Risen (27 page)

"Uh-huh," Carl said, though he had noticed no such thing. They were still eating him out of house and home, as far as he could tell.

"Now this. I'm worried about him, Carl."

"Bernie, I'm not getting up and looking for a cat in the middle of the—"

"I'm not asking you to. I'm just saying that something's wrong, is all. I don't know how you can sleep, anyway, with Groucho missing."

Bernice threw back the covers and got out of bed, displacing Sputnik and Heather and Zoe who liked to sleep on and around her legs, and annoying Pumpkin who was curled up in the crook behind Carl's knees.

"For gosh sakes, Bernie, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to look under the house. Remember the time he got trapped there? You were looking for that leak and when you left you put the screen back on and Groucho was trapped inside. I still think you did it on purpose."

Carl sat up, which caused Pumpkin to stand and glare at him impatiently.

"I did no such thing," Carl said. "And you're not going to go crawling around under the house at this hour! It's insane!"

"I'm not going to crawl around. I'm just going to peek in. Where's the flashlight?"

"Use the rechargeable. It's plugged into the socket by the back door."

"You're really going to let me do this myself, aren't you?" Bernice said. "Any decent husband"

"All right, all right!" Carl complained, throwing back the covers and swinging out his legs. He found his house slippers and pulled on a robe. "I knew I'd get sucked into this one way or another."

He yanked the flashlight out of the socket and walked out the back door with cats milling around his feet. Bernice followed him calling for Groucho.

Carl went around to the back of the house where the access door to the crawl space was. He'd been under the house the day before, spraying for cockroaches, and he hadn't done a perfect job of putting the door back. The door was a window screen, actually, and it had plenty of "give" in it. A space on one side could have admitted a cat. It was only a couple or three inches but he'd seen the cats squeeze through smaller spaces, and if Groucho could've gotten in, he could've gotten out again. But Carl was there now and he might as well look around for Bernice's sake. He pulled the door off and set it in the wet grass and crouched down to peer inside.

"Groucho?" he called, shining the flashlight around. Bernice peered over his shoulder, saying, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!" The light bounced off concrete blocks and pipes and wires and joists, all dripping with spider webs, but there was no sign of Groucho. Carl couldn't see into the farthest corners, of course, and he wasn't about to get down on his belly in his pajamas and crawl inside, but if Groucho was in there and wanted out, he'd have seen the light and heard Carl and Bernice calling to him and he'd have shown himself.

"He isn't under here."

"Are you sure? How can you see from way out here?"

"Bernice, I am not crawling under the house in my bathrobe. It's filthy under there." He gave the crawl space another sweep with the flashlight and this time the light came to rest on a skeleton lying in one corner. "Well I'll be damned," Carl said.

"What is it? Is it him?" Bernice asked anxiously.

"I don't know what it is." The skeleton was almost out of the flashlight's range and Carl couldn't get a good look at it from where he sat. He duck-walked another step closer and bent his head down, poking it just inside the access hole. He smelled the lingering perfume of poison mixed with the dusty, musty odor of the crawl space. "It's some kind of skeleton," he said.

Bernice drew in a breath of horror. "Oh, Carl! You don't suppose?"

"No, no, it couldn't be him. It's picked clean, like something in a museum. It's been here awhile. Could be a squirrel. Or a skunk. Possum, maybe."

"Can you reach it?"

"Not from here."

"You have to get it out! I don't see how I can sleep tonight knowing that thing's under there!"

"It's been under here for weeks, maybe months. Funny I didn't notice it...." His voice trailed off. He didn't want Bernice to know that he'd just been under the house spraying poison around.

Then he got to thinking: Where are the dead roaches? He shined the flashlight around the sewer pipe where he'd seen so many of them. He'd hit them with the spray, he'd watched them die and drop off into the dirt. There should be hundreds of roach corpses under there. Where had they all gone? There wasn't a one that he could see.

Bernice could tell that he was puzzling over something.

"What is it?" she said.

"Nothing. Just looking," Carl replied. "I thought he might be hiding behind a pipe or something."

He backed out of the access hole and stood up, his legs and back aching. He stretched, swiveled his shoulders.

"He isn't under there," Carl said. He bent down and replaced the access panel.

"You're sure? Absolutely sure?" Bernice asked.

"I'm sure."

Carl's house slippers were soaked with dew and he was anxious to get them off and to warm his feet up under the covers. He was wide awake now, of course, and worried about the roaches. He didn't understand where they could have gone. He'd seen the cats eat bugs before. Could Groucho have gotten under the house somehow and gorged himself on dead roaches? Was he lying under a bush, dead from ingesting bug poison? But Groucho couldn't have eaten every single one.

It couldn't possibly be Groucho's skeleton under there. It couldn't.

"I won't be able to sleep a wink," Bernice said, "knowing poor Groucho's out there suffering."

"Groucho's probably out there getting laid," Carl muttered under his breath. He left his wet slippers by the back door and tiptoed across the cold hardwood floor of the hallway to the carpet of the bedroom. He dived beneath the covers and kicked his feet to warm the sheets that had cooled in his absence. He heard Bernice opening cabinet doors and running water in the kitchen. She was probably taking a pill.

"I took a pill," Bernice said as she crawled into bed. "Otherwise I'd toss and turn and worry about Groucho all night."

Bernice found a reason almost every night to take a pill.

"He's fine," Carl said. "You'll see. He'll be here for breakfast in the morning."

Carl leaned over and gave his wife a kiss and said "Goodnight." He turned his back to her and pressed his butt against hers and lay that way for a few seconds. Then the arm he was lying on started to hurt and he turned onto his back. He didn't like sleeping that way but he had a pinched nerve or something in his left arm that bothered him when he slept on it. He'd been meaning to talk to Doc Milford about it but he knew that Doc would just tell him it was old age creeping up, and Carl didn't want to pay good money to hear that.

It took Carl about four minutes to go to sleep. Bernice was asleep sooner than that, not because of the pill that hadn't even entered her system yet, but because she knew she'd taken the pill and therefore had an excuse for not lying awake worrying about Groucho any longer. Heather and Zoe and Pumpkin returned and took up their places on the bed covers. By eleven o'clock, the Tompkins household was sleeping soundly.

None of them noticed the first cockroach slip under the carpet by the wall and into the bedroom, its antennae feeling the air for signs of life.

Following the first cockroach there came another, and then a steady stream of roaches flowed into the bedroom with a mathematical precision that would have impressed Clyde Dunwiddey. Their numbers seemed to explode exponentially as they poured from the walls, skittering through every crevice. They moved like liquid, oozing up through the cracks and over the carpet toward the bed where Carl and Bernice slept, deep in their dreams.

The cats woke and meowed in alarm. They padded around on top of the bed, meowing, but Carl was a heavy sleeper accustomed to ignoring cats, and Bernice would not be roused from her drug-induced slumber. Heather leaped from the bed into the sea of roaches and bounded out of the room. Zoe and Pumpkin followed her.

The roaches engulfed the bed posts. They clambered over one another as they climbed, their sharp insect legs
scritching
against the wood and scratching for purchase on the slippery shells of their brethren. Roaches swarmed over the bed from all four corners and engulfed the sleepers. They crawled into ears and nose and mouth, slid under the sheets and inside Carl's pajamas and under Bernice's night dress. Their mandibles tore at soft flesh.

Carl was suddenly aware that he couldn't breathe. He woke with a mouth and nose stuffed with wriggling roaches. He tried to cough but he couldn't dislodge the roaches from his throat. Vomit rushed up his esophagus and into his mouth and slipped down his trachea into his lungs. He crunched roaches between his teeth as he heaved and more roaches descended over his face, pouring in from everywhere. He dug at them with his hands as he tumbled out of bed and onto a floor undulating with roaches.

He groped for the light switch and flipped it on, hoping the light would scare them off. He saw that his bed had become a sea of roaches. He saw Bernice's body as an unmoving lump beneath the mass of insects, already dead. The sleeping pill had spared her this horror.

The roaches bit at his eyes and Carl squeezed them shut. He couldn't get a breath, couldn't expel the roaches from his airways. He brushed frantically at them as they swarmed over his body. He staggered over the carpet of roaches that crunched and spat gore with every step. His chest was on fire. His stomach heaved. He doubled over, gagging. His foot slipped, and he felt himself falling, falling. He landed on his back in the middle of the writhing mass.

They swallowed him whole. They covered his eyes and face and crawled deeper into his ears. He heard their clicking mandibles through a hurricane roar as they dug in. He was dizzy from lack of oxygen, his head swam. He knew he was dying, knew that Bernice was already dead, knew what had stripped the flesh from the skeleton in the crawl space, knew that the same fate lay in store for him, for Bernice. He knew that nothing in death could match the horror of these, his last living moments.

Oblivion came as a blessing.

Brant sat next to Peg on her bed and carefully unbuttoned her blouse. They'd made out for awhile on the porch swing and when she'd pulled away from him, Brant had expected her to tell him it was time to go. Instead she'd said, "Let's go inside," and she'd led him up to her bedroom.

Brant opened her blouse down to her waist, where it was tucked inside her skirt. She sat up straight so he could pull it loose and finish his unbuttoning. He took his time, and Peg found the sexual tension exhilarating. Brant was stretching out the moment, obviously savoring the thrill. This was a good portent of things to come, and Peg let herself imagine that an orgasm lay in her not-too-distant future.

God knows they'd been few and far between with Rod.

She sloughed off her shirt and reached around to unfasten her bra but Brant stopped her, wanting to do it himself.

"Removing a bra was the only useful skill I learned in high school," he said, "besides typing."

The bra came loose and Peg's breasts fell free. There had been a time when they would have stood out firm and pert. She wished Brant could have seen them then, men have such an obsession with tits. She hoped they didn't look too motherly to be erotic. She tugged at his shirt and he took the hint and pulled it off. She put her hands behind his neck and pulled him close, kissed him deeply on the mouth. He leaned into the kiss and their bodies met. Soon they were fumbling with snaps and zippers, then his fingers were exploring between her legs and she was holding him in her hand.

He seemed determined to kiss every inch of her body before entering her, even rolling her over onto her stomach and kissing the back of her neck, down her spine, kissing her bottom, her hips, the inside of her thighs. It felt like forever before he was inside her and they were rolling together in passion.

She climaxed first. Then almost immediately, as the hot waves crashed through her, she felt him come. For Brant, the long denial paid off with rush after rush, every second drawn out in time until it seemed that he'd never stop. When he did finally roll over in exhaustion, Peg rolled on top of him and planted a long kiss on his mouth.

They lay together in post-coital reverie, Peg nestled into Brant's shoulder, and let the breeze from the window cool their bodies. Brant glanced at the alarm clock on Peg's night stand. Its glowing face told him it was nearing midnight.

For awhile he had completely forgotten about Duffy and Haws and whatever other Risen were lurking outside. Tom would have met his friends at the mortuary by now, and in another few minutes they might be witnesses to a miracle.

Brant looked at Peg and observed that he had a miracle of his own right here. It took the form of a woman he cared about and who cared about him and who was pretty and unmarried and good in the sack. It seemed to Brant as if every event of his life had existed for the sole purpose of propelling him toward this moment.

It surprised him to realize that somehow, amid a lot of extremely strange and menacing goings-on, life had become quite good.

***