The Uninvited (2 page)

 

You ever seen anything like this?” the farmer asked his good friend and neighbor. “I haven't.” He held a dead bug in his hand. The bug stretched from wrist to fingertips.

His friend shook his head. “Nope. Can't say as I have. Can't say as I ever want to see another one. That's a mean-lookin' sucker, I'll tell you that. What the hell is that thing?”

“I was hopin' you could tell me. Like to have scared the pee outta my wife this morning. She found it in the kitchen and stomped on it.” He grinned. “And don't make any smart cracks about my wife's weight.”

“I never once thought about it,” the man chuckled. His friend's wife was indeed ample. “Was there more than one of them things?”

“Nope. And I hope I don't see another one. Sally damn near gave me a heart attack with all that whoopin' and hollerin' this morning. Her jumpin' around shook the whole house.” He dropped the bug on the ground. “How's your crop comin' along?”

“Beautiful. Just beautiful. I've never seen beans this high this early. I got a hunch this is gonna be a year we'll all remember.”

 

 

I worry about you, Billy,” his wife said.
You've been working long hours of late—too many hours. You need to slow down. You're not a youngster anymore, you hear?”

“I hear, but it just can't be helped, honey. When I get a call to spray a house, I gotta go.” He buttered a hot biscuit and looked at the jars of home-canned preserves and jellies on the kitchen table. He selected blackberry and spread a spoonful on the biscuit. “I tell you this. I have
never
seen so many spooky housewives in my life. They got me and that other old boy jumpin' crazy tryin' to keep up with all the calls to spray.”

“What is it this time?” she asked.
Fire ants getting in the houses?”

“No,” he shook his head. “That's the funny part. It's something else, but I can't find it—never seen it. Whatever it is.”

The woman stood up from the table and put her hands on her hips. “Billy, that doesn't make any sense. If you don't know what it is—if you've never seen it—how can you spray for it?”

He buttered another biscuit and frowned as his wife moved the jellies and jams and the plate of biscuits off the table, out of his reach. She'd been cautioning him lately—bitching was a better word—about his weight. “I just been mixin' the standard chemicals for sprayin' houses. Must be workin'. No one's called to complain about it.”

Come to think of it, he silently pondered, that bug man up in Barnwell told me yesterday folks been disappearing. What's that got to do with bugs? he asked himself.

His wife's voice brought him back to the present. She softened her stern gaze and smiled at her husband of thirty years, “You just be careful you wash up good and leave your boots in the workshop. I sure don't want any funny bugs in this house.” She laughed. “That wouldn't be very good for business, would it?”

He returned her smile and then put down his half-eaten biscuit, his expression serious.

“What's wrong, Billy?”

I did see something up under the Garrett house day before yesterday. I think I did. Just caught a glimpse of it. But damned if I can tell you what it was.”

“What do you mean, Billy?”

“I just never saw anything like it before in my life. That's what I mean. I saw it for just a second—part of a second—but God! it was ugly. And something else, too: it was mean-lookin'.”

“What did it look like?”

Billy started to tell her, then changed his mind. No point in getting into a big discussion about something he wasn't even sure he'd seen, much less knew what the hell it was. He might even get her all worked up and she'd worry. But, Billy frowned, biting at his lip, he was certain he'd seen that thing, and he was sure he had never seen anything like it before. And he also knew, from years of past extermination experience, if there was one bug, there was sure to be others. And not just a few, either; nature didn't work that way. He inwardly shuddered at just the thought of thousands, millions of ... them!

He rose from the table, aware of a tightening in his belly. He had eaten too much-again. But the tightness in his belly, he knew, was not only from too much food. It also resulted from something he had never before experienced in this business: fear.

“Gotta go,” he said.

She kissed him. “You take it easy, Billy,” she said gently. “I'll see you later.”

He returned the kiss, with more ardor than usual. His wife flushed from the sudden passion in him and pushed him away.

“Billy! It's seven o'clock in the morning. What's got in to you? Get away now, you hear?” But she was smiling and felt like giggling.

He patted his wife on the rump and she did giggle, watching him leave, the back door slamming. She would see him again, but he would be drastically changed; it would not really be the Billy she had kissed goodbye, and she would never have to fuss at him again for eating too much.

 

 

With the warm sun beating down on the land, instinct told the creatures it was time to move, to march. If they were to survive, they must find food. So from under logs and rocks and rotted places, out of old barns, tumble-down shacks and old storage areas, and from under the floors, in the walls, and out of attics they crawled, millions of them.

Almost all had survived the nesting period after the short gestation time that spring. Not that the coolness would have bothered them even had they been normal creatures. These creatures were practically indestructible, immune to the elements. But the chemical Nandy had touched the eggs, producing mutants tougher than their ancestors, stronger, much bigger, more aggressive.

For several weeks now, they had fed on their smaller cousins, and were content with that food. But now their cousins were all gone. The mutants were growing larger, and they had developed a voracious appetite.

Their metabolism had been altered due to the chemical
N-A-N-1-D
, altered drastically, their senses sharpened to a fineness never before experienced in their species—almost a thought process. They became as one, like the much-feared army ants of South and Central America, where for years telegraph poles had to be made of iron, to keep the ants from eating them. The mutants split into armies of thousands, with leaders and soldiers and scouts, with a central point they marched from and returned to.

None of the pesticides known to man would affect them for long—could kill them. They might halt them temporarily, forcing them to regroup and wait until their bodies could produce the chemicals necessary to combat the insecticides they encountered along the way. And because they were so large, and their metabolism altered so drastically, they could produce that resistant in a matter of minutes.

Man had finally done it, had finally stepped over the line and produced, as scientists had warned for years he would, a super-strain of insect.

The leaders sent out the scouts, and the scouts sent back the message: food is near. The leaders began clicking their jaws, producing a tiny sound, and soon others did the same, thousands of jaws working in unison, signaling the march had begun.

Through eyes that could look in all directions at once, the scouts observed two men talking by the side of the Parish road, near the open doors of a pickup. The men leaned against the hood, smoking and talking.

The creatures moved closer, through the bean field. The jaw-clicking increased.

“What the hell is that noise?” one farmer asked.

“I don't know. Seems like it's comin' from out there in the field. Weird! Come on, let's go take a look.”

The men walked across the ditch, up the far side, then climbed the fence, stepping into the bean field, lush with unexpected growth. The clicking grew louder as they walked deeper into the field. Then, as if on signal, the clicking stopped. The silence grew heavy around the men, almost tangible.

“Now, what the hell?”

“I don't know,” his friend replied, his voice little more than a whisper. Just the faintest touch of fear crawled up his spine, moving around to tickle his belly with cold fingers. He tried to shrug off the sensation, thinking: I'm a grown man, and there isn't a damn thing out here in this bean field for me to be afraid of. But he shuddered involuntarily, the fear not quite releasing him. His friend caught the gesture.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing!” the answer was short.
Yeah,” he admitted. “That sound. I never heard anything like it before. You?”