The evening sky fades to navy. Venus hangs low on the Eastern horizon and Sagittarius spreads above it, barely visible in the gloaming. The breeze is cool and dry and carries a hint of woodsmoke from somewhere out of sight. It ruffles the young man’s black hair, which shoots askew from his pale scalp, swinging as he is, upside-down, ankles lynched beneath the thickest bough of an ancient oak tree.
He does not see the stars, nor feel the breeze. He feels nothing, save the slight discomfort that comes with enduring an unpleasant dream.
Until the bucketful of ditch-darkened water explodes across his face and up his nostrils and shatters the dream and launches Devon Macy into the land of the living.
“What are you doing?!” Devon jerks and snuffles, coughs and retches, and continues swearing between gags and blows. His violence has set him swinging again. The rope creaks at the bough, and the motion tightens the noose around his ankles.
Finally free of the deluge, he blinks bloodshot eyes and focuses on the slight silhouette before him, the shadow of a bucket in the shadow of a hand.
“Jarus,” Devon says, venom in his voice and his eyes.
The man with the bucket—he looks like a boy, really—frowns down at the bigger man. “I warned you, Devon.”
And he had. Devon knows it. So he turns his head and spits into the bracken before turning back toward his former best friend. “So now what?”
Jarus takes a long time to reply. A thousand images flit through his mind, none of them pleasant. Insects the size of sewer rats; a dead man talking and laughing as creatures burrow beneath his moldering skin; a woman he loved and another he may have loved, both gone. And at the center of this blooming flower of pain? Devon Macy. “Now,” he says, his voice barely registering above the freshening breeze, “you suffer.”
Time marches on, the night deepening, stars spinning above them, until the Eastern sky glows indigo in the first blush of dawn. This far from civilization—and what, really, is civilization at this point, Jarus would like to know—no one has heard the screams or the pleas. Not a soul has witnessed the barrage of vile words that spewed from the hanging man’s mouth throughout the ordeal, or the quiet whimpers that escape his bloodied lips now.
“Please,” Devon wheezes, a droplet of pink spittle sliding through a deep gash in his upper lip, past his purple, flattened nose, and into the empty cavern where his right eye had once been. “Please, let me go.”
Jarus paces, rubbing his sore, bloodied fingers slowly, sickened by the tackiness, the smell of it. “Not yet,” he says, “now hush. I need to think.”
Devon tries to obey, but the pain combines with his swimming and maddening head to tear great whooping bellows from the depths of his being that roar up through a throat of broken glass and burble out in phlegmy whimpers and whistles.
He can’t scream anymore.
Jarus paces, counting the steely weapons strewn among the decaying leaves. Wrench, pliers, hatchet, cleaver, chisel, sledgehammer. All used and discarded, bearing their tell-tale stains. He pauses, focusing mindlessly on a single fingernail—the rime of bloodied cuticle still clinging to its root—and he crouches down. Movement has caught his eye. He brushes leaves away from the spot around the fingernail, and catches a glimpse of chitinous black. Then another, all but absorbing the brightening light of day.
Then, finally, he can hear them. Turning away from the young man who should no longer be alive but is, he faces windward and his sweat-wet hair blows back from his smeared and grimy forehead. As far as he can see, marching the miles from the smoldering city in the hazy distance to this high knoll overlooking nothing, a wave of black. Chittering, buzzing, clicking, hissing—perhaps billions of bugs converging on this spot.
The small ones lead the charge, like tiny pawns on a massive board. But well within sight, lumbering behind (but not too far) are the knights and rooks and bishops of this insectile army. They range from plum to watermelon size, and Jarus can hear a swik sound like scissors slicing as the largest soldiers’ scythe-like pincers gnash and grab at the air.
And off in the distance, just nearing the first rise that will eventually become a climb up this grassy bald—at what may be the very center of this deluge of bugs, or perhaps just joining the first half of the first wave—he sees the King and Queen. Great, clacking beasts of segmented, clawed horror, easily half again as long as Jarus is tall. To look at them too long would mean madness, so Jarus turns back to the man who was once the boy who Jarus loved like a brother.
“Please,” Devon says again, his remaining eye swiveling down to look up. He’s seen the bugs marching below him. He can imagine what Jarus sees: the first ebony ambassadors of this mighty kingdom reaching and climbing the trunk of the oak, making their way, inexorably, to the bough and the rope and the man.
Jarus drops his eyes a moment, unsurprised to see the insects are methodically splitting and reforming around his feet, paying him no mind whatsoever. He looks back at Devon and blinks. “I’m sorry,” he says. And he walks away, slowly and carefully, so as not to harm a single bug.
As he makes his way down the hill beyond the oak tree, looking out over a green and gray and brown vista of undulating hills, kissed by the first full rays of the rising sun, he hears a sound rising on the breeze behind him.
It turns out Devon can still scream, after all.