Fiction: The Skin of the Mountain by Kevin Shamel

 

Susan, I know you’re alive. I know your city is receiving this transmission. You’ll see it, I’m certain. I am also certain you’ll die soon after.

You won’t be taken by the bugs. It’s too late in the cycle for that. You don’t have to worry about anything crawling under your skin while you’re least aware. I’m sure you’ve heard rumors about what that’s like.

Know that they’re only rumors. Nothing you hear could have come from an informed source. Only those of us who’ve been infested know the particulars, and I’m the only one to go through the trouble of talking to any of the rest of you.

You will die, but sooner than those with bugs inside of us, and with much less pain.

I felt my bug—my handmaid—as she made her way from the inside of my thigh to my brain. I felt her groping through my muscles, scratching her way up my spine, twisting against my kidneys, lungs, and throat. I can’t really describe the itching fire of her footsteps. Be thankful you’ll never know it.

I felt her dig into my brain and take control of my will.

We all felt it. Three billion people fell to bugs that night. A billion more by the next day at noon. Nearly every person in my city was overcome within half an hour. We ate those who weren’t.

The horde that had been my neighbors—lawyers, cheerleaders, plumbers, welders, doctors, cops, massage therapists, everybody—swept southward like fire. We joined with the millions streaming from Seattle and stripped the land of life.

We met the Portland swarm coming north and cornered a squalling mass of fur and flesh in the mountains between us. Two fleeing waves of panicked animals collided and found their ends. Elk, bear, little girl, badger, man, wolf, pig, blood, hair, screaming—it was a long, loud, fur-flinging feast as our two bug-gangs joined forces and chewed them to bones.

I broke free of the bug’s control eighteen hours after she first set her pincers into my brain. It happened while she was laying her first clutch of eggs. The swarm was on its way south from Portland. I lingered at the edge of the city, picking over the bones of a Great Dane.

I was appalled when I found myself chewing on the dog. But not sick. I didn’t vomit. I actually finished the bite in my mouth.

I knew I’d been under the control of the handmaid. And that she was a handmaid. The whole world was infested with them—billions and billions of people. That knowledge came to me.

The bug inside me fidgeted near my tailbone. She was depositing eggs through the wall of my intestine. These would hatch within an hour and go to work digesting the pounds of flesh I’d been devouring.

There were other eggs to be laid. More grubs to be born. I knew this.

The handmaid crawled up under my ribcage. She pierced my peritoneum and began laying eggs on my lungs. These would hatch into worms. Worms to clean my lungs, to slide through my veins and arteries and capillaries. Worms to slick up my nerves with stimulant, to reinforce their responses. Grubs that would grow into muscle-combers, drug manufacturers, bone-builders, sense enhancers, and surgeons.

My body belonged to the bugs.

But my mind came free.

This has only happened to a few people. It is quite correct to call us the elite.  There were twenty-four originally. Four of them managed to kill themselves when they regained control of their minds. I’ve destroyed three so far. Six others have fallen.  At this time there are eleven of us.

Apparently, it’s because of a large amount of copper in our bodies—a great percentage more than in the rest of the world population. It makes the chemicals that the handmaids use to subdue our consciousness less effective. It lets us think.

That’s not to say that we are free.

I still have hive-thoughts echoing through my brain. I still succumb to their plodding desire to consume. The difference is I am still me. The others are drones. Eventually, they will serve me.

By retaining as much of myself as I have, I am bug royalty. That’s right, you can call me Princess Viola now. If I make it through the next few weeks, I will be Queen.

I fought it, Su. I did. I didn’t start screaming that afternoon in Portland—with the dog meat in my mouth, and the sudden knowledge of what had happened not only to me, but to the whole world. I didn’t cry, or stomp my feet, or kill myself.  I fought.  I called that handmaid to attention by grabbing her through my skin and pinning her against my ribs as she came out from under my ribcage.

I swallowed and said, “Look, bitch.  I know I’m dead. I’m going to crush you against my ribs now. Then I’m going to go and kill as many of you as I can before whatever you’re doing to me, or the poison of your little smashed body inside me, can finish me off.”

The bug tore through my chest and latched herself onto my finger.

I screamed and started flinging my hand around.

The hole in my chest sizzled with pain. My finger was being eaten by a bloody, black beetle. I passed out trying to crush her and my finger under my bare foot.

I awoke knowing much more than I knew before. I have ageless memories.  Memories of people and places upon this planet that haven’t been shared for longer than you can comfortably imagine. My handmaid whispers them to me when I ask her.

I’m going to tell you this, Su, because you deserve to know why you’re going to die. You deserve to know the whole story, because you’re a part of it, and it’s a grand story, Su. A great, grand story to be a part of.

The bugs—they’re called The Living.

They’ve been on this Earth for three hundred and sixty million years.

Their purpose, like most of the little crawlies on the planet, is to clean.

Or rather, that’s our purpose. I must consider myself one of The Living. Hm. That makes me wonder for the first time if you recognize me. Perhaps not, since my skin has been hardened to this oily-metal sheen. Not with my eyes the way they are. Every moment makes me more of them, less of me. But it’s okay.

The re-growing barely hurts now. When my ribs were meshed with regurgitated bone, it hurt. When my stomach was replaced with a gut-slug, I felt more pain than I think you could bear. I wonder if you see me only as a giant bug. Or as the bugs that make me. Is my voice at all what it was?

Oh, Su, I am sorry. I’m sorry for you, trapped in your city. Your city that will fall to the pressing mass of the swarm. It has to. It will. I’m sorry for the cats and dogs, the turtles and the fish—do you know there are aquatic bugs inside dolphins and octopi right now? Even the sharks are nothing more than food.

This is the cycle.

It’s the cleansing.

The Living rise and they raze the Earth. There will be nothing left in the end but the smallest of creatures, the luckiest of tit mice. There will be bugs.  Spiders, aphids, dragonflies, worms, beetles—the meekest of the meek. They will be spared. Like they have been time and time again. They will keep cleaning.

It wasn’t a falling rock that ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

Extinctions aren’t just tsunamis, asteroids, pole-shifts, super-volcanoes or methane gas. The Living came, and they began their cycle. When it is over, they will move on. Just as they always have. They’ll swarm until there is no life left, and no chance of its return. And then they will leave.

The drones can’t be stopped. They went through the re-growing process faster than those of us in the super-copper crowd. The work was done on them in the first few hours of infestation. Their handmaids are in complete control. They’re more than any other plague. Nothing on Earth is their match. Nothing but me and the others like me.

They will eat all the meat in the world.

In the next few weeks, the drones will tear through the animals, and when there are no more, they will turn on each other. Most will be dead a few weeks later. Only the strongest will be left alive in the next sixty days. The last twenty-four drones will be the Queen’s Guard—her guardian mates.

I will be that Queen.

I must fight for it, and still the changes happening to my body could kill me, but it is the strongest desire in my life.

Tomorrow I will grow wings. They will spring out of my body and unfurl in the air. When they are dry, I’ll be able to fly.

Can you believe that?

I’ll be able to snatch birds from the sky. I’ll fly to the tops of mountains for goats and sheep and lions. I will dive on the other princesses, silently from the clouds.

I’m losing myself, Susan.

You’ve got to kill yourself, Su. Jump from a building, or cut your wrists. Eat some pills. Tell them to burn the city. Burn it. No matter what defenses you have, no matter what the people in charge might think, you have no hope. You are our food.

Even now there are many less people than when I first began this broadcast. They’re falling as I speak—families, football teams, communes, prisons, neighborhoods, towns, countries… Do you hear me, Su?  Kill yourself. They will come at you with knives, and guns—with teeth and fists and mad hate. They will tear you apart.

I must fight the other princesses. We will kill each other until there is one. My handmaid tells me I am the strongest. She’s not trying to flatter me, it is merely a fact. 

When I’ve dispatched the rest, I will begin to grow. Drones will heap meat at my feet. I will eat and eat and eat until I’m much larger than I was ever meant to be.

Do you remember the last time we dieted together?

I will shed this skin and several others. My bones will stretch until they are paper-thin. My heart will be a tube that stretches through most of my body. My eyes will be stranger than they are now—I’ll only need them for a short time, and they’ll grow hexagonal scales over them. I will bloat and stretch into a quivering, twenty-ton, messy mass. And Susan, I can’t wait for it to happen!

Drones are building my nest, deep in a mountain mine in Arizona. I will fill it with my bulk.

When only two-dozen drones remain, they will make their way to my nest.

We’ll wrap the mountain around us, sealing all the ways in. We will mate, and I’ll lay eggs in the heart of the mountain. I will eat the drones one by one, after they have completed their nuptial duties. They’ll help sustain me through my years of waiting.

Long after all traces of human civilization are lost to wind, rock and rain—while the meek evolve outside our hideaway, my eggs and I will sleep. As new oceans are born, the continents rearrange themselves, and life gains the ability of intelligence again, we will wait in our mountain.

And I will remember, Susan.  My mind will remain as free as it is today.  I will remember you when I awake in a hundred million years.

I’ll remember your eyes. I’ll remember what it’s like to kiss your soft, people-lips. I will remember what it’s like to hold your hand, and to hear you laugh. I’ll remember everything—shopping malls, rock and roll, terrorism, altruism, skyscrapers, firelight, cat-fights, modern art and popcorn. I will remember.

My eggs and I will doze under the eroding mountain. We’ll wait for the time when the rock gives way and the air from outside comes to cool our den.

When time’s ravages upon the Earth come to wake us with noise and motion—when the skin of the mountain slides away with age, my eggs will hatch. Billions and billions of them, Su, from my strange body. They will hatch, and they will eat me.

I’ll be awake for it. I hope I can see the stars when it happens. I hope I can smell the air of the surface, hear the wind. My young will hatch. They will eat me and absorb all my knowledge—all my memories, and the memories given over by every Queen since the beginning. I will die to sustain the plague. Tiny hatchlings will take to the wind and scatter across the globe.

The newborn handmaids will seek out the most intelligent creatures, and The Living will cleanse the Earth again. The one from my brood who becomes Queen will have long years to reflect upon memories that were not hers. Memories of how much I loved you.

She will remember this moment, too, standing in the field at dawn, gazing fretfully toward your stronghold. She will recall this message, and what it took to send it bouncing off the fossil satellites fallen from their degraded orbits so many years before. She’ll relive the itch under her bones, the odd sensations of body parts replaced with specialized bugs, the fear and the calm that I feel now. She will remember being human.

My shoulders ache. Can you see the wing-buds?

Remember when we flew to St. Lucia? I will fly there. I’ll visit the beach where we spent our days and I’ll shed the remainder of my human skin. I’ll stand in the sand and wait for the last of the prospective Queens to come to me.

Already there are only seven since I last gave you the count. I’ll kill the last of them, and then Viola will be gone. But you’ll be gone before my coronation. I’ll mourn you now, while I can.

Su, I will live as long as mountains do.

Kill yourselves. All of you who hear this. You’re meat. I’m coming to eat you.

Kevin Shamel is a bizarro writer. He spends days staring out the window of his haunted house in the Pacific Northwest at the critters in the yard and making up stories about them. Kevin’s first book, Rotten Little Animals is available at Amazon.com. Weird stories like it, and also others that are nothing at all the same, can also be found online and in various print magazines. Find art, news, and links to more of his writing online at www.shamelesscreations.com