“Left my cell at the cabin,” Chuck said without prompting. “Captain’s rules, right?”

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  What the hell are we supposed to do?

  Being stranded on a lake, even a big lake like Niboowin, was usually nothing more than an inconvenience. All boats eventually floated to shore. Before that happened, there was the option to swim. And cell phones weren’t even needed to call for help; in the tourist season, there were usually plenty of other watercraft within earshot.

  So there was no reason to panic yet. The wind would eventually come back and carry them out of the reeds. Or another boat would come by. Or Stu would get reception on his phone. Or, absolute worst case, they could put on the life jackets and doggy paddle out of the marsh.

  “Hey!”

  Chuck’s shout startled Duncan out of his thoughts. He stared at his buddy, saw Chuck had his hands cupped around his mouth.

  “We’re stuck!”

  Duncan followed Chuck’s gaze, saw he was yelling at the bass boat, floating a hundred or so meters away. The same one that lured Duncan into the marsh because it was the only other boat on the lake. There was a guy sitting on the bow seat, but it was too far away, with too many tall reeds between them, to make out any detail.

  “Hey! We need some help over here!” Chuck waved his arms in the universal look at me gesture.

  “I don’t feel so…”

  Stu staggered and began to pitch forward. Duncan managed to reach out and grab his elbow, steadying him before he face-planted. He helped Stu onto one of the seats, gripping him by the shoulders and staring into his face.

  Stu appeared pale. Zombie-pale.

  “Dude, your hand…”

  Chuck pointed, and Duncan saw the blood dripping down Stu’s fingers.

  “I’m okay. Just a little dizzy.” Stu held up his palm. A small circle, no bigger than a match head, was oozing blood. “Leeches secrete hirudin. It’s a peptide… prevents the blood from clotting.”

  “I think I got some bandages in the tackle box.”

  “That won’t help.”

  Duncan eyed the Rorschach splotches of blood on Stu’s bare toes. “Dude, you’re bleeding a lot.”

  “It should stop on its own. If it keeps up, I’ll make some kind of tourniquet.”

  “HEY!” Chuck scowled to Duncan. “That asshole isn’t answering.”

  “Might not hear us.” But Duncan didn’t believe his own words. Sounds tended to carry over open stretches of water. Especially when there wasn’t any wind, like now.

  Chuck threw up his arms. “Well this is fucking ridiculous. What the hell are we supposed to do?”

  Duncan opened his tackle box and gave Stu the first-aid kit. He also grabbed the walkie-talkie at the bottom, switching the knob to turn it on.

  It crackled to life.

  Twenty-four channels.

  Duncan started with Channel 1. The most common channel, used by his family, and the neighbors, Sun and Andy.

  “Hello? This is Duncan VanCamp. My friends and I are stuck in a boat in the marsh on Big Lake Niboowin. Can anyone hear me? Repeat, we are stuck on the lake and need help. Can anyone hear me?”

  SUN

  A BIT EARLIER…

  “This isn’t right,” Sun said, peering into the microscope.

  She was in her home veterinary office and had the hornet head on a slide, magnification via a 4x scanning objective lens and a 10x eyepiece.

  “Have you seen this stinger?” Andy asked. He was prodding the hornet’s body, which was in a petri dish, using a wooden tongue depressor. “It’s longer than my dick.”

  Sun normally would have laughed at that, but the head was freaking her out a bit.

  “Look at this.” She moved over and let Andy squint into the scope. “What do you see?”

  “A gross bug head.”

  “A gross bug head with what looks like a mammalian eye. And what does that eye remind you of?”

  Andy stared at her, his face going pale. “You’re not saying…”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m going to do a quick dissection, see if I can confirm.”

  “Should we call Frank?”

  They’d named their child Francis after their close friend, Dr. Frank Belgium.

  “If my suspicions are confirmed, Frank needs to know.” Sun checked her Citizen watch. “Our son gets out of summer school in two hours. Let me dissect this, figure out if it’s Vespidae or something else. You can check the windows and isolate the animals.”

  “On it.”

  While Andy left to secure their many pets, Sun located a book on Hymenoptera anatomy from her shelf and then unwrapped a fresh scalpel. She checked the shelves for her dissection tools, which consisted of a small aluminum drip pan filled with two centimeters of white wax, a pack of pins, and a plastic squeeze bottle containing lightly tinted distilled water. She tugged on some nitrile gloves, pulled her vet kit from her back pocket, and began the task of pulling the wings and legs from the insect’s body.

  After setting the appendages aside she gently gripped the wasp in her fingers and began to cut the underside of the exoskeleton, starting at the thorax, through the connective petiole, then continuing on through the abdomen. As she did the stinger wiggled, and Sun dropped the bug in surprise. It fell onto the wax and lay there, motionless.

  Reflex action. It’s dead.

  But she made no move to pick it up again, instead continuing to stare.

  Dead. Totally dead.

  I’m probably exaggerating the threat.

  This is probably something entirely mundane, and I’m overreacting.

  She steeled herself, then used forceps and a scalpel to pry open the shell and pin each half to the wax, opening the insect up to view its anatomy.

  The anatomy was… off.

  Sun added a few drops of water, tinting the opaque organs light blue to make them easier to see, then referred to the Vespidae section of her book for comparison.

  This thing has no midgut. Or hindgut.

  It doesn’t even have a rectum.

  Instead it seems to be filled with tiny, round parasites.

  Sun wanted to get it under the microscope, but first she checked the stinger.

  It has no venom sac.

  Wait… are these…?

  She used tweezers to tug out the internals and the parasites in the abdomen, carefully placed them on a slide, teased them apart so nothing overlapped, and then gave it a look.

  Uh-oh.

  The stinger isn’t for defense. It’s a true ovipositor.

  And those tiny parasites…

  Sun switched to a low power objective lens, 10x. With the eyepiece, she was viewing at 100x magnification.

  Wow. Just… wow.

  Shivering from something other than cold, Sun located the severed wasp head, secured that to a slide using the surface tension of a water droplet, and took a peek through the scope.

  Definitely not a compound eye.

  Sun plugged her phone into the microscope and snapped a pic. Browsing the web, she went to her favorite search engine and dragged the pic into the search box.

  It did not match with photos of wasps.

  It matched with photos of Caprinae.

  Goats. Those really are goat eyes.

  There’s only one reason I know that insects would have goat eyes.

  “Pets are safe.”

  Sun yelped in surprise at Andy coming up behind her. He went sheepish.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The family had a set policy about not scaring one another. Their lives had been scary enough.

  “Stingers evolved from ovipositors,” Sun told him.

  “Of course they did. Everyone knows that.”

  Her husband, for sure, did not know that. She continued.

  “In early arthropod history, ovipositors developed to deposit eggs in specific locations. Female insects needed to be able to lay them in plants, or directly in the male brood pouch, or under some sort of protective cover. As species diversified, some ovipositors evolved to be used as defense. Stingers, with venom sacs.”

  “Things just evolve like that?” Andy asked.

  “Just because science points to evolution doesn’t mean it fully understands evolution.”

  “So the pointy egg thing became a pointy poison thing.”

  “A pointy venom thing. Poison is consumed, venom is injected.”

  “I like it when you sciencesplain to me,” Andy said. “It’s hot.”

  Sun had zero desire to flirt at that moment. She pressed on.

  “Parasitic wasps are the best of both worlds. They use the stinger to lay eggs, but they lay them inside of other animals. Sometimes this includes a paralyzing venom, so the host is immobilized as the eggs hatch and mature inside of it.”

  “This is the best of both worlds? Sounds like the worst.”

  “For the host, yes. It gets eaten alive from the inside out. But for the wasp larvae, the host provides shelter and sustenance.”

  “You’re about to tell me something awful about this wasp, aren’t you?”

  Sun swallowed, then continued. “Certain insects, like moths and mayflies, never eat. When they mature into their final adult forms, their only purpose is to mate. This wasp I found has no digestive system. No mouth, no rectum, nothing in between. Its only purpose is to sting things and lay eggs inside of them. So when it tried to sting me, it wasn’t for food or defense.”

  “It wanted you to be a baby wasp home,” Andy said. “Yuck.”

  Sun nodded. “We need to put on our bee suits, grab our propane weed burner, and look for wasp nests.”

  “Sunshine… is this thing natural? Or…?”

  Andy didn’t need to finish the question.

  They’d moved to Big Lake Niboowin to get away from the craziness of the world. But in the recent past, the craziness had caught up with them.

  I thought that was finally over.

  But what if it isn’t?

  “I don’t know, Andy. Do you… um…”

  “Do I feel anything?” Andy asked.

  Sun winced, then nodded. The unspoken thing on both of their minds had once possessed Andy.

  “No. I don’t feel any pull or attachment or link or anything. I feel like myself. Though a lot more nauseous than usual.”

  “If he was back, do you think you’d sense it?”

  “I have no idea. My body was invaded, we can call it a possession, by something we still don’t fully understand. Could it have left traces on some cellular or molecular level? Imprints on my DNA? Or on my soul? Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like it. I feel like myself.”

  Sun wasn’t sure if she could go through seeing her husband like that again. When she didn’t reply, Andy pressed.

  “I mean it. I think I’m okay. And if it’s him… I’ll make sure he’s dead this time.”

  “Let’s see if there’s a hornet’s nest on the property,” she finally said. “We’ll start there.”

  They went to get their bee suits in their basement walk-in gun safe, so they didn’t hear the plaintive voice coming from Channel 1 on their walkie-talkie plugged into the charger in Sun’s office.

  STU

  SAME TIME…

  When Stu was a kid, his fears revolved around social awkwardness. His thick, geek glasses. His zits. His obesity, which was centered in his core so he had skinny arms and legs but a pot belly and earned him the mean nickname big momma because they claimed he looked pregnant. His appearance led to insecurity, which led to more insecurity, and he disappeared in his studies and books and solo videogames and both ignored and was ignored by his peers of both sexes.

  In college, his face cleared up, he began to eat better and work out, and his geek glasses somehow became en vogue. He made friends, finally got laid, and pursued a career in science with a fearlessness no one expected.

  Stu hunted and captured desert scorpions at night using nothing more than a UV light and a shoe box. He milked tarantulas for their venom. He went swimming with Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish. He respected Mother Nature, but didn’t fear her. Venomous creatures that freaked most people out, like centipedes and wasps and snakes, were fascinating to Stu. His childhood love of insects blossomed into a lucrative entomology career. He exercised caution when dealing with dangerous specimens, but he was never afraid.

  This leech bite, however, made him more than a bit concerned.

  Leeches had sucked on Stu before. As a rite of passage, in college, all the students in his taxonomy class put their hand in a leech jar for as long as they could stand it, and the one with the most sticking to them won a hundred-dollar pot. Stu had emerged with twenty-six, one Benjamin richer.

  But after removing those Hirudo medicinalis, the wounds had only oozed for a few minutes before clotting. Bleeding had been minimal, pain negligible.

  The leech bite currently on his hand dripped like he’d yanked a nail out of his palm. Plus, it ached.

  It might have been because the leech vomited. The correct way to remove a bloodsucker was to quickly break the suction by scraping it off using a fingernail or credit card edge. Pulling tended to make the worm regurgitate the contents of its stomach into the open wound.

  Stu had stretched out the leech to show off; he found it funny to gross people out. In hindsight, a stupid move. He had no idea how much blood he’d lost, but the growing puddle between his feet had to be a few ounces. Maybe more than half a pint. And it didn’t seem to be slowing down.

  Which made him think that his offhand comment to Duncan—that it could have been a new species—had some merit. All entomologists secretly longed to discover some new bug. The one who discovered it got to name it. That looked great on a Wikipedia page. And a resume. When Stu finished the research aspect of his career, he wanted to teach. A peer-reviewed, published paper about the species named after him would go a long way to getting him a position at a good university.

  He stared at his wound, watching it drip drip drip drip drip, and considered his options. First, he needed to stop the bleeding. But a close second was the remains of the leech-infested bass, which had burst when thrown back into the lake, though large pieces of it still floated next to the boat.

  Duncan would throw a hissy fit it I netted a chunk and brought it back on board.

  Either I talk him into it, or do it without him noticing.

  He decided to try the first option. “Duncan?”

  “Celox,” Duncan said.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s in a white packet in the first-aid kit. It clots the blood.”

  Stu unzipped the red plastic pouch and hunted for something called Celox. He found three of them in pouches, each individually packaged and stuck together like condoms. Squinting at the instructions he read that it contained hemostatic granules meant to be poured onto a wound.

  Says it clots blood containing anticoagulants, like leech enzymes.

  Doesn’t list ingredients.

  What sort of medicine doesn’t list the ingredients?

  Maybe I’m a skeptic, but hard pass.

  I can do more research when I have Internet access, but right now I’m sticking to what I know.

  Stu glanced at Duncan, saw he was messing with the walkie-talkie, and put the Celox back in the kit, grabbing a plastic bandage instead. He unwrapped and stretched it over the leech bite.

  “So, what’s the emergency protocol for being stuck?” he asked.

  Duncan looked up from his radio. “There is no protocol. This normally doesn’t happen.”

  Stu didn’t understand. “The motor is broken. So how do we get back to shore?”

  “There’s usually a drift.”

  “You’ve gotten stuck before. What did you do?”

  “I called for help.”

  Stu frowned. “On that Toys R Us radio?”

  “It’s waterproof, shock-resistant, and has a range of twenty miles. When I was a kid and got stuck I called like Chuck just did. Yelling for other boats. This is a popular lake. There are always boats around.”

  Stu did a quick 360 of the lake. The only other boat he saw was that guy in the reeds who wasn’t responding to them.

  “So what if there aren’t any other boats because no one else is stupid enough to go on the lake when the National Weather Service tells people not to go outside because of the wildfires?”

  Duncan shrugged. Stu felt his blood pressure in his ears, his heartbeat thrumming.

  “Isn’t there some kind of emergency plan?” Stu’s voice came out high and squeaky.

  “I never needed a plan,” Duncan barked. “There were always other boats out there. One will come along. It’s the start of the tourist season. I know the AQI is bad, but we’ve been out here for hours and we’re doing okay. We just need to keep an eye out, and get their attention when we see them.”

  “This is ridiculous. And totally irresponsible, Duncan.”

  “The pontoon has been running fine, Stu. And there’s normally people on the lake. Or a breeze.”

  “And now there’s neither.”

  “Except for that guy.” Chuck pointed to the boat seventy or so meters away, surrounded by bullrush. “HEY!” Chuck yelled again. “Is this asshole deaf? Help me out, guys. Shout help on three. One, two, three…”

  The trio all called out HELP! to the guy in the bass boat.

  The guy didn’t answer. He didn’t even seem to move in his chair.

  A fly buzzed past Stu, and he lost focus on the dude in the boat to indulge in his habit of trying to identify whatever insect he just saw.

  Green. Green usually means Calliphoridae or Muscidae.

  That was pretty damn big for either, though. Two centimeters long. The size of Tabandae; a horsefly.

  Stu got another brief look when it circled back and landed near his feet, on a spatter of blood.

  Its attraction to blood could mean Calliphoridae. A blow fly. Blow flies were so named in medieval times. They laid eggs on dead animals and dung. When meat had maggots—maggots were the larvae that hatched from the eggs—the meat was called fly blown.

  Stu leaned down, peering at the insect.