Invasive Species

The scene of the incident was nothing I hadn’t seen dozens of times before, but I never lost that spike of adrenaline as I climbed out of my heavily branded eCar and sauntered to the police tape hooked up around the drive of the suburban home. Two uniformed officers were loitering awkwardly to dissuade visitors from getting too close, the blues and reds from their black cruisers lighting up the neighbourhood, attracting the gawkers and gossipers with their smartphones held aloft.

“You the sanitiser they called in?” asked the nearest cop with a squint.

“What do you think?!” I replied sarcastically, my grey overalls, golden visor and stitched company logo unsubtle giveaways.

“It’s messy…” said the officer, ignoring my slight. “Two adults on the ground floor, two kids on the second.”

“And the nest?”

“Attic…”

I glanced up at the tiles on the roof, which, with their slate-like aesthetics, were impossible to distinguish as solar panels.

It was a typical detached house in a typical town street. It looked new, clean, and fresh from the blueprint – I’d say it had been lived in for no more than two years. Streets just like this one unravelled outward from the town centre, like branches, cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac, intermittently broken by parks, a school, a cluster of shops or a shelter to a bunker.

It was a standard middle-income house design. In the brochures, they called this one the homesteader. Builders were so used to making them that they didn’t need plans.

A silver panelled, family-sized commuter tram was sitting on dead-end rails in the drive, parked between lush green knee-high hedgerows that had been worked every weekend, and of course, there was the perfectly flat, manicured lawn. There was pride in this family, there was order and energy. I noticed the red roses on either side of the tall blue front door, big bunches in ornate pots, like fireworks of nature framing the entrance to a place of love, laughter, hope, and ambition.

It was hard to imagine the horror hidden inside those white walls and the monsters that had caught them all out.

“I’ll get my kit…”

I walked back to the eCar and grabbed my gear, a heavy black holdall with jagged shapes protruding from its unzipped opening.

I pulled out the heavy acid gun. It looked almost identical to a nail gun, apart from its extended nozzle. I hadn’t finished with the cop yet, so I walked up close to him, almost invasively close.

“You know the genus?”

He shook his head, no expression in those eyes, and then he frowned, glancing sideways to recall what he had witnessed moments ago.

“Looks like head bugs, I think. I didn’t get much of a look with the flashlight. Didn’t feel like sticking around with those things overhead.”

“OK – well, head bugs come in four recorded species, from bad to fucking evil. I’m hoping it’s the former. You know the drill, if I come out with one on me, shoot me in the face and don’t miss.”

“Not a problem,” he said without even flinching. There it was, the cold indifference of policing in this place. What a place to build a town.

I did what I usually did in the moment before a job. I took in the sky. It was a pale, misty pink with two beautiful glowing white moons, close to each other, one appearing much larger than the other.

Head bugs were an invasive species on most worlds. Their eggs often came through portals with a shipment of meat, and undiscovered, they bred fast and adapted quickly to any environment.

The church bells rang across the nearby streets, like a portent of danger, a warning just for me. It always amazed me how authentically ancient they had made the churches.

Eight solid chimes. It was eight o’clock, and the light was fading fast. Head bugs liked darkness; they would be on the move, so I was on a timeline.

Swarms of luminous blue night nymphs, with their long swishing insect tails and dragonfly wings, were signalling the retreat of the light as they bobbed and danced in the air above us.

“Good luck…” said the cop. Again, hardly any feeling behind the words. He had made it to his forties as a first responder for the Exoplanet Police Force, changing from one fertile alien world to the next every few years on rotation, so he must have seen it all and was suitably detached from shock.

I pushed open the front door to a special kind of silence, the silence of the aftermath.

Straight away, I caught sight of the adult male, or just his lifeless legs poking out by into the hallway from the kitchen, as if he had been dragged. He had one slipper on, and his beige slacks were torn raggedly at the hem, with deep black bite marks on one ankle. He must have fought hard to prize the thing from his head; head bugs were deceptively strong and muscular. I saw a few of the tell-tale spines from the beast had been dislodged in a struggle and strewn on the floor. There were several drag marks, too. The bug had toyed with the food. I checked the ceiling of the hallway first, those fuckers hid in dark corners above their prey. They could change the aesthetic of their spine-coated skins to any background, tasting colour and texture with their bizarre biology. I looked for movement, displaced colour, where there might be a slight mismatch, but nothing appeared suspicious. A single circular light fitting in the ceiling was off and unlit, and the dim seemed solemn as a morgue, just a single heavenly ray of tired sunlight from the kitchen window to highlight the fallen body. I put the bag down gently and closed the door behind me to block out the murmurs and gasps of the crowd and the distraction of the brazen police lights.

I felt, as I always did, that the excited crowd were waiting for some action to brag about witnessing on their live feeds. From my kit bag, I pulled out the flexi-metal spiked head cap and wrapped it around my skull, so it clicked together neatly with my visor to form a protective makeshift helmet. I switched it on via the tiny button on the side, over my right ear, and felt the surge of electricity pump into the spikes protruding from it.

Feeling comfortable to proceed to the kitchen, I quietly stepped over the dead man’s legs to inspect his remains. The head was missing, which was no surprise. There was just the twiggy, gnarly apple core of brain stem poking out of the neck, half-digested in stomach bile from the creature. The bug was long gone, so I switched my bodycam on to capture the scene for Forensics and Archives. He looked like a typical dad in any town on any world; a comfy knitted cardigan, a polo shirt, a slightly distended gut from lack of exercise, but of course, with no head to identify him by. I let my eyes track to the wall and sure enough, there was a family picture, beaming with four smiles, a stunning sunset enhanced in awe by two moons behind them. One of those smiles belonged to the victim. There he was… In the picture, he had ruddy cheeks, laughter lines, bulging brown eyes and a receding hairline. A typical dad, like I said.

The kitchen looked post-meal, in more ways than the body. Dirty dishes were stacked next to the sink and there was a thick scent of spices and cooked beef. Maybe that was what attracted the bugs. I noticed the entry point for the infestation in the house was via the kitchen floor, in the shape of a rough hole where they had broken the tiles with brute force. They had tunnelled up, so there must be other nests in the town, and nearby, that was a given. Of course, that was extra pay for me, but also a lot of cleaning up, and in honesty, I was feeling uncharacteristically weary. As a sanitiser, I had an acute awareness that, however careful I was, however good at my tradecraft I had become, there was a limit to my luck.

As I absorbed the meaning of the picture on the wall, admiring their family bond, their acknowledged moment of happiness together, there was a loud, rude thud from upstairs.

It was back to business. I checked that the acid gun was primed, and the blade on my belt was unholstered. Head bugs had hard sea-urchin-like shells, tough exoskeletons, and bullets would not always prove effective. I knew their weak points, that a very sharp knife could penetrate, under their overlapping plates, in their joints, the softer hair-laced flesh of their eye stalks. It frustrated me that I felt tired from a poor night’s sleep; this job did not afford having bad days at work.

There was another thud. Indeed, the light was fading outside, the ray through the kitchen window retreating and thinning as I made my way to the bottom of the stairs back in the hall. I’d need to find the other adult victim after I cleaned up the nest. Time, or the lack of it, was the critical factor. I had abandoned my bag of trade tools in favour of stealth, but I could retreat to it if need be. One careful step at a time, I ascended to the landing. The stairs were carpeted and made no noise at all, despite my steel-toed boots. Although the house was spacious, one way or another, this would all be over in a couple of minutes.

I looked up but saw nothing out of place – which was good. The first bedroom was on the right, and the door was wide open. The name Will was scrawled on the door in a jazzy font. It was the son’s room. I peeked around the opening and sure enough, on the spaceship-shaped bed, there was the teenage corpse splayed like it had been dropped from a few feet in the air.

I was not completely immune to the mess I frequently encountered on these jobs. The reality hit me, this time in a shudder, that rippled through my arms. Part of me, the sensible part, didn’t agree with families coming to worlds like this in the early stages of colonising. I got it, I was employed myself on this crazy off-world, so of course, the adventure appealed to me like anyone else in this odd little outpost, but then I was single, as most sanitisers were. In a time of interstellar austerity, the jobs, the perks, the travel, and the sheer wonder drew in families in their droves, but it went without saying, virgin worlds could be full of unimaginable terror. Jump-gates were being put everywhere without the old-fashioned checks and inspections, the technology was so accessible that developers promised cities, towns, villages, resorts, housing and more housing – lining pockets with government contracts that made ‘prosperity’, ‘growth’ and ‘prospecting’ the buzz words at election time. New so-called ‘goldilocks’ worlds were addictive, and like an addiction, the risk of embracing them bit back in the end.

The boy must have been thirteen or fourteen, I guessed. He was in his plaid pyjamas, but the same as the father, the head was missing and blood saturated the duvet. As per usual, I scanned the room. It had all the teenage tropes, posters of rock bands and movie stars, a plastic model jump-gate, a desk strewn with half-finished homework assignments and lots of pint-sized gimmicky technology. It was sad, like his personality was frozen in time in this tomb of his bedroom, his last sanctuary.

I pointed the camera lens at him to log his death scene, and as I backed out of the room, a massive weight bore down on my skull, making me crumble to my knees. It was like a boulder had fallen on me from a cliff edge. I felt a sensation of unbearable pressure and constriction.

I suddenly had no air as I was engulfed in a suffocating blackness. I could not speak, so I hissed out the pain. The arresting combination of stiletto spikes and electric shock sent the head bug scrambling to evade the instantaneous pain. It pushed itself with such force off my neck and skull with its hard, sharp claws that searing agony shot through my nerves in my neck and shoulders down to my calf muscles.

I could sense trickles of blood on my skin from the puncture holes where the animal’s claws had gripped me to feed my head into its mouth. In terms of its basic physiology, a bug was simply a head-sized mouth with rows of teeth, surrounded by a spiny, bulbous crab-like shell and six claw-tipped legs. Like a lot of aliens, it was ugly, grotesque, and deadly. They were ambush predators of the highest calibre, so if your job was exterminating them, you had to assume at some point they would get close, but this was as close as I had ever endured. I spun about on my heels and pulled the trigger of my gun. A long, powerful jet of luminescent green acid burnt into the shell of the parasite, imploding half of its body into smouldering goo as it scuttled for the open doorway. I pulled the trigger a second time as it tried to drag itself to freedom, stepping purposefully after it, a few paces behind. It’s lobster-like legs detached as the steaming acid ate away the sinews and ligaments until it had just one leg left, to desperately pull the disintegrating remains of its body. These things were seriously tough, like oversized cockroaches, and very hard to kill.

I didn’t recognise the genus. It looked similar to the worst species but the colouring was different, whiter, and the spines were longer by an inch or two. It made me unsettled. I liked to know exactly what I was dealing with but these things were not what I would call ‘the usual suspects’. They were quick, and I hadn’t seen any out-of-place detail in the bug’s camouflage to pick it out in the kid’s bedroom.

I could feel wetness under my overalls as the holes in my neck bled out. When the parasite finally collapsed, I hurriedly applied sticky gauze to each hole to stem the flow. This was not a good start to the job, and I duly cursed myself for not noticing its hiding place. I’d need to disinfect my blood later that night if I made it out.

The commotion had stirred up something in the attic directly above me. I could hear the scuttling and banging of creatures swarming awake. I moved quickly to the next bedroom on the opposite side, and to my surprise, no one was in there, no headless corpse or splattered remains, just another teen bedroom, almost identical to the boys except the rock bands and movie stars were women and jewellery and clothes were hanging everywhere, on chairs, on hooks, on hangers, as if a fashion shop had exploded.

That’s when I heard something I did not expect from above.

“Help us!” A faint cry, muffled, weird sounding, but someone, someone who was alive.

It did not seem possible. The cop had identified four victims, but I guess he didn’t say if they were all minus heads, and I’d bet he didn’t check pulses if they were just lying there on the floor. Sloppy. The bugs must be storing live meat. This was new behaviour.

It was dark outside, and all the bugs would be awakening. I had lost my advantage.

I guessed the hole to the attic would be through the master bedroom’s ceiling, the room I hadn’t seen yet at the end of the hall. I could just about hear the bugs falling into the room as I stared at the ajar door, watching the shadows move frantically beyond it.

It was time to abandon any idea of stealth. I jumped down the stairs, two steps at a time, honing in on my tool bag. By the time I found the gas grenades and hurled them upstairs, they were already on the landing floor.

Two pops and the green gas erupted and burst through the corridor. I already had my breathing guard on by the time the poisonous cloud rolled back down the stairs over me. A couple of the things tumbled down the stairs, the size of large dogs, clumsy and angular with their hard shell and spiny legs. They twitched but were no longer a threat by the time they were lying upturned and dormant at my boots.

Throwing the gas grenades was something I had no choice but to do, but I needed to get to the mother and daughter as soon as possible. The gas was worse for head bugs than people, but it could still kill them or give them permanent lung damage if I didn’t act fast. I bounded back upstairs and, waving away the green smoke as I ran, I kicked open the door into the master bedroom. I was now brandishing the large knife to dismember any stragglers from the nest that were still on their claws. I kicked the shells as I ran, scooping them into the walls with my boots. They were unwieldy, big specimens.

I could clearly see the sizable hole in the ceiling where they had gnawed through, but weirder than that, was the wide open wardrobe. There were no clothes in it, just a few bent coat hangers, but there was a trail of shredded material from shirts and trousers and skirts, like breadcrumbs across the floor, smattered over the king-sized bed, and on the floor under the hole above.

“Weird…” I said. There was no other word for it.

Green wisps of gas were floating into the attic, and I wondered if there was enough to knock out the nest. This was a dangerous gamble.

I propped a chair in the corner of the room, flush to the wall under the hole in the ceiling, sheathed my knife and jumped up to haul myself through the gap into the attic space. Once inside, I backed against the wall and I flipped on the flat lamp on my metal cap. The eaves cast shadows across the knitted grid of timber flooring. There were dead creatures up here. A relief. The water tank was dripping, and I could make out thick grey cobwebs. Unnervingly, large round shapes were hanging above me. I could not tell if they had died in their cocoons or were alive and asleep, but they had not attacked, and that was a promising sign.

“Help me…” the faint voice uttered, a weak, fuzzy female voice. It was in the darkest part of the attic, behind a thin divider, so my line of sight was obscured. I slid the knife from concealment. This felt unnerving, unfamiliar.

There, behind the wall divider, was a ball of shredded clothes, a spherical protective nest with an aperture in its centre, an entrance and exit for a single bug, I assumed.

“Help me….” The voice said, and it was clear that it was emanating from within the nest itself.

My heart was beating faster now, what to do?

I shuffled and repositioned for comfort in the cramped roof space. I was about to crawl into the hole when the light on my cap revealed something in my peripheral vision.

Two bodies. An adult and a child, the mother and daughter. They had been crushed into a neat, bloody ball of broken limbs and torsos, something compact to return to feed on later.

It was a trap. The beast inside the nest seemed to understand or sense my realisation.

It emerged steadily with spiny legs first, leveraging its body out through the hole, so its stalked eyes were in front of me, sizing me up. I guessed this one was special, a queen or a senior creature in the natural hierarchy of these weirder-than-usual head bugs. The only rescue mission on now was for myself. I had no more gas grenades on my person, and only my blade for defence. The thing had lured me up there, trapped me in the small confines of its claimed territory, its home patch.

“Help me…” it seemed to mimic, through its wide mouthparts beneath it.

As it lurched for me, I rolled instinctively to the side, fast enough and clumsy enough to fall from the ceiling hole back onto the chair I had positioned beneath. It was headfirst and not a clean fall. Instantly, I broke my arm trying to soften my impact, catching the chair edge at an odd angle. Despite the snapping noise and pain, I knew I had no time to indulge or complain about my wound. I dragged myself to my feet and sprinted for the landing, while the beast dropped more elegantly behind me, its crabby legs scuttling after me at a determined pace, pushing off the walls, raising its underbelly so its teeth were lining up with my back as it ran. I virtually threw myself down the stairs with my legs in front of me, and I bashed my broken arm into a row of family pictures mounted on the stairwell wall, so they tumbled down with me to the bottom, the frames buckling and the glass shattering.

I could feel the presence of the animal right behind me until its insidious claws hooked the sleeves of my overalls, and pulled its weight onto my back in a vice-like grip. I looked down to see its six legs wrapped about my chest, and felt it clawing its way up, after my head. To my surprise, it did not wrap its whole oversized mouth over my skull as it should have; instead, it somehow knew to bite through the straps holding my cap and visor in place. This was a smart bug.

I edged toward the front door and somehow resisted falling as the thing slowly wrapped its jaws around my scalp, ready to plunge my unprotected face into its stomach. I fumbled with my one good hand for the door latch and pushed, stumbling forward one painful step at a time. I saw the cop for a split-second before the world went dark, and burning acids and sharp teeth began to envelop me.

Two shots, loud, not a high calibre, but my head jerked violently backwards with the blows, and the thing, with all its slime and rage, fell off me onto the drive. Its shell had been split all the way through by the second round.

The sizzling acids about my nose and cheeks, the teeth imprints, they were painful, but somehow, I was still alive. I stared at him, gasping for air, my left arm beginning to throb with its raw breaks.

“…Shoot you in the face, that’s what you said, brother,” he confirmed.

The cop was almost smiling. I think saving someone was a rare and meaningful moment for him, even if it was just a sanitiser out of his depth.

The crowd went wild. It had grown since I had arrived and they were jumping up and down, whooping and selfie posing with me in the background, narrating the story for feeds. The beast next to me was cracked into two parts, and its innards were steaming.

“That all of them?” asked the cop, lowering his sidearm.

I nodded and took tiny, deliberate steps toward him.

“Thanks…” was all I could muster.

“Can I give you a lift, sir?” he offered, aware I was in a shabby state.

A two-man forensic crew were now waiting by the lawn, looking at me and smiling.

“Log your footage when you’re patched up, man, I think we all want to see that…”

The crowd cheered, but it may have been for the cop.

“A lift would be good…” I murmured, clean out of bravado and more tired than ever. It wasn’t far to the one hospital in town, at least.

I abandoned my tools and eCar, knowing it would still be there when I returned the next day. Who was going to steal in this little community, anyway?

The cop, to his credit, didn’t bother waving to the crowd and basking in their adoration. He simply made me comfortable in the passenger seat, slung himself in and shut the doors.

That was a good thing because it was only then that I could see it; the situation in its entirety.

“Officer…” I began.

“What is it?”

“Forget the hospital, go straight to the jump-gate… And don’t stop for anything.”

I felt him freeze in his seat, but when he looked up to where I was staring, he got what I was seeing immediately.

The whole street seemed to shift, like the faded light was wrong every few metres. There were bugs everywhere, just sitting next to walls, by cars, with people walking by them. The night was on us, and so I estimated there were only a few seconds before we would witness a mass slaughter like nothing we had seen on an offworld before.

“Go…” I said, deadpan. “Go now… We shouldn’t be here…”

The End