Bewere the Night

INFESTED by Nadia Bulkin

May in the city is the Month of the Missing, and on May 21st the mother of the Cunningham children went the way of a dozen lost teenagers and custody battle babies, as well as uncountable undesirables. She did not come to wake them in the morning, with a shake of the shoulder and a soft “Wakey wakey.” Their father said that she had run off with “some son of a bitch” from her office. “No one we know,” he said.

It saddened and confused Hazel, because there hadn’t been any yelling the night before. Ace was so distressed that he forgot how to tie his shoes and threw up his blue Chemik-O’s in the corner trashcan. Hazel had to hold his hand all the way to the subway stop on 84th.

“Maybe she’ll come back,” Hazel said as they waited for the Red Train. Ace was still pouting, but no longer holding her hand. “Maybe she just had to clear her head.” After all there had been times when their mother would pace the apartment with her fingers pressed to her temples, saying she could not hear herself think, saying she had to get out from under these four walls. She always went out to the hall to cry. Their father said it was no way for a mother to behave, but Mom didn’t know any other way to be.

“Daddy said no,” said Ace. “Daddy said she’s just gone.”

Daddy had clearly been in pain. He’d sat in the kitchen like normal, with his green coffee mug steaming and his floppy newspaper open to Opinion, but today his fingers trembled as if the ritual was just for show. He said their mother had always been selfish, a quitter, and he shouldn’t have expected anything different. Then he said “sorry,” which was disconcerting.

On the platform they stood next to a harried man who kept adjusting his tie. A red-haired woman was following him—her eyes were just as bloodshot as his, but her face was rockier, stormier. The man must have known he was being stalked, because he was itchy and jumpy and kept peering down the tunnel, willing the Red Train to come. At first the woman hid behind columns, but she became more brazen as his discomfort grew. When at last he dropped his suitcase and started to choke, she moved into the open.

“How do you like it?” she shouted, although he was too distressed to respond. “Being turned inside out? You see who you are under all that bull? You’re scum! Human filth!”

The man was transforming. His hands disappeared up his sleeves, and his height shrank with his shuddering legs. His head withered and twisted like a sweater wrung by a washing machine—for a second, onlookers caught a glimpse of something pale and worm-like where his head should have been, something much like a fetus—and then his entire collapsed into a heap of clothes. A chorus of shrieks finally broke loose.

The woman’s voice was an edict, her finger the only arrow she needed. She silenced the crowd. “That man messed with my little girl! He isn’t fit to live!” A murmur spread outward through the platform, as if she had begun a giant game of telephone. “Run, you weasel!”

A brown wriggling animal darted out from under the man’s shirt and half-scurried, half-swam toward the edge of the platform. Commuters screamed again, clutching their own clothes as if to keep their bodies from tumbling out. They gave the weasel a wide berth. Rent-a-cops hurried over with BB guns, but the weasel jumped down to the tracks and escaped into the underground, too small to be lit by the green torches on the wall.

“There you go!” the woman shouted. A rent-a-cop tried to restrain her, but his efforts were half-hearted and she shook him away. When she looked around the platform, everyone avoided her gaze. “The police won’t help you. The law won’t help you. This is what good people have to do these days. This is justice in our city!”

Charlie Cunningham introduced his children to his new girlfriend at the zoo. She was sitting by the large panda statue with her purse in her lap; when she saw them coming she stood and waved. Her name was Paige, and she was skinny and dark-haired. Almost as pretty as Mom, the children thought. But up close she looked cold—not cruel, just very cold. Like someone dead dressed up in rouge.

“Paige works for a City Councilman. Theo Robson. Pretty impressive, huh?”

It wasn’t, not really—their mother had been a paralegal and after she came home late smelling like cranberry cough syrup she used to tell the funniest stories about city politicians—besides, they could hear the sarcastic bite in their father’s voice. Paige lowered her eyes demurely and tucked her hair behind her ear. “It’s nothing fancy, I know,” she said. Charlie smiled and took her waist.

The shaded walkways of the zoo were quiet—it was late in the season and the day—but the animals were restless for feeding time. Charlie left the children with Paige at the Sea Lion Pavilion. “You know what we need?” he said. “Ice cream.” He said “ice cream” as if he meant “bullets.”

Paige said, “Don’t worry, I’ll watch them,” and Charlie gave her a tight smile of approval. He was trying to trust her enough to let her into the fortress, but Hazel could see that he didn’t look at Paige the way he’d looked at their mother. There was not enough feeling there. Not enough hate.

The sea lions—Goonie and Cha-Cha—tossed and dove in the artificially aquamarine water. It took them four seconds to cross their tank. Occasionally they would stop and look out through the glass with small oily eyes, watching their watchers with glazed boredom.

“Do you kids like monster stories?” Paige asked. “Or are they too scary for you?”

Ace liked zombies; the bloodier, the better. Hazel liked vampires. “Like Bigfoot?” Ace said. “He’s not scary, he’s just sad. And sea monsters aren’t real.”

“You’re thinking much too big,” said Paige. “Have you ever heard of pest-people? They’re cursed to live as little tiny vermin. You know, rats and things.”

“That’s really not scary,” said Hazel, but Paige’s stare made her shrink into her jacket.

“Imagine if you were turned into a skink, and instead of going to the zoo with your daddy, you’d be using your little rubber legs to run away from the whole world, full of predators that want to eat you. Wouldn’t that be monstrous?”

“You can do that to people?” For some reason it seemed worth asking.

Paige giggled. “I know someone who can. A sorceress.”

Ace crinkled up his nose. “Like the Green Witch in Boxland?”

“Yes, like that.” Paige smiled. “Except she doesn’t fly. She has an apartment in the Rattle and a magic knee. If you were just a little naughty, she might turn you into something cute and put you in a zoo. But if you were really bad, she’ll make a gutter-rat out of you.”

The sea lions nipped at each other’s fins. They churned like hamsters in a wheel.

Charlie waved goodbye to Paige out by the gift shop after buying her a dolphin-shaped mood necklace. “Say goodbye, kids,” he said, and the children shook their new poorly-stitched sea lions. Surrounded by dormant machines, Paige looked even more like a tender will-o-wisp, glowing with dead light.

A flier tucked beneath their windshield wipers advertised a Pest Transformation Service run by a man named Dr. Terry Devine. Total Transformation Guaranteed, Short 3 Day Turn-Back, All Types of Pests Available! Bring this flier in for a 20% discount. Ace read it to their father as they drove home.

“I think it’s good,” said Charlie, nodding. “It’s street justice is what it is. Those people that get turned into pests are bad folks, I think that’s obvious. Criminals. Assholes. Derelict people. People who’ve been cheating the system and mooching off everyone else. The thing about life, see, is that everygets what they deserve. Call it what you want, karma, whatever. But maybe this’ll make people treat each other better.”

“And they can’t ever turn back into people?”

“They can turn back every once in a while, for a couple of days. Just like shapeshifters change back into coyotes for a day and a half.” He glanced at them through the rearview mirror. “Couple guys at work used it to take care of some low-lives. Have you seen that sign at Mr. Lowe’s bodega? Act Like Vermin, Get Treated Like One.” He laughed. “Good for him.”

“What if someturns Mr. Lowe into a pest first?”

He gave Hazel a stern look. “Cursing people takes money. Like everything else in life.”

After a few blocks of silence, Ace said, “I miss Mom.”

Their father’s sigh sounded like the whirr of a rickety fan. “I wish she could come back and give you an answer for why she left us, champ, because I sure as hell don’t have one.”

They passed animals on the street; frogs in drains and blackbirds on awnings and more than the regular number of mice eating out of garbage cans. People came after them with kicks and brooms but being so small the pests vanished into the crevices of the city’s architecture, up into pipes and down into tunnels.

A cat appeared on the fire escape outside the children’s bedroom while they were practicing mathematics. It looked nearly drowned with stormwater—there had been a big rain the night before. Ace and Hazel eyed each other, twirling their mechanical pencils. Their father was out having dinner with Paige—she had come over to cook for them but had cried into the marinara sauce when she wasn’t even cutting onions. Charlie said she’d gotten bad news about Mr. Robson and told the kids to microwave a pizza. He said to keep the door locked, but nothing about the windows.

After they swaddled the cat in towels, they saw it was an orange tabby. Judging by its tangible ribs and dirty fur—still stinking of the world—the cat no longer belonged to anyone. Even so it clung to the children with desperation, as if dangling from a precipice. Its claws poked through their sweaters and drew little teases of blood.

The cat had unusually long canine teeth: unsightly fangs that kept catching on the lip of the dolphin-safe tuna can. Ace christened it Smilodon and the cat looked at him wearily. It humored their play—chased their shoe laces, let them rub its belly, barely yelped when Ace accidentally stepped on its tail—it must have been glad just to be on the inside looking out. Only when they heard footsteps in the hall did the cat become feral again.

Retribution was swift. Retribution was loud. Their father threw the marinara sauce, the coffee maker, and a meat cleaver, though he refused to touch the cat with his hands. Smilodon not only dodged these missiles but hissed back, taking bold jumps toward Charlie and clawing at his socks. Every time the cat shrieked like a howling baby, Paige whimpered as if being socked. “This is bad,” she said. “This is bad, Charlie, this is bad … ”

Hazel tried to gather up the skittering cat while Ace held back their father’s arm. Charlie threw another object with his free hand—his green coffee mug—and hit Hazel between her shoulders. She glanced back at him, wounded, and Charlie’s arms dropped.

“Do you have any clue what’s happening out there?” Charlie was biting his lip and letting his eyes droop like almonds, but every time his defenses slipped he would pound his voice against the ceiling and get the grind back into his face. He had to present a strong front. “You know what kind of danger you’re putting us in? This isn’t one of your little fantasies, Hazel!”

Hazel and Ace chased the cat into the hall, through the fire door, and down the metal staircase. It looked back at them with wistful, shelter-me eyes. “You can’t stay here,” the children said, and ushered it out the back door. The cat ran around the corner of the building with its tail to the ground—they tried to follow, to make sure it would be all right, but the alley before garbage day was a miniature city unto itself.

They did not find the cat, but they did find a homeless man in that crack in the great wall of the North Sleeper neighborhood. He was pushing a shopping cart full of rats with gouged eyes and crippled pigeons and squirrels whose tails had been burned to the bone, patients from an animal hospital. Less heavily wounded animals followed the man on foot, circling his bandages, nibbling at debris. The man sang in a voice that was cracked and light as aluminum foil, but the children couldn’t understand him. Something about a preacher and a creature?

“Are you one of ’em?” Ace asked. “One of those pest-people?”

“No!” the man shouted. “And they’re not either! So you just leave us alone!”

“You should turn them in to Pest Control,” said Hazel, reciting what she had heard at an assembly. “Vermin spread disease and consume resources, even the ones that don’t start off as people.”

The man scowled. “You two can go to hell, and take this damn city with you!”

Upstairs, Hazel hesitated before re-entering the apartment. Her back was still sore. She was afraid that she had been cast out of her father’s fortress. Paige and Charlie were shrieking at each other inside—it was almost like old times. “Did you see its teeth? What did she tell you about the cat, Charlie? Is that what she said it would look like?” “Look, you better get a hold of yourself before the kids get back … ” “Or you’re gonna what? You’re gonna what?”

Ace fearlessly opened the door and grabbed Hazel’s hand. He said “come on” and Hazel went in, even though she saw this castle sinking.

In music class, a boy named Abel Farrow shoved Ace so hard that he cut his lip open against a plastic desk. Abel had chosen Ace as a victim back in September—skinny, bug-eyed Ace, out of all the fourth-graders at Independence Elementary. The substitute didn’t know what to do—their regular music teacher, whom no one liked, had not been to school all week. Rumors were running rampant that she had been turned into some kind of pest, probably one of the slick black crows that circled the nearby cathedral.

When Hazel saw his bruised mouth, she tried to teach him tricks to stay invisible. But Ace didn’t want to be invisible. He wanted payback. “Paige knows where to go,” he said.

They got the chance to ask her when their father went out for “supplies”—public health officials were going on about the need for heightened pest control in case of an infestation—and told Paige to put his children to bed.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Paige, leaning against their bookshelf.

“Because I want to curse a kid at school,” said Ace.

Paige tipped her head back against the wall, eyes on the smoke detector. “Can I tell you a story first, about the curse?” They shrugged, so she went on. “My boss, Mr. Robson, was running a race—not a race race, but a popularity race, do they have those yet at your age?—against a man named Mr. Malachi. He asked me to help. So I went to the Rattle and I said to the sorceress, ‘Please turn Mr. Malachi into a rat.’ But just before the sorceress started working her magic bone, she said to me … ” Paige lifted her hands as if to conduct a chamber choir. “‘Magic comes at a price! I hope you’re ready to pay it!’ I didn’t want to believe her. I thought she was just trying to scare me, the way witches do.”

They asked what happened next, but Paige seemed distracted. She was running her finger over her little white teeth. “Even little pests can bite,” she mumbled.

“Did Mr. Malachi turn into a rat?”

“Oh, yes,” said Paige, and then abruptly raised her voice. “Has your daddy ever told you where we met?” No, he hadn’t. He just said, I’d like you to meet someone, and I want you to be nice to her. And then there she was at the zoo, the dead woman in the nice dress—but Hazel didn’t mention that. “He was next to me in line to see the sorceress. She warned us both.”

“You’re lying!” Ace shouted. “My Dad wouldn’t curse anybody!”

Paige turned her glacial smile upon him. “You can hope so, sweetie. You know if you wish for something hard enough, you can start to believe it—until you find something else that proves you wrong, of course. Just like you can hope that ghosts aren’t real until you meet one under your sheets.”

Ace looked at the little blanketed hills—his feet—at the end of his bed.

“Who did Dad curse?” Hazel whispered.

Before Paige could answer, something small darted across the floor of the apartment above theirs. Paige jumped away from the bookshelf and grabbed at her scarf. She was ashen. The children gave her funny looks. “I’m scared of rats,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“A rat ate out the neck of Mr. Robson’s child. They follow me now, the rats do.” She looked from Ace to Hazel. “I shouldn’t have brought them here. You have your own vermin to deal with, and anyway … yours wouldn’t like me being here.”

“You’re scaring Ace,” Hazel said. Indeed, Ace’s thumb was back in his mouth. He looked like a baby again, not the boy who’d said something back to Abel Farrow and called a cut lip no big deal. Hazel’s memories of baby-Ace always included their Mama, holding him tucked in the crook of her arm. “Dad wants us to stay together.”

Paige shuddered as if throwing off a heavy coat. “No,” she said, and the despair in her voice made Hazel stop trying. “But you kids should be all right.”

Their father came home with bags of pesticides and traps from Safeway. He had already arranged them on the kitchen table—spray cans and bottles in the back, repellent paste and traps and poison pellets in a mandala in the center—before he noticed that Paige was gone, and his children were watching coverage of the infestation well past their bedtime.

“Where’s Paige?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “Maybe the rats got her.”

“What rats?” Charlie paused. “Hey, look at me. Something you want to tell me?”

Hazel shook her head. She at last recognized her father’s pink, wide-eyed anger as an expression of his fear.

The Channel 8 reporter stood in a building that was silver-plated like a suit of armor, pointing at a small blue door. Pest Control officers in cardboard-colored jumpsuits passed behind her, yelling into their radios. “Shots were shots fired around six thirty this evening—calls started coming in of … bats, it looks like, several bats the size of dinner plates attacking residents and service personnel starting at three p.m. today.”

Charlie sat down behind his children. “What is this garbage,” he said, but he couldn’t quite turn it off.

“A forty-two-year-old man and a twenty-nine-year-old woman were taken to the hospital with severe facial injuries. At least three other people were also injured. Jim, the residents of the Coldhook claim that the bats are actually pest-people, former tenants who were apparently cursed … if so, tonight’s events certainly confirm reports that these so-called pest-people are unusually aggressive and extremely dangerous, in spite of their size … ”

“So Paige left, huh.” Charlie sank back into the couch, deflated after all his excitement over the pesticides.

“You can’t trust nobody, Dad,” said Ace, and Charlie lightly cuffed him on the chin.

“That’s right, son. Look at you. Big tough guy.”

“Where’s Mom?” Hazel asked.

Charlie seemed flustered. “Don’t know how many times I gotta tell you. I have no idea.”

Maybe he wasn’t lying. Their mother could be anywhere in the city’s innards by now. On Channel 8, a black bat straight out of a Transylvanian castle swooped out of the basement door—Pest Control officers lifted their guns but the bat had woven itself into the feathery strands of the Channel 8 reporter’s hair. The audio feed was quickly cut but they could see the terror and anguish on her face. It was cosmic, sublime; truly something to behold.

Traffic cones made a ring around the subway at 27th Street. Yellow tape and a metal safety gate stretched across its entrance. The children lurked around the corner and listened to sounds of battle—shrieks and bodies falling and flat slams of bone hitting bone—rising from below. “It’s the pests,” said Ace. “They took over the subway.”

“But it doesn’t sound like animals, does it?” said Hazel. “It sounds like people.”

Ace’s high-pitched whine—“Oh, ma-an”—drew the attention of one of the patrol cops guarding the subway station. He sauntered away from his post slowly at first, glancing both ways as if to cross the street, before lowering his shoulders and hurrying toward the children. They ducked behind a shuttered newsstand, but he found them there.

“You kids take the Red Train home from school? Station’s closed today. It’s nothing to worry about, it’s just … ” He was interrupted by a wet underground scream. He looked embarrassed. “It’s not safe. Y’all better get along.”

Hazel squeezed Ace’s hand—it was cold and wet, like an aquarium eel. “There’s the stop on 56th,” she said to him, but the patrol cop cleared his throat.

“I wouldn’t take the subway at all, hon.” He whispered this as if he was himself scared, this big tall barrel-chested man in military colors. The absurdity of it almost made Hazel laugh, but she had learned long ago that adults did not want their emotions laughed at.

“We’ll take the bus,” she said.

“Good girl,” said the patrol cop, and left.

They had not taken the city bus for years, not since the winter strike, and the bus shelter looked like an abandoned war bunker now. A glossy perfume poster was hidden behind Missing Pet and Missing Person signs, as well as Beware: Dangerous Pest notices. These came complete with pictures of snarling, bright-eyed rabbits and raccoons, and details of the pest-person’s crimes against society: Thief. Addict. COMPULSIVE LIAR.

The children sat next to a teenage girl dressed in rags whose bare knees were pulled up to her chest. She smelled of sewage. She was gnawing at herself. An older woman with bursting grocery bags sat down on their left and sifted through her purchases, checking her receipts. Hazel took a peek at the bags and saw the same emergency stocks her father had started collecting during the war—freeze-dry food, cans of peaches, horrible whole grain crackers. “It’s gonna get bad,” the woman whispered when she saw Hazel looking. Her eyes were gleaming with joy. Hazel could bet she had already hoarded pesticides, and fantasized about introducing her to their father. “You know we’re in for a fight. Oh, God, there’s one of them there.”

The woman’s gaze had shifted to the ragged girl with soiled nails on the far end of the bench. “Kids, you’d better squeeze in close to me,” she grunted. “She’s a pest.”

The girl was tugging at her matted hair. “I don’t—don’t—don’t know what happened. I don’t know how I got here, I just want to get home.”

“Oh, I’m sure you know exactly what you did. They’ll have boarded those doors when you get home, sweetie, I’ll promise you that.”

The girl’s moan was bloated, like the sound of something rising through layers of mud. She spat up a bit of soap scum: hard to imagine what all she had been eating. It must have angered the woman, because she pulled a can of Home Defense out of her purse and sprayed it in the girl’s eyes. The girl yelped—a shocking, harrowing noise—and fell forward onto her hands and knees on the pavement. There her muscles seemed to settle into a familiar, easy space. Her joints locked into position and her fingers caressed the gritty asphalt. The children wondered who she’d been before the change: a rave angel, a shoplifter, some anonymous angry sixteen-year-old that pissed off the wrong person? Whichever—she was something else now. Even semi-blind the girl scurried down the street, scraping the skin off her knees.

The woman settled back proudly, but there were others—shabby, disoriented people who jerked and stumbled down the sidewalks as if searching for something lost. They were side-stepped—with the city so nervous and quiet, this was not hard. Some passers-by did spit at them and hiss things. “Curse you,” it looked like; it was what all the kids at school were saying. The returnees always snarled back. Everyone said that pests were twice as aggressive as natural animals, and no wonder, they had more to resent, more to grieve. Ace and Hazel watched this drama from the slow, shuddering safety of the city bus, but whenever they hit a stop light and one of the pest-people stared back at them, they’d duck down, breathing hard. What awful eyes those people had. Naked in their desperation.

Charlie was in one of his slow, smoldering bad moods, so they didn’t tell him about the subway. People at work were going AWOL, he said, and he was sick of picking up their slack—but Hazel suspected he was worried.

They ate in silence because the television had become a nightmare-flood of infestation footage: cheap triage, shaky cam, people screaming with fear and rage in the dark. The hall outside their apartment filled this silence, not with rustling shopping bags or jangling keys or the neighbors’ usual bitter mumbles—those comforting sounds had been absent for the past week—but with deep, slow creaks that came from right up against the other side of the wall, like an old boatman was rowing through the slate-blue carpet. “Maybe it’s the super,” said Charlie.

“I don’t think so,” said Hazel, and then someone knocked on the door. It startled all three—Charlie picked up his knife, Ace pushed away his plate, and Hazel stood. She walked to the door despite her father’s yells, looking back over her shoulder once to say, “I’m just going to see who it is,” and see Charlie stuck at the table, halfway between sitting and standing. His eyelids were trembling. He looked a little like Ace.

Hazel went up on her tiptoes and looked through the peephole. In the few seconds that she could balance without falling, she caught a flash of blond hair and clammy, dirty skin, like their visitor had been swimming in the Sound. She tasted salt and thought of the time they had gone—all four of them, back when their wounds were still whole—to the Sound and eaten hot dogs on the pier. The water had been too cold to swim in. Wrong time of year, their father said. I told you so. Dazed, Hazel unlocked the door.

“Hazel!” her father shouted, but it was too late.

The door handle began to turn and Hazel jumped back. After the door swung free of its latches, a pale hand snaked inside the fortress, followed by a pale woman. She had draped herself in plastic. She had no shoes. She smelled a bit like rotten fish—probably all she’d been able to get on good days. Despite all this, she grinned broadly when she saw the children. The corners of her mouth lifted to reveal two long and yellowed fangs.

Here she was, returned. Smilodon. Their mother. The children smiled back. Her expressions had always been contagious, and they had missed the warmth of her burning heart. Charlie sat. He was strangely calm. Maybe some tiny raw place in his heart was glad that she’d come back, even now and even like this, that she wasn’t such a quitter after all. Lisa Cunningham pushed her heel against the door as if she was just coming home from the office—tired, spent, flinging off her purse—and shut it with a soft, finalizing click. The weight of the old plastered walls finally settled on their bones.

The children did not need to see this last fulfillment of their family saga. Hazel led Ace to a window, and from this vantage point they watched the progress of the infestation on the street below. There was motion in that coiled darkness, the frantic energy of vermin in mid-swarm. This crawling energy swept other things into its chaos: people, cars, the ground floors of buildings. Everything fell. Everything was punctured. Maybe that’s what it means to be infested, Hazel whispered. She was holding her brother close, helping him block out the rest. Up and up the infestation climbed, drawing ever closer to their fortress in the sky.