it was coming from, only that it was there and it was growing more insistent by the moment. I looked around. The couch. The desk. A few leather chairs. The radiator. A potted plant long since wilted. File cabinets. A walk-in closet, door closed. A few stray chairs pushed up to the desk.
“I’m not liking that,” Texas Slim said.
Carl and I started looking around with our flashlights. At first we thought it was coming from the walls. But that wasn’t it. I walked around the desk, shining my light around. My beam fell on the clean air vent in the floor. It gleamed off two bulging red eyes.
I shrieked and stumbled back.
A bloodsucker came up out of the vent and circled the room lazily like a moth around a streetlight. It was in no hurry. Texas and Janie ducked, crying out. Carl made ready to put a round in it with his carbine. I grabbed up the wastebasket and tried to swat it. The glow of the candles and flickering lantern light cast a mammoth, leggy shadow of the thing against the wall. It flew like a wasp you see in slow mo on one of those nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel: back hunched, legs dangling beneath, just drifting around.
Carl jumped at it, swung his carbine like a bat and struck it. It bounced off the wall, slid across the desk and landed on the floor about three inches from my boot. I instinctively stomped on it and then almost wished I hadn’t: the sound of its exoskeleton crunching beneath my boot made me shiver. It made a pained trilling sound right before my weight smashed it to paste.
“Oh God,” Janie said.
That cloying stench of hot, seething honey was getting stronger in the room and it wasn’t from what I was wiping off my boot onto the area rug under the desk. Because that scratching came again, only there was more of it. They were coming from the clean air vent.
I saw two of them flying around, bumping into the ceiling. Another settled onto a lampshade and Carl swore, brought up his carbine, and fired. He split it into two sections that skittered about on the floor for a moment or two before going still.
“No guns!” I said, looking over at the black, breathing mass covering the windows. “You break that window, we’re fucked.”
Texas and Janie were clinging tighter than ever. Texas had a throw pillow in one hand and was wildly swatting with it. It was probably the most ridiculous, effeminate defense I’d ever seen.
Carl was chasing the other bugs around. They flew in directionless spirals, bumping the walls, one of them knocking a vase off the desk that shattered on the floor. He knocked one down and smashed it with his boot and I cold-cocked the other with the wastebasket and it nose-dived to the floor. Its wing was damaged only it was too stupid to realize it and kept propelling itself in a buzzing circle on the floor. I killed it with the wastebasket.
But by then there were others.
One of them dove right at Janie and she punched it, knocking it aside and I stomped it. Texas beat another down with his pillow and crushed it under his boot. The sound of it smashing made him wince, say, “Oh Lord.”
One of them dove at my head and I swatted it away with the can. Two others went at Carl, one of them attached itself to his fist as he made to punch it and another latched onto the back of his arm. He smashed the one on his fist by punching the wall, but the other got a good grip and its proboscis suckered to his skin. He let out a wild cry and I took hold of him. I reached out and grabbed the bug in my fist. It was hot and greasy under my fingers, its body pulsating rapidly like the beat of a newborn’s heart. I squeezed it with everything I had. Its wings crackled like dry cellophane and its bony skeleton crunched like an egg shell, brown goo squirting between my fingers. With a swell of nausea in my belly, I yanked it free, the proboscis refusing to let go. As I pulled the mangled body free, the proboscis stretched like a rubber band, then the lips came free with popping, smacking sound and a ribbon of Carl’s blood sprayed against my cheek.
I tossed it to the floor.
Texas and Janie were on their feet, swatting the insects down.
“Cover that fucking vent!” Texas shouted.
Which was exactly what I was going to do, but Carl was way ahead of me. No gun? He had a better idea. He grabbed a can of silicone spray from the shelf on the wall, the kind used to lubricate machine parts and make leather upholstery gleam. He got down on his knees before the clean air vent, pressed the button on the can and held his Bic lighter to the spray. A foot long mushrooming tongue of flame shot out. He held it to the vent. He fried one of the bloodsuckers coming through and it curled up, making a shrill e-e-e-e-e-e-e sort of sound as it died. Others tried to come up but he cooked them and drove still more down the vent. When the lattices of the vent were glowing hot, he yanked one of the filing cabinets over it, sealing it shut.
As he did that, the rest of us killed bugs.
There were about a dozen of them. We smashed and stomped and hit them. One got tangled in Janie’s hair and Texas almost cold-cocked her when he hit it, knocking it free. One got on the back of my neck and I screamed. I tried to pull it off but I couldn’t get a grip on it. I felt those rubbery pulsing lips attach to my flesh. They were warm. There was a sudden piercing like an ice-cold pin.
Then Carl knocked me to the floor and tore the beasty free.
I saw it laying there, smashed, a long needle-like protrusion hanging from the lips. It was wire-thin and probably used to puncture veins and arteries.
The war we fought was horrendous and by the end we had bug guts smeared on our hands and bug blood on our faces and down our arms. But we won. And when we had, we stood there breathing hard, dozens of mangled insects and parts thereof at our feet.
Carl lit a cigarette. “Fuck of a way to fight a war,” he said.
Janie burst out laughing, only this laughter was high-pitched and near hysterical. I understood it: I had the mad desire to do the same. I clutched her to me, that honeyed bug stench so ripe on her my stomach rolled over. Texas kicked bugs into the corner and the rest of us just let the tension run from us.
About the time Carl finished his cigarette, we heard a creaking.
Then a snapping.
And that’s when the window exploded inward.
4
The eruption of glass had not even made it more than a few inches, I bet, before we were in motion. I suppose we were all pumped hard with adrenaline and just ready to jump. Later, I was impressed at how we reacted, how we moved as a single unit: fast, cohesively, and without question.
The window blew in and we moved.
Texas threw open the door to the closet and we piled in…along with four or five bugs which, considering that hundreds had just blown into the room, was not so bad. I was the last one in, shoving Janie before me, and as I slammed the door shut I saw the room fill with insects.
And I do mean fill.
They came in through the shattered window in a droning storm like autumn leaves blown by the wind, an absolute tempest of bloodsuckers that erupted in a single boiling mass of wings and thoraxes and bulbous red eyes, fanning out and inundating the room in their numbers. That’s what I saw in the second or two before I slammed the door shut, smashing three or four between the door and jamb that were trying to follow us in.
It was pretty hairy for a moment after we got in there and the room filled with that ominous cacophony of buzzing. First off, I wasn’t exactly accurate in calling the closet a walk-in closet. It was your basic coat closet with a rod to hang jackets and what not from. About three feet deep, maybe four wide. And all of us in there with rifles. It was like the proverbial sardine can. When you took into account that we were trapped in a confined space with four or five mutant bloodsucking insects, it was not a good thing.
It was pitch black in there, of course.
The only light coming in was from the lantern and candles outside and this filtered through a space at the bottom of the door that was maybe half an inch wide. There was a lot of screaming and shouting as we smashed the intruders. One of them latched itself to Janie’s throat and she went absolutely wild. Carl was the one that finally got it off her. When all was settled and done, dead insects at our feet, we were pretty banged up and bruised. My
