~ Sample Chapter from My Horror Novel! ~
Here is the first chapter of WHEREVER HE MAY SWARM, one of my upcoming novels. I am planning to post the first 3 chapters to z-punk (my Substack) over the next 3 weeks, so stay tuned for the full alpha preview of the story’s harrowing introduction. I expect to publish SWARM during Q2 2025. Here are some additional details on the story:
Title: Wherever He May Swarm
Form: Novel ~ est. 330 pages / 125K words
Genre: Horror x Thriller x Science Fiction {+ Comedy}
Target Audience: Adults / fans of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Paul Verhoeven, David Cronenberg
Premise: A man down on his luck gains the ability to control insects. The FBI investigates. A young girl starts to have apocalyptic dreams. Chaos ensues…*WHEREVER HE MAY SWARM* features a fast-paced blend of action, suspense, insectile ultraviolence, and a satirical take on conspiracy culture, the American empire, and Mankind’s endless battle versus Mother Nature. The story explores themes of postmodern individualism, government control, technological surveillance, and the natural world destruction & mass insect death of the ongoing Holocene Extinction.
Here is the opening chapter of the novel for your consideration:
Chapter 1: The Dragonfly Dream
1
As Nidus Nash awoke from a dreamless midnight void, he spotted a cockroach wriggling itself out from underneath rotting floorboards. His eyelids reopened like broken windows, eyes crooked and aching. The man slept within the drywall of an old halfway house on Centinula Avenue, nestled best he could inside a shattered cubbyhole. Every other bed was taken. Other tenants slept on cots and in sleeping bags, sucking dust and snoring off their daily fatigues. At the sight of the verminous bug, an unconscious eek crept up his spine and knocked Nidus free. His tattered white nightshirt caught on a bent nail and shredded it further.
Here goes midnight again and covered in soot on the ground inside the worst house he’d ever harbored in, only the latest episode of Nidus’ living nightmare.
Vibrations shook the one story as Nidus’ six-foot form thudded to the floor. Instantly he feared awakening Hackett and his two goons, Greg and Danny, from their slumber in the opposing room. Profane drones of snoring could be heard echoing within the house. Nidus took a beat to brush himself off and crouch more comfortably onto his knees. Only his callused toes warded off splinters. The roach appeared in the empty room, the water-damaged and fungi-infested “guest room” of their collective home away from San Quentin.
Not for the first time, Nidus found himself facing off with an insect as equals, each searching for a place to belong. With wiggling antennae and trembling arms and abyss-bound gazes, the pair of creatures scuttled to and fro across those sagging sycamore planks ever ready to plunge one into the crawlspace.
On hands and knees, Nidus stared hard at the littler creature, this thing called cockroach. The disgust drained from him steadily. It was not afraid of him. And it definitely noticed him, was even interested. Nidus saw the thing approach him, a few inches at a time, stopping and waggling its pieces as if studying him deeply.
A sharp intake of sightless spores, aged by lifetimes of damp suburban nights, lurched a whooping cough from out of his gut. Another spike of adrenaline surged throughout Nidus’ lanky form as he imagined a groggy Hackett reaching through to grasp his collar and smash him back through the drywall.
But no iron grip emerged. Neither did the roach flee.
A calming silence fell betwixt man and beast.
Nidus was left staring at the unflinching cockroach. His eyes went to the dingy corners of the room, where the amanitas grew freely, their spotted redcaps ambitiously piercing the floor. The roach coasted to each corner, gliding easily across the wood, inspecting the mushroom colony, then the chipping paint, finally the loose nails and soggy evidence of slow ruination from a flood two summers ago. His gaze fell back in the center of the guest room, and there the little creature returned. Nidus did not breathe as he did the progression again, rotating his mind across the room. As if willed by his very intention, the cockroach followed, lock-in-step with exactly where his eyes moved. He chuckled quietly, nearly slapped his knee.
I must finally be mad…
It made a kind of sense, after today. Nidus put out his hand and the cockroach climbed onto his fingers cheerfully. His revulsion returned, but then faded as he noted every creaturely feature upon the little bug. Two wings, six legs, spiky antennae, mushing mouth and piercing gaze. Nidus’ breath fell in cadence with the creature’s own. The thing sizzled its pieces again, observing quiescently, judging him as he was.
A pressure suddenly emerged in the center of his other palm. Nidus thought it might be another splinter, at worst an errant nail. He raised his left alongside his right, and the cockroach too turned to stare at fresh stimuli. Blood bubbled from out of his skin as a protrusion pressed against the epidermis, soon breaking free. Nidus silently shrieked, breathlessly disturbed, as another cockroach emerged from split calluses, covered in the viscera of his own body. There was less pain and more shock as the bug unburrowed itself from within his palm and scuttled around the roiled red hole in his hand with something resembling joy.
Nidus’ instincts overrode his curiosity and his left hand closed with five steely fingers seeking that which should not be there. The other cockroach splattered and yellow-green trails of blood dripped from his palm to splat onto the sundrenched wood. Part of him wanted to vomit; another wished to cackle aloud. He swallowed both intentions and exhaled heartily.
I am dreaming; I am yet asleep.
For the first time, Nidus noted the rays of moonlight falling into the empty room through the broken window. Instant regret filled his chest as he watched the guestroom roach stare at the splattered remains of his twin. Tears bubbled in Nidus’ eyes at this strange sight, and at the day’s every wretched memory. He shut them hard and tried to forget. Instead, he remembered it all. After a long moment and deeper breath, Nidus finally opened his eyes again and saw the pieces of the roach he had borne from his body. The other, the first, froze in place. He started to close his right hand too, slowly but surely. After all, the landlord blamed them for any pests they “trailed in,” and would certainly put it in the report to their parole officers.
But he stopped as the dead roach in his left began to rattle. Twitching legs came together in a coalescing pool of his own leftover crimson alongside its chartreuse guts, the shattered wings pieced back into place, severed head spiraling last upon the suddenly reforged, chitinous torso…
“Ho!”
A loud voice at the door. It was Hackett. With Danny and Greg. The former stood six-foot-three, shaved bald with a long scar across his scalp, earned from his “championship” fight against an even larger man named Dozer in the yard during his seventh year in San Quentin. He wore all black, even to bed. Behind his corded musculature were the latter two goons standing under the threshold. Scowling, each fattening and aging and balding themselves, with bad beards and beading eyes. All a few years older than Nidus himself, more brutal too, each the kind of fellas he’d avoided all his life. They were bed-havers in the adjacent room and ran the house like a prison.
“Eating bugs again, Nash,” Hackett barked. “You make me sick.”
The two cockroaches, one resurrected, fled his palms together and returned to lurk beneath the wood side-by-side.
Nidus grimaced softly, which Hackett mistook for glee.
“You really are a freak. Get up,” Hackett said.
“This is why we don’t let you have a bed,” Danny spat.
“Belong down here with the bugs in the dark,” Greg garbled.
Nidus stood up and dusted the drywall off his pajamas. Some of the remaining roach guts smeared upon his nightshirt.
“I was meditating,” Nidus said, quickly, trying to calm the situation with words that could be true. He did meditate, and in the guest room too. It was not out of the realm of possibility. A midnight meditation was something he should’ve been doing; a fresh start, a new plan, a clean and clear mind…
“You look like shit,” Hackett said.
The big lug chuckled and cracked his knuckles. Danny and Greg moved into the ruined room to surround him.
Nidus’ gut contracted, his muscles priming for pain. The popping sounds from their fists nearly made him flinch. He was truly glad for the resistance he’d summoned within.
“Don’t think Officer John will appreciate you giving your neighbor a black eye,” Nidus said, a final plea to end the impending violence.
“That’s why you ain’t gonna tell him shit!” Danny said.
“Can’t talk so good with a broken jaw,” Greg added.
Hackett just smiled, flexed his giant hands.
Nidus sighed. “Guys, please…I had a really bad day.”
“About to get worse,” Hackett purred.
~
2
Nidus walked deep into the Santa Monica twilight. The cool air from the shore eased some of the heat and pressure coming from his battered face. He took to the air, freely and with every ounce of his being. Moonful and chilled was the beginning of May. There was little cause for celebration. Sleepless and beaten senseless, his body ached in every corner.
In spite of himself, he recalled the words with Shannon earlier in the evening.
“So you lost your job?”
“I got laid off.”
“Why?”
“Robo trucks.”
“What?”
“They replaced us drivers with computers.”
“Computers drivin’ trucks…? Stupid. What does that mean?”
“It means that I gotta hit the streets again.”
“I am sorry, Nidus.”
“I know.”
“I am moving back to Santa Bellucci soon.”
“Won’t be seeing you here anymore, at the motel.” Nidus studied her, those beautiful black locks hanging over her perfectly flawed face. Shannon was someone marred only by disappointments past, and far more amplified by bits of love shared, here and there. There was always an end though. He’d pre-mourned the loss of Shannon before.
They shared a final smile. Nidus soon after departed her room for the last time.
On the walk back to the halfway house in Greybelt, his mind went elsewhere. In fact, he recalled every twinge of the seething anger he’d felt in his gut that afternoon, as some suit with lying eyes under one thousand dollar glasses and sputtering from a well-cocked coke-mouth told him that their “services were no longer required at the offices of Loader Worldwide Corp and upon the highways of the United States of America.”
Every Class A CDL driver had been drawn into an impromptu meeting in Conference 1. Jack and Andrew and Paula and Xavier and Burt and all the other drivers were there, some still en route and soon to depart again to unload their goods at the next interstation. The first sign of fuckery was all the security guards at the doors, triple the usual number. Private group, no familiar faces.
A man named Maximillian Masterson, “special consultant” brought in all the way from New York City, had taken the podium after some half-hearted words from roadboss Ferris. Nidus remembered thinking the worst in that moment, as he saw this junior varsity nerd fuck speak his silverine voice into the microphone in lieu of any friendly face to deliver it. His inner rage rose mostly against Ferris.
Why hadn’t he warned us? After all of a decade of working together…why hadn’t he been able to do anything?
“Greetings, drivers,” spoke Maximillian Masterson. His grey suit was so fitted he looked like an assassin’s gloved hand, a false form in a dress meant to deny, dissociate, and decimate.
“We have some announcements to make.”
Someone spat, many grumbled, others drummed callused and misshapen fingers upon the tables, ever-polished and unused. A stone cold soon silence permeated Conference 1. Max coughed and let out a nervous chuckle into the mic. Nidus imagined beating him to death with a baseball bat. He remembered hitting his first homerun on the last day of his eleventh May. It was the first and last pops ever saw.
“I have some good news and bad news for our Loader Worldwide family!” Max had started.
Nidus dissociated from his body then. The words landed like raindrops in a pond. Burt cursed only under his breath at first, then rose to shouting by the end of the suit’s dissertation. First, they showed a slideshow of pristine photographs of the latest trucks: stark blue, slick interiors and blindingly clear headlights peaking off such angular perfection. It was as though Ferrari made them; it was in fact Auto-Truck Inc., a mere two-bit mimicker of superior designs. Those interiors were fitted for humming servers, without any true driver or passenger seats.
Jack threw his shoe at Max’s smile and his thousand dollar glasses (who ducked it unfortunately) and was shortly apprehended by KnightGuard security, taken away. Nidus was not sure he’d ever be seeing that bastard again and it made him sad. Ferris mumbled something about a 3-month stipend to get people back on their feet. Maximillian Masterson had the gall to finish with “the Loader family will never forget your contributions, I can promise you that…”
Nidus was not as angry as he could’ve been, as he shoulda. But only because he’d pre-mourned this too. In his heart he knew this day would come. Sure the robots would replace us drivers. They’d already done so for fast food, grocery stores, movies and TV, even some doctors and the computer engineers behind the robos themselves. We were next. Artificial Intelligence could do these things better than people, more efficiently too. That is what they said. How true that really was mattered less than the fact that we had no say at all. There was no celebration for the ‘efficiency’ of these matters for all the people who could no longer make a living.
Democracy, huh? Nidus chuckled. He had nothing real to say to the others when they suggested some kind of revolt, soon dispersed by the private security anyway. Way too late for a union; though that kind of action would’ve laid us all off much sooner.
All of it fed Nidus’ own thesis on the dire state of play within the good ole USA.
I am on my own.
No, it was worse than that wasn’t it?
~
3
Nidus felt himself yearning for a drink, a smoke. A thrill. Along the pacifica beachfront, poorly parked cars littered the street. Most were stolos. Some were long abandoned. He headed toward the boardwalk of lights and lecherous auras. The carnival. He admired the crooked smiles and machines there. He unconsciously jingled his skeleton key in his pocket. Eyes glazing the dust on the dashboards, his heart was thumping again. He yearned for more.
Nidus stumbled into the commotion of chimes and barking dares and cacklers in altered states of every fashion. Wasn’t it the big bicentennial? He hadn’t the mental bandwidth to keep track of such things anymore. It must have been around 2AM now. He wore no watch; he had one in his glove compartment and only donned it for his routes. He’d just driven his final one last week. Did not know it at the time. Route 77 up through Oregon and back over the mountains, through Vegas. He’d just barely resisted doing that again. Always a mistake. His head hurted at the mere thought.
What had Maxy said at the podium? They were going to junk all the old trucks over the weekend. It was Thursday today. Most of his most precious belongings were inside his mac. Would they be crushed too? Or did those fancy new junkyards have a lost-and-found? Nidus grimaced and thought of his Friday. He chuckled, thinking of where he was going now. Make it Saturday.
The big lights lit up the pier, the boardwalk had become a spiraling song of mania and menace, as aging fathers gambled away their saves. Shame that it was much too late for the young ones in love to be populating the carnival with their smaller, simpler joys. Only the nighthawks and sickest dogs inhabited the lit darkness now, soaking in the weighty dampness and the silence of a world asleep and away from hassling them. Nidus walked into the twilighting micro-city of cheap sin, joining them for the games and liquids, for the thrills of a blink away from the world as one knew it.
Nidus had exactly $100 in his pocket, composed entirely of a single Benjamin. Every game entry was $11, and came with a free Long Island Iced Tea. They were so far away from New York. And yet, every L.I.T. hit hard, right where he needed it to.
Nidus smiled as he downed drink after drink, missed his darts and his basketball shots, the former poorly weighted, aimed and the latter’s double-hoop circumference downsized to only allow for perfect rainbows to score. Not to mention the fact that the chain ceiling was too low for such arcing. Even the hammer ball only reached the midway point.
Nidus received a hum of jeers at his form from fellow drunkards and the venerated barker himself. His entire back was indeed being thrown into the errant swing upon the big red button. He was simply weak, his form sluggishly heavy with the weight of poorly made cocktails.
Nidus was not here to win, in fact. He never won. He was here to get absolutely thrashed.
And so he did.
~
4
Nidus wandered into a field on the east side of the pier, inland from the lapping shore and the bright lights. Cars parked here overnight because the cops and parking attendants did not typically bust anyone. These were for midnight adventurers and smarter drunkards, who predicted their lesser capacity just as the truer, more empty and quiet periods of night dawned upon them. When it was the time for sleeping and fucking and not getting behind any wheel.
Nidus’ heart pounded and the key jangled as he stumbled around.
Really took a load on, huh, Nidus? The Loader family won’t like another public intox charge…
“Fuck them! Fuck ’em all” Nidus shouted unto the night. “They don’t control me no more.”
He heard no response, save for a small buzzing. There was no one else. Nidus let his vision settle and his ears tune in.
~ A shadow darted across his vision, only nearly silent. A dragonfly. ~
Nidus Nash watched the insectoid flier go about her work superbly. That work was death-dealing. For many seconds, he could scarcely avert from the darting motion of her quad-wings, jumping around perfectly in the air, her jaws landing viciously well upon smaller wings that floated slower on the wind. Each gnat or midge was only about four times worse at everything than the dragon, and were soon being ingested inside the bigger fly’s own innard juices as a direct result.
Nidus stood there in the grassy parking lot, wobbling over the pond, watching the dragonfly devour the world.
She soon landed to float in the center of the pond upon a perfect lily pad, resting from all the hunting and eating she’d just done. The dragon emitted a black and green sheen, her wings shimmering the air almost like a dress. Her face was all eyes, piercingly translucent and rainbownic within the humidity. Her mouthparts licked and mashed and swallowed all that her flight and speed and hyperactivity had wrought for her body.
Nidus looked into the water lapping at his old boots. Liquid seeped through the holes, drenching his socks. Nidus did not mind.
Small waves washed over his face.
There in his dank reflection he saw a man with a black eye and busted lip. His bloodied countenance had not healed much in the hours since Hackett and his dudelings got their licks in.
Least I clocked Danny pretty good…pretty sure I heard his jaw crack. Not mine, but his!
x
I am better than this.
Stronger than most.
Capable of great things.
Bent by God for glory.
He turned his head upward. Nidus began to laugh aloud at the mantras delivered so reflexively. But only a croak came out.
They helped in the big house. But what the hell. Who am I kidding? I am probably gonna die tonight.
He thought of just falling into the pond, letting nature take her course sooner rather than later.
He breathed unevenly and let his swimming daze study the pond for a long time. The dragonflies buzzed on. Nidus’ lazy gaze flowed across the water to a maroon Trans Am parked at the edge of the pondshore’s southern tip.
Nidus smiled and reached into his pocket to grab his old “key.” Unused these last months on the outside, this latest iteration was the same one he’d buried under the cherry tree. The simple device, fit for any vehicle’s soul, had never failed to thrill his heart. Not even once.
~
5
Nidus Nash was about as hungry as he’d ever been. He pressed the pedal to the metal and revved the engine hard over the asphalt of Highway One. The moon was leaving her scape behind and it was dawn approaching the horizon that Nidus drove to.
“Skeleton key” jerry-rigged into the ignition, he drove the Trans Am like he owned her. And for tonight he could. Full tank. He raced the road’s emptiness, headlights low, engine blasting the night’s steady slumber into a most maddening wakefulness.
Nidus screamed over Springsteen. A gosh dang true blue CD in the dashboard. Windows rolled down, he let “Hungry Heart” blare the dark.
Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back…
Nidus had three simple things on his mind now:
Double cheeseburger, vanilla milkshake, crinkle-cut fries. Smoking apple pie.
Make it four. He chuckled as his mouth watered. His vision swam across the road and he pressed even harder on the gas. He only had $12 left. But maybe he could haggle with Donna.
~
6
Siren wailed behind him in the dark. The rearview showed red and blue.
Instincts kicked in before sense, and Nidus started to pull over. Before he knew it, he’d seized his speed and landed onto the shoulder beside the road. Dueling fields of long grass shielded them from the yawning night. Or were they corn stalks? Nidus was unsure of where he was or why. His brain throbbed with unseen menace.
The sirens stopped their incessant sounding, but the lights glared deep into his corneas. Nidus spotted his own sweaty forehead in the rearview mirror and it all came together.
I am in a stolen car.
I am drunker than a donkey.
I am on parole and will return to prison for a longer time.
Nidus woulda screamed if he didn’t think he might throw up too.
The sheriff approached in the sideview and Nidus Nash breathed in hard, whole body shaking in misery. He rolled down the window.
~
7
“Sir, do you know how fast you were going?”
“About…speed limit,” Nidus croaked.
“No sir you were not. Can you step out of the vehicle?”
“No lie-sense and reg-isstration?”
Nidus turned to the flashlight gracing his profile and instantly regretted it. The light burned his eyes, he saw nothing, and apparently the sheriff saw nothing good in his drooping cheeks and swimming gaze.
“I repeat,” Sheriff Richard said, sternly. “Please step out of your vehicle sir.”
Nidus hesitated, his mind racing with images of prison. He made a promise to his soul that he would never go back. No more. Not that again. Anything but…
“Sir!” The sheriff put his hand on his pistol’s hilt. “I do not want to have to repeat myself again.”
“Alright,” Nidus said. He put up his hands and put on his best behavior. “I am…complying.”
He barely spit the words out. When he moved to open the door, the sheriff backed off a step but kept the flashlight beaming his whole body, blazing his goosebumps. All the weight of his drunkenness and the responsibility of his actions crashed upon his brow.
Sheriff Richard finally asked the question before Nidus was even free of the cabin.
“Have you been drinking tonight?”
“Not much,” Nidus returned instantly. He was already blacking out, his mind transferring executive function over to some other thing inside of him.
The sheriff threw his torch over the Trans Am. “This your vehicle, sir?”
“Too many…” Nidus mumbled.
“What did you say?”
“I say too many questions.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m no such thing.”
“This a joke to you, sir?”
Nidus leveled his gaze at the sheriff, finally looked him square in the face. He had a box for a head, a laser gaze that said duty. His hat was oversized, his muscles overtly toned. He practiced a lot at the firing range; he’d dream of moments like this often. Probably hadn’t had one yet. Looked too young to have killed a man. But who knows…
“Who really knows with pigs these days?” Nidus said aloud.
Sheriff Richard furrowed his brow and grit his teeth into a pained frown.
Nidus flinched forward, both palms raising, eyes flaring alongside his smile.
The sheriff responded to the threatening action just as Nidus hoped he would: he drew his weapon.
“Get against the vehicle,” Dick said, waving his pistol.
Nidus hesitated, nearly bursting into a giggle.
“NOW!”
Nidus started to do as he was told. But then he saw it. And froze. Amusement fell away to awe.
There was a thud on the sheriff’s shoulder, loud enough for Nidus to hear but not heavy enough for the bloke to feel it.
A grasshopper, as green as summer, perched atop Sheriff Richard’s shoulder. The emerald creature starkly contrasted against the grey tunic he wore.
The gunman raised the barrel from midsection to face. “Get against the car right now,” the sheriff repeated.
Nidus just stared at the grasshopper. Memories flowed into his heart like an avalanche. Childhood, in the long grass…with mama. He’d forgotten most of this stuff. Or so he thought. He’d been outside in the welcomed sun running for what felt like the whole day. But he still had energy. He never ran out. This was after papa went to sleep. It was just him and mom. They ran up and down a hill, all day. Nidus felt strongly that such a moment was going to last forever. The thing that had torn him from the dream, introducing a new dimension to his experience, had been such a creature. Grasshopper.
The grasshopper, emerging from the soil, gliding soundlessly over the blades to land upon his hand.
Nidus Nash looked into the little fella’s eyes. And he looked back. One instant, never forgotten. There was a fear of it, at first. The size of the thing, the alien eyes, the small inkling that it could do anything at any moment. But then came the awe, the aliveness of a being so small and yet so perfect. So different, and yet real, in motion, with vision and legs and a mouth, hungry certainly, experiencing this world for the very same moment.
The grasshopper stayed for a long time, then bounded from his skin with ease, going back into the sun and the grass and the world beyond Nidus Nash.
Mama had told him what it was. An insect. “Grasshopper” entered his subconscious lexicon forever. And yet he’d never spoken the word himself.
“Grasshopper,” Nidus said aloud.
“Huh?” Sheriff Dick returned.
The next thing Nidus did was snatch his hands onto the M1911 pistol pointed at his face. It fired once, a bullet whizzed past his neck, burning his hairs there and driving into the rear door’s exterior and the upholstery past that. Nidus wrestled with Dick for a long moment, each grunting before the Trans Am. Nidus kicked his boot toe unto the crotch of the sheriff, who groaned and sucked in a deep breath. His hands weakened upon the iron and Nidus snatched it away. Sheriff Richard fell back into the middle of the road with eyes shut hard and both hands cradling his groin.
Nidus raised the pistol.
Richard put up a hand. “Put…put down the gun.”
Nidus said nothing.
“We can all walk away. You can drive on.”
Nidus grit his teeth. He remembered prison again. He blinked hard and thought of mama.
“Just put it down. Throw it in the field behind you…drive away. I am not gonna arrest you.”
There was a buzzing. It filled his head and no amount of shaking or humming up there would silence it. It was surrounding him. There in the dark grass beyond the road of man was a buzzing. It was rising in the night. The sheriff kept saying things. Nidus did not believe him. He did not care. He did not want to be here. In the road, with the gun. The car was something small. Something he could rectify. A joyride. The job and the half-house and the girl, these were things past. But there would be new things. New ways. He just needed an avenue.
The buzzing would not stop.
“Shut up!” Nidus screamed.
Sheriff Richard had inched forward, with small breaths, as the gunman shuddered and spasmed. They appeared to stop now and the perp’s attention returned, and so the officer put up his hand again and spoke in a soft voice.
“I have a wife and two children waiting for me at home, mister…what is your name? Let’s start there.”
Nidus turned his gaze downward. The grasshopper leaped from the sheriff to Nidus, landing atop his shoulder with a silenced thud. The buzzing became omnipresent.
Now the sheriff heard it too and he turned in his seat on the yellow lines. There off the road in the deep dark, lit by the alternating flares of red and blue, came a great rumbling. The grass, the stalks, the maize shuddered in long throes of alternating vibrations, crossing one another amidst so much violent volume. It was a storm of sound that reckoned one to pay unanimous attention. A thousand echoing micro-roars shook the earth and danced her greenery.
The wall of sound became a long-looming shadow. It was made of green.
Sheriff Richard stood up finally to meet the full measure of the emerald wave as it rose above the horizon and lit up the moonscape.
A wave of grasshoppers two million strong took flight and crashed across the field and upon the road.
Nidus Nash stood astride the middle of the storm as it descended like a tornado upon the man in the middle of the road. In a matter of moments, millions of buffeting thuds and chittering joints and mashing mandibles shredded cloth and flesh and leather and steel all alike and all at once.
The insectoid storm boiled the midsummer air, then dissipated. The satiated, red-faced hoppers returned to their grassy sanctuary on the road’s other side; in their wake there in the middle of Interstate Two stood a bloody mess of a skeleton, half-man, half-corpse. Flesh sloughed from the feasted torso of Sheriff Richard as a final breath was muttered to the morning. The arms fell off and the broken body collapsed into itself in a splat upon the left-hand lane.
Unscathed, Nidus dropped the gun where he stood and shut his eyes.
He turned, too quickly, and swam in the darkness under his eyelids. Not even such shocking savagery could sober this load. Slowly, Nidus opened the door of the Trans Am. He fell into the driver’s seat with a gasp. She was still running, so he shifted to drive, and then did so.
He did not look back.
~
8
The edges of dawn creeped over the roadsides and the grasslands beyond. Those green knives lit up the new day being borne. Nidus tore down the careless road without a sound, his breath barely even leaping from one moment to the next.
Nidus thought he might be sick. But the more he drove, the more he hungered. Diner 55 finally graced his horizon. He thought of Donna and tried to forget everything else. He deserved that apple pie. After today. Yesterday now. Time broke for no man. Least of all him. He’d go as far as he could now, with as much as he had. Breakfast was the only thing left to do.
He soon pulled up to the diner’s parking lot. There were only three other cars there. Two he recognized and one he did not. Nidus parked the Trans Am in the gravel and watched the sunrise. It took only a few moments. The morning sun stilled in the dust and Nidus breathed in the summer’s first airs with glory, every horror of the night and previous day beginning to fade.
The grasshopper perched on his back left shoulder, though he hardly noticed him.
Nidus pushed through the diner’s doors two at once. Inside, he immediately spotted Donna coming from around the bar with a steamy apple pie. She half-smiled at him and moved to serve the only customer. Old Fat Larry was somewhere in the back kitchen, cooking up burgers by the smell. Probably two for him and one for Donna, another late shift carried unto dawn. It was Friday at last.
Those same crimson cushions down on the far booth called his name. Nidus moved towards them.
But there in the middle booth sat the sole customer.
It was Maximillian Masterstroke.
One thousand dollar glasses shadowing beady eyes. Locked in on his phone, scrolling and scrolling, fat and happy. Without a word, Nidus began to saunter over to this other man. With a listless hand, he spun a pair of stools that melded onto the black and white tile before the long counter.
The grasshopper leapt from his shoulder, gliding over the main counter and onto the smoking apple pie. Donna eyed the insect and stopped moving as he eyed her right back. She stayed behind now as Nidus’ heavy Carolina boots clapped the floor and approached the suit.
The man finally looked up from his buzzing smartphone to sight Nidus approaching him. There was a plate of crumbs before him, an oozing pile of ketchup, and over half the fries leftover. He’d already drank his milkshake to the smallest spoils. His suit was finally unbuttoned, his five o’clock shadow coming in. Nidus stepped to loom over him.
Max looked up at him, the red dawn outside over the hills falling through the glass and onto his blank gaze.
“Do I know you?”
Nidus said nothing. Rumbling shook up the whole diner, silverware clattering upon the table in a long, furious vibration.
Max turned out to the road and the deeper fields of grass beyond it. A shadow draped over his countenance and his mouth gaped open.
Once more, the buzzing became omnipresent. ~
END OF CHAPTER 1
TO BE CONTINUED…Next ~ Chapter 2: Spores
For more details on SWARM and my other works: DylanOrosz.com
