Violet Eyes (12 page)

“Wait a minute,” Mark promised, as he witnessed his two friends collapse to the sand under a swarm of purple.

He ran to where the tents had been, and grabbed the canister that he had brought from the hut. When he got back, he could barely make out the writhing body of Jess beneath the shifting mass of black-and-violet flies that covered her, thousands of them fighting for sustenance.

Mark didn’t think twice before opening the nozzle of the pesticide on the bugs.

They creatures stiffened and fell from Jess’s body as he sprayed them, until he could see her skin again through the gaps they left behind.

Nearby, Billy fought his way back up from the ground, swatting and twisting in the air until the cloud of flies writhed around him but did not settle.

Jess vaulted to her feet as the flies fell to the ground, instantly killed by the poison of the spray. Her skin already welted with a hundred angry bites, but she smiled and held out her arms to Mark in thanks.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Thank you.”

But even as she spoke, her mouth changed from a smile of relief to a grimace of pain. And Mark witnessed the pale surface of her skin boil from tan to crimson.

“Mark?” she said, her voice rising strangely. She sounded afraid and unsure at the same time.

Then the flesh beneath her skin brought itself to the fore, hemorrhaging its life onto the sand in a broken stream that didn’t stop until Jess coughed, screamed and then collapsed in a lifeless heap to the sand at her boyfriend’s feet. While some of the top half of her remained recognizable, the other half seemed to have simply dissolved from the bones in a slurry of blood, until her leg bones lay bare on the sand, as if they’d been bleached by a hundred summer days of sun.

All told, her death took less than three minutes.

“What the hell,” Billy gasped, struggling to come closer while still swatting and twisting to break through the wall of flies that engulfed him.

But when Mark turned the nozzle of the spray gun at him, Billy knew better.

He punched his friend and the spray of the gun let loose nearby, but not on, Billy.

“Did you not see what that just did?” Billy demanded and pointed at the jellied remains of Jess, which were still dissolving into the suck of the sand as they spoke. Her skin seemed to just… Melt into the beach. “You’re not spraying me with that shit.” As he said it, flies poured over his lips and into his mouth. Several hit the back of his throat and began to move down. They would not stop. Billy coughed so hard he almost puked.

Mark simply looked dazed, as he held the nozzle of the pesticide sprayer. He shifted the nozzle from pointing at Jess’s body to aim at Billy.

Meanwhile, Billy shook his arms and legs like a madman, determined to fling the bugs off of him. Then he screamed a howl of rage and suddenly ran away from his friend and towards the ocean. He dove into the cool green water and almost breathed in the ocean with relief as he felt the horde of flies leave his skin. The sting of their bites made him want to jump out of his skin.

Billy swam for a minute beneath the waves, reveling in the feeling of having his skin freed; the saltwater burned in his bites, but he didn’t care. He rubbed his hands against his chest and thighs, ensuring that he no longer carried any unwanted passengers, before he rose out of the water and walked again towards the beach.

The swarm didn’t wait for Billy before they attacked again. The cloud converged on Mark, who stood on the beach watching the water for Billy to resurface. And then suddenly Mark dropped the cylinder and began to swat madly at his neck and sides and back. He began to yell and dance, twisting across the beach as the bites grew more intense. The cloud of flies surrounded him until there wasn’t a remnant of his humanity still visible. Mark became the orbit of a shimmery hoard of insects, pulsing and moving in a shape that sort of approximated human.

“Help me,” he cried from inside the swarm, as Billy came running from the water.

“Help me,” Mark cried again, and Billy reached him and began to swat at the angry flies that shimmered with violet hunger but didn’t leave Mark’s body. The more he tried to swat the flies off Mark, the more they began to gather around and attack him again.

“Get up,” Billy urged, but his friend only moaned, and somewhere beneath the flies, he moaned a vague, “I can’t.”

Billy stepped back and looked at the solid mass of flies that moved with insect energy around six-foot space on the sand. He thought “space” because there was no indication that his friend lived there, beneath the flies.

“Mark?” he called out.

From deep beneath the bugs, he heard the faintest, horrible plea. “Get them off,” Mark begged, his voice gagging with the bites of insects streaming into his mouth.

Billy bent and began to swat at the bugs that covered his friend…but as he did, and the flies broke above him to swarm around his head, he looked at his hands.

Where they’d touched the legs of his friend, they’d come back wet with blood. Mark’s blood.

Billy stepped back from the swarm and reached out to pick up the pesticide canister.

He turned the nozzle toward his friend and considered the result of
not
pulling the trigger. The end wasn’t good either way.

“I love you, man,” he murmured. And then he let the death of the spray encircle Mark.

“I’ll miss you.”

Mark cried out for a moment, and then was quiet as around them the buzz of flies filled the air with excitement and anger and death. The swarm lifted briefly and then it dropped again to the sand, in a mass crash of glimmering violet. In moments, the air had grown quiet, and Billy could see the half-eaten body of his friend, lying exposed and bleeding on the sand. One flap of Mark’s cheek hung down to reveal the white of skull beneath.

Billy felt tears roll down his cheeks, but he didn’t let himself stop to think about what had just happened. Instead he dragged the bloody remains of Billy and Jess toward the boat, carefully loading them onto the deck next to Casey. The air still sang in the distance with the call of hungry purple flies, but they seemed to have retreated temporarily from the mist of death doled out by his canister.

He didn’t wait around to let them reconsider. Billy released the boat from shore and headed out, away from the island, back the way they’d come, towards the mainland.

The sky looked blue and welcoming ahead. Behind, it was wreathed in an angry purple glow.

Billy didn’t look back. He couldn’t.

His eyes wouldn’t stop crying.

Chapter Eighteen

Passanattee

Saturday, May 11. 11:36 a.m.

Tears slipped again from Billy’s eyes as he remembered the last moments on the island. As he watched Jess’s body spontaneously dissolve beneath the venom of what he had thought was simply pesticide. As he watched Mark die and turn to jelly beneath his hands… And beneath the cloud of deadly purple flies.

Billy had escaped it all, and lived to tell.

But now, he realized that he hadn’t escaped it at all.

Somehow the spiders had come home with him. And they’d burrowed inside him.

How? Eggs in his clothes?

On the edge of the mattress, his fingers twitched. His whole hand shook, as if someone were pulling the strings, but didn’t know how to operate the puppet.

The tremors grew more intense, and a spike of pain shot down behind his ear. His head felt like a balloon that had been inflated beyond capacity. Things seemed to be tearing inside, and his eyes felt distended, as if he were turning into some hideous Halloween prop. His skull had to pop, it
would
pop. He knew this without question. Despite all logic. The only question was when. And how much pain he would endure before it finally exploded from the pressure.

It hurt to close his eyes, so he left them open, staring with glazed inattention at the busy spiders on his ceiling. The web seemed to be growing thicker even as he watched. The creatures crisscrossed back and forth across his entire room, running down skeins of web as they added more. His ceiling was a cloud that was growing centimeter by centimeter, closer to the bed.

Above his face, he stared at one still spider. It was pale, not black, and larger than the other arachnids. As the sparks of pain shot through his ears and the ache grew unbearable behind his eyes, he saw a piece of the spider shiver slightly. The skin of its back moved, and then seemed to peel forward. Something dark glinted from inside. Several somethings. Tiny legs pushed the spider shell aside, and in seconds an explosion of black wings and purple eyes exploded into the air beneath the spider’s empty skin and above Billy’s face. They hung there for a moment, like a cloud of very large gnats.

And then it came to Billy how he’d become infected. How he’d become the host.

The flies. The flies bit and laid their eggs. The larvae hatched beneath his skin, beneath the boils of his bites and swam to the brain. Something drew them specifically to the brain. He’d been bit all across his body, but the pain was completely centered in his skull.

The larvae hatched into spiders.

He thought of Casey’s half-eaten face.

Hungry spiders. They fed on their host, and then spun their webs. And then they went dormant. Cocoon. And from the spiders, emerged the flies. The travelling form of the life cycle. They would seek out new food. New hosts.

“Jesus,” Billy whispered, as the theory crystallized. He knew unequivocally that he was right about this. Spiders were hatching from inside him, and on his ceiling, flies were hatching from spiders.

“What fucking genius thought this was a great experiment?” he said, thinking back to the vials and instruments in the empty Quonset hut on Sheila Key.

“I’ve got to…” he began to say aloud, but it ended in a scream as something seemed to crack behind his left ear. Still, he struggled to push himself up from the bed. His arms shivered and threatened to collapse instead of holding his weight. He had to tell someone what was happening. If these things spread in a populated area…

Pain pricked at his eye, and Billy’s hand unconsciously lifted from the bed to rub it. He couldn’t support himself on one arm and he fell back to the pillow with a muffled groan. Something crawled across his face, just beneath his eyelid. And then the prick came again, and more tiny feet began to move across his face. He could feel a tickle in his ear too, and Billy knew that he was too late.

The spiders were truly hatching now. The ones on his ceiling were just the front line. Tiny legs pushed out from beneath his eyeballs, and walked wetly across his cheeks. At the same time, a line of hair-like legs moved quickly across his earlobes and tickled down his neck. Something bit him on the ribs, but he couldn’t move to swat it.

His entire body seemed to be trembling. Shivering.

At the back of his skull, the itching, tingling pain that had been growing in intensity for hours—days really, if he thought about it—suddenly burst into a flower of hot pain. Billy jerked an arm upwards; this time his instincts conquered whatever nerves the spiders had chewed away, and his shivering hand slapped clumsily at the back of his head.

His fingers met something wet. He cringed. Had he just crushed spiders across his hand? His jerking fingers slicked the sticky liquid across his hair as his hand shook and slapped its way back to the bed. He managed to tilt his head slightly and saw that the fingers of his hand were not covered in the pulp of smashed spiders.

They were coated in blood.

A light flashed before his eyes, and the entire room seemed to dim. He choked on something that moved in his throat. His face was suddenly alive with the tiny pricks of spider feet and spider mouths. He could see them moving away from his eyes, and crawling across the bridge of his nose. They were streaming out of him, tunneling out from behind his eyes, and ears and nostrils. They tickled there, and he sneezed, repeatedly.

Something shifted with the blinding light in his head, and he felt a rush of something warm across his pillow.

The pressure was suddenly gone.

Dimly, Billy knew why. The cork had finally opened. The creatures had literally burrowed a hole through the back of his head.

Just like the skull they had found on the beach at Sheila Key. The skull with a hole in the back of it.

He saw the evidence as it ran past him. Hundreds of black spiders that raced along the side of his arm and down the edges of the bed. The creatures were spotted in crimson, and shared one thing with the tiny flies swarming the room above him.

They looked at him with violet eyes. But even as he saw the similarity in the eyes, Billy saw no more. He breathed a short sigh of relief as the pain diminished. The world turned gray and a part of him felt his life flowing out from the hole in his skull in wet, rhythmic pulses. But the pulses were slowing. Billy thought of Casey, of the raw meat of her face at the end. How fast they had eaten into her.

He felt them crawling across his face. He barely felt the bites.

And then he felt nothing at all.

Some of the spiders fed on their host, but most were still sated from their time inside. From eating their way out.

Along with the swarms of flies, they looked around the room for other things to attack.

Their blood sang with new life. They were newborn and anxious to explore. They felt a drive in their legs that they couldn’t deny. They yearned to move. To travel to find a new place to nest. To spin their webs.

The flies led the way, slipping out of the room and down the hall, searching for an exit. Searching for the light of the sun. Searching for new places.

Places that were warm.

Places that offered food.

Places that were human.

Chapter Nineteen

Sunday, May 12, 2013. 11:55 a.m.

Aidan Richards slapped a broad hand to his calf. The resulting sound was sharp. And wet. Aidan was sweating his ass off. It was eighty-eight degrees without a cloud in the sky, and the humidity must have hovered around eighty percent. You could almost taste the air as you breathed.