moths still slamming against the door behind me. Finally, I pulled up my legs and pulled myself into a crouch to see where I’d ended up.
That’s when I saw her.
The owner of the house, or at least that’s what I assumed she was, sat as still as a statue on the couch facing the foyer where I’d landed.
“Did you see that?” I asked. “The damn things came at me like a swarm of killer bees!”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry I let myself into your house like that, but I didn’t know where else to go,” I apologized.
Behind me, the soft flutterings and keening insectoid cries and smacks against the screen of the door were abating. In front of me, the woman stood, still saying nothing.
She stepped forward.
“Just let me wait here a second, until I’m sure they’re gone,” I said, picking the library book up. “Then I’ll get out of your house.”
She stepped forward again. Her eyes didn’t blink.
“Um, Ma’am?” I said. Fear began to grip at my bowels. What had I walked into?
She put another foot forward, and now I began to panic. She moved with the halting stiltedness of a robot still discovering its joints. And she hadn’t blinked since the moment I’d looked up and noticed her staring blindly ahead from her seat on the couch. How long had she sat there, waiting for me to fall into her house? What would she do when she reached me? She was only feet away.
I jumped towards the door and she changed direction to follow. There were still a few Luna Roaches circling in the halo of light like moths outside the screen, but I didn’t hesitate. I launched my way into the twilight and ran back up the street towards my home.
Kara’s library book could be late. I’d be happy to pay the fine.
* * *
That was the night the hospitals emptied. And the churches. And the school gymnasiums. All of the places where the volunteers from the Red Cross and a wide range of other medical saviors had stacked the comatose victims on cots and blankets in hopes that someday they would awake again.
That was the night that they did.
When I got home, breathless and confused at what had just happened, Jenna didn’t give me time to speak. When I dove into the family room, she instantly pointed at the TV and whispered, “look.” The news anchors were raving.
“Around 7 PM tonight, the victims of the Luna Roaches began to walk. But it’s as if they are walking in their sleep. They don’t speak, and they won’t stop, no matter what gets in front of them. We’ve had reports from every part of the city; it’s happening everywhere, all at once. The scene is like something out of a movie. An hour ago, there were thousands of victims, all in a mass coma, and now…now…”
The co-anchor lost it: “…now the dead walk!” she exclaimed.
“What do you think it means?” Jenna said. She put an arm protectively around our daughter.
“I think that this is a really bad day.”
I was only partly right; it was actually a bad night. And a strange one. By morning, after frantic eyewitness news reports flooded the television stations and people barricaded themselves in their homes in panic, it had gotten even stranger.
You wouldn’t think that thousands of people could get up one night, walk out into the streets all at once and then disappear, while the eyes of millions were upon them. But that’s what happened that night. The coma victims got up from wherever they lay, walked out into the street, and as the rest of us ran inside and panicked at their single-minded, staggering gaits and blank, black gazes, they kept on walking. By the next morning, nobody could quite answer exactly where they’d gone.
On my way to work that next day, I drove by the house I’d hidden in the night before near the park. The front door was wide open. I bet to myself that nobody was at home. But I didn’t stop to find out.
The chatter went on for days. The networks played an endless cycle of footage of blank-eyed men and women and creepily vacant children staggering out of hospitals and churches and walking down the center of the street, feet padding along strangely straight as they strode the dotted yellow lines out of town.
There was one image that haunted me, especially. They played it again and again, and every time, inexplicably, I began to well up. There was nothing inherently wrong with the picture. It was just a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old. She wore a red T-shirt that had a giant thumbprint stenciled on it. And she walked down the street, on the way out of town. Her hair was long and ratty brown, and tousled in so many knots, the father in me knew they’d take hours to comb out, and many yelps of hurt. I don’t know exactly what it was about her. Maybe the way her big brown eyes drooped and looked hopelessly tired. Maybe it was the way she walked, listless and slow, but with a horrible, unrelenting purpose. Or maybe it was the way she dragged her ragged brown teddy on the asphalt as she walked. The stuffed animal had probably been her favorite toy days before, something she tried to feed and cuddle and hug. And now its head bumped on the ground, silently thumping, thumping, thumping with each small step she took. Her hand didn’t let go of its leg, but neither did she care that she was dragging the toy to death.
Tears filled my eyes at the image and I looked away. At that moment, a thrumming sound filled the house, as if it had begun to hail. Something was pounding on the shingles and the windows all around the house.
“Daddy,” Kara said, running into the room. “There’s a bug on my bed.”
I scooped her up in my arms and took her back to the room, the noise still echoing overhead and all around. Somewhere I heard glass shatter.
“There” she pointed, and on the middle of the pink “Hello Kitty” bedspread sat an abomination. At least two inches long, the Luna Roach sat still, smack in the center of my baby’s bed. Its wings shimmered in the yellow light like a gold haze, and it crept forward as I entered the room, heading for the shelter of her pillow. I set Kara on the floor, pulled a tissue from my pants pocket and brought my hand down on the bug. With a scoop I enclosed it in the tissue and squeezed. The crunch of the thing’s body was audible, and the warm wetness of its insides bled through the tissue to squish against my hand. I threw the mess into the toilet in the hall bathroom and flushed, rinsing my hand as if I’d touched poison in the sink.
From the other side of the house, my wife screamed. Wiping my hand on my jeans, again I scooped up Kara and ran. When we got there, Jenna lay on the floor, arms clenched around herself in a desperate hug. When she saw me, she pointed to the living room window. “They’re getting in,” she whispered.
Sure enough, on the floor near the windows and streaming around the coffee table were dozens of Luna Roaches.
“Stay here, don’t move,” I told Kara and set her on the couch.
Then I started stomping.
When the room was a glistening mess of bug guts and broken wings, I finally reached the window and pulled the drapes aside. The glass on one of the side windows had broken, and insects were still crawling up and over the jagged glass to drop into the room. The room hummed with their high-pitched, ululating trills. I reached back and grabbed a throw pillow from the couch, stuffing it roughly into the hole that had been my window. Its threads caught on the edges of the glass, and when I was certain the room was airtight again, I continued my stamping campaign until I felt sure that every keening bug was dead. The carpet was a mess of orange goo, and Jenna still hadn’t moved from the floor.
“Mommy’s asleep” Kara pronounced, and I realized my wife had fainted.
“Let’s put her to bed,” I said, and with Kara holding onto my leg, I grunted, groaned and eventually staggered aloft again with her mother in my arms. I tucked Jenna under the covers as carefully as she normally tucked Kara, and checked to make sure she was still alive. Her slow, steady breath whispered gently in my ear, telling me that shock had sent her into more peaceful dreams than I was wont to have. When I looked up, my daughter stood at the edge of the bed, brown eyes brimming with salty concern. Her cheeks glistened, and I could see her tiny chest shivering with fright.
“Will mommy be OK?” she whispered.
“She’ll be fine,” I promised. “She’s just scared and tired. Let’s climb in with her and get some sleep, too, OK?”
Kara nodded. I scooped her up and slid her into the center of the bed and climbed in beside her. Once
