INFESTATION
Something had been nibbling on the baby again.
Seely fingered the little bites on her son’s hands and feet, cursing silently. She rejected the deep-seated instinct to cry out in terror, panic-stricken and heartsick. She’d done that the first time. Now she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and checked Donnie’s breathing—deep and even. There were no signs of infection, and the redness and swelling around the bite marks was already disappearing.
She checked the rat traps in his room (none tripped) and the packets of poison (untouched). Then she sat by his crib and wept for a while, waiting for her son to wake up and be fed.
***
Nick had left her two months ago. He came home one night, drunk and belligerent, as usual. He lit and tossed cigarettes like Black Cats and stood outside the front door shouting obscenities at Seely, telling her how she’d never loved him, how she was probably humping every guy at the Piggly Wiggly she worked at, how she just got damned uglier every day, especially since that little bastard was born, and on and on.
Outside the trailer they shared, some underage tramp with too little clothing and too much makeup sat in Nick’s truck, driver’s side, gunning the engine and occasionally honking the horn. Seely heard the baby crying, and she realized she was just too tired to deal with this anymore. Too tired to deal with Nick’s paranoia. Or his constant drunkenness. Or his passion for jailbait. Pick one.
“Go away, Nick.” Three words, spoken in a dull monotone, and he stopped in mid-tirade.
“Huh?”
She looked into his eyes and saw nothing but confusion and, amazingly, fear. “You want to leave, go. Take the truck. Take your girlfriend. The trailer’s mine. I’ll leave the rest of your crap on the porch for you to pick up tomorrow.”
She could pinpoint the moment when Nick realized, in some hidden portion of his mind where the brain cells still functioned, that he was being dismissed. “Hold on, bitch, you can’t . . . ”
Seely was already reaching beside the door as Nick began his tirade. She racked the pump on the shotgun he’d left there, insisting it was ‘necessary’ for protection. The ratcheting of the shell into the chamber shut Nick up again.
“The gun’s mine, too,” she said.
Moments later, Nick and his latest honey fishtailed in the dirt driveway. Then they were gone.
Seely hadn’t seen him since, but his clothes and her TV were missing when she got home from work the next day.
***
“Y’all got roaches, Seely.”
Seely dumped the plastic bags of marked-down groceries from the supermarket on the kitchen table, hanging her head and sighing deeply. “Hey there to you, too, Luanne.”
Luanne Parsons worked the evening shift at the Gas-N-Go down the street from the trailer park. She watched Donnie when Seely worked, and Seely sat for Luanne’s two-year-old daughter Fayette when Luanne pulled her shifts.
Luanne patted her shoulder. “Sorry, hon, guess I shoulda let you breathe a little, I know.”
Seely started putting the groceries away, trying to ignore the gleeful edge to her friend’s voice. “Lord, Luanne, we all got roaches.”
Luanne shuddered. “I only saw a couple, Seely, but . . . ”
She spread her meaty hands out as far as she could.
“Honey, they was big.”
Luanne gathered her purse and a few pieces of peanut brittle from a candy dish on the table.
“Anyway, Donnie was a little darling today, as usual, but don’t he look a little pale to you? You gotta bring him out in the sun more to soak up some light! And someone called but they didn’t leave a name, and the propane guy came ‘round and filled up your tanks . . . ”
“Someone called?”
“Prob’ly a bill collector, honey, they don’t never want to talk to anybody but the target. You want me to bring you home some Raid from the store, or you got some handy?”
Seely shook her head. “I have plenty. Thanks anyway.”
As she left, Luanne called over her shoulder, “Best start using it then, sweetie. Them’s some nasty bugs.”
Seely finished putting her food away, peeling off the ‘WIC Approved’ stickers on the cheese by habit.
Roaches. In the South. Who’d have thought?
She looked at the bowl of peanut brittle on the table, uncovered. She pictured a big old cockroach crawling across the candy. She thought of Luanne, casually tossing the stuff down . . .
Seely dumped the bowl into the trash, trembling.
***
Tuscan, Alabama wasn’t even big enough to be called a small town. It was a stoplight on the highway, a gathering place for people too tired, poor, or lazy to move elsewhere. Other than the necessities needed to support any center of population—a grocery, a gas station, and a Colonel Dixie’s burger-and-chicken stand—Tuscan was devoid of the amenities of modern life, unless junkyards counted as a luxury. Anything else required a drive elsewhere, usually to nearby Mobile.
Seely had always hated going to Mobile. It was necessary, sometimes, but she avoided the drive whenever possible. Her car, a beaten and asthmatic old Pacer, had too many miles logged to count—the odometer had turned over ages ago, then died completely—and she never knew if the ancient rattletrap would make the thirty mile drive into the city, much less return under its own volition. And there was the tunnel to deal with, as well. In order to reach the welfare office, say, or the nearest health clinic that accepted Medicaid, she had to hit I-10 and pass through the tunnels that went under Mobile Bay.
Seely was petrified when it came to tunnels. She didn’t know why. All she could think of when she was forced to drive through the concrete and tile monstrosities, her windows closed to shut out the poison cloud of exhaust fumes fogging the air, was the millions of gallons of water that loomed over her head. She was always terrified that the bay might want to reclaim the fragile tube beneath it for its own use.
She had wanted to take Donnie to the clinic a couple of weeks ago when she first saw the bites, but she’d spent so much time gathering the courage for the drive to Mobile that, by the time she finally packed up his diaper bag and bundled him out of his crib for the trip, all the marks had faded. He’d lain there unblemished in her arms, smiling and blowing bubbles. No fever, no vomiting, nothing to alert a doctor in any way. Having to go to that ratty little clinic in was bad enough—showing up there with an obviously healthy child would be even worse.
Seely wound up giving Donnie a good warm bath that first night and dabbing him liberally with mercurochrome. He’d fallen asleep while she dried him off, and she placed him back in his crib, searching all the while for some trace of whatever had been feeding on her son.
Now, with Donnie burbling in his playpen and Fayette playing mindlessly in the kitchen with some old pots and pans, Seely clutched a can of generic bug spray, her gaze flickering into the corners and chasing every shadow.
This is silly. Roaches don’t bite.
Do they?
***
“I don’t want to be a bother, Seely.”
Seely had barely opened the trailer door when Luanne started whining. It was two days after the cockroach sighting and Luanne stood there in the kitchen, looking flustered and jittery, her daughter wrapped protectively in one flabby arm. All of Fayette’s belongings—toys, changes of clothes, what-have-you—were packed in plastic grocery bags on the table. Seely felt an immediate need to turn and run before the hammer fell. Instead, she shut the door quietly behind her and leaned against it, her eyes closed.
“What’s the matter, Luanne?”
“I don’t think I can let Fayette stay here no more. And, tell the truth, I don’t really think I want to be here, either.”
“Jesus, Luanne!”
Seely took a breath, tried to maintain control, but she could feel the veins in her forehead starting to throb, and she knew the leash was slipping.
“What—I mean, why? What’d I do to you?”
Luanne began gathering her bags, avoiding Seely’s eyes.
“It ain’t you, honey. It’s—it’s those damn bugs. I can hear them in the walls. They’s hundreds of them, Seely, just crawling around all over the place, but they stay where you can’t see ‘em. Fayette won’t even leave my side anymore, she’s so scared they comin’ to get her.”
Seely wanted to scream. She wanted to grab Luanne by her limp, peroxided hair and shake some sense into her fat head. But she looked at Fayette and saw true fear in her eyes, and she thought of the bites that covered Donnie’s arms and legs every morning, and she gave up. She was too tired to fight. Just like that night with Nick.
“Go on, Luanne. Get on home.”
Luanne scurried out the door, roachlike in her own way, Fayette clinging to her like a parasite. “I’d take care of Donnie over at our place, Seely, you know that, but you know how Jimmie needs his sleep . . . ”
Luanne’s husband worked nights as a security guard in Mobile. He was not pleasant when aroused, as the fading bruises on Luanne’s arms attested.
“Go home, Luanne.” Seely started to close the door, but she couldn’t resist one little remark. “Y’all make sure you don’t wake up Jimmie, now . . . ”
She shut the world out with a twitch of her wrist.
Oh, Cecelia Leigh Harden, Seely thought as she sank bonelessly to the floor, you’re really in the tunnel now . . .
***
“Nick?”
“What the hell you want?”
“You know I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t . . . Luanne won’t watch Donnie anymore. I need you to help out, okay?”
Seely took deep breaths, fighting back the scream threatening to tear through her throat.
“I ain’t got money, if that’s what you want.”
“I just need you to watch Donnie when I work, maybe, or help me pay for a sitter.” Don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream.
“I just told you I ain’t got no money for you. Ain’t got time, either.” A sleepy voice moaned something in the background, and Nick murmured something back. “Anyway, I told you to get rid of that little bastard when you got pregnant, but you wouldn’t listen. He’s your problem, not mine.”
“Dammit, Nick, you have some obligati—”
Click.
***
And then the short drive to Mobile and the long, dark nightmare of the tunnel. Seely clutched the wheel, her body knotting itself into a tight ball, nothing functioning but her eyes, her wrists, her feet. She came within sight of the gaping tunnel mouth, and in her terror almost slammed into the car in front of her.
Traffic was stopped. Seely found herself praying to two gods at the same time. Please don’t let this last, don’t make me crawl through the tunnel, I can’t take it. I need to get to the Human Services office and see what they can do for me, and Donnie’s asleep, and I just want this over with, please, please, please . . .
And, with another voice, she prayed to a darker god: Don’t make me go in there, I’ll try again tomorrow, screw the gas money, but don’t make me go in there today.
The dark god won. A policeman walked down the line of cars, explaining that there was a wreck in the tunnel, and the wait might be a while. Then Donnie woke up in his car seat and started whining, and Seely drew a sigh of thanks.
“Sir?” The cop leaned down, struggling to hear her voice over Donnie’s escalating cries. “My baby is real sick, and I need to get out of the line so I can take him to a doctor. Can you help me?”
He nodded. “Hey, I got one at home about that age. I know what it’s like.”
With motions and shouts, a lot of backing-and-filling, and a few illegal procedures, he managed to get Seely out of the cluster of stagnant cars and onto an exit ramp. He gave her a little salute as she pulled off the Interstate and turned toward home.
She almost lost control again as something scurried beneath the accelerator pedal and disappeared under the tattered carpet of her floorboard. She caught a flash of white, mottled and flesh-like. The Pacer careened toward the guardrails, and she wrenched the steering wheel to the left, barely avoiding a spinout into the lanes below.
Donnie started screaming, hiccupped, and put his fists to his mouth, silent once again. Seely drove onto the shoulder, choking off shouts and curses and sobs. She forced herself to open her door slowly. Once she was sure Donnie was asleep, she searched the car methodically, looking for some sign of the creature lurking in her floorboards.
Nothing. Donnie indulged in milky snores, at peace.
***
That night, Seely dreamed the walls were talking to her. They hissed and chattered in some indecipherable language, but the dream acted as interpreter, translating the sibilant speech into images: Nick, stumbling drunkenly from the trailer and back to his lover, followed by dark shapes that crept unseen into the tire-wells of his truck; Luanne, grabbing her things and rushing to escape from Seely’s wrath, not noticing the passengers she carried out with her. Nick again, his face distorted in the Picasso way that only dreams can reproduce, saying Kill the little bastard, he’s not worth the trouble, and Donnie, lying in his crib in a near-comatose state as dozens of ancient, chittering creatures drank up his essence while Seely watched, smiling.
Seely woke up gasping. She’d moved Donnie’s crib into her bedroom after Luanne’s final exit, and she hit her head on its railing when she rolled out of bed. Dizzy from the abrupt awakening and the pain from the collision, she stood shaking her head, trying to focus in the darkness.
The walls were moving.
She shook her head again, desperate to separate reality from nightmare. Nick’s face flashed by, and Luanne’s, and she really thought she was still asleep until she heard the noise, the nerve-scraping chittering of pestilence. She grabbed blindly for the roach spray on her nightstand, still blurry-eyed, spots of half-light swimming through her vision. Something slid along the side of her foot, and she sprayed it instinctively. The room filled with the acrid scent of insecticide, and she almost dropped the can as whatever was down there flew up in alarm, its wings stroking her thigh. She started to scream, checked it by painfully swallowing air, and forced herself to remain still.
The spots before her eyes resolved into grayish shapes, roachlike, luminescent. They wove a pattern across the bedroom, dancing from walls to ceiling to floor, leaving sickly pale slime-trails of residual light across the dresser, the bed, the crib.
The crib. They clustered around the crib, around her baby.
“Donnie!” At her shout, the shapes disappeared, and the sounds of their passing faded. The room was dark, but enough moonlight bled through the broken slats of the mini-blinds to guide her as she snatched him from the crib. She tucked the roach spray under her chin, grabbing Donnie with one arm, supporting his head with her other hand. The can of bug spray tried to slip from its position, and she juggled madly for a moment, finally achieving balance—her son in the crook of one arm, and the can rested in her other palm, ready for business. She pulled Donnie’s sleeping form close, amazed that the violent motion hadn’t brought him instantly awake.
And she felt something, no—something—moving beneath his jumper.
She fought the urge to push him away, even as she swallowed a sudden rush of bile. She reached for the light switch and her hand came down on something hard and cold; it flexed its wings beneath her palm, and she fell back, tripping on a leg of the crib and falling on her bed, remembering at the last minute to cradle Donnie as she fell. His flesh seemed to writhe against her, and she knew she needed to put him down, had to let him go before she lost the little courage she still had and ran mindlessly into the night.
Donnie didn’t react as she disentangled herself from him and placed him on her bed. Working as fast as she could in the dim light, she tried to unzip his jumper. Her hands shook so badly, she wound up just tearing the zipper out; it was faster that way. She could see his tiny chest rising and falling in the moonlight, and as she pulled his clothes off, she could see them as well.
They were bigger than she’d pictured, palm-sized, and they clustered at the joints of his arms and legs, feeding. Seely felt her knees giving way when she realized one of the roaches had attached itself to Donnie’s genitals, its shell pulsating in time with his heartbeat.
No. Seely felt the anger boiling up inside her, the anger that was there the night Nick left, the anger that came again that evening with Luanne, and she reacted, as she always did, with a deadly calm. The trembling in her hands disappeared. She plucked the roaches, one by one, from her son’s body, beginning with the fat bastard at his crotch. They came away without struggling, and as she pulled them off she could see long tubes protruding from them—proboscises, her mind provided clinically. She wrenched the roaches off and squashed them in her fist, ignoring the crunch of their carapaces, the gush of warm fluid that accompanied each death. She looked for blood spots, but all she could see were drops of whitish liquid, shining in the moonlight. She wiped the fluid off with the sleeve of her nightgown in a series of quick swipes across Donnie’s chest and legs.
Once Donnie was clean, she wrapped him in a blanket from the crib, picked up the roach spray, and marched toward the bedroom door. In the wavering moonlight, the walls shifted and shimmered with a filthy grey sheen. Doesn’t matter. No matter how many there are, it just doesn’t matter. Seely felt Donnie stir, and she stopped to adjust her grip. He was squirming, and she knew he would be crying soon, hungry and confused.
Not yet, baby, not yet . . .
The shotgun flashed into her mind. Right by the front door, loaded and ready. It didn’t matter that the chambers were filled with buckshot, which would do damn little against a horde of insects. Power. That’s what it represented, what she needed now.
She hugged Donnie to her chest, ready to make the run for the front door, and the bedroom doorway vanished. The walls seemed to bulge outward, and a living curtain of roaches rushed into the space, locking themselves into place in an unassailable barricade of limbs, wings, and carapaces. They made a noise, a loud, crazed buzzing that Seely felt as a physical attack. She’d calmly constructed a battle plan in the last few seconds–the bug spray, the shotgun–only to find that the enemy was prepared, more than prepared, for her imagined tactics. Now, she could only stand and watch the shimmering veil of insects, while Donnie groggily searched for her breast. She could feel his mouth hunting wetly, trying to feed through the flimsy fabric of her nightgown.
No, not yet, baby, please . . .
Fire. Seely felt the pull of instinct. Nothing likes fire.
Nick had smoked like some people breathed, and he’d left cheap plastic lighters all over the trailer. Seely back-pedaled to her nightstand, set the roach-spray down, and opened the drawer, keeping her eyes on the doorway. She shuffled through the contents blindly, rejecting lipsticks and perfume samples, finally closing her hand on an unmistakable shape. She pulled the Bic out, lay Donnie over her shoulder in burping position, and grabbed the roach spray.
Snick. The lighter worked. She felt Donnie’s weight on her shoulder, and headed slowly toward the bedroom door. The drapery of roaches still hung there, swaying to an unseen wind.
Seely shook the can, held the lighter up, lit it, and sprayed. The alcohol from the bug spray ignited like a flamethrower, and the false door burned away in a shower of living comets.
Seely ran through the doorway, dropping the lighter and the roach spray as Donnie shifted position. She grabbed him, holding him tightly with one arm as she snatched the shotgun with her other hand, breaking the front door open with a vicious kick. She stumbled down the cheap wooden steps, turning as she hit ground level, Donnie in one hand and the shotgun in the other.
The roaches gathered at the door, piles upon piles, and began dropping onto the rickety wooden steps below. Seely tried to ratchet the pump one-handed, failed miserably. And what would it matter? What would you shoot?
Nick’s voice invaded her head again, uninvited, explaining why he thought a shotgun was a good idea. You’re a woman, and women can’t shoot worth crap when it comes to aiming. But with a shotgun, you pull the trigger and you’re bound to hit something. Then he loaded it with buckshot. Nick the frigging genius.
Seely watched the bugs tumble toward her, slowly working their way out of the trailer. She backed away slowly, trying to think, and all she could come up with was fire, fire, fire.
Then, Seely’s brain cells sparking randomly at this point, something Luanne had said days earlier about the propane man popped up, and she knew what to do. Screw the trailer, screw Nick, screw the frigging drive to Mobile. For Donnie.
Seely carried her baby back to the limits of her trailer-lot, set him down behind her carefully, aimed as well as she could with a cheap no-brand shotgun, and fired.
She hit the propane tank behind the trailer on her second shot, and even from this distance the explosion knocked her back. She flew over Donnie and landed a few feet away, dazed by the fireball and the fall. She crawled back to her baby by pure mother’s instinct, her eyes still trying to erase the sudden light, and she almost screamed when she found him exactly where she’d left him, still reaching for his mother.
Seely picked him up, gently, working by feel more than sight. Donnie sighed in her arms and snuggled closer. She watched her home burn, the memories of the past few years going with it, and she tried, but she could feel no sense of loss. I’ve got my baby. I saved the one thing that’s important.
A sharp pain rose between her breasts. The night flexed around her as she sank limply to the ground. With the little energy she had left, she watched Donnie, his tongue now a thin, fleshy tube, begin to suckle. The moon blurred as countless insects whirred their wings, the sound like applause as it filled her ears. Oh, Donnie, baby, not yet . . .
Then Seely went through the tunnel.