Insects: A Novel

by Koloen, John

  Boyd, Duncan, and several others watched as the camera operator moved through the brush unsteadily capturing images of an ever-increasing swarm of insects. One of the men had ventured ahead, and the video showed him performing a wild dance in the field, his arms flailing at the air and high stepping frantically through the thigh high vegetation. For a moment, it looked like a comic YouTube video. And then it stopped being funny. The giggles stopped when the man stumbled. As he leaped to his feet, his hands covered his eyes. The distance from the camera made it difficult to make out details, but it was clear that he was struggling against something. While the others giggled, Azevedo instantly understood what was happening to the man but said nothing.

  That was the end of the video. The man had turned the phone off. Presumably, he had put it in his pocket. Duncan became pensive and stepped away to be by himself. He had to think, to come up with something that he could say that would reassure the group that they were safe. That he was safe. Boyd approached him, camera in hand.

  “What do you think we should do, Howard?”

  The others had moved away from the body and separated into three small groups. Duncan took it in and nodded.

  “One thing is we need to document this. Another, we need to contact the authorities.”

  Boyd waited, expecting Duncan to say more. He didn’t.

  “Are we gonna go back or what?”

  “You think we should quit the expedition?”

  Boyd shrugged.

  “I don’t know. Wish I did. These things aren’t just bugs anymore. They’re killers.”

  42

  Suarez and his boss Javier Costa stood in the middle of a vast hollow looking for the guards. They had followed the trail for two hours, which had grown over with brush and roots. Chopping their way through high grass and brush was brutal. Their shirts were soaked with sweat, the air heavy and humid. They both knew they should have taken their shirts off as soon as they were beyond sight of Duncan—in deference to Cross, he insisted that they wear shirts at all times—but they didn’t. Nor did they have a plan as they looked for the guards. Of course, they also understood that the guards may have gone in a different direction. They reached a point where they stopped, looked at each other and laughed.

  “How will we ever find anything?” Suarez asked rhetorically.

  “We should go back,” Costa said.

  “They could be hiding three meters away, and we wouldn’t know it.”

  As they were about to start the return trip, Costa said, “Hey, why don’t you climb a tree and see if you see anything.”

  “See if I see anything?”

  “Yes. You know, see what’s around us.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Suarez went to a Cashapona that stood at least fifteen meters. Sizing it up, he dropped his daypack and took out a pair of small binoculars. Finally, he removed his sticky shirt and looped the binocular strap over his shoulder while his boss watched from a short distance. Suarez was a good climber and shimmied up one of the tree’s external roots to a point where several of the roots converged and perched. Leading with his machete, Costa had slowly moved into the deep grass in front of the tree. Suarez surveyed the forest quickly and then a second time with the binoculars. No sign of the guards. The grass swayed slightly near Costa though there was no breeze. The air was still and steamy. Sweat streamed off the bill of Costa’s tattered cap as he methodically swept his machete in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” Suarez shouted.

  “I don’t know. I just think I should be doing something. You see anything?”

  Suarez saw that the grass around Costa had started to move. Costa saw it, too. He took it in quickly. He had a closer view, and it wasn’t that the grass was swaying but that something was jumping, like crickets. They were dark as shadows but remained just out of sight so that from a distance they posed no threat. Suarez also couldn’t hear what Costa heard or saw. What he heard was an indistinct noise that rose and fell like a distant surf. Stopping in his tracks, he saw that the wave motion had surrounded him and that the sound grew more distinct as the wave seemed to expand outward even as it drew closer to him. In his search for the missing guards, he’d forgotten that the expedition was looking for insects that looked like cockroaches but weren’t. He felt his heart race and looked behind him at Suarez in the tree, who was recording the scene with his smartphone.

  “Hey, old man …” Suarez shouted, but stopped in mid-sentence. Looking through the LCD, he thought he could see things jumping or flying out of the grass. Small, dark things.

  “Help me,” Costa pleaded as the grass around him suddenly bubbled with activity. A shiver ran down his spine as he turned around and started to move quickly the way he had come. As if by command, a cloud of insects flew out of the wavy grass landing on his head, his arms and shoulders, and from below hundreds more leaped or climbed his bare legs. Panic came quickly. The insects were using their forelegs to chop into his flesh, causing tiny spurts of blood, digging deeper with each blow, raising more blood. Almost from the start, several attached themselves to his face and attacked his eyes, mouth and nose, their bodies blocking his nostrils so that he had to breathe through his mouth, which was their goal, as no sooner did he gasp for air than several flew into his mouth like bats entering a cave. Stumbling, unable to see, he ran into a tree ten meters from Suarez’ perch and fell to the ground. Like a dark, quivering wave, thousands of the bugs swarmed over him, attacking every centimeter of his body, crawling under his clothes, chopping through the fabric until his shorts were reduced to bloody rags.

  Somehow Costa pushed himself to his feet. Blood dripped like sweat from his bare upper torso. A terrified Antonio Suarez watched helplessly as his boss screamed.

  “Antonio, Antonio, help me! They are killing me!” the tortured guide squealed, barely loud enough to be heard.

  “Run, run!” Suarez urged, watching through the phone’s LCD screen. He could think of nothing else to say. It was like watching a movie. Because of the limitations of the lens, Costa seemed farther away, less distinct than with the naked eye. Suarez could not take his eyes off the screen. He didn’t notice that the camera was running.

  Costa vomited as bugs entered his mouth and made their way into his esophagus, some stopping to butcher his cheeks and tongue. He tried to pull out the bugs that plugged his nostrils but succeeded only in tearing them in half. The bugs were hitting him in a hundred places, and all he could do was to deal with them one at a time. They’d squeezed through his anus in a phalanx and busied themselves with chopping up his colon. They turned his eyes into a dripping, gelatinous mass, oozing blood and aqueous humor. He understood now that he was covered in a thick blanket of tiny killing machines.

  He felt them crawling inside him, digging at his organs, chomping on his flesh, eating him alive until he fell to the ground writhing, a steady stream of warm blood flowing from his anus. Blinded, blood foaming from his mouth, he lay in a heap, unable to scream, the pain suddenly diminishing as life oozed out of him.

  And then he was done; while the bugs’ work had only started.

  43

  Suarez spent the fitful night shivering in the tree. The forest cooled, and a steady breeze came up that made him regret taking his shirt off. Before darkness fell, he saw that the ground was still saturated with insects, and he prayed that they would not find him. It didn’t help that the forest was eerily quiet, and his boss was being devoured by an army of bugs. And it didn’t help that they chopped and chewed incessantly, one group being replaced by another as they fed, hour after hour.

  He feared everything about them. The whirring of their wings, the chatter of a thousand tiny chopping limbs scared him to death. He shook with fear. Fear of them. Fear of falling out of the tree. Fear of being eaten alive. He prayed against the fear and prayed that they would not find him.

  Suarez snapped out of his fur
tive sleep before sunrise and waited until there was enough light to get a good view of the ground. As far as he could tell, the bugs were gone. He was grateful that he couldn’t see Costa’s body from his perch in the Cashapona.

  After lowering himself, Suarez put on his shirt, collected his gear and moved quickly in the direction from which he’d come. For him, the expedition was over. His boss, his friend, was dead. If Costa’s wife asked him, he would tell that he’d had a heart attack before the bugs devoured him. He wouldn’t go into details. She would find out from the undertaker. He’d tell her that he was dead, and then the bugs devoured him. That would set her mind at rest.

  But that wasn’t what he focused on. He wanted so bad to get back to Mr. Howard that he broke into a jog and kept it up for a half mile before the adrenaline drained, and he stopped to catch his breath. Sunlight flickered throughout the forest, and the humidity and heat were rising. Sweat soaked into his shirt just as it had yesterday, but he had no intention of removing it. He wanted today to be completely separate from yesterday. When he saw Duncan, he’d tell him what happened and that they had to turn back. He told himself it was a matter for the police now that Costa was dead. Of course, he didn’t know about the skeleton Duncan’s group had found.

  44

  Duncan waited until mid-afternoon and, when the guides hadn’t returned, he led his group down the primitive trail that Costa and Suarez had followed. Several members of the group complained to Boyd about the pace, which he initially ignored until he saw how far they had stretched out behind him. He felt sorry for Azevedo, who was bringing up the rear, his face a bright red and glistening with sweat. Boyd waited for the professor and asked how he was feeling.

  “Not so good,” Azevedo said, wiping his face. “I thought I was better prepared for this, but I’m afraid the heat and humidity are having an effect.”

  Returning to Duncan, who seemed to be putting more distance between himself and the others, Boyd suggested they look for a place to make camp. Duncan looked at his watch.

  “There’s plenty of daylight,” he said.

  “Yeah, but the professor isn’t doing so well.”

  Duncan stopped and looked behind him. He was surprised at how far away the others were.

  “I think the humidity and heat are getting to them,” Boyd said. “We just passed a little clearing that looked like a good place to spend the night. See, right where Rankin and Peeples are, to the left.”

  Duncan was reluctant to retreat though what he could see in front of him was unsuitable as a campsite. Then he noticed Azevedo bending over in the middle of the trail, vomiting.

  “OK, OK,” he said quickly. “We’ll go back and make camp. I was just trying to go a little farther, but you’re right. We don’t want to kill the professor.”

  After finding the corpse, Duncan had put Boyd in charge of the satellite phone with the understanding that he would try to make a call at every opportunity. Though Boyd tried multiple times, he was unable to complete a call. At first, he blamed the forest canopy. However, even in clearings, he was unable to get a signal. He started to curse the phone. The phone’s self-test software showed that it was functioning properly. Still, he couldn’t make a call. It didn’t take long for him to reach the limit of his understanding of how satellite phones work. Although now he felt he should have learned more about the phone, his boss hadn’t required it. He made a mental note that when he became a famous field researcher and academic, he’d require his assistant to have a full understanding of satellite phones. When Duncan asked about the phone, Boyd shook his head and told him he couldn’t make it work. Duncan held his hand out, and Boyd handed the phone to him. Moments later, Duncan tried to make calls but was unable to connect. He fiddled with it momentarily, as if he expected to do what his assistant couldn’t.

  That night, their tents arranged in a semicircle facing a large campfire, they watched through openings in the canopy as flashes of lightning lit up the sky. The storm was closer than it had been yesterday and the day before. Rankin and Johnson thought they could hear thunder. Nobody else did.

  And then it rained for several hours, not heavily but steady. Johnson and Boyd got soaked installing their tent’s fly. At Duncan’s urging, the others had done so before the rain hit. For the others, it was hard not to hear Boyd and Johnson cursing as they struggled in the rainy darkness, even though each wore a headlamp. Back in the tent, they had to strip their clothes off and try to dry themselves the best they could using chamois-like towels. It was good to be dry, especially with the temperature in the eighties and humidity at one hundred percent.

  45

  Duncan broke camp early after a hurried breakfast of instant oatmeal and instant coffee. The forest floor was wet and muddy in places, the humidity undiminished. They shook out the tents and packed them while they were damp, but Duncan was acutely aware that time was running out, that the expedition was supposed to take only a week and that they were near the halfway point. With the discovery of the body, Maggie Cross and George Hamel thought they should turn back and made their opinions known to Duncan in private.

  “Are we really going to continue?” Cross asked skeptically.

  “Of course,” Duncan responded quickly. “Why not?”

  “What about the body we found?” Hamel interjected.

  “What good would it do if we turn back now? We’ve got only another day, and we’ll have to turn back anyway.”

  “What about the body?” Hamel insisted.

  “This is not the first body. You know that. There was the poor fellow at the cabin.”

  “We didn’t see that body,” Cross said. “It wasn’t real. Now it’s real.”

  “You’re worried about your safety?” Duncan asked.

  “Of course,” Cross said.

  “Definitely,” Hamel agreed. “Here we are, our guards have deserted us …”

  “And where are our guides?” Cross added.

  Duncan hadn’t expected this resistance, and his frustration was growing quickly. He resented the criticism. He thought he’d been doing the right thing. It wasn’t his fault that the satellite phone wasn’t working and that some guy and his dog stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time. It made him wonder about the efficacy of inviting nonscientists to participate in an expedition, though he knew that the expedition wouldn’t have happened without Cross’ money. He wondered if any of the others had similar concerns, and whether he should bring it out into the open for a vote. He thought Boyd would support him, and he couldn’t imagine the students doing otherwise for fear of the consequences to their academic careers. It was a gamble to bring it up, but he felt it was the only way to end the discussion without upsetting Cross. What Hamel thought didn’t matter to Duncan, since he considered him to be Cross’ companion and nothing more.

  Without telling Cross and Hamel, he gestured and called for the others to approach him. Everyone had finished packing, and some came forward with their cups filled with the last of the coffee. Sizing them up, Duncan thought they all looked tired, their clothes heavily wrinkled, their shirts sweaty, their hair unkempt but partially hidden under floppy hats.

  The vote went as Duncan expected—four in favor of continuing, two opposed. Duncan abstained. Wasting no time, the group took the trail used by the guides, and presumably the guards.

  Suarez reached them at mid-morning, covered in sweat and catching his breath.

  “Mr. Howard,” he repeated several times as he drew near, “Javier is dead!”

  Duncan stopped in his tracks. A look of disbelief crossed his face like a shadow. At first, no one said anything. They exchanged looks, tried to ascertain how everyone else was feeling about this. And then they started to buzz. They surrounded Suarez as he caught up with Duncan.

  “It’s true, Mr. Howard; Javier is dead. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  Reaching into his pocket, he held out his pho
ne.

  “Here, you can see for yourself. Look at the video.”

  Duncan glanced at his group, each of their faces expressing some form of concern. He wished he had time to think. But he didn’t. He reached for Suarez’ phone. The screen was filled with an image of a man taken from a distance and overhead. Duncan started to move away from the group, but they stayed with him, as did Suarez. He sighed and started the video. The progress bar was about a quarter of the way from the starting point. He could see that the man was jumping and flailing his arms as if trying to bat away mosquitoes. Everyone squeezed around Duncan for a better view of the tiny screen. Suarez reached in to increase the sound. Now they could hear muffled screams and shouts.

  “Is he calling for help? I can’t tell,” Maggie Cross asked.

  “He’s calling in Portuguese,” Boyd said. “He’s saying ‘me ajude’.”

  “Help me,” Allison Peeples said helpfully.

  “I can’t tell what’s happening,” George Hamel said, frustrated by the fact he didn’t understand a word of Portuguese and that others were blocking his view.

  “Sir,” Suarez said coldly, “my friend is dying.”

  “Dying of what?” Hamel asked as he pushed himself into position for a better view.

  “The bugs are killing him,” Boyd said matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t see any bugs,” Hamel said.

  Neither could anyone else. The man was too far away to make out details, but it was clear that he was frantic, much like the man in the video taken by the Labrador’s owner. All but Suarez and Fernando Azevedo were transfixed. Suarez moved away, upset with Hamel’s questions, which he considered disrespectful. Azevedo joined him, and they spoke quietly in Portuguese. Suarez explained what had happened, how he had spent a terrible night in a tree while the ground swarmed with bugs and how he did nothing to help his boss despite his pleas.