“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.