“I’m sure they’re all right,” Karen told her. “Maybe by morning they’ll have come home. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Molly nodded, but Karen could tell by the look in her eyes that the little girl didn’t believe the words any more than she herself did. “Ben’s going to stay tonight,” she said, grasping at anything to distract Molly’s attention, certain that if they talked any more about Julie and Kevin, she would burst into tears. As she’d hoped, Molly’s expression instantly brightened.
“Can he sleep in my room?”
Karen shook her head. “But he’ll be in the room right next door, and tomorrow morning when you go out to take care of Flicka, he can help you. Won’t that be fun?”
Just as Karen had hoped, the idea of having Ben stay the night distracted Molly enough so that she let Russell pick her up and carry her to the stairs with no further protest.
“You, too, Ben,” Marge Larkin called from the living room. “Time for bed.”
The little boy, detecting his mother’s false cheer, got up from the floor and went to the living room, where he wrapped his arms around Marge’s neck. “Don’t worry,” he whispered into her ear. “Jeff will come home. I know he will!”
Marge’s arms closed around her younger son. “I know,” she replied. “I know.” But as Ben followed Russell up the stairs a moment later, Marge knew that she didn’t believe the words she’d spoken to Ben any more than Karen had believed what she’d told Molly.
“Are Kevin and Julie and Jeff really going to come back?” Molly asked as Russell tucked her quilt snugly around her shoulders a few minutes later.
“I hope so,” he told her, leaning down to kiss her cheek. Then he winked at her. “Who knows? Maybe your mother’s right. Maybe by the time you wake up tomorrow, they’ll be back. Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise?”
Molly nodded, but she could tell that her stepfather didn’t really believe they were coming back, either. Tears welled up in her eyes. “What if they don’t come back?” she whispered, her voice trembling. “What if something bad happened to them?”
Russell felt helpless in the face of the little girl’s misery. “But they will,” he said, barely able to mask his own desperation. “I’m sure they will.” Hearing a soft whimpering at the door, Russell looked up to see Bailey standing there, one forepaw up, his tail wagging uncertainly. Russell frowned, then understood. “You want to sleep with Molly tonight, boy? Is that it?”
The big dog’s tail began wagging furiously and he bounded into the room, leaping up onto Molly’s bed, then flopping himself down next to the little girl. To Russell’s relief, Molly’s tears dried up. “Can he sleep with me?” she asked. “Can he really?”
Russell nodded. “I don’t see why not.” He leaned over and kissed Molly once more, then scratched Bailey’s ears. “You two take good care of each other, all right?”
Molly nodded, slipping her arm around Bailey, and the big dog happily licked her cheek, his heavy tail thumping on the mattress.
Russell snapped off the light, closed the door, and went back downstairs.
Molly and Ben, at least, would sleep through the night.
The rest of them, he was certain, would not.
The moon hung low in the sky, casting a dim glow over the valley floor but leaving the interior of the cave swathed in a velvety blackness. Kevin Owen sat on the cavern’s floor, his back resting against the cold rock wall that formed the inner limit of the chamber, his eyes staring vacantly toward the pale gray luminescence beyond the entrance, but his mind focusing only on stimuli he’d barely noticed until he’d come here today.
All around him, from every part of the cave, insects buzzed softly in the night. But tonight, instead of blending into a monotonous white noise that would drop quickly from the forefront of his consciousness, each sound remained clear and distinct.
Just beyond the entrance he could hear crickets chirruping, their musical note seemingly a beacon, not merely to members of their species, but to other creatures as well.
In sharp counterpoint to the crickets’ gentle melody, elater beetles were clicking loudly, and each time Kevin heard one of the sharp snapping sounds, he could almost see the little creatures’ bodies lifting off the floor, flipping in the air, then dropping back.
Though he couldn’t see them at all, he could sense the presence of ants creeping over the packed earth of the cavern’s floor. Indeed, he could even hear something he imagined might be their mandibles working as they discovered bits of detritus to break up and carry back with them to their nests, hidden below the ground.
The most distinct sound, though, was the sound of the bees.
From all around him the vibration came, a nearly subliminal tone to which something inside him seemed to be responding.
For the first time since the sickness had come upon him, the terrible sensations inside his body had eased.
The itching, the terrible itching that had permeated his entire body, had stopped, and the chills of fever that had held him firmly in their grip for almost two days had finally released him from their icy embrace.
A breeze, set up from the steady beating of millions of tiny wings, caressed his skin. And the fear that had been his constant companion since he’d first come up here with Jeff Larkin had finally faded away, and he knew that he had come to the place where he belonged.
He had come home.
He had no idea how long he’d sat with his back against the wall, how long he’d listened only to the narcotizing sounds of the insects that surrounded him, for his consciousness of himself as an individual had begun to fade.
No longer was he Kevin Owen, for the swarming organism that now inhabited his body had repressed all but a few scraps of Kevin’s own personality, bending both his mind and his body to its own imperatives and those of the greater swarm of which it, in its turn, was only a minor part.
As he sat in the darkness, an urge began to form in Kevin, a primal instinct that he was helpless to disobey.
Following a set of instructions that seemed to have no distinct origin nor any true form that his mind could have recognized, even had he wanted it to, Kevin silently rose from his position and moved toward the entrance of the cavern. Emerging from the mouth of the cave, he paused, standing perfectly still, his eyes unfocused.
The night seemed to have come alive.
The air was thick with flying insects, and the floor of the valley seemed to have become a living entity, for in the dim moonlight a constantly shifting carpet of tiny creatures was barely visible, creeping and crawling in what the ordinary observer would have seen as no more than a random pattern. Something in the massive horde’s movements penetrated the entity within Kevin, and he began to move once more, eastward across the valley toward the hill beyond.
Beneath his feet, crushed by the heavy soles of his shoes, thousands of insects died, but even as the life was pressed out of them, their bodies were instantly devoured by the other insects around them.
The carpet they formed remained untorn, the pattern in which they moved unbroken.
By the time he reached the base of the hill and began climbing, the pattern the insects danced on the valley floor had imprinted itself upon Kevin’s mind.
And his body—no longer his own—had become a slave to it.
He walked through the darkness, oblivious to the lack of light, his own intelligence now totally suppressed by the alien consciousness of the hive that had invaded his body.
Molly woke up in the darkness of her room, certain that something was wrong. She was lying on her side, with her back to the window. Though she had not opened her eyes, had not heard anything, either, she still knew she was no longer alone.
Someone—or something—else was there.
Clamping her eyes more tightly closed, she tried not to move, certain that if she so much as wiggled a finger, whatever it was would leap at her, pouncing on her out of the darkness, tearing her apart like the ogres she’d read about in her fairy-tale books
.
Time seemed to stand still, and finally Molly risked opening her eyes. Just a little—just barely enough to see the slight glow of the moonlight coming in through the window.
The moonlight, and a shadow!
Involuntarily she drew in her breath in a soft gasp, then held it, fearful that whatever was in the room must have heard her.
The shadow moved!
And now she heard it, too.
Something was moving toward her, coming from the direction of the window, moving around the foot of the bed—
A scream rose in her throat, but she refused to let it out, because if she did, whatever was coming for her would certainly leap onto her and—
And then Bailey, whimpering eagerly, licked at her face.
Her breath exploded as the paralyzing fear that had gripped her a second ago evaporated, and she threw her arms around the big dog, burying her face in the fur of his neck. “Don’t do that,” she whispered, as if the dog could understand every word she said. “You scared me!”
Bailey slurped at her face again, then pulled away from her clinging arms to trot back to the window. Putting his front paws on the sill, he whimpered softly, then turned and stared at Molly, who was now sitting up in her bed. “What is it, Bailey?” she asked, keeping her voice no louder than a whisper. When Bailey whimpered again, she slid out of bed and went to crouch by the dog, slipping one arm around him as she struggled to see into the darkness beyond the window.
Her forehead furrowing into a deep scowl, she tried to figure out what to do.
Ben Larkin was in the room next door to hers.
But where was everybody else?
Padding silently across the floor in her bare feet, she opened her door a crack and listened.
The house was silent.
Pulling the door open a little farther, Molly slipped out into the hall, then went to the room next door. Once again she stopped to listen, but still heard nothing. Finally she opened the door, crept inside, and shook Ben awake. “Ben,” she whispered. “Ben, wake up!”
Ben rolled over, his eyes finally opening. “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Bailey,” Molly said. “He’s acting real funny. Come and look! Come on!”
Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Ben pulled on his pants and shirt, then followed Molly into her room, where Bailey was still at the window, whimpering eagerly. “Look at him,” Molly said. “What’s he doing?”
Ben, like Molly a few minutes ago, went to the window and peered out into the darkness, but saw nothing. “Maybe he has to go outside,” Ben said. He turned and cocked his head at Bailey. “Outside?” he asked. “Want to go outside, boy?” Bailey wagged his tail furiously and dashed to Molly’s closed bedroom door. “Get dressed,” Ben told Molly. “We’ll take him down and let him out. He has to go to the bathroom.”
Molly scowled at Ben. “I’m not taking off my pajamas with you in here,” she announced. “Besides, if we’re going outside, you have to put on your shoes.”
Less than a minute later, with Molly clutching at Bailey’s collar to keep him from bolting ahead of her, she and Ben stood at the top of the stairs, staring down into the glow of light spilling from the living room into the foyer. “What if our moms catch us?” Molly whispered. “They’ll never let us go out this late.”
Ben’s lips pursed, then he motioned for Molly to follow him, and turned away from the stairs, tiptoeing rapidly back to the room. When both Molly and Bailey were inside too, he closed the door, then went to the window. “I bet we can jump off that,” he said, pointing to the roof of the back porch, which slanted away from the wall only a couple of feet below the windowsill.
Molly gazed at the edge of the porch. It couldn’t be any higher than the roof of the carport behind the building they’d lived in back in L.A., and she’d jumped off that lots of times.
Well, she’d jumped off it once, but she hadn’t hurt herself.
“What about Bailey?” she asked Ben, who was already out on the porch roof, gingerly creeping down toward its lower edge. The boy glanced back and whistled softly, and the dog scrambled out the window onto the roof.
A moment later Molly followed, and a few seconds after that, the two children and the dog were all lined up on the edge of the porch, peering down at the ground eight feet below. “Can you do it?” Ben whispered, and Molly could tell by his voice that he didn’t believe she would.
Instead of answering him, she rolled over on her stomach and slid down the roof until she was dangling from the rain gutter, only her fingers supporting her. She clung there for a second, then took a deep breath and let go. A split second later she was on the ground, grinning up at Ben.
“Come on,” she hissed. “Hurry up, or they’ll hear us!”
Suddenly Bailey, crouched next to Ben, stiffened, his ears pricking, his whole body quivering. An instant later he launched himself off the roof, hit the ground on all fours, and charged off toward the chicken coop.
“What is it?” Molly whispered to Ben as he dropped down beside her. “What’s he doing?”
And suddenly the same idea occurred to both children, and Ben’s eyes widened with excitement. “I bet he smells Kevin,” he said. “Dogs can do that, you know. They can smell stuff from miles away!”
“But if he’s around here, how come he doesn’t come home?” Molly challenged.
Ben shrugged elaborately. “How should I know? Maybe he tripped and fell. Maybe he’s lying out there with a broken leg or something!”
Following Bailey, the children were drawn down the slope toward the chicken coop. They were almost there when they saw a flash of movement, and a dark shape moved through the gate. Struck with fear, Molly froze in her tracks. But instead of dashing toward the figure, as she expected him to do, Bailey pressed against Molly’s knees, a low growl forming in his throat. Terrified, Molly felt her knees begin to shake, but then the shadowed figure turned and moonlight fell full on its face.
“K-Kevin?” Molly gasped, her eyes widening as she recognized her stepbrother in the gloom of the night. And yet, even as she recognized him, she also knew Ben had been right.
Something had happened to Kevin.
For even in the moonlight, even though she could barely see him, Molly could see the smears of blood that covered his face and soaked his shirt.
Kevin stood perfectly still, the moon shining in his eyes. He had no real sense of time anymore, no true idea of how long it had been since he’d left the cave.
Nor was he consciously aware of where he’d been or what he’d been doing, for he was barely aware of anything at all, having almost ceased to function as a physical extension of his own mind, instead becoming merely a tool of the presence within his body.
He had hiked down out of the hills, his eyes barely focused on where he was going, his mind failing to register anything at all of his surroundings. He was following the imperative of the force within, carrying out the directions the patterns of the insect dance on the valley floor had imprinted on his mind.
Food.
He had to gather food, and bring it back to his hive.
He’d set about his task mindlessly, heading first toward the hives on the far side of the property. There, he’d opened the abandoned hives and broken as much of the honeycomb as he could carry out of the frames, stuffing it under his shirt until he could manage no more. Finally he’d turned away and moved on, foraging through the night until he came to the chicken coop, where he’d gone inside, pushed the hens from their roosts, and gone after their eggs, breaking some of them to suck the contents greedily into his mouth, putting others in his pockets to take back with him to the hive.
His pockets full, he’d turned to the chickens themselves, using his teeth to tear the heads off two of the hens.
He’d been reaching for another when he became aware of a presence behind him, though he’d neither seen nor heard anything at all. Moving instinctively toward the gate, he’d frozen as he suddenly came face-to-fac
e with the danger.
And then, finally penetrating into the consciousness the invader had almost totally repressed, Kevin heard a single word.
His name.
It registered slowly. For a moment he didn’t quite realize what it meant. But then a little more of his own consciousness reasserted itself, and he saw Molly standing in the darkness, staring at him.
“K-Kevin?” she said again. “What’s wrong?” She started to take a step toward him, then changed her mind, unconsciously dropping a hand down to rest on Bailey’s head. “Y-You don’t look right,” she said.
Kevin’s fingers flexed, and the corpses of the dead fowl fell into the dirt at his feet.
Within his body the teeming entity surged into frenzied activity, the intelligence of the hive sensing a new nesting place, a fresh site in which to colonize, and breed, and reproduce themselves.
Kevin began to move toward Molly, the black mist already gathering in his lungs, ready to spew forth on his exhaled breath as soon as he was close enough to the new host.
Molly, as if frozen where she was, gazed up at Kevin, transfixed by the strange expression on his face.
And then, just as he started to kneel down to put his face close to hers, to ready himself for the colony’s transference, his own consciousness struggled to the surface and he realized what was about to happen to Molly.
“No!” he gasped, standing and backing away. “Go in the house. Just go back in the house and leave me alone!”
Gathering what few vestiges of his willpower he could still control, Kevin fought against the invader that all but ruled his mind and body. Turning, he staggered away toward the hills.
For a long moment Molly stood where she was, staring after Kevin, though he was already lost in the darkness. Then, from just behind her, she heard Ben’s voice.
“We have to follow him,” he whispered. Molly turned slowly around. Ben was gazing at her in the moonlight, his eyes glittering with excitement. “We can find them, Molly,” he said. “I bet we can find all of them!”
Molly shook her head. “N-No,” she stammered. “It’s dark, and he’s gone, and I’m scared. I want to go back in the house.”