* * *
“And what exactly do you intend to tell the police?” he asked peevishly.
“I still think you should see a doctor,” I said.
“Nah,” said Groat, “that weren’t actually poison, mostly.” He pronounced it ‘pizzen.’ “Jes some sort of acidy bug juice. You mostly got it off in time. Look what it done to my hat, though.” He sadly held his ruined baseball hat in both hands.
You could see the mark on his forehead where the band had been. Even his ratty little mustache was singed. He looked furious.
I shoved a mug of coffee into Groat’s hands and sat down with my own. I was still shaking. “What the hell just happened there? That son of a bitch had a roach in his eyeball!”
Groat took one last sad look at his hat before spinning it across the room into the garbage. “That there was one smart bug. A whole mess of bugs all thinking as one, actually. They’re technically Pacific roaches. Bastards came out through California a decade ago. They’ve been establishing themselves ever since.”
“No,” I said, in denial. “That was a man.” A very good looking man, I had previously thought. Now the concept disgusted me.
“Nah. You saw a host. There’s a brainy bunch of them roaches running the show somewhere nearby, and they send agents out to do the work for ‘em. I killed a brood last year in the bottom of some old lady’s basement. The humans they walk around in are still alive for a while, but the roaches use ‘em kinda like school buses, burrowing in and taking over in order to get places in the sunlight.”
“That’s pretty nasty,” I said.
“You don’t want to see one of ‘em after the human shell gets abandoned. They don’t live long after that. They don’t live long, period, but the colony uses them smell gland things to disguise what they really are.”
“Pheromones?”
“Sure, that sounds right. Them things. They use ‘em to distract people. But hell, you smoke long enough like I have and you got no sense of smell left.” He winked at me, the entire side of his filthy face screwing up in one big awkward wink.
I shuddered despite myself. “I don’t understand any of this. It isn’t some bad movie. People don’t get taken over by bugs.”
He eyed me. “You’re kidding, right? There’re all kinds of parasites that do just that. And I’ll tell ya, if God ain’t a beetle himself, then he sure does love the little bastards. There’s over five thousand different types of roaches alone. And they been around almost three hundred million years. Humans been around for something like 200,000 years. That means that got...” He did the math laboriously. “299, 800,000 years on us. You think they ain’t been evolving?”
“Holy crap,” I said, and sat down. I didn’t want to think about what my art would be like after this. Goodbye prior world view with still lives and landscapes, hello horrible insect paintings that no one would buy. Except the bugs, of course. They’d probably love them.
“Exactly. I got told about this by the man who trained me. He was drunk, so it may be hooey. But he told me about this island chain in the South Pacific where these roaches have pretty much husked everyone out. That’s where they’re from. He found out about it because he was sailing past and thought he saw
a cable car system. Turned out to be giant egg sacks dangling from cables instead. This guy claimed the island was half carved stone monastery and half organic insect hive, chock full of the things.” Groat paused. “I never saw the guy sober, but that’s why he hired me on and trained me. I guess I can’t blame him.”
“That’s awful,” I said. I should have been picturing what it would be like if an infestation like this could be real. Instead, I was brooding on what my life might be like the day after tomorrow. I had been miserable. Was this going to be any better?
“My dream,” said Groat, “is to go there some day. Just me and my flame thrower and my chemical pack. And cleanse the whole place.”
“Seriously?” I asked. I noticed that for the first time he wasn’t slouching.
“Hell yeah,” he said. He checked his watch. “And speaking of which, I gotta go and track down that bastard. If I get him, I’ll send you a bill.”
I was curious. “How are you planning to find him?”
Groat smiled, revealing what was left of his teeth. “Gotta out-think a roach if you want to win. The nice thing about Las Vegas is that it’s got a lot of damn stupid stores for very rich people. I went into that fake spy store and bought a wireless camera. Fiber something. Put it on his van, and I got a monitor in my truck. I can see where he is.”
“You’re kidding?” I asked. I wouldn’t have expected it of him.
“Nope. Be smarter than the prey, that’s the secret to being a good exterminator. I should be able to find him now, or at least where he parked.”
I had made up my mind without ever realizing it. Screw brooding over the past. I stood up. “I’m coming with you.”
I expected him to protest, to make a token objection before accepting my invaluable help. Or maybe I expected him to outright refuse and that we’d fight about it before I stowed away in the back of his car. Not so much. Instead, he looked at my breasts.
“Sure. You got any hotter clothing you can wear, though? I gotta look at you, you might as well be scenic.”
“You’re a real prince, Mickey.” I disappeared to go throw on jeans, a baseball hat and a very concealing normal shirt. I grabbed work gloves as well. I’d help kill them, but I didn’t want to be touching any roaches.
* * *
Just under an hour later we were on the road, Mickey Groat stroking his slightly acid-burned hair and driving while I called out what I saw in the small color monitor. The view from the pinhole camera was so wide-angle that it was difficult to read. “He’s on the strip,” I reported. “
Driving past New York New York right now, and heading down past the other casinos.” We drove slowly but dangerously, Groat honking for other drivers to get out of his way even as he swerved lanes. The inside of the station wagon smelled like unwashed body and bug spray. Revolting.
I tried not to realize that I couldn’t ever remember feeling more alive.
We made our way past the tourist areas. We finally pulled up down the street from the Brody Bug Removal, just outside a half-built casino on the outskirts of the city. The Pacific Islander Resort Hotel and Casino had planned to be huge, but they ran out of financial backers not long after they got started. Now it was just a rude framework of rusting girders that thrust up out of the desert soil. We were near a few support buildings, including a good-sized machine shop that had been built first to support the defunct casino. Groat and I got out of the car.
“How are we going to handle this?” I asked. “What should I expect?”
“Weeeell,” he mused, “they won’t try to kill us. Instead, they’re probably gonna try to burrow up inside us and husk us out. So try not to let ‘em do that.” My knees turned to water, but Groat didn’t seem upset in the least. As far as he was concerned this was just another day of work. “I got me a few tricks up my sleeves, so let’s do some set-up. Then we walk right in and kill any bugs we can find.” He paused. “If we’re using poison and they’re using pheromones, you may find this useful.” He handed me a breathing filter.
When we were finally ready to enter I figured he’s kick in the office door, like a cop or a secret agent. Instead he just turned the handle. It was unlocked. We stepped into hot dimness. No air conditioning here. No power, either. The smell was dry and awful. I thought I could hear high-pitched clattering just at the edge of my hearing.
“Hello?” I asked tentatively. “Anybody?” I looked around the drab little reception area, chemical sprayer raised. There was no one, but I saw signs that people had been here very recently. Groat moved around the outside of the room, looking for living bugs and living people.
He pushed open a door and snorted. I came to see. There was a man lying unconscious in the small bathroom. He had actually ripped the flimsy plumbing out of the wall when he fell over. His pants were around his ankles. I nudged him with my foot.
It was Mr. Blatti.
“Is he dead?” I asked in revulsion. “What happened to him?”
“Not dead, but dying. He’s been husked out by the roaches,” said Groat. He extended one grubby hand and pushed the once-handsome man off the toilet. He fell bonelessly. With his clothes in disarray, it was easy to see that his backside was a mass of red welts up and down the spine. Burrow holes made by insects? He was breathing, but without the roaches to give him animus he wouldn’t be for very long. I couldn’t see how I had ever found him attractive. Pheromones, indeed.
I moved backwards, breathing deeply and trying not to retch into my air filter. I had been doing entirely too much of that recently. “Wonder where they all went?” Groat said amiably, as he wandered towards the other office door.
“Downstairs,” said a familiar voice, and the door swung open on a sea of roaches. The bugs were literally pushing the door ajar. Once they succeeded they all scuttled back into the shadows of the medium sized office. I could hear their feet moving on the tile. “Hello, Shelly. We think we remember you.”
It was Brian.
“Remember us? We found him today, Shelly. After you spurned us. It’s easy to find things in this city by smell. So when we suspected you might come after us with your exterminator, we thought someone who had mated with should tell you not to.” Brian’s voice was tinged by a horrible buzzing. He had gained some weight, I saw. That cocktail waitress hadn’t been good for him. “Perhaps you still wish to have congress with this human? If so, we advise you to exit now and leave the Brood in peace, and you may do so.”
“He’s already dead, isn’t he?” I asked Groat. The Brood answered instead, through Brian’s familiar voice.
“He maintains the semblance of life. We have more husks than we have fully trained drivers, so we need not pilot him if you prefer him for yourself.” He got up. His mouth sagged open, and I could see the brown squirming of a thousand bugs filling his airway. He cracked his knuckles, a very Brian thing to do. My heart broke.
“Kill it,” I whispered.
“Glad to,” said Groat, and he opened up with his flame thrower.
The flames filled the air with heavy black smoke, the sound of roaches popping in the sudden heat reminding me of microwave popcorn. I had a chemical sprayer and was pumping clouds of toxin towards Brian’s body. His skin was burned, sure, but he was still moving; all the roaches inside him were probably protected from the heat by his skin. He grabbed the blotter off the desk and thrust it shield-like at Groat. The flame hit it and bounced backwards, catching Groat in the face for just a brief second until Groat could remove his finger from the trigger. “God DAMN it!” my exterminator wailed, staggering backwards with his hair partially on fire. A thousand tiny compound eyes watched him fall as the roaches began to emerge from Brian’s husk. The body sagged slightly, like a balloon leaking air, but then it straightened and turned towards me. “Shelly,” it crooned in a buzzing voice, “I think I’ll like to ride your body next.”
I didn’t think. I just shoved the end of my sprayer nozzle into his mouth and started pumping.
The results were horrible. The body had taken an involuntary breath of air as I started to pump, and his skin started to ripple as the poison hit the roaches inside. I kept pumping. Welts began to appear in his skin as the roaches tried to escape their sudden toxic prison. I kept pumping.
It didn’t look anything like Brian any more by the time I was done. A few surviving roaches abandoned ship and streamed away into the hall. Thousands more were killed. The corpse lay on the tile, lumpy and twitching. I turned back to Groat.
“This is not my day!” Groat said, pissed beyond belief. He had gotten the fire out with no more than first degree burns, maybe second, but all his facial hair
and most of his haircut were burned away. What was left was an ugly patchwork of untanned skin and frizzy hair stubble. How a man who looked like he did could have so much vanity I’ll never know. He ran his hand over his head. “You know how long I’ve had this haircut for?”
“Fifteen years?”
“Fifteen years.” He looked surprised that I could guess.
“Well, shaved heads are in.” I was still panting through my respirator mask. “We need to finish this.” We followed the fleeing roaches down a set of stairs and into the metal shop. Dried, husked-out bodies of humans lay everywhere; it seemed that when they dropped they were immediately eaten or used as nests. The floor in front of us was clear at first. Then slowly roaches scuttled in behind us. Twenty feet into the huge room I looked behind me, and realized that we were completely surrounded by a skittering sea of bugs. The way opened up in front of us, making a path.
“Not yet,” whispered Groat, seeing me start to panic. “We want the center.”
“I think it’s steering us,” I whispered back. I had the chemical sprayer clutched tightly in both hands.
“Good,” he said, and we both walked. The beetles settled in a moving circle around us, seething and squirming over one another. The chittering from the bugs was what I remember the most. Then we turned a corner and
saw their king.
The bugs had clearly been using their husked humans with a purpose. They had been building. The statue in front of us seemed to be a bronze man eight feet tall, but that illusion faded once you looked at him closely. Every inch of his frame was made from a metal insect. I couldn’t tell whether they were real insects dipped in bronze and soldered on, or whether they were cunningly crafted directly onto the statue. Either way the results were breath-taking.
“Humans.” The voice arose from the buzzing wings of thousands of roaches around us, not from any human vocal cords.
“I’ve sealed yer death,” said Groat calmly. “I got me a whole mess of poison gas bombs hidden in the ventilation system. A mixture of Talstar Concentrate and Niban G. I press a button, and every single one goes off at once. You’ll never get a roach out alive.”
“You mean these bombs?” The buzzing rippled around us. Then eight toxic gas grenades were carried into the room on the backs of roaches, circled us once, and were carried out.
“Huh. Yeah?” said Groat. He had been pumping the button. Nothing had happened.
The voice vibrated the air. I could actually feel it on my skin. “They have been disabled. You have to out-think a human if you wish to win in this town.” The clear circle around us closed slightly as the bugs leaned inwards. Groat actually laughed.
“Point taken. This the point where I try to take you with me?”
I interrupted, my heart hammering. This was leading nowhere good. “First,” I said, “that is gorgeous armor. Is it protection?”
The roaches rustled their wings. “You must take the semblance of man if you wish to seize the rights of man.”
“The rights?” I blinked. “You want the rights of humanity? What, are you stupid?” The roaches rustled, and I continued. “I’ve been doing a lot of brooding over the last six months. I’ve thought about life, and death, and what it means to be worthwhile. And let me tell you, you don’t want it. Right now you achieve. You grow. You learn. Humans try to as well, sure. But if you try to ape humanity, or…” I lost my train of thought for a minute. “Sorry, ape is a bad word. If you try to mimic humanity, you’ll attract nothing but hatred and fear. People who would otherwise never know you existed will try to destroy you and your home. You will gain nothing, and maybe lose everything. But now? Separate from humans? You live in millions of human homes with no one knowing it. You’ve been around something like 1500 times longer than mankind has. You’ll be around when we’re gone. So please learn from us, sure, but don’t try to take from us. That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Groat was staring at me. The metal king gazed expressionlessly as well, but I knew that all the cockroaches had heard what I’d said. I wasn’t sure if I was dooming humanity or saving them. It was all I could think of to do.
“And do you want jobs? You don’t want jobs. We have all these human constructs that have distracted us. Please, go back to your island and focus on that which makes you better, not that which makes you more like humans. Learn philosophy. Improve your race. Trust me, you’ll be doing yourself a favor.”
I went on like that for minutes, not sure when or how to stop. Groat clearly couldn’t believe that I was trying to talk sense into something as alien as a roach. But I figured I might have a chance. Certainly it was a better chance than trying to fight. After I finished, the cockroaches inside the metal armor sent up a vast hum, and all the roaches around us echoed and amplified the call. It was loud enough to hurt. I had the feeling that something was being decided, but neither of us could know what. Finally, the roaches abruptly fell silent.
“We will withdraw and consider,” a low buzzing said. “Perhaps you have wisdom. But we will take the predator with us.” They were on Groat before either of us could do anything. He never had a chance to trigger the flame thrower. My chemical sprayer was out of poison from the previous attack by Brian. They just swarmed him, and I couldn’t get there without getting swarmed myself. I didn’t stop screaming until a long, long time after Groat had already fallen silent and been carried away.
* * *
They let me go and fell back into the shadows, and I went back to my life. The building was empty when I sent the police there on some wild, fabricated story. My house has been clean of roaches ever since. It’s been years. I managed to convince myself that this never happened. Until now.
I’ve been seeing cockroaches in my house all day.
I think they want me for something. I don’t know if I’ll be able to run far enough; roaches live on every single continent, I’m told. I’m trying to mimic Groat and show no fear, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me. Do I want to know?
I hear clattering wings in the next room. It doesn’t matter what I want. I think I’m about to find out. Wish me luck.