Brood XIX (4 page)

* * *

The setting sun bled the sky crimson behind
her, casting her shadow over the barely perceptible hump at the
foot of the plain marble headstone. Vanessa imagined herself lying
in the shadow's stead, six feet---as close as she would ever again
be---from the only man she had ever loved. The grass had filled in
nicely. For a time, there had been patches of dirt that had refused
to accept the lawn, as though to do so was to forgive its
violation. Now it was impossible to tell that the sod had ever been
slashed and rolled away, the ground impregnated with a husband and
father for whom the end had come too soon.

She swept the accumulated debris from the
foot of the headstone and wiped away the grime with a handful of
tissues, carefully tracing each of the engraved letters.

To allow the paltry monument to lose its
luster, she feared, was the first step in the process of
forgetting. And while remembering hurt, she couldn't let that
happen. It was the pain that kept her going. All she had now were
her memories. To lose them would be to lose herself. And whatever
hope she clung to that Emma would one day return to her.

There were still no leads in the case, no
clues to identify the person who had killed her husband and stolen
her daughter, who had robbed her of her entire life. There was no
one to be held accountable. Except for her. She had let Emma out of
her sight and she had been the one who sent Warren to his demise.
It should be her down there in the darkness. It still would be...soon
enough. In one of the two vacant plots to her right, where her
family would eventually be reunited, if only in death.

"I'm sorry," she whispered for the thousandth
time.

She held out the single yellow rose she had
brought with her. It was the same kind that Warren had surprised
her with on their first date. He had been a first-year resident at
the University of Texas Hospital in San Antonio. She'd been an
elementary-level substitute teacher who'd been clumsy enough to
slam her finger in her car door. They'd talked while he splinted
her injury, and she had fallen in love with him right then and
there. He had appeared as if by magic after school two days later,
holding a single yellow rose behind his back. And her life had
never been the same again.

There was a crunching sound, like the crackle
of dead leaves under an invisible tread, and then the breeze blew
it away.

She surveyed the area around her. As usual,
she was alone in a sea of emerald with cresting waves of granite
and marble, some foamy with moss, at the rear of the cemetery where
it met with a wall of cypresses.

The shadows grew longer on a day that would
end like every other, with the same whispered promise under the
same lonely twilight.

"I will find her."

The crunching sound resumed. It was close,
and yet far away at the same time. All around her.

She leaned forward and tossed the rose at the
foot of the headstone.

The noise grew louder. It was coming from the
trees, from the embankment ahead that bordered the bayou and the
manicured knolls between the rows of gravesites. Not a single
branch moved, and yet the sound continued.

She stood, turned away from her husband's
grave, and walked alone back toward the setting sun with the
crackling sound of unseen footsteps all around her.

* * *

Trey waited in his office through the evening
and into the night. It seemed as though all he ever did was wait.
The Sheriff was long gone. Travers was the only deputy formally on
the clock, and he was out on a call. Lorna was up at the desk with
the dispatch radio and computer, drinking coffee and watching
reruns of the day's soaps, giving him a wide berth. They all knew
about the child's body. About the condition in which it had been
discovered. They knew what it meant and figured it best to give him
his space. There were no stock platitudes or Hallmark cards for
Sorry your niece was kicked to death and dumped in the
bayou
. He didn't blame them. He had no idea what he was
supposed to say either.

Emma's dental records and her x-rays had been
couriered to the Crime Scene Response Section in Dallas nearly ten
hours ago now. Dr. Carlton Matthews, the town dentist, had been
more than happy to take care of the details on his end. After all,
he and his wife had a daughter Emma's age who they schooled at
home. Last Trey knew, the evidence technicians were in the process
of creating a plaster mold using the teeth they found at the site
under the direct supervision of a forensic odontologist. The teeth
would be aligned by the observed wear in the enamel and then
radiographed and evaluated for existing caries and previous
fillings. According to Vanessa, Emma had three separate silver
fillings toward the back of her mouth, two on the top and one on
the bottom. The comparison with existing records would be able to
conclusively determine whether or not they had been Emma's teeth.
If not, they would have to begin attacking the database of missing
children in hopes of generating a match. If so, he was going to
have to deliver the worst news imaginable to his sister. He prayed
the news that they had found a child's corpse didn't leak before
then.

A
polymerase chain reaction
, or PCR,
test of the hair they removed from the shallow grave would allow
them to create a kind of DNA fingerprint they could compare against
the samples obtained from Emma's old hairbrush, but that would just
be the icing on the cake. The dental records alone would hold up in
a court of law. Of course, fingerprints would have made all of this
irrelevant, but there hadn't been a scrap of tissue left. There
were enough insects in that swamp, especially now, to clean the
remains as efficiently as a school of piranhas.

Trey's desk phone rang. He snatched it from
the cradle before the second ring.

"Walden," he answered.

"This is Packard at the CSRS."

Trey's heartbeat accelerated. He realized he
was holding his breath and made a conscious effort to regulate his
respirations.

"What do you have for me?"

"I just emailed the test results to you. Feel
free to call back if you have any questions, but I think the files
speak for themselves."

"Conclusive?"

"See for yourself." Packard released a long
sigh. "You have our sympathies. Let us know if there's anything
else we can do for you."

Packard terminated the call with a click.

Trey held the phone against his ear and
stared blankly at his computer screen until the dial tone startled
him. He hung up and opened his inbox folder. The file from the CSRS
was already waiting for him. He opened it with a tap of the mouse
and perused the attachments. They had scanned in the dental x-rays.
Even a layman like him could see they were nearly identical. Maybe
the alignment was slightly skewed as a result of the reassembly,
but the filled cavities were in the right places and there were
small, dark unfilled caries on the same surfaces of the same teeth.
The PCR results looked like side-by-side, out-of-focus bar codes.
They matched perfectly. Lines had been drawn between them to denote
specific points of comparison along the genomes. Notes in technical
jargon filled the margins.

He buried his face in his hands. His palms
became wet and his shoulders shuddered.

First thing in the morning, he was going to
have to break the news to Vanessa.

He might as well shove the barrel of his
pistol in her mouth and pull the trigger for her.

* * *

Vanessa woke with a start. Or had she even
been asleep at all? Time lost all meaning in the dark and she had
grown accustomed to drifting in and out of consciousness all night.
Her waking thoughts and sleeping dreams were the same anyway. A
curious little girl wandering just a little too far ahead of her
through a crowd. A man collapsed on his chest in a field of his own
blood. Throwing a handful of dirt over a velvet rope onto a maple
box six feet below her. A man made of shadows doing inexplicable
things to a much smaller figure. A child crying for her mommy in
the darkness.

An arc of moonlight bisected her bedroom from
the gap in the curtains, alive with swirling motes of dust, blurred
by her tears. The digital clock produced a weak red glare. Buddy's
collar jangled from the foot of the bed when he perked up his
head.

There was a soft crunching sound above her
head.

She listened to it in the still room. The
droning noise was almost comforting.

The sound grew louder.

Buddy poked his gray muzzle up over the end
of the bed and whined.

Vanessa reluctantly sat up and turned around.
There was no doubt that the sound was coming from inside the glass
case. The decayed bear stared back at her through lifeless stone
eyes that glinted with moonlight.

The crackling,
skritching
noise grew
louder still.

She reached up and pressed her fingertips
against the glass. It vibrated almost imperceptibly.

The slightest hint of movement caught her
eye.

She leaned closer, until the tip of her nose
touched the small pane. Surely the shadows had conspired against
her. They shifted in such a way as to mimic motion. The dirt bear's
chest swelled as though it were taking a deep, slow breath. Fine
grains of sand shivered loose and dusted the surface of the wooden
base. One of the dried grass bindings snapped and unraveled. More
dirt crumbled away, revealing thin, dark tunnels. She turned the
case around. The back of the bear was covered with trembling brown
insect exoskeletons. Wingless nymph carcasses. As she watched, they
split like baked potatoes and small white bodies emerged.

Vanessa recoiled. They appeared to grow as
they molted. The crisp exoskeletons stayed attached to the dirt
while thick albino insects clung to them, testing long, clear wings
fringed with gold. They had blazing scarlet eyes with black
splotches where the head met the thorax. Spindly, articulated legs
barely long enough to support the weight of their bodies.

Several more bands of the grass that held the
bear together broke. Clods of packed earth calved away. One of the
bear's ears fell off with half of its head. There was a clatter as
the pebble-eye bounced on the base. A dozen pale bugs crawled over
what was left of her daughter's creation before dropping onto the
mounds of dirt and coiled blue fescue blades on the bottom.

The crunching sound faded to a dull
clicking.

Had those insects been in the bear this
entire time? Growing? Molting?

The remainder of the bear broke apart and
fell to ruin, leaving only the metal post and the bracket that had
been rigged to hold the construct upright.

She reached out and pressed her palm against
the glass.

Her heart rate accelerated. Her breathing
slowed. Was it possible she was still asleep and dreaming?

The white bugs scurried toward the front of
the enclosure and scaled the glass. They aligned their bodies with
her hand so that she could no longer see them.

A loud noise filled the room. A combination
of the crackling sound of high voltage run through overhead power
lines and the chirping of so many crickets.

She recognized it immediately and withdrew
her hand.

The insects stayed where they were in a
perfect imitation of her palm print, a spectral hand reaching for
her, unable to pass through the clear barrier.

Vanessa scooted away from the display
case.

Buddy whimpered.

And the cicadas continued to sing.

* * *

Vanessa sat at the kitchen table with the
rising sun streaming through the window behind her. The glass
enclosure was centered right in front of her. She'd been staring at
it for hours now, watching as the white
imagines
darkened to
their formal adult coloration. Tomato-red eyes. Thick black bodies
ribbed with timbals. Long membranous wings like cellophane
stretched between bright yellow veins. Short antennae. Legs
reminiscent of those of a crab. They clung to the glass and the
center apparatus that had once held the now-crumbled bear, their
abdomens alternately swelling and contracting as they produced an
amazing high-pitched clicking sound as loud in the room as a tea
kettle come to boil.

She remembered them from her childhood. As a
girl of about four years old, swinging in a park as a cloud of them
descended into the surrounding trees. Their bodies had been nearly
the size of her palm, their song deafening. Her father had called
them
Magicicada
, which was one of the reasons she remembered
them so well. She had interpreted it at the time as magic cicada,
and they truly had seemed magical. They appeared again the summer
before she left for college. Hundreds of them clinging to the
screens over the windows and the front door. Their frenetic song
coming from the depths of every tree. They'd been everywhere for
several weeks, and then they'd vanished almost overnight.

There must have been larvae in the mud Emma
had exhumed to form the bear. She must have packed them right in
there. And after two years they had wriggled out of the dried earth
as nymphs and molted for the final stage of their life cycles. As
adults.
Imago
.

A few minutes on the internet had taught her
that these individuals were part of one of thirty distinct North
American broods, Brood XIX specifically, colloquially termed The
Great Southern Brood. They emerged from deep in the soil every
thirteen years for a mating frenzy that lasted less than a month.
The females would carve shallow grooves in tree branches in which
to lay their eggs. When they hatched, the larvae fell to the ground
and burrowed more than a foot down, where they survived on the
roots of plants for exactly thirteen years before all of them
erupted in a synchronized uprising, climbed into the canopy, and
molted into the terminal stage of their development.