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,
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.
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
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
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
