“The sunlight’s keeping them back, so might have a chance here…but you gotta be ready.”
The reporter looked at Crow, and then at the ring of light around them. The clouds were thinning and the circle of sunshine started expanding outward. Suddenly the insects began hissing again as they drew back away from it. “See!” Crow yelled in a voice filled with fierce triumph. “They can’t stand the light.”
“But…roaches always run when you turn on the light.”
Crow shook his head. “That’s because they don’t want to get stepped on…this is different. I don’t think they can abide the light.” It was a strange word to use and it hung there in the air, both of them aware of it and of what it implied.
Newton looked up at the sky. There were a dozen beams of light—the pillars of heaven, he thought, remembering the phrase from an old book. The pillars of heaven, and these little monsters can’t abide them. “No,” he whispered, but he meant yes.
Around them the gloom was visibly diminishing as the clouds above burned away. Now there was a big central column—heaven’s mainstay, Newton thought—and its light washed across the entire field. The sunlight, cold and raw with the humidity of a lurking storm, was still rich and pure and it washed over them and over the sea of roaches that instantly turned and fled in a swarm back toward the house. In thirty seconds every one of them was gone except the bugs that lay smashed and dead in the line from where they had first been attacked. How many had they killed? A thousand? Five thousand? It hadn’t made even a dent in the ocean of them there had been.
Newton suddenly became entirely self-conscious about the fact that he was standing there with his pants down and turned with an absurd stab at modesty away from Crow and pulled up his boxers and jeans—checking to make sure there were no roaches hiding in the folds—and zipped and buckled. As he slipped his belt through the last loop a huge shiver of absolute disgust shook him from head to toes and he took a step away from Crow and vomited into the brush. While he spit and gagged the forest seemed to tilt and sway around him.
“We’ve got less than an hour before sunset, Newt,” Crow said urgently. “We have to make it to the pitch long before then.”
Newton straightened, his face green and his eyes runny with tears from straining to empty his gut, and he stared at Crow for a long second, then looked up at the sky. The light was slanting down from an extreme angle as the sun slid toward the southern treeline. They would be in darkness long before the sun actually set on the region.
“Little bastards must have gone back into the house…don’t ask me how. Or why. But if they’re regrouping or some shit then it’s our cue to haul ass.”
They started running toward the forest and this time Newton ran as fast as Crow.
(5)
Vic punched the dashboard lighter in and when it popped he lit his cigarette and then handed it to Ruger. They smoked in silence for a long time, watching as the sun slipped below the treeline. Vic’s pickup was tucked back into a copse of trees, safe within shadows as dense as the bottom of a well. They could see the sun, but the rays did not penetrate even as far as the truck’s hood. Ruger’s ski mask, hat, and gloves were on the backseat. He wouldn’t need them again tonight. Vic looked at his wristwatch. “Sun’ll be down in ten minutes.”
“Vic,” Ruger said softly, and when the man turned Ruger said, “You know that I know about the sunlight.” He smiled. “Don’t you?”
“I guessed.”
“Why the bullshit?”
Vic shrugged.
Ruger said, “It bothers me, but that’s it. I don’t turn into the Human Torch.”
“Some of your boys do.”
“Most don’t.”
“Well…we don’t know what we got all the time. It’s pretty clear that there are a lot of different kinds of you sonsabitches.”
Ruger said nothing.
“You got dead heads like Boyd. Like extras from Night of the Living Dead, Part Ten. I mean…are they even vampires?”
Ruger just looked at him.
“Then there’s your core group—you and Golub, Gaither Carby, the twins, those guys. There’s your true fang gang.”
“‘Fang Gang.’ That’s cute.”
“But in between you got a bunch of weird spins on this thing, some of them I never even heard of before. I know you’ve been reading my books. Do you have an answer?”
Ruger looked out the window at the fading light. Turned away so Vic couldn’t see his smile.
Vic waited for a moment, then gave it up. It’s something he would take up with the Man. Too much of what was happening was not part of the Plan, and that made Vic nervous. Even within the Plan itself there were variations popping up, and for the first time in his life he wondered how much control the Man had. Were there things he didn’t know, even about his own kind? Just thinking that made Vic’s stomach hurt.
To hide his discomfiture, he said, “Wonder how things are going down in the Hollow.”
“They’re still alive,” Ruger said, closing his eyes. His voice was tinged with surprise.
Vic stared at him, and the sickness in his stomach worsened. “Yeah, I can feel that, too. Son of a bitch!”
Ruger wore a knife-slit smile and was slowly nodding to himself. “I guess I’m not the only one who trips over bad luck when that asshole Crow is in the mix.”
Vic shot him a vicious glare. “You watch your mouth!”
“Oh, face it, Wingate,” Ruger snapped, “that little bastard has the luck of the devil, and you know it as well as I do. Even the Man couldn’t take him down on the first try. Don’t even try to tell me there isn’t something else at work here. It’s not just me.”
They smoked in silence as the sun continued to fall. Vic gave a sour grunt and said, “Yeah, maybe. But at least that bitch’ll be dead soon.”
“Recruited,” Ruger correctly mildly. “Dead’s just a by-product.”
“If Terry Wolfe hadn’t been going off his nut, I’d have popped Crow weeks ago,” Vic mused. “He’s always been a pain in the ass.”
“You think Wolfe would make it to Halloween if Crow was off the board?”
Vic shrugged. “The Man thinks so. He says he has the mayor on a leash, and maybe he is. Hard to say—talk around town is that he’s really starting to crack.”
“Crack or turn?”
“Not even the Man knows that for sure. Like I said, Wolfe’s a wild card.”
“Great,” Ruger said with a sneer, “we got a key player we can’t count on and a sawed-off prick who’s too damn lucky. We’re in clover here.”
“Shit,” Vic agreed and then peered up at the sky. The sun was almost gone. He said, “Luck doesn’t last forever.”
(6)
The Bone Man sat on a fallen log just at the point of the trail where it widened to spill out onto Griswold’s property, his guitar slung in front of him, his slender fingers moving with blurred speed over the strings, the bottleneck slide wailing up and down. The sound of furious, angry jailhouse blues filled the air around him. Birds shouted in the trees, lending a discordance that was somehow appropriate to the moment, and surrounding their noise and the music was a constant rising hiss from the tens of thousands of insects that clustered with fury before him.
The insects had swarmed back out of the house as soon as the sun began to edge toward the horizon, but at the first stroke of the Bone Man’s fingers over the strings they’d crowded to a stop inches from where he sat. They milled and leapt but not one of them could cross the line from field to forest. The rustle of the bugs and the murmur of the trees in the wind of the Hollow both carried a tone of absolute surprise and total outrage.