Hello and welcome to Realms! My name is Zach Roush, the writer and reader of Realms. Realms is a FREE monthly sci-fi and fantasy newsletter that takes you to new worlds once a month. Subscribe today so you get the next story right in your inbox!
Today I have the final episode of Brood - the conclusion you didn’t see coming (unless you did!).
As with Part I and Part II, our wonderful narrator is Cam Daxon, a friend and colleague who is talented in everything creative. Reach out to him on LinkedIn for any opportunities.
Without further ado, Here’s Brood Part III…
He crept forward, down the narrow hall, finding drippings of something organic and moist on the walls and floor, leading to the parlor. Across from it, the way to the kitchen. Perpendicular to both rooms, a screen door that led to freedom. The cicada song was sharp as glass in his ears.
He ran. Threw open the screen door. Stomped down the stairs and dashed out into the grass, his jeans barely hanging on—his mom always told him his skinny ass wouldn’t hold up pants without a belt—when he remembered his truck was on the other side of the house. He screeched to a halt.
“Shit!”
“Al. Come to me.”
He answered, “How the hell are you speaking? You’re body’s on the floor! Is that not you?!”
“Come. To. Me.”
The world flipped. Al’s stomach turned with his body. His body was flipping. The glade, the fiery sky, the rotting ranch house, all spinning. And then he was back inside the house, the parlor specifically, thrown onto a dirt floor. The vertigo struck him from toes to top, making him retch violently. Bourbon. Lemonade. More bourbon. French fries?
He remarked, “Don’t remember those.”
“Alphonse.”
He wiped his mouth, knowing that this was something weird and wrong. “I was outside. Now I’m inside, ” he said without looking up. “You’re not Cleo.”
“Look at me.”
He sighed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. Whatever powers were at work here, they wouldn’t let him go.
“All right. I’m not running”
His head led his eyes. Before him was the end of something, a tail or some such. A segment, rather. Bristling with sharp hairs, long as his fingers. Another segment attached to it, and another, and another. All of them pulsing, wriggling with hidden spasms, thick as the two-hundred-year-old oak tree outside his childhood home. He kept raising his head.
More segments. A dripping fluid. A leg—two legs, no, six! More than there should be for any creature this size—but did Al know of any creatures this size that weren’t mammals? They didn’t exist. Shouldn’t. Now he saw broader segments covered by transparent, folded structures. Wings!
And at the head of it all, this beast, this thing that trailed from the ground and up the wall and clung to the high ceiling, were jaws and mandibles and four sets of human eyes. The call of cicadas rang louder and louder, like a scream the size of a world. Al laughed, at first. The shock was too much.
“Al,” it intoned without a mouth, without teeth or tongue. “I told you that you had saved yourself.”
He laughed some more. “You sound like Cleo.”
“I am. And I am not.”
“Who--what in the hell am I looking at?”
“I was here long before the age of humans.”
“So, you’re a…a…cicada?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, well—”
“You do not need to understand more than what you see.” The thing with Cleo’s voice detached from the ceiling. He stood as still-human eyes—Cleo’s eyes—leveled with his. He was ready to run, to bolt and throw caution to the wind. It betrayed his every instinct to stand there. Then, that segmented abdomen slithered around him. No way out. Those great mandibles clacked against each other—tock, tock—like an old grandfather clock counting down. Its body hissed as it inhaled and exhaled, bestowing upon the human a perfume that reeked of ancient undergrowth and fresh spring all at once, of things that died only to be reborn, and yet others Al had no name for and never would.
Al’s eyes bore into Cleo’s. The woman he met that morning. A lifetime ago.
Al was trapped with this thing. No way out. His brain chugged through the bourbon strain, trying to put the pieces together. What was it that happened to real cicadas? They crawled out of the earth. They molted. They mated. And then laid eggs to begin the cycle again.
Which stage was Al part of?
“The bones,” Al said. He paled. “Look, I wasn’t ever interested in just…”
“Al, I know you. I know you through footsteps and vibrations. I know you through light you cannot see and sounds you cannot hear.” It broke eye contact. “I cannot bring myself to complete the cycle. You are genuine. Many a human I have engaged who wanted nothing more than to…conquer.”
“Well…shit.” He laughed once. “Call me lucky…”
“No. You are good. You are good and you may go. But quickly! Quickly…Alphonseeeeeeeee.” A rumbling ensued inside the cicada’s body. Those eyes, those deep brown pools, blinked, were replaced by completely white eyes bloodshot through. They were turning red. Her segmented body opened up a way through.
Al leaped through the window, glass crashing and piercing him as he rolled. He yelped and shouted like a dog, got his feet under him, and made for his truck.
The sun was going down, the shadows long and reaching and menacing
The truck wouldn’t start.
“Oh, come on. Please.” A false start. A shudder from the engine. The house behind him was shivering, shaking, groaning. Wood was flying off the sides, shingles sliding down and pattering the earth. A great groan overtook the scintillating whir of the cicadas and became a new call, a new song that heralded a great change.
“Oaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhsssssss.”
The hiss at the end told Al all he needed to know. Cleo was gone, given over to the undying cycle of the glade.
The truck wouldn’t start.
“Aw, hell.” He popped it into neutral. The rise that the house sat on let him get the truck rolling. He pushed it. His ass hung half-out, his cheeks bared to the rising moon.
The engine turned over just as the entire house exploded behind him.
“God almighty!” He raced against the last of the light, dying as he would die: slowly and limned in red. His truck shook and rumbled, and not from the engine.
Dirt clods and bundles of grass burst toward his truck in a wake of destruction, its epicenter a hulking, leaping mass; red-eyed, mandibles opening wider in a grin of hunger. Its wings were fluttering out, pushing it on with increasing speed.
He looked forward. Where was the road? Where? There! He steered toward the thin gap that marked his escape route.
He screamed, “Come on! Come on!”
Al flicked on his headlights, illuminating the way out of the glade. The only way. A maw of life before, one of death behind. Those red eyes were so bright now he could see the glow on his dash. He pissed himself.
“Make it stop,” he begged, his heart pounding hard enough to hear over that stupid, horrible, insane cicada song. “Goddamn, that noise!”
A slavering set of chitinous jaws. A song that rippled across his skin. A woman, a beautiful woman who was true to him even when she changed…had she even been real?
His eyes flicked to the mirror. And then he was through.
He didn’t pump the brakes like he should have. He nicked the corner of his truck on trunks and bushes, skidded out sideways, and smashed the vehicle into an old tree. He smashed his head against the glass, making his head spin. Dizzy, delirious, he looked back. A curtain of twilight had embraced that old place, from the boughs above to the roots below. A tunnel out to the glade was still apparent, though it was fading fast. A great, steaming, horrible mass lingered. As the sun died, two sets of red eyes floated, it seemed, attached to that mass.
Al breathed. He waited. His mind cleared. The eyes returned his patience in kind. Al, in an act that would dumbfound him forever, got out of the car.
He stood there, shirtless, bleeding from a temple, swaying slightly from the dizziness. He wanted to look this timeless, hungry beast in its eyes and respect it for what it gave him: a chance, even though he was but a blink in its eternity. Even though he was just meat and a source of genetic material.
An age. A lifetime. An eon passed.
The eyes moved on, dragging their body with it, singing that song that Al would never forget, never shake. The ruler of this ancient place would lay its eggs and die and be reborn, as it has done since it ruled this forest. In some time, another mate would be needed.
Al felt the weight of his survival like a barbell dropped on his chest. He sat in the dirt. He coughed. He laughed. He blubbered. His face spewed snot and tears. He couldn’t believe it. He’d met, did the nasty with, and escaped something beyond his comprehension.
Al’s crying turned into laughter. Cackling. A broken staccato of choked, impossible humor.
“She…swiped right on me. That thing!”
He laughed and laughed, only stopping when his body started shivering. Night’s coolness had descended, breaking the heavy heat of the day. Al stood, his gaze unwavering from the glade. He got in his truck, the door creaking closed, breaking the near-stillness around him. Crickets chirped. An owl hooted, then left its branch in a silent swoop. Night was all around. Al listened to it all, expecting to hear a roar, a thunderous chase. But nothing. Here he was, a human who had survived a thing he could tell no one, and yet…And yet…
He wondered what it would have been like, to be eaten alive. A strange thought.
Putting the truck in gear was no trouble. Driving it straight wasn’t either, despite crashing into a tree. The trouble was driving away at all. He kept looking into that rearview mirror, hoping to see those red eyes. He’d felt so alive and more in tune with instinct than anything else. Returning to normal life, hell, returning to the motel didn’t seem as real as that monster, or Cleo, for that matter.
How could he go back to that life, now?
He applied the brake and pulled his truck to a stop and turned around in his seat. His tired eyes bored into that wooded corridor with an empty ache, a forbidden sort of longing emerging from deep inside him. His shaking hand went to the key in the ignition. The truck’s lights went out.
Thank you for reading Brood!
Here’s the cicada itself that inspired this story - give its haunting call a listen!
This year, a HUGE brood of cicada emerged: https://cicadas.uconn.edu/
The Pharaoh cicada, also known as Magicicada septendecim, makes this terrifying sound that was in my head as Cleo chased Al: https://listeninginnature.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-pharaoh-of-cicadas.html#:~:text=People%20describe%20the%20song%20as,volume%20level%20at%20the%20end.
Some quick questions for you:
What did you think of this story?
Did you see the ending coming?
What kind of monster do you think Cleo is?
Next week I’ll compile the whole story into a single episode, then you can listen to it all at once or share with someone you know would love it.
I hope you’re well and that you’ll keep your eyes peeled for next month’s story.
Until next time Realm Walkers, I’m Zach and your reading Realms.
Brood Part III