Christopher Rice - The Vines

Where the hell was that Sentra parked? Close to the front office so Clay could keep an eye on it? It’s only been ten, maybe fifteen minutes since she walked past the thing, her latest customer, Mr. Lawyer Pants McUptown, hot on her heels and smelling of whiskey, and still she can’t place that damn car.

If she could shut her eyes maybe, try a little astral projection, or whatever her sister used to call it. But Lawyer Pants—on his first visit, he said his name was Charles, but that was probably bullshit—is taking her missionary, and with each graceless thrust he stares down at her with the pained intensity of a man trying to take a dump.

She remembers another vehicle parked outside, one of those mini-RVs you can rent these days, the kind with the rental company’s logo painted in bright, cheery letters along the side, letters that seem to scream, Been out of my element for months! Please rape and murder me!

But Taletha doesn’t know if those things have an alarm, so the Sentra’s going to have to be her fail-safe. If for some reason things go to shit inside this mildew-smelling little room with its plaid curtains and growling window-unit air conditioner, she’ll run for the Sentra and kick its rear bumper hard enough to set off the alarm.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. Sometimes the alarm is enough to freeze a psycho where he stands, the belt still raised over one shoulder or the gun she didn’t notice aimed at her disappearing shadow, his head still swarming with sick-fuck ideas he didn’t have the balls to mention when they were arranging a price. And sometimes that’s not enough, sometimes a few people will have to pop out of their rooms first. And then other times, times she wants to forget, she just has to run like hell and grab for the nearest handful of rocks. But whatever the case, a car alarm in the middle of the night has saved Taletha Peterson’s ass (and her face and her breasts and her fingers) on more than a few occasions.

Suddenly Lawyer Pants flips her over like she’s a sack of potatoes, slides one arm under her waist, and pulls back until she’s on all fours. She’s afraid he’s sensed how far she’s slipped from her own body, from their passionless rutting, but she also needs to give him a gentle little reminder—doggy style’s cool but the backdoor’s off-limits. But before she can address either issue, she’s distracted by a dark flutter in the lamp’s frail glow. Suddenly Mr. Lawyer Pants is back inside of her—the traditional way, thank God—and Taletha is staring at the giant bug that’s just landed on the man’s wedding ring.

Last time the guy took care to stuff the little gold band in his jeans pocket before he stripped down. But tonight he’s drunk, so he left it out on the nightstand. It looks tiny and insignificant now, but maybe that’s because the bug resting on it is about the length of Taletha’s index finger.

… and it’s staring at me. These words shudder through her, bringing unwanted life to parts of her body she instinctively knows how to deaden before every trick. If it were any bigger, she would figure it was a Halloween toy some jerk was controlling with a string. But it’s just big enough to be… wrong .

And the color, a black so deep she finds herself groping for the right word to describe the shade. It’s a word that seems fancy, but she’s heard it before a bunch of times throughout her life, just not to describe a damn bug. Black as night. Black as… lava. Obsidian. The color of cooled, frozen lava. Despite its size, the bug is so black its individual features are impossible to discern, except for the two forelegs that rest atop the gold band, whisking slightly back and forth as if they’re kissing the metal. She’s seen squirrels that are like this, so accustomed to humans they’re not afraid of them. But a bug ? This thing is perched , birdlike, patient, positively studious.

“What are you?” Taletha whispers. But she’s loud enough to cause the man on top of her to jerk and go still.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he curses.

His feet hit the carpet, and as he stumbles toward the nightstand she can’t tell if he’s as bothered by the bug’s wrongness as she is, or if he just wants the damn thing off his precious little ring.

Taletha has pushed herself halfway across the bed by the time the man swats at the insect as if it were just a housefly. It takes to the air, its wings each filled with a glistening pattern that looks like oil floating on water. Then the bug is gone.

Taletha says, “Where did it—”

Lawyer Pants makes a sound like he’s been kicked in the chest. Lightning bolts of pain seem to shoot through the man’s body as he stumbles backward across the room. And Taletha is as stricken by his gape-mouthed silence as she is by his shuddering and by the tears sprouting from his eyes. The stuttering groans that rip from his chest sound like some little kid’s parody of monkey sounds.

The bug is gone. Taletha can’t see it anywhere.

It must be clamped between the guy’s hands, which are still clasped in front of him even as his back slams to the wall.

Blood pours from between the man’s fingers. His hairy legs crumple under him like windless flags. Once his ass hits the carpet, his arms go lax too—his hands unclasp and that’s when Taletha sees the gaping red hole in his right palm. He crushed it, she thinks. He crushed it and it stung him, and now he’s dying.

But the hole is too big for a stinger, and she didn’t remember it having a stinger to begin with, and…

Then the bug flies toward her out of the man’s open mouth.

Clay Lee’s uncle has owned the Hibiscus Inn for thirty years, and because Clay is not a reader, he gets a panicky feeling in his chest when his uncle talks about the days when all the TV stations used to sign off around midnight with some recording of the national anthem, leaving whoever was stuck behind the motel’s front desk with a pile of magazines and some shitty paperback novels.

Clay is relieved those days are long gone. Clay is relieved that the television people finally came to their senses and realized that there is another America out there, an America of men and women who have to spend the graveyard shift behind a desk and need round-the-clock reruns of stupid cop shows and repeats of the ten o’clock news or else an unexpected late-night customer will walk in on them playing with themselves and then they’ll have to explain the whole thing to their mother and maybe get fired by their uncle.

Not Clay. On a job he can never quit unless he wants to get kicked out of his mother’s house, Clay has round-the-clock entertainment, and that’s why when he hears a loud crash followed by a car alarm, he assumes it’s coming from the episode of Law & Order: SVU he’s been struggling to follow for a half hour now. But the folks on the idiot box are standing inside a morgue talking over a dead body. Not a car in the shot. In fact, it’s been several scenes since anyone in the episode has actually gone outside at all.

Headlights flash in the front office’s glass wall, winking out a mad accompaniment to the bleating alarm. At first Clay thinks they belong to a car that’s stalled out on the highway. Then he realizes they’re a reflection, a reflection of his car.

The first thing he sees when he bursts from the office is the open door to room 14 clear across the parking lot, the dull glow of one of the lamps within. Then he sees one of the lounge chairs from beside the swimming pool resting inside the shattered rear window of his Sentra. Someone’s thrown it so hard it’s sitting half-in, half-out of his car, and that someone has to be Taletha, because she’s down on all fours, back rising and heaving, the sounds coming out of her a mixture of retches and sobs. He’s not sure whether to run to her or from her, and the battle between these urges freezes him in the office’s door.