The Squirm
A short horror story about a swarm
Kira stood at her window and watched the police helicopter circle in the night sky, its red and blue lights flashing. The message blasting from its loudspeaker was muffled behind the duct-tape framed window, but it didn’t matter, she’d heard it before. The message played on her phone, as well as on the TV, and the radio, every hour, on the hour:
This is Vector Control, due to abnormal Vector levels, all citizens are ordered to stay indoors. Citizens caught outside will be arrested and sent to quarantine. Stay indoors. Vector Control repeats, stay indoors. All violators will be placed in quarantine.
Kira let the curtain drop from her clenched fist. One hundred and sixty-three days of seeing nothing but the inside of her own apartment. One hundred and sixty-tree days of feeling nothing but the same carpet under her feet, the same coffee table, sofa, and bedsheets under her fingertips. One hundred and sixty-three days of hearing Vector Control say twenty-four times a day that they were shit at their jobs and there was going to be a day one hundred and sixty-four. It was supposed to have been a few days. That’s what they’d been told at the beginning of this nightmare. Vector Control would contain the threat and normal life would resume.
But that had been one hundred and sixty-three days ago.
Kira’s fingers twitched.
She pulled the curtain back again, lately she’d had a perverse urge to watch them. In the daytime they swirled high in the sky in massive clouds, thick and black. Like an oil slick in the blue ocean, they shouldn’t be there. Not in those numbers. At night they massed and swirled at street level, drawn to the light and snaking in black swaths through neighborhoods and around homes, seeking entry at doors and windows. Kira waited, holding the curtain in a white-knuckled grip, until she heard the whine, a high-pitched, tinny drone. A billion wings searching for a bloodmeal. Not for themselves, for their broods. Kira put her hand against the glass and felt it vibrate with the whine as the ribbon of black came undulating across her view. This close, she could see the individuals that made up the ribbon as they brushed up against the glass. Their syringe-like mouths, their black and white banded legs… their eggs were ravenous. They’d sucked every living thing dry for miles. And they were spreading across the country. Cities in their path were scrambling for a deterrent, a control, a barrier, anything to keep them out.
One hundred and ninety-seven days
I am God and these my creatures squirm inside the yellow void. Infinite they wriggle, I see messages in their movements. Protect. Kill. Protect the squirm. Kill the human. Kill the human. Protect the squirm. I am God and my squirm pleases me. My squirm seed shall multiply and cover the Earth. I shall give them the land. I shall bless them with bloodmeals and sweet nectar for all of their days. And I will protect all of my squirm, from this day forth.
