Growth by Jeff Jacobson Page B

itself, pulling out ingredients, collecting utensils, all while an internal clock kept track of the heat and time on the stove.
    She reached out, grabbed an egg from the basket.
    Cracked it with a precise, practiced motion.
    Tiny black centipedes scurried out of the broken shell and crawled over her hand.
    Ingrid didn’t see them at first. She only felt a vague sensation that the weight of the egg was off, that the yolk should be spilling out into the bowl. A whiff of something foul and rotten invaded her nose, and the long black insects spread across the back of her right hand and slithered up her arm.
    She uttered a deep cry of disgust and whipped her hand at the floor, trying to fling the bugs away. Her left hand knocked the basket off the counter, and the rest of the eggs smashed on the floor. Hundreds of long, black insects erupted from the shattered shells and weaved and seethed across the tiles. They looked as if ropy black tissue had stolen dozens and dozens of spindly legs from other insects and was now blindly searching for more warm flesh.
    Ingrid slapped at her arm, trying to brush the string-like bugs away. Her fingers left dark gray streaks where she had crushed clusters of the centipedes, spattering them across her skin like thick droplets of oily rain. She cried out again and fell back into the fridge, clawing at her arm with her fingernails, ripping at the writhing horrors. They moved in S patterns, like tiny, frantic snakes, surging up her arm, wriggling under her shirt, and crawling up her neck.
    Ingrid went berserk, spinning and flailing. Her shoes spun in the wreckage of the infected eggs, crushing bugs, creating a blackened slime on the kitchen floor. She slipped in the mess and fell, smacking her head into the stove as she went down. One wild arm struck the edge of the frying pan and sent it crashing against the back of the stove.
    On the floor, Ingrid whipped her head back and forth as the centipede things crept over her jawbone and forced their way into any hole they could find, worming into her skull through her mouth, her nose, her ears, slipping between her eyelids and eyeballs.
    Her body flopped and thrummed against the tiles as if she were having an epileptic fit. Eventually, her legs stopped shaking. Her arms slowed and stopped. The insects on the floor swarmed across her body and disappeared under her clothes.
    For a full five minutes, Ingrid did not move.
    Her right hand fluttered and curled into a soft fist. Her head twitched. Her eyes, which had never closed, gazed dully at the ceiling. She managed to roll over to her stomach and draw her knees under her. She rocked back and forth for a while, as if getting used to how gravity worked. Moving like a toddler, she crawled toward the back door.
    Kurt’s voice boomed through the thin slats of the bathroom door, echoing throughout the empty farmhouse, “Better not be burnin’ the fuckin’ bacon again.”

C HAPTER 7
    Bob hadn’t moved in hours. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been in the bathroom. The news was still maddeningly vague. Nobody knew anything, only that the island had suffered a massive, severe fire, and it was feared that there were no survivors. But that didn’t stop all the speculating.
    Bob couldn’t even muster the indignation that the White House had not even held a press conference yet to express their sorrow and condemn those responsible. He couldn’t understand why it was so difficult to simply provide a list of the known fatalities. A brief phone call from his son’s employer was not enough. He needed the power of television to make the death of his son final. Then he could move on. Until then, he was stuck in a sort of formless limbo, caught between knowing deep in his guts that Bob Jr. was dead, and the irrational hope that refused to let him sleep, to rest, to even blink.
    Around nine in the morning, a white van turned off the highway and cautiously trundled