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One missile fired. One missile struck, with a massive ka-BLAM!
Markovic felt a wave of searing heat, felt parts of him wither and crisp and die. No pain, just an awareness that some of his eyes had suddenly gone blind. The debris of the explosion fell like hail around him, but the falling gravel did him no harm.
Now when he raised eyes above the surface of the water, he saw the gunmen were much closer, coming around the quarry, running toward him, pell-mell down the ramp. The man with the tanks on his back huffed and puffed to keep up.
Rage took Markovic. This was unfair! He had done nothing wrong. He’d hurt no on
e. He was the victim! He hadn’t asked to be hit by some space rock, nor had he volunteered to be shot down in a stinking field.
“I am the victim here!” Markovic shouted in a voice unlike his own, a voice like a thousand locusts shaping buzzes and the beating of wings into words. It was a staccato sound like a person talking directly into whirring fan blades, a rasping, inhuman sound.
The man with the flamethrower caught up as the gunmen slowed, all four now grown cautious, seeing that the missile had not killed Markovic.
Markovic’s reedy whisper said, “Leave me alone! Go back or I’ll kill you!”
It was an empty threat, Markovic thought: he had no weapon, he had no armed men on his side, he could barely even “stand.” This was his own government—a government that had collected millions in taxes from Markovic’s Money Machine—and it was trying to kill him! Madness!
Unfairness. Injustice.
“Tone, light him up, for Christ’s sake!” one of the gunmen shouted.
Suddenly Tone, the man with the flamethrower, slapped at his face. Then slapped again.
“What the hell, Tone?”
But then the gunmen, too, found themselves besieged by flying insects diving with relentless intent into their eyes, crawling toward their ears, scooting over lips and into screaming mouths.
“What the hell?”
“What, what, oh, God, what’s happening?”
“Ah, ah, ah! They’re biting!”
“Help me!”
Guns fell from fingers. The flamethrower was shrugged from Tone’s back. The four men writhed wildly, looking like marionettes whose puppeteer was having a seizure. It was almost comical, Markovic thought. But for the screams.
Markovic moved toward them, striding on swarm legs, stepping with massed insects in lieu of feet. He could do more than see the four men: he could smell them, taste them, take their temperature, hear their panicky heartbeats. He had eyes inside their mouths. He had close-up views of insect mouthparts and stingers stabbing into flesh.
It was at once utterly fascinating and profoundly disturbing. He was watching, smelling, feeling men afraid for their lives, men desperate to escape the swarm of insects around them. He tasted the adrenaline flooding their veins, veins now feeding hundreds if not thousands of insects.
One man broke and ran toward the water to jump in, but he tripped, and when he tried to rise to his hands and knees, he could not.
The other men tried the same thing, each seeing the water as a way to escape. And, Markovic thought, it might have been. But they would never reach the water, of that he was sure, though it was mere feet away. None of the men seemed able to walk, to move a leg. Their waving, slapping, gesticulating arms slowed, growing heavy.
Markovic sensed a foul odor, a smell so strong and repugnant he instinctively reached to pinch the nose he no longer had. He knew the smell. Sickness. Rot. Decay. Oh, yes, he knew that smell. He’d been in the Navy in the Persian Gulf, and the destroyer he’d served aboard had come across a derelict sailboat, its sail in tatters, the wood bleached white by the relentless, pitiless sun. He had been part of the boarding party. Markovic, then Lieutenant Markovic and armed with a pistol, had pried up a hatch and shone a flashlight down into hell.
Two dozen humans, men and women and babies in arms, lay there. Half at least were dead, and the rest might soon be. They were refugees from the war in Yemen and had contracted cholera from infected water and food. The deck was awash in vomit and diarrhea, but the worst of the stink was decaying flesh. The decaying flesh of people who had been six days dead in 115-degree heat, with no one strong enough to throw them overboard.
This was that same unbearable stink. The odor of putrefaction. The odor of disease and death.
He thought of his insects all returning to him, and in four distinct clouds they rose from the men and flew back to rejoin the swarm.
Somehow Markovic had expected to see the men perhaps pocked with red bite marks. The reality was worse. So very much worse.
Well, Markovic thought grimly, I guess that will be a lesson to anyone who messes with me.
But that did not mean he wanted to stay and watch. He moved away, fast. He kept moving his “legs,” but that was mere habit, for he moved not like a running man, but like a cloud on a stiff breeze, a buzzing mass of death-dealing insects.
