THE FLIES MET in the cornfields, in a hollow they’d crunched down between rows. They called it their clubhouse, but it wasn’t a house or even a shack—just an open-air clearing with a cooler that doubled as a card table and some ratty, sun-bleached lawn chairs they sat in like thrones while us new recruits knelt in the soil. I always had pebbles embedded in my knees when I left the Flies’ clubhouse. Deep, moon-crater pockmarks I’d lick like a dog in my truck after initiation, head bent while I traced the marks with my tongue, desperate to swallow even the most filthy, infinitesimal fragments of their world. Corn dirt-sharp from the ammonia of their combined piss, I’d take it. I used to think it made me cutthroat, hardened, and ambitious. Fly material. Now, I’m old enough to know it only made me stupid.

***

Not every kid in town wanted to be a Fly, but they all tried out during initiation season anyway. The dead of summer, second week of July when the world was brightest, crispiest. Big blue skies, no clouds, a stillness like the grave. Sweltering, too-long days so hot that even after the sun set, you couldn’t walk barefoot on the sidewalks without getting blisters. That was when the Flies held their tryouts in the cornfield, where they put us through a series of humiliation rituals, each year’s tasks more dastardly than the last.

The leader of the Flies, Anthony Spelmont, was a real sadist, and I’d tried out enough times to watch him hone his craft. The first summer, for example, he had us each pick a live grasshopper out of a mason jar and put it down our pants. The next summer, out came the mason jar again. We had to select a grasshopper, maim it, pluck its wings off and hold its flailing, still-jumping body under our tongues for as long as we could stand it. This summer, we were instructed to strip naked and lie in the dirt between the rows of corn. Anthony and the other Flies each picked a maggot—their name for new recruits—held him down, and fed him live grasshopper after grasshopper until the maggot puked, or until the grasshoppers ran out. I lay there under Anthony, bare ass sweating into the dirt while he slapped my cheek and popped them into me like communion wafers. “Chew, maggot, let me see it crunch between your teeth,” he said, grinning wildly, backlit by the sun, Jesus on his way into Jerusalem, the corn swaying in and out of his halo like holy palms.

I won—after fourteen grasshoppers. The next day, I won again, by stuffing a kitten into a gallon-size ziplock bag and pummeling it with a rolling pin into a furry blood-soup faster than any of the other maggots could do the same to theirs. Anthony crowed like a rooster, hooked me under his arm so I could smell the virile stink of power in his sweaty pits. “I like this one,” he told the other Flies, dragging me in front of their thrones by my hair. “My bet’s on him.”

You know me already, I wanted to tell him. You’ve cut me two years in a row. I’ve never even made it to August, but I’m taking it seriously now. I trained all year. I want this more than anyone else. But we weren’t supposed to say anything to the Flies for the duration of initiation, so I kept my mouth shut. Maggots don’t talk.

The next day, Anthony lined us up in our boxers and whipped our backs with an extension cord. I took two blows, ten blows, twenty. Blood dripped into my ass crack to mingle with the summer sweat, but still, I did not scream. Russel Bernstein, my only remaining competition, passed out, and for a minute everyone thought he was dead. But Anthony revived him like Lazarus, dumped the dredges of his warm Coors can in his face, and watched him sputter, gray and shaking. “He lives! He lives!” Anthony shrieked and stepped onto my chest, leaving a boot print from sternum to navel and grinding my new lash wounds into the pissy dirt. Then he put his hands on my shoulders, eyes wild and locked with mine. “He lives, but he dies. That means you’re in, maggot. Welcome to the Kingdom of the Flies.”

I staggered to my truck that night, sore but sated, on top of the world in a haze of post-victory euphoria. I stripped my shirt from sticky scabs and brought my chin to my chest, trying to lick the indentations in my flesh left behind by Anthony’s size eleven tactical boot. I was in rapture, untouchable, unstoppable. I felt like I could fly, and I could.

***

Not every kid in town wanted to be a Fly, they just knew it was better than being anything else. Most kids didn’t want to kick anyone’s ass or terrorize girls or steal people’s dogs and drown them in the reservoir, they just didn’t want to get their asses kicked or be terrorized or have their dog drowned. It was survival in their eyes, to be a Fly meant to escape the Flies’ menace. But not me. I wanted it, badly and wholly. I didn’t just want to be spared torture, I wanted to torture. I didn’t just want to be spared powerlessness, I wanted to wield power. Product of a broken home, I guess you could call it, the natural consequence of having a father who sneered at everything I did by daylight, then downed a handle of vodka every night before he took me out into the garage to humiliate me.

He was gentle about it, that was the worst part. Couldn’t just throw me over the seat of the tractor and rape me like we were two men in prison. He had to pet my hair, kiss my neck, tell me he was sorry, but he had to, he just had to. It started when I was too young to know how to fight back, stopped when I was thirteen—I got too lanky for him, sprouted too much hair. Like Anthony was a bona fide sadist, my old man was a bona fide kid-diddler, the real deal. Once I was no longer too little to be confused about it, I guess I lost my appeal. He kept drinking and criticizing me, though, and every night I fantasized about different ways to kill him. Bash his head on the edge of the bathroom counter or the toilet tank, put his skull through a bandsaw, shoot him with his rifle. Things I could pass off as drunken accidents.

But I never did it. I’m not sure why. Maybe because in spite of everything, I was still afraid of him, still relied on him. Still slept in his house and drove his hand-me-down truck and made sure he didn’t burn the kitchen down when he was on a bender. Maybe it was because he was my dad, and dads feel unkillable. Like kings, like gods.

Yearning to be a Fly made me stronger. Made me able to envision a version of myself who kicked my father in his wrinkly, smelly old balls instead of pretending I was anywhere but the garage when he told me to suck them. Fiji, Florida. Beaches with bikinis. Floating in that pretty blue surf. I got it in my head, somehow, that the Flies were my way out, my way to make up for all the shit that had happened to me by making some shit happen to other people. I was bloodthirsty, ravenous. I wanted other kids to hurt like I had hurt, I wanted to see them kneeling and crying like I knelt and cried, I wanted to show them they were lucky to be burned and kicked and have their hair pulled out in fistfuls. They had no idea that the worst thing in the world was to have it gentle.

But I would show them. Pain is a gift, maggot, I’d say as I fed them grasshoppers. It’s real, it bruises, it bleeds, it shines. It leaves scars you can be proud of, scars that prove you were hurt. You’ll thank me later, when you have marks to show for all you’ve been through.

***

I didn’t know about the occult stuff until I was already initiated. The Flies didn’t seem like satanist types, in their army surplus getups under old Carhartt plaid. But once they took turns beating me under the baking sun, their hands glistening red in the glare and meat bees buzzing around me, they brought out the book. A hefty old thing, leatherbound, something from a horror movie. Anthony crouched down beside me and put his hand on the back of my neck, leaving a crimson handprint as he forced me to bow over the spine. “Kiss it,” he ordered. “This is your life now. You serve the King.”

“I serve you,” I agreed, choking up metallic spit into my mouth and swallowing it down.

“No,” he corrected, kneeing my ribs. “You serve him.”

He cracked open the book, thumbed to a crude drawing of a vaguely man-shaped entity made from thousands of smaller components. The images seemed to buzz and distort on the page itself, or maybe that was just my concussion. It seemed real, though, a fear that solidified into a pike in my gut. “The King,” he said simply, snapping the book closed. “This is all for him, brother.” He struck his chest twice with a bloody fist, then kissed his fingers before pressing them to the earth. “Carrion for life.”

“Carrion for life,” the other Flies murmured. I tried to say it back, but all that came out was a weak gurgle, like the last slurp of bathwater sucked down the drain. Anthony grinned at me, and I thought I saw grasshopper legs stuck between his teeth.

***

August came in hot, but piddled weak and lukewarm into September, triple digits forgotten and the nights chilly again. The school year started, boring and banal as ever, but I had the Flies’ clubhouse to look forward to, a grand prize that made each day worth living. We mostly drank cheap beer and fired pebbles from homemade slingshots at ground squirrels, but sometimes Anthony would bring the book out, lay it in the center of our corn hideout. “The King wants blood soon,” he’d croon to me, weaving unsteadily, slurring his words. “New boy’s gonna make his first sacrifice.”

The other Flies whooped and hollered, gathered behind me and made engine revving sounds, taking the bones of my lawn chair in their hands and shaking it. “You ready, new boy? To feed the beast?”

“Born ready,” I promised. And I was—I thought I was. I’d been gearing up for weeks, knowing I was expected to kill something soon. If the kitten was only part of the initiation, I knew it had to be bigger game this time, higher stakes. Go into the woods beyond the mill and shoot a bear, drag it back. Put the barrel of a gun to your old man’s temple while he sleeps and pull the trigger.

Anthony dropped down to straddle my lap, clutched my face between his palms, and squeezed so hard I could feel the shape of my teeth indenting the slick of my cheeks. His thumbs mashed my ears, made me deaf, and I zeroed in on a fat sweat droplet at the tip of his nose about to fall, imagining the salt of it on my tongue. “Tell me, new boy. Have you ever been in love?”

The blood roared in my head, and I felt myself flush. I thought of my dad’s lips at my ear, telling me he only did this because he loved me so much. Wrong answer. “No,” I told him, wrenching my head from his mania-tight grip. “I mean—crushes in grade school, girls I might bust a nut to, but…not love.”

“C’mon,” he goaded, standing up and poking my red cheek. “Maybe not love, but there’s gotta be a girl you’ve obsessed over, wished you could marry.”

“Stephanie Johnson,” one of the other guys said, and the Flies wolf-whistled, slapping his back.

“Miriam Taylor, for me,” another chimed in, and the crowd went wild.

I sat there blinking, wondering why these names were familiar. We lived in a shit-kicking town on the outskirts of the county, the high school in the nearest suburb, twenty minutes by bus. It was a big, hulking penitentiary-type building with a massive student body, flanked in chain-link and surrounded by corn. Five hundred kids from the suburbs and us stragglers bussed in from the surrounding agricultural districts. It was easy to play hookey, easy to be forgotten. I sleepwalked through my days there, my mind loose mesh, equations and dates falling through it like sand.

It wasn’t until a few days later, when I saw the sun-faded Missing Persons signs tacked up in the bus shelter, that I put it together. Stephanie Johnson. Skinny, blonde, cheerleader smile. Miriam Taylor, a prom picture, purple dress and a tiara in her loose brown curls. Pictures I’d seen, day in, day out, so commonplace they became wallpaper-boring, and I stopped really seeing them. There were more, too. Angelica Carnway, Lindsay Bomber, Maddy Franklin. Girl after girl after girl, headlines I’d ignored, news stories I didn’t care about droning in front of my father when he passed out on the couch. Always last seen in October, by the clubhouse field.

***

“Dude, we thought you knew,” Anthony said. “Chief perk of being a Fly. No one would go through the maggot treatment if they weren’t dreaming of abducting a girl,” he stated matter-of-factly. “Except you, sicko—you did all that for what? Status? To prove you could?”

“Maybe girls don’t get him off, smashing kittens does,” another Fly said, elbowing me. “Maybe initiation wasn’t torture, maybe he liked it.”

“How the hell are you guys not getting caught?” I blurted.

“The King provides,” Anthony said in his best Big Lebowski voice. Two thumps of a fist to his chest, a kiss to the dirt. “Carrion for life, man, I’m telling you. He protects us, looks out for us. You feed the King, you eat like kings. Flies eat the dead, we buzz above the law, we do whatever the hell we want, when we want.”

“So what’s the ritual—you bring a girl out here, sacrifice her to the King…and what? He brings you health and prosperity? Seems a little woo-woo.”

Anthony dug his favorite pocketknife out of his tactical vest and flipped it open, pressing the flat of the blade to his tongue and staring at me. “Playing with the demons isn’t woo-woo, it’s ancient shit, brother. New boy picks new girl, we have a little fun with her first, get her nice and scared. We call him, and he eats. Then, all year long, we get to live like gods. No judgment, no retribution, no consequences.”

“The catch, though, is that you gotta love her. It can’t just be any girl, the King doesn’t want her if she’s not a real sacrifice,” another Fly explained. “And brother—it will break your heart, to slit her throat. It has to, that’s the deal. But you will never feel more goddamned alive, take it from me.”

Then the Flies threw their heads back and howled at the moon, a fat white thing in a pink September haze like a tick drunk on blood. I stood among them and the corn, wondering if I had ever loved anything in my whole life enough to count.

***

For the next few weeks, I tried to fall in love. Plotted at it, forced it like love is an icy swimming pool you can psych yourself up to plunge into, headfirst. In homeroom, I stared at the backs of girls’ heads, trying to imagine wanting to kiss their gum-chewing, gloss-shiny mouths. But my heart never stirred. It had been shut off in the garage all those years ago; my dad killed the engine, and it needed jumper cables to start. In the clubhouse, I’d flick on a lighter so the flame made the metal white-hot, then I’d press it to my arm to burn myself. Do you love, now? Do you feel at all? It didn’t work.

October was nearing, and I had no girl to offer up to the King. So, I had to come up with some other form of sacrifice, some other loose interpretation of love. What else might be worthy of the King? I spent my nights pacing, trying to imagine what I treasured most, what in my life would wound me to give up. The only thing I gave a shit about was being a Fly, though, and I couldn’t sacrifice my membership to secure my membership. It made no sense.

Ultimately, I decided to catch a hot one. Not just a girl I cared about, but a girl the student body collectively adored and abhorred in equal measure, a girl elevated to queendom within the closed economy of high school. Ashleigh Patton, last year’s homecoming queen, star volleyball player, student body president, and the only girl I knew by name who wasn’t already missing. None of these illustrious titles she won by kindness or merit, but by looks and money. She was a rich bombshell, the sort of girl who might have been a centerfold in an eighties Playboy. Golden skin, tits like softballs, itty bitty waist, etc. She was extraordinarily popular, which meant she was extraordinarily protected, moving in an entourage of plainer girls or else hanging on her boyfriend, the typical football type you’d expect.

I had to kidnap her and bring her to the King. It was the only way—a sacrifice because I would be risking my own safety, putting my ass on the line, and baring my neck to that pack of cling-on girls and the quarterback boyfriend and the five hundred students who loved and hated her. I was risking my safety and anonymity on her, and that was its own sort of love. Or that’s what I told myself, anyway.

***

I began to study her. Her habits, her whereabouts, spots she went after school and where her boyfriend dropped her off for volleyball practice. I skipped the bus and shelled out extra money for gas so I could follow her around in my truck, get the full scoop on her boring life. Turned out she was no better than the rest of us—she drank cheap beer in a different cornfield, she let her boyfriend feel under her shirt, she got zits and covered them with foundation she pocketed in an aisle of the local drugstore. She was so arrogant she sometimes went for walks alone at night, cellphone cemented between ear and shoulder while she shuffled down the sidewalk in her sweatpants, hair still wet from the shower.

That was when I took her. Eleven o’clock the night of the ritual, a big midwestern storm roiling in the distance, the air alive with an occasional crack of lightning. She was smoking a cigarette in someone else’s driveway, blabbing to one of her friends about her stupid mom not letting her wear some stupid costume for Halloween, and she didn’t even scream. I was too fast, too slick. An invisible Fly in the night, landing on her shoulder, unswattable.

Hand over her mouth, duct tape, a blow to the head so she’d stop struggling. Then, I hauled her into the flatbed, covered her with an old blanket, and went careening back to the clubhouse in time to meet the King at midnight.

***

There was a dirty mattress waiting for me and a fire raging in a trash can. The Flies stood around these two centerpieces, cackling and leaping, their faces gaunt and lit up by the hectic flames. My heart pounded as I marched Ashleigh between the rows, hauling her up every time she tripped, disgusted by the piss stain darkening her PJ pants. When I threw her down on the mattress, her eyes were wide and terrified, swollen from crying. She didn’t look like a volleyball star or homecoming queen, she just looked like a girl. A scared, sobbing girl. I pitied her, and hoped pity would be enough to mask the absence of love. The plan was starting to feel stupid, now, with the smell of gasoline and rain charging the night.

The Flies recognized her right away, and a sudden quiet fell over the group. “Holy shit,” Anthony breathed, reaching out and slapping my shoulder, clutching it with a grip so tight it felt electric. “Holy shit, brother, you brought him the motherload.”

The other Flies whistled appreciatively, and one started unbuckling his belt. “You get first dibs, new boy, but you can’t stop me from beating off while I watch.”

The crowd erupted in laughter, but Anthony immediately silenced them, holding the book above his head. “Shut up!” he roared. “It’s almost midnight, no time for festivities. Remember why we’re here. Get on your knees, Flies.” He winked at me, shoved me into the center of the circle so I was standing over Ashleigh. She’d gone oddly quiet, no more tears, just a blank, dead look to her eyes like she’d vacated the premises entirely. I was glad—it made it easier to take Anthony’s pocketknife and press it to the thrumming, sweat-tacky line of her throat.

“Don’t do it until he’s here, and he’s accepted the offering,” he warned me.

My pulse sped. “How will I know he’s accepted her?”

A wild, grasshopper-dirty grin. “Oh, you’ll know.”

Then the book fell open, the storm raged closer, and Anthony started chanting. It wasn’t English, it wasn’t even Latin—it was something older, scarier. It rang in my bones and vibrated the soil under the mattress. Ashleigh slumped against my legs, and the other Flies stamped at the ground and thumped their chests, whooping and slobbering and jackrabbitting around the fire like demons.

But when the King appeared, they no longer looked like demons. When he appeared, his presence reduced them to little boys, playing a game.

I smelled him before I saw him. The reek of dumpsters in the sun, sewage, that slimy brown digestive substance maggots leave on rotting meat. A cloying, decay smell that plundered my lungs and made my eyes water, bile creeping up the back of my throat in an acrid bubble.

From the storm, he manifested: a towering figure, four limbs and a head, but no eyes or mouth to speak of. Just a consuming, writhing darkness. It was only in the firelight that I could see the iridescent flickering of his body, a man made from billions upon billions of flies. Their collective buzzing morphed into a deafening roar, a maddening engine whine. With shaking hands, I shoved Ashleigh at him, her screams muffled through the duct tape. “Here,” I shouted above the din of insect whirring. “Take her.”

But he didn’t. He ignored her entirely and buzzed past me to Anthony, who stood, awestruck and grinning, his arms outstretched in a warrior’s pose. Without warning or preamble, the King shot upward, forming into a dagger point of flies before funneling himself into Anthony’s open, laughing mouth.

Anthony choked, sputtered, eyes pinned wide with shock as the flies poured into him. Wave after wave of the King, down his throat, rippling blackness, an endless cascade.

The other Flies scattered, confused, but I didn’t. I watched as the flies rent Anthony open, tore him apart, emerged from his eyes and nostrils and asshole to balloon his pants. Oh, you’ll know, he had said, and I did.

Mechanically, I dropped Ashleigh and staggered toward him, pocketknife lifted, glinting in the moonlight before I brought it to the bob of his Adam’s apple.

And they were right. It broke my heart, but I never felt more goddamned alive.

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