Creeptych

BAD DAY

I can remember the very first time I heard the news report on them. A commentator made a joke of it. “Paul Hughes,” he said, “had a bad day today.”

That was something of an understatement, to say the least. Paul Hughes had just been fired from pushing paper literally the day after his wife filed for divorce. He made the news because in the aftermath of this personal implosion, he was walking, no doubt somewhat disconsolately, in the forest near Brave River. As he moped along a walking trail some kind of insect attacked him. The commentator speculated that the buzzing sound of the creature at the back of Hughes’ earlobe led him to jump, slap at the back of his head and consequently lose his balance to fall to the concrete walking path below. He ended up in the hospital after a cardiac arrest left him thrashing on the river bank with said insect crushed in a chitinous orange paste to the back of his head.

It wasn’t really funny, but I laughed. The poor guy lost his wife, lost his job, and now, might lose his life because a hornet or something “took advantage” of him at the wrong moment.

That was the last time I laughed.

* * *

In the beginning, everyone thought they were some strange, exotic breed of roaches. They measured about two inches long, and like the roaches of the deep south, were bronze-tinged, dark as well-cured tobacco. They were quickly dubbed Luna Roaches, because they flew in clouds on the wind at twilight and descended on the city in a swarm that blotted out the light of the moon. What bugs flew at night? Nobody really asked that.

The warnings went out quickly. Don’t stay out after dark. Don’t let your children stay out playing after school. Don’t leave your windows open.

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

The media told us to hunker down and hide, cuz the killer roaches had come to town.

Of course, they didn’t say it that way. But while some of us laughed at the story of Paul Hughes flailing about and ending up in a coma because a bug dive-bombed him, we lost our morbid sense of humor really quick when swarms of them began to attack people on the streets at night.

We didn’t know what they could do, at first. Didn’t know what they wanted. Initially, the concern was that they could carry some kind of virus or disease.

Who would have guessed that what they brought us was so much more? And so much worse?

* * *

“Kara, come inside,” my wife shouted. Our little girl was only five, but already she was a handful. Sometimes I was glad that I had to go to work everyday and sit in an office. While I lived for the hours that we played together, and she giggled and kicked and fought against my tickle-bombs, I knew I could never spend the day with my baby and keep up with the girl. She was a handful of laughter and energy, while I felt like a slow-moving anchor of molasses shellacked in tar. I was tired after lofting her in the air a few times like a rocket and rolling about on the floor with her before pronouncing bedtime. I played with her an hour or two a day, while Jenna had her for the other 12.

The city was under alert now; for the past few nights swarms of the Luna Roaches had descended on the streets in a bizarre attack of buzz and wings and biting venom. Those who fell prey to the things were taken to the hospital, but couldn’t be revived. Neither did they die. The doctors quickly learned not to try to pry the roaches from the flesh of the bodies they brought in. While the victims were comatose when they came in to the hospitals with the bugs on their necks or skulls, when the insects were removed, the low level of neural activity dropped to virtually none. If you removed the bugs, you turned the patient into a human vegetable. But if you left them attached to the host, the victim lay in the hospital in a coma. The difference seemed negligible, but as we soon learned, the difference was great.

Jenna slammed the sliding door like a shotgun behind Kara and my little girl ran right into my arms.

“How’s my baby?” I asked, lofting Kara in the air like a juggler’s bag. She giggled and screeched, kinked bronze hair flying in the air like her mother’s had once, when I’d had the energy to lift and twirl Jenna around like so much paper. Now, I’d be lucky to dance around her mother, let alone lift her. A combination of her own gain in “stature” and my own declining energy. We’d had Kara late in life, and frankly, the kid wasn’t making me feel younger, as people had promised. I felt every strain in my back these days as I twirled her in the air and when I looked in the mirror in the morning I saw every age line darkened by another night of worry when she was sick.

I’m getting too old for this, I told myself more and more often. I didn’t dare broach those thoughts to Jenna, whose pallid complexion and dark bags beneath her eyes spoke for themselves. She lived in the trenches of child-rearing. I only dabbled.

Kara giggled as I twirled her in the air and asked again, “How’s my baby?”

“Good, Daddy,” she said, throwing her arms around me, and then pushing off my shoulders to raise moon eyes at me. Knowing she had my attention, she said seriously, “Daddy, there were bugs by the swing set!”

In another time, such a statement from a child would have raised an eyebrow with a smile. But now, today, in an age of Luna Roaches that rendered their victims either comatose or vegetable, I spun my daughter in the air and ran my fingers up under her hair, praying with every pounding beat of my heart that I would find nothing beneath those copper locks.

My hand met only the cool skin of a child and I set her to the ground before slumping myself into a chair, exhausted from the onset of panic. My wife hadn’t moved an inch during our conversation. She held her breath. And when I nodded that everything was ok, she closed her eyes and put a palm to her chest.

“What kind of bugs?” I said, as Kara’s moon-eyes stared up smiling at mine.

“Ladybugs!” she proclaimed and ran into the living room laughing and singing: “Ladybug, ladybug fly away home….”

* * *

If only the Luna Roaches had been ladybugs. If only they had flown away home. But they hadn’t.

Paul Hughes was one of the lucky ones. Apparently, as he’d slapped and fallen, he’d killed the bug before it set its hooks in him. He was shaken. He was physically injured. He was depressed by the disaster of his life.

But he recovered from the bug’s bite. Thinking about his situation, I bet he was later sorry for that. Then again, he never really had the chance. The news reported that he died of a heart attack just a couple days after regaining consciousness from his ordeal. His bad luck streak could have been legendary.

The hospitals were quickly growing overcrowded with those who had not recovered. Instead, bed after bed filled with bodies that were neither dead, nor, in a rational sense, alive. Oh, they laid there breathing. Their hearts beat out a predictable circadian rhythm, but behind their eyes…nothing stirred.

Within a week of the first Luna Roach swarm sighting, the hospitals were out of beds, and emergency wards began forming in the gymnasiums of high schools and colleges.

Nobody liked roaches…but few people were so afraid of the things that they wouldn’t go out after dark.

They should have been.

* * *

The Luna Roaches were legion. The true meaning of that struck me on a Tuesday night as I walked the five blocks from our house to the library. Kara had forgotten to return The Book of Five Cows that day after school, and was distraught that if I didn’t get it back to the library she’d have a fine. Welcoming the opportunity to stroll through the neighborhood on a warm summer night, I took the heavily illustrated volume and started down the sidewalk. I was passing the park just a couple blocks down from my house when I saw them.

A silver-white cloud rose like a mist from thousands of blades of darkened grass, and a sibilant hiss filled the air. In a moment, the sky was a mass of pin-wheeling, shimmering dust motes. They ascended like a flock of startled pigeons, and then after gaining their bearings in the sky, momentarily blocking the light of the moon from which they took their name, they turned their shivering antennae on me.

I saw the shift; one moment, the swarm drifted aloft startled and unsettled. The next, they had a direction. And that direction was my head. As they began to shimmer towards me, a million Luna Roaches on the trail of a new victim, I looked around for a safe place. I’d seen plenty of the creatures over the past few days, but never so many in one place. They turned the sky a slithering arm of silver, and its fingers were reaching for my head. When I saw the shadowed house not too far away, on the corner lot near the park, I nodded to myself. And ran. Where else could I find shelter?

My ears cringed at the chittering sound that grew louder behind me as I shot up the flagstone walkway to the weathered old colonial like a bloodhound, determined to nab my quarry before the things behind me nabbed my back. And my quarry, in this instance, was safety. When I got to the doorway of the house, I found its entryway unlocked. I didn’t hesitate in throwing open the screen door and diving in, as a flurry of shimmering wings beat the air in a hungry hiss behind me. Many of them crashed into the screen as it slammed shut, unable to turn, and I breathed a sigh of relief on the floor as the soft crashes echoed in the air behind me.

“Wow,” I whispered, tossing the thin hardcover book on the floor in front of me. “That was close.”

I laid on the floor for a couple minutes, breathing heavily and occasionally glancing back at the cloud of angry moths still slamming against the door behind me. Finally, I pulled up my legs and pulled myself into a crouch to see where I’d ended up.

That’s when I saw her.

The owner of the house, or at least that’s what I assumed she was, sat as still as a statue on the couch facing the foyer where I’d landed.

“Did you see that?” I asked. “The damn things came at me like a swarm of killer bees!”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry I let myself into your house like that, but I didn’t know where else to go,” I apologized.

Behind me, the soft flutterings and keening insectoid cries and smacks against the screen of the door were abating. In front of me, the woman stood, still saying nothing.

She stepped forward.

“Just let me wait here a second, until I’m sure they’re gone,” I said, picking the library book up. “Then I’ll get out of your house.”

She stepped forward again. Her eyes didn’t blink.

“Um, Ma’am?” I said. Fear began to grip at my bowels. What had I walked into?

She put another foot forward, and now I began to panic. She moved with the halting stiltedness of a robot still discovering its joints. And she hadn’t blinked since the moment I’d looked up and noticed her staring blindly ahead from her seat on the couch. How long had she sat there, waiting for me to fall into her house? What would she do when she reached me? She was only feet away.

I jumped towards the door and she changed direction to follow. There were still a few Luna Roaches circling in the halo of light like moths outside the screen, but I didn’t hesitate. I launched my way into the twilight and ran back up the street towards my home.

Kara’s library book could be late. I’d be happy to pay the fine.

* * *

That was the night the hospitals emptied. And the churches. And the school gymnasiums. All of the places where the volunteers from the Red Cross and a wide range of other medical saviors had stacked the comatose victims on cots and blankets in hopes that someday they would awake again.

That was the night that they did.

When I got home, breathless and confused at what had just happened, Jenna didn’t give me time to speak. When I dove into the family room, she instantly pointed at the TV and whispered, “look.” The news anchors were raving.

“Around 7 PM tonight, the victims of the Luna Roaches began to walk. But it’s as if they are walking in their sleep. They don’t speak, and they won’t stop, no matter what gets in front of them. We’ve had reports from every part of the city; it’s happening everywhere, all at once. The scene is like something out of a movie. An hour ago, there were thousands of victims, all in a mass coma, and now…now…”

The co-anchor lost it: “…now the dead walk!” she exclaimed.

“What do you think it means?” Jenna said. She put an arm protectively around our daughter.

“I think that this is a really bad day.”

I was only partly right; it was actually a bad night. And a strange one. By morning, after frantic eyewitness news reports flooded the television stations and people barricaded themselves in their homes in panic, it had gotten even stranger.

You wouldn’t think that thousands of people could get up one night, walk out into the streets all at once and then disappear, while the eyes of millions were upon them. But that’s what happened that night. The coma victims got up from wherever they lay, walked out into the street, and as the rest of us ran inside and panicked at their single-minded, staggering gaits and blank, black gazes, they kept on walking. By the next morning, nobody could quite answer exactly where they’d gone.

On my way to work that next day, I drove by the house I’d hidden in the night before near the park. The front door was wide open. I bet to myself that nobody was at home. But I didn’t stop to find out.

The chatter went on for days. The networks played an endless cycle of footage of blank-eyed men and women and creepily vacant children staggering out of hospitals and churches and walking down the center of the street, feet padding along strangely straight as they strode the dotted yellow lines out of town.

There was one image that haunted me, especially. They played it again and again, and every time, inexplicably, I began to well up. There was nothing inherently wrong with the picture. It was just a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old. She wore a red T-shirt that had a giant thumbprint stenciled on it. And she walked down the street, on the way out of town. Her hair was long and ratty brown, and tousled in so many knots, the father in me knew they’d take hours to comb out, and many yelps of hurt. I don’t know exactly what it was about her. Maybe the way her big brown eyes drooped and looked hopelessly tired. Maybe it was the way she walked, listless and slow, but with a horrible, unrelenting purpose. Or maybe it was the way she dragged her ragged brown teddy on the asphalt as she walked. The stuffed animal had probably been her favorite toy days before, something she tried to feed and cuddle and hug. And now its head bumped on the ground, silently thumping, thumping, thumping with each small step she took. Her hand didn’t let go of its leg, but neither did she care that she was dragging the toy to death.

Tears filled my eyes at the image and I looked away. At that moment, a thrumming sound filled the house, as if it had begun to hail. Something was pounding on the shingles and the windows all around the house.

“Daddy,” Kara said, running into the room. “There’s a bug on my bed.”

I scooped her up in my arms and took her back to the room, the noise still echoing overhead and all around. Somewhere I heard glass shatter.

“There” she pointed, and on the middle of the pink “Hello Kitty” bedspread sat an abomination. At least two inches long, the Luna Roach sat still, smack in the center of my baby’s bed. Its wings shimmered in the yellow light like a gold haze, and it crept forward as I entered the room, heading for the shelter of her pillow. I set Kara on the floor, pulled a tissue from my pants pocket and brought my hand down on the bug. With a scoop I enclosed it in the tissue and squeezed. The crunch of the thing’s body was audible, and the warm wetness of its insides bled through the tissue to squish against my hand. I threw the mess into the toilet in the hall bathroom and flushed, rinsing my hand as if I’d touched poison in the sink.

From the other side of the house, my wife screamed. Wiping my hand on my jeans, again I scooped up Kara and ran. When we got there, Jenna lay on the floor, arms clenched around herself in a desperate hug. When she saw me, she pointed to the living room window. “They’re getting in,” she whispered.

Sure enough, on the floor near the windows and streaming around the coffee table were dozens of Luna Roaches.

“Stay here, don’t move,” I told Kara and set her on the couch.

Then I started stomping.

When the room was a glistening mess of bug guts and broken wings, I finally reached the window and pulled the drapes aside. The glass on one of the side windows had broken, and insects were still crawling up and over the jagged glass to drop into the room. The room hummed with their high-pitched, ululating trills. I reached back and grabbed a throw pillow from the couch, stuffing it roughly into the hole that had been my window. Its threads caught on the edges of the glass, and when I was certain the room was airtight again, I continued my stamping campaign until I felt sure that every keening bug was dead. The carpet was a mess of orange goo, and Jenna still hadn’t moved from the floor.

“Mommy’s asleep” Kara pronounced, and I realized my wife had fainted.

“Let’s put her to bed,” I said, and with Kara holding onto my leg, I grunted, groaned and eventually staggered aloft again with her mother in my arms. I tucked Jenna under the covers as carefully as she normally tucked Kara, and checked to make sure she was still alive. Her slow, steady breath whispered gently in my ear, telling me that shock had sent her into more peaceful dreams than I was wont to have. When I looked up, my daughter stood at the edge of the bed, brown eyes brimming with salty concern. Her cheeks glistened, and I could see her tiny chest shivering with fright.

“Will mommy be OK?” she whispered.

“She’ll be fine,” I promised. “She’s just scared and tired. Let’s climb in with her and get some sleep, too, OK?”

Kara nodded. I scooped her up and slid her into the center of the bed and climbed in beside her. Once beneath the sheets, it didn’t take long before I heard the long slow rhythm of my baby’s deep sleep breathing kick in as she clung to her mother’s back. I thought about waking Jenna to make sure she was OK, but then decided she was better off to just sleep, while she could. Lord knows I couldn’t. I wished that I could join the two of them, but instead I lay awake listening to the light rain of bugs battering against the roof and windows of my house for what seemed like hours. My ears magnified every creak of the house into the echo of an imaginary phalanx of roaches advancing on my bed. I kept itching at phantom touches on my head and legs and hands, driving myself crazy with the idea that a new attack of insects would descend to smother us there in the bed at any moment. At some point, long past midnight, the sound finally quieted and the house grew quiet. I put a hand on my baby’s shoulder, and eventually fell asleep myself.

It was the last good sleep I would have.

* * *

“Daddy,” Kara said, pushing tiny hands against my shoulder. “Daddy, I’m hungry and mommy won’t get up.”

I blinked heavy lids open and squinted against the glare. The sun was fully up in the sky and the room glowed with the searchlight of morning. Kara sat in the middle of the bed in her Candykids nightgown, dark hair tousled, but eyes bright as the sun.

“Daddy?” she said again.

I rolled over and hugged her, and then prodded Jenna. Nothing happened.

I pushed against her back again, and then pressed my head to her side. She was breathing.

“She won’t wake up, Daddy. I’m scared.”

“Let her sleep,” I said, slipping out of the bed and grabbing Kara in my arms. “Let’s go have some cereal and let her sleep.”

I tried to sound boisterous as I said it, but inside, my heart was dissolving like ice on the beach. I knew why Jenna wouldn’t get up. A chill went through me as I thought about it. God, we’d slept right next to her. But I knew if I moved her hair aside, I’d find the shell of a Luna Roach attached to her neck.

I choked back a tear as I reached for a box of breakfast cereal in the cabinet and Kara settled herself on a chair at the kitchen table.

Jenna was not going to be waking up. Kara would probably never have her mom make her breakfast again.

* * *

The TV was playing snow. Snow on almost every channel. There was one local access channel still broadcasting, with a wide-eyed, disheveled man screaming into the microphone. “They’ve come back,” he kept saying. “They’ve come back and there’s only one way to stop them: aim for the head. It’s the roaches, you’ve got to smash the roaches…”

As I watched him babble, the door behind him opened, and a stream of people entered the studio. They surrounded the man, who leapt up on a chair and grabbed a microphone stand, holding it out like a cattle prod. Then he began swinging it wildly, like a bat, again and again until he finally connected with someone. The stand hit a woman right in the back of the head, right where the Luna Roaches loved to fasten. The woman went down. But then so did the man. There were hands all over him suddenly, and a buzzing sound slowly filled the room. I heard him scream just before a hand covered the lens of the camera, and then that station turned to snow, too.

There were still cable stations playing old sitcoms, but none of the local networks were broadcasting. The same with radio. At last I understood what they meant now by corporate “canned” radio. Only the FM channel programmed by someone a thousand miles away on the left coast still played the latest singles from U2 and Green Day. And I knew it was because they had programmed the schedule days before. Nobody was working the boards right now.

For the first time since I’d seen the news story about Paul Hughes, I truly panicked. I felt the ice in my belly, and struggled not to fall to my knees and tremble like a baby in front of my baby, who was holding my hand and counting on me to be strong, to make things all right.

Except that I couldn’t.

Not even close.

In the other room, Kara’s mom was turning into some kind of a zombie in her sleep, and outside, the world was awash with buzzing, swarming death.

There was no way out.

“Daddy, can I have more milk?”

Blinking back tears, I opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a carton. I wouldn’t look at the missing person picture on its side. Soon, we might all be missing.

* * *

“We’re just going to take a little ride,” I said, as I buckled Kara into the seatbelt.

“But what about mommy?” She quailed.

“Mommy needs her sleep. We’ll bring her back some dinner later.”

It killed me to lie, but I had to get her out of here. I had to get Kara out of the city.

As we pulled out of the garage, I saw the door from the house open, and Jenna stepped out onto the concrete behind us. Thank god Kara was buckled in and couldn’t look in the rear view mirror. Her mother looked ghastly.

Her eyes were vacant.

I hit the gas and squealed out onto the street. I don’t know where I thought we were going to go. Somehow it seemed like this was a local problem; if we could just get out of the city and into the country, everything would be normal again.

We never left the neighborhood.

I pulled out on Highland and turned on to Norfolk to get out of the subdivision…but just before I reached the main road, the way was blocked.

They moved slow, but they were moving. And they were moving inward, a barricade of bodies 10 and 20 deep. They strode towards us, honing in. When one turned, all of the others followed, as if driven by a single mind. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw they were behind us as well. Surrounded.

I stopped the car to think. The bodies didn’t stop. They came forward, slowly, inexorably. Their eyes were dark, and unblinking. I could see the tan shadow of Luna Roaches trembling on the necks of some of them as they stepped forward, one shambling shoe at a time.

“Daddy,” Kara said. “They’re getting closer.”

Her hand gripped my shirtsleeve and my heart crawled into my throat. I had to do something…but what? I had no idea. I could try to plow the car through a phalanx of still seemingly human bodies but I had no faith that I would get that far. If we left the car, we were doomed for sure. The mob stretched as far as I could see, in every direction. Were we the only regular humans left in the neighborhood?

“Daddy,” Kara repeated. “They want to come in.”

The first one had finally reached the car. He was an older man, I’d guess 65 or 70. His hair was white as salt on his head and his lips thin as parchment. He leaned his pale, too-slack face into Kara’s window and leered, teeth exposed and rotten.

The pounding began then. And from all around us a hum began to wail.

First the old man began to smack his head against her window. And then from the back window an answering echo, as one of the other Luna Roach automatons began to slap slack fists against the glass. An answering thud joined from my side of the car. One old woman threw her body onto the hood of the car and tried to claw her way up to the windshield. When a gnarled finger grasped at the windshield wiper, I turned the control to full and watched the steel and rubber arm bat her tentative grasp away again and again.

But nothing was going to keep them away for long. Kara held on to my arm tighter and tighter as the car began to shake.

“Daddy, what are we going to do?”

The metal of the passenger door suddenly creaked and squealed. The golf pin of a door lock snapped, the plastic vanished to the floor.

“I don’t know what to do,” I finally admitted, as the door wrenched open and six arms reached through the breach towards my baby girl.

“Daddddddy!” she screamed.

I pulled her closer, but the hands gripped the fabric of her shirt and pants and then, next to my ear, the glass exploded. Another hand reached through the broken glass to bat at my head.

“Kara, hold on,” I begged, grasping for her.

But she was gone.

From outside the car I heard her screams. I dove after her to follow, but before I had my feet on the ground a dozen fists pounded into my neck and back and shoved me to the asphalt. Through a field of swaying bodies and limbs I saw Kara raised above the mob, and then Jenna appeared, arms held out to take her.

“Mommy!” Kara cried, arms outstretched.

My wife scooped my baby up, and Kara hugged her tight. Jenna stared at me over our little girl’s shoulders, and a look of victory flickered in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I was sickened by seeing my wife smile. But then, strangely, that smile grew confused, uncertain. It turned to a frown. Her eyes squinted like they did when she got migraines. I could see the muscles on the backs of her arms begin to tense and shiver as she gripped Kara tighter. Then she opened her mouth, not to kiss our baby, but to scream. I heard it clearly over the cacophony of the mob.

That’s when the Luna Roach slid out from the wet cavity between her eyeball and eyelid. Kara saw the bug and recoiled from her mother, but Jenna only held our baby tighter, as the roach walked to the edge of Jenna’s nose and poised there to stretch its wings. Then my wife’s whole face convulsed and began to change. Her skin crawled and swelled; her whole body began to visibly tremble. Jenna’s face exploded at that moment, as the hive of Luna Roaches nesting and gestating in her brain finally clawed their way free of her flesh and bone and took to the air. A cloud of blood sprayed the sky as her eyes and flesh caved in like undermined sand to the angry mandibles of a thousand trapped and buzzing bugs. As the first spurts of blood misted, a black and tan cloud of buzzing wings instantly hid the sudden ruin of her features. Luna Roaches lit from her exposed flesh to swarm around the bloody mess of her eyes and the sticky, shredded cartilage of her nose, which hung by a thread down her face.

I launched myself forward to save Kara, but the arms and feet of the mob held me down as my baby beat tiny hands against Jenna’s gore-streaked shoulders, trying to escape. Against all sanity, her blinded, broken mother did not fall or let go. A buzz of wings multiplied in the air, and a cloud of Luna Roaches hovered like a bee swarm around my baby’s screaming, horrified face. I screamed for her, holding out a helpless hand that was quickly stomped to the ground. Something in my arm snapped as it met the asphalt, but louder than my own cry was Kara’s shriek. I swear that she called for me, but the street was alive in screaming and calls for help. Whether she called my name, or something else, in seconds, it was all over. Kara lay quiet and still, limp and blood-spattered in what had been her mother’s arms. But I knew, even if my baby never really did, that those were not Jenna’s arms any longer. Luna Roaches darted across my baby’s face, sampling her innocence with their nervous, hairy feelers.

The crowd drew back from me, setting me free from where they’d pinned me to the pavement and I stood up outside the car, cradling my arm and staring at the crowd of blank eyes that glittered like obsidian in the descending night. Silence fell like midnight fog around us, as the mob grew still, and the moment pregnant.

“What are you?” I whispered. “What do you want?”

One of the men stepped forward, and tentatively opened its mouth. A growling sound came out, and then a word. “Jeessst.” It said in a voice like shifting gravel. Its unblinking eyes fluttered at the sound and it seemed to smile. Understanding dawning.

“Jeessst yur legs,” the man said, the words coming out slowly before it stepped forward. Its face looked pleased. “Jeesst your arms.”

“And what do I get in return?” I asked.

“Us,” someone else growled.

From above I heard the fluttering drone of thousands of translucent wings.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“The places you have never gone,” came my only answer, a whisper from the crowd. And then the cool teeth of a Luna Roach settled onto my spine. For a moment I struggled, hoping to throw it off. But then the ice slid through my brain, and I felt the world go quiet.

As I slid back to the ground, I wondered what would become of my body. And of all the bodies that surrounded me. Normally in a symbiosis, the predator used the host to serve as a nest for its offspring.

Oh God, I cried, as my body went numb. What would gestate and grow inside of Kara. What would hatch from my poor, sweet baby?

What would climb out of my own swollen belly after I had been used…and used up? Or would they use me like Jenna?

I prayed that the chittering sounds I heard in my brain would take any knowledge of that away. Already, I could almost understand what the keening, droning noises I’d been hearing now during the nights meant.

Eat. Eat.

Kill. Eat.

Spawn.

Paul Hughes was lucky. His bad day had ended a long time ago now, before things really did get bad.

Mine was only just beginning.