Infestation

Hiatus was due to vacation, failure, lack of commitment, disenfranchisement, and the ever looming darkness. At least Mort is having a worse day than I did. 

~~~

Infestation

In the tight belly of the dead

Burrow with hungry head

And inlay maggots like a jewel.

Karl Shapiro — The Fly

~ ~ ~

Mort

Mort didn’t want to be at the bodega at two o’clock in the morning on a Monday, but that’s / that was where he was. And that wasn’t even the worst part — the damn bug spray was going to cost $14.99. 

“You’re serious?” he asked the old guy behind the counter. The old guy nodded. Mort wasn’t sure why he’d even asked the question because Of course the bug spray would cost $14.99. 

Mort handed over a twenty and waited for the change. He wasn’t about to throw away a fiver just because he was in a hurry. Mort had some principles. “And this will work on flies, right?” he asked.

The old guy behind the counter nodded and handed over a grimy looking fiver. Mort grimaced and stuffed it into his pocket grabbing the bug spray and hustling out of the bodega. The harsh fluorescent lights flickered in the darkness behind him. 

His duplex was only an eight minute walk — he’d timed it — but he didn’t like being out at this time of night or morning, rather. And he was flustered, mostly because he was supposed to be at work in a few hours and the fucking flies had cost him a lot of time. There were still things to be done.

Sure, it was a duplex, but Mort was pretty proud of himself for owning both levels and if the comfortable life he had was something that Clara was happy to give up, it was her loss. She’d been gone a month now, and maybe the bug problem had been getting worse since then, or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe Mort was just noticing it more because he was alone and tended to find things like flies more distracting than before. Well, not tonight he thought. Tonight he was all out of time. 

He stomped up the bricked front steps and and unlocked the door. What awaited him was worse than twenty minutes earlier. A small swarm of flies buzzed out into the front hall as he opened the door and he couldn’t help but exclaim and duck. “What the hell!?” He was asking himself as well as the flies. They were everywhere, not thick enough to block vision, but loud enough to make a person such as Mort particularly uncomfortable. He didn’t have time for this shit. 

He blasted the air with the fifteen dollar bug spray and coughed as it flew back in his face. The buzz of the flies dwindled a little, so Mort blasted the swarm some more and retreated through to the kitchen on the lower floor of his duplex. His dinner — Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes — was still sitting half-eaten on the tiny dining table. He’d been too wrapped up in researching to clear away before he had a shower, before he went to bed, before the flies woke him up with their incessant droning. “What the hell?!” he asked the air again.

Surely the flies should have been gathered around the abandoned meal. Surely they would have been attracted to the unattended food. No. Instead they were up on the ceiling, on the kitchen cabinet handles, covering the refrigerator door and the coffee machine. 

Mort raised his fifteen-dollar bug spray can and blasted the air, making an elegant twirl as he went, arcing the poisonous mist this way and that, wreaking what he hoped was havoc. 

Buzz. Pat.

Buzz. Pat. Buzz. Pat. 

Buzz. Pat. Pat. Pat.

Buzzzzzzz. Pat, pat, pat. 

“Ha!” Mort pumped a fist into the air. The fuckers were finally starting to drop. Like flies he thought. That made him laugh. He sprayed again and laughed harder until he’d sucked in too much of the poison and he doubled over in a hacking cough. “Fuckers,” he murmured to himself as he watched the dying flies helplessly squirm on the floor at his feet. They kicked their tiny legs and spun in upside down circles. They were so fucking pathetic. 

Mort kept the bug spray clasped tightly between his fingers and stomped upstairs to his study. His laptop screen was still open where he’d left it before finally going to bed hours earlier. A few flies buzzed in the corners of the room. He ignored them.

The  tabbed pages in Safari blinked to life as he thumbed the track pad. He toggled through them, reassessing the information he’d garnished earlier and smiled to himself — Clara’s divorce papers arriving in the mail was one thing, her hiding from him was another entirely. That thing was a betrayal.

Just as he was about to zoom in on the satellite map, a single fly zoomed past his face, striking him on the nose as it went. Caught off guard, Mort leant back too far in his chair and hit the ground hard, flinging out across the study floor on his back and ass. “Motherfucker!” He scrambled up and lurched for the bug spray on his desk but the fly was already gone out the door and the rest that had lingered, now followed. He stalked out of the room and watched them go down the stairs and congress near the front door. Frustrated and fifteen dollars poorer, he managed to blast one last dose of poison towards the stairs and then gave up, stomping back to his bedroom next to the study. 

~ ~ ~

The alarm woke Mort at 5:15AM just like it always did and he slumped onto his side, knowing for sure that he had definitely not had enough sleep. A soft buzzing from the hall outside his bedroom reminded him of the flies. “Fuckers,” he said to himself, but it was soft a sleepy, he was too tired for anything better. 

He switched on the coffee machine to heat it up and dumped last night’s dinner, plate and all, into the trash. Clara would probably die if she knew he hadn’t saved the food, hadn’t even bothered to clean the plate, hadn’t ensured the kitchen was immaculate before he headed to bed. But Clara was a cunt. 

Mort set the coffee machine to pour him a double espresso and then went back upstairs to get dressed. He found a barely ironed Genesys Corp button through hung in his closet and a pair of khakis that would most definitely bring him some flack from colleagues, but dressed was better than undressed, and at least he would be on time. The flies hadn’t quite ruined everything. 

Back downstairs he retrieved the double espresso and added a little milk and sugar. He swigged it and knew it was just what he needed, until a hard lump caught in his throat. What? Mort coughed and coughed until he spat up the lump into the sink.  

A dead fly.

Mort wanted to scream, to grab the bug spray and go mental, to grab a match and set the whole damned place on fire, to burn the fuckers into oblivion along with his Clara-less duplex. He rinsed his mouth out with water and vowed to buy a new coffee machine after work. He ignored the small mass of flies huddled above the top of the door frame as he left.

~ ~ ~

“Dude, you look like shit.” It was Dylan, Mort’s cubicle neighbour with a nose that was never devoid of flecks of pie. 

“No doubt. I got a bug problem that’s keeping me up.”

Dylan seemed intrigued for unknown reasons. “Like, for real? What kind of bugs?”

Mort paused before clicking his next call through on the ancient PC that the company insisted they used. “I don’t know. Flies mostly, I guess. Bought some spray last night, cost me a fucking fortune but doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.”

Dylan rolled his chair further around the cubicle wall. “Like, just flies?”

Mort squinted at his screen. “Yes. Just…flies. I don’t know. They’re fucking everywhere.”

“You should get an exterminator.”

“I work at this dump — I don’t have money for an exterminator.”

Dylan scratched his nose, appearing to think. “You could do one of those DIY bug bombs. I’ve heard they’re cheap but like, maybe super poisonous.”

This piqued Mort’s attention. “Bug bombs. Hmm. Do you get them from the supermarket?”

Dylan shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. But you’re probably better going to a hardware store or something. Maybe like Bobby’s?”

“They’re over from here, right? Just a few streets?”

“Mmhmm.” Dylan nodded and scooted back to his desk. 

Mort clicked his next call through and started making a plan.

~ ~ ~

Eight hours is a long time. 

Eight hours is a long time, especially when you’re trapped doing something that is necessary but not really a pressing matter. Eight hours can sometimes last a lifetime. Today, Mort was feeling a lifetime use up all of his Monday. 

Eventually finally ultimately it was two o’clock in the afternoon and a little extracurricular work while on the clock had proven fruitful — he even had a potential Facebook page for Clara, who was now calling herself Tiffany Montgomery. Gross. Mort didn’t like that name at all. He was almost certain she’d chosen it just to keep him from being drawn to her. But Mort was better than that. He could disguise himself at work and he could do it at home as well. He had looked for her since she’d left, he’d looked for her for a month, he hadn’t stopped looking for her. Because he knew he was going to find her. And he had. 

She had slipped up on the photos — actual photos of her with her sister and her nephews and her dog. She’d cut her hair and dyed it so that now she was a dark brunette. Clara was not a brunette, she was a redhead and Mort knew that more than anyone else. Her carpet was ginger. And her face was a photograph in Mort’s mind. Clara could never be forgotten. And now she was about to be found. 

***

Mort was relieved to find a certain deterioration in the fly population when he finally opened the front door of his duplex just after four that afternoon. He’d stopped at Bobby’s tools and picked up four residential house bug bombs for six bucks a-piece. He had decided he was never going back to the over-priced bodega with the old guy behind the counter. 

There were a few small clusters of the black-winged fuckers in the corners of the rooms in his duplex, but they appeared to be keeping to themselves, and they certainly weren’t as confrontational as they were the previous night. He made a plan for the morning, drew up where he was going to place the bombs, and then retreated to his study to check on Clara and what she had been doing. 

The activity was low and so Mort was disappointed. There was nothing new posted to Facebook or Instagram by Tiffany Montgomery and so he scrolled through the photos that he’d found the night before, poring over them. He thought about the bug bombs, and Clara, and his recent discoveries. He wondered which was most important. Maybe all of them were important, maybe none of them were. But that was just the thing — Mort didn’t believe in coincidences. 

As he scrolled further through her Facebook page looking for slip-ups and clues Mort found what he had ultimately been afraid of. It was an innocuous photo at best, but it was blurry, hastily taken, and there was a hand near Clara’s shoulder. A male hand. 

Mort tried to calmed himself but the thought had already taken hold of his mind and heart. He knew what this was. He what this was. What this was. This was her — the bitch — taking aim directly at his his weak spot, provoking him, making things much worse than they had to be, making him much worse than he had to be.

A few had left their swarm and started doing little circuits around his head, bumping into him now and then. Mort swatted at them but it was useless. The damn things could fly for goodness sake. A few more of them detached from the cluster in the corner of the study and joined in the circles around his head.

Just as Mort was about to close the laptop something popped up on Tiffany Montgomery’s Facebook feed. 

Hey guys! Just letting you know I have a whole bunch of old sentimental crap that needs burning, but I thought I’d have a garage sale instead :)

A smiley face? The bitch was testing Mort’s limits.

From 6am in the front garden guys! 1120 Hollyhock Drive. See you there :)

The second smiley face was quickly forgotten as Mort felt himself get a little hard — an address. An actual address delivered to him on a silver-fucking-platter. Cunts like Clara could run, but they could never hide. Cunts like Clara could abandon the men that they loved, but that was never the end of it. Mort knew better. Mort knew that he was someone who understood commitment. That’s why he had found her.

~ ~ ~ 

1120 Hollyhock Drive. A little bit of searching later and he grabbed his keys — the address was only forty-five minutes away if he drove. Just one tiny problem, his car was in longterm storage a couple of blocks away. Not quite the end of the situation but definitely a lego brick on an otherwise leisurely stroll through the hallway. That’s fine Mort told himself. He had the key to the storage facility and it was his right to go down there and retrieve his dusty old hatchback in the middle of the night on a Monday. The other tiny problem was gas. If there had been gas in the car when he first stored it that would have been handy, but by now it had most surely evaporated and there would be no way he’d be able to turn the engine over.

Mort bit his lip as he paced in the front hall, keys in hand, a small congregation of flies still circling his head. Suddenly it hit him. He cut Mr Wilkinson’s grass next door. The duplex didn’t have any grass but Mort had a mower and when he’d first moved in, he had offered to do the chore for old Mr Wilkinson. Long story short, there was a can of gas in the bottom of Mort’s broom cupboard. 

Sure enough the can was there and as he picked it up and headed out the door with newfound confidence, Mort wondered if Clara would scream the same way now that she was a brunette.

~ ~ ~

Clara

It had been growing, of course, but she didn’t know when it had started. If asked, she couldn’t give you a day or a date or even a period of time. At first it was just here and there. One or two. Nothing to really catch anyone’s attention. But soon it was more and more. Clara learnt quickly. 

Her bruised face was hard to hide sometimes. It was better to put the green-toned concealer on before her foundation. Frozen spoons hid the bulges of her eyelids. Long-sleeved shirts avoided questions about the abrasions, the cuts, the finger marks. Hiding was something that Clara had become good at, but she was no professional. She supposed that was why the flies had come.

And that Monday they had come again, all the way to her sister’s house on Hollyhock Drive, and they had called to her from afar. Their swarming, buzzing sound comforted her and so she quietly slipped out the back door in her night-dress and went to meet them. The flies with all their eyes and all their wings drew her across the yard and told her they were her. They were her. Clara wondered if it was true. She felt the flies and the flies felt her. A million eyes and a million wings. She felt them lift her up, tell her things. She was becoming the flies. 

No she though. The flies were becoming her. Her. The flies were becoming her.

Clara walked for a long time in the darkness, her bare feet becoming dirty as they made contact, over and over, with the asphalt. She wasn’t a stranger to pain — she had Mort to thank for that — but this was something different. The flies were her companion for the journey and without realising it, she found herself back on the street, not too far from Genysis Corp, where Mort had made a house and a home for them. 

A blackness rose in her. It was commanding. It was something that she couldn’t resist. 

And so she didn’t.

~ ~ ~

Mort

Mort was barely a half mile down the road when he heard them — the flies — buzzing in huge swarms somewhere out in front of him. 

Dammit, where were these things coming from? He changed the gas can to his other hand and searched his pockets for his phone because fuck this he was going to call an Uber. Before he could even open the app there was an explosion further up the street — a few street-lamps had burst. At least that’s what Mort presumed it was. He squinted into the darkness and saw nothing. The street was black. It was right in front of him. The flies were behind him and they were in front of him and they were everywhere. Suddenly he heard them as if there was nothing else to be heard. 

A swarm hit him from the front and Mort was on the pavement, his gas can wrenched from his hand and he cursed as the damned thing spilled all over him. Is stunk up to high hell and soaked through his clothes. Mort was beyond angry. He swatted at his face but just like that, the flies ascended and hovered above him, clearing his view.

What he saw was Clara. 

Mort watched as she took a small packet from the pocket of her nightdress.

She smiled at him and something flared in the darkness.

Clara had lit a match.