No, that mark on your arm isn’t from a Brown Recluse.
No, you can’t tell a ladybug’s age by counting its spots.
No, you weren’t bitten by a cockroach. Cockroaches almost never bite.
Of course, there were exceptions to every rule. Payton always left these conversations with a satisfied feeling, as if his niche focus of study helped clarify yet another invertebrate myth.
Then the attacks began.
There was no grand moment that spurred them. No recurring town curse or hidden cache of steadily leaking nuclear waste. One day the coastal town of Spoil, Georgia had been its usual self, and the next day, everything changed.
There were hints. Clues that a hideous shift was on the horizon. Boyd was one of the unlucky few who’d seen such a hint. The week before, the color of the sky changed to a shining brown the color of shoe polish. He’d been called in by the local police to provide assistance on a murder. Despite his otherwise milquetoast career as a professor of entomology at the local university, this wasn’t an unusual event.
Spoil wasn’t a huge town, and its police department didn’t have the money or need for a full-time forensic entomologist. Determining time of death based on the life cycle of fly larva was more of a parlor trick to local detectives. But Boyd had offered his assistance on more than one occasion, and it wasn’t long before he was asked to take a look at any decomposing creature the cops found, whether it was a person or suspicious roadkill. Rotting corpses hadn’t become a standard feature on the streets of Spoil.
The day began with the sober tone of a detective asking for Boyd’s opinion on a home invasion in Spanish Creek, a well-heeled neighborhood out near the salt marshes. He was led into the McMansion by a policeman with an ash-colored face. The cop wouldn’t look at anything but the floor. When they entered the nursery, Boyd saw why.
Something had come in the night and turned the crib into a cage of gore and gristle. Unspeakable stains smeared the white carpet beneath. The greasy faces of several dozen cockroaches peered curiously over the linen sheets at Boyd as he approached. More still skittered gently near the silent air conditioning vents. He realized the air in the room was the humid soup of the low country outside.
“They turned off the AC,” an investigator told him, gesturing toward the hordes of roaches gathering in the corners of the room. “They kept getting in.”
Boyd found himself shaking at the sight of the unidentifiable mass in the bassinet. He swatted at the roaches, each the size of a wine cork, and was disturbed to find they wouldn’t scatter from the crib. It was as if they’d claimed the quarry inside, and refused to be intimidated. Beyond their shining bodies, Boyd couldn’t find any evidence of flies or larvae to investigate.
There was nothing left for maggots to feed on.
Boyd didn’t know what to tell the police. By the time he made it to his car, his guts were filled with equal parts acid and pity. Pity for the shattered people inside the house. Acid for him and him alone. He left before he had the chance to see the parents, and no one stopped him. He didn’t want to see their faces. The sickened and confused faces of the police had done enough. He didn’t want to see the ache and torment of the parents in Spanish Creek, who had spent their lives dedicated to buying themselves a tangible level of security that was completely ignored by the forces of nature.
Some 7 days later, Boyd mused, the swarm had begun on the outskirts of town. Denizens of Spanish Creek, and the surrounding golf communities, had overwhelmed the police and animal control with reports of swarms. Hundreds of thousands of glistening roaches lumbered through the air on clumsy wings, clogging exhaust pipes and splattering themselves in suicidal handfuls against windows. The police reported the revolted phone calls, which were a constant for a full hour until they suddenly stopped. Shocked voices over the police radio chatter explained why. The tidy, wealthy communities were silent, gore encrusting their streets like bubble gum scraped from the bottom of a shoe.
Things only got worse.
The perimeter of roaches closed in on Spoil, getting tighter and tighter as confusion turned to chaos and an entire city fell beneath the ruthlessly efficient hunger of the swarm. In days, militias of men and women armed with everything from shotguns to industrial-sized cans of bug spray rose and fell. There was nothing supernatural in how the roaches kept coming. They were bred for this over millions of years --born survivors. Boyd knew he might have been the only person in the city whose fear of the creatures was adulterated with at least a drop of fascination and even respect.
A cockroach could live for a week without its head. Humans? Not so much. He’d seen enough examples of both in the previous week to know for certain how true those facts were. He’d watched police cruisers crumple beneath the weight of the scuttling horde. He’d listened to death rattles interrupted by tiny bodies erupting through flesh and skin. He’d seen the sun blotted out by millions of copper-colored creatures bulldozing their way through the summer sky. Fuel lines burst with the corpses of dead roaches. One by one, the main routes out of the city became flooded with the swarm, completely inaccessible, even if they could be reached somehow.
Boyd knew they had always had the numbers. Something had shifted. Something in the world made the creatures decide their place in the food chain was insufficient. From where Boyd stood, it looked like the fight was over. He was far from the only one who felt that way. If more of the bodies had been left behind, he might have an easier go of guessing how many were dead. The roaches left little behind but the bones, which attracted other creatures from the surrounding marshes to finish the job. The situation was desperate, which is how they’d ended up with Whistle.
He sat in one of the elementary school’s chairs, one designed specifically for children. He was a smaller framed man, but still seemed ridiculously large in its plastic seat. He had one knee crossed casually over the other. He spoke, bent over a chicken wing, muttering and smacking around the bone. No one knew where he’d found it, and though many of the survivors surrounding him in the gymnasium were hungry, nobody asked. No one was sure where Whistle had come from.
“The kids,” he said between bites, “what’s most important is keeping them safe, am I right?”
No one answered.
No one needed to.
Whatever disagreements the people of Spoil had in the past, protecting their children was never in question. Of the 100 survivors crowding the school’s gym, two-thirds of them were children. As people scrambled for shelter, they pushed the kids ahead, in the hope they would find safety before their elders did. Sometimes this worked out. Sometimes it meant the younger ones were the first victims of the swarm.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Boyd thought.
“People come running in times like these,” Whistle said. “They go looking for someone with a solution. Right solution, wrong solution, it doesn’t matter to them, mostly they just want someone to lead.”
Whistle tossed his spent chicken bone across the gym. It whizzed lazily over several people’s heads landing with a muted thump on the polished wood floor. Some of the kids watched it sail and laughed, forgetting for a moment the hell their lives devolved into.
“Well, I’m always happy to lead,” Whistle said, standing to a full height that barely reached many of the children present, “but I don’t work for free.”
If there was anyone with the energy to scold the strange man for thinking about payment at a time like this, no one did. It might have been pure exhaustion and fear that kept everyone quiet. He was right. People didn’t want to lead. Not now. They wanted to be instructed. Even Boyd couldn’t bring himself to do anything and he was in a better position than anyone else in the room to understand the creatures that hunted them. He wanted to help, just like everyone else. He couldn’t begin to guess how to start. Instead, he found himself watching constantly from the sidelines. It might have been the exhaustion that left them mute. Boyd guessed it had more to do with Whistle himself.
Spoil was well-known for its population of odd characters. Bohemians, artists, and general eccentrics flooded the city limits since its founding in the 1700s. They made a name for themselves as local celebrities and added color to the town. Most people liked having them around, but no one had ever seen Whistle before. No one knew where he’d come from. Dressed in scraps of clashing animal print, he would have been hard to miss. Zebra stitched with lion stitched with leopard stitched with snake: the combination was a dull roar against the eyes. His shirt and pants were sewn and stapled together. His small frame floated inside the cloud of baggy fabric. He was otherwise unimpressive otherwise. Without his eccentric clothing, he would have blended in anywhere in the world. Still, he frightened Boyd. His eyes twinkled like glass at the bottom of a sewer pipe nothing but emptiness and trouble deep down.
“How can you help?” asked Bob Chambers, perhaps the only person left who would have felt comfortable in a leadership role. He’d been a local alderman for years before retiring and spending the past few years watching the boats come and go from a historic home built on the harbor. Old, drafty houses like his had been some of the quickest for the roaches to clear out. Though he’d survived admirably for his age, no one asked where his wife was.
“I have abilities that, perhaps, others lack,” Whistle said, bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Specialized skills, to be sure, but useful,” his dark eyes twinkled again, “and I’ll use them.”
The crowd murmured. They’d maybe expected a getaway plan or directions to a safe haven. An actual method of removing the swarms of roaches from Spoil? It seemed impossible.
“How?” asked Boyd, surprising himself with the question.
“Niche skills!” Whistle said, pulling a recorder from the folds of his many-printed shirt. The instrument was made of the same cheap plastic as a child’s recorder. It was yellowed with age. It didn’t look like a tool to save lives. It barely looked like it could squeak out “Hot Crossed Buns.” Whistle blew into the instrument. It didn’t produce any sound.
He cackled.
“What?” Whistle asked when no one reacted. “You’ve never heard of a dog whistle? Well, this is a roach whistle!”
Chambers frowned, not even pretending to understand how this was meant to work.
“And if your plan and your… eh…” the old politician grumbled over the word. “...skills do the trick? What do you want?”
“I want a house and a place to live, Alderman,” Whistle said, his fingers dancing absently across the recorder’s tone holes. “I’ve been on the road for a long, long time.” Whistle’s eyes gleamed in a way that was difficult for Boyd to parse. They seemed… covetous. “And this seems like a real nice community. Not that I know much about nice communities.”
Boyd sighed. This was getting insane. Did they have time for this? He searched the room to see if other faces conveyed the same lack of hope he had. What he saw instead was movement in the corners of the gym. Slow, familiar movement.
“You want a house?” Chambers asked. “Any house?” Chambers asked.
Boyd opened his mouth to say something, anything, to alert the room of the danger he knew was coming.
“No, not just any house,” Whistle said, then laughed. His eyes were wide and manic. “I want your house. The house where your wife died.”
Chambers would have bellowed and perhaps attacked the smaller man, but he was interrupted by the low drone of heavy wings. The roaches had found a way in, and the only sound to drown out their awful descent were the screams of the people in the gymnasium. Boyd dropped at the same time as Chambers. While the entomologist threw his arms up defending himself from incoming creatures, the older man fell forward, hitting the gym’s floor with a heavy thump. The roaches were in his hair and his ears, crawling their way in and out of orifices. They worked with a speed that left him breathless, and as their glistening bodies worked their way out of the dead Alderman’s nostrils and mouth and crept toward Boyd, he found himself muttering pleading cries. It didn’t sound like him. There was no dignity here.
Chambers pressed his face into the smooth surface of the gym floor, smelling rubber and bare feet. As he waited for death, he heard the sound of shuddering wings, like every insect in existence had entered the gym. There was a series of faint pops, like a gentle chorus of burping frogs. The room was silent. Boyd rolled over.
Chambers was dead, his body hadn’t been picked clean like every other corpse Boyd had seen in the past week. Blood spattered against the walls and the floor, and Boyd lifted himself to his feet, taking in the sight. Whistle leaned against a nearby wall, a wan smile playing across his lips as he observed the silent shock around him.
Piles of roaches lined every surface of the gym. They gathered in corners and made hills around those, like Boyd, had driven themselves to the ground to avoid the swarms.
They were everywhere.
In three blocks, their march from the elementary school turned into a victory parade in . Whistle played his silent recorder, driving millions of cockroaches to suicide. Some drove themselves into buildings with sickening ferocity. Others simply flew straight up, escaping the sound, before popping from the inside out, showering laughing survivors with chitin and foul-smelling viscera. When they made it to the harbor, Whistle played an elaborate glissando of notes. The music spun the final swarms of roaches into tornadoes and funnels of glistening copper that eventually gave way to a rainfall of invertebrates, falling steadily into the river where they drowned. The murderous creatures lined the surface of the river as far as the eye could see. Whistle was lost in a sea of cheering citizens, who carried him away on their backs.
Boyd would see Whistle only once more.
It was a week later outside the courthouse. The governor arrived in the wake of the citywide massacre to assess future plans. There was talk of a marketing campaign, something dedicated to the suddenly devalued property and quiet community that might bring in new residents. In a matter of a week, roaches had devoured a third of the town. Another third was poised to move out. Despite its ultimate victory over the bugs, Spoil was becoming a ghost town.
Later on, Boyd would hear how this was used as an excuse not to pay Whistle. Even after everything that happened, he understood. A strange vagrant had saved the city by literally hypnotizing billions of insects into suicide. It was a hard sell for a politician who hadn’t lived in his representative state in decades.
Boyd was on his way into the courthouse when he passed Whistle, who offered that mysterious grin, before stopping at the threshold of the front door.
“You’re the bug doctor,” the odd man muttered.
“Yes,” Boyd said.
The confirmation pleased Whistle. He patted Boyd on the shoulder like a man offering condolences on a football loss.
“Well,” Whistle said, straightening his garish, leopard print shirt. “Sorry for killing all of your kids.”
Boyd chuckled. It was an odd thing to say, even for the little man who’d saved the town. Whistle wasn’t the first person to assume Boyd had a paternal affection for insects. Whistle wandered around the corner of the courthouse, heading toward the harbor. Boyd watched him go. As he entered the courthouse, Boyd thought he could hear Whistle’s recorder. It wasn’t playing the frantic, staccato tune that he’d imagined as the piper had mimed the little creatures to their deaths. Instead, the sound was slow and sad.
He would remember the tune for years to come, particularly as the last children of Spoil began to disappear. It happened slowly over weeks. When the first signs of them were found beneath the shells of dead roaches that floated on the river. Whistle was gone, and the town of Spoil with him.