Images pulsed through his mind as well: sunbaked vistas, hazy pyramids in the distance; an expanse of outer space, colorful galaxies flowing like cotton candy in black ether; a broken army of strange, stalk-like savages, swarming to escape a ravaging enemy attacking from above and beneath; bizarre cities razed to the ground, planets reshaped, civilizations destroyed by an army with countless numbers…
The whispers and images quickened, faster and faster, driving into his head, erupting like a supernova in his mind’s eye.
The frantic, overwhelming invading thoughts were hurting. His sleeping body began to shake, blood spat from his nose as he groaned and coughed. In the half dream-state (if it was a dream at all), his head felt like it was swelling, his brain bursting apart, bubbling with the acid of alien thoughts, visions of unknown worlds no human mind could comprehend. He winced and barked broken denials, as if in a nightmare… fighting the whispers, the voices, now wanting them out of his head… Stop! he screamed in his mind. Please, he begged, afraid, please get out… it hurts… you’re hurting me… you’re HURTING ME! GOD DAMN YOU I SAID STOP!
With a jerk he woke, raised his head from the cold surface of the laboratory counter on which he’d been dozing with a gasp. His temples pounded viciously, a migraine behind his eyes so sharp and painful that the room wouldn’t come into focus. His stomach flipped and gurgled as if filled with acid, its meager contents wanting, quite badly, to rush up and out. He lurched drunkenly off the stool. His legs immediately buckled and he fell hard, cracking his forehead on the concrete. A stack of notebooks and papers filled with notes, sketches and data collapsed on top of him, scattered across the floor. He moaned, rubbed the butt of one hand into an eye that felt like it might very well explode.
I need a drink, he thought, and then, more rationally, and some fucking food.
Alfie wasn’t sure the last time he’d eaten anything of real substance… didn’t think he’d eaten anything at all for days, other than the dregs of a giant bag of greasy chips, whatever beer had remained in his fridge and a couple granola bars he’d dug out of a dusty backpack he’d found tossed into a corner, remains of a former expedition.
He slowly, carefully, got to his feet, one hand resting on the lip of the counter, and let the room sway a moment, then, after a few deep breaths, steady. He wiped a line of drool dangling from his lip, scratched at the week’s growth of beard growing like unruly moss just below. Jesus, he thought, I’m a mess. I’ve got to…
Then he heard it.
He froze, listening, holding his breath. He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, heard only the beating of his heart throbbing in his ears, the sealed room devoid of all other noise… except for… and there it was…
Scratching.
He looked at the aquariums, eyes wild.
While he’d slept most of the larvae had transformed, entered the pupa stage. He was shocked. What should have taken weeks, or months even, had happened in mere days.
But even so… regardless with the speed with which they were developing, they certainly shouldn’t be moving, and they most certainly shouldn’t be digging!
Alfie moved closer to one of the aquariums, saw that the pupae had, miraculously, burrowed deep into the six or so inches of earth, and a few of them were now pushed against the glass, as if trying to continue their path, to go deeper, as was their nature in the adult stage (or at least the nature of their earth sister, the beetle), in order to build a wider, broader nest.
And now pupae were trying to dig through the damned glass. Their undeveloped legs protruded like jagged broken matchsticks from their thick, jelly-like bodies, claws tenaciously flicking blindly against the aquarium sides. To Alfie’s relief, the glass was holding.
For now.
The pupae themselves were unlike any he’d ever seen or studied. Each was easily the size of a baby’s fist, and had a deep, golden hue pulsing beneath their slick mucilaginous surface. Other than the size, however, they didn’t seem to be all that irregular from the earth pupa of a beetle. What was strange was the strength and vitality of the aliens. A normal beetle – an Earthen beetle – in the pupa stage would be completely stagnant, essentially developing within a chrysalis, awaiting their transformation to full imago before shedding the pupa layer and emerging. But these were active workers. Diggers. The pupae appeared as nothing more than a fat lump of worm with a shining bronze head, complete with new antennae; while the tarsus and claws were emerged, working frantically, the femurs were still hidden beneath the wet golden shell.
As he looked more closely at the undercarriage of one particularly tenacious creature, Alfie could actually see thin scratched lines in the glass where the pupa’s claws had grooved the interior surface, as if their claws were made from rock, or diamonds.
The sound of the hard, scratching limbs on glass filled the lab. Combined with his headache, and the nasty dream he’d had, Alfie was suddenly overwhelmed. His heart raced, his breath came in gulps, black spots crowded the corners of his vision. He felt suddenly panicked, perhaps even a little frightened. He staggered for the stairs, wanting suddenly free of the lab, of the strange creatures growing there, of that incessant sound.
Once upstairs he went to the kitchen, all but lunged for the refrigerator. He was out of beer but there was a half-filled bottle of orange juice, a somewhat pruned apple, and an unopened packet of cheese slices. He ripped the top off the orange juice and gulped it down, nearly vanquishing the remains in one breath. It wasn’t until he lowered it and breathed in deeply that the sharp tang of spoil hit his taste buds. His stomach lurched and gurgled loudly enough to reverberate in the small kitchen. He picked up the apple, prepared to eat it, but thought he may need it for the bugs, so he stuffed it into his pocket and instead unwrapped three or four slices of American cheese and stuffed them into his mouth, the processed dairy turning to mush as he chomped and swallowed it in a dry lump; it sank into his stomach like a ball of grease, slowly digesting in the rancid juice and percolating stomach acid.
He dropped the plastic juice jug to the linoleum, where it clanked, fell over and sloshed out part of its remains onto the floor. He lurched to the bathroom, hoping he wouldn’t have to throw it all up, but needing to pee and brush his teeth. His mouth was dry, pasty and sour.
He used the toilet and turned on the faucet to scrub his hands. When he looked into the medicine cabinet’s mirror and saw himself, he nearly gasped in shock; there was a brief moment where he, quite literally, did not recognize his own face. His hair was mussed and plastered oddly in places, clumped wildly in others. Facial hair covered his mouth and cheeks and chin in a hazardous tangle; patches of crust and particles of meals long-past clung to the beard like the last survivors of a sinking ship. His eyes were bloodshot, and worse. One eyeball had ruptured a vessel, flooding the sclera with red, giving the right side of his face a monstrous look.
“Damn it,” he said, and splashed water over his face, his eyes, his beard and hair, sloppily grooming himself to a relatively respectable level. “Gotta get it together, man,” he told the dripping reflection, and vowed to have a shower and a proper meal before the day was through.
And what day was it, anyway? he thought, then shuddered. He’d lost track of time so completely he had no idea. He hadn’t followed up with the professor; had left his cell phone, the battery certainly dead, somewhere in the lab. He wondered if his associates, his friends, had grown suspicious of his extended absence without communication. Surely, by now, curiosity would have grown to concern, fictitious dying mother or no. Have they come to my door? Have they tried? Have they called the police? He doubted the last. He only had a few friends, and most of them traveled on their own projects, had their own busy schedules.
Just how long had I been down there?
The thought of not knowing panicked him slightly, as did his grizzly, wild appearance. “Screw it,” he said, and decided a break was in order. A shower, a shave, and a trip out of the house to get himself a solid, cooked meal.
The bugs will be here when I get back, he thought, and smiled weakly at his reflection, feeling good – feeling confident – about taking control once more.
He was just about to take off his stinking, sweat-soaked t-shirt, eager to get into the hot spray of a shower, when he heard the muffled sounds of breaking glass.
It came from the lab.
ALFIE TORE DOWN the stairs and pushed through the reinforced door into the lab space beyond. He slammed it behind him, eyes scanning the aquariums, the tables, the floor. He saw that two of the aquariums had shattered. The other four seemed to be holding, but he could still hear that constant, determined scratching. He ran to the aquariums that had broken, saw that heaps of dirt and most of the pupae had spilled out over the table and onto the floor. At first, he went to pick them up, thinking to put the spilled ones into the other aquariums, but as he looked more closely, he noticed that the pupae seemed quite alive and, almost disturbingly so, active. The dozen or so that had dropped to the floor were writhing on the concrete, but not without purpose.
They were still digging.
And, by the looks of it, making progress.
Alfie stared as the frenzied pupae tore at the concrete floor, deep scratches already evident where two or more seemed to be working – somewhat impossibly, Alfie thought – in unison.
Mesmerized, and more than a little curious, Alfie stepped over to the other aquariums, careful not to accidentally step on the pupae, although a part of him wondered if it was to keep from smashing them or from hurting himself. Those claws must be razor sharp.
He picked up the first aquarium, the glass sides vibrating with the efforts of the aliens within scratching for freedom. He tilted it over, let the contents pour down onto the floor. Dirt, roots, and golden, wriggling blobs of the pupae all fell into a giant pile, joining the rest. They too, without hesitation, started attacking the floor with their claws, the tibia on each creature a blur of frenetic motion.
Alfie turned over the remaining aquariums, one-by-one, creating a great pile of dirt and alien bugs on the lab floor. He pushed the mortician tables to the side of the room, clearing as much space as he could for the bugs to work, and for his own observation.
He stacked the empty aquariums against a wall, then backed to the doorway, shower and food forgotten, and slid to the floor, his back against the door, amazed by the power and tenacity of these creatures that had not even yet reached the imago stage of their lives.
He pulled the shriveled apple from his pocket, thought about taking a bite, then tossed it overhand into the pile of dirt.
It was immediately devoured.
4
THE FIRST ADULT spawned three days later.
The Meketaten, as Alfie had come to refer to the scarab-like creatures, for reasons he didn’t wholly understand, had burrowed through the basement floor, the foundation, and into the earth below the house. Alfie hadn’t gone down into the tunneled earth to thoroughly investigate, primarily because he feared the tenacity of the workers (he didn’t want his limbs perceived as an obstruction, to be sawed through the way they had torn through concrete, rock and earth). But he had crawled to the edge of the massive crater in his floor, easily big enough to drive a car through, and flashed an industrial flashlight down into the depths the Meketaten had created.
At first, there didn’t seem to be a bottom, but then he noticed the deep tunnel that they’d dug curved northward, so that he saw only the tunnel’s bend and, not having a powerful enough light to illuminate it, assumed it a bottomless void.
They had gone on to dig multiple tunnels extending outward from Alfie’s property – each wide enough for a human being to walk through, if slightly hunched over – to unknowable lengths. He assumed, based on his early study of insect life, that they had built a nest somewhere down there, deep in the belly of the Earth. As if to prove this theory, it was from one of these tunnels he saw the first adult emerge.
It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
