Everything’s cool now. It’s been absolutely crazy, beyond nuts, but it’s a done deal now. There’s only a couple more hours left until down, and then just another hour until my relief gets here in the morning, along with the miners. The other guys are never going to believe this crap. I’m going to have to save the leftovers, just leave this mess right where it is so I can show it to them. They won’t believe me without some kind of proof. Even taking a picture wouldn’t be enough to convince anyone that this thing was real. They’d just say I digitally edited the…
A somewhat distant sound made James freeze right in place. He felt something quivering in his chest like a piece of muscular jelly and realized that it was his heart, not just beating frantically but practically trying to punch its way out of his chest. He was barely able to discern the other sound over the throbbing drumbeats of his pulse in his ears, but it was there, clear as could be and terrifying as hell: deep, low, and loud, the humming sound of an approaching insect … one bigger than anything that should have ever crawled upon this very planet at any point in history.
That was it. He was done. He was so out of this place. He didn’t care if nobody believed him. He didn’t care if he got written up or even fired for abandoning his post. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. This wasn’t a game anymore. This wasn’t some silly, slightly sadistic means of passing the time on a lonely job assignment. This had become a fight for survival, an honest-to-God life and death struggle. And the thing that he heard humming around in the darkness, the area lit only by the spotty glare of the diesel generator’s lights and the starry, moonless night sky above, was certainly going to be more than he could handle.
The pipe wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t stupid or crazy enough to make a stand against some nightmarish mega-bug with nothing but a length of steel pipe in his hands. Hell, he wasn’t even sure that a twelve-gauge shotgun was going to be up to the task here. He had to leave. He had to bail, to get the hell out of Dodge, and that needed to happen, like, yesterday. He had to be the one to call in reinforcements, summon the cavalry, or maybe just cry for his mommy – yeah, a grown-ass man in his thirties, crying for mommy.
Man-sized insects will do that to a person … it was man-sized, as he glimpsed a shadow of it streaking by overhead, some huge and heavy thing so massive that its passing caused a little gust of wind in its wake. It flew right by the lights of the generator, maybe just seeking to snap up a mouthful of some of those other bugs that had been flying around it – he’d seen bats and nocturnal birds doing that all the time – or maybe just to give him just a horrifying glance at just how massive and terrible it was. He didn’t have a chance to make out the entirety of its form, just a flash of dark iridescent colors, huge wasp-like wings, several crab-like and hairy legs, and a pointy rear-end that likely held a stinger the size of a railroad spike.
He practically dove into his little Chevrolet SUV. It was an old and beat-up thing with a quarter of a million miles on the odometer, but it was his, it was paid off, and it had never left him stranded. That reliability, as well as its ability to handle rugged roads, was what he was counting on to get him the hell out of that place and away from this devil-bug land. He slammed the door shut, locked it – yeah, probably pointless, but he wasn’t taking any chances now – and he frantically dug the keys out of his pocket. It took him three tries to get his shaking hands to successfully guide the key into the ignition and turn it. The V6 engine cranked and then gurgled to life, a thing of unimpressive horsepower but plenty of torque, and James yanked the gearshift lever down into Drive. He stabbed the gas pedal with his right foot, and the right-rear tire spun and loudly flung gravel everywhere as it momentarily fought for traction. He turned the little old S10 Blazer toward the gravel road leading away from the mine property and out toward Highway 60, fishtailing a bit and bouncing him around in the driver’s seat until he eased off the throttle just long enough to grab his seat belt and start trying to latch it into position.
Just as the buckle found its home and clicked into place, he heard a terribly loud thump as something very heavy dropped onto the top-rear of the SUV with enough force to make the suspension nearly bottom out. James screamed an expletive in response, and began shouting that curse word over and over and over again as he raced recklessly for the highway, as if it had become a single-word prayer that might somehow protect him from the multi-legged monstrosity that was now surely latched onto the top of his vehicle. That stupid roof rack, the prominent exterior feature of his SUV that he had never once used, had now apparently found its purpose as a hang-on for a bug from hell.
He kept repeating his vulgar one-word prayer, louder and more frantic, as he heard the scratching and scraping of claw-like appendages searching for traction upon the roof of the SUV as he sailed and banged over bumps and holes in the road. It seemed nothing short of a miracle that he successfully made it onto Highway 60 without destroying the suspension of his vehicle. The sharp, tire-squealing turn he made onto the highway seemed to finally tear the giant bug loose from the Chevy, as he heard that long, screeching, scratching sound of its feet/claws/whatever dragging across the roof and suddenly going away. He strained to look up and back with the rear-view mirror on his door, unable to see any sign of the huge bug, nor able to hear its humming wings or the scraping of its appendages upon the metal of his vehicle…
…but he did see the lights of a massive tractor-trailer bearing down upon him, just a moment too late. The last thing he heard before the deafening, crushing impact was its blaring horn and his own tongue-swallowing gasp of surprise.
The next night, his fellow security officers were passing off the usual information and the new set of keys for the guard shack and gate – new, because the others were still probably trapped within the horrific wreckage of James’s Chevy. Naturally, there was a somber moment of reflection as they both expressed sorrow at the loss of a fellow security guard, a solid co-worker, and someone who had seemed like an all-around nice guy in general. Nobody had yet figured out why in the world he had abandoned his post in the middle of his shift like he had, taking off like a bat out of hell in his compact SUV and heading west toward Gold Canyon. He’d never really hinted that he was so displeased with his job that he had even been thinking of quitting, but maybe he’d just had some sort of a late-night revelation and decided that he’d had enough, that he was just sick of the whole security gig, and he’d just decided to go home, get some sleep, and start a new career the next day. He couldn’t really be blamed. The job was boring as hell and didn’t pay a lot, anyway.
But whatever his reasoning had been, James had apparently been in such a rush to get out of there that he had zipped out onto Highway 60 without stopping or yielding, and had thus pulled right out in front of a semi that had been carrying a full load of acid toward one of the mines in Pinto Valley. There was no way in hell the heavily-loaded big rig could have stopped in time, even if James hadn’t been traveling in the oncoming lane for some idiotic reason. Those smooth-bore liquid-carrying trailers had a tendency to allow all of that weight to shift forward under hard braking, carrying it all forward like a giant, unstoppable missile and crushing that little SUV like a bug on a windshield … or a gnat under the pressure of a thumb pushing down upon a desk. They hadn’t so much extracted James’s body from the wreckage as much as they’d scooped him off the road and hosed him out of the twisted pile of metal.
The worst part, the guards agreed, was that this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. There had been that other guy, what was his name … Frank? Fred? Whatever. It had only been about a month beforehand, in fact. The guy had apparently been drinking on the job, as they had found alcohol in his system afterward, and he had apparently hopped into his car around midnight and taken off toward Globe, apparently making a late-night beer run. Well, Frank-Fred-Whatever had nodded off or passed out or whatever, floored the gas, and driven straight past a barrier and down into a deep ravine, rolling the car several times and crushing the roof upon h
im.
One of the guards suggested there might be some kind of curse on the post, some kind of hex placed upon the area or the company or maybe just the security guards by those angry Native American folk. In fact, one of the guards said, they remembered hearing that the local tribe had claimed the land was sacred, that there were powerful forces in the land that had to be respected. The white man – well, not just the whites but anyone non-Native, really – just couldn’t understand this and just wasn’t willing to live in harmony with the spirits. They would be punished, the tribe had warned them. Maybe that was the case here. Or maybe not. Maybe James had just lost his marbles, and maybe Frank-Fred-Whatever had just been an irresponsible drunk.
And they couldn’t figure out what the hell had bored through the wall next to the window, or what that sticky crap was all over the pocket knife that he found on the floor behind the desk. Maybe the Natives had been throwing eggs at the guard shack? Perhaps that was what had set off James. Maybe he’d confronted them, maybe gotten out his pocket knife to threaten