Hornets and Others

towns surrounding their town they rode a train, climbing into its engine and getting the diesel to fire and studying the controls and making it move. The engine made a sound like caught thunder. Even Jerry laughed then, putting his head out of the cab to feel the wind like a living thing on his face. Suzie fired the horn, which bellowed like a bullfrog. They passed a city, and then another, until the train ran out of fuel and left them in another town much like their own.

They moved on to another town after that, and then another after that, and always the ropy thing was there, following them, a sentinel in the distance, rising above the highest buildings, its end twitching.

Summer rolled toward autumn. Now, even when he looked at Suzie, Jerry never smiled anymore. His eyes became hollow, and his hands trembled, and he barely ate.

Autumn arrived, and still they moved on. In one nameless town, in one empty basement of an empty house, Jerry walked trembling to the workbench and took down from its pegboard a pair of pliers. He handed them to Suzie and said, 'Make me stop believing.'

'What do you mean?'

'Get the ropy thing out of my head.'

Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry's ears.

'Nothing in there but wax,' she said.

'I don't want to believe anymore,' Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.

'It's too late,' Suzie said.

Jerry lay down on the floor and curled up into a ball.

'Then I want to die,' he whispered.

Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.

It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.

Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.

Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.

Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.

A few pale snowflakes fell.

'I want it to end,' Jerry whispered hoarsely.

He had not had so much as a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.

'I...want it to stop,' he croaked.

He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child's body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.

When he spoke, it was a soft question: 'It wasn't me, it was you who did it.'

Suzie said nothing, and then she said, 'I believed. I believed because I had to. You were the only one who ever loved me. They were going to take me away from you.'

There was more silence. In the distance, the ropy thing finished with the cornfield, stood at attention, waiting. Around its base a cloud of weak dust settled.

Quietly, Jerry said, 'I don't love you anymore.”

For a moment, Suzie's eyes looked sad—but then they turned to something much harder than steel.

'Then there's nothing left,' she said.

Jerry sighed, squinting at the sky with his weak eyes.

The ropy thing embraced him, almost tenderly.

And as it pulled him down into its pulsating jelly body, he saw a million ropy things, thin and black, reaching up like angry fingers to the Sun and other stars beyond.

The Only

When you meet Harbor Road, turn south. Now I can almost hear your footsteps. Walk until the breakers on your left seem about to wash up around you over the boardwalk, and the shop lights become dimmer, more secret. The shadows hug themselves here. Your footsteps are tentative now, but you are close—when you pass under a dull yellow streetlamp that hums, blinking out and then flaring on again, on the verge of an extinction never achieved, look up. There is a sign in a window, of three letters, and inside and upstairs, as they told you, you will find me. This is what you must do.

I can hear you coming.

Bill was drunk when they met him at the bus terminal. When Paul held out his hand, a lopsided smile of welcome on his face, Bill only grinned widely and put a half-empty pint of Jim Beam into his palm. 'There's one or two more of those somewhere,' he said, patting at his drab green coat. He grinned again, an elfin thing from this small man, smaller-looking under the army crew cut that was beginning to fill out on his head.

'Bastard,' the third member of their party, silent till now, said. He looked as if he was brooding, but the other two knew he wasn't.

'Bastard yourself,' Bill said, and then he hugged the other, holding him out then at the shoulders. 'How are you, Jimmy?'

'Good enough.' The thin, sour features turned wry. 'Better than you, you drunk bastard.'

'Hah! And more of that to come! I want to hit Harbor Road.'

Paul began, 'I thought we'd go back to my place for a while, have a couple of beers—'

'Beers, bullshit. I want to see the Bay, relive old times. Four friggin' years...'

He looked down at his shoes, shiny black, trying to remember something, feeling around his memory.

'Four friggin' years...'

'Come on,' Paul said, taking him by the arm. 'We'll do it your way. I know just where to start.'

'Oh?' Bill said, and then he smiled and held out his hand to take the pint of Jim Beam from his friend.

It was late and grey. It had been warm in the afternoon, the thermometer crawling up from the damp thirties to hover, exactly at midafternoon, near fifty. But now the mercury was falling again, and the sky was falling with it. It had been a damp October and now a damp November, and the weak try at Indian summer the weather had given the past couple of days looked now to be losing out to the inevitable cold. It would be chilly tonight, and there was already, out over the edge of the Bay, a hint of mistiness that would turn to thick fog by morning.

They walked east, toward the water. A movie marquee said HALLOWEEN FRIGHT WEEK, but the K in week was already down and an attendant on a ladder was carefully removing the other letters one by one; the posters in the window now showed two lovers in a close-up 1940's-style embrace. They walked past a couple of bars, but even Bill didn't turn his head; this wasn't their section.

'The Sirens?' he asked. 'To see Snooky again.'

Jimmy nodded dourly, and Bill smiled.

A hard left onto Harbor Road, and there was the water to meet them. Their legs carried them on, but suddenly Bill stopped short, staring out at the Bay.

'What is it?' Paul asked.

'Nothing,' Bill answered, staring into space. Again he seemed lost, searching for something. He shook his head. 'It's just that I haven't seen that water in a long time, but it seems like I never left it.'

The Seven Sirens looked barricaded against winter's advent. The green and white striped awning was rolled