“Does your boat have a horn?” Duncan asked.

  “A horn?”

  “The bugs, they hate the sirens. It can kill them if it’s loud enough. They—”

  Over the sound of his voice, Duncan heard the unmistakable buzz of insects. He jerked his head up, trying to pinpoint the direction the next horror was coming from, and saw a swarm of giant hornets rising up from under the water only a few meters away, popping to the surface like black bubbles and then taking flight and forming a growing swarm of insects.

  And following them up out of the water, breaching the surface…

  Something unspeakable.

  Something unholy.

  Something horribly familiar yet horribly perverted.

  “Bring weapons,” Duncan said. “There’s a monster here.”

  Before they could reply Duncan turned down the volume knob and switched the radio off.

  The creature that rose from the lake, soaked in black muck and red blood, had the body of a nude woman, completely pockmarked with clusters of irregular holes. Like those gross-out trypophobia memes on the internet.

  But these holes had bugs inside. Wriggling, writhing bugs.

  And this nude woman, though brutally disfigured, was recognizable by her pink and blue hair.

  “Lyon,” Duncan announced.

  “That’s Lyon?” Chuck said under his breath. “Someone took an ugly stick and beat her ass for weeks.”

  “She’s a goddamn bug farm,” Stu added. “Is she the one that did this? Is your stalker some kind of tenth level demon witch bug necromancer?”

  Lyon seemed to have no trouble walking on the mucky lake bottom, and as she neared the shore she raised her hands above her head and the cloud of bugs rose up around her, gathering mass.

  “Hello, Duncan.”

  Her voice was low, croaky, straight out of The Exorcist.

  “I just pissed myself,” Stu said.

  Duncan forced himself to stand up, not sure what to do but knowing escape wasn’t an option.

  We’re too injured to run. And if she can somehow control the bugs, we won’t be able to hide.

  “Hello, Lyon.”

  “Duncan, what are you doing?” Chuck asked, reaching for his leg.

  Duncan waved him away and continued to approach the creature—

  —and then the creature raised both of her arms, and the swarm of hornets and dragonflies and sand flies and who knew what else buzzed across the water, heading toward Duncan and his friends.

  “Stop it!” Duncan ordered, putting up his palms.

  Incredibly, the insects paused in mid-air, halting the attack and hovering just above their heads.

  “This is inevitable, Duncan,” Lyon purred. “It has always been inevitable.”

  Lyon kept moving forward, and as she got knee-deep in the water he watched, stomach churning, as leeches slithered out between her legs and plopped into the muck.

  Chuck vomited. Duncan felt close to doing the same.

  “Let my friends go,” Duncan said, modulating his voice, getting the fear and disgust under control. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  A low, wet rumbling sound came from Lyon.

  Jesus. She’s laughing.

  “You’re wrong, Duncan. I can do whatever I want. I don’t need your permission.”

  She’s a crazy stalker. I know that.

  Now she’s a crazy stalker and a monster who can control killer insects.

  What’s the play here?

  What’s my move?

  I can’t fight.

  Which means…

  “What if you had my permission?” Duncan asked.

  Lyon’s head cocked to the side, like a confused dog.

  He made himself smile. “What would you rather have, Lyon? You forcing me to do something? Or me doing it willingly?”

  “Willingly?” she croaked.

  “Call off the bugs. You won. You finally made me understand.”

  Lyon came up on shore, bringing a stench with her.

  Blood. Viscera. Meat going bad.

  Her glossy eyes went wide, thin white worms oozing from her tear ducts and squirming onto her holey cheeks, and the bugs hiding in the holes feasted on the worms like noodles. “What do you understand, Duncan?”

  Stay cool. Stay calm.

  This is like deescalating a bar fight.

  Soothing tones. Rational words.

  “I was wrong to choose Katie. You’re the better woman. You’re smarter. You’re stronger.” Duncan swallowed, then tried his best to flirt. “You’re… you’re more attractive.”

  “You like the new look?” Lyon asked. After she spoke, a long red leech slithered out of her nostril and dropped onto her protruding tongue. She slurped it up.

  “Jesus Christ, Duncan,” Stu said.

  “Stu, shut the hell up!” Duncan tried to smile. “You’re very powerful, Lyon. Power is hot.”

  “If you think it’s hot, kiss me.”

  “Oh hell no!” Chuck said. “Just let her kill us, Duncan. I can’t watch that.”

  He whirled on his friends. “Chuck, show some freaking respect.” Then he lowered his voice and said, “I’m not going to let you guys die.”

  They didn’t reply.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Duncan insisted. “Let me have some private time with this girl. Go!”

  Chuck managed to get up. He offered a weak smile. “I puked up the maggot I swallowed.”

  “Help Stu. Get away.”

  Chuck’s eyes got glassy. “Duncan… all we’ve been through, I can’t handle this emotional bullshit.”

  “Man up and handle it. You’re my brothers,” Duncan smiled, his lips trembling just a bit. “I love you guys.”

  Chuck said, “We’re ride or die, Duncan.”

  Stu nodded. “Ride or die.”

  “Well,” Duncan said, “the ride is over.”

  They stared at him.

  “Captain’s rules,” Duncan ordered. “What the captain says is the rule, right? Both of you, go. Now.”

  Neither of his friends moved.

  “Now!” Duncan yelled.

  Looking like scolded children, Stu and Chuck limped away, into the woods.

  Duncan inhaled deeply, the sooty air rough in his lungs.

  Keep it together until Andy gets here with weapons.

  But what could guns do against thousands of insects?

  He pushed back the doubt and turned to face Lyon—

  — who was standing directly in front of him.

  Up close, her condition defied reality, defied sanity. She was a night terror come to life, bugs everywhere, holes everywhere, blood everywhere, her bare, tortured flesh rippling as insects crawled over her, in and out of her, a walking, grinning, gory nest of wasps and ants and hell.

  She smiled, revealing pink gums wiggling with slimy grubs, red ants scurrying over her lips and face like runny makeup, the holes in her cheeks filled with flies and hornets, contemplating Duncan with their wet eyes as they poked out their heads.

  Lyon stuck out her tongue, a black tongue, and it kept stretching and stretching and it eventually slurped out and fell, not a tongue but another huge leech. The insects buzzing around her landed, finding the gaping holes in her flesh, coming back to their living hive.

  “How about that kiss, lover?” she gurgled.

  Duncan checked behind him.

  His friends were gone.

  He checked the lake.

  No sights, or sounds, or any approaching boats.

  I have my Swiss Army knife.

  She has thousands of biting, stinging insects living in her skin.

  I only have one option.

  Kiss the girl.

  Duncan remembered being a kid, a real kid, before the destruction of Safe Haven, when bad dreams were only dreams and evil didn’t exist yet and monsters were just fantasies made up to scare children.

  It had been third grade. Recess after a rain. Earthworms on the playground, frolicking in the puddles, looking to inch their way back into the mud.

  Duncan had been dared to eat one.

  The dare included bribes. A new box of crayons. A Transformer toy. A Spider-Man comic book. Duncan held out for more, and eventually his classmates also offered him three dollars, ten videogame tokens for the local arcade, a Braves hat, and a pack of Bubblicious.

  Duncan picked up the worm, dangled it above his open mouth, and swallowed that sucker whole.

  He won a bunch of stuff, won the respect and awe of his friends, and felt like the bravest kid in the school.

  The worm had been covered with mucus, tasted like cold pennies, and had wiggled going down.

  It wasn’t pleasant, but it was bearable.

  How much worse could this be?

  Duncan closed his eyes, tilted his head, and moved in for the kiss—

  —and the kiss began.

  Lyon’s mouth was cold, like raw liver.

  Raw liver that moved and rippled.

  Duncan tensed, feeling the slimy little maggots stuck in her gums caress his lips. He kept his tongue pulled away, waiting for the bites and stings, but what happened next was in some ways worse.

  The bugs didn’t attack. They invaded.

  Duncan’s mouth began to fill with crawling, slithering things, like rice pudding that was alive. The taste wasn’t too bad, nutty and a bit sour, but the disgust factor got worse as his cheeks expanded, and the nauseating sensation of having a mouthful of living creatures caused his stomach to somersault, but he didn’t dare throw up because his tongue was pressed against the roof of his mouth, blocking off his throat so nothing crept further inside of him.

  Duncan tried to pull away, but Lyon grabbed the back of his head, pressing into him, her wormy leg rubbing against his bare calf, her tongue—or maybe another leech—tunnelling through the maggots in his mouth and licking the backsides of his teeth.

  She moaned, low and deep, and Duncan didn’t want to touch her infested body but had to so he could push away, and when his palms pressed against her chest she moaned, louder, and then something in his mouth began to bite him, little electric nips of pain on his gums and inner cheeks and underneath his tongue, and then he had only one defense left…

  Duncan began to chew.

  The taste turned bitter, acrid, and slightly oily, with a texture like grapes made of raw meat. He continued to bite the creepy crawlies as they bit him, but he couldn’t get away from Lyon, she was impossibly strong, and the more he resisted the more excited she seemed to get.

  This was the worst decision I’ve ever made, and the last decision I’ll ever make, and I’m going to die in the most horrible way and I’ll never see Katie again and oh now Lyon is reaching into my swimming trunks and there is something pushing past my tongue and into my throat and at least I saved Stu and Chuck those ungrateful little—

  There was a THWAK! sound and Duncan was suddenly freed. He staggered back, spitting and choking, digging his finger into his mouth to wipe it out, and kept hearing THWAK! THWAK! THWAK! and noticed Stu and Chuck were beating the absolute shit out of Lyon with large tree branches the size of caveman clubs.

  When Lyon stopped moving, her head and chest flattened, blood soaking into the ground beneath her, Stu and Chuck stopped their attack and looked at Duncan.

  “Ride or die, Captain,” Stu said.

  Duncan, overwhelmed by emotion, stretched open his arms to hug his brothers and they both backed away.

  “Hell no! You still got maggots in your damn mouth!” Chuck said. “How could you kiss that beast?”

  “I did it to save you jackasses.”

  “You liked it!” Stu accused. “You got wood! That’s disgusting!”

  “I don’t have—” Duncan looked down at his swim trunks, which were sticking out a few inches more than usual.

  Sticking out, and wiggling.

  He reached in, felt around, and his fist locked onto an enormous leech. He screamed, tugged it out of his shorts, and threw it into the woods.

  As he felt his knees giving out, a buzzing sound filled his ears, and he watched, blurry-eyed, as the bugs began to evacuate Lyon’s crushed body, crawling out of their flesh homes and taking to the air.

  “Run,” Chuck said, dropping his club and using his good arm to grab Duncan’s wrist.

  “The fire tower,” Stu pointed. “The lookout room is screened in.”

  They moved as fast as they could, staggering around the barbwire topped chain-link fence surrounding the tower, and coming to a gate.

  A locked gate.

  We’d planned on coming here later. We knew there was a padlock.

  That’s why I brought my lockpick kit.

  Having a family into prepping meant learning a lot about a lot from a young age. Starting fires with sparks and tinder. Making water potable. Building a shelter in the woods. Knot tying. Reading a compass. Shooting a variety of weapons. Foraging for edibles. Trapping animals.

  And, inevitably, picking locks.

  Duncan found himself facing a standard Master Lock 7LF. He wouldn’t even need to pick it. With a tension bar and a wave pick, he could rake the lock; basically stick the pick in and out really quick while pressing up against the tumbler pins and applying torsion to the cylinder.

  It took three seconds.

  But no one had time to be impressed, because the horde of flying insects had found them and the attack had begun. Duncan dropped the lock, opened the gate, and the three injured men hurried to the ladder. The fire tower was essentially a screened-in room with a large siren on the roof, eighty feet above the ground on top of a steel lattice structure. From that height you could spot smoke columns and flames and judge the direction the fire was moving in and how quickly. Essential before 5G became a thing.

  They hurried to the first metal staircase, Stu going up first, Chuck behind him, and Duncan bringing up the rear, ascending quickly considering their injuries, only stopping to swat at stinging insects.

  By the fourth set of stairs they were exhausted. But the insects weren’t, and apparently had no trouble flying and attacking at that altitude. And while the shitty air quality burned their lungs and slowed them down, it didn’t slow down the flies and wasps, who kept dive bombing the trio faster than they could slap them away.

  With two flights left Duncan passed Chuck and half-carried Stu, making it to the top, opening the unlocked steel door and setting him on the floor, then going back to assist Chuck.

  When all three were inside with the door closed behind them, coughing and wheezing, Duncan noticed a few bugs got in as well. The 15’x15’ room was nothing more than four walls surrounded by screened windows, overlooking the lake and forest. In a corner was a circuit breaker panel and a metal locker. In the center of the room, a square table with three chairs.

  “It’s like they knew we were coming,” Stu said.

  On the table were some old magazines, a deck of cards, a worn out Jack Kilborn paperback, and a dusty pair of binoculars.

  “Keep your eyes closed, guys. I’m going to take care of the bugs.”

  Four gigantic wasps, and three flies, had entered the tower room with them, and as his friends sat in the chairs Duncan hunted down the insects with a June 2012 copy of Playboy. In deference to the pretty brunette on the front cover, he rolled the magazine reverse-side out, smacking the insects with the Justin Timberlake Givenchy ad on the back.

  Bye bye bye!

  And when the NSYNC boy’s face smashed the last giant wasp into goo, Duncan sat at the table with the boys.

  “Guys…” he said. “We made it. For real this time.”

  Stu, wiped out and barely keeping his eyes open, gave him an up nod. Chuck, cradling the lure still stuck in his shoulder, also gave him an up nod, but his eyes were locked on the Jaclyn Swedberg magazine cover.

  That’s when Duncan heard a sound that cut right to his very soul.

  From the ground below, screeching like a beast from hell, something roared, “DUNCAN!”

  “Oh, shit,” Chuck said. “We broke the cardinal rule in the horror genre. Make sure the big bad is dead.”

  They went to the window and looked down, watching as the actually-not-dead bug-infested Lyon got back up and beelined for the fire tower.

  LEO

  SAME TIME…

  All three hundred and fifty of his joints aching and threatening to separate, Leo followed Sun back into the house.

  The Tug didn’t want him in the house. It wanted him on the lake.

  He still had no idea why.

  Leo also had no idea what to do if he snapped in half. His spine really hurt, and if his lower body fell off he wasn’t sure that it could be reattached with an angle grinder, even with the chainsaw blade.

  I guess I’ll find out when the time comes.

  Life is full of lovely surprises like that.

  Spending time with Mary the other day had been an interesting experience, but an unrelatable one. He had no idea what it was like to be elderly, so he couldn’t fully identify with her worldview. Driving with Katie had also left Leo somewhat detached; while he could remember being that young, his situation had been so far removed from Katie’s that he felt more than a single generation older.

  But seeing Sun, in an apparently happy and healthy relationship with Andy, stirred regret in Leo.

  There was a time when I could have married. Got a house on a lake. Maybe even had kids.

  I’d always been too vain. Too angry. Too preoccupied. Too selfish.

  Now it seems like I’m getting my nose rubbed in all of my mistakes and regrets.

  I know I deserve it. If the Universe is keeping a balance sheet, I’m very much in the red.

  This is the destiny I’m due.

  Leo let himself dwell on the thought, but felt oddly at peace with it.

  Maybe I’m changing mentally as well as physically.

  Maybe it isn’t all about me.

  Marriage isn’t in the cards. No house on the lake. No children.

  I might not have a future.

  But maybe, just maybe, I’ll find out how to live with myself before I die.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Sun warned him as they walked through the kitchen.

  Leo kept his hands in his trench coat pockets. Sun and Andy’s house, like Duncan’s, was set up to deal with trouble. Everywhere he looked, security doors and windows and locks, surveillance cameras, weapons likely hidden everywhere.