saw the bug bob around in the air, turn to face him, and then hover right in place. And then it just stayed there, buzzing angrily, its wings sounding almost like one of those little remote-controlled helicopters. It stayed, it hovered … and it stared at him. It actually stared at him with a conscious, intelligent, knowing sort of look that was absolutely not the behavior of a typical bug.
What the hell was going on here? Was this some kind of super bug, some rare mutant thing that had either been spawned by the toxic chemicals of the nearby mine? Was it some ancient, prehistoric insect that had been hibernating for millions of years and then awoken and released when the mine had dug up its eggs? Crazy theories bounced around in James’s head as he locked stares with this fat hornet-fly-whatever thing, gripping the swatter so tightly in his hand that the wire frame of its handle was bending.
James took a step to the left. The bug adjusted its hovering and moved in the same direction, stopping its side-tracking at the same time he stopped moving. James feinted at the bug, jabbing the swatter in its direction. The bug zipped back and higher, then resumed hovering.
Okay, he thought, this is going from weird to downright creepy. Bugs don’t act like this. Bugs aren’t this smart. And they sure as hell don’t stare back at people like this. Even birds rarely seemed to exhibit this kind of intelligence, and those were vastly more complex and advanced creatures than these little things. Whatever the case was, James was locked in a battle with this bug. And, worst of all, this thing was between him and the door. Darting out and slamming the door shut behind him wasn’t even an option. The only way out was through this bug.
The swatter just wasn’t going to do. James knew that already. The only thing it was going to accomplish was to annoy this big ol’ bug even more. He needed something stronger, something with more firepower, so to speak. With just his eyes, he frantically began to scan the surrounding area and consider his options. The only things that seemed like a viable option were the cardboard folders full of stapled-together reports. Those would be big and heavy enough to crush this bug, but light enough that he could swing them with enough speed to score a hit.
He tossed the swatter aside to the desk. Amazingly, as he did that, the bug stopped hovering and lowered itself onto the edge of the window. Had the bug actually understood the significance of the swatter? Had it seen him discard it and accepted that as a sign of either surrender or a truce? It seemed absolutely nuts to even think an insect could be that smart, but the change in behavior was immediate and obvious. The bug crawled around the bottom edge of the window sill, turning its side to him but still watching him with one of its two big, bulbous, shiny black eyes without pupils.
The folders were directly behind James, located on top of a shelf where they stood on end among some other binders full of older reports, post orders, and so on. He put his hands behind his back, eased away from the window and nearly up against the wall where the set of shelves stood, and grabbed one folder with each hand. As he drew away from the shelf again, clutching the folders readily and tightly in preparation, the bug seemed to notice the purpose in his movement. It turned to face him directly again, squatting down slightly as if it might disregard its wings and simply jump right at his face.
Just as James drew almost within arms’ reach of the windowsill, the bug sprang up into the air. Flinching back with alarm in the same instant, James swung both arms around in front of him and clapped the folders together so solidly and loudly that it was like a gunshot within the little shack. He fell backward and his shoulders slammed up against the wall and shelf, knocking the cheap little calendar off the small finishing nail it hung from upon the wall. He saw the bug drop from between the folders and fall to the floor. It was visibly damaged and twitching. James stomped upon it. It kept twitching. He stomped, and stomped, and stomped yet again, finally standing on the thing with his heel and doing a violent twisting motion back and forth. Some crazy part in the back of his mind started playing an old Chubby Checker tune, as anyone who might have seen this would have thought he was doing some kind of silly dance. The insane grin of satisfaction and victory he felt upon his face only added to the wild scene. After a moment, James even heard himself giggling with a mad sort of giddiness.
When he finally lifted his foot, he saw the bug was a crushed, mangled, torn-up mess of black bits, yellow and clear snot-like fluids, and disconnected legs and wings. On some level, he sort of wished that he could have found a different way of killing it, somehow preserving the body of the insect so that he could maybe show it to one of his co-workers or even take it in to some place where they might be able to identify it. He wanted … no, he had to know now what the hell this thing was, this bug that had been so smart that it could match him move-for-move and stare him down like that.
James’s hands were trembling with adrenaline, both from fear and exhilaration, as he again used the swatter to dispose of the bug’s remains, scooping them up off the floor like he was using a spatula for eggs on a fry pan. The leftovers of the thing actually stunk like nothing he’d ever been around before, sort of smelling like a sick cross between spearmint and dog feces. He dumped the bug carcass into the trash can, made a big fat tally mark of victory on the back of his report, and celebrated the outcome of this battle by pouring some freshly-brewed coffee into his insulated mug. He didn’t like drinking his coffee black, but he didn’t have any creamer on hand at the time. The coffee seemed redundant now, as he was more than awake at that point and probably wouldn’t be able to sleep once he got home from his shift. His bit of combat with that big, ugly, and disturbingly intelligent arthropod probably would be giving him nightmares for a day or two.
It was as he was considering this, scratching away a brief note on his report – “No activity, all secure,” because “fought and killed a big, scary bug” would just sound absurd – that he heard a scratching, sort of crunching sound coming from one of the windows. About an hour and a half had passed since his duel with the big bug. His hands had stopped shaking, but he was still wide-awake and a bit jumpy at that point. He had nothing to fear at that point. He’d killed his big bug for the night. The fat horsefly had been enough of an oddity in itself, but that monster wasp-thing had been a complete one-off, something he’d never encounter again. Anything else that might bother him that night was bound to be smaller, weaker, more insignificant, and less of a threat to him. Mosquitoes were the worst he had to fear at night, and up in the mountains, nowhere near a still body of water, they were pretty much non-existent.
As such, when James stood and yanked down the cord of the blinds to raise them out of the way, he was expecting to see another bug of some kind, or maybe even some kind of a rodent – a mouse, maybe even a raccoon trying to find its way inside in search of whatever old food it smelled from the trash can inside. What he wasn’t expecting to see, however, was a hole that had been chewed through the wooden frame next to the window, roughly an inch in diameter, with little bits of drywall and wood shavings getting pushed out of it. Apparently, this was how the last bug had gotten inside. And it looked like another one was trying to follow it in through the same hole … something even bigger, if that was even possible.
James cursed loudly as he recoiled from the sight, sloshing hot coffee onto his hand from the mug he still held. Quickly, he set the mug down upon his desk, flinging away the coffee that was mildly burning him. He started looking around inside the shack quickly now, desperate to find something to either fight this new bug or at least to prevent it from getting inside. He’d had a hard enough time fighting that last one in such tight quarters, and he’d been damned lucky to kill that thing the way he had. He didn’t want to push his luck with this newest enemy.
What the hell was going on here, anyway? This was just too coincidental, too weird to just be a random thing. Bugs did not arrive in progressively larger sizes and varieties just to bother humans. It was like they were being sent out one at a time from a home base, some sort of bug airport that dispatched them like litt
le buzzing fighter jets. The first little gnat had maybe been the same as a little Cessna airplane; that big, evil bastard he had just killed was the equivalent of an F-22 Raptor. What the hell was trying to get at him now? The insectoid version of a B-2 stealth bomber? Maybe a B-52?
James was almost out of options. He briefly considered using the handle of the broom, but he realized that it was too flimsy to be useful as a weapon, since it was just a thin tube of aluminum or tin with an even thinner layer of plastic over it. He couldn’t very well swat the bug with anything, as it still seemed to be burrowing its way through the wall. A crazy thought occurred to him to use the nearby aerosol can of spray lubricant as a flame thrower, but he didn’t have a lighter or any other way of igniting it. Even if he had, he probably would have wound up burning down the little shack in the process of trying to kill a stupid insect, however big it might have been.
James saw the head of the insect beginning to make its way through the drywall and wood now. It was absolutely huge, ridiculously large. The head was almost as big around as a baseball,