Insecticide, Part III: Invasion

Here on the fields of battle, we have been arming against the bugs in vain. The war is not going well.

We stocked up on Citronella torches and candles for defenses and all manner of bug spray for offensive purposes. We armored ourselves with repellent. We established a strict buddy system, never wandering off alone. We implemented a curfew.

The bugs have adapted.

We have to constantly try new formulas of repellent because the bugs are like the Borg in that they become immune after taking a few hits. And every generation gets stronger and more resilient.

And their schedule has moved up. I don’t know if we forced their hand of if we’ve simply played into theirs, but the invasion has begun.

”It was just before dawn… they came out of nowhere…”

They got him. The guy who came over to mow the lawn… gone. I saw it myself. Swarms of bees and wasps engulfed him, bulbwalkers deploying ants to carry him off, thrashing and screaming a Wilhelm. It was horrifying.

The female roommate’s boyfriend and I set up a citronella perimeter and waited outside the workshed-greenhouse, armed to the teeth with different kinds of spray, including supersoakers filled with citronella oil. We waited the afternoon out, ever vigilant for the next attack. We thought we had the wasps, at least, pinned down. It seemed like a Mexican standoff… and that’s when the UPS guy showed up.

We shouted for him to go for cover, but he must have figured we were playing a game with our water guns. That’s when the hybrid waspees emerged, right when our focus and group cohesion were broken. I tossed a bug spray can to the UPS guy and he reflexively caught it, confused. I pointed behind him and he turned around just in time to see a cloud of wrath nearly upon him.

They went straight for his legs, unprotected by the uniform brown shorts of UPS. He fought back and we laid down suppressive fire, driving back most of the warrior bugs, but he was still outmatched.

The horde of wasps we’d been pinning down seized the opportunity to evacuate their compromised lairs. The sky was specked with bugs going every which way.

I ran out to drag the UPS guy back to safety, but there was no safety by that point. The three of us had to fall back or we were going to be overrun by the bug army. We headed indoors, but we knew the house was infested. Better to fight the jumproaches and moths than to be overrun by flying enemies, we decided.

The others were inside, patrolling. We had strength in numbers if we could just stick together. There were ten of us total, some residents and some visitors who had arrived at the wrong time and couldn’t leave. This wasn’t the only house being invaded. The whole neighborhood—probably even the whole geographic region—had simultaneous bug attacks going on. Damn the Texas summers.

We came inside just in time to see a team take down a giant moth in the living room. Those suckers had been increasing in size. I said that in an earlier post, but that was an understatement: the moths were now the size of Frisbees and getting larger with every passing day, it seemed.

Several of my compatriots by now sported battle damage in the form of giant moth-eaten holes in their clothing. Despite the August heat, some of them had taken to wearing leather jackets, but even that level of armor was no good against the moths’ debilitating devouring ability.

The bugs were organized. They had a real synergy across species, giving them strategic superiority over us. We knew we were going to have to diversify our functions and tactics as well, if we were going to prevail.

The UPS guy, Steve, wasn’t badly injured. He told us about bug encounters on the far side of his route, saying he had no idea they were in full invasion already. Apparently our house was truly the front line. That implied that we had a launch point to the source of the bug invasion… if only we could find it.

Steve made eleven of us. It was time to regroup, rearm, and stage a counteroffensive.

For the next few hours, we took shifts napping and patrolling the house for infiltrators. So far, we had relative safety indoors, but that wouldn’t last. We had to do something.

While we were strategizing, the bugs let loose a new terror. We’ve dubbed them hookwings. I’m telling you, there are some weird bugs in Texas, and I’m finding new weird stuff here all the time! These things are like crickets only with nasty hooked appendages. I’m guessing they serve multiple purposes: combat, sabotage, and construction. They can even deliver a payload of other bugs by carrying things with their hooks, even carrying bulbwalkers.

What was behind all of this? Seriously. Too many bugs in Austin. In Missouri, the weirdest things you’d see are cicadas, praying mantises, and centipedes.

Anyway, we quickly took down the two hookwings that had somehow entered the living room, and we immediately took to dissecting and studying it.

Meanwhile, I led a team of redshirts and the UPS guy out to the backyard, to that tiny mosquito haven I told you about, to nuke the water with chemical bombs. It was time to hit them where it hurt—what surely had to have been the hub of tiny mosquito eggs.

The swarms were wise to our advance. They redirected their flights to flank us while CGI ants surrounded us, but we had the big guns and enough manpower to hold the line. It was a massacre, and we cranked up the Basil Poledouris to boost our morale as we laid waste to wave after wave of enemies. It was glorious under the waning dusk light.

A few moths made off with one of the redshirts. I couldn’t remember his name. Hey, that’s what redshirts are for. Just as his flailing legs went out of sight in a thicket of tree branches, his cries of agony were abruptly silenced, followed immediately by a bucket-load of blood spraying all of us.

We were doing serious damage, but our ammo wouldn’t last. A pile of empty bug spray cans was growing in the center of our circle of defense. We had nearly made our way to the egg hub and were ready to strike, but the question was, would we have enough cover fire to make it back to the relative safety of the house?

The Basil Poledouris music ran out just as we began dropping chemical bombs into the water, the absence of film score providing a stark sense of gravitas to our dark deeds. Even our own chatter had ceased, and the only sounds were those of countless bugs of every type trying to stop us.

And then the water began to roil around as though the elements themselves were furious at our destructive efforts. From the dark water in this concrete structure emerged two giant pincers, each the size of a man.

The pincers snagged a redshirt and cleaved him in two.

“Fall back!” the UPS guy shouted. We all retreated just as the rest of this giant bug emerged.

The game had just been changed. Until that point, the largest bugs had been the size of basset hounds, but now we were dealing with something terrible.

The mammoth was part beetle, part ant, part grim reaper. Each of its six serrated legs stood like a pillar of obsidian and steel, jointed and jagged like the retractable arm blade thingies from Predator. It was easily ten feet at the shoulders, a massive, cruel head like a tyrannosaur with pincers mounted above the armored abdomen, with eyes of pitiless black discs sizing each one of us up.

And it was pissed.

The other bugs suddenly thinned out, giving us a wide berth, either to watch with collective glee as we got squashed like… well, like bugs… or to stay out of the mammoth bug’s way for fear of being casualties of friendly fire.

None of us had signed on for a boss fight. Not one of this caliber, anyway. I didn’t have a magic Zeus sword or a Pegasus to help me out, either. So it was just us against it.

See, that’s the thing. If you proudly declare that you’re going to “do this as a man,” without the help of the gods, then why do you freely accept the use of a magic Zeus sword and a Pegasus? And don’t even get me started about how much Percy Jackson sucked.

Anyway, so I’m no Sam Worthington. I have three disadvantages when stacked up to him: I’m less agile, less muscular, and less Australian, so I knew I didn’t stand a chance in a one-on-one match against a giant bug. But I also knew that the UPS guy, Steve, had been proving himself more and more the much-needed Michael Ironside of this war effort.

And we know what that means. Not only is he a badass, but he can die heroically as the rest of us retreat. He had a lot more stage presence than the redshirts (he even had a name, after all!), so he made a fitting sacrifice to aid our escape—not too tragic, but not too apathetic of a casualty. The kind of cool death scene where you feel bad for the guy but are grateful it didn’t happen to someone else, because you kind of saw it coming with the casting. Michael Ironside never lives in his movies, you know that.

”Come on, you apes! You want to live forever?”

As the mammoth bug chomped away at Steve’s legs, he let loose a steady stream of fire right into the mammoth’s face. His death throes echoed across the woods, following us back up to our makeshift fortress of protection. Finally, he set of a grenade, sacrificing himself completely.

Poor Steve. At least I think that was his name…

Well anyway, I’m back in the house and I’m online blogging about it all. I’d say today was a bad day, overall. The body count is rising. If you’re ever in a situation like this, introduce yourself to everyone! Seriously, you don’t want to be a redshirt. If you bond with all the characters, you might even be considered a main character and won’t die. That’s the best advice I can give you at this juncture: have a strong presence. Be likeable, but not too likeable, because you don’t want to be a comic-relief sidekick who might get killed off for the sake of tragedy. That’s my advice. That, and go buy the score to Starship Troopers if you don’t already have it, because you’ll need it. Trust me.

So the bugs are getting bigger. Huger. Ginormous… er.

It looks like we are cornered now. Sliding glass doors maybe weren’t the best idea. We should have holed up in a different house, but we didn’t know any better. So, right now, the others are debating what to do, but I can tell you it looks like we’re probably going to forfeit the house and head for a more sterile environment and hole up there. This house has too many leaks, too many entry points for bugs.

Oh, they’ve just decided. We’re going to prepare a desperate transport for a more secure location where we can set up a perimeter with lots of supplies. I hope they have Internet there. Uh-oh, I gotta go. I’ll keep you informed.

Godspeed, fellow bughunters, and stay sharp.