Garret shivered, his nervous foot hovering over the brake.
"Column, halt!" Streep called over his PA system hookup. The Freedom Convoy came to a jouncing and dusty stop.
"Dismount!"
From the pickups and sport-utility vehicles, the shock troops of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia poured out, locking and loading and racking their Remington shotguns, those that had them.
In the relative security of his command RV, their leader dialed the PA system to its highest setting and lifted his mike to his lips.
"Attention! This is Commander Mearl Streep! I call upon Dr. Helwig Wurmlinger to exit his awful abode to answer for his crimes against American agriculture."
The bee buzzing abruptly dropped. Silence fell.
Then an oval door opened, and out into the moonlight stepped a tall, gangling figure whose eyes were wobbly discs of moonlight.
"Are you Wurmlinger?"
"I am. Did you say you were Meryl Streep?"
"Mearl, dammit! Mearl Streep of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia."
"Then I have never heard of you, and you are on my property."
"We have come to make you answer for crimes against America and Iowa."
"What rubbish are you speaking? Step into the light where I can see you."
"So you can assassinate me with your devil bee? No. We are not such fools, Wurmlinger." A pause, then he went on. "Boys, get ready to torch that Frankenstein mud-hut!"
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia looked around helplessly.
"With what?" one asked. "We ain't brought any torches."
"Well, go into that devil hut and find some flammables."
No one moved. They were too afraid, and the humming. started anew. It was unhappy, like the drone of dying honeybees.
Then a bee did appear. It was big and fat and bobbed up and down in the moonlight, finally coming to a point at the window glass of the RV where Commander Streep was issuing his demands.
It went tick against the glass. This caught Streep's attention, and he turned around.
In the moonlight, the compound eyes regarded him with an alien malevolence. But that wasn't what made the hairs rise on the back of Streep's thick red neck.
It was the unmistakable death's-head on its fuzzy golden black back.
"Assassin bee! It's an assassin bee!" Streep screeched. "Turn smartly, men, and chop it down if you value your lives!"
As one, the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia wheeled, weapons snapping up and ready to fire.
If they could only find a target.
Questing muzzles remained cold. No gun flashes painted the surrounding woods with their red, purifying flame, Streep saw.
"What are you waiting on, you idiots?" he roared.
"Where is it? Where is it?" his men were saying. Their weapons were tracking the trees, the moon, the RV and the ground. Everywhere but where the solitary devil bee hovered, patient and sinister.
That was when Streep fumbled a flashlight out of a cargo pocket of his cammies. He clicked it on. A light popped. He trained it on the bee and called out, "There is your target! Shoot to kill!"
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia did.
The night air was lit by zipping yellow tracer flashes. The percussive stutter of autofire and the accompanying din of the war cries of men more afraid than angry shook the tense air.
When the guns stopped, there was no sign of the bee or Dr. Helwig X. Wurmlinger.
"Did we get him? Did we get him?" a shaking voice asked.
Coming up from under a pile of cushions on the RV floor, Commander Mearl Streep wondered the very same thing.
He was fumbling for his flash when a new sound cut the disturbed evening.
It was a drone. High, metallic, it was nothing like the sad drone of the hived bees that had greeted them. It was angry, insistent and it filled the night like viciously sharp blades of sound.
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia stretched and craned their necks all around them. Fear warped their moonlit faces, their eyes bugged out and sweat oozed from exposed pores.
"Shoot at the sky! Shoot the sky!" Commander Streep called out. "It's a swarm of devil bees. They come for us!"
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia obeyed their commander with an alacrity that would have made a four-star general proud.
Except for one problem: they had neglected to reload their weapons.
Click-click-click went their weapons like so many cap guns firing. Or in this case, not firing.
Because, while their helplessness was dawning on them, the insistent buzz reached a crescendo and they began grabbing themselves at every exposed orifice. A few sneezed violently. But whatever had gotten up their noses wouldn't come back out. Some covered their ears with their palms, but just as quickly uncovered them when they realized the high buzzing was inside their ears already.
One militiaman stood with his head cocked to one side, slapping his right ear in hopes of dislodging whatever had gotten into his left auditory canal. He cried out with each self-inflicted jar of his skull.
From the relative safety of his command RV, Commander Mearl Streep watched in mounting horror. The cream of his militia was falling all around him, conquered by something they could neither see nor shoot at. All it was was a high noise that might have been the sound of the glassy falling moonlight under severe stress, if light could emit sounds.
One by one, the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia began dropping.
At his post at the RV's wheel, Gordon Garret enjoyed a commanding view of the slaughter. "What's killing them? I can't see anything!"
By way of answer, Commander Mearl Streep retched uncontrollably.
When a man rolling on the ground in his death throes happened to turn his way, Commander Streep saw the thing that made him sorry he had ever elected to take on the dark forces of the federal government.