The Uninvited (15 page)

She came to him and put her arms around his waist.
Vic, we've been married twenty-seven years. We got married just three days after you got back from Korea. Remember?”

He put his face against her soft hair. “Yes,” he murmured, his hands around her slim waist, “I remember.”

“We stayed together during the bad flood of '57, when you were still a rookie deputy. Fifteen years ago, when that punk shot you, I was right by your side in the hospital. We stayed together and cried together when we heard that Vic, Jr. had been killed in Vietnam. Are you forgetting all that?”

He pushed her away, gently. “No, Carol, I'm not forgetting. But this is different. Very different. And I want you to go. For my sake. Please?”

She glanced up at him, her dark eyes boring into his equally dark eyes.
It's dangerous, isn't it, Vic?”

“I won't lie to you, Carol. Yes, it could be.”

She suddenly grinned mischievously. “All right, Vic. But I'm thinking. Before you make me go . . .”

Vic chuckled. “You are a wicked woman. What do you have in mind?”

She whispered in his ear.

“In the daylight? Shocking! The priest might stop by for a visit.”

“If he does, he'll sure see something that'll make his day.”

Tommy Sabatier crouched in the stifling hot toolshed just a few yards from the Lost Swamp. The shed was well built, and he had managed to stuff the few cracks he had found with pieces of wood and box crating found in the shed. But he was desperately thirsty and dehydrating badly; the shed was like a prison sweat box. He had stripped down to his shorts and that had helped, but he knew he could not last much longer without water. The June sun had turned fierce. Soon, he knew, like it or not, he would have to make a run for it.

For my sanity,” he whispered in a creaks voice.

At the sound of his voice, the tin roof seemed to come alive with the dry rustlings of thousands of legs. The creatures shifted position for a few seconds, then the roof was silent as they continued their waiting. And their clicking.

Amazing, Tommy thought, how the bastards herded me in here. Almost as if they have the ability to think and reason.

That thought filled him with dread.

As he crouched in the hot shed, he remembered what one of his professors in Entomology had to say.
Some day,” the old man had warned his class, “mankind will run out of ways to control the common roach, and then we'll be in a battle for our survival. But it is my fear—and I am not alone in that fear—that we will someday produce some potent type of chemical and call it a miracle, when in reality, it will be a disaster, producing some mutant strain of roach. God only knows what it will look like or what it will be capable of doing.”

“Well, Professor,” Tommy whispered, “looks like your fears have come true.”

The dry stirrings above him increased. Tommy heard a chewing sound behind him. He turned, his heart pounding with fear. The mutants were chewing through the boarded-up window. They were through the carefully placed two-by-fours on the outside, and eating their way through the inner boards.

“Now or never!” Tommy said.

He dressed quickly but carefully, tying his jeans snugly to his ankles with rope found in the shed. He covered his arms and hands with sacking and put a burlap bag over his head, tying it snug around his neck. He had slit tiny eye-holes in the bag with his pocket knife.

He crossed himself and said a very quick prayer, probably the most sincere prayer he had ever whispered. He slowly turned the doorknob, not yet cracking the door. Because of their unique ability to flatten their bodies, enabling them to enter cracks much smaller than they, half a dozen roaches slithered into the shed, attacking his ankles, trying to bite through the denim,

“Now!” he screamed, flinging open the door, jumping into a horde of mutants, running for his life.

The roaches covered him, head to foot, swarming all over him with a savage fury.

Tommy had carefully planned his escape route. There was a drainage ditch just a few hundred yards to his right, full of water and stinking from the drainoff of an old chemical dump about a mile away, and that had given Tommy an idea, for he knew the chemicals in the ditch would burn, and his Zippo lighter was safely buttoned in his shirt pocket.

He headed, screaming as he was bitten through his flimsy protection, for the ditch. He leaped into the ditch, the impact with the foul-smelling water dislodging the mutants clinging to him. He splashed across the ditch, clawing his way up the far bank. He slapped off the few remaining roaches that clung to him, sparked his Zippo into flame, and lit the hardy dry marsh grass that grew alongside the ditch. He threw burning clumps of it into the ditch. The chemicals in the ditch caught, glowing in the hot summer sun.

He ran for his truck, fumbling for his keys. He dropped them, wasting precious seconds stopping, turning around, and retrieving the keys.

He thought his heart would burst before he reached his pickup. Sweat was pouring into his eyes, and he ripped the sack from his head, flinging sweat from his face. As he ran, he tried to remember whether he had left the truck door unlocked yesterday, when he was out looking for more damage from the creatures. He decided he had left the door unlocked.

Tommy staggered just before reaching his truck. Already exhausted from twenty hours with no sleep, living on the ragged point of terror, listening to the creatures slither about on the roof of the shed, he didn't think he was going to make it. He fell heavily to the ground and dragged himself to his knees. He did not have the strength to continue. He looked behind him, waiting for painful death to crawl on him.

But the creatures were not following him. They had stopped at the edge of the burning drainage ditch. They covered the field like a brown filth, millions of them, but they would not cross the burning ditch.

Tommy Sabatier put his face in his hands and wept from relief, not knowing how short-lived it would be.

 

 

“I got the equivalent of twenty-five thousand sticks of dynamite rollin' behind me,” the tanker driver complained, “and that damn fool punk passes me on a curve. Almost wrecked us both. Jesus! The nuts they give driver's licenses to these days.”

The truck driver rolled on, toward Lapeer Parish, cursing the “long-haired, hippie-lookin' son of a bitch,” in the jacked-up hot rod. A wasp flew into the cab of the truck and he swatted at it, angering the already confused and disoriented insect. The truck driver dropped his cigar on the floorboards and howled in pain as the yellow jacket planted its stinger in his neck, directly on the vein.

“Bastard!” the truck driver hollered, slapping at the wasp.

Ten seconds later sweat began to bead his forehead; his heart began pounding as his vision blurred. He did not know it, and would not live to tell of it, but he was having an allergic reaction to the wasp's venom. He fought to maintain control of the rig.

The driver shuddered as his hands slipped from the huge steering wheel. His head slumped forward, eyes closing, and he felt himself dragged into unconsciousness. The Velour River bridge was only a few hundred feet in front of him, and coming up fast.

On the other side of the bridge, in the curve, Al Little's thoughts were many, but among them was the image of the woman he planned to marry. As soon as she got back from a business trip Monday. That is, if he wasn't still working, unofficially, on this case. He was trying to think of an explanation for delaying their vacation. Of course, he could not tell her the truth. Like Inspector Benning, she'd think it was another of his jokes and get all upset.

“No, honey,” he said aloud. “Our vacation plans have to be altered a bit. Why? Well, I'm working on a case—helping out Sheriff Ransonet. It involves giant mutant roaches.”

He had a picture of himself telling her that.

He shook his head, stuck a cigarette in a corner of his mouth, and reached for his Zippo, thumbing the lighter into flame.

“What to tell her?” he muttered.

Al had only a few seconds of numb fear as he rounded the curve, coming up to the bridge. He witnessed the huge tanker, on its side, coming at him. The rig blocked the entire bridge, gasoline spewing from its ruptured side, sparks exploding pockets of gas as steel squalled against concrete.

Al hit the tanker at sixty. A heartbeat later, the bridge was engulfed in a mighty roar of igniting gasoline. Then an explosion shook the air, blowing away the center span of the bridge, leaving a huge gap. What was left of Al's car slid into the Velour River and sank swiftly out of sight, taking the charred remains of Special Agent Al Little with it.

Al Little would play no more practical jokes on anyone.

And now there were two bridges leading into and out of Baronne and Lapeer Parishes.

 

 

“I wonder who it was?” Slick asked, more to himself than to the Louisiana State Trooper standing beside him. The stink of burning rubber, fabric, paint, and gas hung in the hot air. And the slightly sweet odor of roasting human flesh.

“God only knows,” Rollie replied.

What was left of the rig had been blown to the Wilson Parish side of the river. Fifty feet of empty space now separated Lapeer and Wilson Parishes. In the murky depths of the Velour River, the water gently flowed south, to join Bayou Sorelle, Lake Sanlow, and the Mississippi River, cooling the blackened remains of Al Little. His car, his coffin—for a time—had been blown into the air just seconds after impact, the power of the explosion hurling the two tons of steel into the air as effortlessly as a child tossing aside a rag doll.

“There's nothing we can do,” Trooper Satler yelled across the space to the Wilson Parish deputies and the Trooper stationed there. “So you guys take it easy, huh?”

“Yeah, thanks a lot, Rollie. This cuts down your territory some, don't it?”

“Oh, I think I'll probably find lots to do,” Rollie shouted his reply. He wanted to tell his buddy about the creatures, the bugs—whatever in the hell they were—but FBI Agent Little had asked them all to keep their mouths shut tight. No point in starting a panic.

None of the men working the wreck noticed the millions of eyes watching them in the hot afternoon of early Louisiana summer. None of them noticed that the trees had darkened in color, the east bank of the Velour seemed, occasionally, to shift slightly, as if one intelligence controlled the movement of the mutants.

An alligator watched the mutants from the west bank of the river. The ‘gator was not afraid of the bugs—man was his only enemy. Like the roaches, the 'gator had remained virtually unchanged for millions of years. But something in the 'gator's brain did warn him to stay away from the bugs; they were like nothing he was familiar with. It was not fear, just caution.

The ‘gator slid noiselessly into the river, submerged, and slowly swam away from the bridge, letting the river take him south. Bugs did not really interest the 'gator; they were unpalatable to his taste.

Traffic was detoured to the bridge south and to the bridge north.

As the afternoon wore slowly on, the mutants joined other mutants just reaching maturity and began another march. They were at full strength now. Millions and millions of them.

In the Baronne Parish library, the ladies prepared to close for the afternoon, unaware of being watched. It had been a slow afternoon. Not many patrons. It wouldn't hurt to close up a bit early.

“See you, Betty,” a librarian called. “I'll lock the door so no one else can come in.”

Okay,” Betty answered.
Thanks. Have a good weekend.”