Spelunking Through Hell, page 37
Let them mourn. She had a funeral to attend to. After that was done, she could sit down with them and tell them what had happened, so they could add the story of her father’s death to their history of the family line. So it could be preserved. But all that could wait; all that was for after he was buried and gone.
“Oh, Daddy,” she whispered. “I didn’t even have time to pick up the bodies.” There would be no final record of Jonathan Healy to add to the family’s memorial collection. Just like her mother, who’d been killed by something they had never been able to identify or track. There was a hole in the history, and it was getting bigger with every loss.
The spot on her arm where she’d been stung by the Apraxis was throbbing like a rotten tooth under the stitches, despite the antibiotics the doctors had pumped into her. She rubbed it distractedly with one hand as she started for the kitchen. Coffee. She needed hot coffee brewed strong and maybe with a shot of brandy added to make her focus while she did what needed to be done. There was no one else to do it.
Fortunately, she’d been through the process of arranging a funeral before. She’d been there when her grandfather arranged the burial of her grandmother, and she’d handled her grandfather’s funeral mostly on her own; her father had been too stunned by the suddenness of his own father’s death to really be of any real use. It was just a matter of making a few phone calls, accepting the condolences gracefully, and saying “the usual” would be fine. A plain box, yes, of course, and the date of his death carved into the blank half of the tombstone he would share with his wife, her mother. The family plots had been paid for years ago. They’d never said so in quite that many words, but Alice was fairly sure her grandparents always knew the family wasn’t going to leave Michigan alive.
Three generations wasn’t that bad for a family of cryptozoologists living in exile and trying to defend humans from cryptids—and vice versa—without any resources or support. It was pure luck that had kept them fighting for as long as they had. And now it was just her—Alice, youngest and most unskilled of them all—with no one left to arrange her funeral when the time came.
“Don’t dwell,” she muttered through gritted teeth, and called the library—her father’s library, which he’d run calmly and without dispute for as long as she could remember—to accept their tears, regrets, and solemn promises that she’d still have a job when she felt well enough to return. The children’s library would be waiting for her.
“Thank you,” she said, over and over, so many times that the words lost all meaning. She too numb to move by the time she got off the phone, and she let that tell her what to do, for a little while; she sat down at the table, put her head against her arms, and simply breathed, trying to remember what was supposed to happen next.
It was easier if she didn’t try to think. That was a problem because she had to think; she had to go into her grandfather’s library, look up everything they had written down about the Apraxis, and make sure things were really finished. It had been too easy. In the end, it had all been too easy, and she couldn’t allow herself to trust it.
And yes, maybe she was looking for revenge—for some chance there was a second hive, something she could destroy without the need for mercy or conservation—but what was wrong with that? They’d killed her father. They’d earned it. For once in her life, Alice was ready to stand with the Covenant’s ideals. If any of those demon bugs were still alive, they damn well deserved to die.
Time kept flickering around her like a badly-cut film as she moved through the afternoon and early evening. One moment she was in the kitchen, pouring another cup of hot black coffee and doctoring it with brandy; the next, she was in the family library, cheeks wet with her constant tears, pulling a volume from the high shelves of cryptid lore and extra-dimensional zoology.
“You have to understand something before you hunt it, Alice,” her grandfather used to say. “If you don’t, you’re no better than a small child kicking over an anthill just for the sake of being mean.”
She didn’t see anything particularly wrong with being mean at that specific moment. She wanted to be mean. She didn’t want to understand the ecological niche filled by the things that killed her father. Maybe she hadn’t liked him much, but she’d loved him, and now she was alone. She wanted the Apraxis to die. She wanted them to suffer while they did it.
Her arm still throbbed. She rubbed it again, wincing as her fingers encountered the bruised place just below her stitches, and opened Gray’s Guide to Insects, Arachnids, and Exoskeletal Beings of the Cryptid World. It was an essentially flawed manuscript filled with juvenile mistakes, but it also held a great deal of useful observation. What it got wrong, it got very, very wrong, but what it got right . . . might prove useful.
The entry on the Apraxis was in the third chapter, “Hive Intelligences.” Someone—presumably her grandfather; it looked like his handwriting—had added a new title in pencil underneath the official one: “Things Not to Ask To Dinner.” Smiling slightly, she checked the page numbers against the index, flipped to the right section, and began to read.
The Apraxis wasp, or “mind eater,” is one of the most dangerous hive intelligences. It is highly mobile, sturdy enough to survive in most climates, and possesses not only the capacity to learn, but the ability to acquire knowledge at an accelerated rate by incubating its young in the flesh of its victims. The soldier Apraxis possesses a hollow stinger which delivers both a painful venom and small, nearly-invisible eggs with a single sting. The eggs hatch rapidly once implanted in the flesh of their victims. They mature most rapidly in a living host. Once they finish growing to adult size and absorbing the knowledge of their host, they will chew their way out. This process is most often fatal to the host, who will have been distracted and unfocused during the maturing process, due to the telepathic influence of the larvae, and may not have thought to seek assistance. Indeed—
Alice stopped rubbing her arm, feeling the animation draining out of her face. Then, taking a deep breath, she looked back to the book.
—many hosts will not even be aware they have been infested.
“That sort of thing could be pretty easy to overlook,” she said faintly.
The average gestation period of larval Apraxis is three days in living flesh, or three weeks in the bodies of the dead. Burning the body will not kill the eggs but will cause them to disperse into the local soil, where they will await ingestion by a suitable host in order to finish the maturation process. Many areas have suffered repeat infestations due to improper handling of the bodies of the infected.
Her father had been stung more than a dozen times. Alice remembered that much, even though most of the details were mercifully blurred by the memory of darkness and the shock of the event itself. She’d only been stung once, in the arm, in a spot that was sore and bruised, and throbbed more beneath the stitches than the injury could really justify.
Well. It had only been a day and a half since the attack. She had time to finish reading before she went to take care of . . . whatever needed to be taken care of.
Apraxis are relatively fragile and can be killed by direct hits to the body, head, or thorax. The bladed edges of their wings can be dangerous in close quarters, but their effectiveness as weapons is reduced when the adult wasp is in flight. Nymphs can be killed through blunt trauma, or by drowning. Gasoline and the blood of Johrlac have both proven excellent for preserving the young—
“Because a cuckoo is just what this little slice of hell needs,” Alice muttered, shuddering at the very notion.
—and some specimens have now been under study for more than thirty years. Eggs preserved in this fashion will gestate and hatch if removed from suspension and brought into contact with mammalian tissue, either living or dead. Individual Apraxis have little to no sense of self-preservation—
“Well, that’s something we have in common.” Alice barely noticed that she’d started rubbing her arm again, testing the dimensions of the sore place with her fingers.
—as they are bent, instead, toward the survival of the species as a whole. Entire hives have been known to sacrifice themselves in order to claim a more suitable host.
Alice simply sat there for a long moment, looking at the words and considering their implications. “Entire hives will sacrifice themselves in order to claim a more suitable host.” That’s what it said, right there in black and white.
There wasn’t a child in town who didn’t believe—really and truly believe—that she had magical powers, that she could make the monsters go away. There wasn’t an intelligent cryptid in those woods who didn’t know about Jonathan Healy and his position on things that hurt his town. The first humans to vanish were all children. Who knew how many cryptids had died before the Apraxis moved on to more protected prey?
The Apraxis said they knew where she lived when they spoke to her in Jenny Sampson’s voice. The hive must have increased in number every time it took a child, and every time it took a child it heard, again, that the Healys hunted monsters in the woods. Three days to gestate in living flesh. The damned things had taken Jenny alive, and her death had been . . .
Her death had been something that didn’t bear thinking about.
“It was a trap,” said Alice, and rubbed her arm again. Was the bruise beneath her stitches starting to swell? She rather thought that it was.
There was nothing more of use in that book, or in any of the others, although she found several small warnings tucked in amongst the dryer passages, all cautioning the reader not to go alone into areas where Apraxis had been sighted, and especially not to go at night, as the hives tended to hunt most actively in the dark. Too little, too late. The damage was already done.
Alice replaced the books on the shelves, making sure they were in the correct order—the librarian in her coming out again, almost automatically, underscored with the macabre awareness that this could very well be the last time she used the library. If she died without an heir, her grandfather’s safety deposit box would be opened, and the last letter to the Covenant of St. George would be sent. The letter that restored the family’s property to them and asked them to come clean certain materials out of the house.
Three generations wasn’t such a bad run. She knew that. She did, really, down to the bones of her, and yet she was crying again when she turned down the lights, and she kept crying as she closed and locked the library door. She hadn’t been out of tears after all.
5.
* * *
It took the better part of an hour to get everything together. Finding a clean scalpel wasn’t hard; neither was finding an oilcloth to spread over the kitchen table. But her chain mail gloves were in the barn, and after she spent twenty minutes finding them, she wound up needing to go right back out again in order to find a pair of forceps small enough to slide into an incision without tearing her bicep open. She was already missing half of her left calf. She didn’t need to spoil her arm as well.
The gas cans were in the shed on the other side of the house. At least the canning jars were easy to find, tucked safely into boxes in the basement.
Alice surveyed the items arrayed on the table. Home surgery, she thought grimly, is never as simple as you think it’s going to be. Not that she really expected this to be simple once it was underway. The egg or eggs had been inserted near a major vein, and from the feel of her arm, the larvae had managed to burrow down to nestle against the bone. She’d need to cut deep and fast, without incapacitating herself, and extract the nymph one-handed before it could burrow deeper into her flesh. Worst case, she’d bleed out before she got it out of her body, and the gestation period would take a little longer as it finished inside a corpse.
“Well,” she said, as philosophically as she could manage, “I suppose I’ve finally found something I like less than library board meetings.” She sat, moving the forceps and the jar of gasoline into easy reach before pulling a chain mail glove onto her right hand.
The stitches on her arm were slightly above the tender spot. That made sense; the eggs were extruded through the base of the ovipositor, which had been roughly four inches in length. Alice traced the bruise with her fingers, noting the points where the pain was most severe. Then she picked up the scalpel and calmly drove it into the meat of her arm.
The blade was sharp, and it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d been afraid it would. She’d only cut a few inches when she heard a thin keening noise, like a kitten crying through a window. The sound was grating—fingers scraping along the inside of her skull—and worse, it was coming from inside her arm.
Moving quickly now, Alice dropped the scalpel, grabbed the forceps, and shoved them into the wound. They hit something that resisted like bone when they were barely half an inch past the skin. She clamped them shut, pulling as hard as she could.
The keening grew in intensity to match the pain, which was now shooting along her arm in vast, pulsing blasts. Alice ground her teeth together, biting the inside of her cheek to keep herself from screaming, and kept pulling until the forceps came free with an audible popping sound, pulling a squirming horror nearly the length of her index finger into the light. It was milk-white underneath a thin film of viscous, watery-looking blood. The buds of its wings were furled tightly against its back, and its mouth was working constantly, mandibles opening and closing as it shrieked at her, voice whistle-sharp and piercing. It stabbed the air with its half-formed stinger, trying to strike at anything in reach.
“Bastard,” she hissed, and plunged the forceps into the jar of gasoline, holding them under until the nymph stopped squirming.
After the movement died, she dunked the forceps into her waiting mug of hot water before picking up a towel and wiping the worst of the blood from her arm. She felt the area around her incision as she did. The pain wasn’t lessening, and there was a second sore spot, smaller but definitely swollen, about an inch below the first one.
Alice closed her eyes for a moment, sighing, and reached for the forceps again.
The second nymph was less developed and hence easier to extract. It helped that the trauma to her arm was becoming severe enough for shock to set in, numbing the pain. As it was, she had to pause several times, biting her cheek while she waited for the room to stop spinning.
The third nymph was the smallest but had been warned by the sudden disappearance of its siblings; it fought her every inch of the way, biting down and clinging with tiny claws as she pulled. It kept squirming even after she had it free, nearly knocking over the jar of gasoline before she could get it immersed and slam the lid into place.
She sat there for several moments, hand clamped tightly against her arm, feeling for sore spots as she watched the nymph slowly stop moving. She didn’t feel any more of them, and that was good because she didn’t have the strength for another extraction. “If I’m not done, I’m done,” she said, and was dismayed by how far away her own voice sounded. “Oh, that’s no good. Get up, Alice. You still have work to do.”
Her legs didn’t listen. Not moving was better, they argued. Shock would keep the pain from coming back. She could watch the infant Apraxis float in their sea of amber, and maybe that would teach her . . . something . . . about where they’d come from, and why. Even if they didn’t, she’d be motionless. Wasn’t that better than trying to move around?
“I have to get up now,” she said, closing her eyes. “Come on, Alice. Don’t be a silly. Get up.” No, argued her legs. Her arms were joining the mutiny. Sitting was better. She should sit.
If she sat, she was going to die.
Was that such a bad thing? If she died, the Covenant would come to town. They would dismantle the house, taking everything the Healys had learned during their short-lived rebellion, and take it back to Europe, where they could use it to teach other people not to make the same mistakes. It wouldn’t be lost. Just . . . reclaimed, in a way, by the people they’d tried to leave behind. They wouldn’t be forgotten. There were worse fates.
But she didn’t want to die.
So what? Three generations wasn’t such a bad run—hadn’t she had that thought herself, more than once? The Healy luck couldn’t last forever. Maybe it was better to stop fighting than to be the only one left clinging to something that was better off gone.
No one would think to tell Thomas if she died. He’d find out when the Covenant arrived.
That was enough to make the mutineers pause in their argument. Alice pursued that line of thought, telling herself fiercely, If you give up here, he’ll never know. Or maybe he will because the Covenant will tell him. Do you want him to find out that way? Do you want them to tell him about your diaries, or about the picture under your pillow? Get up. Don’t do this. “Just get moving,” she snarled, and then—to her great surprise—she was.
She cleared away the jar of gasoline, the scalpel, and the forceps like she was sleepwalking, tucking them into a cupboard before getting out a loaf of bread and a plain kitchen knife. She rubbed the blade thoroughly in her blood; there was plenty of blood to go around.
It took forever to walk to the phone, take it off the cradle, and dial for directory assistance. “Operator,” said the distant, tinny voice of Maisie Baker.
“This is Alice Healy,” Alice said, her own voice sounding nearly as far away as Maisie’s. “I was making dinner, and I heard a sound, and I jumped with the knife in my hand, and I’m afraid I’ve hurt myself. Can you please ring the ambulance for me? Thank you, so much.” She hung up without waiting for a reply.
