“I don’t think so,” said Hazel, and then someone knocked on the door. It startled all three—Charlie picked up his knife, Ace pushed away his plate, and Hazel stood. She walked to the door despite her father’s yells, looking back over her shoulder once to say, “I’m just going to see who it is,” and see Charlie stuck at the table, halfway between sitting and standing. His eyelids were trembling. He looked a little like Ace.
Hazel went up on her tiptoes and looked through the peephole. In the few seconds that she could balance without falling, she caught a flash of blond hair and clammy, dirty skin, like their visitor had been swimming in the Sound. She tasted salt and thought of the time they had gone—all four of them, back when their wounds were still whole—to the Sound and eaten hot dogs on the pier. The water had been too cold to swim in. Wrong time of year, their father said. I told you so. Dazed, Hazel unlocked the door.
“Hazel!” her father shouted, but it was too late.
The door handle began to turn and Hazel jumped back. After the door swung free of its latches, a pale hand snaked inside the fortress, followed by a pale woman. She had draped herself in plastic. She had no shoes. She smelled a bit like rotten fish—probably all she’d been able to get on good days. Despite all this, she grinned broadly when she saw the children. The corners of her mouth lifted to reveal two long and yellowed fangs.
Here she was, returned. Smilodon. Their mother. The children smiled back. Her expressions had always been contagious, and they had missed the warmth of her burning heart. Charlie sat. He was strangely calm. Maybe some tiny raw place in his heart was glad that she’d come back, even now and even like this, that she wasn’t such a quitter after all. Lisa Cunningham pushed her heel against the door as if she was just coming home from the office—tired, spent, flinging off her purse—and shut it with a soft, finalizing click. The weight of the old plastered walls finally settled on their bones.
The children did not need to see this last fulfillment of their family saga. Hazel led Ace to a window, and from this vantage point they watched the progress of the infestation on the street below. There was motion in that coiled darkness, the frantic energy of vermin in mid-swarm. This crawling energy swept other things into its chaos: people, cars, the ground floors of buildings. Everything fell. Everything was punctured. Maybe that’s what it means to be infested, Hazel whispered. She was holding her brother close, helping him block out the rest. Up and up the infestation climbed, drawing ever closer to their fortress in the sky.
WATCHMEN
by Aaron Sterns
The illuminated advertisement on the front of the cigarette-machine is a slivered beacon of blue sky and clouds amongst the smoke and strobe lights; a slice of heaven obscured by a couple deep in conversation: the guy all pained mouth and gesturing arms; the woman silent, staring. They are oblivious to the throng around as if enclosed in a vacuum. I stare at them from my post, trying to work out what they’re saying—their voices drowned out by the brain-regressing bass pounding up through my feet—but an image of Lisa arguing with me kicks in and I have to flick my eyes away across the dancefloor. I try to suppress a surge of anger.
The straining flux of dancing bodies moves in waves of artfully-ripped faded clothing, bleached hair and pale flesh made gaunt and alien-blue by the overhead fluoros. The sunken dancefloor—the Pit—is huge, nearly fifty feet across, and it’s hard to survey its entire length. I glance over at the other black-clad figures on their raised podiums: impassive dark statues almost lost in the belching haze of smoke machines and cigarette smoke, legs spread and hands clasped over their groins as if cupping themselves. They seem like ciphers to me, unsmiling names; protective of their cohesion. I’m still the interloper.
Two girls walk past below, staring up. One is breathtakingly beautifuclass="underline" tight tan in red lycra, angry auburn hair and clear eyes. She smiles and I reflexively smile back, feeling instantly guilty. She pauses, tracing the neckline of her dress as if considering approaching my podium to stand at uncomfortable groin height and flash her hungry smile up at me, then runs a finger down her perfect cleavage. Unsettled, I’m about to look away when she flicks down the right side of her top to reveal a dusky nipple. She teases it to quick stiffness then disappears into the crowd, hungry eyes melting into the crush of bodies. Her friend follows.
The two-way almost slips from my sweaty hand as I try to track their passage towards the front of the club. I lose them amongst the squawking, impatient drinkers clamoring at the huge main bar for the attention of the bargirls. Disappointed, I glance up at the semi-circular balcony and its darkened tiered couches overlooking the main bar, the figures standing at its edge separated from death only by a thin brass railing. But the massive scale of this cavern has lost its novelty value by now and my gaze drops.
An angry voice pierces the oppressive techno music and I search again through the disorienting sweeping lasers. The man by the cigarette machine throws his hands in the air and stalks off. The girl stares transfixed, tears on cheeks. Just broken up, presumably. I shake my head and start to look away.
But the man can’t let this go. He whirls and punches his girlfriend. Hard.
She crumples to the ground. The guy looks at her without expression, then reaches down and grabs her by the back of the neck and the waistband, lifting her off the ground to swing like a battering ram into the illuminated blue cigarette-machine. The crack sounds even above the deafening techno bass. The machine short-circuits and spits flame.
I slam into him too late and we skid through the crowd. His nose smacks into someone’s shin in a spray of blood, and when he struggles against me I snap him in the nose again with the two-way, pinning him around onto his front so I can cradle his throat in the crook of my arm and lace the other arm behind his head. He tries to claw up at my arms, my eyes, but I put him out with a vicious tensing of my biceps, cutting off the circulation in his neck. I rest his deadweight on its side and bring the cracked and blood-flecked radio up to my mouth to call the others.
A group of middle-class yuppies ring me, too scared to help but perversely rooted in place by the bloody spectacle. I stare back from my crouch, wondering if the guy has friends here, if someone will launch from the crowd to kick at my face. I can’t see the girl past the gathering designer jeans but don’t want to risk leaving him alone: sleeper-holds aren’t debilitating enough; when they wake they wake instantly, mad and in control—
—and then splitting the crowd like huge black-clad figures of death, smooth-shaven and short-haired, barely contained. They push the crowd back, striking one guy who won’t move with an open hand to the face, sending him beneath their feet. A fury of movement around and then Lucs over me, omnipotent Lucs, always uncannily first on the scene, grabbing the unconscious boyfriend from me, eyes almost gleaming red in the searching light. Raph beside him, staring past me. I follow his gaze to the prone of the girclass="underline" her head split like a melon, open and weeping, curled brains nestled within.
We take the boyfriend up the stage stairs, a warning procession past groping couples on low-slung seating, and shoulder through the milling dancers to a door reading STAFF ONLY. Lucs bursts through the swinging door using the boyfriend’s head and dumps him on the corridor floor. The doors close after us like a dampening field. An overhead light glares above and my vision swims as I adjust from the dimness outside, getting a brief glimpse down a corridor extending away in progressive darkness. Raph barks something into his two-way.