Paul pulled the woman out of the rubble, struggling to heft her over his shoulder. She was just a little shorter than he was and probably a lot lighter, but she was out cold and almost impossible to lift. He finally managed to get her back to the trailer and stretched her out on the concrete at the base of the front steps. His father sat out on the picnic bench, his eyes bulging, empty whites, nodding his head and mumbling replies to the very real voices in his head while Paul examined the woman’s face, her arms, legs, ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken, but she was cut badly on her face and hands.
Worse, though, were the Mites. He could see their glittering shells moving in and out of her long, thick hair, moving along her cuts and dancing within the coagulating blood. He ran into the trailer and came out with scissors and wet rags, hastily cleaning the wounds and wiping away as many of the Mites as he could, then began hacking at her hair. Within minutes he had it chopped down to two or three inches, at which point he rested her head in his lap and began picking at individual Mites, crushing them between thumb and forefinger, slapping at those that escaped onto his pants, moving quickly and with the hopeless determination he’d once used with his father—before the man had succumbed to the sweet, perpetual dreamworld which the Mites offered and began responding to Paul with violent flailings and screams. Then it had no longer been his father talking, but the Mites inside of him.
Paul looked at the woman’s face as he groomed her. He wondered how old she was. Surely not as old as father. Thirty? Twenty-five? There was a delicate beauty about her features that no scar or stress line could hide. He had been a little boy the last time he’d seen a real, uninfested woman—probably no more than twelve years old.
He saw a large Mite disappear down the front of her shirt and ripped away the buttons in a panic, trying to grab it before it escaped. Suddenly she was awake, letting out a scream that escalated into a roar and grabbing his wrists. He tried to stand but her grip was unbreakable and he found himself fighting to free his wrists and retain his balance as she stood and tried to throw him back to the ground. He twisted his body abruptly, managed to free one arm and break her grip on the other with a downward sweep onto her forearm. She howled with pain, then punched him in the face. He landed tailbone first on the concrete and then squinted up at her, trying to make her out through the thousands of flashing lights that danced before his eyes. When he focused on that face again—that pretty, delicate face—it wore a wide-eyed, teeth-clenching grimace of rage. Her hand fumbled at an empty knife sheath.
“I was only trying to get the Mites off you, lady. They’re all over you.” He propped himself up on one elbow and pointed toward the stream. “You better go wash yourself off—”
He didn’t have to finish. Her attention turned abruptly to the hundreds of tiny creatures crawling over her. She let out a resounding “Shit,” then headed off toward the stream. She turned back to him for just a moment as he was standing up. “You lay a hand on me again, mister, and I’ll fucking KILL you!”
He watched her retreat and wiped away the blood that was leaking from his nose and into his mouth.
His father moaned and looked at Paul with eyes that for just a moment seemed just a little bit aware and alive before his weighted head drooped forward and the eyes went dead-white once again. When Paul stepped forward to push his father’s body into a more comfortable position, he noticed several long, white strands of hair lying across his arm and draped over his head. He gathered them together and held them to his face and breathed deep. They smelled sweet and pungent… like the woman bathing in the stream.
They lived in rusted hulls that were scratched and torn from some long-forgotten struggle, staring at the outside world through cracked and cobwebbed glass. Had Kate been of a more philosophical mind, she might have taken issue with the idea that they were still human at all. As it was, she could only look upon them with hopeless, cautionary fear, knowing that the only way to avoid their fate was to climb out of this crumbling, parking-lot wasteland and face the thing that had forced her here in the first place.
Which, of course, was the decision all of these people had once made: either risk agony and death at the hands of that thing up there, or fight the inevitable infestation of Mites and spend the rest of their lives in whatever shadow-world the Mites in their heads would take them to. What purpose did these people serve the industrious insects? What did the humans provide the Mites? They could build a mound four feet tall in a single afternoon, using nothing more than their own secretions. How were the encrusted cylinders blooming from the heads of these people different?
Paul did not, could not, know. But Paul’s father, and all the rest—she counted 24 in all—knew very well. Perhaps that was all they were able to know. It was Kate’s overwhelming priority never to find out for herself. She was starving down here, and the few dried rags of meat or canned green beans Paul gave her were not nearly enough. What did the others eat? Did the Mites feed them, sacrifice their own bodies for the nutritional needs of their hosts?
Kate wandered the court during the daylight hours, trying to keep the angelhair from accumulating too heavily in one spot. She tried to talk to the crowned, white-eyed, gently mumbling people who staggered about, trying to grasp something useful in their aimless wandering or in the apparently random building and scurrying of a billion tiny insects. She tried to keep those same insects off of her own body as she walked the perimeters of the trailer court and looked for signs of the monster in the fog. As she did, the angelhair fell, snagging atop the trailers and on the old rooftop antennas and in the branches of the dead trees until it seemed as though she was weaving a canopy of silky fibers over the entire court.
How many of those creatures—warm-blooded predators, large enough to require frequent meals—could there be in a world where there was very little on which to feed? Surely there couldn’t be all that many—maybe it was a sport, a one-of-the-kind monstrosity. But as she walked the perimeter, weaving the outer edge of her silver canopy, she looked into the fog-laden roads and slopes and could feel their presence, their attention. During those first few days it had been hard to understand how these people could have allowed themselves to be subjected to the Mite infestations; why Paul, tearing himself apart to hold the infestation off a few more precious weeks or months, didn’t just take his chances and escape this valley. The longer she stayed, the more she understood. It was the fog and the shadows lurking within it. Once you saw the creature, especially at the range from which she’d seen and felt it, it was impossible not to see suggestions of it in every dark or thin patch in the rolling blanket of cloud.
Kate had to get out. She’d wandered too many years to end up trapped here, scratching her flesh away because of a bunch of gruesomely opportunistic insects, afraid to leave because she saw hallucinations in the fog that surrounded her. There had to be a way to get free, and as the days passed she grew convinced that somehow the answer lay with Paul.
After their first ugly encounter, she’d kept away from him for a couple of days, always aware of his presence, his curiosity, his obvious and sadly awkward attraction to her. Once she came to believe the reason he’d given for his groping hand on the first day, she let down her guard and allowed him to approach and talk to her. He led her to the most well furnished of the abandoned trailers, he found her scraps of food, and in his own, clumsy fashion, he tried to provide her with conversation. Were it not for the horrible scabs and scars festering atop his head, he might have been a fairly attractive young man; his eyes were piercing light blue and there was a warmth and determination in his smile that was almost heartbreaking when she considered how bleak his future was in this rusted, bug-saturated hell.