Echoes of Darkness (10 page)

The Clarke woman’s reaction to his suggestion was like something out of a nightmare for Devin. To be dressed down by one of his daughters’ contemporaries was bad enough, but when she was actually in the right, and he knew it, it was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat. He’d wanted to interrupt her angry tirade, but she had sounded so much like Margaret he just hadn’t dared.

When she’d ground to a halt, looking past him with a quizzical expression, his relief had been monumental. When she’d taken a step forward, murmuring the beginning of a question, he’d been only too happy to step aside and let her look at whatever she wanted.

Anything that distracts her from me right now
, he’d thought,
is okay in my book!

Then he saw the cloud. At least, he
thought
it was a cloud, though it was moving like no cloud he’d ever seen. The weather out here was all a mess, though—nothing like the sensible weather they had back east. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years in Boston.

“What
is
that?” he said, and heard the girl’s distracted “I don’t know.”

He stared at the dark wall of cloud as it came, oozing over the horizon until it filled the sky. He didn’t like the way it moved, surging and squirming through the air like something alive rather than a weather phenomenon. He glanced at his rented buckboard, the horse tossing its head, agitated, and felt something in his stomach. Odd . . . it felt like when he was too near those big drums they sometimes used for parades back home, though rather than a beat this was a steady feeling, like a feather twiddling deep in his guts.

Then he heard it.

“What’s that noise?” he asked, the growing roar tickling his innards even more. “Is that thunder?”

“I don’t know,” said Evangeline, though something in her voice made him think she had a suspicion. One she did not like. He glanced back at her, but her focus was still on the strange, thrumming shadow blotting out the sky. There was a strange
whirr
behind him, and he turned to face whatever it was just in time to see something, a small stone perhaps, strike the road in a small cloud of grit. There was another thud somewhere, but before Devin could ask what was going on he heard humming, like when he riffled the pages of one of his bank’s thick ledger books, and something struck the edge of the porch right in front of him.

It was a bug, brownish green and nearly the size and shape of the cigars he smoked whenever Margaret was not around. He gaped as it folded away wings nearly the span of his hand and appeared to regard him with the round, reddish eyes set to either side of its squat head.

“What the hell is
that
?”

He shouted over the growing roar of the cloud overhead, and if he hadn’t been backing toward her in gut-wrenching horror he would have missed the Clarke girl’s whisper entirely. As it was, he caught only one word, but hearing it nearly unmanned him.

“. . . Judgment.”

The door closed behind him.

“No!”

Devin spun, the envelope containing all his proofs of power, both legal and financial, half-crumpled and forgotten in his left hand as he pounded with both fists. The door held firm. He tried the knob and found the bolt was thrown. He returned his attention to beating the thing down, though it was too stout by far to be forced by the likes of him.

Behind him, more
whirr-thud
s came, then more, gaining in intensity like increasing rain. Several struck the wooden porch, and he flinched at each hollow sound, redoubling his efforts to open the door.

“Miss Clarke, please! You can’t leave me out here! What’s happening?”

He heard her voice, but through the closed door and his own panic he couldn’t make out her meaning. He’d just started another round of yelling when the first of the whizzing little horrors struck him in the back.

With a breathless shriek he spun, flattening himself against the too-solid door. He felt the disgusting pop of the thing clinging to his suit coat, heard the sharp crack of its carapace as he smashed his full weight against it. Before his stomach had time to rebel at the thought of the crunchy, gooey mess now coating his back, another of the things struck him in the chest. Then another. Then two came whirring in to impact his left leg.

He could see them now, falling like living hail, some swerving into a more horizontal track to come in beneath the porch overhang. More and more hurtled into him, so many that, try as he might, he could not bat them away fast enough. He swept them from his chest and legs, but for every one he knocked away, two, three, or even four replaced it.

The cloud! It’s all bugs—enough to cover the sky!

Terrified thoughts of Egypt and holy plagues were interrupted as a whinny cut the air, high and terrified. He looked down and saw the buckboard he’d left in the road lurch forward several feet as the panicking horse lunged about, shaking its head furiously, dislodging a dozen or more of the huge insects from its mane.

Good God, I forgot to set the brake!

With no brake set, the only thing that had kept the horse from simply wandering away, wagon and all, during his conversation with Evangeline Clarke was its good manners; manners that were swiftly disappearing as the beast was pelted with more and more of the flying, clinging, climbing bugs.

If it fled now, he realized, he’d have no way to get to town or find cover, and the Clarke woman seemed all too happy to leave him out here in this Hell on Earth.

“Hey!” he shouted, trying to calm the horse, or at least get its attention. “He—
awwwk
!”

The locust that had flown into his open mouth scrabbled at his tongue with sharp, twig-like legs. He choked, spitting the thing out to flop, disoriented, on the porch before him. He tried to stomp on it as, retching, he started down the two steps to the front yard, but he stumbled, nearly falling as the things continued to land on him. They covered him front and back, crawling up his sleeves and pant legs, clinging to his hat and hair, their weight enough to actually slow him down as he lumbered toward the buckboard.

Devin flailed, frantic, beating at his own torso and head, but no matter what he did the number of his attackers did nothing but grow, so many of them now falling, flying, and whizzing through the air that he lost sight of the horse and wagon in the hellish blizzard. There was a new sound now, rising up to drown out the roar of billions of buzzing wings: a loud and angry hiss, reminiscent of a hard rain beating upon the ground. Terrified thoughts rolled through his head, though one idea was repeated again and again, as if the thought itself was trying to get his attention:

It’s the end of the world! The end of the world!

He glanced down as he staggered toward the buckboard, his crunching feet obliterating locusts with each step, more falling every second to fill the holes he made in the squirming chitinous carpet. That buff-colored envelope, still clutched in his left hand, was half-gone now, locusts clinging determinately to the ragged upper edge of the thing, gnawing and chewing away.

They’re eating it!

He stared at the insects covering the grass, at the dozens depending from his coat-front. Everywhere he looked, it was the same.

They’re eating
everything
!

All across his chest the woolen fabric was disappearing as the army of little horrors moved about, and wherever he could see their heads those blank, alien faces were pressed firmly to him, tiny mandibles working. His head swam as more of them crawled about his ears, and the hiss grew louder, masking all other sounds but his own screams, muffled though they were; frightened to open his mouth again, he shrieked almost nonstop through clenched teeth.

Another whinny slashed the air, and he caught the hint of motion through the now nearly horizontal flow of tiny whirring bodies, and he turned toward it, one hand thrust out blindly, the other up protectively, if ineffectually, before his face.

The buckboard! It’s my only chance to get ou—

The thought was interrupted as the horse suddenly erupted out of the locust swarm, eyes round and rolling in terror at the living mane of clinging, chewing insects covering its head and neck. It was panicked, running full out, thundering past Devin a mere three feet away. Realizing the danger, he tried to leap aside, but the iron-bound wheel of the trailing buckboard caught him a terrific blow to the ribs, spinning him about to land hard on his back on the locust-covered lawn.

No,
in
the lawn, as the army of already-grounded locusts washed over him like a misplaced seaside wave. He opened his mouth to scream, but somewhere along the way the wind had been knocked out of him. Two, maybe three of the marching insects tumbled into his open maw, and he gagged even as his lungs strained against their paralysis. He tried to roll onto his side, to get to his feet, to spit out the clawing, wriggling bodies filling his mouth and throat, when a sudden knife of pain stabbed through his chest, pinning him to the ground like a great railroad spike driven by the famous John Henry.

His left arm thrust skyward, stiff with pain, as his right hand beat at his breast, looking for the source. His searching fingers encountered no spike or knife, merely the tatters of his waistcoat and great swatches of skin in the places where the Hell-spawned bugs had chewed all the way through the outer garment, then the shirt beneath.

Within his breast, his terrified heart tried, but failed, to beat.

And now they will eat
me
, he thought numbly, unable to feel any more horror. As his body arched, drumming its heels upon the ground, his mind clung desperately to words and phrases he’d learned by rote back when he was in short pants, and still said every Sunday, standing next to a stiff-backed Margaret.

Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in—

He was interrupted by blackness swallowing him as his heels slowed, then stilled, his rigid arm falling slack to the ground beside him. Stiff and spasming fingers relaxed, opened, and the last remnants of his buff-colored envelope, all the proofs of his authority, both legal and financial, were caught up by the breeze and sent fluttering into the air, where they were set upon by a dozen of the ever-chewing locusts.

In less than a minute it was as if they had never been.

Evangeline Clarke spun from the window, pressing her back to the wall and sliding down to sit on the floor, legs splayed. Sobs shook her as she stared across the room at the settee, at the fireplace mantle, at the painting of her mother above it, at
anything
but the window again. She cried, and listened to the scritter-scratch of tiny legs as they covered the porch, the roof, the entire house; the sound barely audible over the chittering hiss of their chewing and chewing.

She had watched through the window until that poor man had fallen. Watched until his body became nothing more than a hump in the crawling, writhing carpet of living insects that extended in all directions, just as far as she could see.

She had owed him that much, having called this Doom down upon him.

Long before it was over, long before he fell, she had begun to pray to God for mercy, trying to take it all back; but it was as if her Lord, so attentive to her prayers for punishment, had turned away, unable or unwilling to hear.

Lord, please, it was a terrible thought, a sin to pray for, and I do repent, but please please please take back Your plague. I prayed for punishment, and it came. I prayed for revenge, and it came. But, Lord, please
 . . .

She got to her knees to peer out the window, ignoring the odd hump on the lawn, carefully not seeing the black, polished, inedible shoes thrust out of one end of the squirming, man-shaped mass. She looked instead to the left and right, to the east and west, and as far as the eye could see there was nothing but locusts. Millions of them. Billions. Billions upon billions, and they were all eating. Eating
everything.

The farm they had fought so hard to keep, that her father had worked himself nearly to death for, was gone.

Eva recalled the sky before the locusts had begun to fall, the cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon, and knew that theirs was not the only farm to be destroyed that day.