Warped Brood

Chapter 1: Now

Ray wakes up on a bare, stained mattress on the basement floor with the worst headache he's ever had. Boards cover the windows, but stray rays of morning light peek through the cracks. He stands and steadies himself against the bumper pool table until the dizziness ebbs away. The thin light is just enough for him to see her sleeping on the couch. Ray shuffles closer, listening to her shallow, rapid breathing. Her face is sunken and her lips are cracked.

It's getting harder and harder to think. Although he has no fat left, his body feels heavy. Like the planet's gravity has changed.

Maybe it has. Who knows?

Ray slumps into a recliner and tries to think of what to do. Although he'd never say it to her, in truth he fantasizes often about putting the revolver's barrel in his mouth. He's actually done it a couple times when she was asleep, just to see what it's like. But as long as she's alive, he has to stay. Well. It'll be over soon one way or another.

Her voice is hardly more than a hoarse whisper, but it still startles him. How are you feeling?

Ray thinks about the question. It takes some effort to put words together. I have to go out today.

Don't.

I have to.

It's got to rain soon. The water collectors will work.

Maybe. I hope so. What he doesn't say is that she's doing even worse than him, that he's sure her time will be measured in hours rather than days if he doesn't at least find some water. Or that he doesn't feel confident he has many days left with the strength to go out at all.

Don't go into houses.

He says nothing.

Go into houses, you're going to get shot. And they won't have any water left anyway.

He stands and takes a moment to steady himself. Everywhere else is cleared out.

She still lies perfectly still. Go over to the lake maybe? We can boil it.

Ray picks up a backpack and unzips it. We have no idea if boiling even does anything. I have to try to find something bottled. But he puts empty plastic bottles in the backpack anyway, telling himself he'll bring some lake water only if he can find nothing else.

Be careful. Please.

Ray stuffs the revolver into the waistband of his filthy jeans. The things out there completely ignored people at first, while there was so much else for them to harvest. But now that everything is stripped bare, they've been coming at Ray more and more aggressively over the last few weeks. The last time he went out, he saw with his own eyes what one of those things did to a neighbor, a guy about his age whose name he couldn't remember. Made him seriously consider whether it's better to die in the basement quickly with a bullet from his own gun.

He sits at the edge of the couch and holds her hand. It's cold and very dry. Her expression tells him she's crying, but no tears form. Ray squeezes her hand and puts a blanket over her, then trudges up the steps.

Ray cracks the door and peers through, squinting against the light, listening for movement. No sound at all. He looks back at her and takes a deep breath, then steps out quietly. He pads into the first-floor hallway and gingerly steps around a pool of tar-like scum, black with gray streaks through it. The stench makes him pull his t-shirt up over his face. A rank odor of old cat litter and toxic chemicals. His eyes water and burn.

The walls are half-eaten. When he reaches the living room, he's shocked at how much has been ruined. They'd consumed the houseplants and some of the couch cushions long ago, but now most of the furniture is completely gone. Big chunks of wall, ceiling, and floor gnawed away.

Ray stops and stares through a hole in the wall big enough for a man to crawl through. He looks back toward the basement door and scratches his beard. If or when those things decide to eat through that, then the basement won't be much of a refuge anymore.

They need to have a serious discussion when he gets back. Make some plans. Difficult decisions.

But one thing at a time. Water first. He goes slowly, wide-eyed, ears open, sidling up to the sliding glass door. Peeking one eye around the corner, he watches for movement. The spring sun shines, but under the achingly beautiful sky, the earth has been completely stripped and fouled.

The grass. Flowers. Trees. Anything green is gone. No birds anywhere. No cats, no dogs, not even a squirrel. The complete lack of birdsong in spring is deeply unsettling. He once saw a couple of the creatures float down into Keppler Lake, so he assumes by now the fish are gone, too.

And the ooze is everywhere. On the dirt, streets, sidewalks, houses. Some dark green, some purple or red or black. Sometimes it pools in watery puddles, and sometimes it looks more like a semisolid goo. But the sickening smell is always the same.

Ray slides the door open and pokes his head out, eyes and ears straining. He squints across yards in every direction, considering which way to go. The grocery stores, convenience stores, and gas stations were cleaned out long ago. Despite her pleas, checking houses is his best shot at finding something to drink. He grimaces and wrings his hands. North. He'll go north and skirt the edge of Reed Park, checking houses along the way. If none of those work out, he can see about the little water park, the lake, and the pond. But only as a last resort.

Crouching, head on a swivel, he dashes from yard to yard, always stopping after each sprint to hide behind a house, fence, or car. To catch his breath and scan the area. Ray tries to keep his footsteps and breathing as quiet as possible, but it occurs to him that he doesn't know if they even rely on a sense of hearing. Or sight for that matter. Who could know what modes of perception they use to hunt? Maybe they use smell, echolocation, or electromagnetic fields. Maybe his efforts at stealth are all pointless.

He makes his way across the back yards of houses along the edge of the park. Bursts of frantic speed alternating with hiding. Listening. Watching.

Pressed up against the siding of a small, white Cape Cod, he draws deep breaths. His tank has long been empty, and he's running on some blind and groping animal instinct for survival. Ray grits his teeth and slides along the house to the back, where he tries the door. Locked. He peers in windows, tries to open them, but none give. For a few heartbeats, he considers breaking a window, but decides it would be too loud. And anyway, he'd probably end up cutting himself.

The back door of the next house stands wide open. Ray adjusts and re-adjusts his grip on the gun as he steps inside. A musty laundry room. Into the kitchen. The fridge and cabinets all open and empty. A chair flipped on its side and dried blood stains smeared across the floor.

The next unlocked house so nauseates him with an overwhelming smell of death that he immediately falls to dry heaving and backs out the way he came, burying his mouth and nose in the crook of his elbow.

Another house has locked doors but he finds a window that slides up easily. Ray opens it and moves the curtain slightly to peer in. Darkness fills the room. Part of his mind screams at him to leave. But desperation drives him to pull himself up and in, his muscles rubbery from running on nothing but adrenaline.

Ray ungracefully falls through the window, banging his head on some unseen sharp edge of furniture and landing awkwardly on his shoulder. He sucks air through his teeth and lies there for a moment, listening.

A sound somewhere in the room. Shuffling.

With his eyes open as wide as they can possibly be, Ray holds his breath. He senses movement.

Hello? Listen. My name's Ray. I live a few blocks away. I'm truly sorry to come in here like this, and I'm not here to hurt—

A gunshot explodes with a flash and Ray's heart almost bursts. His ears ring with the shock of it and his limbs pull him up and push him back out the way he came and he runs in a random direction as two more shots ring out and sing past his head.

The urge to enter his neighbors' homes now gone, Ray makes his way around the north side of the park to have a look at the open bodies of water there, starting with Turtle Splash Water Park. Sludge covers the water slides, the fake rock waterfall, and the rows of beach chairs. The pool is a stinking, murky soup.

Ray's heart sinks when he finds Keppler Lake to be similarly fouled. The Reed Park pond seems a little less contaminated, with only the bank on one side darkly stained. He squats at the water's edge farthest from the sullied shore and fills a bottle. Raising it to his nose carefully as if the water might jump, he sniffs.

It smells brackish. Ray holds the bottle up to the light and examines it. Dirty and brown, lots of stuff floating around.

He sighs and hangs his head, then takes out the other bottles and fills them, telling himself they can filter it somehow and boil it. Why not? They'll certainly die soon anyway if they don't try.

On the way home, Ray finds that he needs to stop and rest constantly. The adrenaline has worn off and impossibly heavy bottles of water fill his backpack. His head spins and his muscles cramp. Bent over behind a house with hands on knees, he runs a dry tongue over cracked lips. Part of him desperately wants to open a bottle and chug it.

Motion in the periphery of his vision. His heart instantly starts to hammer and he presses up against the house, willing himself to become invisible. Fresh adrenaline washes through Ray's body and the dizzy, confused lethargy disappears.

A creature floats over the bare-dirt back yard of a house down the block. It gives no sign that it's aware of Ray, so he steps backward slowly, slowly, to the edge of the house and hides around the corner.

Ray takes a small pair of binoculars out of the backpack and drops down on one knee. He peeks out around the corner and watches.

Its body is three and a half feet long. A fat barrel of uncanny flesh, translucent for most of its length so that Ray can clearly make out the digestive system. A gray tube runs from one end to the other, with a bulge in the middle that Ray assumes is the stomach. It appears to have no other organs, except for half a dozen oblong sacs below the stomach, each filled with a dark mass. Ray can't unsee what happened to one of his neighbors, a memory that haunts his sleeping and waking hours alike, a trauma that would make him break out in a sweat if his body were able to.

He knows those sacs are clusters of eggs.

The creature's mouth is a wide, gaping hole ringed by eight groping fingers, each gray at the base and shading into black at the tip. Like a nightmarish, thumbless, eight-fingered hand constantly searching and grasping. The mouth, too, reaches out, like the lips of a horse stretching toward an apple.

The other end, throbbing and heavily veined, tapers into a prehensile tail with a grotesque sphincter at the tip. The creature floats four or five feet in the air with no wings or obvious means of buoyancy, its mouth end sometimes up, sometimes down as it scours its environment. It dips its tail end down and the sphincter opens. Part of the creature's digestive tube prolapses six inches out and deposits a prodigious, oozy, seaweed-colored muck on the earth.

Ray lowers the binoculars and cocks his head. Better to take the long way around and stay the hell away from the thing.

He turns, drops the binoculars, and freezes. A creature hovers head-level just a few paces away, its ring of fingers pointing at him and probing like antennae tasting the air. While Ray's brain races through freeze, fight, or flight calculations, one of the thing's fingers points and sprays a red mist in his face.

Chapter 2: Then

I Can Taste Everything with My Fingers and Face

What do you think of when I say locust? Most people imagine dark swarms clouding the sky and stripping the earth in biblical destruction. But a lot of people don't realize a locust is nothing but a grasshopper that's entered the swarming phase. In certain conditions, the creature's behavior and physiology shift. It's called phenotypic plasticity. When the right environmental cues come along, mild-mannered grasshoppers transform into a monstrous plague.

-Paula Morrow, author of Plague Shift

It was the first day Ray noticed the Warp seep in. Those initial weird worms squirming into the edges of everyday life, just a hint of the preposterous tickling at the periphery. Easy enough to explain away in the beginning.

Ray picked up a short stack of textbooks from his desk in his home office. Intros to philosophy, logic, and moral theory, bristling with post-it notes. After placing them on the shelves, he stepped back and folded his arms, then rearranged a few just so. He straightened the bust of Marcus Aurelius that sat on his top shelf. From a distance it looked like it would be a heavy stone or ceramic piece, but it was actually hollow plastic. He dusted the framed family pictures, organized the papers on his desk, and wiped down his laptop screen. His side of the office was easy, since he always kept it tidy anyway.

He turned, surveyed Mia's side of the office, and let out a long breath. Her bookcases sprawled with thick primary texts, academic journals, and impenetrable works of scholarship, some in the original French or German. Heavy books on top of other books and stacked in two rows deep and crammed in every available space and upside down or backwards or in towering piles that threatened to topple. Rings of dried coffee and the grease of forgotten sandwiches stained their covers, and Ray knew that Mia's nearly unreadable, scribbled notes filled the margins of the pages. Her collection—which also extended to her office on campus—represented years of undergrad, master's, and doctoral study in philosophy, as well as years of publishing her own research and teaching. Texts representing the tradition of philosophical pessimism covered her desk in haphazardly piled stacks: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cioran, Benatar, Dienstag.

Once when they were drinking wine and listening to music late at night, Ray had made an offhand joke about her books being the collection of a doomer. She laughed and gestured with her wine glass toward his shelves and said his books were the collection of a tourist. He doubted she even remembered saying that, but the comment had remained a sliver in his mind ever since.

Ray eyed her mess and scratched at his beard, calculating how much tidying on her side would be tolerated. He lifted his nose and breathed deeply, scrunching up his face at a hint of odor he couldn't quite identify. Mold? Some old food in her garbage can? A dead animal in the walls? After a minute of sniffing around with no luck identifying the source, he shrugged and decided he'd just empty her garbage can and take the dirty coffee mugs and wine glasses down to the sink.

But first, Ray drained the dregs in his own cup. As he waited for the dopamine hit of the caffeine, he leaned against his desk and zoned out on Mia's oil paintings. A red, rocky Martian landscape. A dormant cryovolcano on Titan. A violent storm of alien clouds raining rubies and sapphires on HAT-P-7b. They hung on every wall of the office, each piece depicting a lifeless world. They'd taken a painting class together early in their marriage, and although Ray had been disappointed to discover he had no knack for it, he still sometimes found her in front of an easel at 3AM, her hair pulled back and her skin smeared with colors.

Barking and peals of laughter drew Ray's attention to the window. For the briefest moment, he had the urge to warn Nick he'd been in the sun too long, a thought he immediately recognized as the voice of his own mother. Ray's pale blue eyes, red hair, and freckled skin had left him with countless severe sunburns when he was a kid, and his mother had endlessly yelled at him out the window to come inside and get out of the sun. But thanks to Mia's Afro-Latina complexion, Nick didn't need his father's vampirish anxiety about the sun.

The eight year-old threw a ball and their Corgi, Jake, tore off after it with his tiny legs pumping and tongue lolling. Before Jake returned with the ball, Nick suddenly seemed to lose interest in the dog. He swayed in the middle of the back yard, his eyes closed and face tilted up. His mouth hung open as he moved his hands slowly through the air around him, tentatively taking small steps forward.

The boy pointed his outstretched hands at the dog, moved them over the grass and the raised garden beds. He approached the big oak and waved his fingers over the shape of the trunk, then bent down and scanned the roots, and finally reached his arms up to the new spring leaves. When a squirrel ran down the opposite side of the trunk and shot across the grass, Nick's right hand traced its path.

What the hell? The weirdness of Nick's behavior set off a primal alarm in the ancient, reptilian core of Ray's brain. Something about it struck him as unsettling for reasons he couldn't quite pinpoint. Ray strode out of the office and skipped down the stairs, his mind grasping at logical explanations for whatever Nick was doing. By the time he reached the back door, he'd told himself that of course Nick was just playing. After all, Ray could remember running around in the yard as a kid with a kitchen towel tucked into the back of his shirt, pretending he was a caped superhero.

He opened the sliding glass door to the back porch and emerged into the warmth of the sun. Jake scurried over, circled Ray a couple times, and shot into the house. Nick