumbles of thunder sounded at all hours, out in the roiling wet murk. The scientists in the desert were tearing holes through the sky and the earth out there, and maybe the tissue of the universe itself. They set fire to the clouds. For the first time Francis understood clearly that he was a contaminated thing, an aberration to be squashed and covered up, by a corporal with a government checkbook and a briefcase of binding legal documents. It had been hard for him to recognize this at first, perhaps because Francis had always felt contaminated, a thing others wanted not to see.
In frustration he shoved himself away from the split bag of garbage, moving without thought. His spring-loaded back legs launched him into the air, and the hardened petals on his back whipped furiously about him. His stomach plunged. The hard-baked, litter-strewn ground bobbed recklessly below him. He waited to fall, but didn’t, found himself veering through the air, landing a moment later on one of the massive hills of trash, settling in a spot still in the sunlight. His breath exploded from his body; he didn’t even know he had been holding it.
For a moment he balanced there, overcome by a sensation of shock that he felt a pins-and-n
eedles prickling at the tips of his antennae. He had climbed, scrambled, swam—no, by Jesus, he had flown!—through thirty feet of Arizona air. He didn’t consider what had happened for long, was afraid to think it over too closely. He fired himself into the air again. His wings made a buzzing sound that was almost mechanical, and he found himself swooping drunkenly through the sky, over the sea of decomposing disposable goods below. He forgot for a moment that he needed to eat. He forgot that only a few seconds before, he had felt close to hopelessness. He clutched his legs to his armored sides, and with the air rushing in his face, he stared down at the wasteland a hundred feet below, held entranced by the sight of his unlikely shadow skipping across it.
3.
After the sun went down, but while a little light remained in the sky, Francis returned home. He had nowhere else to go and he was so hungry. There was Eric’s, of course, but to get to his house he would have to cross several streets, and his wings wouldn’t carry him high enough not to be seen.
He crouched for a long time in the brush at the back edge of the lot around the filling station. The pumps were switched off, the lights above them turned out, the blinds down across the windows of the front office. His father had never closed the place so early. It was utterly still at this end of Estrella Avenue, and except for the occasional passing truck, there was no sign of life or movement anywhere. He wondered if his father was home, but could not imagine any other possibility. Buddy Kay had nowhere else to go.
Francis staggered, light-headed, across the gravel to the screen door. He lifted himself on his back legs, and peeked into the living room. What he saw there was so unlike anything he had ever seen before, it disorientated him, and he swayed as a sudden weak spell passed over him.
