I thought about calling the front desk for a new set of sheets, but I really didn’t want the attention —and besides, when you make your living inhabiting the bodies of the recently departed, bugs sort of come with the territory. Last year, on a job in Oxford, I found a dude on a tip from Lilith who’d been laid out on the floor of his apartment with the heat cranked for the better part of a week. Fucking meatsuit was crawling with flies by the time I got to him, and to make matters worse, in life the guy’d apparently been scared shitless of bugs. A phobia that deep-seated goes well beyond memory —that shit lives in your
Anyways, once I climbed into bed, the beetle was forgotten. Exhausted as I was, I fell asleep in minutes. Would’ve stayed that way, too, if the goddamn tapping hadn’t roused me.
It was an odd, irregular sort of noise, quiet but persistent. At first I thought it was the television, which still prattled on quietly atop the dresser and bathed the room in eerie, blue-white light. When I shut the TV off, though, the room was plunged into darkness, but the tapping kept right on going.
I flicked on the bedside lamp and looked around. Nothing. Pissed now, I tossed off the blankets and swung my feet down to the floor, determined to find the source of the noise. But the faucet wasn’t dripping, and as far as I could tell by pressing my ear to the wall, the rooms on either side of me were vacant.
That’s when I realized it was coming from the window.
I yanked open the curtains, half-expecting to see a couple prepubescent pranksters, merrily tapping at the glass so they could rob me of my sleep. What I did see rocked me back. It was my little beetle-friend, paying me back for the kindness of not killing it by bouncing off of my window, over and over again. And the bastard had brought reinforcements. There were dozens of them —not just beetles, but also massive flying roaches, as well as moths and locusts, wasps and mayflies. The largest of them ricocheted off the glass only to regroup and try again, while the smaller ones slammed into the window like tiny kamikazes, splattering into oblivion against the pane.
I confess, the scene had me a bit unnerved, but what the hell could I really do? Persistent though they were, the little fuckers were outside, and so long as they stayed that way, they were all right by me. I shut the curtains and snatched my still-damp towel from where I’d let it fall beside the bed, twisting it up and laying it along the seam between door and floor by way of insurance against any future six-legged visitors. Then I climbed back into bed and pulled a pillow over my head.
This time, sleep didn’t come so easy, but it eventually did come. I awoke hours later, my face still buried in the pillow, to the persistent buzzing of the alarm clock. Fucking thing must’ve been set by whoever stayed here last. After the night I’d had, they’d be lucky if I didn’t hunt them down and throttle them for their thoughtlessness.
I pulled the pillow down tighter over my head, but it wasn’t any use —that buzzing refused to be ignored. Fine, then —I’d just have to shut it up. I took a blind swipe in the general direction of the bedside table. A swing and a miss. I tried again. My hand whacked the corner of the table and came back smarting. The third time, I managed to give the alarm a good wallop, but the buzzing didn’t stop, and why the fuck was my hand sticky?
I tossed off the pillow and looked around. Then my whole body clenched as revulsion washed over me. Every surface of the room was coated in a shifting mass of bugs —crawling, scrabbling, flitting back and forth with the electric hum of a thousand insect wings. They covered the floor, the ceiling, the bed on which I laid. A thick smear of snot-green flecked with shards of black encrusted the top of the alarm clock where I’d smacked it, and as I watched, the smear and then the clock itself disappeared beneath a teeming swarm of scratching, hissing, buzzing things.
It was then I realized that
The answer was right in front of me, but in my panic, I almost didn’t see it. There, atop the shifting insect landscape before me, was my little beetlefriend. It drifted toward me from the foot of the bed as if by magic, its cohorts beneath it conveying it ever closer.
And with it, its payload.
Once the beetle and its earthen ball reached me, it stopped. The mass of insects beneath it still boiled with activity, all red and brown and iridescent blue, but the fat black beetle held its ground, regarding me with what I couldn’t help but think was an expectant gaze. Then it nudged the ball toward me once more with one spindly, bristle-laden leg.
Gingerly, I accepted the proffered package, and the sea of insects seemed to calm a little —not receding, exactly, but quieting, as though waiting for my response. My heart was anything but quiet as it thudded painfully in my chest. What I’d taken for a ball of dirt wasn’t dirt at all, though its surface was filthy enough that my mistake was understandable. No, what the tiny creature had been carrying was in fact a small bundle of cloth —once military drab, but now black from the dirt in which it had been buried.
I recognized that bundle. Of course, I
It was a soul —
These creatures were Deliverants.
They were Deliverants, and they were angry.
I wasn’t yet sure why, but I was beginning to get an idea. Whatever was going on, Danny Young had set me up.
He’d set me up, and he was going to pay.
7.
That fucking son of a bitch. In all my time as a Collector, I’d never once had occasion to interact with my Deliverants, and now after my meeting with Danny, they flat-out reject the soul I’d buried? That was too much of a coincidence for me to swallow. The question was,
I eyed the door before me. It was typical for the front door of an apartment —stainless steel, and reinforced, at that. But the jamb was standard pressure-treated lumber, and the building wasn’t young, which meant that all that held this tank of a door closed was a latch installed in a plank of aging wood. Not great if subtle’s what you’re shooting for, but easy enough to pop if you don’t mind a little noise.
Right now, I didn’t mind a little noise.
I glanced back toward the front of the building where I’d left the Fiesta, but the night was getting on, and there wasn’t anyone about. The place itself was nestled in an upscale residential neighborhood, and from the curb, it looked to be yet another in a line of neoclassical homes, all stark white and austere, with a series of four columns flanking its massive, transomed entryway. But the hearse in the large circle drive out front and the tasteful, somber sign beside it indicated otherwise. No, the only living going on around here was in the apartment tucked around back —and that’s just where I was headed.
The first kick made a hell of a noise, but the door didn’t budge. The second, and the wood began to splinter. If this were some cheesy dime-store novel, I suppose the third time woulda done the trick, but the fact is, I had to kick that fucking door a half a dozen times before it finally gave, swinging inward with a sickening crack and a hail of wooden shards.
I was inside in a flash. Ethan Strickland was cowering behind an upturned kitchen table, a Louisville Slugger