Insects: A Novel

Insects

A Novel

John Koloen

Watchfire Press

Copyright © 2015 John Koloen. All rights reserved.

Published by Watchfire Press.

This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities are coincidental.

Watchfire Press

P.O. Box 9056

Morristown, NJ 07963

www.watchfirepress.com

Cover design by Kit Foster

www.kitfosterdesign.com

Insects/John Koloen – 1st ed.

Print ISBN: 978-1-940708-82-9

e-ISBN: 978-1-940708-83-6

For Laura

Please visit
watchfirepress.com/jk
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1

On the street
below the apartment building on Avenue 7 de Setembro, several cars came to a screeching halt, followed by angry shouts in Portuguese and a brief honking of horns. Howard Duncan paid no attention, despite the open windows of his third-floor apartment overlooking the steamy, wet street below. Sweat dripping from his brow, he stared at the 15-inch laptop, his face inches from the LCD. Nearsighted, he’d removed his stylish horn rims to get a better look at the digital images but found only frustration. What he wanted was a big color print that he could examine under a magnifying glass, or a giant flat screen.

Frustration increased faster than the humidity. He felt his blood pressure rising, and left the small table in the kitchenette to pace through the two rooms that he shared with his assistant Cody Boyd. They were in Manaus to survey insects in the Rio Negro basin to fulfill the terms of Duncan’s grant, which he hoped would lead to a multi-year renewal or at least an extension. Like any graduate entomologist, Boyd hoped to discover a previously unidentified species that would launch his career.

“Did you see that?” Boyd shouted as he burst into the tiny apartment, nearly crashing into Duncan. He’d run up the three flights and had to catch his breath.

“See what?”

“I almost got hit by a jerk in a Fiat. I had the right-of-way, goddammit. I was lucky I didn’t drop the food,” Boyd said, holding out a plastic bag. “I got Brasileiroas and a couple pastels we can have now or later.”

Duncan acknowledged Boyd but continued pacing.

“They’re still warm,” Boyd said as he emptied the bag on the small table, pushing the laptop aside and pouring a cup of coffee from the French press on the small countertop. The coffee was tepid. He reheated it in the small microwave and asked Duncan if he wanted a cup.

Duncan approached Boyd from behind and, leaning against the back of Boyd’s chair, said gruffly, “I can’t tell a damn thing from your pictures. They’re a little blurry, and I don’t have a clue about their size. It would have been helpful if you’d put a ruler in the picture.”

Boyd sighed, having taken a bite from his buttered Brasileiroas roll. He had hoped to savor his breakfast in peace, but that was no longer possible.

Boyd had photographed the insects on a day trip some fifty miles from the office. He
’
d gone with a local guide on a boat to a narrow peninsula that jutted into the river like a jetty. He
’
d had no particular reason for stopping there other than it provided an easy landing and because it was piled with driftwood and seemed promising.
The insects were hidden under a pile of brush, and he was startled when he exposed them. They reminded him of cockroaches but were larger and shaped somewhat like a .50-caliber bullet. He ran off a series of photos using autofocus and autoexposure and then tried to pick one of the insects up with his bare hands. In an instant, he felt pain and dropped the bug. It had bitten him. Pulling his hand to his face, he saw a tiny, bloody cut, the skin torn. When he looked down, the insects were gone, scattering into the brush. He scoured the area for them, overturning limbs and driftwood and kicking the underbrush, but to no avail. They had disappeared.

Duncan was skeptical when Boyd reported back to the office.

“You know how long a .50-caliber bullet is?” he scoffed.

“I didn
’
t say they were the size of a .50-caliber bullet, just the shape, but they must’ve been eight, nine centimeters at least,” Boyd countered. “I
’
m tellin’
you, it was big, and it bit me. Just look,” Boyd held out his hand. He
’
d put a Band-Aid over the wound and peeled it back.

“Where?” Duncan asked. “
I don’
t see anything.”

Pulling the bandage off, Boyd waved the underside of the pad at his boss.

“See the spots of blood?”

Duncan glanced at the bandage skeptically.

“I see some blood. So you were bitten. Cockroaches can bite.”

“It wasn’t a cockroach. Why would I lie?” Boyd insisted. “Here, look.”

He squeezed his hand where the insect had sliced him. Up popped a droplet of blood.

“Now do you believe me?”

Duncan thought the conversation was going nowhere, shrugged his shoulders and waved his hand dismissively. Changing the subject, he asked if Boyd had collected specimens.

“The specimen was the one that bit me,” Boyd said defensively. “But I’ve got more pictures. What you looked at were just from the first memory card. I used two.”

“What’s on the card?”

“I haven
’
t looked at them yet.”

Duncan held his hand out.

“Give me the card, and I’ll download them into my laptop. I hope they’re better shots than the first card.”

Boyd grimaced. Duncan tended toward sarcasm and almost always made his criticisms known. Of course, that was part of his job with graduates. He rarely cut them slack.

Boyd fished out the camera from his bright yellow daypack and extracted the memory card.

“Now we
’ll
see just what kind of man-eating cockroach we
’
re dealing with,” Duncan said.

Duncan wasn
’
t certain about what he was seeing on his laptop as he returned to his desk. But he was certain it wasn
’
t a cockroach. Boyd stood behind him, staring at the screen. It was clear to him, standing four feet from the laptop screen, that it wasn
’
t a cockroach.

“Still think it
’
s a cockroach?” Boyd sneered with feigned indignation.

Duncan sighed deeply as if he had been holding his breath.

“Did you get dimensions?”

“I didn
’
t have a chance. Like I said, at least eight centimeters or more for the one that bit me, but there weren’t many of them. For a few seconds, they were there and then they were gone. Didn
’
t even have time to get the ruler out.”

“There
’
s nothing on the photos to give us scale,” Duncan said.

“You know, maybe I can get it from the Exif data on the file.”

“The what?”

“It
’
s a type of file format, but it includes information about focusing, distance, et cetera.”

“How does that help us?” Duncan said, looking toward Boyd.

“It should tell us the distance the lens was focusing.”

Duncan looked puzzled.

“If we know how far away the object is from the lens, we might be able to make at least an educated guess about it
s
size. I know when I grabbed it, it was longer than my hand is wide.”

Duncan grabbed Boyd’s left hand and slapped a plastic ruler into it.

“Let
’
s just measure your palm,” Duncan said. “Seems like that would be the easiest and maybe the most accurate way to do it.”

“I guess that
’
s why you
’
re the boss, and I
’
m the worker bee.”

“Not really. I
’
ve got a grant, and you don
’
t.”

The palm of Boyd
’
s hand was almost exactly four inches wide.

“It was longer than your palm?”

“Yeah, but I can
’
t remember by how much. It bit me almost as soon as I picked it up. It was really aggressive. It didn’t try to escape until I dropped it.”

“But you’re sure it was bigger, so maybe we can assume it was at least four inches long.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“We can take that and get its width from the pictures, at least an estimate.”

Using a printout, they measured the length and width of the insect. Boyd mentally calculated the thickness at one inch. They exchanged surprised looks. Duncan whistled reflexively.

“What the hell is this thing?” he wondered.

2

Fifty-four-year-old Raul Barbosa
stood a chunky five-feet-four inches tall, sporting an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard that stretched nearly to his waist. It wasn
’
t that his beard was long so much as his torso was short. His head was covered with long, thinning, mostly gray hair. He often tied it back in a ponytail. His upper lip was hidden under the thick outcropping of an untrained mustache that, when his mouth was closed, covered his lower lip. Often, when he chewed, his few remaining teeth would grab onto an unruly mustache strand and painfully pull it away from his lip. When this happened, he would use grooming scissors to cut the mustache until it no longer covered his lower lip. He was a practical man.

Barbosa came to the Rio Negro from Bogota while in his late twenties. The beetle-browed bachelor had broken up with the girl he thought would become his wife, which precipitated a weekend bender that included an assault charge alleging that he tried to strangle her in a bar, necessitating a new start out of the reach of Columbian authorities. He had a vague plan to live off the land, but that was before he had actually tried it.

Making his living as a miner, he was both lucky and industrious. Unlike most miners he knew, he banked most of his earnings, and when he was not working retreated to the plot of land he purchased some sixty kilometers southeast of the Rio Negro town of Manaus. By the time he turned forty, he not only had learned to live in the forest but to thrive. His pride and joy was the forty-six-square-meter stilt house he
’
d built. The property, which stood fifty meters from a narrow creek, was accessible only by small boat. Even so, navigating from his place to the river was complicated and involved many twists and turns. It was easy to become lost and hard to find one
’
s way. But he craved the isolation and took pride in his property, having cleared the land himself. He had help erecting the house, which cost nearly fifteen-thousand reals, including labor.

And unlike many miners who ended up dead or crippled, Barbosa had escaped his profession with only minor scrapes. His lucky break came four years ago when he won forty-thousand reals tax-free playing the Mega-Sena Lottery. That allowed him to add a solar water heater, wind turbine, and photovoltaic arrays. Although he had few friends, he kept in touch via radiotelephone with Jose Silva, who owned a small export business in Manaus. Despite having money in the bank, Barbosa was frugal, and when he wasn
’
t tending his garden or selling his services as a fishing guide, he hunted black caiman, or
jacare
, as they are known, for meat and hides. While a black caiman purse could easily sell for six hundred American dollars, the raw hides that Barbosa sold to Silva covered his fuel cost and little more. However, he used the meat as bait to trap yellow-footed tortoises, which he sold to restaurants in Manaus for a handsome profit.

Barbosa had good luck hunting the past week, and after radioing Silva that he had several hides for him, one of them over four meters long, he began preparing to make the trip. His five-meter aluminum boat, with its fifteen-horsepower outboard, showed its age but held an affectionate place in its heart. He called it Maria and often shared his thoughts with her while on the river.

He spent an hour in the morning loading the boat. It took four trips between the cabin and the boat to finish. But he didn’t work hard. He carried each hide separately and then returned to the cabin one last time for his backpack. As he dropped the shutters on the windows, he noticed something unusual in his garden. Was it locusts? Something was moving through some of the rows. Grabbing his backpack and shutting the door behind him, he descended to the ground and moved quickly to the garden. He was proud of the vegetables that he nurtured from seeds and took it personally when insects or animals, especially squirrel monkeys, attacked them. He relied on canned goods from Manaus but always looked forward to seasonal vegetables. He loved tomatoes and occasionally ate them off the vine with a pinch of freshly ground pepper.

The garden was about twenty-five meters west of the house. As he approached, he heard a soft buzzing, which grew louder with every step. Holding up at the garden
’
s edge, he surveyed the far end, where he thought he saw movement. It occurred to him that it could be a jaguar or a snake and that his rifle and machete were in the boat. He thought about either retrieving the rifle or leaving for Manaus. But his curiosity got the best of him. He stepped into the garden cautiously, stopping halfway in to peer at the area where he
’
d seen the movement. The buzzing was pronounced and unlike anything he
’
d ever heard. At least it wasn
’
t a snake as he
’
d feared. Stepping forward, he leaned toward a thick row of corn and pushed the plants to get a better view of whatever was causing the movement. He regretted it almost instantaneously.

The ground was crawling with large, cockroach-like insects. He no longer heard the buzzing. It had faded into the background like elevator music, pushed aside by the utter terror he felt as the bugs launched themselves at him, clinging to him with hatchet-like forelegs that they used to stab him over and over, drawing blood almost immediately. Dozens embedded themselves in his beard.

Barbosa stumbled backward as he wheeled on one foot but managed to keep his balance long enough to fall into several tomato cages, ending up on his hands and knees. He grabbed at the insects clinging to his shirt, but they resisted, holding fast. The ones he pulled off tore pieces out of his shirt. He could feel them hacking away on the back of his neck, his legs, and now on the top of his head. He screamed, rose to his feet, closed his eyes and lumbered forward blindly. They were attacking his eyes. He told himself to jump into the river, that immersing himself in the muddy water was his only hope. But the insects were relentless. More and more of them continued to join the attack, so much so that as he picked himself off the ground a second time he ripped two of the bugs from near his eyes, screaming with pain as chunks of his flesh went with them. He was out of the garden and could see the boat. He mouthed the words, “I have to go there,” inadvertently providing the opportunity for at least one insect to scurry into his mouth and down his throat. He choked and vomited, expelling the bug. He clamped his mouth shut, but the bugs continued to attack his eyes. He screamed as they pounded away with their deadly forelegs. His vision faded quickly as the insects chopped into his cornea. Blinded, crawling in the deep grass, he no longer knew what direction he was moving. Where was the river?

“
Dio aydarme!
” he screamed, which only made things worse as several bugs entered his mouth. All he could do was dry heave as he felt them chopping away at his esophagus. If anyone had seen him from a distance, it would have looked as if he was struggling with a dark throbbing blanket.

The bugs owned Barbosa
’
s body now. They chopped away as methodically as robots, raising tiny geysers of blood on every square inch of skin. They tunneled into his rectum and chopped away. They chopped holes in his esophagus and chopped at every organ within reach. Just as the buzzing had disappeared, the pain diminished as life leaked out of him. His body had become a sieve. And then there was a rush of blood through his anus as the bugs chopped through his rectum and into his abdomen. But it wasn
’
t a problem for him any longer, as thousands of insects took their turn at stripping the flesh from his body.