Insecticide, Part VI: Extermination

Just after midnight, the assault began.

They poured into the facility like water through a submarine’s breached hull. They flooded the front and back hatches in full force.

But we were ready for them.

Everyone was in position, fully armed and rested. The tunes of General Poledouris kept morale up high as we unloaded our new armament on the bugs.

Alcohol. Who knew?

We took out the weaker bugs with such ease that even the more stoic ones among us couldn’t resist whooping in elation. The bug invasion had taken its toll on our spirits, and this was the first time that we had real reason to have them buoyed.

The stronger bugs weren’t killed outright by the toxins of Beam and Daniels, but they did lose group cohesion. The hive mind broken, each individual bug flailed erratically around like a remote control helicopter with its rear rotor clipped. They smashed into the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and even into each other. Total disarray. Chaos.

Victory seemed imminent.

And then the bigger ones came. The horse-sized abominations entered, paving their own paths through the corpses of their fallen comrades, crunching along the corridors with murderous intent.

I gave the command for a few to lay down suppressive fire while we switched to heavier weapons or reloaded our smaller ones.

Even the bigger ones reacted intensely with cheap tequila being flung at their exoskeletons, burning away. Tequila sucks no matter what species you are.

While the big bug was thrashing around against the burn of Sailor Jerry all over its thorax, I readied a Bacardi bomb and got right up on him. I stuffed it down the thing’s throat and fell back for cover.

After a moment’s pause, the bug froze in its tracks and then began to spasm violently, throwing itself against the wall and fighting off an invisible assailant, its death throes a decrescendo of energy until at last the beast lay still.

”Get on the wire, tell them how to bring those sons of bitches down!”

It would seem that the tide had turned.

After the bugs’ defeat and retreat, many of us celebrated while the rest of us rearmed and fortified the place in the event of a possible feint.

Our moment of levity was interrupted when a pair of scouts came in to report what it was that the Boss Bugs had been looking for a while back. It turns out that one of our ranks had been… infected.

A new parasite had taken hold of him a long time ago, gestating inside his brain until maturing enough to control his actions. The bugs had been called to him, but they failed to find him.

Before we could discuss how to flush out the unwitting traitor, he saved us the trouble by fleeing with a good portion of our ammo. He covered his escape, but he left a trail.

Now we know what to do and where to go. We are mounting an assault on the lair itself, the gateway to which happens to be in the brush right behind the house where I was living before all this went down.

We’re taking this fight to the enemy.