Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative Read online

  “Had to piss. I grabbed a bunch of waters, they’re on the counter. I’ll grab some food.”

  “I’ll take the bottles out to the truck,” Kevin said. He gathered them in his arms and shouldered the door open, loaded them into the truck, and came back in to find Jason standing in the middle of the aisle, staring down at the floor. “What’s up?”

  “They got it all,” Jason said.

  Everything, every bag of chips, every candy bar, anything the bugs could get to, lay open, some of it scattered on the floor, some torn open on the rack, but there was nothing here that hadn’t been touched and partially eaten by the bugs.

  “Fucking everything. What the fuck?”

  “Fuck it, let’s go. We’ll find it somewhere else.”

  “Where else is there?” Jason asked. “They’ve gotten everywhere. We’re not gonna go anywhere they haven’t already been. These things have been around how many millions of years? Dude, they’re everywhere.”

  “We’ll find someplace, but let’s go.”

  Then they heard it, the familiar clack-clack-clack as legs shuffled over carapaces and a thousand cockroaches, beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers maneuvered into position behind them.

  “Let’s go, now,” Kevin said, turning and seeing them forming outside.

  They approached the door and looked at the writhing black and brown roadblock.

  “It’s not gonna end, is it?” Jason asked. “There’s too many of them.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re in shock, man. Knock it off, and come on. It’s only a few, we’ll stomp half of them on the way to truck. You ready?”

  “I’m not in shock,” Jason said. “I’m seeing the truth. Look over there,” he said, pointing to the truck.

  Bugs poured out through the grill.

  “Shit,” Kevin said, thinking about his motorcycle.

  “You go on,” Jason said. Kevin looked at him, but Jason’s eyes were dead, defeated. His face had a numbing glaze to it and Kevin thought if he could be Jason for just a second, he’d feel the tears beating at his chest, struggling to get out. Not that he could blame him. Kevin didn’t have a family, and the few friends he counted as his, he hadn’t even wondered about them all night, so he obviously didn’t consider them too important, did he? But Jason had literally watched his family being eaten alive.

  He didn’t question Jason’s state of mind or condemn him for slipping away from reality for a moment.

  “Come on,” he said. “We can’t stand around here, let’s see if there’s a back way.”

  The back way, however, was closed off, too, as they heard the bugs coming out from wherever they’d been hiding inside the store. The sound they made as they came up the aisle with the decimated chip bags and candy wrappers was like a giant strand of firecrackers amidst the utter quiet of this new world.

  As for the flies, they heard the buzz only seconds before the swarm hit them both in the face, blinding, deafening, and disorienting both men. Kevin, facing the door, ran forward, pushed through to the outside, whipping his head back and forth and swatting at the air with his palms. Jason, however, turned toward the aisles to see the approaching wave, and as the flies attacked, he swatted, flinched, and fell back into a display of anti-freeze jugs, tumbled to the floor, and was met by hundreds of pinchers going straight for his fingers and hands.

  He yelped and the flies got into his mouth. The bugs scurried up his arms and legs, overwhelming his frantic attempts to shake them off. He stood up, but fell back again, this time into a rack of motor oils and brake fluids. Kevin heard the clatter inside the store, but he’d made it through the pool of bugs and . . . he couldn’t bring himself to go through it again to help. He cursed himself, but right now he had his own issues. The flies still swarmed his head. The bugs crawled up his pants. Some slipped under the cuffs and crawled up his legs.

  He squashed these with his fists against his legs, but he had to move before they became too many to control.

  He hated himself for it, but he turned and ran.

  ««—»»

  He woke up an hour or two after sinking into the dark of the guard shack. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. He listened for bugs, but the shack was silent around him.

  The sores on his feet and hands were open and stinging. He shuffled his position, trying to find one that didn’t hurt. His hands were stiff and felt like welts had been raised on his palms. His scalp itched and he quickly ran his hand through it, afraid it would be crawling with bugs.

  He flexed his knees and tried to find the energy to stand. His knees popped, but he didn’t get any further.

  Kevin tried to think of what his next move would be. He’d run away from the truck stop with no plan, no direction. He’d simply moved, and kept moving. Who knew how much distance he’d covered since then? Or how much there still was to cover before he found some place safe to stop. He certainly couldn’t live in a tiny guard shack. He wasn’t even sure what this place was supposed to be guarding, the lights had been out and he’d been too preoccupied to pay much attention to the warehouse or factory or whatever it was behind the shack. He’d only known he probably wouldn’t be able to get inside there, so he’d focused on the shack instead.

  He thought for a second about Jason and wondered if, at the end, he’d thought Kevin as much a coward as Kevin thought himself. He tried to justify his abandonment by reminding himself Jason had told him to go, and really, at that point, Jason wasn’t going to be of any use to him anyway. But none of his rationalizing made him feel any better about how quickly he’d cut and run.

  God, his feet hurt. I might not be going anywhere for a few more hours, he thought. Maybe not even until tomorrow.

  He had to bandage them, if he could. He wondered if there would be a first aid kit here in the shack. He leaned forward and searched under the counter that served as the desktop, using his hands to help him in the dark. He maneuvered around the supports, into the corners and crannies, searching blindly, until his fingers sank deep into a hidden pile of cockroaches, and those tiny legs crept over his knuckles, up to his wrist. They tickled as they scurried up his forearms and Kevin jerked back, flailing his arms, trying to shake them loose, smash them, and it suddenly occurred to him what was so peculiar about the stinging in his soles.

  Through the skitter of the bugs up his arms, Kevin realized the burning on his feet wasn’t caused by having been on the move all last night, all the following day, and into the next evening—during which the signs of the insects’ total reclamation of the world was evident in every empty building, abandoned car, and half-eaten, egg-laden corpse he saw—but by the scurrying bugs that were crawling around, inside and out, of his broken blisters. They were inside him. Not the big ones, not yet. But God, he felt them. He felt them under his skin. He felt them tiptoeing across his muscles and tendons. He felt them inside, gnawing on his bones and trying to get into his organs. The cramps doubled him over and he screamed and the bugs got in that way, too. The only other sound besides Kevin’s scream, for miles around, was the clattering of the bugs scurrying over one another, and the chirp of the crickets calling the forces to battle.

  — | — | —

  I’M SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS

  RONALD MALFI

  Unable to sleep, Buddy Tupelo peeled the bed sheet off his body and dropped one foot to the floor. Careful not to wake Marie, who slept soundly beside him, Buddy climbed out of bed and, with his hands feeling around in the darkness ahead of him, zombie-walked across the bedroom to the door. Once he made it out into the hallway, he eased the bedroom door closed then flipped on the hall light. The single naked bulb in the ceiling caused him to wince.

  He made his way to the living room, nearly walking right into the Christmas tree he kept forgetting was there, and over to the small table that sat at the bend where the two sofas formed an L. On the table was their shared laptop, an outdated piece of crap Buddy had purchased a few years ago for around four hundred bucks. Marie had wanted one of t
hose fancy-schmancy MacBooks, but Buddy, who had learned frugality at a young age, hadn’t seen the point. Sure, their cheapo laptop often froze up or lost the Wi-Fi connection—and lately, the goddamn curser had a tendency to drift to the upper right corner of the screen for no apparent reason—but for Buddy, who was about as skilled on the computer as a dog is behind the wheel of a school bus, the thing worked just fine. Also, he thought MacBook sounded like something you’d read at a McDonald’s.

  He groped for the laptop in the dark, working his fingers around to where the power cord was plugged into the back. He unplugged the power cord, tucked the laptop under his arm, then continued on down the hall toward the bathroom. Sure, there was a bathroom off their bedroom, but Marie often complained that he woke her in the middle of the night, particularly when his gastritis was really boiling up his guts. Also, the bathroom at the other end of the house was just far enough away for him to indulge in…less seemly activity…without his wife’s knowledge. (And if she suspected he looked at pornographic websites at night while hunkered down on the toilet, even after he’d gone through the trouble of clearing the Internet history, she’d never said anything to him about it.)

  In the bathroom, he flipped on the light and the ceiling exhaust then set the laptop on the counter beside the sink. Marie’s hairbrush was on the edge of the sink, its stiff black bristles bursting through a meshwork of his wife’s dirty blond hair. Buddy dropped his boxer shorts and scanned his doughy, middle-aged frame in the large mirror with some mild disdain. He could stand to drop a good twenty-five pounds. Maybe even thirty. Once the holidays were over, he promised himself, he would buckle down and start working out. Hell, maybe he’d treat himself to a gym membership. At the very least, he could watch the soccer moms doing Pilates while he huffed and wheezed along a treadmill’s conveyor belt.

  Buddy dropped the toilet seat, grabbed the el cheapo laptop, and settled himself down. God, the lousy gastritis had been doing a job on him this week. And with all the holiday food they would be eating, it only promised to get worse. A lover of all this salty, fatty, and spicy, was Buddy Tupelo.

  He winced and leaned to the left as he released an almost mournful expulsion of flatulence. Then, briefly, he contemplated masturbating, precariously balancing the laptop on one knee while he downloaded porn and worked himself into a sweaty little mess, but in the end—and mostly due to the gastritis, thanks so much—he decided to forgo such recreation and pulled up his Facebook page instead.

  It had been Marie who’d showed him how to use Facebook. Buddy had resisted for as long as he could, uninterested in the technical shrewdness he believed he would have to cultivate in order to use the site. Also, what was the point? If he needed to talk to someone, he’d just pick up the phone. Not to mention he had little interest in turning into a clone of Marie—always hunched over the laptop, clacking away at the keys, sometimes tittering or chuckling or sighing or saying oh oh oh whenever she’d read someone’s happy or funny or sad post. It wasn’t until Marie set up his profile and starting connecting with his old school friends on his behalf did he finally acquiesce, and even then it was so his friends wouldn’t mistake his wife’s silly little comments as his own.

  Yet to his surprise he found he had become quickly addicted, and in less than four months, he had managed to accumulate more Facebook friends than Marie—nearly four hundred at the moment. Some were colleagues at the foundry, others were neighbors and relatives, and some were even his old high school buddies, many of whom he hadn’t spoken to in nearly a decade. Buddy didn’t post on his own page very often—what did a middle-aged, overweight factory employee really have to say that was so pressing?—but he did find voyeuristic pleasure in scanning his friends’ pages or reading the messages others had posted on his page.

  As he squeaked out another odorous spurt of flatulence, Buddy entered his screen name and password into the appropriate blocks then logged onto the site. The little horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen incrementally turned green as the site began to load. A few seconds later, his personal avatar appeared at the top of the screen. It was a photo of him when he was a bit younger, his hair a little longer, his weight more manageable. Unlike many of his online friends, Buddy shied away at posting current photos of himself, opting instead for pics of his favorite album covers—Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, among others—or the occasional can of Natty Boh or Dale’s Pale Ale sitting comfortable on a coaster. Maybe after the holidays, once he hit the gym and dropped down to a more presentable weight, he’d take a nice photo of him and Marie. Some of his old high school cronies had been pestering him to do so.

  He saw now that he had not only one post on his homepage, but a whole column of them. He read the first one which said, simply, I’m so sorry for your loss. He looked at the one below it, which said, My condolences. And below that, a third post read, You are in our hearts and prayers. In its infinite wisdom, Facebook saw it fit to amputate the majority of messages and hide them behind a link that said, See all 109 messages. Buddy gaped at that. Then he clicked on it and, sure enough, the page loaded with over a hundred messages, all of which conveyed some genus of condolence for some apparent great loss. Even the comments that had been pecked out in the abbreviated gibberish of computer lingo—we r there 4 u!—carried the same general theme.

  Buddy’s first thought was that he had gotten hacked—that someone somehow had managed to usurp his Facebook page and was playing some sort of prank on him. That was certainly possible, wasn’t it? Sure. But what he thought might not be possible was for that Internet hijacker to have also appropriated all his friends’ Facebook accounts as well, for all the posts, Buddy suddenly realized, had come from his cache of Facebook friends. These weren’t strangers. These were people who knew him.

  His second thought was that this had to be some kind of joke. Christmas was only a week away, so it was a bit soon to be laying on the April fool’s jokes…but what other explanation was there?

  “A mistake,” he muttered to himself, his voice barely audible to his own ears beneath the whir of the exhaust fan. Sure—that was it, wasn’t it? A simple mistake? Someone had gotten some piece of information wrong and, before they knew any better, these Facebook drones had simply started commenting on his page. This seemed the most likely explanation, and Buddy was somewhat surprised that it caused him noticeable relief.

  He clicked on Bob Sherman’s name—old Bobby Sherman, who had posted, ever so meticulously, u in my tougts bro—and waited for Bob’s page to load. Buddy figured he’d shoot old Bobby a message and ask him just why he was in his “tougts.” But Bob’s page didn’t load. Buddy clicked the name again, but again nothing happened. He tried someone else—Margot Lucille-Miller from the foundry, who had expressed her sympathy in a conga-line of X’s and O’s—but Margot’s page didn’t load, either.

  “Okay, you stupid piece of crap,” Buddy grunted at the laptop. “Don’t you freeze up on me now.”

  He scrolled back to the top of the page, intent on hitting Refresh, which was when he noticed something that, at least for a moment, caused his confusion to drift toward fear…

  The date of the most recent post was January 11…of next year. The earliest posts were dated January 9, also of next year—approximately three weeks away. Buddy stared at the dates for an inordinate amount of time, as if to stare them into making sense.

  A cool sweat broke out along his scalp. A glitch in the system—surely that was what this was. Lord knew it happened to Facebook all the time—the site froze up, or posts simply vanished into the ether for no apparent reason. And if it wasn’t Facebook screwing up, it was probably the lousy el cheapo laptop.

  But, he wondered, how could this be the laptop’s fault?

  Suddenly very frightened, he hit Refresh.

  The page went blank and the little horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen turned from white to green again as the new page loaded. Buddy held his breath. He wasn’t sure what he
had just been looking at, but whatever it was, it didn’t sit well with him. He didn’t like it, not one bit.

  The fresh page loaded. There was his avatar, the old Buddy Tupelo with the longer hair and the slimmer waistline. There was a series of comments on his page, too…only they were different now. The first comment was no longer I’m so sorry for your loss; now it was Derrick Porter asking if he was up for bowling on Saturday night. The comment below Derrick’s was from Bob Sherman, suggesting they skip bowling and just head over to Shooter’s and put down a few Fat Tires. Buddy scrolled down the page, searching for any of the bizarre comments that had just been there a moment ago, but they were gone. All of them—gone. And when he checked the date of Derrick’s and Bob’s posts, they were from earlier today—December 19.

  Buddy stared at the screen for a long time. He hit the Refresh button a few more times, yet each time the screen reset, it was unchanged. Bowling or Shooter’s? The list of a hundred-plus sympathetic comments had vanished into cyberspace.

  Five minutes later, after he’d finished up in the bathroom and set the laptop back on the table between the two sofas, Buddy got into bed and pulled the sheet up nearly to his chin. Beside him, Marie slept soundlessly. He thought about waking her and telling her what had happened, but in the end, decided not to. If it still bothered him at breakfast, he could bring it up then.

  Buddy turned over and closed his eyes, though he knew sleep would not come to him anytime soon.

  — | — | —

  TIMOTHY MEEK