The man smiled and a stink came off him like wormy viscera. “Not quite.”
Styer pawed beetles off himself, wild-eyed and terrified now, his chest tightening unpleasantly. This guy was dead. He was…well, he was a zombie.
The man pulled the sheet off the young woman and the flesh had been chewed from her chest and throat right down to the musculature beneath.
“What?” Styer said, trying to make sense of it. “What…what is this? What are you doing?”
The man grinned and it was awful. “Doing? Why, I’m eating, of course. But I hate to eat alone.”
Then Styer looked up and that seething mass of beetles fell down on him in a hailstorm of biting bodies, covering every inch of him. On the floor, he writhed and twisted, but soon the waters of that hideous creeping sea washed over him and he went under for keeps.
“Desecration,” the dark man said, pulling long red worms out of the holes in his face with skeletal hands. “Desecration.”
He dropped the worms onto Styer’s corpse.
After a time, the beetles abandoned the remains of the undertaker and surged up and over the dark man, became him until you could not see his form, just that vague manlike shape sculpted of thousands of beetles, creeping and massing and chittering. Properly clothed then against the storm, he left with a distant sound of piping.
6
The last thing Mitch remembered was driving those kids to the precinct house downtown. Maybe they should have taken them to the hospital, but the precinct was a good bet. They pulled the van into the police garage and got the kids out. They were choppered about twenty minutes later to the National Guard tent camp outside town. No point in trying to find their families, not on a night like that.
Afterwards, while Tommy chewed the shit with George Lake, his cousin who was a cop, Mitch sat in the van. Smoked and brooded and…that was really the last thing he remembered.
And now he was awake.
And it was no gentle rousing from an afternoon nap here, he jerked awake, rattled with panic. That dream. That godawful dream. Tommy was nowhere around. He was still sitting in the van. Alone. Pulling off his water bottle and wishing it were whiskey, he had a smoke and began to remember his dream.
It was about Lily, of course.
He was dreaming that Chrissy was gone and they had the house to themselves and it wasn’t raining outside. They took a bath together in the garden tub Mitch had nearly broken his back putting in. Then they made love there with candles burning, lots of suds. That part had been good. He seemed to recall they spoke of the trip to the Rocky Mountains they’d always talked about taking. Other things he could not remember. Lily kept talking and as she did, the color drained from her face, her body, until she was perfectly white. Then she began to bloat up, bits of her dropping away and floating around in the suds until she looked like some horrible B-movie zombie.
That’s when he’d come awake.
He sat there in the van, just physically drained and emotionally wrecked. His heart was pounding and his face was wet with tears. Chrissy was missing and Lily…Lily was probably dead. No, forget the probably, she was certainly dead. Dead and he would never see her again.
And how was that for a door prize to this madhouse?
Lily was dead. This was how all the good times and bad times ended, this is where the struggles and love and laughter and pain and triumph ground to a halt. It had started on that beach eleven years ago when he’d met Chrissy, then met her mother and fell in love and it had all gone terribly fast, hadn’t it? So fast, just thinking of it all left him dizzy and disoriented. It passed through his brain in some kind of crazy blur, like being on a subway train and watching station after station whir by with dazzling speed. He saw all the memories whipping by and it left him gasping. Why hadn’t he tried to slow it down? Why hadn’t he tried to dig in his heels and slow it all down so maybe he could have enjoyed it more, lived it more, maybe held some of it in his hand and kept a piece in his pocket for the horrible, dark times ahead when he would really need it? Just a bit of it to get him through the night?
Dear God…how could it be over? How could it end like this?
Like anyone else, Mitch had maybe wondered in some back room of his mind which of them would die first. And maybe what that would be like. But he’d always seen it as some impossibly distant point in the future when they were both white-haired and used-up. Not now. Not while they were in their prime. Christ, maybe forty-four seemed old when you were twenty, but when you were forty-four and healthy and on top of your game, it seemed like you were in your prime. And it was not natural to be throwing dirt in the face of the love of your life when you were in your prime. It was just…well, it was fucked-up, that’s what it was.
Mitch sat there, sweating and shaking, drawing from his cigarette and just dying inside. There was a great aching swell in his belly that went right up into his chest. He felt feverish, yet numb and cold and hot and too many thing to catalog. His skin felt tight like it couldn’t fit over the skeleton beneath anymore.
But was Lily really dead?
Was that the absolute truth?
And, yes, he knew it was. He could sit around pretending that she might turn up unharmed, but in the end that was only self-denial and self-denial was just the suspension of truth. Self-denial was keeping the razor of acceptance from laying your wrists open. You could hold it back only so long and when that blade finally cut you, it could be really bad. Better to let it cut a little at a time, rather than letting it gore you in one fell swoop.
Finally, if he hadn’t before, Mitch accepted.
And in accepting, there was torment beyond anything he knew or could imagine. Nobody ever claimed that life was fair, but this pretty much tipped the scales a bit much, now didn’t it? You wake one gray morning hearing that cold rain falling and falling, worrying about your wife who’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown ever since her dirtbag nutso sister killed herself, and by the end of that day you see the dead walk and things crawl out of the cellar of hell. And to cap it off, one of them?possibly?calls your wife out into the storm and that’s all she wrote, man. End of story. End of the romance, end of the road. This was the big zero and eating lunch with the damned and trying to see by the light that failed.
Mitch opened the door of the van and stepped out into the police garage, buzzing fluorescent lights overhead casting an unreal illumination over him. He saw the battered green bench where they’d sat with Tommy’s cousin earlier that day. He dropped himself into it, wanting badly to fall to his knees on the concrete floor and cry his eyes out.
There would be no trip to the Rocky Mountains and no retiring to the Carolinas where Mitch had family. No more nights spent talking in bed or big Sunday morning breakfasts or lazy Saturday afternoon naps or backyard cookouts. No, in fact, there was no more anything.
And this was how the grief finally set its hooks into Mitch Barron. How it found him and held him and would not let him go, just kept whispering memories into his ears and taunting him with what could have been but would never be. Odd as it sounded, it was like being castrated. Having your balls cut off and held out so you could see them, see what you had and would never have again. And the really ugly part of grief is that this was only the beginning of the pain and torture and ugliness that would eat his mind away slowly in economical, bite-sized portions.
“How you doing, Mitch?”
He looked up and Tommy was standing there, looking uncomfortable, looking like he was on the edge of tears himself. Caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Wanting to grab his old friend and give him a hug, but unable to because of how he was brought up, the things that had been pounded into him by society. Men did not cry and they did not hug other men regardless of the circumstances. It was positively antediluvian and ridiculous, but still those archaic working class values and mores held on tight. Tommy was fighting against them, but in the end he simply lost.
“How you doing, old buddy?” he said again, choking on his own words.
Mitch stared up at him through red-rimmed eyes. “Not so good, not so good at all.”
Tommy swallowed. “You look like shit, too.”
