DMV, page 38
Zal felt the bench board break free and leave his hands as Jorge and Bernard lifted the plank high. They shoved the plank into the center of the growing, clicking shape. Ants fell, cascading like a black waterfall, even as arriving insects continued to join in. Sweeping the board around, moving it up and down, and from left to right, they managed to dislodge gobs of clinging ants that fell to the stone floor in chaotic confusion, disrupting the incoming columns.
“I don’t think we stopped anything,” Bernard said. He glanced around. “Maybe it’s the building itself.”
“There’s no way we could bring down a whole building,” Zal said.
Jorge was looking at lines of ants that continued to stream into the temple. “I’m not sure it is the building.” He pointed. “Where are they coming from? And where did the bees go?”
The answer was somewhere outside, and as one, the eight of them moved quickly down the center aisle and through the open entrance. In the open space before the temple, there was no sign of Mr. White, Mr. Black, the guards or anyone else. The walkways and road beyond were empty.
“Maybe we should just go,” Violet suggested. “Get out of here.”
“Seconded,” Beverly said.
Jorge remained silent.
Beverly confronted him. “What? What are you thinking?”
“We’re here. This may be our only chance.”
“We can tell people about his place, let them know—”
“It would just give the DMV time to regroup, protect itself. Besides, I think we can stop them. And,” he pointed out, “they may not let us leave. Just because it looks calm out there doesn’t mean it is. I’ve been here for awhile. I know how things work.”
“And they won’t hesitate to kill us,” Todd added. He shot a quick glance at the dazed boy next to him.
Beverly sighed. “So what do you want to do?”
Jorge described a series of weird wax honeycomb structures he’d found out in the woods. They were in a clearing that he had come across while hiking, and as soon as he’d aproached, guards had immediately arrived to physically remove him from the area. “The bees were there, and they were talking, and…there was just something about that place,” he said. “I think that might be the root of it all.”
“So you want to…”
“Destroy it.”
“Then leave?”
“Then leave,” he agreed.
It made sense to Zal, and he found himself nodding along with the rest of them.
Jorge led them back to the road, and then around a building he identified as the DMV library. Leaving the concrete path, they walked between trees and bushes, reaching a dry stream bed, and, eventually, a wide ravine. They’d gone far, and it seemed to Zal that they were way the hell out in the middle of nowhere—how big was this DMV camp?—but they continued on. Moving away from the edge of the ravine, they followed a narrow footpath through the woods, walking single file.
The noise was faint at first, so low that it made Zal think his ears were plugged up, but he quickly realized that it was a sound he was hearing. A hum. A buzz.
Bees.
Around them, the landscape changed. The air became hazy and indistinct, and color seemed to drain from the surrounding brush. The trees themselves had grown strange, their leaves diseased, their branches crooked at odd and impossible angles.
“It wasn’t like this the last time,” Jorge said. He spoke quietly, as though in a library.
Their destination was visible up ahead. Through the stunted trees and pallid bushes was what looked like a small city, a cluster of symmetrical off-white objects that contrasted sharply with the wildness of the surrounding woods. Passing between two sticker bushes, they entered the clearing of which Jorge had spoken. The buzzing here was louder, with a conversational cadence that rose and fell in irregular rhythm, and the air, if anything, was even more opaque than it had been moments before, not hazy now but thick, like the shimmering of desert heat.
They had no weapons, but along the way, at Jorge’s behest, they had each picked up a heavy stick or short piece of broken tree branch. Zal was not sure such primitive implements would be of any help—but the bee god in the temple had been dispatched with a bicycle seat, and the ant creature had been broken up by a seat plank, so anything was possible.
They moved cautiously forward. Zal’s attention was on the huge angular waxwork before them, which seemed to be glowing. This close, he could see that the large geometrical shapes were connected, more like a single building than the city it had appeared to be from afar.
Movement in his peripheral vision drew his gaze to the edges of the clearing, where numerous vehicles had driven up, vehicles unlike any he had ever seen. He counted three…six…nine…twelve…fifteen. They were comically small, every single one of them, yet at the same time were intricate in design, each utterly unique and constructed from disparate and largely incongrous materials. He saw a truck smaller than a golf cart with a hood that looked like a repurposed washing machine meshed with a homemade guillotine; something that resembled a miniature Model-T made from pigskin and pounded-out beer cans; a tiny limousine with a shiny grill that resembled a crooked grinning mouth.
Zal didn’t like the vehicles. There was something off about all of them, and looking at any one for too long made him feel anxious and unclean. He noticed Mr. White and Mr. Black hunched over in adjacent windowless cars, both of them clutching white papers in hands that held steering wheels. The other drivers, he assumed, were also DMV employees.
Members of the family.
“Fuck,” Bernard said.
“Focus,” Todd told him.
Jorge nodded. “Ignore them. Let’s do what we came to do.”
The primitive clubs they held might be able to damage wax, Zal thought, but they would not be of much use against those cars and trucks if the vehicles came speeding toward them. Still, he followed Jorge across the pale grass, uncomfortably clutching the rough heavy branch in his throbbing right hand. He could feel energy emanating from the eerie angular assemblage before them. Far more powerful than what he’d sensed in the temple, it coursed through him in physical waves that caused his head to hurt and the hair on his skin to bristle.
Jorge was right. This was the source.
Only it wasn’t.
It might be the source for their DMV—right here, right now—but there were other DMVs, as there had been throughout history, in early Europe, old England, ancient Rome and who-knew-where, so this obviously could not be its true origin. Like magma beneath the earth’s crust that randomly and periodically percolated up to form fissures and volcanoes, its real source was somewhere else, and this was only a localized manifestation. Zal’s hand held the branch so tightly that it hurt. They might manage to disrupt things here or even destroy what was in the clearing, but it would not be permanent, and it would all come back sooner or later.
Behind the illuminated wax, he saw movement, something almost visible darting crazily back and forth. He had seen the same thing during their initiation, or something very similar, and the sight filled him with gut-level fear.
Around the edge of the clearing, the vehicles’ engines started. Headlights were turned on, horns honked, turn signals pressed into service. Voices began declaiming.
“Your visitation permits have been rescinded.”
“We are suspending your driver’s license, Three Four One Five Seven Nine …”
“You are to be detained under Section Six, Sub-Section Thirteen of the…”
“…fees have accrued due to your failure to…”
“You will not be allowed to…”
“Your right to contest this action has been permanently revoked by order of…”
The drivers were talking over one another, their cacophonous chatter blending into incoherence.
“Run!” Todd shouted.
They did, and in a sudden flurry of activity, the diminutive cars and trucks drove between trees and bushes onto the colorless grass of the clearing, their courses interweaving, as though the entire thing had been tightly choreographed. Jorge first and Danny last, assisted by Todd, the eight of them reached the closest rectangle and flattened against its wax wall as a small car that appeared to be made from old musical instruments sped past, leaving forms flying in its wake, sheets of paper that fell like snow on the ground next to them.
From this proximity, Zal could see that the connections between geometric sections of the wax structure were far more intricate and convoluted than could be seen from other angles, and behind a towering polyhedron, in front of an upright cylinder, he spotted a narrow opening.
Another car sped by, a stapled stack of forms landing at Rosita’s feet.
It was only a matter of time before a car hit one of them or all of the vehicles pulled up in an offensive line, and wordlessly they looked at each other.
There was only one place to go.
Inside.
They had all seen the opening. Jorge was closest to it, and he moved quickly to the left, slipping through the gap, Zal and Violet right behind him.
They were in a tall narrow chamber with softly glowing walls. Immediately upon entering, all outside sound was cut off. The grinding purr of tiny engines disappeared, replaced by a pleasing musical hum, a sound neither manipulative not hypnotic but just…nice. The sweet air in the room made him feel exhilerated, almost euphoric, as though the oxygen content had been elevated. Even gravity felt different, and Zal found it refreshingly easy to move. This wasn’t a bad place, he thought. It was a wonderful place.
It was also where the bees had gone. They were not bunched together in a solid shape nor flying in a smoky cloud, but were arranged in patterns positioned asymmetrically throughout this chamber and the rooms beyond. There had been thousands of them, hundreds of thousands perhaps, and there seemed nowhere near that amount now, but Zal knew that was an illusion.
They were here.
Somewhere.
He could feel them.
Honey coated the ceiling, though it did not drip. The bees had worked together to carve elaborately detailed friezes in the wax, and the effect was beautiful. The history of transportation was depicted here, the history of movement, the history of the world.
Something made him reach into his pocket, take out his wallet and remove his driver’s license. Looking at it in this yellowish orange light, he realized what an exquisite thing it was to behold. The truncated rectangular shape echoed the beauty of the structure in which they stood, and the placement of words upon it perfectly balanced the astonishingly designed watermark. He had never looked so attractive, Zal thought, as he did in his license photograph.
Why hadn’t he used his license on the trip over here? How could he have let Beverly drive to the camp when that honor should have fallen to him?
Because the others had not let him. They had kept him down. They had been jealous of his driving skills and—
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Bernard shoved his shoulder, frowning, and Zal saw that all of them were staring at him. Violet’s expression was one of nervous concern. He looked down at the license in his hand and realized that he had dropped his wallet. He picked it up, shaking off his reverie. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Todd and Jorge had already moved into the next room. “In here!” Todd called.
Violet took his hand. “Are you okay?”
“I am now,” Zal told her, squeezing back.
They followed Bernard into the adjacent chamber, where Todd was pointing at one of the walls and tracing something in the air with his finger. Bones had been incorporated into the wax, arranged in shapes that Zal did not recognize but that frightened him nonetheless. At several pivot points, the empty eyesockets of skulls stared out, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching him.
Still, the gravity was light, the smell and sound pleasant.
“It looks like writing,” Todd said. “Like some kind of alphabet.”
Bernard glanced around. “We should’ve brought a flamethrower with us. Melt this place down.”
Violet was looking over her shoulder at where they’d just been. “How come they’re not coming after us?”
“I don’t know,” Jorge said.
“Be thankful for small favors,” Beverly told her.
Zal wondered if the DMV people were afraid to come in here, which made him think that maybe they should be afraid.
This was the real temple, he thought. This was where their god lived.
A jarring screech cut through the agreeable background hum. Blacker than black, a winged creature of indeterminate shape, flitting crazily about in the spastic manner of an agitated moth, flew through an opening in the wax wall to their right that acted as a window between chambers. It was the thing he’d seen through the wax from outside. More solid than anything made from bees or ants, more dense than anything Zal could remember seeing ever, the creature hit the ceiling, hit another wall, flew through the doorway ahead. It left in its wake a palpable coldness, and a feeling of despair that Zal experienced and, judging by their faces, the others did, too.
The thing disappeared from sight for a moment, though its dark frantic movement could still be seen behind and through the lightly illuminated walls. Seconds later, it flew in through the same window, nearly hitting Danny in the head. Even this close, the darting thing was blurry, with no clear definition.
“We need to take that thing out,” Bernard whispered.
It flew past him, close, as though it had heard him, and Bernard batted it with the branch in his hand. The thing skittered into a wall, leaving a dark stain on the wax, the yellowish illumination disappearing from that spot and a sizeable section of wall surrounding it.
Before it could recover its momentum, they were all on it, swinging their primitive cudgels, beating it into submission on the white wax floor, the creature’s darkness spreading beneath their feet, creeping up a nearby section of wall.
Flamethrower or no flamethrower, the wax seemed to be melting around them. It was not falling on their heads or encasing their feet, and there was no heat involved, but the walls were re-forming themselves, as was the ceiling. The chamber in which they now stood was not the one they had first entered. The carved friezes were gone, replaced with curved rounded walls that were as far as could be from geometric. The bees were gone, too, although Zal saw what he thought were bunches of them encased within the walls.
There was nothing left of the flying thing save an irregular black smudge beaten into the wax floor. As solid as it had seemed, it had not had much mass, and now it resembled an oil stain more than a dead body.
The contours of the stain reminded him of the twisted amorphous shape formed by the ants in the temple.
He jumped as Jorge started whaling away at the wax wall in front of him. Zal was about to ask what he was doing, when he noticed that the chamber they were in no longer had any doors. They were trapped.
Jorge broke through the wax rather easily, revealing a narrow empty space with another wall behind it. Leaving the remnants of the flying thing behind, the rest of them joined in with their makeshift clubs, expanding the opening Jorge had made.
By the time they broke through the second wall into another room, the entire structure seemed to be shuddering, as though they’d removed the support upon which it rested. The interconnected series of symmetrical shapes that had made up the edifice was now a blobby collection of globular units collapsing around them.
They made it out just in time, tumbling through a final opening in a final wall as the huge waxwork broke apart behind them. Zal landed on hard dirt, rolling away, seeing the white ceiling fall, crushing everything beneath it as the last of the yellowish light was extinguished. He and Bernard were the only ones who had fallen, and their eyes met as they stood. Violet, off to the right, found him and rushed over, hugging him tightly.
Whatever bees had been inside were either flying away, free and uncontrolled, or entombed in the waxy rubble. In the glade, most of the strange vehicles had left, as had the men and women driving them. One, a car of rusted metal and brightly colored wire, had crashed into a tree, and the driver, a man with a small bald head, lay dead amidst the debris, his midsection crushed between two panels. Another, wheels still spinning, lay upside down on the pale grass, its occupant nowhere to be seen.
Zal stepped forward. Gravity was no longer light, and the air smelled of pine and smoke and motor oil. The late afternoon sun was warm on his face.
Things felt…normal.
He wiped dirt from his hands on his pants. His mind was clear, nothing influencing his thoughts or playing on his emotions, and the absence of any outside pressure made him think it might be over. From somewhere, bells and alarms were ringing.
They followed the path back to the campus, not speaking.
On the cul de sac, DMV employees were streaming out of buildings, running around crazily and pointlessly, men and women in guard uniforms and business attire and casual clothes dashing about in a frenzy. Mr. White was circling a light pole over and over and over again. Mr. Black was nowhere to be seen. The building at the center of the campus, the one Jorge had identified as the proto-office, the ur-office, was on fire, smoke billowing from broken windows, a harsh low sound like the crying of a wounded animal issuing from within, mingling with screams of terror and pain.
Zal was reminded of what happened when a bee hive or an ant colony was stirred up, and how, after a period of crazed pandemonium, the insects inevitably regrouped and fell back in line. While there might not be quite so fast a recovery here, Zal was certain that things would eventually return to the status quo. They might have temporarily disrupted ordinary operations, but it was not over. It would never be over. Whatever power was behind this had not gone anywhere and would soon find a way to reemerge. It was enduring, like the moon or the stars, and the most they could hope to do was briefly pause its progress.
