“Baby…” he called out after me.
“Don’t you fucking call me that,” I shrieked, leaning against a cold pipe, staring absently at the dark shadows in the corner. “You don’t get to. Not after what you just said.”
“Why is this bothering you?” he asked. I felt him closer again. Was he just going to slowly follow me all over the basement? Like a mosquito that wouldn’t go away, no matter how many times you swatted at it?
I chuckled viciously. “Heaven forbid this should bother me.”
“Did you want me to tell you?” he asked quietly.
“What the hell do you think?”
“Did you think I owed it to you?”
His questions were strange. I didn’t know what he was getting at.
“I guess,” I admitted with a sigh. “I would have told you.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I turned around slowly to look at him. I could barely see him here, I could only make out his faint outline, which was tall and tense. “You’re…”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t know how.
I swallowed hard and looked at the ground, trying to see the white rubber outline of my shoes in the dark.
“Perry,” he said carefully. His tone made me look up.
“What?”
He hesitated. The air between was heavy, laden with anticipation.
“Are you in love with me?”
My eyes widened until it felt like they might fall out.
“Excuse me?” I managed to say.
He walked up to me but his face still remained hidden in the shadows.
“Do you love me?”
Whether I could see him or not, the honesty, the, dare I say, vulnerability, in his words were apparent. He was serious.
And suddenly I saw my life branching into two separate paths, depending on what my answer was. I could play it safe and lie. Protect my heart and protect my pride. Protect my relationship with him and the future of us working together.
Or I could be honest. I could finally admit to him how I really felt. Tell him and hope for the best. For the small chance that he happened to feel the same. Or for the larger chance that he didn’t. I’d be humiliated and hurt. But I would do what Uncle Al wanted for me. For that giant knife to go into my heart, bleed myself dry. And get over it.
“Perry,” he repeated. “Do you love me?”
I sucked in my breath, wishing I could see him better. Wishing he could see I was looking him right in the eyes.
“No,” I told him, my voice calm and steady. “I don’t.”
It was the biggest lie I had ever told.
His shoulders deflated an inch.
“Oh,” he said simply. Was that disappointment I heard? Or is that just what I wanted to hear.
“Why?” I asked. I found myself taking a step closer to him. I peered up at his dark face. “Do you want me to?”
I could tell he smiled.
“Well, kiddo…what man wouldn’t want that?”
My heart melted, swirling in thick confusion. Was he serious? I couldn’t tell without looking at him. I fished out my phone from my pocket and turned the light on.
I shone it at his face.
I barely had time to read it. A shimmer rippled through the air, like a wave of heat.
Abby’s disfigured, broken head was right behind him, those eye sockets of grey goo peering at us over his shoulder.
A scream escaped my lips and I dropped the phone as I turned to run. I didn’t know where to run, though, and I was quickly met with pipes and boxes that brought me to the ground in a heap. I heard Dex scream too, a terrible inhuman sound, and I struggled to my feet. I crashed through the basement until I was in the light of the main hall and ran toward the door.
Then I stopped myself in the middle of the room and looked for Dex to be right behind me like he usually was.
But he wasn’t there. I was alone.
“Dex?” I cried out, wringing my hands nervously. My words fell short in the large space. “Dex, are you OK?”
Are you alive? I thought.
I listened hard for a sign of him, of anything. I couldn’t hear anything except the occasional gust of wind from outside and the creaks and groans of the pipes. There was nothing else. The silence was terrifying. Nausea crept up my throat and held me paralyzed.
“Please Dex,” I said under my breath and started to quietly ease back down the middle of the room. My eyes flitted from side to side, examining the shadows, fearing any movement.
As I got close to the corner where I had last seen him, a thick fuzzy noise wriggled into my ears. It was like static. A drone that made my insides feel like they were being brushed with steel wool.
I paused and listened. The drone got louder until I heard individual sounds more clearly. It was the collective noise of buzzing wings. Insects.
Wasps.
And to make a point, something landed on my outstretched, shaking hand.
I swatted at it but my movement caused the insect to drill its stinger into my hand. I cried out at the pain and connected with the scaly, winged creature with force. I felt it fly somewhere across the room.
I grasped my hand and raised it to the pale light from the windows. It was already swollen and an angry red color. I was grateful I wasn’t allergic to bees, not like Dex was.
Oh, God. Dex.
The feeling came back into my feet and I hurried toward the buzzing noise in the corner. I was too horrified of what I might find but I couldn’t hide and let it happen.
“Dex?” I looked around the boxes. It was too damn dark in here. I stepped carefully. My foot landed on a limb.
I shrieked and dropped to my knees, feeling around me like a blind person. It was a leg. Dex’s. And it was still. I felt down his shin to where his boots were and felt the leg hair underneath his cargo pants.
Heart in my throat, I felt up his leg, adjusting myself on my knees. My foot nudged something metallic sounding. I quickly reached back and found my phone under my hands.
I whipped it forward and pressed the on button. It hadn’t cracked, miraculously, and I aimed it at Dex.
I was not prepared for what I saw.
Dex was lying on his back, still as anything, except his hands were twitching at his sides.
His face. Oh God, his face.
He had no face. It was just a moving, writhing blanket of wasps that covered him from the neck up.
I cried out but no sound came from my lips. My chest constricted, squeezing the air out of me, lacing my heart until it couldn’t beat anymore.
Dex was deathly allergic to just one wasp sting. He had at least 100 of them on his face. Just one sting and he would be dead. Dead and dead fast. The only antidote, the EpiPen, was in the car. The car that was so close but so far. And though his hands were twitching, those glorious long fingers of his, I couldn’t tell if it was because he was alive or slowly dying.
I didn’t want to spook or startle the insects, even though a few of them were losing interest in him and started to fly around my head like winged demons. I let them land on me, let them sting me. I reached, ever so slowly, inch by inch, for one of Dex’s hands and covered it with my own. It was cold and clammy. But after a few seconds, it opened and he grasped my hand.
He was alive. My heart sang but the joy was short lived. The reality set in. Just because he was alive right now, it didn’t mean he would be in a minute. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to do? He was covered in wasps. His face. His mouth, his nose, his neck. They were even going in his ears. I shivered at the image, the light wavering, and tried to keep calm. I had to think. I had to save him.
“Dex,” I said with soft deliberation. “I’m here. I’m going to figure out what to do. You’ll be OK.”
That sounded so hopeless and ridiculous coming out of my mouth. But he squeezed my hand back, holding on for dear life. I was so close to losing it and bursting into tears.
I took in a deep breath and with the phone, gently swatted at another wasp that had landed on my shoulder. Luckily the thickness of my leather jacket was keeping most the stingers at bay.
What could I do? How did you get rid of wasps? There was no water down here. Not unless I found out a way to break open one of the pipes.
I sat back on my haunches and eyed the pipes by the walls. Though they had dripped from time to time, I doubted there was any water in the place. Why would there be?
If I couldn’t douse them, what could I do? What worked at home during those late summer days in the back yard?
Smoke. My dad would light the open fireplace and it would keep the bees away during the day and the mosquitoes at night.
I could smoke them out.
“Dex,” I said, projecting a calmness I didn’t feel. “I’m going to smoke them out. OK? Just stay still, no matter what. Stay with me.”
I placed the phone in my mouth and gripped it between my teeth. With one hand I searched his pants pocket for his trusty lighter; with the other I very carefully opened up the front flap of his cargo jacket and pulled out the bag of weed and the package of rollies.
I wasn’t sure if this would work, but I didn’t have a choice. I placed both of them on his chest, as close to his neck and face without disturbing the vile wasps. I pulled out the gold lighter and held up the rollie packet. I spun the wheel but the flame wouldn’t light.
I brought my thumb down again and again against the hard, ragged edge but it sparked hopelessly.
“Oh shit,” I cried out softly. This couldn’t be it.
Trying harder, I spun and spun the knob until my thumb was painfully raw. Now a wasp made a go for my own neck and started crawling around it to the base of my skull.
I felt the painful pinch of a stinger where my spine started. At the same time, the lighter’s wheel latched and a flamed sprung up. The sight of it, the minor triumph, erased the pain and the nasty spreading heat at my neck.
The flame caught the end of the rollie packet with ease. I waited before it was good and going and then I placed it on the Ziploc bag of weed, my fingers lightly singed.
I breathed in as much fresh air as I could, while I could, and watched as the plastic bag began to curl and smolder, giving off a sick, thick smell as the purple, blue toxic flames danced. A poisonous cloud of dark smoke rose, a potent mix of pot and chemicals.
I sat back on my heels, still gripping his hand and covered my mouth with my arm. I coughed uncontrollably at the smoke as the flames really started to spread; then, before it could catch hold of his jacket, I quickly knocked off the burning bag so it was on the ground near his head.
Now his jacket was on fire. I let go of his hand and took my own jacket off, throwing it on Dex’s chest to put it out.
The wasps buzzed angrily around his head. They weren’t doing anything but circling in a crazy motion up toward the ceiling and bit by bit, through the hazy smoke, I could make out Dex’s face. His eyes were shut. I feared he was dead.
Then he coughed, his mouth opening, trying to suck in air but only getting smoke. I held his shoulder down with one arm, waiting for the last two wasps to leave his neck.
Once they did, flying groggily above him and then off to join the others, I quickly stuck my arms around his shoulders and pulled him forward to get out of the smoke.
“Come on,” I coughed and got him on his knees. Down low by the floor, the smoke was thin. I kept one arm around him and urged him forward out of the corner and into the rest of the room. As we reached the more open area where the smoke hadn’t reached yet, I stopped and he collapsed on the ground next to me, aching for air.