Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) (17 page)

Today, however, he knew
they
were the ones who were in trouble.

Sean gave Howard a violent push, causing him to backpedal and nearly fall. "
I said
: what did you do to my little brother?"

There’s nothing "little" about your brother, jerkwad
, was Howard’s first thought. His second thought was,
You’d never believe me if I told you
.  And then he surprised himself by telling Sean the truth, "I spat a bee at him."

Whatever the four jocks expected to hear, it wasn’t this.

Jason called Howard a, "Smart ass."

Wesley asked, "What do you think you are— some kind of lame-ass magician?"

Howard was focused on Sean.  As much as he hated Jason, he knew Sean was the bigger threat.

Sean’s nose was an inch away from Howard’s as he shouted, "My brother’s eye is swollen shut!  His
whole face
is swollen!  You could have put his eye out with your geeky little trick!  Did you ever think of THAT?"  Sean slammed Howie’s shoulder.

The punch hurt and it made Howard angry.

Something deep inside him began to buzz.

Now Danny spoke up and his tone suggested disgust, not contempt or anger, which surprised Howard.  "Look at his eyes, Sean! What’s wrong with his
eyes
?"

Wesley sounded worried. "Is he sick or something?"

Sean’s brow furrowed as he appraised Howard.  "What’s up with the yellow contacts, freak?  That some kind of queer boy fashion statement?"

Howard couldn’t see his own eyes but he somehow knew they were now the color of honey.

The buzzing inside him got louder when Sean punched his shoulder again.  "Ever hear of ‘eye for an eye,’ asshole?"

 Jason grinned and Wesley snickered.

"Well, the way I see it," said Sean to Howard, "since you closed my brother’s eye, it’s only fair I shut yours!"

Wesley lunged forward even before Jason shouted, "Grab ‘im!"

Howard didn’t struggle.  He was enjoying this. 
You guys have no clue how righteously fucked you are!

Wesley slipped behind Howard and wrapped an arm around his chest, just below his neck.  Danny captured one arm and Jason captured the other.

Inside Howard, the buzzing fury continued to build.

"Hold him still, guys," shouted Sean, sounding excited.

"Hit ‘im," said Jason.

Danny agreed, "Do it, dawg!"

Wesley snickered.

Sean grinned as he raised his fist.

Howard Hawthorne exploded.

He unhinged his jaw, opening his mouth unnaturally wide as a torrent of bumblebees roared out.  The living blast hit Sean directly in the face, pelting him with insects that struck stinger-first.  In an instant, he suffered dozens of stings and the bees just kept coming, spouting out of Howard’s mouth with the power of a directed dust devil.

Sean screamed, only to have his shrieks cut off an instant later as bees stung his tongue and choked his throat.  Batting at his already swelling face, trying in vain to swat the storm away, he stumbled backward and fell.

Howard then wanted the swarm to attack Jason and instantly, it did.

The atmosphere thickened, becoming heavy with mutant bees.

Around the world, bees had been disappearing and Howard alone knew the real reason why.  Reacting to pesticides, global warming, and other human contaminates, a new type of queen bee had recently evolved.  These new queens were not only resilient in the face of man’s poisons, they had developed rudimentary sentience—a Hive Mind.  Honeybees weren’t actually vanishing.  They were being gathered by these queens and gradually transformed into an organized insect army with burgeoning group-awareness.

The bees knew who was destroying the ecosystem.  The bees fighting back. 

Sean Lofton, Jason Mercuriadis, Mike Keller, and Danny Pescucci were all shrieking.

Once enough humans were transformed, once Howard was joined by other living hives, it wouldn’t be long until all humanity was screaming.

The swarm continued to flood out of the hive’s mouth.

The screams of the jocks had a calming effect on Howard.  Listening to their agonies was almost as sweet as the nectar on his lips.

Howard knew a normal hive could house anywhere from fifty thousand up to half a million residents.  He was also proud to know he was the Biggest Hive that had Ever Existed, host to nearly
three million
mutant bees, all with a single purpose: to protect the hive/Howard.

The workers served him and he served Her.  Sensing Her presence inside him for the first time, Howard thought,
For the Glory of the Queen!

Bees began shooting out of Howard’s anus.  His pants were baggy anyway and the sudden push of the winged insects caused them to fall to his ankles.

Bees squirted out of his ears.

And a raging tempest of bees still emanated from his mouth.

Sean Lofton went into what looked like a kind of epileptic fit.  He thrashed and flopped beneath a blanket of bees.  And the swarm poured down his throat.

Sean would die from suffocation, rather than poison.

All four of Howard’s tormentors would be killed today.

When Howard Hawthorne spoke, the bumblebees spoke with him, joining their voluminous buzz to his voice.  He raised his arms to the sky and thundered, "I AM A TEENAGE BEEHIVE!"

The Howie-Hive’s moment of triumph was short-lived.

                        ******

Amy Grubman loved Sean Lofton with all her seventeen-year-old heart.  She didn’t want to lend him her car after school that day but when she saw how upset Sean was, she couldn’t refuse him.

When they found the geek, Sean didn’t need to tell her to remain in the car.  Amy
always
stayed with the air conditioning when it was this muggy outside.

She watched as Sean and his friends surrounded the geek.  She looked down for just a minute and now, when she looked back up, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Bees seemed to be coming out of the geek’s mouth!

And Sean was screaming.

Terrified, Amy grabbed her cell phone and dialed 911.

The operator who took Amy’s call understood very little that Amy said except for the location and, "MY BOYFRIEND’S BEING ATTACKED BY BEES!"

Like Sean, Jason was rolling on the ground, covered with big fat bumblebees.

Amy saw Danny running down the middle of the street, being chased by his own personalized swarm.

Mike was wailing like a little girl as he did these jerky spasms where he stood, as if his body was being riddled by machine-gun fire.

Amy looked again at Sean, the boy she lost her virginity to, the love of her life.  When he went into his own seizures on the ground—and still the bees keep coming out of the geek—his pants had fallen down and bees seemed to even be coming from the geek’s ass—his legs and buttocks were covered in bees—Amy freaked out.  She impulsively slid over behind the steering wheel, shifted her car into drive, and floored the accelerator.

So many bees splattered the windshield, it quickly went completely dark.

Amy Grubman wailed as she drove into Howard Hawthorne, running him over.

The bees went berserk, attacking her car.  The sound of their buzzing was like television static at maximum volume in Dolby stereo.

Crying, unable to see, Amy drove into the side of a house.   Her airbag saved her from injury.

Amy couldn’t be coaxed out of her car until long after the swarm had dispersed.

When Amy finally got out of her vehicle, in addition to all the dead bees on her car, she saw the grill and hood were splattered with thick puddles of honey.

The police arrived first, quickly followed by paramedics, but all the victims were beyond help.

The officers who took Amy’s statement thought she was hysterical until they got a look at what was left of the teenage beehive.

Later, an autopsy would reveal that, at the time of his death, Howard Hawthorne didn’t have a drop of blood left in his body.  All his veins ran thick with honey.

When Amy saw the devastation her car did to Howard’s body, she passed out.

Even veteran police officers were shocked.

The impact of Amy’s speeding car not only ripped Howard’s body apart like a wet paper bag, it cracked open his skull, revealing what was inside.  Where there should be wrinkled brain tissue, there was instead a series of hexagon-shaped honeycomb chambers, some still capped with beeswax and filled with honey.

No one saw the fat stealthy queen bee when she slipped out of Howard’s broken head and flew away.

The mutant queen flew unerringly to Amy’s purse, where she settled in and hid.

Later, after Amy had been treated at the Emergency Room and sent home, the queen came out of hiding.

When the teenage girl slept safe in her bedroom, the queen bee crawled into Amy’s mouth and scuttled down her throat, stinging her repeatedly as she went.  The young woman would have nothing but a mild sore throat in the morning to mark the beginning of her transformation into the next living hive.

Amy Grubman had a terrible nightmare: she was walking to school with some friends, when suddenly they were chased down by a great swarm of bees.

zzzz  THE END   zzzz

I Was a Teenage Beehive
was originally a 120 word script that
Weird Tales
magazine produced into a
One Minute Weird
.  It can be seen (with a completely different ending than this story) on YouTube and also at the official
Weird Tales
website. 
________________

Crimson House

Despite the NO TRESPASSING signs posted outside Crimson House, Cyrus Colton knew the young people would come, the way they always did every Halloween.  A Rite of Passage in this rural Kentucky county was to find out which teenagers were brave enough to spend a night in the haunted house. 

Mostly, it was boys who sought to explore the ramshackle building, but they occasionally brought their girlfriends.

Cyrus hoped there would be girls this year.  He was feeling the old itch again.  He had no intention of making one of his trips up to the Big City— the cravings weren’t
that
strong— but he didn’t see the harm in spying on girls, as long as he didn’t act on his cruel impulses.

Cyrus was a paragon of self-discipline.  The years with Hope and the boys had mellowed him.  He wasn’t the same person he was when he was younger.

It had been years since he’d slain someone.

More than eleven years, to be exact.

Even serial killers believed in retirement.  Killing people and getting away with it was not exactly
easy
work.  It was work better suited to the young.

Hope—Cyrus’s dutiful wife of thirty-three years passed away thirteen months ago, snuffed out by lung cancer.  Her death came quickly and Cyrus was glad.

In all those years he was married to Hope, he only committed three murders.  He was very proud of his restraint.  It was a testament to his respect for his wife.

When he was younger, before he met Hope, he once killed three women in a single
night.

Cyrus knew why the cravings were back.

He was lonely.  He told himself that was only natural.  Both his sons had long since moved away; his wife passed away; even his favorite dog was six months gone.

Was it any wonder he was looking forward to a diversion?

Cyrus once lived in Crimson House, back when he was a kid, back before he even started torturing small animals.  He was happy in that house, Way Back When.

When Cyrus was eleven years old, the county was hit by a terrible blizzard.  It continued for four days straight, burying everything.  Under the weight of all that snow, the roof of Crimson House partially collapsed.

His family lived for a while with his grandparents, until later the next spring when construction was completed on the Brick House.  The newer residence was closer to the road, had better plumbing, better insulation, and employed an oil furnace, instead of a coal-burning contraption like the old Crimson House had.

Eventually the entire farm— all eight acres of it— passed to Cyrus, after his father died.

Crimson House fell to rack and ruin.

When Cyrus was a young man, just twenty-three years old, he murdered his first victim in Crimson House.  The dilapidated building was secluded, so far off the road, all the screaming didn’t matter.  He was clumsy about it; later he would become much more proficient at inflicting pain, at prolonging the experience.  But that first time, he ejaculated too quickly, killed the girl too fast, and it was over entirely too soon.

Afterwards, Cyrus took her nude body to the basement of Crimson House and laid her to rest.

All total, there were fourteen women buried down there.  He actually wanted to stop at thirteen but he thought that was an unlucky number so he killed one more.

Throughout his quiet years, when he was particularly happy being married to Hope, Cyrus would still occasionally have a craving.  But generally he could trek back to Crimson House, spend a little quality time there reminiscing about His Girls and the way they died, and then would be able to return to the normal part of his life.

Hope often urged him to have Crimson House torn down.  She said it was an eyesore.

Cyrus agreed it was ugly.  But he also secretly thought of it as a shrine.

Over the years, he’d done his best work there.

It was Cyrus himself who started the rumors about Crimson House being haunted.  Or rather, it was Cyrus’ sons.

Both of his boys were the sensitive type.  In that regard, they took after their mother.  They were squeamish about blood.  They were easily frightened.  Both were jokesters, hiding behind laughter, but Cyrus knew the truth. 

His sons were wimps.

When his boys were young, Cyrus made up the ghost story.  To give it more impact, he would only tell it once a year, on Halloween night.  The first time he told the tale, he fully intended to scare the crap out of his sons and he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.  For weeks, both his boys were plagued by nightmares.  Hope was furious.