Twenty-eight
Gunshots echoed through the early dawn. Rex pushed
away from Connie and rolled to his feet. He could see nothing from the
front windows despite his second floor vantage looking out over Brighton
Hollow. He dressed, muttering profanities to mask his fear. He had
caught a whiff of a familiar odor in the dawn air and knew what was
happening.
He left the house on foot. By the time he reached
the residential blocks on the south side of town, Carl Miller and his men
were tearing zigzag fashion between the houses. Rex caught a glimpse of a
child ducking into underbrush. He stopped when he saw another lying dead
on the ground, a girl of nine or ten. She lay face up on a mowed lawn,
staring into the morning sky. Hardly more than a trickle of blood stained
the torn and dirty dress she wore, although the amount of blood beneath
her warned of a massive exit wound. Rex stood paralyzed by the sight of
her, not knowing what to feel, or how to react.
Screams from nearby galvanized him to action. Two
doors down, a woman clutching a baby ran from her house and collapsed in
hysterics. Rex went inside with his revolver drawn and caught sight of a
child leaving by the back way, a child wearing an orange and brown
caterpillar on his shoulder. Its victim lay collapsed in a rocking chair
with a quilt spread neatly across its lap, little more than a skeleton
inside a thin sheet of skin leaking clear water to soak into the rug. Rex
thought he may have known the old woman, mother to the woman who had fled
the house, and grandmother to the child.
Carl Miller was yelling orders from down the block.
"Forget the bugs! Take out the hosts!"
Rex ran out to stop him. "No, wait!" he cried,
although Carl and his group had already spread out toward the wall of
trees at the edge of town. Even as more gunshots roared, he saw a
caterpillar racing and leaping across a nearby lawn. Leading his aim to
compensate for the motion, Rex fired off two shots, the second of which
sent the insect spinning into a flower garden.
A shot sounded from directly behind him followed by a
shriek. Rex turned in time to see a boy fall writhing. Like the girl he
had seen, the clothes he wore were too small. The seams of his shirt and
pants alike had split. He looked well fed and healthy. As Rex watched,
he died.
Carl Miller emerged from the underbrush shouldering
his rifle. Rex's anger would have gotten the best of him hadn't he taken
notice of the man's violent trembling. Even as he watched, Miller turned
away and vomited.
"My God," he croaked through his own gagging. "They
killed a dozen, maybe more. Their own families even, for Christ's sake.
They brought them fucking bugs to their own families."
It added to the horror of the situation a
thousandfold. No wonder the bugs needed hosts. They needed treachery
to find their way through locked doors and closed windows.
"They're so goddamn fast,” Miller said, dropping to
his knees alongside the body of the boy. “I think we only got two or
three. There must have been a dozen. They're just kids, for Christ's
sake."
"We have to warn anyone that has family missing," Rex
said, thinking aloud.
"We should have known!"
Rex felt a stab of compassion for the man. There was
no way a sane mind could have anticipated this.
Miller glanced up at him, simmering with a rage that
slowly faded. "Yeah, you're right. Missing persons might
mean trouble. I'll get word out."
Rex turned away and headed home through the deathly
quiet town. He hadn’t been part of the killing. He didn’t want to be
part of the clean-up. Except for a few of the gunmen heading home as
well, Brighton Hollow, to all outward appearances, appeared deserted.
The downstairs apartment door was locked. Connie
screamed when he pounded. She stuck her pistol out the window and then
her head, wild-eyed with terror, to identify the intruder. Rex ducked out
of her line of sight when he saw her brandishing her revolver.
"It's just me! Don't panic!"
She came down the stairs after a time and let him in,
then rushed back up to the apartment and paced incessantly, wringing her
hands and hugging herself in a bout of quiet hysteria. She had no way of
knowing how bad it had been, and Rex refused to talk about it when she
finally began throwing questions at him. He shook his head and turned
away each time.
"She's one of them, Rex! Caitlin is one of them!
She could have come back and killed me! You left me alone!"
"Connie, for Pete's sake..."
He reached out to take her hand.
"Don't you touch me! You still want her! Even after
everything that has happened, you still want her!"
He reached for her again. "Connie..."
She rushed to the far side of the room and turned to
him with clenched fists. "I heard what you said to her! I saw you!"
Rex sifting through his options. Reason wasn’t going
to work, or any degree of reassurance. Connie had been obsessed with
Caitlin during their entire relationship. So he shrugged and said, "Okay,
so what do you want to do about it?" He was far too weary to argue.
Her jaw fell open. It took her a moment to voice her
greatest fear. "Are you going to go to her?"
Rex laughed. "She'd kill me, don't you think?"
Her brow furrowed. "Then why?"
He shook his head. “I don't understand the
question. Why what?"
"Don't play games with me, Rex. Why do you still
love her?"
He shrugged helplessly. "I guess because feelings
aren't something you turn on and off like a water faucet."
Connie's expression registered abject shock. "You
admit it!"
Rex was burned out. He was finished with the game.
Denial would get him nowhere. "If you want me to admit it, what can I
say? I admit it."
Connie fought to compose herself. "Then why haven't
you gone to her? Why are you still here? Because of Leon? Have you been
that big of a coward?"
He had to grin at that one. For the most part, she
had hit upon the crux of the problem. "I didn't love her enough, I
suppose. Or maybe I didn't respect my own right to what I wanted out of
life enough. I do think about it, believe me."
Connie was still confused. She had so little insight
into herself, and no grasp of her value to him. If it hadn't been for her
constant paranoia, her insecurity and her self-centeredness, her maturity
would easily have won out over Caitlin's nubile beauty. The constant
tension between them would never have been.
She began to see a glimmer of the truth. "It was
never just Caitlin. It was me. You hate me."
"We've been through this before, Connie. You're hard
to live with."
She folded her arms against her breasts, backed
against the wall and radiated a quiet panic. Even knowing the source of
the problem, she could do nothing to resolve it, no more than he could
change his feelings for Caitlin.
"We've had serious trouble." He started to turn
away. "I need to speak with Doc."
"Don't be gone long."
"I don't have anywhere else to go." He waited until
she gave a little nod of acknowledgment before he turned away again.
Rex jogged to Doc’s house, uneasy in the dying
light. Doc was napping in his recliner with a quilt pulled up about his
shoulders. His eyes came open as Rex eased himself into an overstuffed
couch. "You shouldn't leave your door unlocked, Doc."
"I heard what happened. They're probably the same
group that attacked the soldiers. I've scheduled an autopsy for one of
the bodies later this evening. Maybe it'll give us some answers."
Rex had yet to mention his visit with Caitlin. He
filled Doc in with the details, and Doc sat up a bit straighter. "Arrange
for a meeting between us, just you and me. The others will kill her if
they find out. I need answers to a thousand questions. I need to know
what makes the hosts tick, not just their physiology, but their symbiosis with
the caterpillars, their psychological adaptation, as well. It may be a
matter of life and death to us."
"Did Moresey have a point, do you think?” It was a
question he hadn’t wanted to ask about Caitlin. “About the hosts not
being sane?"
"Did she seem in good physical health?"
"Yeah. I swear, Doc, she's grown since the last time
I saw her."
"The caterpillars are responsible for that, I
suspect, but I can’t imagine how she can hold up under the stress of it
all. I just can’t imagine. It has to be a symbiotic
relationship. A person couldn't possibly be forced to withstand such
horror. There has to be a reward, a terrible, terrible reward.”
Rex stared off into the dark corners of the room.
"She keeps coming to me for help. She's been coming to me ever since she
was a kid. I fail her every time."
"Set your personal problems aside for the duration,"
Doc said. "I've lost three more elderly patients and one baby during the
past twenty-four hours, and those are just the ones I know about. If the
black-out continues over the course of the winter, we'll loose all of
them. We'll have no food reserves, or medical
supplies. Even without the parasites to contend with, the population of
Brighton Hollow will be hard-pressed to survive until spring."
Rex rose to his feet. "Jesus H. Christ, Doc, that's
looking ahead a bit too far, don't you think?"
"We won't go down without a fight, my young friend.
The military can fall back on laser and fiber optic technology for
communications, if nothing else. And we know the caterpillars aren't
bullet proof."
"I don't know if I buy into this invasion bullshit,"
Rex insisted. "It makes more sense to hold tight on the paranoia until we
hear more about this."
Doc gave him a weary, compassionate smile. "I've
been a country doctor all my life, more accustomed to the natural cycle of
life and death than most. I don't have any strong loyalties toward the
life-at-any-cost mentality. I've been in a good position to see something
like this coming, although I certainly didn’t think it possible.”
"I don't follow."
"Imbalance," Doc said. "We hold death at bay with
our medical technology, but do nothing to control our population. We know
how essential natural checks and balances apply to populations of
wildlife. We pretend they don't apply to us. We ourselves have become a
cancer and a scourge upon the Earth."
"What does that have to do with the caterpillars?”
Rex said mildly, in genuine confusion.
"We take for granted that God appointed us caretakers
of our own world, young man. We have failed, if that is the case. To my
way of thinking, another party who values this world more highly than
ourselves considers us of a part of the problem rather than the solution."
Rex kept his mouth shut, hoping Doc would moderate
his point of view a bit for the sake of a peaceful night's rest.
Doc stared off into space, lost in thought. "I
couldn't figure out why it had to be this way. Why not a bacteria, or a
virus? Except that a bacteria or virus would invariably mutate and escape
into the general ecosystem. If the caterpillars are as finely tuned to
our biochemistry as I think they are, they'll die when we die and have no
lingering effect upon the rest of the ecology."
Rex felt awkward, not knowing whether Doc's
assessment was the natural pessimism of an old man, or the evaluation of
an exceptionally smart one. He was too badly outclassed to judge for
himself.
"I won't live long enough to know for sure." Doc
smiled apologetically. "I won't last the winter, my young friend. I've
been susceptible to pneumonia for all my seventy-two years. It almost
killed me at age two. I've been hospitalized a hundred times since then.
If I get sick again, the physician will be unable to heal himself."
Which explained why Doc had the courage to look so
far ahead. The old man saw the upcoming winter as an insurmountable
barrier. Rex tried to imagine life without Doc Kaufman, and failed.
"You can survive one winter without me," Doc said,
interpreting his pained expression correctly. "If you can't shake this
thing, there won't be anyone left to survive a second."
