Interlude 2

You didn’t respond to my last letter. Your ex-wife informs me that you have the dog this week, so I can only assume you’re still at home. I’m overnighting this one. For the love of god, please listen to me.

The firm sent me a map of where you’re intending to go. Out in the deep woods, is what it looks like. Out there in the thorns and the kudzu and god knows what else is fucking growing in that tangle of ferocious vegetation. The Savage Green, we used to call it. That stuff could swallow a man whole and you'd never find his bones

We’ve been through some serious shit together. The frigid thickness of Siberia. The steaming jungles of the Congo Basin. The desolate golden glare of the Sahara. And I know what you’re thinking: Florida is America and America is tame. And you’re right. We’ve paved and plowed and ripped and shredded the entire goddamned wilderness. We rendered it as sterile as a petri dish. The wild is gone, but something else grew up in its place. There are some things which can thrive in even the most sterile environment. The vermin follow us wherever we go. And in the absence of the mitigating factor of true wilderness, the natural cycle of predation, they have grown numerous and belligerent and bold.

I used to know a fella named Okaloosa Jem. He thought he was a tough guy. He was a burly boy of Irish stock, all thick-shouldered with an upturned nose like a bull and a thick beard of red hair. Used to smoke math and dive for snapping turtles in the Shoal River. More often than not he ate them raw, let the blood dribble down his chin like a cannibal Santa. Well, one day me and Okaloosa Jem were out in Jem’s old rust-bucket of a truck, cruising the red dirt roads, looking for scrap metal. Rent was coming up and our landlord was a guy by the name of Tallahassee Pete.

Tallahassee Pete made Okaloosa Jem look like Miami-Dade McDaniel. You didn't wanna come up short on rent with Tallahassee Pete. But I digress.

The truck broke down. Nothing unusual, but only Okaloosa Jem ever knew how to get the damn thing started and he was in a mathhole at that particular moment. The only thing to do was to guide him back to the highway so we could carjack a ride home. The interstate was ten miles away by the road, but only a mile as the crow flies. It was a hot day, a cloudy day with a slight drizzle steaming up the air, and I don’t think you’d think me weak for saying I wasn’t excited to walk that shit. Nobody would be, and Okaloosa Jem said we could take a shortcut through the Savage Green.

"But Jem," I said. "I reckon we ought not to do that, on account of the immediate death which prevails over all who would be foolish enough to try their luck in them there woods."

Jem spat a wad of mathchaw on the ground and glared at me.

“You don’t really believe all them stories, do you?" he asked. "And even if all that shit is true, ain't nothing killed me yet, and ain’t nothing ever gonna."

He smirked.

“I am going to live forever," he said.

Well, you can probably guess what happened next. Okaloosa Jem pushed his way into the green. There was a gentle hum. The melody rose and blossomed into a rich harmony. Rising and falling, rising and falling. It seemed like a new voice joined the chorus every instant. A hundred voices all joined together in a haunting tribute to the most divine insights of the universe.

Believe me when I tell you it was the most beautiful goddamned sound on the face of the planet. Immediately my mind was filled with images of glowing angels, so goddamned beautiful and shining it would make a grown man weep. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to go out there with Jem, but somehow I managed to resist. I could hear Jem weeping out in the green. He was telling the singers not to be sad, because he loved them and he knew they loved him. And just then the drizzle stopped and for a brief moment the clouds parted overhead and a thin shaft of dazzling light cascaded down from the sky, landing directly on the spot where Okaloosa Jem stood weeping at the beauty of the world. I must have had some dirt or something in my eye, because my eyes kinda started watering up. I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted out.

“Jem! Goddammit! You get the hell back here! Jem!”

The music stopped and in its place rose a discordant flurry of buzzing insect wings. There was an awful, inhuman scream of unequaled pain and terror. Jem came stumbling back out, but you wouldn’t have known it was him if you hadn’t seen him go in, because you couldn’t see so much as an inch of skin for the dusty brown roaches swarming and clinging all over him in one great big coat like scales on a fish. He swiped and slapped and ripped at the roaches and they fell from his body in great tumbling rolls of brown and slapped against the wet mud and quickly righted themselves and swarmed back up his legs or went buzzing up to his neck, and for every roach Okaloosa Jem knocked off, a dozen more found purchase and sunk their fangs deep into his skin and hooked their legs in place and began pumping and writhing as they grew fat from his blood and then dislodged themselves and fell plumply to the ground to skitter back into the green.

Finally, the screaming stopped and Jem flopped down on the ground in one great big pile of writhing, shrieking mound of dull brown. But he wasn’t dead. The numbing venom of the bloodroaches had finally overwhelmed the math in his system, and he was now paralyzed. He was beyond help: even if you killed the roaches gorging themselves on his blood you’d never find all the eggs they’d laid beneath his skin, not before they hatched and began the process anew until every ounce of Jem had been chewed and consumed and impregnated.

And forget about Jem, I wasn’t exactly safe myself. I’d scrambled back inside the truck and locked the doors but the roaches had grown bold on the math in Jem’s blood.

They flew right after me, thumping against the windshield like raindrops in a thunderstorm, individually at first and then a constant patter of roaches falling down and crawling all across the windows, blocking out the sun with their dusty brown segmented bodies. I didn’t have a watch, but I’d reckon I spent three days camped out in the broken down truck, doors locked and windows rolled up, even in the full heat of summer, but still I wasn’t entirely safe. At least a dozen times an hour one of those fuckers would come scurrying through the air vents and twice I awoke from a short nap to find one of them perched on my neck, sucking away at my carotid artery. No telling if they laid any eggs or not, but just to be safe, I burned them off with Jem’s math torch. Eventually Tallahassee Pete came looking for his money and scattered them all with a mighty shout. I had to give him the truck to make up for the late rent, but I was glad just to be alive.

Just promise me you’ll be careful.