He turned the nozzle toward his friend and considered the result of not pulling the trigger. It wasn’t good either way.
“I love you, man,” he murmured. And the death of the spray encircled Mark.
“I’m sorry.”
Mark cried out for a moment, and then was quiet as around them the buzz of flies filled the air with excitement and anger and death. The swarm lifted briefly and then abortedly fell again to the sand, in a ray of glimmering violet. In moments, the air had grown quiet, and Billy could see the half-eaten body of his friend, laying exposed and bleeding on the sand. One flap of Mark’s cheek hung down to reveal the white of skull beneath.
Billy felt tears roll down his cheeks, but he didn’t let himself stop to think about what had just happened. Instead he dragged the bloody remains of Billy and Jess toward the boat, carefully loading them onto the deck next to Casey’s. The air still sang in the distance with the call of strangely purple flies, but they seemed to have retreated temporarily from the death doled out by his canister.
He didn’t wait around to let them reconsider. Billy released the boat from shore and headed out, away from the island, towards the mainland.
The sky looked blue and welcoming ahead. Behind, it was wreathed in an angry purple glow. Billy didn’t look back. He couldn’t. His eyes wouldn’t stop crying.
At Home
Billy was a hero. And a victim. The papers painted it both ways. He didn’t think much about it. Instead, he stared at his coffee every morning in his apartment, and wondered when his headache was going to go away.
Wondered, until one day, he felt it shift and move. And his eyes exploded into tears from the pressure.
“Damnit,” he complained, and hung his head into his hands.
When he pulled his head back up, his palms were glistening.
Tears had escaped from his eyes, and as he looked at the white of his hand, he saw the remains of something purple fragmented across his skin. He pressed his hands to his forehead and brought them back, There was another tear left behind.
And another purple glimmer. As he looked closer, the legs of the glimmer moved.
The legs of his new cargo.
The legs that made his headache grow deeper. The legs of spiders with violet eyes.
He thought of the flies, and their bites. And he thought of the maggots that flies normally left behind. These flies, perhaps, left something else. Something that hatched with eight legs.
He remembered the blown-out hole in the back of the skull they had found on the island and groaned.
Maybe this time, they would be gentler, kinder.
But when Billy laid back in his bed, he really didn’t think so.
Instead, he waited for the explosion to build at the back of his skull. He waited for the inevitable.
And he cried purple tears.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels
For information on his fiction, art and music, visit John Everson: Dark Arts at www.johneverson.com.
Table of Contents
Creeptych: The Hatching
Bad Day
Eardrum Buzz
Violet Lagoon
About The Author
