CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Infestation
The glass elevator rose through the earth above, and Charlie fell swiftly down from the sky; a sea of red cherries, rich and hot with the setting sun.
He landed into a field of shallow snow, his knees scraping the gravel below and the ice at once melting against his skin. The frigid wind gnashed at his figure as it gusted between his bent limbs and through his hair, and the boy noticed that his blanketed outwear had been torn asunder in his transport. He wrapped the canvas sheets tightly around him as he rose to his feet, pressing his arms to his sides to hold them in place.
When he looked up, he observed with astonishment that he was standing in the driveway of his family's home - the home he'd grown up in.
Mom! Dad! Charlie thought joyfully, instantly forgetting the cold around him. He bustled carelessly through the crunchy frozen grass, passed the cracked living room window, up the wooden stairs and through the front door, which had already been blown open.
"Mom! Dad!" he shouted, out loud this time; he looked excitedly through the shadows searching for their dancing silhouettes. Yet nothing moved, and he could hear only the whistle of the air through the cracks in the walls. His hands, pressed against the doorframe, sagged dejectedly.
His eyes adjusted, at last, to the darkness. The boy whimpered.
Every piece of furniture, from the tattered sofa to the broken grandfather clock his mother had inherited, all of it was broken and burned. Holes smashed through the walls gaped like ghastly maws, fenced behind shadows of the picture frames that hung around them, tossed askew in every direction. As Charlie stepped hesitantly into the shadows, he felt splinters of wood and charcoal crackle between his toes.
The wind hammered the curtains with a series of pillowy thuds, and in the rush of air that caught him, he felt a million tiny bugs crawl utop his feet and begin creeping quickly up his legs.
"Gah!" he spat, horrified, stomping his feet and running back out into the snow outside. He brushed his hands frantically against his calves, watching countless black insects fall onto the ground around him; their tiny legs clawed aimlessly at the air above as their upturned bodies swivelled against the ice.
Charlie saw at once that there were more of the vermin in pursuit of him - they spread like spilled molasses across the door's frame and onto the house's walls outside.
He screamed again: "Mom, Dad! Answer me!"
They did not answer him.
The terrified young man pivoted swiftly on his toes and ran back down the front lawn, towards the road. It looked starkly different too, he noted anxiously. The road directly ahead, which led to the great factory he'd raced to earlier that morning - where before it had been quite level, now it descended dramatically into a very steep hill. Not even the factory could be seen in the distance ahead, but perhaps it was just concealed behind the surrounding curtains of dense white fog.
He had no choice. The chatter of the approaching insects behind him grew louder and louder. He sucked in a chestful of the falling snow through his blue lips, and ran precipitously down the slippery hill ahead of him.
Walls of houses zipped past him, worn and tattered bricks wrapped in brown, withered vines; windows with beautiful men typing on their typewriters, their expressions serious and distant - other windows, dusty, sparkling with pink and violet LEDs and flickering neon lights. Telephone poles wrapped in faded flowers of every colour, cheap and desperate testaments to the people who died in the neighbourhood. A desperate and futile reminder of life's emergence from death, whatever it was, and perhaps it was more ironic than not that the flowers were fake - tattered and frozen fabric with threads sprouting loosely from every petal's edge.
He could hear the honking of invisible trucks, passing in strides without the falling sun's light to catch their rusted doors and carriages. The chatter of pregnant mother's pulling air through half-lit cigarettes, the abject homeless outstretching their empty cups as honey traps to the unattracted coins of the passerby. Spiked benches, whining sirens from apartment windows to scare away the mice and rats that didn't exist anymore. The odor of burning gasoline with the floral twist of pyrethrin pesticides, the air was dry and cold, dusted with snow and diatomaceous earth; it drank the sweat from Charlie's pores till he, himself, was drier than a bone.
The sliding boy noted at once that there were none of the usual birds scattered about, the ones that sang and chattered and spewed their ominous advertisements. None were perched along the wires and rooftops, nor in the withered trees' branches - none of their erratic, robotic silhouettes could be seen watching against the sky. Impossible, Charlie thought - the birds had always been there, it wasn't fathomable that they would simply disappear. There was never a moment, since his birth, that there hadn't been a bird located somewhere in his peripherals.
His sliding body came to a halt at the bottom of the hill, his tapestried garments having fully been torn away from him. He curled, frozen and scathed from the icy road, naked and frightened.
Before him were the factory gates, towering rods of textured black iron that met high above in a flamboyant archway, ordained tightly with rusting barbed wires. Through the bars, he could see five children approaching the massive factory's entrance, as he had with the others earlier that day. Their strides were as earnest and eager as his own had been, and Charlie felt tight binds wrap around his breast and heart as he feared for them.
"Stop!" Charlie screamed at them through the gate, "Turn around! Don't go in there!"
He felt the blunt tip of a cane press against the back of his neck, and Charlie froze.
"If you insist, Charlie." A deep, familiar voice spoke to him, smooth as chocolate ribbons. "I have no need for further visitors."
Like a symphony of firecrackers, a clamour of loud bangs and pops shattered the air, poking holes through the racing young bodies; each of the far, faceless teens that Charlie thought he'd never met, collapsed onto the snowy concrete below.
Charlie screamed, his whole body shaking in terror and agony, but there were no birds to scatter in the bleak, violet sky.
As the sky darkens in this story, please be attentive that the sky does not darken in your own.
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