Murmurations
A.M. Sutter
“Incredible, isn’t it?” Aaron says as he cranes his neck back and watches. Caleb doesn’t agree; it’s too many bodies too close together. He thinks it must be hot in the center of the flock, with all those hearts pumping all that blood to the surface.
“Yeah,” Caleb responds, instead of saying I can’t keep doing this.
He picks up a fry and watches it dangle between loose fingers. Aaron continues to make small talk, discussing some new client he’s picked up at the firm. In many ways, Caleb hates these weekly lunches. He’s not stupid; he knows they’re a check-in, a pity meal. Aaron says he just wants to make sure Caleb is getting back out there, but he doesn’t know why Aaron even cares. After all, Aaron’s the one who called things off.
“How do they not hit each other?” Aaron asks, turning his attention back to stare at the sea of fluttering black high above them. “How do they know where the others are?”
Caleb drops the fry and swallows back the words he wants to say. Says, “Maybe Google knows,” instead of Why are we still pretending?
Aaron looks down to type something on his phone at the suggestion, while Caleb glances over at the other patrons to try to avoid watching all those fluttering wings and black bodies.
“Huh. Apparently, there are computer models to describe how they do it.”
For a moment, Caleb pictures fit young men and women in name brand underwear directing bird traffic, and he laughs. A sharp, short, ugly noise.
“What’s funny?” Aaron asks with that patient smile of his.
“Nothing,” Caleb answers, instead of Why are you doing this to me – acting like you’re still invested?
Seemingly satisfied, Aaron goes back to looking at the birds overhead, and for a few seconds Caleb studies Aaron, tracing his eyes over features he’s long memorized. But since everything ended, he’s found that Aaron’s mental silhouette has developed gaps like a dotted line, and he’s trying to fill in the blanks before he forgets everything entirely.
“God,” a woman complains a few tables down from them, loud enough for people to turn their heads, Caleb included. “This itch behind my eye is driving me crazy.”
The woman drives a tight knuckle into her eye socket and rubs. Her friend leans in and murmurs something, but Caleb can’t quite make out what she’s saying. Aaron is still studying the birds; Caleb is studying the woman and how hard she is driving her finger into thin flesh. Something above startles the birds, and alarm calls fill the sky. The flock swirls around a swooping hawk and then past it, leaving it confused as the smaller birds disappear from view.
The woman gasps – a quiet, stuttering sound of surprise, and Caleb watches her. She probes cautiously at her cheekbone, directly where a deep eye bag bruises her skin. Then something pops from the center of her left eye, peeling back the globe like the skin of a grape.
Her friend shrieks and knocks her plates off the small metal table. The ceramic shatters against the ground, and whoever wasn’t paying attention before now is.
Something like a worm writhes out from within the weeping socket of the woman’s eye. It undulates its body in a way that makes its colors seem to pulsate like a boardwalk funhouse. The woman turns to her friend, her remaining eye squinting in confusion, as if she doesn’t understand the shock on the face across from her. Maybe she doesn’t feel the blood dripping down her cheek.
“I’m good,” the woman tells her friend, who has tripped backward out of her chair and covers her mouth with a shaking hand.
Startled shouts fill the evening air as people move away. Aaron, now paying attention, pulls Caleb out of his seat and along with the throngs of others backing up from the scene. But Caleb can’t help but watch the twitching stalk throb around fresh blood and another, unknown fluid.
He hears the woman again – or thinks he does, because how could he make out her soft murmurs over the chaos of the crowd? “It’s okay, it doesn’t itch anymore.” She turns in her seat, blind, searching for her friend, reaching out to the toppled, empty seat. “It doesn’t feel bad. Come back.” A faint pop, and another stalk crawls out of her right eye. Together they pulse and change color. A signal that is unintelligible but terrifying.
She stands up, hands still out, palms up. Placating, pleading.
“It doesn’t feel bad at all.”
Caleb’s not sure exactly what they witnessed at the restaurant, and the woman was ushered into an ambulance too quickly for him to be sure that he truly saw what he thought he did. Based on the subtle red rimming under Aaron’s bright eyes, Caleb’s fairly certain that he didn’t imagine it.
“Are you alright?” Aaron asks, placing a gentle hand on Caleb’s forearm.
“I’m okay,” Caleb says, instead of I can’t begin to process this, and I’m terrified.
Frowning, Aaron lets his touch drop, and Caleb’s skin chills quickly under the ghost of lost fingers. “You have to be honest with someone,” he tells Caleb. “You have to let someone in.”
Caleb’s heard it all before, in this very hallway, with Aaron’s overnight bag over his shoulder and Caleb’s apartment decidedly emptier.
“I mean it, I’m okay,” Caleb insists, instead of I don’t know what just happened, and every time we do this it breaks me down.
Aaron thins his lips but grasps Caleb’s hand and squeezes once before turning to leave.
Caleb wants to say I miss you, but every time we do this, it breaks me down a little more.
Instead, he says nothing.
Caleb sits on the couch and lets a show play in the background as he scrolls through his phone. He’s not sure what to believe in the articles, but what he reads – real or not – makes him feel sick. Some say she passed away, while some insist she’s still alive. He tries to think about something else. There are soap opera detectives on the television, dressed too much like they’re getting ready for a photoshoot to be believable, discussing a murder like they’re reading Shakespeare.
Somewhere behind the screen, or maybe in front of it, or maybe not at all in the room, he watches the woman at the restaurant turn to face him. She seems to be looking at him, but he can’t be sure as her eyes are gone, weeping messes down her cheeks. The pulsing stalks rotate toward him, appear to be watching him.
He blinks and finds that the drama has ended. The news chases the scrolling credits. A reporter stands by a police barrier, a blockade set up on a suspiciously empty city street. They say something that Caleb doesn’t register. He’s too busy watching the motion behind the smartly-dressed suit with the mic. Figures stumble behind the barricades, a small group of police clumped cautiously nearby. Caleb notices the twitching stalks before he notices how the figures move. The parasites – that’s what the news calls them – flash and strobe and seem to talk to each other through colors and undulation.
The infected are blind, but they move in unison, a wave flowing over the waiting police and crashing around them. They avoid the touch of the officers like a plague, like they are the clean ones, and when the infected are finally tackled, they shriek like they are on fire. Like they are burned by the touch.
The woman wasn’t the first case. She isn’t the last.
This group numbers in the dozens, maybe even a hundred. It halts traffic, though the infected twirl around the cars with an odd combination of heavy footfalls and grace. Pressing himself against the building behind him, Caleb holds his breath, tries to make himself thinner, smaller. There’s too many of them, they spill off the asphalt and onto the sidewalk. They crest like a tidal wave, and Caleb can’t move as he watches the wave come to consume him. His panicked heart kicks nausea against his throat with every beat. He supposes this is it, this is how he dies. Or whatever he will become after his eyes are shed. He squeezes them closed, as if a thin layer of skin will protect him.
The wind of movement sweeps over him and then passes. He is not touched.
“Beth!” a man shouts. It’s a high wail, a mix of disbelief and crushing sorrow. Caleb opens his eyes and watches the man jog toward the herd, which has elegantly pirouetted around the onlookers and stalled vehicles. The man picks up his pace, quickening into a sprint as the group continues onward, his cries unheeded.
“Beth,” he calls again. “Beth, come back.”
Caleb doesn’t know which one of the eyeless things the man is calling to; none of them pause. The man reaches out, fingers brushing a tattered sweatshirt, the only thing he can reach.
The one he touches shrieks, and suddenly all of them are screaming, as if the touch carries a risk of infection or pain. They break into a stampede, desperate to get away as the parasitic stalks flash bright warning colors of danger. The screeching is overwhelming, driving Caleb to his knees. The man trips over the sound and falls, splitting his chin and lip against the pavement. Blood splatters the sidewalk, and Caleb feels the visceral flinch, the instinctive reaction. An echo of the flashing eyestalks, and their warning of danger, predator, stay away.
The screaming dwindles as the infected flee, the street stunned to silence in their wake. Caleb wants to call Aaron and tell him that he’s scared and could use some company. Instead, he crouches and hangs his head until his breathing finally evens out and the gray clears from his vision.
One stops by his aisle and he drops the jar he’s holding. Thick, clumped jam and fragments of glass splatter across the floor. Those stalks turn, and though there are no eyes he knows that they can sense him. The infected tilts her head, the parasites remaining fixed, still watching.
“By yourself?” she asks.
And for a moment, her voice echoes in stereo, as the others mimic her question across the store, talking as one unit. A droning cacophony. “Isn’t that lonely?” All of them are talking specifically to him in that moment. Or none of them are.
He wants to scream, wants to tell the monstrous thing before him to Get away, leave me alone, it’s none of your business.
Instead, he nearly trips as he backpedals down the aisle. The other infected approach; they have a hard time knowing where to place their feet, but they don’t hit anything else. They twist their limbs like the starlings flicked their wings, a dancer’s choreography.
The first speaker folds back into the group, unspoken instructions preventing her from hitting the others, and then she is gone with the rest through the big glass doors. The building seems to sigh in the resulting quiet.
He should get the rest of his groceries, but he turns tail and goes out the employee entrance, desperate to lower his chance of running into the group again outside. He passes three more wandering masses of infected on his way home, and watches a man fall to his knees across the street. A moment later both eyes are gone, the stalks glistening with something that shines in the evening sunlight, and the closest group closes in around the man, absorbing him into their ranks.
Caleb runs back to his apartment, locks the door.
He should call Aaron, ask him to come over, ask him to stay. Instead, he watches TV until the news anchors lose their eyes. Until the television stops broadcasting. Until the power shuts off.
He made the mistake of opening his door once; Mrs. Mathers on the other side, waiting for him. Her eyestalks twitching. He might have accidentally caught one of her stems when he slammed the door. Her scream was echoed by mouths all across the building, and from the outside, as if he had injured thousands. Caleb has not reopened the door after that to check, no matter how many knocks there had been. No matter how many quiet pleas and placations had slithered through the gaps in the wood.
“Caleb?”
He startles at Aaron’s quiet voice, muted by the thick barrier. For a moment, he is sure he is imagining it.
“Caleb, are you in there?”
It’s Aaron’s precise tone, harsh edges of words softened with a simple authority, used in courtrooms and official phone calls. Caleb doesn’t hear it echoed, but he hasn’t heard movement in the hall in a while and can’t be sure he’s not just hearing what he wants to. He gets up and tries to noiselessly shuffle to the door. Curses when his toes catch the edge of the empty soup can that he hadn’t bothered to clean up.
For a moment, there is only silence on either side.
“Are you okay? Caleb, I need you to answer me.”
The voice is so sincere that Caleb wants to cry. He opens his mouth to respond.
“Can you let me in?”
His jaw snaps shut. Is Aaron asking because he’s afraid? Or because he wants Caleb out in the hallway? Unprotected.
“Caleb, let me in,” Aaron begs.
Caleb imagines himself opening the door, imagines Aaron falling into his waiting arms. Instead, he retreats to the couch, pulls the comforter around him, and pictures strobing stalks where Aaron’s beautiful eyes used to be. He won’t open the door because he doesn’t know which Aaron waits for him.
Eventually, Aaron leaves, whether under his own power or swept up into the swarm, Caleb doesn’t know. He tries to ignore the sliding of his shoes along the carpeted hallway. It sounds so much like worms sifting through dirt.
The hallway remains eerily still, apartment doors closed tightly or hanging open, revealing slivers of dark abyss. He glances out the hall windows and only finds empty streets.
One of the abandoned apartments at the end of his floor flooded some time before the water stopped, a broken sink faucet the culprit. Not caring about the moldy smell of standing water, he collapses to his knees on the kitchen tiles and palms it into his sticky mouth again and again. The water coils like a cold snake in his stomach, but finally pushes back the beast of thirst enough for him to think. The building is so quiet, no creaking hints of footsteps, no muted murmurs of conversation. It’s oppressive, and he pushes himself up, wipes at his damp jeans, and returns to the humid stairwell.
When he stumbles out onto the street, it feels decidedly emptier than his apartment; Caleb finds it crowded with abandoned cars and trash, but that only emphasizes the absence of people. He wants to call out, see if anyone answers, but isn’t brave enough. What if his voice brings a surge of parasitic bodies?
Stifling his harsh breathing, he searches building after building. Finds no one. Scavenges food behind open doors and imagines rotting, long forgotten meals behind closed ones. Eats standing, nervous, but finally able to think.
He wants to organize, gather up a pack of supplies to survive in the wild like every apocalyptic movie he’s seen. He wants to find other people, other survivors, and gather them together. He wants to rebuild society – its life, its chaos. Its all-pervading crowds. He doesn’t know what he wants.
He wants Aaron.
Caleb backtracks to his old sedan and manages to weave through the congestion of an abandoned city and its silent cars, monolithic towers looming down over him.
He thinks of Aaron’s soft voice on the other side of his door and desperately clutches to the hope that Aaron is alright – that he, like Caleb, held out just long enough to survive. An acidic burn crawls up the back of his throat as he steps out of his car; he should have let Aaron in.
Forcing back the intrusive what ifs, he tries the front door and finds it locked. He looks under the rusting planter for the spare key, but Aaron has moved it at some point. That hurts, matters more than it should in all of this chaos. He pounds on the door first, begging Aaron to come to the entrance, but no one answers. In a panic, he heaves a rock from the garden through the beautiful bay window and uses his shirt sleeve to gingerly knock away the shards of glass. He crawls, ungainly and heavily, into the kitchen where he used to drink coffee and stare out at the swaying trees while Aaron cooked breakfast on Saturdays.
A framed picture of the two of them rests on its back on the kitchen table. It’s too easy to imagine Aaron hunched over it. Around it, a halo of dried blood and some other, unidentifiable fluid mar the polished wood. Caleb doesn’t want to think about whether Aaron’s involuntary tears were cried before or after he came to Caleb’s apartment.
The sudden loneliness surges over him, surprising and crushing in its force. He can’t have Aaron. Now he just wants anyone.
A subtle quake tremors through the floorboards. Caleb feels it in the soles of his feet. A dull, quiet murmuring builds outside, like the cresting of cicada calls in summer. Something large approaches – a slow stampede. He rushes to the front door and unlocks the deadbolt.
He steps out onto the stoop.
The infected move in the largest herd he’s seen, so many bodies that he could never hope to count. Their feet move in a coordinated march, creating the low roar. There are stooped elders, young children, men and women, all twisting and spinning in and out of smaller groups, and all the while a sea of eyestalks oscillate an oil spill of colors. Caleb can’t understand them, but they understand each other; that much is obvious.
There must be thousands. Hundreds of thousands. An entire city in exodus, an entire civilization but Caleb, and Aaron must be in there.
In that moment, Caleb makes his decision.
Caleb sprints after the ambling group, shoes kicking up loose asphalt as he surges past their easy gait. He races down the road, with the ponderous stampede of worn shoes and bare feet mere yards to his left. He glances at the faces as he passes, hoping to catch sight of Aaron. There are too many of them, and he can’t pause to look in fear of being left behind.
Up ahead, the road opens to a meadow and the thick forest border beyond. The first infected reach the treeline, startling a flock of starlings from the canopy. The birds whirl and chirp in the air above him, and Caleb grows desperate, knowing this is his last chance. If he doesn’t join them now, he’ll lose them among the trees, weighed down by the thick underbrush.
He cuts diagonally toward the crowd, pushing his thundering heart and burning muscles, and then he’s in. Sliding to a stop in the middle of all the heat and heartbeats, he bites back a sob and spreads his arms, reaching out and upward, like he wants to be lifted up, carried away. Eyes open, desperate for one last glance at the golds and coppers of the early autumn leaves before he loses his sight, he waits to be drawn in.
The horde splits down the middle, like a biblical sea, and flows to either side of him. Thousands of eyestalks pulsate a dazzling strobe of colors, confusing him as he attempts to grab at them. They pick up their speed, gliding past his flailing, searching hands.
“Please,” he begs, even as he stumbles and falls. No one catches him, and he grinds his teeth against the flare of pain as he hits the ground. He throws out his hand, and there is an arm so close. Just a few more steps, a little farther, and he’ll be able to reach, be able to wrap his fingers around flesh. Be able to connect.
The throngs of infected pull away, swirl and twist, break and rejoin. A beautiful dance, coordinated by some underlying instinct that he can’t understand. He reaches out again, but it is too late. They avoid his touch, pinwheeling into shapes that make him dizzy. He is not welcome – he is an outsider, a predator, and they take safety in numbers. They continue to pirouette around him, waves breaking on a dry shore, streaming into the forest, leaving him alone in their midst in the middle of the field.
Overhead, a hawk screeches – not in flight, but perched in a dead tree, confounded by the starlings swooping around. Caleb sits among the tall grass and listens to the raptor keen, wants to think he’s relieved that everything seems to finally be over and that he has survived.
Wishes instead that he felt a scratching behind his eyes.
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