“No—Vernon. Was Troy blackmailing Vernon too?”
“I don’t—”
The sound that comes next is like several tennis balls spitting from a practice machine, and suddenly Kyle Austin’s chin is gone, the rest of his final sentence lost in a fluid-sounding cough. The right side of his face is suddenly and hopelessly distorted by an eruption just beneath the skin, and for an instant Blake thinks the guy is about to do some clownish impression of someone and that’s why his face is all messed up. But then the three glistening stalks, each the thickness of a man’s arm, tug on Kyle’s frozen, erect body from where they have speared it in three different places. Kyle crashes through the section of floor the vines weakened when they punched through it only seconds before and disappears in a rain of debris.
“Bye, Kyle,” Caitlin whispers.
Blake watches the process repeat itself, watches Kyle hit the floor of the guest bedroom below, watches it give in exactly the same way. Kyle’s limbs don’t flail or tumble, but instead the vines hold him like a speared fish as they descend, wood and debris falling after him, and Kyle Austin’s fatal plummet looks like the sudden flight of a jet-pack-propelled superhero played in satirical reverse.
As Blake stumbles past her toward the steps, Caitlin reaches out for him. He bats her hand away, manages to catch the banister in his free hand before he falls forward over his own feet. The back of his throat is on fire.
He rights himself and makes it to the guest bathroom before emptying his stomach into the toilet. Even as he vomits, he is aware that he’s still holding the gun in one hand, that he’s laid it across the back of the toilet bowl, barrel aimed at the wall. He can’t let go of it even as his entire body, right down to the marrow in his bones, tries to repel what he’s just witnessed. To expunge it like a virus or an infection. And he wonders if he has a space in his brain or in his soul for monsters and demons, or if he will, like most people, choose insanity when confronted with a fearsome reality.
When Caitlin begins stroking the back of his head, his body rebels against that too. In an instant, he’s on his feet, gun raised, standing in the open bathroom door, and Caitlin has backed up into the hallway, shaking her head in disappointment, her hands going up.
“I said no,” Blake whispers. “You asked me what I wanted and I said no.”
Now there is anger in her eyes, a flash of it as she meets his stare head-on, as if he has left her alone with this nightmare simply by pointing out what she’s done to him. As if he was the one who betrayed her. As if he was the one who slashed her chest and threw her into that pit. It might have been his blood that sparked the vines, but their blood was on her hands.
And the earth knew that too.
Caitlin begins to speak. Before she can get a word out, there is a terrible buzzing sound from outside, made louder by the open door to the widow’s walk behind her. And from her startled expression and the way she looks dumbly to the ceiling overhead, Blake realizes this is not part of her plan, that this sound is unfamiliar to her as well. And for the first time that night, she looks frightened. When her eyes meet his, she is Caitlin again, unsteady, and full of insecurity that too often coalesces into self-hatred.
“Blake…”
The shadows of shifting tree branches along the sloping wall of the staircase behind her darken suddenly. Blake lets out a small cry, and Caitlin jerks at the sound, and her stare is suddenly expectant and desperate.
And then they hit her. It’s a column so thick the staircase behind her goes black. The open door disappears as she’s slammed into the opposite wall face-first. They’re piling up behind her, like ripples in water, and there’s no doubt that she is the locus, their target, that the great deafening and blinding cloud of insects now filling the upstairs hallway has come for Caitlin Chaisson and no one else. Not a single one has landed on his skin. Not a single angry thread of them heads in his direction as he backs up, the gun still raised stupidly on a target that has turned swirling and amorphous.
When Caitlin screams his name again, it’s as if the bugs themselves are absorbing her voice, amplifying it while also filling it with a great and inhuman rattle. And when she peels herself off the wall, arms batting wildly at the air all around her, Blake sees that she is literally losing her very matter to them, that as they pull free from her skin, mirroring her every action now at various distances from her body, they take more and more of her with them. There is no blood, no tearing of flesh. But they are consuming her. As she stumbles wildly toward the top of the grand staircase, they are devouring her.
“Blaaaaaaaaaaake!”
There is almost none of Caitlin Chaisson left in the scream. It is, rather, the voice of this terrible, all-consuming cloud of insects so tightly joined to one another it’s impossible to tell what species they’re composed of. And they are transforming Caitlin into something that is more writhing, desperate spirit than person, while ignoring Blake altogether. He literally does not exist for them.
At the top of the grand staircase, what remains of Caitlin inside the cloud loses its footing and goes over, and the swarm adjusts perfectly as Caitlin’s vaporous remnants tumble down the stairs, losing skin and flesh and bone on their descent so that halfway down the stairs, the matter inside of the swarm looks more like an abstract, animated sketch of Caitlin Chaisson’s fall than an actual person somersaulting down unforgiving wooden stairs.
At the bottom step, all traces of Caitlin the human are gone. It is only at that moment that the swarm lifts into the air, organizing itself beneath the swinging chandelier. A sudden, dizzying uniformity sweeps through each tiny member, and now there is a clicking and clattering of pincers and thicker, heavier wings. Each place within the miniature cyclone of insects Blake directs his attention, he sees bigger and more formidable creatures, flashes of stingers and antennae. But they’re all moving so fast, it’s impossible for him to get a detailed picture of a single one—they seem to exist only as a whole. Their buzzing sound has deepened from an outboard’s high-pitched whine to something that sounds more like a motorcycle’s growl.
Blake is about to fire at them. Maybe they’ll come after him, but he doubts it after the way they’ve been ignoring him. At the very least, it will disperse them. At the very least, it will give him something to do other than stand there, dumbfounded, emptied of recourse or any frame of reference for what he’s seeing, the gun in his hand now as powerful and protective as a fingernail clipper.
And then they’re gone.
It takes Blake a few seconds to see where they’ve gone to, and the effort requires him to stumble halfway down the grand staircase until he can see the hole that Kyle Austin’s body—not Kyle, the vines; the vines broke that hole—punched through the ceiling of the first floor. The more organized swarm of newly enlarged, otherworldly insects has spirited away up through the opening in the widow’s walk floor.
His vision blurs and blackens around the edges at the same time. He hears the gun falling barrel over butt down the stairs, feels a vague distant sense of alarm that it might fire, but it doesn’t. It lands at the bottom with a hollow-sounding thud. Hollow and useless against these new terrors of the night.
27
Left foot, right foot, breathe. Left foot, right foot, breathe.
It’s a mantra one of the senior nurses taught him after he first started working in the ER. She’d assured him it would come in handy after the first serious trauma case was wheeled in, an accident victim so hopelessly mangled her appearance in the emergency room was more of a grim formality than a first step toward recovery.