Theres quintillions of them and they are coming for me.
Fun fact:
Insects make up the highest amount of bio-matter in the world aside from plants. In fact, the entire human population as well as that of all livestock is dwarfed by insects to a staggering 300%-400%.
In number, there are about 200 million insects to every human…
I was working on the house when it really started and a cicada flew into the back of my head and grabbed onto my hair near my ear.
Normally, I have really good composer when it comes to these sorts of run ins, but in this particular instance, one of its stupid little hooks on its leg caught the tender skin on the side my neck which tricked me into thinking I was as being stung. This paired with the exceedingly noisy signature of its wings screaming into the back of my scalp caused me to yelp like a pup whose tail has been freshly trod upon by a careless owner. Simultaneously, I hurriedly flicked it off with a panicked hand and cursed in hushed tones at the poor handling of this inconsiderate run in.
“Another damn cicada?” I said as it worked itself upright on the ground, spread its wings and flew off. This was the second time today and fourth time in two days this had happened. And it was always hitting or attempting to stick a landing near my ears.
Very unsettling.
Well, no sooner had the jitters left my system than that same noisy fat bug came and landed right on the bill of my hat! I really was just annoyed at this point but have no other issue with bugs. Always enjoyed them to be honest.
However, as I’m studying this beautiful insect thats landed on my hat, I think I hear it say something.
“Listen”
It spoke with no accent, unusual inflection, chirping noises or anything that would give away that it was a bug talking. It spoke to my mind perfectly clearly.
Just sounded like a little child no older than 10 had addressed me and asked for my attention.
I grabbed it and held it up by its sides while looking into its eyes.
It was just a bug. Nothing new or unusual to report about it. But it had definitely told me to
“LISTEN!”
There it was again! But, this time, almost a scream. I flung it away and it caught flight once more, buzzing away into the trees.
I had a strange dream that night about being covered in bugs of all sorts. Some soft bodied that slunk across my skin with ease and an almost comforting smoothness and some that grabbed my flesh with their barbed feet and used my pores as hook holds to traverse my body. Through it all, I could not speak or move.
They started at my feet and hands and crawled up to my arms and legs.
They were crawling to my face.
Sensation and realization were the catalysts to panic. Panic was the ruler of my mind in that moment. My mind was void of reason or answer to my new hellish conundrum.
I squeezed my eyes closed harder and harder as they inched closer to my face. My nose! My ears! What if they crawl inside!? I tried to flex some unknown sphincter in my olfactory and auditory orifices but to no avail.
Every inch of my body crawled with microscopic (and some not so microscopic) hooks and foot pads and slime-less, but somehow sickeningly slick bodies. Chirping irrupted from every millimeter of territory the insects now claimed on my body and with it all I could do absolutely, undeniably, maddeningly … nothing.
Then, they all stopped. At the edges of my ears, they gathered in tight packed hordes.
Not daring to invade my nostrils or ear canals, but instead they spoke.
They said something simple and chilling.
Horde, “Listen now.”,
and even more silently, as if to prevent the chance of something overhearing or perhaps to garner my trust through the impression of calm innocence, “He is coming.”
Then the chirps became a chorus of it. The same phrase over and over. Louder and louder as if to raise in adoration and worship,
“He is coming.”
“He is coming.”
“HE IS COMING.”
Then silence. For a moment. The ringing of the words dying from the hot moist air. Just as all noise had faded, their legs bite into my every pore to the point of breaking my skin in a instant shocking coordinated tensing of chiton. With the total focus their actions had earned them, they broke the silence by whispering in a crisp, clear and urgent manner,
“Listen for him.”
Just like that, I was awake.
I maintained complete masculine composure and certainly DID NOT jump out of bed and search every crevice of my bed and room for bugs to squish.
For real though, honestly I actually woke with a sense of euphoria. Like, total peace.
My skin was crawling the entire day following this, but I felt emotionally … sated.
It wasn’t an hour after sunrise that, while making coffee before work, I saw that cicada on my kitchen window.
I walked to it, sipped my coffee and gave it the greeting of the day.
Me, “Well, good morning”
Cicada, *stares bugishly*
Me, “Yeah. I slept great. Thanks for asking.”
Cicada, *adjusts mandible*
Before I tell you what happened next, I need you to know something. Cicadas are the oldest bugs on the earth. Not like been around the longest, but they live longer than any other bug. They achieve this during the pupal stage when they are planted in the ground as an egg, take a year or so to hatch and spend about 5-17 years (depending on species and conditions) in the earth as a pupa eating tree sap from roots and absorbing other minerals in the soil as they mature. They maintain this until the soil is exactly 64 degrees Fahrenheit and that temp lines up with the specific species preferred time of year to hatch. They then crawl up a tree, shed their exoskeleton, and bud like a butterfly into the adult cicada. They only live for a matter of weeks as adults, eating nothing and solely serving the purpose of procreation. During this period they “sing” by rubbing their wings against their bodies in order to locate a mate or even startle a predator into releasing them.
Down here in the south, their song lasts all day and peaks in the heat of the day.
Alright. Thats out of the way now.
After it mundanely adjusted its mandible and right as I was about to speak to it through the pane of glass, it spoke again, cutting me off quite rudely.
Cicada, “Can you hear him?”
Me, “Uhh, no?”
Cicada, “Are you listening for him?”
Me, “Who is he?”
There was a long pause, as if the risk of answering was being weighed on the scales of risk and necessity.
Cicada, “The Lord of the Wind and the Sky.”
The words hit me deeply despite a lack of knowledge as to their importance. The words struck me in my chest, and the ringing in my ears, from my dream came back as if a gong had been struck in my brain stem.
Me, “Okay. And who are you? Aren’t you supposed to be looking for love or off being loud in the trees?”
Cicada, “I am the trumpet. I bear the good news.”
It was not lost on me how stupid it felt indulging this obvious slip into insanity but when I tell you that this was real, I mean it. It was really speaking to me. The volume of a normal voice impacted only by distance. It spoke in my mind and in its mind.
Cicada, “You must listen. You must listen so that you may know. And you will feed him. You will all feed him.”
My humor faltered under the weight of that statement. My euphoria constricted to a pinpoint and disappointing sobriety reclaimed my senses. I’ll admit that I was beginning to believe the mind words of the trumpet cicada. My tone shifted and I truly wanted to know more.
Me, “What does he sound like? Can I talk with him?”
Cicada, “You will feel him.”
Me, “Well, I don’t like that. When is he coming? Why you? Why a bug?”
Cicada, “He has lain. Slept. As I did. He is to come again. To judge and consume. Listen for him. Believe and be saved. Birth him.”
And that was all I could take for the morning. I set my coffee down, it was too hot anyways, grabbed my keys, gave Mr. Trumpet Cicada a middle finger and made my way to work.
That night I did not dream.
And I did not sleep all that much either.
Just as sleep’s calming undercurrent begun to tug at the tassels of my exhausted subconscious, I was coldly alerted to the sounds of Cicadas singing.
At the foot of my bed.
Loud and angry.
I whirled around. My thoughts and emotions bifurcated by anger and fear. What stood there was worse than my last dream. It was real. It was the Trumpet. A cycloptic mound of writhing exoskeletal horrors stood on top of the foot of my bed. Little unfortunate bugs fell from its fingers and chin like droplets of black oil running down the lower prominences of some demons lesser features. He had chosen what I can loosely describe as human form. And he was not good at it. The cicada I had shared morning communion with sat affixed to the forehead of its cranium and from it, amplified by all the others, came his voice at an insane volume.
The Herald, “LISTEN”
Me, “I am.” I croaked with a throat parched by shock and fear.
Cicada, “You do not.” He proclaimed. His voice in my mind was weary. Rasping. “You must listen. You must go. You must feel.” Every word ever so slightly more distorted than the last. “You are the deliverer. He has chosen you. I speak plainly. The field. Go to it. Feel the earth. Feel for the Lord of the Wind and the Sky. He will birth from you. You will join his judgement.”
Me, “What the fuck dude. I’m not doing that! Why the hell would I?”
He stood there. They stood there. Every word spoken oozed chewed up larva, beetles and worms. They were spilling onto my sheets in wet thick clumps like putrid punctuations to my heralds proclamations.
He leaned over my shivering being.
The Herald, “Because if not, I will take you there.”
I’d rather fight a bug than obey one. But the instant I began to plot the “attack on katydid”, my mind was violently thrashed with images of being held down by mountains of insects. My limbs neutralized by venomous bites and my health robbed in moments by the melting bile of formic acid coursing through my veins. And I felt it as clearly as if it were happening. The herald. The trumpet. Crawling into my mouth. Capitalizing on my screams and grunted efforts. Stopping at my uvula. Slicing and pushing his path through my flesh and clawing into my brain. It was happening but not happening.
The Herald, “Do you understand?”
I could not dare open my mouth. I shook my head. North, south. He understood.
I got up from my bed as the pressure on my legs shifted. It had my legs pinned the whole time. Our mental correspondence had cluttered my thoughts enough that I did not even notice the near bone crushing pressure on my lower extremities.
Getting up to my feet I was ushered by the form bursting into millions of shards of flighted chittering chiton. Their noise and presence drowned out the ability to think rationally and I could do nothing but take the next step. Then the next. And the next after that.
When I got outside, I saw it.
A tornado of buzzing, chittering flesh reaching to the heavens as if to mock the mere finite distance of the stars, plunged its mass into the soil of my field behind my house. Like the end of a morbid rainbow marking the destination of the damned, it had bored away the top soil.
The wings and sharp glistening bodies flickered the light of a full and bloody moon. Dark, red light marked the girth of a phenomenon I had never once dreamed could occur.
Fireflies caught in the melee of edges and spikes exploded in tiny clear bursts of bioluminescent puffs as their bodies were crushed by their compatriots. Their deaths were a joyful flare of decadent sacrifice aimed at the glory of the coming God.
They were harkening to the Lord.
They were harkening to me.
I took step after step. Every moment, the swarm grew louder and louder. The perfect symmetry of their vortex of worship was compromised only long enough to draw me in.
There I stood.
The earth below me was cold on my feet. Ants and worms squirmed beneath my bare and sweating feet. Not a single grain of dirt laid anywhere. It was bugs. All of it. The ground, the wind, the sky.
The Herald, “Lay with God.”
The resounding command given to me by every one of the quintillions of beings.
The Heralds voice was so far ground by age that it was unintelligible. Only the presence of the other beings, still fresh from chrysalis or hearty enough to withstand the meager time allotted their pathetic mortal coils could render the command legible in my mind.
The Heralds voice boomed in my head once again.
“LAY WITH GOD. Let him eat your womb.”
The soil churned slightly. Weakly.
I placed my hand against the cold, indifferent earth and all other sounds ceased.
I could hear him.
I could hear my savior. My Lord. My son to be. He shifted sleepily. But I could hear his hunger. I could feel his rage. Denied his Godhood for millennia. Denied his justice. He writhed and his hunger turned sour. It turned into angry, bitter, vengeful determination.
I turned.
So fast, I turned.
I ran.
Splintering chiton tore at my flesh. Needle like utensils plucked at my skin, filling my blood with acid and toxins not yet mastered by man.
The whole of the swarm began to descend on me.
But my hand still held my keys.
My car still functioned and unlocked.
The autostart still initiated.
My legs, pushed me faster than the bugs could fly, but still some were on me and in my way.
Their broken worship crackled into raging fury at my cowardly defiance.
My memory fades from the toxins.
But I know I am somewhere right now that is not there. Nowhere is safe. But I’m somewhere safer. I just need to rest and refit. I need to flush my body from these toxins. They burn and itch at every inch of my body. The pustules they have cratered into me ooze with rancid ichor.
My new abode is a bunker that one of my uncles built not 2 years ago. He’s a prepper and former construction foreman.
This bunker is over built as fuck.
And it’s just not enough.
In my head I hear them. I feel their bodies pressed against the walls of this concrete tomb. I feel their wild anger and burning need to bring me back.
I haven’t heard from anyone up top in some time. I have a phone line to them. I’ve called them countless times now but, something tells me they aren’t there anymore.
I go to take a shower and as I turn the shower handle the water refuses to come through. They’ve clogged the pipes.
I had to close all the vents. I could hear them congregating around the filters and chewing through the fabric and metal blockades.
It’s so hard to breathe now. And I hear skittering …
somewhere.