Good evening, thanks for taking my call. Summer of 2007. If you were anywhere in middle Tennessee that year, you remember the cicadas. Brood whatever, the seventeen-year ones. They were everywhere. Billions of them. You couldn't walk outside without stepping on shells. The noise was unbelievable, this constant screaming from the trees. My neighbor said it sounded like the earth was ringing. I was living alone at the time, had a little house outside Cookeville. Nothing fancy. I'd been having trouble sleeping that whole week, I swear to you, the cicada noise just got inside your head. Plus my boss had been riding me about some project deadline, so I had that on my mind too. Point is, I was up at dawn most mornings. Couldn't stay in bed. I'd make coffee, sit on the porch, watch the sun come up through all those bugs. That's what I was doing when I saw her.
I came out with my coffee and there was a woman sitting in the chair at the far end of the porch. Just sitting there, facing the yard. Hadn't heard a car pull up, hadn't heard footsteps. She was just there, like she'd grown out of the wood. She was covered in them. Cicada shells. Hundreds of them, stuck to her skin, her hair, her clothes. They were clinging to her arms, her neck, clustered around her eyes. Some of them were cracked, some of them looked fresh, still that pale amber color before they darken. She looked like she'd been lying in a pile of them all night. Well maybe she had. I said something. Hello, or are you okay, something like that. She didn't answer. Didn't move. I stepped closer and that's when I saw her eyes. Filmed over. Cloudy, like cataracts, but worse. Like there was a membrane across them. She was looking at me though. I swear to you, I could feel her looking at me through whatever was covering those eyes.
I set my coffee down real slow. I was thinking I needed to call someone. Police, ambulance, I didn't know. This woman needed help, or I needed help, one of the two. I backed toward the door. Told Linda to stay inside and call 911. once lived alone in Rual Tennessee, it was so peaceful back then - Finn' Kept my eyes on the woman the whole time. That's when it happened. Every shell on her body split open at the same time. All of them. Hundreds. This wet cracking sound, all at once, like a single broken bone amplified a hundred times over. The shells just opened up, split right down the back the way they do when the cicada crawls out. But nothing came out. Nothing emerged. The shells just gaped open, empty, still stuck to her skin. She sat there covered in all these hollow split husks, and she smiled. I swear to you, her mouth barely moved, but she smiled.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]