The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Still, They Live
by Nikki Blakely

The movies got it wrong. And so did the books. Not even Stephen King in his infinite twisted wisdom could have come up with anything like this. The scientists, the conspiracy theorists, the doomsday prophecists. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And the religious fanatics. Wrong. About so many things.

Now if someone would have asked Roy Burgess, he might have had a thing or two to say. I picture Roy now as we hunker in the basement of our six floor walk-up with a few of the other tenants from the building; his thin wisps of greasy black hair combed over to the side, pit-stained wife beater stretched taught over a six pack-a-night Budweiser belly, hairy ass-crack peeking over the waistband of his Levi’s as he bent over, flashlight shining like a beacon into the recesses of our kitchen cupboards and proclaiming “What you got here is an infestation, but I got just the stuff for it”, squirting liquid death from the pony keg of poison he carted around from room to room, from apartment to apartment. Roy Burgess, exterminator extraordinaire, whose slogan “Got Bugs? Get Burgess!” garnished bus stop benches, shopping cart baby seats, and late-night infomercials. Yeah, good ol’ Roy might’ve had some thoughts on all this had anyone asked, but no one did, and now the fat lady has sung, and good ol’ Roy’s probably dead now, anyway.

By the time NASA figured out the green and purple gas-like substance that appeared almost overnight over every land mass on earth was not an Aurora—had nothing to do with the magnetosphere, or solar winds—it was too late. The rains came a day later, the sky bleeding purple and green until they blended together into a thick mist as cold and gray as a tombstone. Odorless, tasteless, seemingly benign, until mere hours after exposure, blisters appeared. Thin pinpricks of red turned into larger pustules that oozed black and stinking until they finally burst, the tender flesh falling from the bone as easily as a stewed rabbit.

When the television stopped broadcasting, we watched from windows, stuffing towels, old t-shirts, and bits of torn rag under doors, into jambs and keyholes. We crammed sheets and duvet covers into vents and fissures, rolled up memory foam mattresses and expanded them into chimneys. How long until the oxygen runs out? We don’t know. One of our phones shows two bars, the others are dead or no service. Outbound calls go straight to voicemail, or just ring on and on into the void, and not a single one rings an incoming.

There are eight of us left, huddled in the basement dark, and theories abound. Mr. Rabinowicz thinks nuclear fallout, while John Keening thinks biological warfare. And Mrs. Boyer, she thinks it’s the rapture. But me? I got my own idea. I think what we got here folks is a people infestation, and someone, or something, had just the stuff for it.  

Directly below the ceiling, a few street-level windows cast an ominous glow through an ash-colored haze that cloaks us like a burial shroud. From the sill comes a faint clicking sound as a cluster of small, brown, insectile bodies emerge from a crevice and scuttle down the wall, antennae twitching. Somehow, still, they live. Maybe somehow, we can too.

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Fiction © Copyright Nikki Blakely
Image courtesy of Pixabay