JEREMY LAY FLAT ON HIS STOMACH IN THE BACKYARD GRASS, watching three bugs crawl across a flattened soda can. They were larger than June bugs, with that beetle shape. One was copper colored, one was silver, and one rusty. Every so often their wing cases would lift slightly and reveal iridescent crystal blue beneath. The rusty one was almost twice as long as the others, with extra legs and a junction point where the new head would be after it split. Everywhere the bugs crawled, holes appeared in the metal.
Jeremy’s dad rounded the corner and said, “Get your butt in the car right now. We’re outta here!”
Jeremy scrambled up, brushing off his jeans. Ever since the power had gone out three days before, Dad’s temper had gone from easygoing to better-watch-out, and Jeremy wasn’t going to do anything that might trigger it.
When they rounded the house, Mom and Laurie were putting laundry baskets full of clothes into the trunk. Laurie was saying, “But why can’t I go over to Sarah’s instead? You said I could last week!”
Dad and Mom exchanged glances. Dad’s eyes narrowed and he opened his mouth, and Mom said quickly, “You’re going to have to trust me on this one, honey. Sometimes plans change.”
Dad shut his mouth and moved to the driver’s door. He muttered, “We should’ve left last week.” He paused and took a look at the house, head tilted back. Jeremy swiveled to see, but Dad barked, “In the car. Now!”
Jeremy got in the back and tried to look up through the rear window. He couldn’t tell what Dad had noticed, but it was hard to see ’cause Dad peeled out of the driveway and he was thrown across the seat and into Laurie.
She shrieked and shoved Jeremy back. “Put your seat belt on, idiot!”
He did, his eyes wide. The few times Dad had ever driven like that, Mom had screamed at him and made him stop the car, but now she was just looking back at Jeremy to make sure he got the seat belt fastened.
The tires screeched as they made the left at the subdivision entrance. Jeremy felt himself sink into the seat back as Dad accelerated toward the interstate.
Mom spoke through gritted teeth. “We’ve got to survive to survive, Peter.”
Dad blew air through his nose and slowed down slightly. The telephone poles were flicking by faster than Jeremy had ever seen, but there were no lines between them. Curling pieces of black insulation littered the ground and the side of the road.
Short of the interstate, Dad hesitated. “Last news report seemed to say it was spreading from Phoenix but it was worse in New Mexico. I think we should take 86 and 85, then join up on 8 and make for San Diego.”
“What about Mexico?” Mom said.
Dad shook his head. “No. They’re shooting people who try to cross. It’s stupid. The bugs travel all by themselves. It’s not going to help.”
“Do we have enough gas?”
Dad shrugged. “Maybe. There’s fifteen gallons in the jerricans.”
Gas wasn’t the issue.
Maybe Dad thought there’d be fewer bugs on that route because there were fewer people. Fewer people, less metal, but he hadn’t counted on the industrial park just west of San Pedro Road.
Mom muttered, “Where did they come from? Why are they doing this?”
You could see the frameworks of the buildings, but the skin, the painted steel sheets, were like Swiss cheese. Closer, at the side of the road, there were irregular mounds shimmering in the sunlight—silver, gold, copper, rust, all mixed with iridescent blue.
They didn’t slow down, but even going by at speed, Jeremy could see that the mounds weren’t still. They undulated and shifted, exposing the odd windshield or tire or plastic fender liner.
There was a crunching noise under the tires, and suddenly the air was full of iridescent wings.
It was like driving through a hailstorm. The bugs banged off the hood and the windshield and the roof. Dad took his foot off the pedal for an instant.
“Jesus!” Mom said. “Don’t stop! They’re not sticking.”
And that’s what they thought for another ten minutes. Then the bugs began edging over the front of the hood from the very front of the car. The grille had been scooping them up like a catcher’s mitt. You’d think that when they’d enter the slipstream on top of the car they would’ve been blown off, but they weren’t. They pressed their dark blind heads against the hood and stuck.
“Maybe we should get out?” Mom asked.
Dad tilted his head to the side. Through the rearview mirror Jeremy saw his eyes darting around. “Let’s get as far as we can.”
A few minutes later the radio antenna came off near its base and, several bugs still attached, clattered across the windshield, bounced once off the trunk, and was gone. Now the hood was covered and the bugs were climbing the roof struts on either side of the windshield. The left windshield wiper came off, and then the roar of the engine abruptly died, and everyone surged forward against the seat belts as the car slowed.
“They got the ignition,” Dad said, putting the car into neutral. “When I tell you, get out of the car as quickly as you can and run off the road.”
The car was on a downhill stretch and it wasn’t slowing much. Jeremy thought that was good. There weren’t as many bug mounds by the road, and the car was clearing the industrial park. The only bugs he could see were a small group eating a mile marker and the ones on their car.
Mom screamed, “They’re coming through the dashboard!”
They weren’t, really. There were a few crawling out of the plastic A/C vents. They began eating the metal radio trim. More crawled out, and she said, “Get me out of this car, Peter!”
Dad licked his lips, then nodded. Jeremy saw his body shift as Dad said, “The brakes are gone! They’ve eaten through the hydraulic lines!” Jeremy heard the ratcheting of the emergency brake, and the rear tires screeched. The rear end broke loose and slid. Dad steered into the skid, but with the engine dead, the power steering was no help at all.
They came over a rise, and saw the remains of another car—plastic, carpet, and tires in a jumble. Beside it, a cluster of turkey vultures were clustered around something dead. Rather than hit the wreckage, Dad headed toward the vultures. He tried to honk the horn, but it wasn’t working. As the car bore down on them, the birds jumped into the air, revealing their meal.
Mom screamed and Dad swore, swerving again to avoid the dead man, and the wheels caught the shoulder.
It wasn’t much, but it jerked the car around and it went off the road, bounced into, then out of, a ditch, and then plowed through a stand of prickly pear cactus and yucca, out into the desert.
The car came to a stop in a cloud of dust. Dad was bleeding from a cut on the side of his head, and his side window was shattered, but he just said, “Okay?” looking around. Then, “Out, out, out!”
There was dust swirling around the car, but it had cleared the worst of the cactus. Jeremy scrambled through the door and backed away from the car.
Dad was doing something with the dashboard, but he finally scrambled out, brushing at his pants leg. Bright copper flashed and fell to the ground. Dad reached into his pocket and threw something from him. It glittered as it passed over the hood of the car. Several bugs lifted into the air and followed it.
Jeremy looked at Dad’s leg. Where his right pants pocket had been, the cloth was riddled with holes; and there was blood spotting the white tatters that had been the pocket lining.
Mom and Laurie were standing on the other side of the car, near a hoary old saguaro. Mom had taken her cell phone out of her purse. Jeremy don’t know what she thought she was going to do. The cell towers had been the first to go. She turned it on, though, to try to acquire a signal, and the bugs rose up and headed for her.
Laurie screamed, and they both ran.
Dad yelled, “Get rid of the phone!” over and over again, running after them, wide around the swarm.
Mom must’ve heard him finally, for she tossed it off to the left and veered right.
The bugs followed the phone.
Mom and Laurie dropped, exhausted, onto a stretch of sand between the cholla. There was blood on their legs from the mesquite and cactus they’d torn through, and Laurie had a segment of jumping cholla stuck to her knee.
Jeremy paled when he saw that. Jumping cholla is a kind of cactus with nasty barbed spines. They stick all too well. You snag one on your shirt, and a branch segment breaks off in a banana-size chunk, and the recoil usually embeds twenty or so spines in your skin.
And since they’re barbed, they don’t like to come out.
Mom took a large comb out of her purse and held it behind her back toward Dad. He took it and held it low, where Laurie couldn’t see it.
Laurie’s eyes were wide, and she was hyperventilating through clenched teeth.
“Easy, easy,” Dad said. “Oh! Look what the bugs are doing to the cell phone!”
Jeremy knew that was bullshit. There was lots of brush between them and where the phone had landed, but Laurie turned her head, and Dad slipped the comb down between the cholla segment and the cloth of Laurie’s jeans and yanked.
Jeremy ducked. When the barbs let go, the chunk flew thirty feet, whizzing past his hair. Laurie screamed once, and then Mom was holding her tight and rocking her.
Cool, Jeremy thought. He hadn’t know Dad could be so sneaky.
“Gotta get the water out of the car,” Dad said. “I tried to pop the trunk before we got out, but the switch wouldn’t work and my keys are still in the ignition.” He took Mom’s purse and dumped it out onto the sand.
Mom’s keys—a jangling tangle of keys, souvenir key dangles, and the keyless remote for the car—were there. There was a also a small pocketknife, a metal nail file, and a pair of nail scissors. And a mountain of change.
“Shit!” Dad looked around wildly. There were bugs in the distance, but none near. He began scraping a hole in the sand and pushing the change into it.
“Bury it!” he said to Jeremy.
Jeremy stared back blankly.
Dad pointed at the bloody place where his pants pocket had been. “Metal. Any metal. They were going after the change in my pocket.”
Jeremy started pushing sand over the change. “But they really were interested in the cell phone,” he said. “More than the money in Mom’s purse, or her keys.”
“Yeah,” Dad said. “I think anything with an electromagnetic field. Anything with an electric current. Remember how they went for the electrical transmission wires first?”
Jeremy froze. “Shit.”
Despite her tears, Laurie giggled, and Mom’s eyes got really big. “Jeremy Bentham, what did I tell you—”
Dad held up his hand. “What’s wrong, Jerry?”
Jeremy took his GameGuy out of his hip pocket. “It’s mostly plastic, but electronics and a battery, too.”
“Ah,” Dad said. “Yeah, that could’ve gotten ugly. It’s off, right?”
“Yeah. I had it charging when the power went off, and I didn’t want to play it since I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to recharge it.” Jeremy started to put it in the hole.
“No. We can use it, I think.”
Dad took the trunk key off of Mom’s key ring and dropped the keys down on top of the coins. They mounded the sand above them, perhaps six inches high, and Jeremy marked it with a circle of stones.
Dad took the GameGuy and headed back toward the car.
Jeremy followed him, threading through the cholla with care. He stepped on a tinder-dry mesquite twig, which popped loudly, and Dad jerked around. For a second, Jeremy thought Dad was going to order him back to Mom, but Dad closed his mouth and nodded.
As they got closer, Jeremy heard a humming and then a cracking sound. Most of the bugs on the car weren’t flying, so their buzzing wasn’t the loudest thing. It was the car.
“Noisy,” Jeremy whispered.
Dad laughed without humor. “I don’t think you have to whisper. I don’t think they can hear anything outside the electromagnetic spectrum. That and detect metal. That cracking sound is the internal stresses of the metal being released as individual molecular bonds are broken.”
The bugs covered the entire car, including the trunk. The plastic fender liners had slumped down onto the ground, and the tires were flat. Paint was peeling off in shreds. The plastic parts had holes in them too, but they were incidental. The bugs went through them to get to other metal.
Dad looked at the GameGuy, then handed it to Jeremy. “Turn the volume up to max. I figure the more juice to the speaker, the bigger the electromagnetic field. It doesn’t broadcast on an antenna like Mom’s cell phone, but it’ll do something.”
Jeremy rotated the volume knob all the way up with a quick swipe of his thumb. His index finger went for the power switch, but Dad said, “Not yet.”
Dad held up his left hand, the trunk key encased in his fist. “I want you to turn the GameGuy on, then throw it over the car so it lands in that thicket in front. Don’t hit the car—we don’t want to knock it hard enough to stop working. The electromagnetic field needs to persist.”
Jeremy heard what Dad was saying, but his eyes were on Dad’s hand. “Dad, what about your wedding ring? Oh, Christ! What about your pacemaker?”
Dad froze. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.
“Oh, God!” Jeremy said. “What about your crowns?”
Dad shut his mouth with a snap. Then he said, “Let me see your mouth.”
Jeremy opened wide, and Dad sighed. “Right. Your mom always insisted on composite fillings for you kids. No mercury silver amalgams.” He looked down at Jeremy’s pants. “Shit. Take off your pants.”
“My pants?”
“You’ve got a brass zipper, a brass snap, and copper rivets reinforcing the corners of the pockets.”
“What about your zipper?” Jeremy said.
Dad shrugged. “You’re right about my pacemaker. I’m not going near the car. You’ll have to do it. We need the water and the clothing, if they haven’t already turned the containers into Swiss cheese.” He looked down. “Looks like your shoes are all leather and plastic—punched lace holes, no grommets. So get out of your pants, and we’ll try this.”
Dad took the GameGuy while Jeremy took his pants off. He felt funny about it—standing outdoors in his underwear—but had his shoes back on in just a few minutes.
Then Dad gave Jeremy the key. “Stick it in the lock, turn it, and flip the lid up. Don’t try to get the key back out.”
Jeremy nodded solemnly.
They moved around until they were lined up behind the trunk, about twenty feet back. Dad had Jeremy show him the GameGuy’s on switch. “Yeah—thought so, but wanted to be sure.”
He swung his arm back and flicked the switch.
There was moment of stillness on the car as every bug stopped moving; then iridescent blue wings exploded into view and bugs buzzed into the air, headed for them. Dad flung the GameGuy through the heart of the swarm, and most of the bugs shifted to follow, but a few still headed toward them.
“Damn it,” Dad said, and bolted. Jeremy dropped to the ground and shoved his fist, the one with the trunk key in it, into the loose sand. With his other hand he scraped sand over it, mounding it high.
One bug flew by, ignoring him, but another hovered for a moment, shifting back and forth in the air over him. Then it dropped to settle on Jeremy’s discarded jeans and began eating the brass zipper.
Jeremy loosened his grip on the key, then dug his other hand into the sand and lifted a mound up, the key inside. He didn’t know how much sand it would take to shield the metal from the bugs, but hopefully, with the car, the GameGuy, and the cell phone, the bugs would have higher-priority targets. He walked slowly forward, dribbling sand as he went. Bugs were returning to the car now, but the trunk lid was largely unoccupied.
Jeremy brought his mound of sand right up to the lock before he let the last grains pour out of his hands. For one frantic second, he nearly let the key slide out of his hand with the sand, but he caught it, aligned it, and jammed it into the lock.
The bugs on the trunk lid were twitching, but they kept eating even as the lock clicked and the trunk rose on sprung hinges.
There were a few bugs in the trunk, but it wasn’t too bad. Jeremy grabbed the baskets of clothes and flung them behind him, far from the car, then snatched the two water jugs and backed up.
The motion of the trunk lid had stirred the bugs up, and more were in the air. One bumped into his head and snagged on his hair. Jeremy could feel it moving, and pictured it eating into his skull. He shook his head violently, and the bug flipped off, buzzing into flight before it hit the ground; but now it was closer to the car than to him, and it flew to the vehicle.
Jeremy quickly gathered the spilled clothes back into the baskets. He dragged the water into the shade of a mesquite bush, well away from any metal. Then he took the clothes back to where Mom and Laurie were still sitting. “Where’s Dad?” Jeremy asked. Dad should have circled back to them by now.
Mom looked around. “I don’t know. I thought he was with you.”
Jeremy guessed she hadn’t overheard their conversation about the crowns and Dad’s pacemaker. He didn’t want to worry her. “He’s probably looking for shelter.”
“Where are your pants?”
“Too much metal,” Jeremy explained. “Metal zipper and snaps and rivets.”
He dug out a pair of basketball shorts, baggy and long but with an elastic waist, and pulled them on over his shoes. He pointed at the clothes baskets. “You should probably change out of anything with metal on it—unless you can remove the metal itself.”
“Where’s my purse? I’ve got scissors in them.”
“We buried them, Mom. Metal, remember?”
He went back and got one of the water jugs, dropping it on the sand by Laurie. “Here. I’ll go check on Dad.”
Dad had gone north, away from the road, away from the car. Jeremy picked up the other water jug and followed.
There was a large stretch of gravel and sand interspersed with mixed cactus and mesquite, and some dry-as-tinder grass. Jeremy kept his eyes open for rattlesnakes and scorpions. He wasn’t as worried about Gila monsters, since they rarely bit unless you picked them up.
The brush stopped at water, and Jeremy blinked, surprised. It was a water trap on the edge of a golf course. On the other side of the water was a green fairway starting to turn brown, and condos lined the far side of that.
They weren’t as far out in the desert as he’d thought.
There were bugs buzzing across the water, and something moved just below the surface, then Dad’s head came up and he took a deep gasp of air. The bugs shifted toward him, but Dad was already underwater again. Jeremy saw a flash of a kicking leg as he swam toward a different spot.
Jeremy knew Dad couldn’t do that forever. He wished he had the GameGuy again, so he could heave it across the pond, distracting the bugs. He had to do something.
A groundskeeper’s shed, roofed and sided with corrugated fiberglass panels, was strewn across the grounds at one end of the pond. There were bugs crawling through the contents, but Jeremy saw, off to one side, some scraps of hose. He ran over, slowing drastically as he got closer. The bugs were eating metal shovels, brass fittings, and the screws out of the two-by-four framing.
But they’d cut through a bunch of hose, too, while eating through the metal reel the hose had been coiled around. Jeremy inched closer until he could reach in and snag a foot-long section. It was still connected to the main hose, but only by a small strip, left when the bugs had crawled through it. Jeremy put his foot on the longer section and heaved. The connecting material broke with a snap, and he fell back into the brown grass, clutching the short end.
Bugs—disturbed by the vibrations, Jeremy guessed—rose into the air, and he froze on the ground as they swirled over him, then finally returned to the scattered shed and settled back onto the tools.
Jeremy edged away from the shed and ran back to the pond, plunging in and swiftly heading for Dad through waist-deep water.
This time, Dad’s face was out of the water, just barely, just enough for him to breathe. His eyes were wide and flicking back and forth, looking for bugs, but they hadn’t spotted him yet.
“Get back, Jerry! Those bugs could get you as they’re trying to get me!”
Jeremy held up the tubing. “A snorkel.”
Dad couldn’t hear him. The water was in his ears. So Jeremy put one end of the tubing in his mouth and tilted up the opposite end, then held his other hand flat, indicating the surface of the water below the upper end of the hose.
“Ah!” Dad reached for the hose, and Jeremy put it in his hand. Dad’s head came up out of the water, and the bugs, four or five, homed in on him. Dad dove back under, and Jeremy did too.
When Jeremy came up again, the bugs were spread out, quartering the pond. He could not see his dad, only the hose sticking out of the water in the middle of the pond.
The water wasn’t that cold, but when Jeremy climbed out of the pond, his wet skin and clothes acted like an evaporative cooler, chilling him. It felt good at first, and then uncomfortable. He wanted to get those bugs away from Dad. Dad couldn’t stay in that pond forever.
Laurie and Mom had changed clothes when he returned. Mom looked up sharply when he came back into sight. “Where’s your father?”
Jeremy gestured. “He’s okay. But he needs to stay where he is. The bugs really like his pacemaker and his crowns.”
The car was now completely covered in bugs, and its outline had changed substantially. It was lower on the ground. Between cactus thorns and bugs burrowing through the tires, going after the steel fibers, the tires no longer held air.
“We should get farther away from that,” Jeremy said.
Mom started stuffing their metal-free clothes into one of the clothes baskets, ignoring the discards.
Jeremy looked at Mom’s purse, still lying besides the ring of rocks that marked the buried coins, keys, and scissors. He picked it up. It was a leather purse lined with cloth. The straps were a continuous sweep of the body’s cloth-lined leather and it had a nylon zipper. The only metal part, the zipper pull, had come off the previous year.
He started filling it with sand.
“What are you doing?” Laurie said.
“Need to carry some metal over to where Dad is.”
“What? Won’t that bring the bugs down on us?”
“Not if it’s buried in sand. Shielded.” He dug his hands into the sand in the middle of the rock circle, worming his fingers down.
He found the scissors by stabbing himself firmly in the ball of his thumb. He jerked his hand back up and stuck it in his mouth, tasting sand and blood.
Jeremy brought the items up one by one, centered in a double handful of sand, and dropped them into the purse. Only once did a bug come to investigate, and he frantically shoveled more sand into the purse until it flew back to the mound of bugs that used to be their car.
The last thing was his mom’s key ring, with the radio remote for the car and some decorative metal stars hanging on chains. As he pulled it up out of the sand, several bugs took to the air and flew toward him. He dug down into the growing hole, grabbed the last few coins, and threw them at the approaching bugs. As the pennies and nickels flew by, the bugs turned around to follow them.
He had to get Laurie to help him carry the purse, it was that full of sand. She took one strap, Jeremy took the other, and they staggered back through the mesquite and chollo to the water trap.
Dad was still underwater, out in the middle of the pond, breathing through the hose. The bugs, now more than a dozen, were patrolling the water’s surface.
“Where’s your father?” Mom asked.
Jeremy pointed and told her about the snorkel.
She put her hand to her mouth. “We’ve got to get him out of there!”
“And put him where?”
“Someplace where he won’t drown.”
“What about the bugs, Mom? If he gets out of the water, those bugs are going after his crowns and his pacemaker.”
Mom blinked and looked around desperately, as if hoping for a policeman or an EMT or a fireman to help her. Then she covered her mouth, as though holding back screams to keep them from echoing across the pond.
Jeremy curled in on himself, arms crossed. He remembered the body from the road, the one the vultures had been stripping, and he wondered if this is how the man had died. Had the bugs drilled through his head, going for his crowns? Did he have a pacemaker or an artificial knee or hip? For a terrible instant, Jeremy visualized his father lying faceup in the sun, the bugs crawling over him.
Laurie said, “Bury him.”
Mom dropped her hands, shocked. “How is that better than drowning?”
Laurie shook her head. “I don’t mean like a grave. Shield him with earth, like this.” She jerked her chin at the purse.
Jeremy licked his lips. He took a deep, shuddering breath. That could work, maybe. “We’ll have to dig a hole.”
It took an hour to build the bunker. They ran into caliche—fused clay and gravel—at a foot and a half. Without metal tools, they couldn’t really go any deeper, but they could raise the ground around it.
They ended up with a trench that was as long as Dad was tall, with walls that stuck up three feet above the caliche floor. Jeremy dragged some of the fiberglass panels over from the remains of the groundskeeper’s shed, and set them aside. When they were ready, he retrieved a quarter from the center of the sand-filled purse and flung it across the pond. The hovering bugs followed it.
Dad was able to stick his head up out of the water long enough for Jeremy to explain the plan.
He said, “I’ll try anything to get out of this damn water.”
Mom and Laurie waited in the pond near Dad while Jeremy dug his hand into the purse and found Mom’s keys. When it seemed clear enough—there were only a few bugs now quartering the surface of the water—he ran for the fairway, around the pond to the side that was opposite the shed, Mom’s ring of metal keys and bangles dangling from his hand.
A few bugs followed him, but when Jeremy reached the middle of the golf course, he pushed and held the unlock button on the car remote. Bugs rose all around him: from the remains of the shed, from the pond, and from the condos on the other side of the fairway. Thousands of bugs.
He hadn’t thought of that. They were everywhere.
He flung the keys as far toward the condos as he could, and dashed up the brown grass, zigzagging, hearing the bugs tear past him, stinging and burning as they bounced off his face; and then he seemed to be clear of them.
Jeremy circled back around to the pond, where Mom and Laurie had helped Dad out of the pond and into the trench, then laid the fiberglass panels across the raised dirt walls. They were scooping dirt on top of him as fast as they could. Jeremy tried to help, but blood kept running down into his eyes. When the first layer of soil covered the fiberglass, Mom made him go sit in the shade and hold a T-shirt to his face until the bleeding stopped.
Dad stayed in the bunker for seven more days. The structure was open at each end but they built zigzag walls leading out from it, so there were no straight lines for his pacemaker EMF to leak out.
Jeremy scavenged food from the condos, fishing food out of pantries with long sticks—lucking out early on with plastic jars of peanut butter and spaghetti sauce. He went alone, moving carefully among the slowly collapsing buildings, and he always came back with food or liquids. No cans, of course. No jars with metal lids.
Fortunately, most of the residents had fled early on. Most. He didn’t talk about the bodies he did find until Dad, stir-crazy in the bunker, wanted to run for it.
Laurie and Jeremy built a solar still with clear plastic sheets and a hose, and the surface of the pond was substantially lower by the time the National Guard found them.
The Guard moved Dad thirty miles to the west, shielded by sandbags, on the back of an improvised cart, and when they got to a place where they couldn’t find any bugs, they put a white chalk symbol on the ground twenty yards across. A helicopter dropped down from ten thousand feet just long enough for them to throw Dad aboard. Bugs came, but the copter went high, fast, shooting for the thin air at the upper reaches of its operational altitude.
It worked. The bugs couldn’t keep up, and the helicopter didn’t fall out of the sky.
Mom, Laurie, and Jeremy didn’t see Dad for another two weeks—the time it took them to walk out—but he was waiting for them when they crossed out of the zone, near Calexico.
The bugs were behind them, still reproducing, but they weren’t spreading out of Arizona and New Mexico, a guardsman told Jeremy.
“We don’t know why. Maybe they only like the areas with sunshine? Or they’re consolidating before they expand farther?”
Like Jeremy, the soldier had half-healed bug burns across his face. Jeremy had told him about the bodies he’d found in the condos.
The soldier understood. “With holes in their heads, right? Mostly around the jaw?”
Jeremy gulped and nodded.
The soldier hooked a finger in his mouth and pulled his cheek back to show a gap in his molars. “Once we realized what they were after, I had my CO knock out that crown using a rock and a stick as a chisel. This was after we starting ditching all our metal gear.
“It was nice getting your dad out. We found too many people who stayed, with metal crowns or artificial joints. I mean, we saved one guy by amputating his leg while the bugs were working on his artificial knee; and we knocked a lot of teeth out. Your dad, though, is the only survivor I saw with an electronic prosthesis. Saw a lot of nonsurvivors.”
Then the soldier shook his head, smiling slightly. “Almost weirder are the survivors who’ve stayed in there, trying to make it without metal, staying clear of the bugs. We were told to evacuate everybody, but it’s hard enough getting the people out who want to leave.” He scratched gently at one of his new scars. “Wonder if they’ll make it?”
Dad moved them to Maine, and he would’ve moved farther if there’d been any place in the Continental United States that was farther from the bugs. Jeremy couldn’t blame him. If Jeremy had a pacemaker, he’d do the same.
When kids asked him about the scars on his face, he told them the truth, but they usually looked at him like he was crazy, like he was making it up.
Fine. They weren’t there. They couldn’t really know.
Jeremy tried to be a good kid, working hard in school. He read everything he could find on the bugs and their dominion, the newly declared Southwest Emergency Zone. He made a special effort to get along with his sister. His parents had been through enough, he thought, and he did his best to ease their days.
It was going to be hard enough on them later, when he went back.