Chapter 7: The Aftermath

Chapter 7: The Aftermath

Silence.

For the first time since he’d arrived, the house was utterly, profoundly silent. The cheerful, looping music was gone. The chittering of a thousand insects was gone. The agonized screams of a woman and the death shrieks of a monster were gone. The silence that remained was heavier and more oppressive than any of the noise had been. It was the silence of a tomb.

Jack lay pinned beneath the dead weight of the Brood-Father, his cheek pressed against the grimy hallway floor. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest. The air, thick with the chemical stench of the foam and the coppery tang of blood—his and the creature's—burned in his lungs. For a long moment, he just lay there, breathing. In and out. Proving to himself that he still could.

With a groan that was half pain and half exhaustion, he began the arduous process of freeing himself. The monster was a dead weight, a mountain of cooling chitin and ruptured organs. He shoved, twisted, and heaved, his own wounds screaming as fresh pain lanced through his chest and shoulders where the creature's claws had dug in. Finally, with a sickening, wet squelch, he managed to roll the colossal carcass off him and onto its back.

He lay there for another ten seconds, staring at the ceiling, which was now painted with a grotesque fresco of brownish ichor. Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself into a sitting position, his back against the wall. He took stock. His uniform was shredded, caked in blood and filth. Deep, ragged gouges crisscrossed his chest and arms, bleeding sluggishly. His head throbbed where it had hit the doorframe. He was alive, but he was wrecked.

His eyes fell upon the creature’s corpse. Its legs were curled inward, its magnificent, terrifying wings were bent at awkward angles, and its complex mandibles were frozen open in a silent, final scream. It looked pathetic now, just a dead bug. A very, very big dead bug.

But the silence in the house wasn't just an absence of sound. The oppressive feeling was gone. The psychic pressure that had made his teeth ache and his scar itch had vanished, as if a switch had been flipped. The house was no longer a hive. It was just a house. A trashed, blood-splattered, reeking house.

Stephanie.

The thought cut through his pain-fogged mind. He had to know.

Using the wall for support, he hauled himself to his feet, his legs trembling from adrenaline and exertion. He limped into the master bedroom, the beam of his flashlight cutting through the gloom.

He found her curled in the far corner of the room, as far from the bed as she could get. She was a small, broken thing, her wine-colored robe torn, her skin covered in a hundred tiny, bleeding bite marks. But she was alive. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, hitching breaths.

Surrounding her, scattered across the floor like discarded shells, were the dead and dying bodies of the smaller roaches. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They lay on their backs, their legs twitching in their final death throes, or were already still. Alistair had been right. Cut the head off the snake. With the Brood-Father dead, the psychic signal that animated its court had been severed. The hive had collapsed in an instant.

"Stephanie?" Jack said, his voice a raw croak.

She didn't respond. Her eyes were open, but they were staring at a spot on the wall, seeing nothing. Her lips moved, forming a single, broken word over and over again.

"Mittens… Mittens… Mittens…"

The delusion of 'Travis' was gone, shattered by the horrific reality of the red feast. But her mind hadn't returned to sanity. It had simply fled, leaving an empty, whispering shell behind. There was nothing he could do for her here. He turned to leave, to call for help, when a flicker of movement by the doorway caught his eye.

It was coming from the corpse of the Brood-Father.

He froze, his hand instinctively reaching for the crowbar that wasn't there. But this wasn't the movement of life. It was something else, something far stranger. The air above the dead monster was shimmering, distorting like the heat haze off summer asphalt. But this haze felt cold, sucking the warmth from the room.

He watched, mesmerized, as the distortion began to coalesce. It wasn't smoke, and it wasn't light. It was… an echo. A psychic residue. For a fleeting, impossible moment, he saw the faint, shimmering outline of the creature as it had been in life, a ghostly, translucent afterimage superimposed over its own dead body. He saw faint, colorless threads of this energy reaching out, connected to every dead roach in the room, a phantom nervous system that was now fraying, dissolving into nothing.

This was the link. This was the influence Alistair had talked about, the web that had held the house and Stephanie’s mind in its grip. He was watching the soul of the hive evaporate.

As he watched, the shimmering echo faded, the last threads of its connection snapping and dissolving into the stale air. When the last of it was gone, the house felt truly empty. The lingering wrongness vanished completely, leaving only the mundane reality of violence and decay. The monster was finally, completely, gone.

Jack stumbled back out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, not stopping until he was leaning against the side of his van, the cool night air a balm on his feverish skin. He pulled out his phone, his bloody fingers smearing the screen as he found Alistair's number.

His uncle picked up on the first ring, as if he’d been sitting by the phone, waiting. "Jack? You alive?"

"Yeah," Jack breathed, the single word a monumental effort. "It's… it's dead."

"The woman?"

"Alive. But… gone. Catatonic."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, filled with the sound of a heavy sigh and the familiar clink of ice in a glass. "That's how it goes sometimes," Alistair said, his voice devoid of surprise. "The psychic backlash can shred a mind that's been under the thumb for that long. Did you see it? When it died?"

"The… shimmering?" Jack asked, his own voice sounding distant. "Like smoke, but not?"

"The echo," Alistair confirmed grimly. "That's the soul of the hive-mind bleeding out. Good. Means the link is broken for good. Now listen to me. Wipe your prints off anything you touched, get in your van, and get the hell out of there. Call 911 from a payphone a few towns over. Anonymous tip. Tell them a woman is screaming, you think it’s a domestic dispute. They'll find her. They'll find the… mess. They won't know what to make of it, but they'll get her help."

"They'll… they won't believe it," Jack stammered, thinking of the meter-long corpse upstairs.

"The body will be gone by the time they get a warrant," Alistair said with absolute certainty. "Things from that strain… they don't leave evidence. They dissolve. Rot to nothing in a couple of hours. All they'll find is a crazy woman in a trashed house. A tragedy. End of story."

Jack slid down the side of the van, the metal groaning under his weight, until he was sitting on the asphalt. The whole surreal nightmare, erased. "Uncle… what was that thing? Really?"

Alistair took a long drink. "I told you. An ancient strain. A Brood-Father. One of the hungrier types. Our family… the Carters… we don't just kill roaches and rats, Jack. We kill the things that pretend to be roaches and rats. The things that crawl in through the cracks from… somewhere else. Your granddad did it. His granddad before him. I did it, until my leg got ruined on a job that went sideways. Now… now you do it."

The words landed on Jack with a crushing weight far heavier than the monster’s corpse. This wasn't a one-time event. This was an inheritance. This was his life now. The weird gut feelings, the unorthodox training, the secret compartments in the van—it all snapped into a terrifying, coherent picture.

"So this is it?" Jack asked, the question barely a whisper. "This is the true family business?"

"This is it," Alistair confirmed, his voice heavy with a grim, weary resignation. "What you did today… going in there with nothing but a crowbar and a can of my special sauce… that was your final exam. You passed."

There was no congratulations in his uncle’s tone. No pride. Only a deep, bottomless sadness.

"Get some rest, kid," Alistair said, his voice softening for the first time. "Clean yourself up. When you're ready, you come to my house. Your real training has just begun."

The line went dead.

Jack sat there in the quiet suburban street, the phone still pressed to his ear. He looked at his hands, covered in his own blood and the creature’s foul ichor. He was an exterminator. He’d always been an exterminator. But the definition of "pest" had just expanded to include things from the darkest corners of human terror. The job wasn't over. It was just getting started.