The Swarm Read online

  The Swarm

  By

  Rob Heinze

  Copyright © 2012 by Rob Heinze

  www.sketchesfromacelestialsea.com

  All Rights Reserved.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another reader, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book (not just the sample) and you did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to places, events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is recommended for mature audiences. Contents include sexual situations and descriptions, obscene language and violence. Reader discretion is advised.

  Author’s Note

  Dear Celestial Sea Wanderer:

  This is a self-published book, making me an Indie author. What does this mean? Well, for one, it means I can charge a lot less for my stuff, hoping that people will discover it and enjoy it. But most importantly, it means that I must put my stuff out to the public (you, Celestial Sea Wanderer) without the protective layer of professional editing. That means, when reading this book, you might catch me with my fly down, foolishly saying “stuck” when I should be saying “struck”. Anyone who has tried to proof-read their own work will know that there is some sort of pre-existing grooves that your eyes and mind fall into that prevents you from going anywhere else, like pitted tire-tracks of an old dirt road on which you are driving. So where there are typos like “where” instead of “were”, I do apologize. I have put forth my best effort to catch these oops, and hope that it won’t detract too much from your reading experience. If you’re a reader on whom this will have an impact, I suggest you not spend your $0.99 on this book. But I think I have caught most of the big errors, especially after the first couple reviews came in.

  I wrote the first draft of THE SWARM in roughly 8 days. This book possessed me (or as a bad writer might write: I was possessed by the book). Is it any good? After six years of not writing a single word of fiction (I had all but given up after being teased then rejected by the big Publishers), I don’t know. All I know is, this story poured out of me with little thought, layering itself neatly and properly as the story progressed. And when I was writing it, I felt like I couldn’t do any wrong, since I wasn’t so much creating it as I was transcribing it. Writing it was like discovering a crate full of rare jewels in your attic; amazing, unexpected and unforgettable. I did not plot or plan or create an outline for any part of this book: each successive scene came forth while writing as if I had simply received a mental broadcast of a new movie. All this doesn’t mean that it will have the same effect on you, the Reader, as it did for me, the Creator. After all, how many parents praise their children to you, when you think they’re little pains-in-the-ass and in need of some Adderall? (As a guy with ADHD, I am entitled to say this.) But I hope it does.

  The Swarm did start with an idea, though. The story was inspired by a special on National Geographic in which they were featuring the Christmas Island Crabs. Run a Google image search for these guys and see what you get. Here is a species of crab that migrates across an island, towards the ocean to reproduce, heedless of their own safety, indicating that it is more important to procreate than to live. I was absolutely captivated by this (particularly when the camera filmed the crabs getting run over with the audible crunch-pop…sorry about that).

  Well, you know how I do: I started to think, what if people did that and didn’t know they were doing that? And more importantly, why would people do that? I hope you enjoy The Swarm; it was great fun to write (especially about the guy in the town dump…oh, man, you’ll see!). And if you are like the first reviewer on Amazon.com (who gave me a 1-star and wrote “BURN THIS BOOK”) who is bothered by reality—or how horrific things can, and do, happen in reality—then I suggest you not read any further. I don’t want to trouble people who write or say “Good Grief!” instead of “What the fuck?” THE SWARM and its contents will certainly ruffle these folk’s feathers, to steal a cliché.

  One last thing—if you like reading this, can I ask for a favor? Put a good review on whatever site you purchased it on, and check out my other books, all of which have a similar style and subject matter. I only want people to enjoy reading my stuff and get freaked out or entertained or whatever. You can also drop me a line at [email protected], or post a question on Amazon’s product page; I will do my best to answer it.

  Now let me ask you this, Celestial Sea Wanderer: what would you do if you woke up naked on a beach with 12,000 other people and didn’t remember what happened?

  That’s some deep stuff right there, yo…deep stuff.

  Rob Heinze

  Hunterdon County, NJ

  2012

  Fiction by Rob Heinze

  Novels (ebooks)

  The New Law (not published)

  Dreamweaver

  Dark Wafts

  Weeds

  Blackwood Barker

  Old Dirt Road

  Worldwide Answers (not published)

  The Chaser: Dark Storm 1 (fantasy)

  Easterly Retreat

  Strange Places

  Those of the Light & Dark

  Skylights

  Glasdel (fantasy)

  Lake in the Bad Neighborhood

  How a Psychic Vampire Came to Stafford

  The Swarm

  Short Story Collections

  Sketches from a Celestial Sea (Volume 1)

  Crystal Ruins

  Chapter 1

  Several hours before the start of what would be known as The Swarm, Dawn Thompson awoke mid-sleep and felt the blood along her legs. Paul was asleep next to her, which she barely realized: all her senses were focused on the blood. She frantically felt along the bed sheet, moving her palms in hectic loops. She yanked them up, looked at them—

  Clean, she thought. They’re clean.

  But she could feel the blood, its tacky coldness coating her thighs and butt in a pseudo-encasing. It was solidifying as she thought about it.

  It must have dried, she thought. I must have bled last night without realizing…

  Her chest was moving in rapid, quick respirations like that of a tiny animal. She leapt out of bed. It was full dark and the strange glow of the satellite receiver was her only light. She staggered to the bathroom in a slight bow-legged waddle, not wanting her thighs to rub the gore together, flipped the light on, and looked down at her legs.

  For a single minute she swore she saw the maroon blood, crusted and drying—

  It’s dying, oh God…

  —on her legs. But within a moment, the illusion had vanished and she was left to stare at her clean-shaven legs, smooth and seamless in the cold blue LED lights of the bathroom. For a long time, she couldn’t move. She had locked herself into a rigor mortis pose, knees bent slightly, back arched at a small angle.

  “Dawn?”

  She screamed, then turned to see Paul standing in the doorway. His face still bore the scars of sleep—creases and half-mast eyes—but therein she could see his concern.

  And fear, Dawn, he’s afraid too…he doesn’t want it to happen again.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t speak. He took at tentative step towards her. After eight years of marriage, they had become attuned to each other’s reactions. It was a cliché, after all, that married couples know what the other will do before he or she even does it. In this case, Paul was right: Dawn started to sob—disjointed, malforme
d cries that disturbed Paul. He had heard her cry like that once: just as he had come racing home from work six months ago.

  That’s how crazy people cry, he thought. Or laugh.

  He went to her immediately and embraced her. She stiffened, trying to squirm away, which in the early years of marriage had confused Paul and led to many fights and accusations of his insensitivity. Now he knew that her resistance was a defense mechanism, and he persisted in his embrace. Her cries began to taper into steadier, human cries and he held her harder, wondering what might have happened had he not been home.

  He didn’t need to ask why she was crying. He already knew. But he asked anyway, because that spec of fear was always with him too.

  “What happened?”

  “Blood…I had a dream I was bleeding,” she said, then cried harder.

  Paul felt his own tears coming, and swallowed them back hard as the lump in his throat grew exponentially. He told her it was okay, there was no blood, look, babe, no blood, it’s okay, and he led her towards the bed. He turned the light on and together they scanned the sheets. They were white sheets (if not slightly yellow), old sheets, blood-less sheets.

  “There’s no blood,” he said.

  He didn’t want to ask any more about the dream. He didn’t need to know the details.

  “I’m so scared,” she said. “I can’t go through that again.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “Me either.”

  Their house around them was quiet and brooding, a nail popping in the rooms downstairs. Outside he could hear the crickets in their night symphony. It took a long time before they were both able to get back into bed, Paul relaxing faster than Dawn. She lay long after he started snoring, unable to lower her defenses. Sleep was the ultimate defenselessness, wasn’t it? You opened yourself up to dreams—nightmares—and sometimes worse: madness, insanity, death.

  It’s okay this time, she told herself.

  And she prayed, as she had done since she was a little girl.

  She prayed as she had when the fetus had come out of her six-months ago, making horrendous plopping sounds as it fell into the toilet. It had come in successive waves, her astonished at how much stuff there was. She had never felt sheer terror, not like that moment, not the moment when God said fuck you and ordered gravity to pull her baby out. And how did you get over that? How could you pray? How could it take a 28-year-old girl a year to conceive, months of trying and testing and testing and trying, only for her vagina to vomit the product into the toilet? There was no poetry or beauty in that, no God: just irrationality.

  This time it stuck, she told herself. This time it’s okay.

  # # #

  In the morning, Paul got up first and made coffee. Then he sat on the couch and watched the news. There was no need for Paul to tell himself that he worried about Dawn. It was very clear that if this pregnancy was a miscarriage, she would go insane. She would not be the same woman. He couldn’t fault her. It was hard to stay sane with something like that happening once, let along twice. Paul, who had not thought the miscarriage would have impacted him so much, felt the desire to cry again. He had no kids (if he had, his emotions would have been greater), but when he thought about his nephews (both were teenagers now), he imagined how his baby might have grown.

  It’s six weeks, he told himself. Six weeks and no bleeding. She started bleeding at five weeks last time, two days after taking the fucking test. But she’s not bleeding now. This one will work.

  He brought her up breakfast and coffee (decaf), which he did every day. She was lying in bed, awake, with no TV on. She was staring at the window, the blinds of which were down. That meant she had been crying. He smiled at her, and she hated that smile: it was too sympathetic, a smile you gave someone really fucked.

  But I am, she thought.

  “Hey,” he said. He put the coffee on the nightstand with the bagel and sat down. “Okay?”

  “No,” she said. “How could I be?”

  “I know,” he said.

  “The dreams stopped until I took that test,” she said. “Now I am…”

  She started crying again. Paul got up to hug her, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want comfort: she wanted certainty and he couldn’t give it to her.

  “This one feels different,” he told her. “Right?”

  She sobbed a bit more. “I guess, I don’t know.”

  “You told me it did. You said that you didn’t feel sick with this one.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, that’s something. It’s different. The last one was…I don’t know. Not meant to be.”

  “Is it ever meant to be?” She asked.

  “Yes, now.”

  He tried to put a hand on her stomach, low, but she shrugged away.

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  They sat oddly for a while. Paul felt he had to say something but couldn’t think of anything.

  “Until I see a doctor, I won’t be okay.”

  “When’s the appointment?”

  “Next week, Friday.”

  “Okay,” he thought. “Eight days away.”

  “I just want someone to tell me it’s fine.”

  “It is fine,” he said. “Look, you said that you were sick for two weeks the last time and that you had cramps before you took the test, right? You started bleeding right after you took the test. So three days have passed since the test, and you’re not bleeding. Have you had cramps?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, just small ones…”

  “Probably implantation,” he said.

  They had both become experts at scourging the internet chat boards for experiences of women who’ve had miscarriages. Any tidbit that brought them solace was welcomed, anything that The God Google could bestow upon them, and which they could then contort to soothe their minds, was a blessing. The morning of the miscarriage, she had told him her cramps were really bad but that she ate yogurt for breakfast and that it might be gas. He had brought her two Rolaids with anti-gas and given them to her. Then he had gone to work. An hour later she had called, and he knew what was happening before she said anything. “I need you…” was all she had said, and he had rushed out of his office, his secretary asking if everything was okay, he not being able to answer and his feet, damn them, couldn’t move right (cold, it was cold outside) and the car, he drove so fast, going 55 mph down the suburban streets of Bay Isle City, he lucky that no cops had seen him. Most of all, he remembered the sound that she made when he had come inside the mud room. It was not a sound he had heard before, not from her: it forced his skin to contract across his entire body, his testicles pulling up into his body.

  She’s dying, he had thought.

  He had rushed into the living room, towards that God-awful noise, he nearly tripping over the throw rug, his heart beat seeming to somehow grow his ears with each thud. She had been sitting on the couch with her head in her hands. “Let’s go…” he had said, taking her hand and saying nothing else, and he had helped her to the laundry room where her larynx had stopped producing that noise, thank God, but she was trembling and Paul was so mad, so angry that she had to go through this, and she had told him, “the toilet, I have to clean it…” he telling her to forget it, it’s okay, urging her softly but sternly into the car. The doctors had told her, yes, you were having a miscarriage (thank you, assholes, how much do I owe you?) and then they were left to sit in silence for eight hours as an arsenal of mostly unnecessary tests were run.

  He remembered all this in the span of a few minutes, and he knew that his playing Doctor and relying on Google as a consultant would not comfort her. It didn’t comfort him.

  “I don’t think I can go through that again,” she said.

  “Me either,” he said.

  “I mean it,” she said, looking at him. Her eyes were clear and cold. “I won’t make it.”

  For a moment he almost asked, what do you mean? But her eyes: they told him. She would not be the woman he loved anymore
, not in mind or soul, and their marriage would crumble and the life he—they—had dreamed would become impossible. They had spoken about adoption, fertility treatments, but only in passing and with no real seriousness.

  “It will be okay,” he said.

  Their conversation ended at that. Paul got into the shower and left for work. Dawn had the day off, as she was working tomorrow, so she lay in bed until after he left. Even then, when the sun moved positions in the sky and the room was filled with natural light, Dawn did not move or turn the TV on or dare to think an optimistic thought. Optimism, she knew, was a sure way to encounter disappointment.

  When she finally did manage to get out of bed, she showered, went downstairs, and turned on the laptop. She gave The God Google its daily offering of searches, requesting that it enlighten her with “dreams after miscarriage” information. She read through some people’s experiences, looking for something telling her when they would stop. She knew, of course, that the first three months of the pregnancy were the most tentative. She also knew she had to relax, or she would self-fulfill her nightmare. It had been six months since the miscarriage, and the dreams had tampered off about two months after losing the baby. The night after she took the test, confirming she was pregnant, and the dreams had started again. They did not occur every night, but they happened enough. It was in that late-morning hour, as she gave praise to Google, that she told herself this was it: if she miss-carried this one, she wouldn’t try anymore. She would have Paul get snipped.

  She went to the couch, sat, and turned the TV on. There was a news show on, and she left it unchanged, gazing absently at it. There was an anchor interviewing an older woman about a tree that had fallen on her house two days ago from a storm, and the woman’s name displayed on the screen.

  Dawn saw it, and yelped.

  Miss Kari