Violet Eyes (22 page)

Rachel walked into the office and was immediately hit with something
not
good. Ken Harold, the supervisor, called her into his office. He pointed at a stack of manila files on the side of his desk and asked her, “Does this look like a good place for files?”

She watched the fat beneath his chin jiggle as he said it and struggled not to laugh. Somehow, watching Ken Harold talk was like watching a rooster strut. There was a lot of ego, but on a close glance, not too much to back it up.

Carefully, slowly, Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t put them there,” she finally said, in a very small, don’t-punish-me voice.

Ken grinned. She hated it when he grinned. It reminded her of a giant slug with teeth.

“I didn’t say you did,” he offered. “But I would like you to help me take care of them today.”

Seriously
? Rachel thought. Her bosses’ boss was going to reposition her solely to help file a bunch of crap that probably nobody in the world would ever read again before it ultimately ended up in the shredder? That wasn’t why they’d asked her to work a Saturday!

“Yes sir,” she said, instead.

For the next two hours, she had to endure his bad breath and even worse jokes as she helped him organize his office.

When she finally got to go back to her cubicle, Susan caught her before she’d even entered her cube. She’d been asked to work overtime too.

“Did you see this?” Susan asked.

She threw a copy of the
Passanattee Times
down on the desk. The first headline made it instantly obvious what Susan was upset about.

Spider Scourge Spreads:

Local Teen Found Dead from Bites

“My neighbor has been complaining to me for days about how she has all these spiders all over their street and on the sidewalks and they’re getting into her house and the village won’t do anything,” Susan said. “She had to call the exterminators.”

For once the beach blonde’s voice didn’t sound perky, Rachel thought.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” Susan said. “I was visiting at the Windsor Retirement Home the other night, and the place is just overrun with flies. The people there are getting bit like crazy, and they say the exterminators aren’t doing any good!”

Rachel skimmed the article about how two teens had stumbled on the half-eaten body of another high school girl at the edge of the woods. The article noted that this discovery followed reports of two other local children listed as missing, as well as several area pets. A local official was quoted as advising people to stay close to home and to carry insect repellant at all times while out-of-doors until the current migration of dangerous arachnids had passed.

How people were to know when the insects passed was another question.

“Creepy, huh?” Susan said. She was chewing gum, and popped it just then with a snap that made Rachel jump.
There
was the typical Susan showing through the anxiety.

“Yeah,” Rachel said. Her voice dropped. “I don’t think we’re going to get our puppy back.”

Susan stopped chewing and raised an eyebrow. “No,” she said, her tone now completely serious. “I don’t think you will.”

That didn’t stop Rachel from making one hundred copies of the missing poster of Feral before she finally was allowed to go home at three in the afternoon. And as soon as she stepped in the front door, Eric ran from where he sat on the couch with Jeremy to ask, “Did you make more signs?”

Rachel nodded, and fifteen minutes later, they were driving around the neighborhood. She hated to make him do it, but it made the most sense for her to drive from house to house and for Eric to run up the concrete or brick walkways to ring the bell and hand out a flyer with Feral’s picture on it to whoever answered the door. They could cover the most ground the fastest this way…but it meant that Eric had to open his heart again and again and again to strangers.

Only to have it trampled.

“Have you seen my puppy?” he asked at door after door, presenting the flyer with Feral’s picture.

Every “no”, no matter how gentle, had to have been a stab in Eric’s spirit. Block by block as Rachel saw doors
not
open to Eric’s knocks, and then those that did reveal shaking, negative heads, Rachel felt her son’s energy wane.

They had covered all of the east side of the neighborhood, and worked their way back to their own block to go the other way by 7 p.m., and Rachel was beginning to think it was time to call it a night.

“We are gonna have to stop for dinner soon,” she warned, but the threat only seemed to boost Eric’s dying energy. “We have to keep going,” he insisted. His face was flushed from running up and down sidewalks and explaining his mission.

“Another half an hour, and that’s it,” she said.

She turned the corner on Morningside, and stopped at the first house. As Eric ran up the walk and rang the bell, Rachel looked down the block. The street was silent; black asphalt un-cluttered by cars. The streetlights hadn’t gone on yet, but every parkway looked lush, low and green—the product of a wet spring. There were no kids on the lawns, and no cars in the driveways…the place looked deserted, though there were already some front porch lights turned on. It got eerily quiet around here after dusk, Rachel thought. Hell, sometimes it was eerily quiet at noon…but she was rarely around to witness it.

She looked farther down the street and frowned. It was almost as if one of the houses was cloaked in a cloud. The more she looked, the more she realized she couldn’t make out any details of the roof or sides. There was the vague shape of the house…and the white of cotton.

Eric ran down to the next house and the next, and she followed in the car, now watching the house ahead of them more than she was her son. The closer it loomed, the more she realized that something was terribly wrong.

At first she’d thought there was some kind of water spray in the air, or some equipment she couldn’t see spouting out steam. But now she could see the house appeared to be covered in something like cotton. Something thin, see-through, white, fuzzy…it was thick but not so thick that she couldn’t see the house through it.

But what was it…and why was it there at all?

She let the car coast a house, and then another. When they were two houses away, she put the car in park and rolled down the passenger’s window. Then she called out to Eric.

“Eric, come here,” she demanded.

When he returned to the car, she pointed at the house just down the block. “I don’t think we should go near that,” she said.

“Me either,” Eric agreed. “Tracie and I went there the other day. The place is crawling with spiders.”

“You
went
there?”

Eric shrugged. “Yeah, I saw it when I went to her house. It looked weird. But I don’t think anyone’s living there anymore.”

“No,” Rachel agreed. “I don’t suppose they are. And I think that this is probably a good place for us to call it a night. We can hit the rest of the neighborhood tomorrow.”

Surprisingly, Eric didn’t complain at all. She couldn’t tell if it was because of exhaustion, or depression that so far nobody had admitted to ever seeing Feral.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said.

Eric dropped the remaining flyers in his hand to the car floor, and didn’t answer. He just looked out the window as she turned around one driveway before the spider-web house.

She thought she heard tears in a sniffle. But she didn’t ask.

There are some things that everyone wants to deal with alone.

Even when you’re just a kid.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Monday, May 20. 5:15 p.m.

On Monday, the flies attacked. They swarmed out of the swamp around Passanattee like a violet cloud. They attacked people as they walked from their cars on the way to the office, and they settled on people in the park playing ball or Frisbee. Their bites stung like fire. People tried to use OFF and RAID and other bug sprays, but nothing kept the things away. They attacked anyone walking outside without warning, like a cloud of hunger. By 2 p.m., the local radio and TV outlets were issuing special bulletins and warning everyone to stay indoors to avoid the swarms and to wear protective covering—like raincoats—if they had to venture outside. But not everyone stayed inside by choice. Some of them stayed inside because they couldn’t move anymore. Because the people of Passanattee had begun dying.

On her way home from work, Rachel heard sirens on virtually every block. And as she passed into the quieter streets of her own neighborhood, she saw three more homes completely covered in spider webs. Not only were the flies biting and stinging people to death from the air, but the spiders appeared to be taking over from the ground.

As she slowed down to pull into her driveway, she glanced across the street at Billy’s house. That’s when she noticed the reflection of the sun off the fine strands of silk that led from the home’s side gutters to the bushes below. She hadn’t seen Billy in days…and the fact that his house was now overrun with spiders didn’t bode well. She made a quiet “hmmm” to herself and shut off the car.

She didn’t realize how worried she had been about Eric getting home safe from school until she opened the front door and he jumped up off the couch. Then she took in a gasp of air and realized she’d been holding her breath since getting out of the car. He’d gotten home from school safely.
Thank God.
She hated it that she couldn’t be there when he got out, and now with all that was going on…

“Mom,” he cried, running towards her. “It’s crazy out there. They told us at school that we couldn’t go outside for recess and maybe they might even close school for a couple days if they can’t get the flies under control. Principal McStevens said that it’s, like…Biblical.”

Rachel’s heart grew cold at that word. It was the kind of thing Anders would have said. She thought just about the only book he ever read was the Bible. He didn’t seem to see any irony in the fact that he broke most of the Ten Commandments on a regular basis. She didn’t think he’d ever killed anybody, but he lied, cheated and stole, rarely went to church and she saw his eyes on other women all the time. She had no proof that he’d committed adultery, but she guessed he had. Certainly he had “coveted”. Still, Anders would quote the Bible as if he were a preacher to support the things he wanted other people to do for him. He simply ignored the parts that condemned most of his own actions.

Rachel gave Eric a firm hug. “I heard at work today that they’re going to spray the whole town with insecticide tonight,” she said. “They’ve got planes coming in with it, and once it gets dark, they’ll fly over. Hopefully tomorrow, we’ll be cleaning up a lot of dead bugs, instead of hiding from them!”

She thanked Jeremy, and told him to be careful walking home. Then she set her purse down on the kitchen counter. As she did, a handful of flies took off from the sink, and almost immediately came back down to land. She watched them walk across the Formica surface. They walked almost as one, slow, deliberate insect steps. Like they shared a hive mind. And they were walking towards her, not away. She watched them advance, and noticed their eyes. She tapped her fingers on the counter, but this time they didn’t leap into the air, as when she’d first startled them.

Instead, they simply swiveled their black heads and watched her with glittery purple eyes.

Eyes almost metallic.

They looked exactly like the flies that Billy had described attacking them on the Key. “Violet eyes,” he’d said. She knew without a doubt that these were the same bugs that Billy and his friends had run into on Sheila Key. Maybe he had brought them back with him when he’d escaped. And they’d multiplied. In two weeks they’d multiplied into a deadly swarm.

Rachel backed slowly away from the counter and picked up a newspaper from the other side of the room. She rolled it up, slowly, and returned to the sink, with her arm raised. When she brought the paper down, she managed to smash two of them at the same time. 

The other three droned around the room, and two of them settled on the kitchen window near the table. She followed them, and smashed one behind the drapes. The other she mashed to the table seconds after it landed. She wasn’t sure where the last one went, but she pledged now to comb the house for the creatures. 

But first, she had another mission. 

Thinking of Billy talking about the violet flies on Sheila Key had reminded her of the spider webs on his house. And the fact that she hadn’t seen him in days. Something inside her suggested that despite getting away from the flies on Sheila Key, maybe he hadn’t really escaped at all.

“Eric,” she said. “I’m going to run across the street to check on Billy. Maybe he’s home by now.”

“I’ll come with,” he said.

“I’d rather if you stayed inside,” she said. But he protested, and at last she gave in. She didn’t really want him to go near the spiders, but she had to admit she also wasn’t keen about walking up to the house alone. She’d never been fond of spiders.

Eric slipped on his sandals and together they crossed the street. The neighborhood was quiet for late afternoon. You could hear the hum of electric in the air, and the whir of air conditioning units working. But that was all. There were no kids’ voices or barking dogs or anything. Even the locusts seem to have stilled. Rachel cleared a silken web from the doorway and then opened the screen door and knocked three times on Billy’s inner wooden door. They waited for a few seconds for some kind of response. “I can’t believe he’s still not home,” Rachel said under her breath. They waited another few seconds and when there was no response, Rachel knocked again.

“Maybe he’s working in the backyard,” Eric suggested.

“We can check,” Rachel said, “But don’t get too close to the house.”

“Why not?” he asked, as they cut across the lawn to the side of the house. Rachel pointed up at the roof when they rounded the corner.

“That,” she said.

“Whoa!” he said. “It’s just like Mrs. Haidan’s house. Only they’re not really in the front at all.”