by Stone, Naomi
“If you’ve made other plans for today I can take a project home to work on.”
“No, no. I need our outings to keep me inspired,” Aggie assured her. “Hank stopped by to surprise me with some donuts for breakfast.”
“You said you love the filled ones, and there’s a bakery near me.” Hank’s smile kept a fine balance between humility and self-satisfaction.
“And they’re delicious.” Aggie gestured Gloria toward the box of remaining pastries. “We got to talking about our expeditions and Hank tells me he’s never been to the Sculpture Garden.”
“You’re kidding.” Gloria picked out an apple fritter from the box. “We can’t let that stand uncorrected.” She turned her biggest smile on Hank. “You have to come with us. We can show you around.”
* * * *
“Bring them along the path of the winding water. Thereafter, go north along the chain of lakes,” Elysha commanded the motley assemblage of her underlings. They gathered, nearly invisible, in the shadows of the dripping undergrowth in the hour before dawn. The rain had ceased, leaving the parklands wet, but not so wet as to keep the swarm from flight.
It took some effort for her minions to hold the legions of whining insects in check, confining them to smaller prey, waiting for the right moment to release them to best effect. Now the moment drew near. The Hero couldn’t be in as many places at once as could the members of so large a swarm. He wouldn’t be able to save everyone. While he was occupied in the vain attempt, Elysha would strike at her other target.
The undergrowth rustled and stirred as if a gale wind blew there, but no wind stirred in the upper limbs of the surrounding trees. The scales of a thousand insectile wings glistened in the shadows of leaf and branch.
* * * *
Maybe he’d stop at the computer lab later. Greg stowed the few groceries he’d bought while out on his morning ride. He hated to let much more of the morning pass without making a patrol as Wonder Guy. He had a bad feeling, which had only grown since the incident with the dinosaurs, and had gone to orange alert status since the incident with the disappearing dogs last night.
Part of the problem lay in the niggling suspicion that he was part of the problem. Men weren’t supposed to have superpowers like his, any more than living dinosaurs were supposed to appear in the middle of a twenty-first century city, or any more than pit bulls were supposed to disappear between one moment and the next. The universe didn’t work that way. If magic had laws, he didn’t understand them and knowing as much made him nervous. Magic was afoot, and while some of it might be beneficent, some of it clearly represented an opposing force, the fairy godmothers’ enemy mentioned by Serafina. What had they called her? He had no way of knowing where their enemy would strike next.
He stashed a carton of eggs and a couple of replacement cans of Mountain Dew in his fridge and folded away the empty reusable nylon grocery bags.
Should he contact Serafina? So far he hadn’t found her explanations of any of this very illuminating. He needed more to go on. He hadn’t known nearly enough about this enemy–only that he was supposed to draw her into the open. Okay, he’d do a patrol, go out there and make himself visible, face whatever trouble reared its misshapen head.
Greg exited the garage and, making sure there were no witnesses, said, “Super-ize me.” He took a flying leap in full superhero costume, soared up, among and beyond the leafy branches of neighborhood trees, past a chattering squirrel, and sent a flock of sparrows spiraling up in alarm. He angled back toward the neighborhood where the pit bulls had disappeared. It should be easier by daylight to pick up clues as to how the dogs had managed their disappearing canine act.
His headset beeped. “Young man,” Serafina’s voice broke through. “Please hurry to the lake called Harriet at once. The situation is dire.”
“On my way. What is it?” Greg replied as he veered in midair, turning west to where the lake lay below like an enormous, polished aquamarine, set in its band of deep green woods.
“We can’t see the enemy’s magics.” Serafina’s voice sounded thin and faded into the wind whipping past his ears. “But waves of terror and pain have erupted there.”
At the lake shore people ran frantically in all directions, taking shelter wherever they could find it, darting behind trees and cars, under picnic tables, diving into the lake and below the water.
What scared them? A droning thrummed through the air. He waved his hand to brush aside some mosquitoes and gaped as the true scale of things sprang into perspective. Not tiny insects near him, but enormous mosquitoes, flying far below, near ground level.
A mosquito the size of a full-grown man darted around a tree and cling with all six legs to a woman crouching behind the trunk.
As the mosquito’s proboscis plunged toward the intended victim, Wonder Guy’s heat vision lanced the distance, frying the monster’s brain in its casing. Dead, the mosquito’s six attenuated legs loosened and the woman scrambled free.
Thousands of the giant insects darted everywhere. Greg had to deal with one at a time. He concentrated on individuals in danger and picked off their attackers one by one. True, original bloodsuckers. Talk about vampires.
A sturdily built, gray-haired man ran full tilt along a path winding toward residential streets as a huge mosquito zoomed after him and swooped in from behind, its legs grasping, its proboscis extended.
Greg hit it with his heat vision straight between the bulging eyes, frying the insect’s brain, producing a satisfying sound, “Zap.” So, that’s where the comics got it. A bundle of legs and wings collapsed to the path.
A mosquito flew at a boy and girl in swimsuits. They raced toward a woman beckoning them from the open door of a car. The children’s kite trailed by its string, still held in one chubby hand. The insect entangled in the string, ripped it from its owner’s hand and dove for the children.
Zap. Another one down. The kite sailed away into the sky.
A young couple huddled under a picnic table on which crawled two monstrous bloodsuckers, while three circled above, droning like dentist drills.
Zap. Zap. Zap, zap, zap. The dry corpses hit table and turf with sounds like the rasping of cornhusks.
People ran in every direction from giant mosquitoes. Zap, zap, zap. The swarm seemed endless. As if caught in an out-of-control video game, Greg lost count of his kills. He soared higher to get more of them in his sights. Zap. Zap, zap, zap. The acrid scent of fried mosquito singed the air as if he’d stuck his nose in a giant bug-zapper. He turned this way and that, blasting one after another with his heat vision. A stream of insects followed victims onto residential streets. Zap. Zappity, zappity, zap, zap, zap. The empty husks hit the road and rolled, inspiring drivers to slam on their brakes.
More winged monstrosities hovered above the water, threatening swimmers who dared to rise for a breath. A swath of heat vision cut them from the air to fall into the placid waters.
Probably only minutes passed before the swarming mosquitoes vanished from the area. Good. Odd. He hadn’t killed nearly enough of them to eliminate the threat. He glanced around, and spotted the threatening cloud of the swarm heading north from the lake, toward the heart of the city.
Chapter 18
The widespread terror pleased Elysha. Confronted with their ancient enemy grown to monstrous size, the residents of the city fled in panic. Some fought. Many of the boaters and those near the landing seized paddles, wielding them as weapons, smashing insects out of the air. The ferocity of these defenders pleased her nearly as well as did the fear of those who fled.
She cloaked herself in the shadows of a wooded section of shoreline while she directed her swarming creatures, relishing the waves of horror.
A tall woman, wearing a halter-top with jeans, screamed when a hovering six-foot mosquito grasped the bare flesh of her arm with yards-long legs and struck into her flesh. It drew blood into its proboscis until a young man seized a long wooden paddle from a nearby canoe and used it to crush the fragile
exoskeleton of the beast.
No problem for Elysha. She had hundreds, if not thousands more, and the scent of spilled blood maddened her creatures. They darted after the fleeing humans, heedless of a new source of destruction when it fell upon them. When large numbers of her swarm rained from the sky, blasted from above, Elysha scanned the heavens. The pain and deaths of her own creatures produced as much pleasure for her as did that of the human victims, but this came too soon.
Him. She wasn’t ready for him. The Pederson woman wasn’t here yet with the weapon.
But there, an emanation from the north, the energy signature of her other target. Time to beat a strategic retreat here, but this withdrawal allowed her to go after the young woman who’d eluded her last night. There’d be no easy end for the girl this time. She must be taken. The girl must be punished for the pain she’d inflicted on Elysha. Briefly, she relished the vicious tang evoked simply by imagining how it would feel to wring every possible drop of misery from the troublesome young woman before she died.
* * * *
“That’d go with one hell of a sundae,” Hank commented, rocking back on his heels. He stared up at the twelve-hundred-pound, bright red aluminum cherry poised above them on its massive spoon.
“I can’t believe you’ve never seen it before.” Gloria stood beside Aggie’s chair as Hank paced around, getting different angles on the sculpture.
“Not live and in person. I’ve seen photos. Don’t do it justice.” He grinned, showing strong, even teeth.
“Now I can’t help picturing your giant sundae,” Gloria admitted.
“We’d be in the middle of it.” Aggie gestured around them, to the surrounding lawn, right at the edge of the pool below the spoon bridge. “And I wouldn’t care to be scooped up along with the cherry.”
“What’s that noise?” Gloria lifted her head, looking around. Not the ordinary noise of traffic from Hennepin Avenue running along the eastern edge of the sculpture garden. “Kind of a high whining, like the world’s biggest mosquito.” She laughed with her companions. Looking up, she caught sight of what seemed at first a low, fast-moving cloud front. Then it resolved into individual elements and she soon made out their shapes. “Speak of the devil,” she whispered, too stunned at first to register the danger.
“Holy crap.” Move now. Gawk later. She turned to Aggie and Hank, gesturing to the south. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“What is it?” Aggie twisted to look. “Good heavens! It can’t be.”
“We’d better get under cover whether it can be or not.” Hank moved behind Aggie, and pushed her chair back toward the Walker Arts Center, which seemed impossibly far away, through the courtyards and across the road fronting the museum building.
“The conservatory would be closer.” Gloria moved beside them, but they’d only gone a few paces, not much closer to either destination, when the chair stopped short, causing Aggie to lurch forward and Hank to curse.
“What now?” Gloria bent and looked at the wheels. The right front wheel sat at an angle to the others, an angle she recognized. “Oh crap.” The same wheel had gotten stuck before.
The droning sounded louder. Screams and shouts pierced the air and some other patrons of the arts ran for cover, back toward the Walker and the shelter of its solid walls, into the face of the impossible, threatening swarm. Others ran toward the conservatory where palm trees grew even through the harsh Minnesota winters, and a giant, glass-scaled fish reared up on its tail, poised forever in mid-leap. Yet others sought shelter among the many sculptures.
Gloria knelt beside Aggie’s chair. She had managed to loosen the wheel before. She just needed to joggle it...
“Leave it,” Aggie protested. “Leave me! Get out of here, Gloria. Run for it.”
“It’s okay.” Hank bent over Aggie. “Leave the chair. I’ve got her. The greenhouse isn’t far.”
Aggie looked at first as if she’d protest this too, then sighed and lifted her arms to Hank.
The swarm filled the sky directly above them. Gloria looked frantically for something to fend off the monstrous insects diving at them and seized the umbrella hooked over the back of Aggie’s chair before she hurried after Hank. Aggie never went out without her trusty bumbershoot. “Rust, just what it takes to make this chair perfect,” she’d say.
Gloria wielded the umbrella like a sword and darted forward in time to counter the thrust of a three-foot mosquito proboscis aimed at Aggie, who clung helplessly to Hank. Gloria flanked her companions as Hank moved toward the dubious refuge of the conservatory. Already cracks appeared in the glass panes of its walls, where the giant mosquitoes crashed against them in pursuit of people who fled there for safety. The panes were large enough for the mosquitoes to squeeze through if enough of the glass was broken.
She opened the umbrella in the face of one after another of the determined insects diving at them as she guarded Hank’s back. Screams sounded on every side, along with the wailing of small children. Gloria checked the impulse to run to the defense of a six-year old girl who took shelter under a table of sandstone blocks. She couldn’t abandon Aggie. The child seemed safe in her refuge. Gloria batted aside another thrusting, needle-sharp proboscis.
* * * *
Greg followed the retreating swarm, flying above them, picking off the stragglers and out-fliers with blasts of heat vision. Retreating? No. This swarm hadn’t come from downtown. It wasn’t returning there. They advanced. Did they have some target in mind? Where? Just how intelligent were they?
He could aim for the center of the swarm, destroy more of the monsters at once in the swaths of heat blasting from his eyes, but then he’d have smaller swarms going off in every direction threatening who-knew-how many people before he could track them down. No, better do it this way. Make sure they stayed together and pick them off from the edges of the swarm.
The man-sized mosquitoes flew lower when they neared Loring Park and the surrounding area. Not until they began a diving run did their target become clear: the sculpture garden north of the Walker Art Center. What the hell? Did the mosquitoes have something against modern three-dimensional art and its patrons?
People ran helter-skelter among the sculptures, seeking shelter from the attack. Screams sounded shrilly from below.
A stout woman on the lawn near the giant spoon sculpture played tug of war with one of the enormous mosquitoes. With its attenuated, stick-like legs, the insect grasped a screaming toddler by the shoulders. The woman clung fiercely to the child’s legs, fighting to keep it from being hauled up and away.
Zap. Greg fried the brains of the kidnapper mosquito. The woman fell back, child clasped in her arms. Both scrambled away toward cover.
Zap. Zap. He fried the creature about to attack the woman from behind, striking with a proboscis as long and sharp as a sword.
Most people seemed to be faring pretty well, making it to the conservatory or the museum building ahead of the swarm. Some took refuge in the small Flatpak Visitor Center. Others crawled under or hid behind the sturdiest sculptures.
A man ran headlong at one of the punched steel panels forming part of a hedge and dove aside at the last instant. Three mosquitoes in close pursuit crashed into the panel, trapping their proboscises in the holes piercing the panel, leaving the creatures to struggle to free themselves, as they frantically lashed their long gossamer wings.
A wheelchair sat abandoned on the lawn between the spoon bridge and the conservatory. A man carrying a woman hurried toward refuge, and another woman followed, playing rear-guard, waving an umbrella at dive-bombing mosquitoes. Walking backward, she closed the umbrella to thrust it like a sword, parried a proboscis then opened it suddenly to thwart the forward rush of another attacker.
Greg zoomed in with Wonder Guy’s telescopic vision. My God. Gloria. Aggie. And who the hell is that, carrying Aggie away from her wheelchair?
He would have stumbled if he’d been afoot. Instead, he faltered in midair as the mosquitoes seemed to notice him f
or the first time. A phalanx broke from the swarm, rising to rush at him like blood-seeking missiles.
When he turned to face the attacking mosquitoes, he spotted another squadron acting in concert to surround Gloria.
With her attention turned to the enemy before her, others closed on Gloria from behind. Rather than strike for blood, four sets of impossibly long, thin limbs grasped her as others tore the umbrella from her grip.
Carried by the huge insects, like Dorothy in the grip of flying monkeys, Gloria rose helplessly into the air.
* * * *
Gloria’s senses reeled between vertigo and horror as she struggled frantically against the elongated legs dragging her away in their sticky grip. This couldn’t be happening. The repulsive insectile bodies had her shuddering, wincing, and choking back bile. The wriggling mouths and bulging abdominal segments pressed way too close to her cringing flesh. The drone of giant wings drowned all other sound.
It had to be a dream. If only. If only she had the refuge of unconsciousness as the bug-eyed monsters lifting her up and the earth fell away below. She had nothing but sympathy for the heroines of old movies who would swoon in the face of danger, but she couldn’t give up. She had to fight for all she was worth. She twisted and tore at the clutching limbs until more creatures secured her arms. She kicked against resilient abdominal segments and scaly exoskeletons. Thrashing wildly, Gloria shouted outrage when she wasn’t screaming in terror.
At least, she struggled until she looked down. The lawns and sculptures spread like a map below her. Far, far below. A fresh wave of vertigo dizzied her. Even if she managed to escape the clutches of her captors, she’d only be dashed to death on the tiled paths or the massive curves of the Henry Moore bronze now directly below. The scene shifted and spun, and now it looked like the Calder would be a good bet for impaling her. The whirling of the scene made her stomach swim in sickening waves. She closed her eyes and stiffened, ceasing her struggles, though she still cringed from the huge limbs holding her.