After the Fade Read online

  “Jesus Christ,” Scott grunted as he crouched down beside me.

  “We shouldn’t move her,” said the guy in the sweater. “We should call the police first.”

  “He’s right,” said Jake Probie. He rubbed his hands brusquely together, as if trying to erase the feeling of striking the giant bug with the tray from them.

  “Tori,” Scott said from over his shoulder. “Go call the police.”

  Tori didn’t move.

  “I’ll do it,” Jake said, already snatching his iPhone off the bar.

  “We should at least cover her up,” I said.

  “I’ve got some old tablecloths in the back,” Scott said. He got up and moved away, his heavy footfalls treading with eerie gravitas across the floor.

  I stood and went to the bar. The circular tray had been set aside, revealing the smashed chitinous husk that leaked a bloody, snot-like goop onto the bar top. Three of the four wings were still attached to the insect’s body, though they were all folded over like the pages in a paperback novel. The fourth wing, liberated in the fatal attack, stood out on the bar like a single glove left behind by a careless patron. I crept closer to it, bringing myself down to eyelevel with the thing. Its silvery eyes, so much like the honeycombed eyes of a housefly or a honeybee (though much larger), still glittered with an alien intelligence of a sort. This close, I could clearly see the proboscis—a barbed, fleshy straw about as thick as a toothpick that resembled a miniature harpoon. A patter of bloody mucus trailed away from the proboscis along the bar top; horrifically, in my mind’s eye, I could imagine the blood spurting from the tubular nozzle in an arc as Jake Probie slammed the serving tray down on it, much like when I was a kid and my friends and I would stomp on our drink boxes and squirt fruit punch or grape juice at the girls during recess.

  I thought I would be sick. Queasily, I stood and trailed one hand along the bar until I reached the end. My legs felt rubbery and I was burning up. I struggled hard to keep it together.

  A shadow fell on the wall in front of me. I turned around to find Lauren standing there, clutching her hands to her chest, a pleading, tearful look in her eyes. Stupidly, I managed a wan smile. It felt like my face would crack.

  “I want to leave,” she said in a small voice.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

  Scott came out of the backroom with a white tablecloth bundled in his arms. Lingering behind him was a stoop-shouldered guy in a filthy white apron and beard scruff that ran high up on his cheekbones. It hadn’t occurred to me that there must have been someone back there cooking the food and cleaning the silverware. I hugged Lauren and watched Scott drape the tablecloth over Wendy’s body with Derrick’s assistance.

  “What was that thing?” Lauren asked.

  “It looked like some kind of bug.”

  “It killed her.”

  I squeezed her tighter.

  “This can’t be right.” It was Jake addressing the room while still holding his cell phone to his ear. “It’s still ringing. How can 911 still be ringing?”

  On the floor, Wendy’s body looked like a piece of furniture covered up in an abandoned house beneath the tablecloth.

  “And now it cut me off,” Jake said, looking at his phone.

  Scott went to the phone behind the bar while the woman in the floral dress dug around in her purse, presumably for her own cell phone.

  “Can’t we go?” Lauren said again.

  “Let’s just wait a minute, see what’s going on.”

  “Still ringing,” Scott said, the receiver to his ear.

  “Mine, too,” said the woman in the floral dress who was on her cell phone.

  Silence passed. We all stood there looking at one another, as if searching for the one among us who might suddenly provide some explanation. My eyes kept returning to the shape beneath the tablecloth, hideous in its suggestion of a human profile. Eventually, old Victor Peebles broke the silence when he pulled himself out of his dark corner, crossed the barroom floor, and reclaimed his seat at the bar.

  “Any of you folks mind if I finish my beer?” he asked the room.

  Astoundingly, I felt a bubble of laughter swell up toward the back of my throat. I let go of Lauren and went over to Tori, who looked like a zombie. She stood beside an old brick hearth, and she had taken down an iron candlestick from the mantel; she clutched it now in both hands.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “Not really.” She laughed nervously.

  “Why don’t we get some water or something for these folks? I’ll give you a hand.”

  “Okay. Good idea.”

  Still clutching the candlestick, she went behind the bar and I followed her. Scott still had the telephone to his ear; as I brushed by him, he offered me a doomsday expression—brows knitted, lips in a firm frown. “No dice,” he said, and hung up.

  “How can that be?”

  “Beats me,” he said. He looked across the bar to the woman in the floral dress. She still had her cell phone to her ear but the expression on her face was a grim one. “How ’bout you, lady? Any luck?”

  She took the phone away from her ear and examined it, the glow of its screen casting a dull white light onto her face. “It just rang and rang and finally disconnected,” she said. Then she looked up at Scott and me. “My name is Kathy Bowman.” She reached out and gently took the elbow of the man in the cream-colored sweater. “This is my husband Charles.”

  “Maybe the cell phones aren’t able to get a proper signal in here,” Charles suggested. “These old buildings are sometimes like that.”

  “I got the same result on the land line,” Scott said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Charles Bowman.

  “It’s what it is,” Scott offered, folding his arms.

  I helped Tori dump ice into some glasses. She filled the glasses with water and I dropped a wedge of lemon in each glass then set them out on the counter. I didn’t like the tone of Charles Bowman’s voice and I didn’t like the way Scott had folded his arms across his chest. In an effort to steer away from any conflict between the two, I said, “Okay, we got some water here for whoever wants it. Lauren?”

  Lauren came over, but cut a wide berth around the section of bar where the dead insect lay in a puddle of its own juices. Its legs projected up into the air like a series of twist ties used to tie up trash bags. Everyone came over for a glass of water, with the exception of Charles. He walked around to the other side of the bar after snatching his glass of wine off the table by the window. He didn’t sit down but remained lingering beside one of the stools, as if the notion of sitting down was pleasing but he didn’t possess the physical ability to do so.

  “Could go next door, see if Tammy’s got a phone,” Victor suggested.

  “What’s next door?” Kathy Bowman asked. She held her glass of water in both hands, the way a small child might.

  “Cigar shop,” Victor said, finishing his beer.

  “You’re not from around here?” Scott asked her.

  “Charles and I are from Connecticut. We came down for a week to visit with friends. They were supposed to meet us here tonight.” She smiled wearily. “I’d never seen the Naval Academy before.”

  “It’s just a building,” Charles grumbled.

  “You know,” Jake said, “there’s always a police car up at Church Circle. One of us could take a walk. Or drive up there.”

  Hearing this made something click toward the back of my head. The comment bothered me, though it had nothing to do with the prospect of walking or driving up to Church Circle in and of itself. What bothered me was the sudden realization that I hadn’t seen anyone walking or driving along Main Street since Lauren had arrived. The plate glass windows that looked out upon Main Street were dark and silent, like looking at a framed photograph of a street. The buildings on the other side of Main were dark and closed up against the cold.

  “What?” Lauren asked me. She set her water down on the bar. “What is it?”

 
; I voiced my concern about the street outside being empty. Even at this time of year, at this time of night, the occasional vehicle would slide past the windows. I thought about the tourists I’d seen down at the docks on my way here this evening and wondered why they hadn’t walked by, either.

  “Is that unusual?” Kathy asked. “For the street to be so quiet?”

  “Yes,” Tori and Scott said at the same time.

  “You’re right,” Derrick said. “I can’t remember the last time—”

  A loud thump caused us all to jump. Someone’s water glass shattered on the floor. The sound had come from across the barroom. We all looked in unison at the plate glass windows, where it sounded like the sound had come from. The sun had fully set and darkness pressed against the glass. I noticed that it was darker than usual, and it took me a moment to realize the lampposts along the sidewalks hadn’t come on.

  “Oh,” Tori said, her voice cracking. It was a simple sound, unaffected by emotion, so I didn’t think anything of it until she backed away from me, both hands coming up to her mouth again. “Oh my God…”

  I didn’t see it at first. But then I did: it clung to the outside of the window, a black shape shrouded in a cloak of darkness, its tubular body pressed against the glass while its twig-like, segmented legs moved with that hypnotic lethargy. The wings vibrated in a fury that couldn’t help but draw attention, and even standing on this side of the thick glass I could hear a sound like the droning of an electric fan.

  We stood there in horrified silence, all of us. As we stared at the enormous insect, a second one swam through the darkness and struck the glass beside the first. The sound of it striking the glass was like the sound of a fastball slamming into a catcher’s mitt. I felt cold dread coil around the very center of my body. Even as I stared at those two giant bugs—even as I could hear their palm-sized wings buzzing and their tine-like legs moving against the glass—I was not fully prepared to accept their existence. Surely bugs like that died out a long time ago, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Surely bugs like that—

  A third one slammed against the plate glass window, and this time I was certain the whole windowpane shook in its housing.

  Beside me, Tori shrieked. On the other side of the bar, Lauren dropped her water glass. Someone else emitted a low, guttural groan that sounded eerily like a foghorn in the night. As for myself, my entire body was overcome by a pervasive paralysis; I felt locked in the crosshairs of a charging rhinoceros, powerless to step aside and destined to be bowled over and crushed. Outside in the dark, the things’ heads twitched as their proboscises probed the glass. Their overlong legs screeched along the glass. There was something horrifically deliberate, something intelligent, in their movements, and I think that was what frightened me the most. They moved the way I had always imagined aliens from another planet to move, if they’d ever come down to invade Earth.

  That might not be such an incredible idea after all, I thought now.

  Derrick was the first to move. He crept a few steps toward the window, hunched over and wincing like an old man who’d lost his spectacles. Jake called out, “Don’t,” but Derrick did not slow his progress. He stopped just a foot or two from the glass and stared at the hideous underside of one of the creatures.

  “They got stingers,” he said after a moment. “Angry-looking ones, too.”

  Breaking my temporary paralysis, I crept out from behind the bar and slipped an arm around Lauren, who stood in what looked like her own state of immobility. Beneath my arm, she felt as stiff and as pliable as a wooden board.

  “Where’d those things come from?” she asked.

  “Hell, by the look of ’em,” Victor offered before I could answer. Not that I had an answer. He went to the window and stood beside Derrick. When he reached out one crooked finger to tap on the glass, Derrick quickly grabbed his wrist while the rest of the bar sucked in a collective intake of breath.

  “Don’t,” Derrick warned him, as if the glass was electrified.

  “How thick is that glass?” Charles Bowman asked no one in particular.

  “Two inches, at least,” Scott said. He had one hand on Tori’s shoulder. Poor Tori looked about ready to collapse. “I had it replaced after Hurricane Isabel in 2003. That shit’s bulletproof.”

  “Good,” I heard Jake say.

  “It’s like they want to get in,” Victor said. “They keep tapping at the glass with their little thingies.” Victor brought a finger up under his nose and waggled it back and forth to illustrate the “thingies.”

  “They could be attracted to the light,” I suggested, looking around at all the blazing fixtures.

  “Oh, Christ,” Tori moaned. “Please don’t suggest we turn the lights off, Tom. Please don’t.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything.” Though I had to wonder if I hadn’t been correct in my hypothesis…

  Jake turned to face me, his own face red and beaded with sweat. He was Derrick’s age, which made him older than me, but we’d been on the outs a few times nonetheless. Annapolis was a small town, if you happened to live there, and after a while the same faces pop up in crowds from time to time. At the moment, I could only recall one time where an exchange of words had prompted Jake and me to start swinging at one another, but even that memory was faded and grainy, like old JFK assassination footage.

  “Anyone still wanna hump it up to Church Circle and find that cop car?” he asked, his eyes still locked on mine. After a moment, I saw the wry smile begin to curl the corner of his lips until it had fully taken over his face. A few of us chuckled then. Christ, I could have kissed the son of a bitch on the mouth at that moment.

  A loud bang from the entryway cut our laughter short. A second bang followed, this one more muted than the first, and not dissimilar to the sounds the other bugs had made when landing on the plate glass window.

  “Christ,” Scott uttered. “The front door…”

  “It sounds like someone banging on the door,” Kathy Bowman said nervously. “Maybe someone needs help.”

  I dropped my arm from around Lauren’s shoulder and hustled into the short, dark corridor that led out into the vestibule. Jake joined me, our respiration commingling in the claustrophobic little space. The door was shut against the night…but one of those things crawled along the glass window in the upper half of the door. The glass in the door was thinner than the plate glass windows, but it was reinforced with mesh wiring. I only hoped it would keep the bugs out.

  “That wasn’t a person banging on the door,” I commented in a voice low enough so that it wouldn’t carry back out into the barroom.

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, too,” Jake said. It was not a question. “About that window.”

  “I think it will hold.” I hoped it would, anyway.

  “Yeah.” Then he uttered a pathetic little laugh that held more fear in it than humor. “We’re talking about giant bugs breaking windows, Tommy. Giant fucking bugs. Can you dig it? Are we all losing our minds or what?”

  “We’re gonna need one hell of an exterminator,” I said. Then I nodded my head in the direction of one of the two-story buildings across the street. There was a soft light on in one of the second-story windows, muted by the sweep of a semitransparent curtain. I thought I caught movement beyond the curtain. “There’s someone alive up there.”

  “Let’s hope there’s a lot of people alive everywhere,” Jake responded coldly.

  Back in the barroom, Jake said, “The door’s shut tight but there’s more of those things out there. We could see them on the glass. Are there any more windows or doors in the place, Scott?”

  Scott said, “There’s a fire exit in the back, but that’s closed and there’s no window on it.”

  “There’s an emergency door in the kitchen, too,” said the broad-shouldered fellow in the dirty apron who’d followed Scott out of the kitchen earlier. “No windows on that, either.”

  Jake nodded. “Okay. Good.” He looked around. Derrick and
Victor were still staring at the bugs on the window. There were five of them now. The largest one looked to be about ten inches long, from proboscis to stinger. “We all got cell phones, right? Let’s try calling someone other than the police, see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “And maybe we should try calling some people outside of town,” suggested Lauren. “Like, maybe this isn’t going on everywhere.” She looked around at the rest of us, her expression hopeful. “Right? I mean, it can’t be everywhere, right?”

  No one answered her.

  “Can we please do something about her first?” Lauren asked, quickly changing the subject. Her eyes were cinched to the shape of Wendy Pratchett beneath the white linen tablecloth on the floor.

  I looked over to Scott, who was still massaging Tori’s shoulder. “Is there someplace we can put her?” I asked.

  “We shouldn’t move her,” Charles Bowman interrupted before Scott could answer. “No one should touch her until the police get here.”

  “What police?” I said. “There’s no police coming. Not yet.”

  “I just don’t want to keep looking at her,” Lauren said.

  “The lady’s right,” Scott said, coming around the side of the bar. “There’s no harm moving the body out of the way.” He turned to me and said, “I’ve got an office in the back. We can put her back there for now.” Then he turned back toward Charles Bowman and said, “I think the cops will understand, given the circumstances.” Scott’s tone dripped of sarcasm.

  “That thing, too, please,” Tori said in a small voice. She jerked her chin at the dead insect on the bar top, its legs still bent at unnatural angles in the air. Hell, the whole goddamn thing was unnatural.

  “Yeah, okay,” Scott said. “Good idea. I’m tired of looking at it, too.” He turned to the cook in the filthy apron. “You think you can clean that up?”

  “Sure,” the cook said. Yet he looked queasy as his eyes fell on the dead insect. It was a task he was not looking forward to completing.