“He’s not listening. He doesn’t hear anything.”
The Straggler cast Paul a dismissive glare and continued his pitch to the boy’s father, conjuring vivid images of the goods in his truck: radios, canned goods, guns, books, personal generators… the list went on and on and seemed to grow bigger every time he repeated it. When he gave up it was with a wave of the hand so violent that Paul feared the fat man was actually going to strike his father.
Paul followed the Straggler around the trailer court and tried to see the place through the stranger’s eyes. The Crowned Ones wandered in and out of the fog, some not as badly infested as his father, others far, far worse. The gray-brown hives rose like chimney-clusters from their heads with black gaping holes at the top of the encrusted crowns. The Mites swarmed in and out of those holes, marching along the humans’ faces, through their clothes or across their naked flesh, in and out of the fissures that spread over their bodies.
The Straggler was still wary of the Mites but wasn’t as afraid as he had been at first—and probably not as afraid as he should have been. He would shout at the Crowned Ones as he followed them, hover over them as they sat, asking them what they usually used as trading goods. It always ended with a disgusted wave and a shrug, followed by an increasingly bewildered look at his surroundings. Sometimes the Straggler would step too close to the towerlike mounds that grew along the gravel road, then have to leap away, brushing and slapping at the hordes of Mites that attacked him. He never seemed to notice that some of those mounds were shaped like human beings frozen and thickened into poses of erect, skyward-staring submission.
When the fat man finally approached Paul, the boy was scratching his bald, slashed and scabby head and looking at the dead Mites in his bloody hand.
“You! Boy! What the hell kind of a place is this, anyway? What’s happened down here?”
The Straggler smelled awful, looked awful, and had a hateful sneer on his face. The boy spat into the fog and walked away carelessly, calling over his shoulder, “What’s the matter? You haven’t seen Mites before?”
“Mites? Is that what they are? What are they doing to all these people?” Now the fat man sounded truly frightened. His palms slid over his face and body, searching out the bugs before they began to dig at him.
And so Paul tried to explain the Mites to him, though everything Paul knew was obvious just from looking at his father for a few minutes: the Mites not only built their mounds up from the ground, but were able to dig into the scalps of higher organisms—dig deep—and build their clustered towers out of the tops of their hosts’ heads. Some of these crowns were well over a foot high with bases that swelled in gruesome brick patterns over the hosts’ brow ridges. The Mites were everywhere.
“And that’s why your scalp is so fucked up?”
Paul shrugged.
“Why don’t you leave? I mean, things are bad up there, but you could get away from these things. You’ll starve to death down here. That stream you’re drinking from is so full of toxins that nothing can live in it. Look,” he said, his eyes getting funny and his cheeks started to rumble, “you can leave with me. I got a truck up there.” He pointed to the highlands beyond the trailer court. “You can work for me. You’ll eat well, see lots of things, grow your hair back. What do you say?”
Paul shrugged again and shook his head. No, he wasn’t going anywhere with the Straggler, and he wouldn’t feel safe venturing out of the trailer court with anyone. When he told the Straggler why, the fat man laughed.
“There’s no monsters in those hills, kid. No, you know, real monsters. And if there were, what would keep them from coming down here for you? Who’s gonna protect you here?”
The boy slapped himself in the face and held out his palm so the Straggler could see the Mite squashed across his fingers. “They do. The monsters are afraid of them.”
“Ah, Jesus Christ, you little ass! I’m leaving and if you want to come along, you’d damn well better tell me now!”
He got no answer, and turned with another dismissive wave and walked away. Paul followed, asking him to bring back some canned goods. But the Straggler wasn’t giving away anything and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make the walk down from the road again. Paul followed him to the court’s entrance, then watched him stumble through the grasses along the jagged shards of concrete that had once been the road leading into the trailer court oh-so-many impossible years ago.
Within moments, the fat man was swallowed in the rolling fog. Paul stood there for a few minutes, listening for the sound of a scream, the starting of an engine, but heard nothing. He decided to see if he could find himself and his father something to eat.
The Beast crawled from a narrow opening in the earth, away from the shrieks and the wet crowded darkness. He stood in the fog and listened.
Not far away, something big and clumsy trudged across the mud and jagged concrete slopes. It did not sound like one of the sick ones who lived in the valley. He had caught one of those not long ago, when hunger had driven him nearly mad and rendered him groggy and weak. He had torn it apart searching for meat, but found only shriveled organs, swollen joints, and a heavy, rocklike growth atop its head which grew deep into the skull, piercing and embracing the jellylike brain. Mites had exploded out of that head so quickly that he wasn’t sure whether they had also infiltrated the dry, narrow cavities within the body itself. It didn’t matter; there was very little edible meat on the body and the Mites were so voracious that they attacked him immediately, driving him away before he had a chance to take more than a few tentative, dissatisfied bites.
But this one was surrounded by a pungent, alluring odor as it gasped at the thick air and stumbled over the earth. He could feel the vibrations of every step.
Fantasies of ruptured, flowing flesh appeared in the darkness of his mind like quick, blinding flashes of light as he crouched behind a rotted stump, resting his arm along the fallen length of tree that still connected it by thin, tenacious strands. He watched as the figure appeared from out of the fog; a man, not too old, and very fat. The man did not see him through the fog, even as he looked around in a kind of desperate, cautious confusion. He was searching for something, and was too distracted to notice. The man stumbled off in another direction, up and toward the road.
He followed at a safe distance, measuring the strength and edibility of the man, deciding whether it would be better to give chase or spring upon him from a hiding place somewhere farther down the path. But as the human gasped and the smell of his sweat grew stronger, the Beast grew hungrier, more agitated, then found his legs pumping harder as he zeroed in with silent fury, in a race against time and starvation.
The fat man turned and gaped, face frozen in stupid terror as his belly was slit open with a swift downward slash of claw. The scream was transformed into a gurgle almost before it left the Straggler’s mouth.
He slid his hand through the tear and felt his fingers swim through the tangle of intestines, rupturing the stomach and left lung before gently fondling the beating heart as he lowered the fat man’s body into the shivering wormgrasses. He knelt close as the heartbeat quickened and grew erratic under his probing fingers. He looked into bulging brown eyes and let his tongue unroll; the sharp but oil-moistened tip of his tongue ran graceful lines around the eyes, savoring the stupid fear of the dying man, smelling the meat as it marinated in its own panic, before driving his tongue brainward through the eye as his hand crushed the heart within the body cavity.