Lynn plugged in the flash drive and typed a long security code. A series of folders emerged on the screen.
The cursor moved to one labeled “SWARM.”
Inside were dozens of photographs, and Lynn scrolled through them, clicking on one.
“These are from Tom’s camera. The lens is much better than my phone’s camera.”
Roxy put her glasses on and leaned in. A tree in the photo looked as if an infection had overtaken it; a red mass covered every inch of its trunk.
“Those are all ladybugs?”
“Yes. Look at this next picture. They swarmed up the tree. Covering every inch of it. Now, look at this.”
She closed the folder and opened another labeled, “IN THE SKY.”
Even taken with the excellent lens, the photograph just showed a mass of black dots against a blue sky.
“I don’t get it.”
Lynn pointed to the photograph. “They started to move, like a wind had blown them off the tree. They just kept drifting upward. Now, this is the picture I took when they resettled.”
She opened another photograph that showed the beetles had begun to make a formation, moving into clear curves.
“How can they do that? I know birds know how to fly in formation, but bugs? But it’s not like they’re forming an arrow pointing to the grove or anything. What is it?” Roxy asked. “And what are these other folders? Michigan, London, Argentum—”
Lynn opened another folder. It was an illustration, clearly taken from a scientific journal. She moved the graphic to sit directly beside the photo of the formation the beetles had made in the sky.
“My God,” Roxy said, covering her mouth with her hand.
“It’s what they did to us,” Lynn said. “It’s why I have to find William.”
TWO
Sweat surged down his face, soaking his T-shirt, despite the best efforts of the box fan from Walmart pointed directly on him. It was a fairly new purchase, given that he’d run the last one from Goodwill so consistently at night that it ultimately burned out.
With a temporal vein bulging across his forehead, he could not move, paralyzed by the kind of fear usually reserved for children caught in the throes of nightmares, crying out for their parents.
He, however, was twenty-two years old.
Rubbing his aching shoulders, he sat up. It was not uncommon for him to be unable to stand after the dreams, his calves burning and even his feet throbbing from his fiercely curled toes. When he woke, there was no part of his body that wasn’t tense.
He swung his long legs over the bed and gingerly touched the floor, anticipating pain. Instead his legs only trembled, which meant he could get the ibuprofen without feeling like he was walking on nails.
The distance to the bathroom was a short walk across carpet that twenty years ago was a stylish shade of deep red. In the dark, the stains from coffee and God knows what else were blessedly hidden.
Even in dim, filtered light, the pill bottle was easily found, for it was always in the same place on the corner of the sink. He had considered moving it permanently to his nightstand, but stashing it in the bathroom meant he would have no choice but to get up after the dreams. And if he’d learned anything, it was the importance of not lying in bed in a state of shock. It was better to move, to remind himself that what he dreamt was not real, that his subconscious was simply reacting to nagging fears, that there was a difference between worry and reality. It was why, even knowing exactly where the bottle rested in the dark, he turned on the light.
His reflection appeared in the mirror, revealing hair so ridiculously unkempt that he almost laughed. His brothers certainly would if they could see it. The higher the hair, the closer to God, their mother would say, running her fingers through his churning locks, which grew like crabgrass in a wet spring. Jabs would be made about pulling the WeedWacker out from the shed, and certainly the ruler stashed in the junk drawer would be seized to see if the height had reached a new record. His dad would wrap his arms around him, pretending to hold him in place while the ruler rested on his scalp, his brothers and mother delighting in counting the centimeters, cheering if the height stretched past seven. One summer, it reached to twelve, which was noted with a red Sharpie on the ruler, an exclamation mark drawn next to it.
He wished he could dream of them.
Twisting open the pill bottle cap, he tossed back three pills. Then he turned off the light and lumbered across the bedroom, rotating his shoulders to increase the blood circulation. He leaned his six-foot-two form against the frame of the room’s solitary window, parting blinds to squint at the early morning light.
You are surrounded by cotton in the middle of nowhere. You are not even close to what you’re dreaming about. What’s irrefutable is that you need to get your butt ready for work.
But it always felt so real. He could practically taste it.
And this time, there was something more.
As always, the nightmare had started in a storm. The blistering rain had barreled around him, beating him with stinging winds. Torrential rain soaked him, making his clothes a second skin.
Raging waters rushed like an army towards the city in the distance, crashing into levees, seeking crevices, cracks, anything to slip through to further erode the stone. What it couldn’t break it would bypass altogether, to pummel the electricity-stripped buildings and homes beyond.
He tried to look away from the bodies in the mud-clogged waters, knowing they hadn’t anticipated the storm would arrive so fast, or with such fury. But on this night, when he wrenched his gaze away, he saw them: two specks of white in the swallowed city, tiny stars in the engulfed night. In all the hundreds of times the dream had come, he’d never seen them. They felt like a stare, a gaze, directed at him.
Then the dream shifted. He was surrounded by people, shoving and shouting. The anger from the crowd seeped into him; their heat like an iron an inch from his skin.
Many held signs that blurred in the fight, some crashing down in the swirl of bodies, others pounded against the pavement as if intended to stab through the very earth.
When the bullets started whizzing past, it was as if a shock wave rolled over the crowd; people covered their heads or ducked. And he saw them again: eyes, watching the massacre, then turning to him.
Overwhelming heat came next. Not anger, but embers and ash and flame. Trees fully engulfed, like a city of skyscrapers on fire. Yet someone was there, someone was surviving all this, and their eyes watched from beyond the flames.
The smell of the hospital came a moment later, both fetid and sanitized. Bleach applied over and over again across tiled floors on which gurneys rushed, carrying people covered in plastic.
It wasn’t just the doctors and nurses wearing masks, but the attendants at the help desk, and the panicked family members trying to find their loved ones. Some covered their mouths with scarves or their hands.
He heard the high-pitched beeping of the sinking heart rates, the suctions pumping stomachs.
Once again were eyes. But this time, they didn’t watch from behind the doctors, the hospital walls, or even the windows. They were in the far distance, almost miniscule amongst the towering stones that lined the horizon.
Suddenly, those eyes were right in front of him.
He was in the rock itself, encased in the dark, unable to move or to breathe, trapped, with something slithering across his skin—
He snapped the blinds shut.
He could still feel the wretched smoothness of the scales, the sensation of being encapsulated within the rock. It was always what ended the nightmares, his mind unable to stand the feeling of the encompassing swirling of the snakes around him.
But this time, those eyes—those different, haunted eyes—felt like someone stabbed through his chest to his heart.