Sacrificing Virgins (14 page)

After work, he stopped at the supermarket to pick up a frozen dinner and some sleeping pills. The buzz had subsided some, but it was still there, coiled and hissing in his brain. It had snaked into his consciousness like a viper, and it would not leave its lair.

“I can't live with this,” he mumbled in the analgesics aisle, and his eyes welled up as he stared at a bottle of sleeping pills. He was at his end. “I don't
want
to live with this,” he whispered, and read the back of the bottle to see if it warned against a lethal dose.

When he looked up, the piercing, icy eyes of the skank who'd blown him off at the Eardrum Buzz party were staring back at his over the low aisle shelf. She looked startled when he caught her glance over the top of the Bufferin boxes and turned away.

“Wait,” he said. “You can do that to me once but not twice. I'm Wes.”

“Jen,” she said. Her voice was brittle, with a melting point that Wes wasn't likely to reach.

“Sorry I spooked ya, Jen,” he said. “But I saw you recognized me.”

“We're both part of the swarm,” she said, nodding. He noticed that her eyes looked as bloodshot around the edges as his own. And her perfect gloss hair from a few nights ago had a frizzy, static-cling look to it now. She was windblown, or buzz blown, around the edges.

“How are your ears?” he asked, not knowing quite what to say.

She jerked. “What do you mean?”

“Mine are still buzzing from that show last weekend,” he complained.

“I'm fine,” she breathed, and pulled something from the shelf to throw in her cart. “Spread the word.”

And she walked away.

The next day Wes saw the grizzled mutton-chop Metallica guy from the Eardrum Buzz party standing around the newsstand he stopped at each morning. As Wes paid for his paper, he saw the guy staring at him from over the top of a newspaper he was pretending to read.

Two in two days, he thought. Some coincidence.

Normally Wes did all he could to avoid trouble. But over the course of this week, his patience had grown thin. He didn't care about consequence anymore.

“Why are you spying on me?” he asked, walking up to the older man. From where he stood, the man sidled backward, as if trying to be unseen.

“I know you from the concert,” Wes said, unconsciously pulling on the edge of his earlobe. The sound seemed to be growing as he remembered the night he'd first seen this loser. And now the guy was spying on him.

“You know nothing,” the man hissed. As he approached, the man threw down his newspaper on the pile and darted away, melding into the crowd of briefcase toters and disappearing into the glass door of an office building.

In his head, Wes heard the buzz grow like the keening call of a locust swarm on a hot August night. He grabbed the light pole at the curb and held on as if he were on a ship in hurricane season. When he pulled his face away from the cold gray steel, its surface was wet, and the locusts laughed and buzzed behind his eyes.

Wes did not want to live like this.

He pulled out the bottle of pills and read its contents again. He could swallow the whole thing with a couple glasses of water, and then the buzzing would go away. Everything would go away. He closed his eyes and thought about going to the top of an office building instead, and jumping. He would fly for just a moment, like the bugs he swore he heard, before the sound would be gone for good.

He shook both thoughts away and walked on.

On Friday, Wes couldn't stop the tears from streaming down his face. He cried as he bought his newspaper and cried again as he tripped and fell over a crack in the pavement, scattering his pages to the wind and the trample of commuter feet.

“I can't stand it,” he moaned, writhing on the ground as if he were being bitten by a thousand fire ants. He shivered and jittered and put both hands to his ears. “No more.”

Hands grabbed at his arms and pulled, tugging under his armpits until he had staggered to his feet. His eyes were swollen and blurry, but he could still make out the faces of his rescuers.

Goth-skank Jen. And the scraggly guy.

“Can you hear them?” he whispered.

Jen nodded. “You're the vessel of the swarm to come,” she said. “And this is their time.”

She reached a hand then to her own ear and tugged hard on her lobe. When she poked a long, black-painted fingernail into her ear to itch and clear the channel, Wes swore he saw a winged thing fly out, as if a beetle or fly had been feasting on the wax inside.

“Where are we going?” he asked feebly as they escorted him to a beat-up Volkswagen and shoved him into the backseat.

“For help,” the man answered.

The car followed a winding road out of the city and past the docks and the warehouse district. Then it shivered off onto a gravel road that led to a small shack within spitting distance of the bay. As the woman helped him from the car, Wes complained, “I haven't slept, it's so loud.”

She nodded and pointed up at the trees around them. “They never sleep.”

It was then that Wes realized the trees all around them were alive with the sound in his head.

“I tried to take sleeping pills,” he began, but she only laughed and pulled him toward the gray-boarded shack.

“They never sleep,” she repeated.

“Will I ever have my hearing back right?” he asked. “I just want to go back to normal again.”

Metallica Man laughed at that. “You're chosen,” he said. “You'll never know normal again. Just the swarm.”

With that, the man grabbed him around the throat and whispered, “Lie down” into his right ear.

“Why?” was all he could say.

“Eardrum Buzz.”

They pushed him onto a cot, and as he lay there, face buried in a dusty pillow, Wes could hear the sound in his head chime and chitter, rise and fall like the whir of an engine. It called to the noise in the trees, and as it received an answer, its buzz grew more excited. The nagging pain in the back of Wes's head grew from dull to ice sharp and spread to pound like a nail gun into his forehead, hammering just behind his eyes.

I'm going to die
, he thought. And the thought was good.

Wes woke from a droning doze to the sound of boots. They clomped hard on the wooden floor and paced back and forth nearby.

“It's almost time,” he heard a voice growl.

Wes opened his eyes and rolled to see the thin, saturnine features of Arachnid pacing near the cot. The singer wore his usual black leather pants and boots, and a tight, ripped T-shirt. On its black cloth surface, the white fangs of a spider opened hopefully.

“You did this to me,” Wes accused, struggling to sit up.

Arachnid shook his head. “Not me,” he said, grinning and pointing to Jen. “She did it. I just told her what to do.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“You want the buzz to stop, yes?”

Wes looked into Arachnid's too-black eyes and nodded.

“Then we must release the swarm.” He lifted a pair of gardening shears from a small table and ran a finger down the sharp side of the blade. A bead of blood collected almost instantly on the tip.

It occurred to Wes that “releasing the swarm” was not a procedure he was likely to live through.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked, stalling.

“You were drawn to our music, right?” the singer said. His voice was almost gentle.

“Yeah.”

“They
are
our music,” Arachnid said. “They live within each of us; it is their sound that makes Eardrum Buzz.”

“How do you live with it?” Wes whispered.

Arachnid leaned down, until Wes could smell the faintly licorice and hay scent of his breath. As Wes stared at the singer's discolored-brown and gold-flecked eyes, a small black form crawled from the man's ear. Its antennae shifted back and forth quickly, like the nervous jitter of a roach. Then, with a spread of brown-and-clear chitinous wings, the bug launched itself from the lobe of Arachnid's ear and flew up in a lazy circle to land somewhere in the shadow of the pitched roof.

“They're our children.” Arachnid grinned. “We love them.”

Wes's stomach churned as he realized that thanks to Jen's false kisses at the party, those same bugs were inside him right now. Growing inside his ears. Rubbing tiny hairlike legs together to sing in the center of his brain.

“Bugs don't live inside humans,” he whispered. Hoping perhaps that by saying it the statement would be true. But he'd seen the evidence proving his theorem false just seconds ago.

“These do,” Arachnid smiled. “They feed off of us just a little at a time. They can't live without us. That's why we're helping them find new hosts. Soon the swarm will be strong enough to fend for itself and find its own hosts. But right now…only one in a million survives.”

“What do they eat?” Wes whispered.

“Brains.” The singer laughed and pointed the shears at Wes's forehead. “Right now they're in there nibbling. Before long, if you incubated a few nests of them, you'd have a hole in your head as big as a baseball. Like our drummer, Cicada. He found them a couple years ago when he went on a rain-forest trip. But he's hosted so many that he's not much there anymore, ya know? That's why he never does interviews.”

Arachnid drew a cold steel line from Wes's forehead to his ear.

“But you won't have to go through that. I know you haven't enjoyed our children. Jen and Orin have told me their song is driving you a little nuts. So we'll just set your brood free.”

“Set them free?”

“Outpatient surgery,” Arachnid said, laughing and brandishing the pruning shears. “Won't take but a moment. And when we're done…your babies will be free, and the swarm will have a fresh dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“Your brains.” Arachnid shoved downward with the shears like a spear thrust. But Wes had seen the tensing of his arms and rolled just in time. He jumped to his feet as Jen and Orin grabbed him from behind.

Kicking backwards, he heard a grunt of anguish from Orin, and as one set of hands released, he spun hard to his left, catching Jen in the breast with his elbow. Like a dancer he spun in a slow circle away from the three. He lost his balance in the momentum and staggered into the roughhewn wall in the corner of the shack. Something rattled as he hit the wall, and Wes grinned when he darted a glance to see what. There was a rack of old rusted gardening tools screwed to the wall.

“Just what I needed,” he whispered, and reached past a rake to nab a long, pointed spade from its hook.

Arachnid was on him before he had it fully in hand.

“Drop it,” the singer hissed. Wes felt the bite of cold metal at his throat, and he twisted backward a step before letting his body crumple. The shovel thumped to the floor as he released it. Before Arachnid could follow through with a stab, Wes rolled into the singer's shins, knocking him off-balance. Wes grabbed the shovel again, and from a crouch on the floor he brought it around hard to finish the job his body had started. The edge of the steel connected with Arachnid's shins, and the singer went down hard as Wes leapt up.

Orin and Jen were waiting.

They circled him, hands outstretched to grab for his shovel, to disarm him. Arachnid moaned on the floor and clutched his leg in a fetal curl.

Orin came for him. Without thinking, Wes brought the spade up and around, catching the grizzled man in the side of his shiny head with the back of the rusted blade. The man went down with a low
whoof
.

Something scratched at his neck, and Wes gasped. Jen brought her fingernails around to claw at his eyes. Wes couldn't go forward without driving her nails into his brain, so he shoved hard in reverse, throwing his weight against her. She didn't expect the motion and fell back as he pile-drove her into the wall. Her body slammed hard enough to rattle the window.

Jen screamed. Not a little “there's a mouse” squeal of fear. Jen screamed a horrible, long, wrenching cry of anguish.

Wes turned to see why, and the reason fell to the floor as Jen staggered to the center of the room grabbing at her back. The rake rattled to rest, and Jen fell forward, five blooms of blood already seeping through the puncture marks in the back of her shirt. She was gasping for air, her screams cut short by a gurgle of fluid filling her lungs.

Wes backed away to the other side of the room. Orin lay where he'd fallen. A gory gash split the skin along his forehead leading to his ear. And around that ear clustered a handful of small, black, antennaed bugs. They buzzed quietly as more emerged from the black, bloody hole of Orin's ear. They shook the crimson free as they met the air and gathered on the man's cheek.

“Fuck,” Wes gasped, and held a hand up to his own ear. The noise in his brain escalated when he covered the canal.

Jen was shuddering on the floor, trying to crawl toward Orin. But Arachnid was no longer on the ground with them.

Arachnid was back on his feet and moving slowly toward Wes with the shears. He was not smiling.

“It would have been painless,” the singer growled.

“For you, maybe.”

Arachnid launched forward and cut at Wes, who recoiled and tried to bring the shovel around. Too late. The blade slashed against his chest, cutting through the shirt and drawing a line of blood. He screamed and ducked as Arachnid brought the shears down again, this time aiming for his neck.

Wes threw himself sideways and rolled over the dead weight of Orin, disturbing the small swarm that had gathered on the man's face. Wes came to his feet in front of the door and with one hand felt behind him for the knob. It turned as Arachnid rushed at him. Wes pushed the door as the lock released, and fell back, stumbling down the step to the ground outside.

“You're not going anywhere,” the singer yelled, limping after him.

Wes leapt to his feet and ran around the shack, waiting for Arachnid. He didn't wait long. The singer turned the corner, brandishing the shears.