Christopher Rice - The Vines

There’s that hard edge again. What had she said to him then? All you know is flesh and bone. It’s not just hard; it’s confident, knowing, self-satisfied… three things Caitlin has never been in her entire life.

“Fine. Come inside,” Caitlin finally says. “Both of you. Come inside and meet the man who really killed John Fuller.”

The attendant is still stewing over the rich bitch in the BMW X5 who told him to fuck off when he hears a sound like a fantail boat coming right up the highway toward the gas station where he works. The nearest fingers of swamp are too far from his little island of harshly lit concrete for a boat to sound this close. So he just sits there, blinking at the glare outside, cursing the way it masks the highway and the surrounding night sky.

He’s about to leave the register and investigate when the sound gets abruptly—and violently—louder, like a chain saw revving up. It’s a buzz that reminds him of bee swarms he’s seen on nature shows, but there’s another undertone to it, a clicking that sounds almost like his mother’s press-on nails rapping against the edge of the table.

If his mother were a giant and her nails the size of butcher knives.

When the handle of the far gas pump is ripped from its holder and slams to the concrete, he figures the whole thing is a trick of the wind. But everything else outside is ghostly-still, and a few seconds later, he can make out the swarm of insects covering the fallen gas pump as if the rusted metal handle were coated in some sort of irresistible nectar.

Within seconds, a veritable second skin of insects coats the fallen pump. They’re coming so fast and furious from the darkness beyond the station’s island of light that he can’t actually see them. He can’t tell them apart either. Are they termites, roaches, cicadas? He’s had creatures of all shapes and sizes slither and dart across his outpost in the late hours of the night, but never something this immense and angry.

Then they’re rising into the air in several slender fingers that seem positively elegant in comparison to the thickening mass below that gave them birth. He feels his jaw go slack and hears the magazine slap to the floor at his feet.

An impossible shape is assembling beyond the glass, but one that seems vaguely familiar. It is like the finest of pencil drawings, only each pencil stroke has its own violent and barely controlled interior chaos.

The shape is over five feet tall now. And in its details he can see the woman’s skinny neck and sloping shoulders. The rest of her is a mix of suggestions, as if the bugs have latched on to lingering threads of soul and dead skin and made the best version of her they possibly can. Then the shape turns its hollow head in his direction, and he sees writhing knife slashes suggesting the woman’s wide, furious eyes and her snarling mouth. And with a voice that consists of a great swelling and fragile modulation of the grinding chain saw sound coming from the entire cloud, the ghost composed of insects snarls, “Fuck off!”

Then, as if in response to the attendant’s strangled, terrified cry, the cloud disperses, and he sees the tail end of the thick fingers as they take to the night sky beyond the gas station’s lonely glare, and the ghostly impression of the girl in the BMW X5 has departed on a swarm of tiny wings.

The first thing Blake sees in the front parlor is Caitlin’s iPhone glowing in the dock atop one of the antique end tables. The dock is connected to the stereo speakers throughout the first floor, so her phone must be the source of the Faith Hill song that’s threatening to knock him into the past. There are bloody fingerprints on its screen.

Caitlin adds to them by turning the music down, and in the ensuing quiet he can hear Nova breathing next to him. The rush of blood in his ears gradually takes on the rhythm of a desperate, deafening pulse. It seems his every thought, his every breath, is now devoted to assuring himself that Caitlin has completely lost her mind and slipped into a world of self-inflicted violence and delusions.

Then he sees the overturned wing chair, the bloodstained sofa cushions in a tumble on the floor. This evidence of a recent struggle guides his attention to the fat man crumpled in a fetal position on the floor next to the flipped-up edge of the Oriental rug, the same man Caitlin is now standing over. She’s also pointing a gun at his head. The man’s black outfit looks like a trick-or-treater’s idea of a cat burglar costume, save for the silver duct tape that binds his ankles and wrists.

Compared to the man, though, Caitlin is a mess, her hair a clawed and uneven tangle, her left cheek bleeding from scratch marks. Despite these injuries, she seems radiant with feral energy, while the man at her feet is pale and wheezing from extreme blood loss.

It doesn’t matter that Blake doesn’t recognize the man at first, because there is enough recognition and guilt in the man’s pain-widened eyes for both of them. Just the sight of his expression alone is enough to collapse Blake’s self-assurances that Caitlin’s slipped into a world of utter lunacy.

Which means that this man is somehow connected to John’s murder… and Blake’s life for the last ten years has been nurtured by a lie.

Nova’s hand comes to rest on his elbow. He’s not sure if she’s frightened or trying to comfort him, and it doesn’t matter. He is grateful just for her touch.

“You don’t remember him, do you?” Caitlin asks. And it takes Blake a second to realize the question is directed at him. Before he can manage a response, Caitlin says, “Of course you don’t. The last time you saw him he was wearing a mask.”

“Listen,” the man wheezes. “Please… listen…”

“His name is Mike Simmons,” Caitlin says. “We went to high school with him, Blake. And, boy, did he fuck up. He assumed I was in on it, you see. So after I caught him in the yard, he started making me offers. And he said too much. Way too much.”

“In on it? What’s happening?” Blake whispers. “Just… tell me what’s happening.”

“There’s a tape, you see. A tape of this bastard and his friends leaving the scene of John’s murder. Troy had it. He stole it from a security system in one of the homes along the levee that night and kept it from the homicide detectives while he framed the wrong men for the murder. Troy Mangier, our hero , he had it for years. And he used it to blackmail this… piece of shit and his pals. When they heard he’d gone missing, he”—and she emphasizes who she’s talking about by kicking the wounded man in the stomach—“put my house under surveillance and started following me.”

Blake feels as if his gaze is shrinking to a pinpoint somewhere above the man’s body and just below Caitlin’s chest. He is breathing through a straw and there is a tingling weightlessness throughout his shoulders and upper back that makes him feel as if the top half of his spine has gone molten.

“This is him, Blake,” Caitlin says, her voice just above a whisper. “This is the man who killed John Fuller.”

“No!” The man’s scream is fluid-filled and lashes his gaping mouth with spittle. “No. No. We didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t know about the pumping station. We didn’t know… the water. We didn’t know the water would…”

Nova lets out a stunted groan. She tightens her grip on Blake’s elbow just as he begins to sink to the floor. When he lands in the chair she’s steered him into at the last moment, he finds his casual, seated pose to be almost sacrilegious, and so he bends forward and places his face in his hands because it feels like it’s going to fall off him, along with the rest of his skin and anything else designed to armor his soft, interior parts.