Dead Man's Song

“Oh my…it could have…” Newton sputtered. “I mean, it nearly fell on us.”



“Yes, it sure as hell did.”



Newton swallowed and they sat there, staring at the porch. He cleared his throat. “Kind of strange, it happening just now.”



“Oh, you think?” Crow shook his head.



Another chunk of the roof sagged down, hung swaying for a moment, and then broke off and thudded down onto the mess, kicking up more dust.



“That’s not normal,” Newton said.



Crow said, “We left normal when we started down that hill.”



Newton felt something warm on his forehead and wiped his hand over his face. It came away with a smear of blood across the palm. “Shit.” He glanced at Crow, who was picking pieces of dust off his tongue. “Is it bad?”



Crow leaned over and peered at the cut. “You’ll live.” He dug a Kleenex out of his shirt pocket and handed it to him.



“You saved my life,” Newton said, marveling at the idea. He had never been close to death before and the thought that he was actually in a real life-or-death moment excited him, despite his fear. He dabbed at the cut and then stared at the tissue, amazed at how intensely red his own blood was. “I don’t know what to say.”



“For the love of God, do us both a favor and save the gushy shit for some other time. Preferably after time ends. Besides, I was trying to save my own ass and I jumped off the porch. You were in the way, so you got to come along for the ride. End of story.”



“Fair enough.”



“So—let’s go back to Plan A, which is hauling ass out of here.” Crow crossed his legs under him and got to his feet, then bent and began slapping the dust off his trousers, glancing at the house as he did so. Newton was looking at Crow and saw his face change from annoyed to slack to a mask of total shock, and Newton whipped his head around to follow the line of Crow’s gaze. What he saw twisted his heart like a rag and together they stared in complete horror as from the cracked and shattered timbers of the broad porch roof, from each little pocket of space between beams and shingles, through all the weather-worn holes in the lumber poured a seething, bristling, boiling black mass of roaches. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands, their chitinous shells gleaming like polished coal, their million scrabbling legs skittering and hissing over the debris. The whole black festering tide of them began sweeping down the porch stairs directly at them.



Crow grabbed Newton’s coat and hauled him up, spun him roughly, and gave him a violent shove away from the house. “RUN!” he screamed.



And they ran. Both of them, very fast, as behind them a wave of insects swept after them with a hiss like foam over the hard-packed sand of a beach. They left behind the walking stick and Newton’s camera, which he had dropped again during the fall from the porch. They left behind Crow’s machete, buried now under tons of rubble through which a hundred thousand roaches were swarming.



Crow and Newton ran the wrong way at first, cutting in the most direct line across the large front yard, dashing through the patch of sunlight to the edge of the forest by the overgrown fields, tearing along the line of trees, moving fast despite the spongy ground. Crow risked a hasty glance over his shoulder. He was horrified to see that the roaches were spreading out across the field, the carpet of them covering dozens of square yards.



“Christ!” he said. They kept running until they were into the woods, then as one they realized they were heading in the wrong direction. Crow looked back again and saw that the roaches had reached the patch of sunlight. He skidded to a halt for a moment, stunned by what he was seeing. As the roaches reached the strip of sunlight, they parted neatly, going left and right around it, avoiding it completely.



He grabbed Newton’s shirt and pulled him to a stop. “Newt! Are you seeing this?”



The reporter stood there, eyes bulging, mouth working for a while until he gasped out a single word. “God!” The roaches raced around the sunlit patch, reforming into a single seething mass as they reached the end of it, and the reformed tide of black bugs scrabbled and whispered on toward them. “They’re still coming,” Newton cried.



Crow nodded sharply. He glanced around to reorient himself. “This way—come on!” Moving as fast as their legs could carry them, they tore along the edge of the woods, making a wide circle back toward the side of the house where they had first left the forest. The roaches turned, following as if guided by radar; the change in vector gave them a shorter distance to cover and they seemed to devour that distance, rolling like a sheet of oil over stone and leaf and withered grass.



“They’re going to cut us off!” yelled Newton.



“Shut up and run!” Together they raced to the entrance to the forest of old-growth trees and made radical turns, skittering on the moss and wasting valuable seconds trying to find traction. The roaches came in like a midnight tide, the gap closed to barely a few yards. Crow took the lead, his boots getting better purchase than Newton’s sneakers. He reached back and again took hold of the reporter’s shoulder and pulled him along until they ran side by side, sometimes guiding, sometimes pushing. Breath rasped and wheezed in their lungs, blood roared in the ears. They burst out of the grove into the thicker forest of diseased trees and dripping vines, running hard back up the path they had come.



Something moved at the edge of Crow’s vision and he turned his head to see a second wave of cockroaches swarming out of the back of the house. They were not racing toward them but were almost heading in the same direction. Then Crow realized what they were doing and a knife of terror stabbed him in the heart. The roaches were not paralleling their course, they were racing forward at a converging angle. In seconds the way forward was going to be completely blocked.



(2)



Mike Sweeney stood in the shop doorway and looked back into the store, his eyes roving over every aisle and rack of the Crow’s Nest. Ever since he could remember he’d been coming into the store to spend his allowance—when he hadn’t lost it as a penalty for accidentally breaking one of Vic’s many household rules—or his paper-route money on the stuff Crow sold. Mostly comics and half-priced old paperbacks, but also model kits and posters and science fiction novelties. One summer he had managed to score the entire Ace Books run of Edgar Rice Burroughs—the ones with the Frank Frazetta or Roy Krenkel covers. The store had always been the single most fun place in town, and one of the few places where he didn’t feel like a geek or an outsider. Hell, no one was a bigger geek than Crow.



Now he was standing in the doorway with a ring of keys in his hand, ready to lock the place up after having worked there all day. He was now a part of the place, and just thinking about made his head a little swimmy and his feet feel like they weren’t really touching the ground. He was grinning so hard his face hurt, though considering the bruises he still had, that wasn’t saying as much as it should. At that moment he wouldn’t have cared all that much if he knew he was going home to another of Vic’s beatings. Now he had somewhere to be, and someone to be. Now he had Crow.



Mike stepped out and pulled the door shut, locked both of the locks, and pocketed the keys. He’d taken care of the re-stocking, counted out the till, and put the cash drawer with the day’s take in Crow’s apartment, fed his cats, and shut the place down. It was Little Halloween, and though there had been brisk traffic through the store all day, Crow had said that it would die by sunset because there were so many things going on just outside of the town proper—the movie marathon at the Dead End Drive-In, parties on the campus, fireworks up by the Crescent Bridge, and a rock concert at the Hayride. Crow told him that he could close at five tonight, which left him four whole hours before he had to be home. He wanted to be on his bike—the War Machine—and be out flying along the roads, feeling the wind and feeling the freedom. He walked down the alley beside the store and unchained his bike from the chain-link fence, rolled it back to the street, and swung his leg carefully over it, though his wince was more a reflex than a reaction. Though he still hurt in a hundred little places, the aches were small and dull and fading. All of the big pains, even his broken rib, had vanished over the last few nights.



The fugue was a furnace—a forge—and he melted in it like iron ore.



Mike thought that this speeded-up healing was due to puberty. He was almost fifteen and he was aware of the changes in his body, the thickening of his muscles, the hair growing under his arms and on his crotch, the broadening of his palms and the soles of his feet, the shadowy faintness of a red-gold mustache. He figured that as you got older you healed faster. Why else could pro ballplayers shake off those train-wreck collisions on the gridiron? Why else could boxers take hit after hit in the ring? It made sense to him.



In the furnace of the fugue the impurities are burned away and the metal becomes denser.



He had no idea at all that each night he was taking a short trip sideways out of his body, or perhaps just winking out for a bit. Not being there.



The purified metal waits for the blacksmith’s hammer to learn its shape and its purpose.



Walking the bike to the top of Corn Hill, he paused for a moment, enjoying as always the colorful complexity of Pine Deep’s many stores and galleries and shops, and then he kicked off and swooped down the hill and up the other side, banked hard right onto Orenda Street, and rolled past the Dark Hollow Inn and Corn Dolly’s Bar, both bright with lights and activity, the usual late weekend crowd swollen with scores of people from out of town. He rocketed by Dragon’s Lair Games, which was still packed with kids, and past the darkened windows of the town’s biggest store, Gordon Python’s Fine Antiques, closed now for the day. Little Halloween revelers were never known for antiquing of a Friday evening. Feeling happy for the first time in a long time, he kicked the War Machine into action again and stopped at Half-Baked to buy a couple of pumpkin muffins, still hot from the oven.



“Hey, Mike,” said Hillary MacPeake, leaning out of the little sales window cut into the side of the store, “what happened to you?”