Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle

by Tim Downs

  Then one of the men said something that shut the mouth of every man in the room. He said he had seen an agricultural pamphlet from one of the American seed companies; the pamphlet said that Americans were now using corn to make ethanol—a chemical they could burn in their automobiles. Everyone laughed at the man—until he pulled the pamphlet from his pocket and showed them. The pamphlet said the Americans thought they were too dependent on foreign oil, and they wanted to develop alternative sources of fuel. Someone had discovered a way to turn corn into alcohol, so precious land that once grew edible corn was now being used to grow corn that could only be used for fuel. It was true—horribly, unthinkably true: The Americans were now burning food while Africa was starving.

  Jengo was startled by a sudden noise—he heard a rustling in the fields just ahead of him. He thought it might be a neighbor’s cow or ass that had wandered into his fields—but then he heard a human voice. He quickly squeezed through two rows of stalks and surprised a man, a woman, and a little boy, each clutching two ears of corn.

  Jengo looked at the man and his wife. They were terribly thin; their clothes hung from their limbs like rags on a clothesline. Their faces were drawn, almost skeletal, and their eyes seemed large but strangely dull and lifeless.

  Now Jengo looked down at the little boy. His arms and legs were so thin that Jengo could see the bulge of his knees and elbows. He was barely dressed—he was barefoot with just a loincloth wrapped around his waist. Above the cloth, the little boy’s belly was so distended from hunger that it looked as if he had swallowed a hornets’ nest whole. Jengo couldn’t take his eyes off the boy’s belly. He knew about hunger, of course—what Ethiopian didn’t? He had heard about the strange phenomenon that occurs when the diet is so low in protein that the fluid from the blood all drains into the belly and forces it to swell. But it seemed impossible. His arms, his legs, his rib cage were all so thin—it was as though they were all being swallowed up by a belly that could never be filled. Maybe that was what was happening to all of Central Africa—to Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan. Maybe all of their countries were just shriveling limbs that would soon dry up and disappear.

  And Americans are burning food.

  The little boy stared up at Jengo, but Jengo felt too ashamed to look back.

  Jengo took off his shirt and spread it out on the ground. He began to cut ears of corn and stack them in the center of the cloth.

  Jengo felt a squeeze on his left hand; he looked over and saw his wife’s smiling face. Mena nodded at the stage and he looked—the dance was over and his daughter was taking a bow.

  19

  When Nick turned the key he found his laboratory door already unlocked. He pushed the door open and saw Pasha Semenov standing in front of the rearing chamber with the glass front raised high.

  Pasha looked back over his shoulder. “Good morning.”

  “You get started early,” Nick said. “I’m usually the first one here.”

  “I am a farmer,” Pasha said. “I get up with the chickens.”

  “I get up with the worms,” Nick said. “They beat the early birds every time.”

  Nick saw Pasha slide the left terrarium back into place. “You don’t need to bother with those specimens,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “Manduca sexta—tobacco hornworms.”

  “I am not familiar with that insect.”

  “You’re a corn farmer—you don’t need to be. North Carolina is tobacco country; they’re very familiar around here. Has there been anything new in the last couple of days? Any signs of migration? Third-instar maggots crawling out of the cups and burrowing into the vermiculite?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let’s keep a close eye on them,” Nick said. “If you’ve got a minute, I’ll show you how to tell when a maggot’s about to pupate—then you won’t have to watch as closely.”

  “Perhaps another time. I should be going.”

  “Busy season?”

  “Yes, very busy.”

  “How’s your research going?”

  “Good.” He offered nothing more.

  “Well, thanks for the help,” Nick said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Thank you for the lessons,” Pasha said, hurrying for the door. “I will be back tonight.”

  Nick shook his head. Grad students, he thought. Poor guys—talk about the bottom of the food chain. They’re overworked, underpaid, and undervalued. Nick remembered his own days as a grad student at Penn State. The first year’s schedule was crammed with coursework and the classes were spread all over campus—entomology here, research statistics there, genetics on the opposite side of town. Then there was the undergraduate course you taught to offset your tuition, and maybe a teacher’s assistantship so you could spend your evenings grading papers and composing the next day’s pop quiz. Then came the research—not just your own, but the research you did for your beloved faculty sponsor whose budget was footing your bill. Spring and summer were the worst months if your research had agricultural applications, because May through August was the growing season, and in those months you worked from sunup to sundown collecting your data. The winter months brought a slower schedule; that’s when you did your data analysis and writing and maybe even attended a couple of professional conferences if you could manage to scrape up the money.

  The effect of row spacing on the European corn borer—that’s what Pasha said he was here to research. That meant right now he was spending endless hours in the cornfields in the sweltering August heat, carefully counting insect populations before the final corn harvest. Nick couldn’t imagine anything more boring. At least he picked the right faculty adviser—Sherm Pettigrew is about as boring as the human species gets.

  He had to hand it to the Russian, though—at least he wasn’t afraid of hard work. When Nick was working on his own PhD there was no course of study in forensic entomology—the degree didn’t yet exist. He had to make it up himself, piecing together a curriculum from a dozen different departments, auditing courses in pathology at the med school, and supplementing his classroom knowledge with visits to the county morgue and his own original research. But Nick knew that’s how education works: Ultimately, you get out of it only what you’re willing to put in. Apparently Mr. Semenov knew it too. Good for him, Nick thought.

  Nick pulled the terrarium on the right closer. Pasha was correct—there were no signs of migration yet, though the maggots were clearly in their third and final instar and some of them were already beginning to darken in color. It wouldn’t be long until pupation, and all that would be left then would be waiting for the adults to emerge.

  He pushed the terrarium back and glanced through the glass side of the second terrarium—the one containing the green Manduca maggots. To his astonishment, the terrarium on the left appeared to be empty. He pulled it closer and looked down through the lid. It wasn’t empty at all; every single larva in the terrarium had climbed the glass sides and was clinging by its mandible to the screen top.

  And they were all dead.

  Nick couldn’t believe his eyes. He had replaced the moldy marijuana with a pile of fresh leaves from Kathryn’s tomato plants, and the ravenous hornworms had begun to eagerly devour them just as he expected. A larva never migrates until it’s ready for pupation; it spends its entire prepupal life stuffing itself with food to give it the energy it needs to develop into an adult. What would cause the larvae to abandon their precious food supply and scale the glass sides of the terrarium—and all at the same time? It made no sense. The larvae had developed normally, growing more than an inch in length, and in the next few days they should have doubled in size again—but they were dead. What killed them? A number of common pesticides would do it—but what would make them climb like this first?

  Nick carefully lifted the screen top from the terrarium and carried it to a table, then gently tapped the lid until several of the dead larvae released their grip and dropped off. He bent down to study them—and something imm
ediately caught his eye.

  Whoa.

  He adjusted his glasses and looked closer. His lenses weren’t strong enough—he needed more magnification. He took a magnifying loupe from a desk drawer and held it over one of the insects.

  There it was—a tiny, shootlike structure growing from the back of the insect’s head. It looked like a tiny bean sprout, no more than half an inch in length, with a little bulblike tip. He checked the other larvae; they were all afflicted with the same strange growth.

  “Nicholas?”

  Nick looked up and saw Noah Ellison standing at the door. Nick urgently waved him in. “Noah—come here, quick.”

  “Nicholas, I’m here to remind you that we have a brief faculty meeting scheduled for nine a.m. I sent you an e-mail reminder, but I know you never read them.”

  “Noah, come here.”

  “When you actually showed up for our graduate student reception, I allowed myself to hope against hope that you had somehow been rehabilitated and would now begin to keep your appointments. Then I came to my senses.”

  “Noah, would you get over here and look at this?”

  The old man shuffled across the lab and Nick handed him the loupe. He bent down and examined the larvae.

  “Well?”

  “Manduca sexta,” Noah said. “Tobacco hornworms, probably in their third instar.”

  “I know what they are, Noah. Look at the head—right where it joins the first abdominal segment.”

  The old man looked again. “That’s very odd. It would appear to be some sort of parasitic growth—a fungus perhaps.”

  “That’s what I thought. Can you identify it?”

  “I’m afraid it’s outside my specialty.”

  “I’ve seen that parasite somewhere before—I know I have.” Nick began to stare off into space.

  “I hate to interrupt you when you’re engaged in thought like this, but—the faculty meeting?”

  “Noah, I can’t stop now. I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Nicholas, you’re always ‘in the middle of something.’ If I wait until you have nothing to do, you’ll never attend a meeting of any kind.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me.”

  Noah glared at him over the top of his glasses. “Nine o’clock, in the faculty commons. That is my plan.”

  Nick slumped in his chair in the faculty commons and stared blankly across the table. He was vaguely aware of forms gesturing around him, but he saw no faces and heard no sounds. All the lights were off in his mental house except for one bare bulb, and right now that bulb was focused on a mass of dead larvae afflicted by some unknown parasite.

  “Nicholas?”

  Nick’s consciousness snapped back like a recoiling rubber band. “What?”

  “I need to ask you a question, Nicholas.”

  Nick sat up straight and slapped his hand on the table. “I agree—Sherm Pettigrew should be immediately dismissed from the faculty. It’s a bold move, but I think we’ve all seen this coming.”

  Pettigrew rolled his eyes. “Very amusing, Dr. Polchak.”

  “Nicholas, we aren’t discussing Dr. Pettigrew.”

  “Well, we should be. This department has to have some standards. What if word leaks out that he works here? Even insects won’t come around anymore.”

  Pettigrew turned to Noah in disdain. “I don’t know why you bother waking him. He never has anything productive to contribute anyway.”

  “Nicholas, you’ll be happy to know that the faculty meeting is just about over—so try to stay with us for a moment, will you? I was just mentioning to the group that Barbara and I are hosting a cocktail party on Saturday. Members of the faculty from various departments will be attending, and I was just about to ask if anyone from our department would like to attend. Not a fancy affair; just an intimate soiree.”

  Pettigrew did a double take. “You woke Dr. Polchak up for that? Why? I’ve never known Dr. Polchak to attend a social function in all the years I’ve been here.”

  “Have you attended these functions?” Nick asked.

  “I most certainly have.”

  “Well, that explains it.”

  “Gentlemen, please. Barbara has requested a head count so she can plan the hors d’oeuvres. Dr. Griggs from the Department of Mathematics will be attending; so will Dr. Sandberg from the Chemistry department. I’ve also received an RSVP from Dr. Lumpkin in the Department of Crop Sciences.” Noah paused for a moment. “Come to think of it, Nicholas, you might be interested in meeting Dr. Lumpkin.”

  “Why?”

  “Dr. Lumpkin is a mycologist.”

  Nick raised his hand. “I’m in.”

  Pettigrew did his second double take of the day. “Dr. Polchak, did I just hear you accept an invitation to a social gathering?”

  “I’m just a social butterfly,” Nick said. “What would you expect from an entomologist?”

  “How many will be in your party, Nicholas?”

  Nick blinked. “Party?”

  “It’s a social gathering,” Pettigrew said. “I believe the word social comes to us from the Latin socius, meaning ‘companion’—as in, will you be bringing one?”

  Nick leaned across the table to Noah. “Party of two.”

  Pettigrew grinned. “Will wonders never cease? Dr. Polchak, I wasn’t aware that you even had a companion. I wonder who this mystery woman could be?”

  Good question, Nick thought.

  20

  Pasha steered his Boxster into the parking lot of Carolina Insectary and skidded to a stop, then swung his legs over the side of the car like a gymnast dismounting from the parallel bars. He threw open a metal fire door marked private: employees only and charged into the building.

  Jengo and Habib looked up as he entered the room.

  Pasha headed straight for Habib.

  “The incubators will serve well,” Habib said. “All we have to do is—”

  Pasha reached him before he could finish the sentence. Without breaking stride he backhanded Habib across the jaw, sending him sprawling backward onto the concrete floor. When Habib attempted to sit up, Pasha planted one foot in the center of his chest and shoved him back down again.

  Jengo timidly approached. “Why do you do this, Pasha? What is wrong?”

  Pasha reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag. Inside it was a small dead larva with a tiny growth protruding from the back of its head. He tossed the bag to Jengo. “That is what is wrong.”

  Jengo held the bag up to the light and immediately recognized the insect. “Where did you get this?”

  “From a laboratory at the university.”

  “How did it get there?”

  Pasha jammed his heel into Habib’s breastbone. “I was hoping our friend could tell us.”

  Habib was unable to speak.

  Pasha finally removed his foot, allowing Habib to regain his breath and struggle to a sitting position. Pasha took the bag from Jengo and dropped it into Habib’s lap. “Well?”

  Habib looked at the specimen in horror. “But how—”

  “This hornworm was found in a tomato field. It must have arrived in the shipment—the shipment that you sent, Habib. The question is, why is this insect infected with the fungus?”

  Habib began to pout angrily. “I told you—it was a jungle. The conditions were deplorable. I had to share my laboratory with barbarians. I had to do all my work in one small space—my work on both the insects and the fungus.”

  “The fungus was not to be present until the second phase of our test,” Pasha said. “The first test was only to determine if the insects would survive shipment. Was this not clear to you?”

  “The shipment must have become contaminated. I was working with a fungus in a very small area—the spores, they drift. I couldn’t help it—it was an accident.”

  “Chernobyl was an accident,” Pasha said. “That excuse did not satisfy the dead. There were two other shipments, Habib. Were they also contaminated?”


  “I don’t know,” Habib said. “I prepared them on separate days. Perhaps not.”

  “Perhaps not,” Pasha repeated.

  “What does it matter? The other shipments did not even arrive.”

  “They did not arrive because they were intercepted,” Pasha said. “Right now someone from the Drug Enforcement Administration may be looking at your clever little fungus, wondering what it is and where it came from.”

  “There is no danger,” Habib said, climbing to his feet. “The toxin was not present.”

  “There is danger, thanks to your clumsiness. This specimen was collected by an entomologist—a professor at the university. I know this man; he is a very curious fellow, and he will want to know why a fungus from Asia has infected an ordinary hornworm.”

  Jengo grew more agitated as he listened. “What if this man knows already? What if we are discovered?”

  “There is nothing to know,” Habib scolded. “You two are a couple of old women. What if this man does identify the fungus? What will that tell him? I tell you, without the toxin he knows nothing.”

  Pasha gave him a searing stare. “Listen to me, fool. Our plan was for the eggs to be delivered; then the insects would hatch; then the fungus would do its work; then the toxin would be released, and by the time the toxin did its work the insects that carried it would have long since died and withered away. Did you not understand this? There would have been no trace of our delivery method—no connection to us. Now there is a possible link. Now I may have to deal with this man.”

  Jengo’s eyes widened. “What do you mean, ‘deal with this man’?”

  Pasha turned to him and forced a smile. “Never mind, Jengo. Perhaps I have been too harsh on Habib. We are all under pressure, yes? Let me worry about this man. We must each focus on our own responsibilities. What remains to be done?”

  “Only replication,” Jengo said. “To produce this fungus in such quantity . . .”