Josh buries his face against my shoulder, torn between clinging to me and pushing away so he can follow the siren call of the worm in his brain. His voice is weak, not hardly his own voice any more. “Dad, I’m scared.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Holding him to me, I lift the rapeworm to my nose. It sparks as it enters, tickling, making me want to choke. I taste a spurt of hot blood. Then I take hold of Nick’s hand, and Josh’s, and we rise. When we go, we’ll all go together.
Everglades by Mira Grant
Mira Grant is an open pseudonym for fantasy writer Seanan McGuire. Under the McGuire byline, she is the author of Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, and An Artificial Night. Seanan is also a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. As Mira Grant, she is the author of the Newsflesh trilogy, the first of which, Feed, came out in May. She describes the Newsflesh books as “science fiction zombie political thrillers” that focus on blogging, medical technology, and the ethics of fear. Our next story is set in the same milieu, during a time called “the Rising,” the event that changed everything.
Steve Irwin was the host of the extremely popular Australian TV show The Crocodile Hunter. Irwin, who had been wrestling crocodiles since early childhood, took over his parents’ zoo, and married a woman who had attended one of his shows. (They didn’t wear wedding rings, as these might pose a hazard to them or the animals.) He was criticized for once holding his infant son in his arms while feeding a crocodile, though Irwin maintained that the child had been in no danger. Danger was something he lived with daily. A television ad he appeared in joked about him dying of snakebite after not choosing the fastest delivery service. He eventually did die after being attacked by a stingray while snorkeling at Great Barrier Reef. Later, several stingrays were found dead on local beaches, their tails chopped off, presumably by vengeful Steve Irwin fans.
Our next tale is also about danger, death, and wild creatures. The author says, “This story is about the inevitability of natural selection. And it’s about alligators. I’ve always had a passion for reptiles and virology, which gets you looked at sort of funny when you’re a perky little blonde girl. I have been bitten by multiple kinds of venomous reptile, and one of the most chilling things I’ve ever done was go into the Florida Everglades to see the gators. That really makes you realize that Nature has things much more efficiently designed to survive than we are. We’re just blinks of an eye to the alligator.”
The smell hanging over the broken corpse of the campus is rich, ripe, and green-the heavy reptile smell of swamplands and of secrets. It teases its way past sealed windows and in through cracks, permeating everything it touches. Across the empty expanse of the quad, the green flag suspended from the top window of the Physics building flutters in the wind. It marks the location of survivors, waiting for a rescue that may never come. I wonder if they smell the swamp as clearly there, tucked inside their classrooms full of quiet air, where the search for the secrets of the universe has been replaced by the search for simple survival.
Something darts across the pathway leading toward Shattuck Avenue. I twitch the telescope in that direction quickly enough to see a large black cat disappearing under the Kissing Bridge. I haven’t seen anything larger than a stray dog in the two hours of my watch. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to stop looking. Alligators are invisible until they strike, a perfect match for their surroundings. In this dead world, the zombies are even harder to see. From A to Z in the predator’s alphabet.
This is California, a world away from Florida, but that makes no difference now; the Everglades are here. I lean back against the windowsill, scanning the campus, and breathe in the timeless, tireless smell of the swamp.
I was eight and Wes was twelve the last time we visited our grandparents in Florida. True to family form, Grandma and Wes promptly vanished to spend their time on the sunny beaches, exchanging hours for sandy shoes and broken seashells, while I dove straight for Grandpa’s tobacco-scented arms. Grandpa was my secret conspirator, the man who didn’t think a passion for snakes and reptiles was unusual for a tow-headed little girl from Ohio. Our visits were wonderful things, filled with trips to zoos, alligator farms, and the cluttered, somehow sinister homes of private collectors, who kept their tanks of snakes and lizards in climate-controlled rooms where the sunlight never touched them. My parents saw my affections as some sort of phase, something that would pass. Grandpa saw them for what they were: a calling.
Grandpa died five years ago, less than a month after seeing me graduate from high school. Grandma didn’t last much longer. That’s good. I haven’t seen any reports out of Florida in days, and I haven’t seen any reports from anywhere that say people who’ve been dead that long have started getting back up again. Only the fresh dead walk. My grandparents get to rest in peace.
That summer, though, the summer when I was eight and Wes was twelve, that was the perfect summer, the one everything else gets to be measured against, forever. Our second day there, Grandpa woke me up at four-thirty in the morning, shaking me awake with a secret agent’s sly grin and whispering, “Get dressed, now, Debbie. I’ve got something to show you.” He rolled me out of bed, waited in the hall for me to dress, and half-carried me out of their cluttered retiree condo to drop me into the front seat of his ancient pickup truck. The air smelled like flowers I couldn’t name, and even hours before sunrise, the humidity was enough to twist my hair into fat ringlets. In the distance, a dog barked twice and was still. With that bark, I came fully awake, realizing at last that this wasn’t a dream; that we were going on an adventure.
We drove an hour to a narrow, unpaved road, where the rocks and gravel made the truck bounce uncontrollably. Grandpa cursed at the suspension while I giggled, clinging to the open window as I tried to work out just what sort of an adventure this was. He parked next to a crumbling little dock, pilings stained green with decades of moss. A man in jeans and an orange parka stood on the dock, his face a seamed mass of wrinkles. He never spoke. I remember that, even though most of that night seems like a dream to me now. He just held out his hand, palm upward, and when Grandpa slapped a wad of bills down into it, he pointed us toward the boat anchored at the end of the dock, bobbing ceaselessly up and down amongst the waterweeds and scum.
There were lifejackets in the bottom of the boat. Grandpa pulled mine over my head before he put his own on, picked up the oars, and pushed away from the dock. I didn’t say anything. With Grandpa it was best to bide your time and let him start the lesson when he was ready. It might take a while, but he always got there in the end. Trees loomed up around us as he rowed, their branches velvet-draped with hanging moss. Most seemed to stretch straight out of the water, independent of the tiny clots of solid ground around them. And Grandpa began to speak.
I couldn’t have written exactly what he said to me even then, without fifteen years between the hearing and the recollection. It was never the exact words that mattered. He introduced me to the Everglades like he was bringing me to meet a treasured family friend. Maybe that’s what he was doing. We moved deeper and deeper into that verdant-scented darkness, mosquitoes buzzing around us, his voice narrating all the while. Finally, he brought us to a slow halt in the middle of the largest patch of open water I’d seen since we left the dock. “Here, Debbie,” he said, voice low. “What do you see?”