Duncan purposely didn’t look. But as he glanced away, he saw the leeches that had piggybacked onto the boat via the bass were beginning to crawl around the floor of the pontoon, one of them slinking up Stu’s rubber soled flip-flop and over his bare toes.

  A moment later, Chuck was stomping on the creature, blood squirting out like a squashed ketchup packet. One that had a thick line of spoiled yellow custard running through it.

  Duncan had to turn away. He suffered with vasovagal syncope; getting light-headed by the sight of blood. He hated gore the same way he hated rot.

  From that tragic childhood event in Safe Haven.

  I don’t handle death in a healthy way.

  He managed to avoid vomiting by taking some deep, slow breaths, which tasted faintly of soot. “Dude. You’re getting worm guts everywhere. You gotta clean that up, man.”

  Chuck, being Chuck, seemed unconcerned about his friends’ opinions. He was frowning at the bottom of his Nike. “You think we could fish with these things? You can fish with leeches, right?”

  Stu had his camera out and was photographing the bloodsucker feasting on his arm, its black body pulsating as it gulped.

  Duncan turned away, his stomach wrenching like it was filled with leeches, wiggling and gnawing and squirming to get out.

  I’m starting to lose it. I need to take a few deep breaths and calm down.

  But how am I supposed to take a deep breath with the stink of death in my nose and mouth?

  “Get it out of the boat, Stu. Now.”

  “Gross, dude,” Chuck said. “There’s a baby leech coming out of its eye.”

  Against his better judgment, Duncan looked. Protruding from the bass’s eye socket, wiggling like a finger, was a white worm.

  “That’s not a leech.” Stu squatted down for a closer look.

  “So what is it?” Chuck asked.

  “I’m not sure. Too big for a Loa loa.”

  Duncan didn’t want to know what Loa loa were, but sure enough, Stu explained.

  “Loa loa are parasitic roundworms that live in the conjunctiva of the eye. They’re spread by deerflies. They eat eye tissue and cause blindness.”

  “Deerflies?” Duncan could see several deerflies buzzing around the boat.

  “They live in rainforests, not Wisconsin. And these don’t look like nematodes. They’re more like…” Stu made a face. “Maggots. That’s weird.”

  “No shit it’s weird,” Chuck said. “Think we can fish with it?”

  Stu took a pic of the maggot. “That’s a big one. Maggots don’t have teeth. They have these mouth hooks that tear out flesh.”

  Stu pinched the maggot and it came out of the fish eye with a slurping sound.

  “Big sucker.” He placed it next to himself on the vinyl pontoon seat. “It can move, too. Look at the little sucker go.”

  “Get the fish off the boat,” Duncan repeated. “Now.”

  “I need to get your lure.”

  “Fuck the lure. I’ll cut the line. Get it out of the boat. Chuck?”

  “I ain’t touching that thing.”

  Stu rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Duncan. It’s just nature being nature. Death is part of life. No need to act like a baby.”

  “He’s not being a baby, Stu. Remember that incident? When he was a kid?”

  “It wasn’t an incident,” Duncan clarified. “Some psychopaths massacred everyone in my entire town. The whole town, Stu. Over a thousand people. That’s more than a goddamn incident.”

  “Easy, brother. I’m not trying to get you upset.”

  But it’s too late for that.

  Duncan leaned down and opened his Umco tackle box. After pulling out the expanding trays, he felt around in the bottom for the gaff. It was a large metal hook with a rubber grip, used for landing big fish. Duncan had never used it for that purpose; he practiced catch and release, and gaffs could cause serious injury to the fish. But he’d inherited it from his grandpa, and it was a good luck charm of sorts.

  He handed it to Chuck. “Can you…?”

  “Sure, man.”

  Chuck speared the large hook into the dead bass with a wet THUNK! He lifted the fish and its leech and maggot passengers out of the net and over the side of the boat and shook it off, letting everything plop into the water.

  When it hit, the fish’s belly popped open, exploding with a wiggling knot of worms.

  Duncan came over to cut Stu’s line, using some nail clippers he had hanging around his neck on a lanyard. Thankfully, the smell of rot went away, which made his stomach settle a bit and his stress ease up.

  But Stu was still fondling the gigantic leech sucking on his hand.

  “Get rid of it,” Duncan told him.

  “I study this kind of stuff, Duncan. I’m telling you, nothing like this is supposed to live in this area.”

  “I want it off the boat.”

  “I can put it in a water bottle.”

  There were five empty plastic bottles they’d finished earlier that morning.

  “I’m not playing, Stu. Throw it overboard.”

  Stu seemed annoyed, but Duncan didn’t care. With his free hand, Stu pinched the end of the worm and pulled. The leech stretched out like a rubber band, so long that Stu appeared to be shooting an arrow from an invisible bow. Then it snapped off, flicking a line of blood across Duncan’s face.

  Duncan fell to his knees, his world going dizzy, and as he blacked out he didn’t notice Stu putting the maggot in an empty water bottle.

  SUNSHINE

  SAME LAKE, SAME TIME…

  Sunshine Dennison-Jones stared, wide-eyed, at the creature on her window screen.

  That hornet is enormous.

  Sun’s veterinary skills encompassed domesticated animals and pets, including arthropods. In her previous jobs she’d helped the owner of a tarantula get rid of mites. She’d saved an ant farm from fungus. She’d even worked with a boy to set up a habitat for his giant Madagascar hissing cockroach. And on Lake Niboowin she’d helped a local beekeeper remove an infestation of Galleria mellonella; wax moths.

  But her animal-loving heart had no affection for hornets. Not with all the animals she had in the house and around the property. Not with Francis, a child who was fearless around all creatures no matter how creepy or dangerous. And especially not around her husband, Andy, who was stung by a yellow jacket a few months ago and had an allergic reaction. Anaphylactic shock. His throat closed up, and he could barely breathe.

  Luckily, Sun had a few EpiPens on hand; epinephrine injector devices which she’d stockpiled before their costs went up to almost a thousand bucks a shot.

  Well… if three extra pens can be considered a stockpile.

  Andy quickly recovered, the yellow jacket nest was located and destroyed with the help of the bee suits they’d purchased to deal with the wax moths, and life on the lake went on for all (except for those stinging pests).

  But this hornet wasn’t anything like the paper wasp that had gotten Andy.

  This is something different. Something strange. Something worse.

  Fighting a twinge of dread, Sun took out her cell phone to take a picture of the insect clinging to the outside living room window screen, carefully putting her thumb, which wasn’t as long or wide as the bug, alongside it for scale.

  She snapped the pic—

  —and the hornet pounced, clutching at her finger, sticking its abdomen through the screen holes. Sun jerked her hand away just as the stinger poked through the mesh, the centimeter-long tip glistening with venom.

  That’s uncommonly aggressive.

  Sun’s expertise didn’t extend to Hymenoptera, but she knew that hive insects became more likely to attack as winter neared. However, this was the height of summer. Sun hadn’t touched the wasp, hadn’t threatened it.

  So it’s not defending itself.

  Why is it attacking?

  I’m much too big to be food.

  Sun stared, curious, as the stinger retracted and the wasp began to chew at the screen. It wings beat frantically, quickly getting up to a speedy blur and giving off a deep, frightening buzz, while the creature shook against the metal scrim like a crazed prisoner trying to escape a jail cell.

  It’s trying to get in.

  Interesting. Very—

  Sun gasped, taking a step back as its mandibles cut through the screen and its bulbous head poked through.

  “Nope!” she said, and then scraped her cell phone against the screen and cleanly decapitated the flying insect at its thorax.

  The headless body continued to buzz, and the severed head that had fallen to the floor—next to Sun’s pinky toe and almost as large—continued to open and close its mandibles, seeking something to bite.

  “What’s up, babe?”

  Andy had come up behind Sun without her noticing, and she let out an uncharacteristic squeal, causing her empathetic husband to yelp in response. That caused Bertram, their miniature silky fainting goat who had tagged along with her husband, to immediately keel over and faint, stiff legs sticking up into the air.

  “You okay, hon?” Andy asked.

  They both ignored the goat, and Sun focused on the insect. The wasp’s body continued to twitch and buzz, its feet hooked to the screen.

  “Holy hell,” Andy said after following her gaze. “Where did that thing come from? Outer space?”

  “It looks like a Vespa mandarinia,” she told her husband.

  “An Asian Murder Hornet?”

  Andy didn’t know animals, but he was an expert at languages. Latin was a favorite.

  “Yeah. But the coloring is off.”

  “I didn’t think they’d come to North America,” Andy said.

  “They haven’t. And this one doesn’t look right.”

  “No shit. It’s the size of a mouse.”

  “Yeah, it’s big. But there’s something about the eyes.”

  Andy squinted at the bug. “What eyes? I don’t see a head.”

  Sun squatted, and Andy squatted next to her. Sun reached into her pocket for her vet kit; an essential assortment of medical tools in a canvas wrap. She opened up the pack and selected a pair of forceps, then moved to pick up the severed head.

  She didn’t have to. The mandibles opened and clamped onto the tip of the tweezers, holding them tight.

  Sun raised it up to eye level for a closer look.

  “See it?” she asked Andy.

  “See what? That it’s trying to eat your tweezers?”

  “Wasps and flies have compound eyes called ommatidia. Each little multifacet is its own lens. But what do you notice here?”

  “Pupils,” Andy said. “Elongated pupils.”

  Sun nodded, a lump growing in her throat. “Horizontal. Like Bertram’s.”

  Their goat had recovered from the faint and jumped on the couch to sleep next to their snoring bulldog, and Sun completed her disturbing observation.

  “This wasp has the eyes of a goat.”

  LEO

  GETTING CLOSER…

  He was walking west on I-94 when the burning in his right wrist became unbearable. Leo squatted alongside the highway, wincing while he gripped his undulating, wiggling skin.

  It feels like my hand is going to—

  Then his hand fell off.

  He blinked, unsure it wasn’t a hallucination.

  Leo stared at his wrist, watching as the puckering flesh continued to pulse, staring at the cross section of his bones, his veins and arteries, his tendons and ligaments, his muscles and viscera, which, oddly enough, looked like a hunk of bloodless, raw ham hock. As he watched, the reddish-pink flesh color darkened, scabbing over at an accelerated rate and forming a hard crust.

  It reminded Leo of a badly skinned knee two days after falling off a bike.

  This isn’t a promising development.

  It didn’t hurt, much. But the tingling sensation in his stump wasn’t pleasant.

  He reached for his severed hand, realized a moment too late that he was trying to grab it with his stump, and then picked it up with his remaining hand. It felt like picking up a dead animal.

  Unsure of what to do, he stuck it in his trench coat pocket and continued to walk up the highway.

  So… a hospital?

  I have this crazy accelerated healing power. Maybe they could just stick it back on.

  Or…

  Testing the insane idea, Leo stretched out his bare wrist. Just below the stump he used a fingernail to scratch the skin, deep enough to draw blood.

  The wound knitted itself, almost instantly.

  Okay. So maybe I don’t need a doctor.

  Maybe I can do this myself.

  Setting his jaw, Leo picked and scratched and tore at the stub on his arm, clawing off the scab, then pinching and twisting the sealed ends of his arteries to get them to start bleeding again.

  The pain got real bad real fast.

  He drew some blood, but not much. After an unpleasant thirty seconds of trying to reopen the wound, he stuck his severed hand back on the stump and held it there, as if waiting for glue to dry.

  After another thirty seconds, his fingers began to tingle, and he was able to wiggle his pinky.

  He smiled, for the first time in as long as he could remember, and tried to make a fist.

  His hand immediately fell off. Again.

  Smile gone, Leo picked up his hand, tucked it away, and hiked three more kilometers to the town of Yonder Bay, where he found a big box store just off the highway. Fighting against the Tug, he walked across the parking lot with a vague idea taking shape in his mind.

  Biological glue.

  He roamed the aisles, forming a strategy, and used the twenty bucks that Mary Streng had given him to buy four things.

  In the hunting section, an upswept skinner knife with a three-inch blade.

  In the hardware section, some powdered rat poison.

  In the cooking section, a four-sided aluminum cheese grater.

  In the pharmacy, the cheapest bottle of aspirin they had.

  He had a quarter left, and put it in a gumball machine by the front doors.

  The machine ripped him off.

  But, bonus, he found a thrown-away fast-food cup in the garbage, still mostly filled with ice.

  Back in the parking lot, Leo sat on the waist-high concrete post supporting a giant overhead light. He set the cup next to his hip, thumbed off the plastic lid, and clumsily poured in the rat poison from its cardboard carton.

  Leo couldn’t get the lid off the aspirin bottle using only one hand, so he pried it off with his teeth and dumped half the tablets into his mouth, the other half into the cup.

  The rodent poison contained warfarin, an anti-coagulant. It stopped the blood from clotting.

  The aspirin was a vasodilator. It widened the veins and arteries, improving blood pressure and also prolonging bleeding.

  And of course, aspirin is also a painkiller.

  Hopefully, it will help with some of the pain I’m about to inflict on myself.

  He swirled the mixture in the cup until most of the ice melted, then choked down the lumpy slurry in five big gulps.

  There’s a chance this will kill me.

  I can live with that.

  The cheap skinner knife, likely made of soft metal that wouldn’t sharpen well, happily came razor-sharp out of the package. He gripped it firmly, and held the blade to the top of the scab on his stump, as if ready to slice the butt off a loaf of bread.

  So… cut in a sawing motion? Or whittle and carve?

  Decisions, decisions…

  The straight cut seemed like it would be less damage, so Leo took a deep, full breath and then attacked his scab like he was in a deli cutting some ham for a sandwich, moving hard and fast and only screaming through his clenched jaw a little bit.

  I should have bought a better knife. And more aspirin.

  And something to bite down on.

  The skinner didn’t do well with bone, so Leo carved around it, this time imagining a Thanksgiving turkey leg being stripped. The result wasn’t pretty, but the blood was coming pretty fast, in little fountains.

  Before the bleeding stopped Leo again tried sticking his dead, limp hand back onto the stump.

  For a moment it seemed to work better than his earlier attempt at reattachment, and after sixty seconds of sticking he could actually wiggle his fingers.

  But once he tried to lift his arm, his hand once again fell off. It fell slowly, a few veins holding on and stretching out like pizza cheese.

  Everything is a food metaphor. I think I’m hungry again.

  As the stump began to heal, Leo considered his options.

  What’s the best method for glueing something back together?

  Rough the edges, then put the glue on both pieces.

  So he held the four-sided cheese grater between his thighs, tight, and then freshened up the wound on the severed hand, scraping the wrist up and down and taking off a few millimeters of skin, flesh, and bone. As he did, a mother pushed a full shopping cart past him. She was preoccupied with her cell phone. But her child, sitting in the cart, stared at Leo with huge eyes and immediately began to wail.

  I know how you feel, kid. I’m about to start sobbing any second.

  Once his severed hand was prepped, Leo set it on his thigh and gave his stump a serious grating, reopening the wounds, hoping the aspirin and warfarin would work long enough to keep fluids pumping for a proper reattachment, and hoping he didn’t pass out.

  Leo clenched his jaw so hard he felt a molar crack, which hurt almost as much as filing down his arm bones with a cheese grater.

  Grin and bear it.

  It’s for the grater good.

  Ha! Grater good!

  I have amusing thoughts when I’m out of my mind with pain!

  Half-laughing/half-sobbing, Leo halted the self-torture and then he stuck his gooey hand on the stump and held it there—

  —and held it—

  —and held it—

  —and third time was a charm.

  Leo wiggled his fingers.

  Good.

  He made a fist.

  Good.

  He even gave his hand a slight tug.