with big, black, shiny eyes and some seriously wicked-looking mandibles crunching away at the wall’s material in its effort to get inside. It was coming for him. It wasn’t just blindly exploring and trying to find food. It wanted him, specifically. He didn’t know how, but he just knew for sure that this bug had a personal grudge against him. It wanted to hurt him. It probably wanted to kill him, maybe even eat him.
James went with the only thing he had on hand that could even be called a weapon: his pocket knife. Given, the post he was working was technically an unarmed security officer position, and both company policy and state law prohibited him from being armed on the site of such a post. But a pocket knife wasn’t really a weapon, especially not the one he hand, just a simple folding knife from an auto parts store with a blade less than four inches long. He drew it out from where it was clipped to the seam of his pocket, flicked it open, and waited until the bug had burrowed its way just inside of the wall far enough that he was sure it couldn’t come back out. The bug saw him, intelligently looking up to him as it bit off that last piece of drywall and began to wriggle its way through.
I see you, it seemed to be saying. I’m coming for you. You killed my little cousins. Your ass is mine!
“Not tonight,” James replied to the unspoken threat as he struck.
The bug seemed to try to shrink back an instant before he hit it, but it couldn’t crawl forward or backward through the hole in the wall fast enough to get in the way. As smart as it might have been, and however much of a threat it might have been to James if it had been crawling or flying around freely, it had put itself in a stupid position of helplessness. The blade of James’s pocket knife pierced right through the bug’s eye and plunged into its head, skewering it fully until the tip of the blade jutted out the opposite side and its other eye.
The bug shuddered, scrabbled, and buzzed inside its place of demise within the wall, a mostly clear but yellowish liquid oozing out of the mortal wound to its head. Just for good measure, James twisted the knife inside the bug’s cranium – assuming that’s what an insect’s head was technically called, he didn’t know or care – and more pus-like fluid oozed out, along with some grayish-brownish stuff that might have been bug brains. The thing still thrashed and vibrated in its death throes, but it wasn’t trying to go anywhere. It was just a bunch of dying nerves now, just an invertebrate changing from an animate thing to an inanimate object … just the stuff of nightmares.
Except it wasn’t dead. Not quite, it wasn’t. What James had initially thought was the creature’s dying moments now seemed to be an attempt to regain its bearings. Instead, it was now trying to crawl back out of the hole in retreat. He couldn’t allow that. Hell no! If that thing left, it was going to … to … to do what? Call for reinforcements? Scream for help? Cry out for its mama?
That last thought sent a chill down his spine. These things were getting bigger, smarter, and meaner. Just how big were they going to get? Just how huge and nasty was this thing’s mother? Or queen? Or whatever the hell was spawning these nightmare cooties?
He had to make sure it was dead. Sure, killing the other bugs had apparently summoned bigger and badder relatives. But this one had to be the king (or queen) of the bunch. This was as big as they possibly could have been. The laws of nature and reality and so forth just couldn’t allow for anything bigger. Surely, in this day and age, someone would have found an insect of this size and recorded its existence. Something this big would have made the news, pictures of it splashed all over the Internet, and probably been used to some effect in a horror movie … or at least a fake recreation of it.
And even if this was some exceedingly rare example, maybe just a one-off freak of nature, then this was the one and only. This was as bad as they could be. And some bug this big and bad simply could not be allowed to carry on and live. What if it bred? What if those other bugs had been its babies, and this was the mama bug? He had to stop this thing, kill it, and make sure there wouldn’t be any more after it. He had to stop the monster bug bloodline at this generation.
Even if he had to go out and look for this thing’s nest – it couldn’t have been far from the shack, given how many of them had shown up – and he had to destroy it. Maybe he would siphon some diesel fuel from the generator, pour it on there, and burn it up somehow. Or, if nothing else, just report it to the mine company and have them send some professional exterminators out here to deal with them. Yeah, that was probably a better option. He didn’t want to fight any more of these little monsters himself. He might be a little crazy, but he wasn’t completely out of his gourd.
James left the knife-impaled bug squirming in the wall and went outside for a better weapon. He knew exactly what to use and where to find it. For anything else but maybe a rabid badger or coyote or other small four-legged mammal, it might have been overkill. But in this case, it seemed entirely appropriate. These things were hard and tough. These things had some seriously heavy-duty shells protecting them. Even if it wasn’t buried halfway in the wall, his boot wasn’t up to the task for this thing.
He went around the corner and grabbed the four-foot length of galvanized steel pipe that was propped up against the guard shack. It was left there as a piece of some temporary chain-link fencing the company had been using around the perimeter of the equipment yard, before the mining company had contracted a security company to send actual guards out here to keep an eye on their bulldozers and backhoes. It was an unofficial but well-known piece of equipment that the officers had kept on that post as a “just in case” measure. Again, they’d had incidents in the past with some rowdy Native Americans giving them problems. If two or more of them showed up and wanted to start a fight, well … he might not be legally able to have a gun at that post, but he could certainly wield a scrap piece of metal as an improvised weapon to help even the odds. Or, in this case, to help deal with a severe bug infestation.
James took the pipe in both hands and was already raising it up in readiness as he rounded the opposite corner of the shack. He was going to nail this thing from behind as it was in the wall, maybe even shove the pipe right up its bug ass. That thought faded just a bit as he saw the other half of the bug and just how monstrous its full size and form really was, a sight that halted him and made his jaw drop open wide.
The insect had to be at least a foot and a half long in total. Almost a foot of its rear-end was still sticking out of the wall, the other half buried in the wall with its head stuck through the other side and impaled by his pocket knife. Apparently, the pocket knife was keeping it from backing out of the hole successfully. He wasn’t sure how the hell the thing could be smart enough to still even think to do that, being that he’d shoved a sharpened length of steel right through its head. But there again, he didn’t know everything there was to know about bugs. For all he knew, this thing’s brain was in its butt, right by the giant inch-long stinger that he saw waving around from its backside like a huge, black thorn.
Anatomy be damned, he knew enough about insects to know that stinger was a huge threat to him. If that thing got loose from the wall – in fact, it seemed to be trying to pull its own head off just to escape – then what would happen if that big huge stinger found its way under his skin? Pain, obviously, and a whole lot of it. Poison? Probably. Maybe some kind of paralyzing neurotoxin, something to immobilize him so it could package him up in a cocoon like a spider and munch on him at its leisure, or maybe drag him off to its lair and feed him to its babies? Hell, maybe that stinger was exactly how it made its babies. Maybe that was some kind of a bug penis? Or what if the thing used that to inject eggs into its victims, and the babies hatched and ate their host from the inside out?
This was too much. James had to get the hell out of there. But not before taking this sucker down once and for all. With a cry of both rage and fear, James raised the pipe overhead and brought it crashing down upon the back of the bug. There was a solid thump and a bit of a crunch, just a bit of sticky goo that clung to the tip of the pipe with
that first hit. It wasn’t enough. The bug was still thrashing, only stunned for an instant by that first hit. James raised the pipe again and brought it down again. And again. And again and again. He realized he was making a frantic, hysterical sort of whimpering, keening sound as he bludgeoned the gargantuan insect into a nasty pulp. If this wasn’t such an insane situation to begin with, he would’ve been certain that he’d completely gone off the deep end.
The bug guts absolutely reeked. The smell was utterly indescribable, terribly pungent and rotten, but with that same weird minty sort of edge to it that most any other bug had. Yellow, clear, some parts almost flesh-toned, the insect’s innards oozed and splattered out as James pummeled apart the thing’s back half. He only stopped when he had destroyed enough of it that he was succeeding only in hitting the side of the guard shack itself instead of what little of the bug was left exposed. He stopped, let the goo-sheathed end of the pipe clank down upon the gravel, and he paused to catch his breath, trying to calm down.
Okay, he thought. It’s over. I got it. I got that ugly sucker. It’s dead. I’m safe.