… and it’s staring at me. These words shudder through her, bringing unwanted life to parts of her body she instinctively knows how to deaden before every trick. If it were any bigger, she would figure it was a Halloween toy some jerk was controlling with a string. But it’s just big enough to be… wrong.
And the color, a black so deep she finds herself groping for the right word to describe the shade. It’s a word that seems fancy, but she’s heard it before a bunch of times throughout her life, just not to describe a damn bug. Black as night. Black as… lava. Obsidian. The color of cooled, frozen lava. Despite its size, the bug is so black its individual features are impossible to discern, except for the two forelegs that rest atop the gold band, whisking slightly back and forth as if they’re kissing the metal. She’s seen squirrels that are like this, so accustomed to humans they’re not afraid of them. But a bug? This thing is perched, birdlike, patient, positively studious.
“What are you?” Taletha whispers. But she’s loud enough to cause the man on top of her to jerk and go still.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he curses.
His feet hit the carpet, and as he stumbles toward the nightstand she can’t tell if he’s as bothered by the bug’s wrongness as she is, or if he just wants the damn thing off his precious little ring.
Taletha has pushed herself halfway across the bed by the time the man swats at the insect as if it were just a housefly. It takes to the air, its wings each filled with a glistening pattern that looks like oil floating on water. Then the bug is gone.
Taletha says, “Where did it—”
Lawyer Pants makes a sound like he’s been kicked in the chest. Lightning bolts of pain seem to shoot through the man’s body as he stumbles backward across the room. And Taletha is as stricken by his gape-mouthed silence as she is by his shuddering and by the tears sprouting from his eyes. The stuttering groans that rip from his chest sound like some little kid’s parody of monkey sounds.
The bug is gone. Taletha can’t see it anywhere.
It must be clamped between the guy’s hands, which are still clasped in front of him even as his back slams to the wall.
Blood pours from between the man’s fingers. His hairy legs crumple under him like windless flags. Once his ass hits the carpet, his arms go lax too—his hands unclasp and that’s when Taletha sees the gaping red hole in his right palm. He crushed it, she thinks. He crushed it and it stung him, and now he’s dying.
But the hole is too big for a stinger, and she didn’t remember it having a stinger to begin with, and…
Then the bug flies toward her out of the man’s open mouth.
Clay Lee’s uncle has owned the Hibiscus Inn for thirty years, and because Clay is not a reader, he gets a panicky feeling in his chest when his uncle talks about the days when all the TV stations used to sign off around midnight with some recording of the national anthem, leaving whoever was stuck behind the motel’s front desk with a pile of magazines and some shitty paperback novels.
Clay is relieved those days are long gone. Clay is relieved that the television people finally came to their senses and realized that there is another America out there, an America of men and women who have to spend the graveyard shift behind a desk and need round-the-clock reruns of stupid cop shows and repeats of the ten o’clock news or else an unexpected late-night customer will walk in on them playing with themselves and then they’ll have to explain the whole thing to their mother and maybe get fired by their uncle.
Not Clay. On a job he can never quit unless he wants to get kicked out of his mother’s house, Clay has round-the-clock entertainment, and that’s why when he hears a loud crash followed by a car alarm, he assumes it’s coming from the episode of Law & Order: SVU he’s been struggling to follow for a half hour now. But the folks on the idiot box are standing inside a morgue talking over a dead body. Not a car in the shot. In fact, it’s been several scenes since anyone in the episode has actually gone outside at all.
Headlights flash in the front office’s glass wall, winking out a mad accompaniment to the bleating alarm. At first Clay thinks they belong to a car that’s stalled out on the highway. Then he realizes they’re a reflection, a reflection of his car.
The first thing he sees when he bursts from the office is the open door to room 14 clear across the parking lot, the dull glow of one of the lamps within. Then he sees one of the lounge chairs from beside the swimming pool resting inside the shattered rear window of his Sentra. Someone’s thrown it so hard it’s sitting half-in, half-out of his car, and that someone has to be Taletha, because she’s down on all fours, back rising and heaving, the sounds coming out of her a mixture of retches and sobs. He’s not sure whether to run to her or from her, and the battle between these urges freezes him in the office’s door.
He’s calculating the cost of the broken window and trying to recall the last time his mom nagged him to renew his insurance policy when he hears a sound louder and more grating than Taletha’s wheezing. It seems to be coming from room 14, and it makes him think that the only thing worse than forking over a bunch of dough to fix his own shit car will be the amount of free overtime he’ll have to give his uncle if one of the rooms gets destroyed on his watch.
He’s almost past Taletha when she reaches out and grabs the leg of his pants with a clawlike grip. “Don’t,” she gasps. “Don’t go… over there.”
He shakes himself free, confident whatever’s buzzing away inside room 14 won’t be as impossible to deal with as some meth-head hooker who just wrecked his ride.
He’s about ten paces from the doorway when he sees what at first he thinks is a ghost. But it’s not. It’s a man, a man he glimpsed only minutes earlier as he walked across the parking lot with Taletha, only now this man is standing by himself in the middle of the room, arms spread in a lazy-looking parody of a crucifixion, and it takes a few minutes for Clay to realize the man is hovering several feet above the floor. The force that seems to suspend the man is what’s distracted Clay, rendering him as mute and paralyzed as a pilgrim at Lourdes. They have to be bugs, but they are blacker than any bug he has ever seen, and there is an elegance and organization to their cyclonic swirl that almost masks the horror of the scene. And in the all-encompassing grip of this swarm, the man’s body is being eaten away with such speed and precision that not a single drop of blood hits the carpet below, and in another few moments, he will be gone. Ground away, rubbed out.
From within the cold, expanding prison of his shock, Clay wonders if the bones will be all that’s left at the end of it. If they’ll fall to the carpet in a dry tumble, and if out of respect for the man, he should wait for this awful moment.
Behind him in the parking lot, a man is screaming now. A man who’s left the door to room 5 open behind him as he races for the highway. The lamp inside has been knocked to the floor during the man’s escape, but Clay can see what, from this distance, appear to be tiny droplets of black circling through the entire room, a cloud just like the one inside room 14.
Still down on all fours behind his Sentra, Taletha places her palms against her open mouth, brings them away, places them against her mouth, and brings them away, and he realizes she’s been doing this ever since Clay shook his leg free of her grip.