The Detention Cell

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

An emaciated man, long and thin like an ancient, eon-eaten scarecrow come to life (or something like life), was sitting on the cold floor of a detention cell. His sharp chin gestated an uneven crop of small, unhealthy, prickly clumps of beard whose dubious glory was crowned by a ratty mop of dull and thinning gray hair atop a conspicuously round head. Only about thirty years old, he looked closer to fifty, or sixty. Regrettably, his intellect was no more solidly grounded than was the chassis. Only the jagged remains of weatherworn memories (liberally patched in mismatched fantasy) littered the corners of his much-abused mind. His name, which no one had asked him, was David. When first pushed into the room, the Outlaw had immediately christened him the Wraith. David had not protested.

This wide chamber, sunk into the ground, was not particularly claustrophobic, but it was very dark, like a great buried drum. Perhaps at one time it had been a grain silo (or something like one). The meager light that managed to filter down into the cell had a certain faintly greenish, spectral quality. Spidery-thin dribbles of water, or some liquid, trickled down from the heavy grate located twenty feet above the heads of the inmates. This grate comprised both the ceiling of the detention cell and the floor of the murky yellow-olive-black room above. The prisoners heard frequent, intermittent, scratching and scampering sounds moving over the grate's heavy surface. These hard and clicking, scurrying sounds, and sometimes a whuff-whuff-whuffing sound like soft steel brushes, were invested with the same kind of aimlessness exhibited by insects moving in a kitchen at night, but the authors of this muffled clamor were larger than cockroaches or congregations of earwigs and silverfish. If they looked up the inmates could sometimes discern the ghostly shadows of their captors passing overhead, now and again dislodging flecks of dirt to rain down into the chamber below.

David was not looking up. The protuberant knobs of his alarmingly curved back met the clammy cold of the metal wall at a tangent point, as he sat leaning forward with his long arms wrapped around boney knees, head hunched forward and eyes closed. He wore the same kind of thin, filthy smock in which his fellow detainees were attired, yellow and brown, stained and frayed, and the tightly-welded ringcollar around his neck. The ringcollar chafed and itched as it always did, and he ignored it. He was cold. He was wet. He was tired. He was thinking intermittently of how it would be nice to have a razorblade. What he could do with one. Find out secrets. Get down to business. Or a dead silver shredder. Even just its head. They said you could break off their mandibles and fashion crude weapons of them. Keen cutting edges. He'd never seen it done, but it sounded plausible. Strange sensations originating within the cell played over him, but he paid them little heed. Sometimes he heard whispery and unnervingly muted, clicking vocalizations from above. These he ignored, too.

Interdicting the perpetual complaints of his fellow prisoners was more difficult.

One of the others ‑‑ the Outlaw had designated him the Priest, although of course he was no such thing ‑‑ whimpered and snuffled constantly, little twin wet streams issuing from his nostrils. He had entered the cell only a few minutes after David did, but it was impossible that he had arrived at the camp on the same lorry from the north country. The Priest looked to be in his mid-thirties and was revoltingly fat, his smock stretched tremendously tight over his immense gut. His body stank. David wondered with marveling curiosity what res the man had come from. It must have much more food than they had in Minnesota. He did not ask. The Priest was off by himself with his back to the others, sitting cross legged and facing the wall, rocking back and forth, back and forth, praying out loud for forgiveness for all, for themselves as well as their captors. These prayers alternated with his cracked-voice and panic-stricken solicitations for divine intervention, for rescue, for release. All of his prayers seemed of equal avail to David; that is to say, none at all.

The Priest had an unfortunate condition of unmanageable flatulence. This malady had inspired, at turns, fits of profane mocking and indecent cursing from the Outlaw for a while, until it had finally grown terminally boring.

"I wish they would just hang us now and get it over with," the Outlaw muttered.

Besides the Priest and David, three other convicts occupied the cell.

There was the dark-haired Professor, who was youngest of them all. The Professor kept pacing back and forth, mumbling to himself, to them, to anyone who would listen, to no one at all. The Professor was maybe twenty years old, David guessed. The young man was losing control of himself (or he had already lost it). His voice was unusually high-pitched, and when he spoke his Adam's apple bobbed up and down violently. He spoke almost constantly and seemed to lick his thin lips every two or three times he paced the cell. A fiery wildness burned in the Professor's heavily lidded eyes as they darted around the cell. He looked, David thought, like a terrified lizard. When the Professor's eyes happened by chance to lock onto his own it was, David felt, as though he were seeing all the way down an infinitely long tunnel into Hell. But the contact did not linger. The Professor's gaze quickly zipped away, and it seemed doubtful that the young man never really even noticed he'd made eye contact at all. In fact, it seemed to David as if maybe the Professor was already not even in the cell with them at all.

"It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense," the Professor ranted, pacing, pushing his long hair back from his axe-shaped face. "I haven't done anything. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be here. They shouldn't have brought me here. Why have they brought me here?"

The Outlaw's olympian belly-roaring laughter roared out.

"You know why they brought you here," the giant Outlaw snarled. "Why they brought us all here. You know what's going to happen."

The Professor winced at the booming insinuations, but he continued pacing, looking everywhere and nowhere all at once.

"It doesn't make any sense. It's a mistake. A mistake."

The Outlaw was how David thought of the tremendous man, although of course he hadn't volunteered a name for himself. The Outlaw was burly-huge, not fat like the Priest, but a real mountain of a man with kinky long black hair and a curling black beard and each massive upper arm as big in circumference as the ruins of David's own chest. Like the Priest, the Outlaw stretched out the tenuous fabric of his smock too, but he had torn off the arms, and there were rips down the side seams to better accommodate his own substantive limbs. Presently the Outlaw, with a tilt of the head and a gleam in his eye, was sitting on the floor a short distance to David's right, watching the Professor's ravings and occasionally peering up at the grate high above.

Last to be brought to the cell was the Marketeer. The entires conducted him down the same tight spiral curve the others had followed, down through the steep, cramped tunnel with its rough-hewn steps cut through musty, hard-packed dirt. Inside the cell they could hear his approach, all the way down. When they reached the bottom a brief pause ensued, followed by the nerve-grating squeal of a heavy iron bar skidding across hard, cold stone. The curved door swung inward. None of the other captives was near the door when it opened; even the Professor suspended his frantic pacing for the duration and squeezed himself down into an almost fetal position close on David's left side. The Priest's demented prayers were not suspended, however. The new arrival did not protest his new accommodations but advanced without prompting into the cell. The entires unhooked the long shockpoles from where they were latched onto his collar. Their last prisoner now securely situated inside the cell ‑‑ a short, dark man with an impishly wide mouth and a fleshy nose and ears and wispy silver-gray hair flying all over, standing at a kind of broken, slump-shouldered attention ‑‑ the entires pulled the door closed and locked it again, the noise from the clanging iron bar echoing resonantly in the enclosure. Beyond the curving walls they could hear the men with their long poles slowly scuffling back up toward the surface.

The last prisoner looked them over. Something in the Outlaw's looks obviously distressed him, for he sat as far away as possible, his back pressing against the cell door.

The Outlaw scrutinized the new arrival for several minutes, during which time the Professor unfolded himself up out of his defensive posture and resumed his agitated pacing. "What are you?" the Outlaw sneered at last. Clearly the giant man at his side had already reached a number of unfavorable conclusions about the new arrival. David looked up to watch what would happen.

The newcomer sat up straighter. His tone was not defiant of the Outlaw, but he spoke with a certain attempted command in his voice.

"I am a trader," he said. "I arrange bartering between the desert scavengers and the people of the res. My res, in Newark. But you are not--"

"You're no trader," the Outlaw said, cutting him off sharply. "I know your type. You're a toothless parasite, no better than the entires. Worse ‑‑ at least they don't sham concern for us cuts. Sharking with the collarless truants of the wastelands. Sucking the blood out of your own family members and neighbors. You'd sell all mankind in a second if there was a penny in it for you. Marketeer!"

And so, despite his strenuous protestations, the man received his designation: he was the Marketeer.

David gazed a long time at the Marketeer, wondering whether the fuzzy old man might could get him a razorblade. Probably not, he decided. He'd been brought here ‑‑ wherever here was ‑‑ from the East. He had no connections here. Not yet. If he stayed here he would probably develop connections, though. His kind always did.

They were five disjoined, unacquainted someones locked away from the world. How long they were down in the cell together was unknowable; at least, the interval was unquantifiable by David. Inestimable. The round chamber and the guardroom above (if it was a guardroom), troubled by its clustering of scuttling, chitinous denizens, remained unshakably tedious in the chop-suey green swirls of indistinct lighting. No night and no day, no progress on any clock ticked away from then to now. They swam in the molasses of perpetual forever, tides pulling massively through incarceration time, unspooling without purpose or end. Like the others ‑‑ like and unlike ‑‑ David was intimately familiar with the ordeal of desultory existence, or borderline subsistence. Before arriving here (if there had been a before), vaguely chalky bits of metered ephemera snarled backwards from him in disjointed streams of interminable, chaotic accretion. No uniformity broke time into measured and countable intervals for him. Time was brittle, a discretely friable process, like shuffling forever in slow motion at the bottom of a deep, dark lake. . . .But before arriving at the detention cell, he remembered. . . .He remembered. . . .He thought he remembered. . . .He must surely remember that. . . .

He had made a long, bone-rattling journey here in the back of a tremendous lorry, packed in among a host of other kitten-feeble, perspiration-stinking, rotten teeth breathing, skin erupting, carbuncle draining, fever-sweating, lice-crawling, nominally human bodies layered beneath the open sky under a tightly woven network of close-fitting barbed wire. Sometimes the entires stopped the lorry and several would debark to hook their shockpoles to the ringcollars of two or three prisoners and haul them down to the frozen rolling pasturelands. David lay on his back near the edge of the lorry's bed and during one such stop, watching upside down, he saw them march three prisoners some distance across a brown, barren field, three entires to each captive. The sky was cold, gray and yellow chrome, with shreds of very low, rusty iron cloud so close to the ground it looked like smoke. The clouds yielded no rain or sleet or hail or snow, only sterile pregnancy and knives of stabbing, bitter cold. Inevitably one of the prisoners panicked against his confinement, but temporary release of the shockpole deadman triggers delivered devastating voltage that quickly restored pacification.

A huge, hulking steel upright set in concrete out in the field was their destination. David noted indistinct mounds of some nameless remains or ruins collected around its base, at this distance too far to identify with certainty. One by one the entires transferred their prisoners from the ends of their mollifying shockpoles to that massive steel spar rising like an ugly finger into the raggedy gray sky, a pair of large black birds perched like sentries on top. All three of the transferees at last securely anchored in place, the entires left them there and slowly marched back to the lorry which, minutes later, lurched forward to resume its errand. David turned his head, watching backwards, upside down, as the those left behind grew smaller and smaller in recession. Never once did they cry out.

The next morning the process was repeated on the opposite side of the truck, this time David thought with four prisoners. Later that afternoon the remaining prisoners arrived in a new camp, all of them fouled with the blood, urine, feces and vomit of each other. Several had not survived the trip. These shriveled corpses the entires flung to the side of the road during unloading like so much paper wadding, and their withered husks were still lying there, dry, glazed eyes pointed skyward, when the survivors were shuffled and separated and herded away. They were lined up then and stripped and sprayed with blasts of freezing water. . . .

Some tectonic movement rattling through time's metamorphic structure plunged him abruptly back into the cell, where he found a debate in progress.

"--be from this world," the pacing Professor was declaiming. He was inveighing, lecturing, raving, his sharp features twisted in such a mask of earnest concentration that he appeared to be in intense physical pain. Indeed, the young Professor was partially bent over as he paced the cell, rabbiting on, one hand crumpling up the smock over his belly.

"What other world would they be from?" the Marketeer, still seated near the cell door, protested.

"I don't know. But they can't be from here."

"Of course they're from here. They're bugs."

"They're bugs, but they can't be from here. The earth could never have brought forth such a plague upon mankind."

"A plague. . . .You sound like him!" the Marketeer said, jabbing a finger in the direction of the mad Priest, still facing the wall, rocking and praying, rocking and praying, sometimes breaking wind.

"It's inconceivable that man could have built up such a magnificent and technologically first-rate world, computers, rockets, power plants, robots, only to have it laid low by mutated insects scampering up out of the sewers and drains!"

"Then where else--"

"Outer space!" the Professor creaked, his shrill voice screeching and breaking like a tormented barn owl. "Maybe they're from another solar system."

"Outer space!"

"They came in spaceships--"

"There were no spaceships, you idiot! Everyone knows that. They just started boiling up, coming up out of the earth--"

"Spaceships that landed underground."

"Landed underground! You are fruity."

"Or underwater. Maybe they landed in the oceans, and then came up on dry land. Or maybe their ships were invisible--"

"You're a nut case. You don't know anything. You're an egghead kid. You don't even have any original memories. You've stitched together all this. . . .this mythology from rumors you've heard. Wild speculation. Dreamers like you are a dime a dozen. A few of us are still around who were there, and I assure you, there were no spaceships."

"They came to our planet for conquest," the Professor continued, undeterred. "That much at least is obvious ‑‑ as obvious as the implausibility of your stupid chthonic bedtime fairytales. Drains and gutters and sewer pipes! The bugs came for conquest, and they succeeded. Oh boy, they succeeded, alright!"

The Marketeer shook his head.

"They're from here. They're like us. They always were here. Bugs boiling up out of the sewers and into the streets ‑‑ I saw it happen, I tell you! Bugs getting the upper hand, taking over. It was all over in days."

The Professor shook his head violently. "Not possible. Not possible."

"Possible. Probable."

"No!"

"True. They came on in such numbers that they couldn't be turned back. A flood of bugs, vile, gray, brown, red and yellow things, many legs, many times many, segmented, twitching antennae. I still remember the smell, and how they came, on and on. Racing over people running in the streets. The noise. Breaking glass. People screaming, covered with bugs. Bugs in their hair, ears, noses, rushing in their screaming mouths and down their throats. Not enough insecticide in all the world. Not enough--"

"Shut up!" the Outlaw roared.

The Professor and the Marketeer dropped it immediately, their eyes darting to him with fright. His shout was loud enough even to temporarily interrupt the Priest at his prayers, and David imagined that even the scampering across the ceiling grille ceased for a few seconds.

"I've been listening to this muck-a-muck my whole life," the Outlaw rumbled, "and it's all skanky rubbish. The bugs are from space. The bugs are from the sea. The bugs were spewed up by ice volcanoes. The bugs crawled out of your dear dead mum's redolent, frost-free albacore quimby. Who in the nine circles of Hell cares where the bugs came from? It doesn't matter one bit. Not worth one single bug dung pellet. The bugs are bloody here. All that matters is staying alive through the day. Get it? Everything else, anything else, you're just playing with words, posing yourselves up, getting all roused. Screw off your mind games already. It's blooming disgusting. Keep yapping your yaps and I'll bust out your teeth and rip your tongues out your throats. Used to call them Salvadoran neckties. I know the trick. Seen it done. Start it up again."

Silence followed for a few minutes before the Priest resumed his chanting, now sotto voce, almost pianissimo.

It went on that way for some time, maybe for an hour, or two, the Professor and Marketeer arguing, only now more reservedly, until eventually even the Professor sat back down by the curving wall of the cell.

There was nothing to do in the cell. There was nothing to say, nothing to think, nothing to worry about, nothing to eat. No easy way to sleep, although the Marketeer did lie down on the cold earthen floor, curved up against the wet wall, and seemed to try to do so. There was only unbroken time, spinning on and on, on and on, on, on. No way to feel. There was only the long wait. Waiting. For. Nothing.

To the bugs, human suffering was a cipher, zero. Zed. Less than nothing and cold as interstellar space. But their dispassion wasn't reserved only for people. Empathy was nonexistent in bug psychology, a moth-eaten hole in the insectan philosophy. No empathy for either their captives or for each other. One bug would kill another bug as easily as it would kill a person. Rip it savagely apart, jointed limbs flying crazy in the air, gray-brown bug juice spraying out with dabs of blue-brown softer tissues. David had seen them do it.

None of this bothered him. He was unaffected by it. He had no empathy left either.

His empathy (if he'd ever had any) he'd lost years and years ago on the Minnesota res, freezing in the winters, fighting for food, for warmth. Watching people starve and die in the snow. Skeleton snowman people, gray and ashy, sunken eyes, flesh melted away. Stealing food from them. That was staying alive just one more day on the res he came from.

There was never food. That fact was the sun of his orbit.

He remembered once, years ago, finding a big egg case. He was probably about fifteen years old, he guessed. It was a cold day, a windy day, and a whirlwind outside the wall must have picked it up and flung it over into the res. Who knew how many miles the thing had traveled through the air before falling like manna (or like its hemipteran equivalent) back to the ground inches ahead of his toes. The bugs simply dropped the foul things wheresoever they happened to be standing when it was time to do so, and then they moved on, oblivious to the fate of the next generation. Hard, leathery brown and yellow objects about the length of a man's forearm, or smaller, depending on the kind of bug that had deposited it. David had been warned, many times since childhood, about protein incompatibility, but when you are starving such warnings don't always matter. He grabbed the egg case and ran away, other prisoners watching him go, shouting at him to stop. But he didn't stop, running on and on through the noxious fungus farms, the spores stirred up by his passage burning in his nostrils and causing his eyes to swell and stream with tears. He had a secret place a mile away where he had stashed a tiny cache of dry wood and a few matches under a sheet of plastic. He built a fire and put the egg case on it and waited for it to cook. Some people said if you denatured the proteins enough it made them safer to eat. The egg case in the fire turned darker brown and its curled edges straightened out, and then the individual eggs, long, bulging, hard yellow tubes, began to pop open on the ends. The smell was atrocious and the taste much worse. Afterwards he vomited up everything, and he was desperately sick and feverish for almost a week. Somehow he made it back through the snow to the slums, where he was slowly nursed back to the borderlines of life by whomever had found him. He couldn't remember who it had been. Just another anonymous prisoner like himself, not a good Samaritan (that type being extinct), but someone expecting ‑‑ demanding ‑‑ recompense. Get into that kind of obligation and there was never any escape. Bug. Human. Everyone took and took.

"It's not so far to go from In God We Trust to Caveat Emptor as you might think," someone had told him once, a long time ago. He never remembered who said it, and he never knew quite what it meant.

It was later. He was hungry. They had not been fed on the lorry, but they'd been given strips of brown and red sundried meat after the hose-downs. He thought he woke up. He never really slept, but sometimes his mind went away farther. He noticed that the Priest's chanting had abated, and now he saw that the Marketeer was over next to the fat man, and they were whispering softly to each other. If he tried hard enough he thought he could probably make out what they were saying. He didn't try. To his right the massive, muscular mound of the Outlaw seemed to be asleep, but that might easily be a ruse. To his left he saw the wild-eyed Professor looking at him with those bottomless eyes leading to nowhere. The Professor was whispering to him. Had been for some time, David thought. Licking his lips. Adam's apple bobbing away. He wondered idly whether he'd been whispering back, or nodding encouragement.

"I've given it a lot of thought, you know. Over the years. I'm not just blowing off steam here. Shooting my mouth off. There are things I've seen. Things I've heard. Things I wasn't supposed to hear. Whispered things, you know, like when you're supposed to be asleep and people are talking behind your back because they think you are asleep. Only you're not asleep. You're just pretending, right? That kind of thing. And I've heard other things besides. Heard things, learned things, thought things through. Believe it or not, you and I, right now ‑‑ even right now! ‑‑ we're like a couple of spies creeping about the reedy shores of Lake Lerna. . . .Real avant-garde stuff, I mean. The trailblazers always take the greatest risks and earn the least credit. Fall through the cracks of time. Fall out of the present. Appreciation for us, if it exists at all, is only in the future after we're long gone, and some society arises that is able to look back and finally understand with crystal-clear sophistication what we were talking about. But you know what I'm talking about, and you know it right now. I see it in you. It's what people like us are born to do. We have no say in the matter. I've known people ‑‑ not like this, this hotshot Marketeer who comes from the East coast and thinks he knows everything. He doesn't, believe me. Not by a long shot. Not by half. I mean, I've known other people, people who know what they're talking about. You know what I'm saying? Smart people who have made an effort to preserve memories, to pass them down, see? Preserved history. And secrets. Secrets you probably couldn't believe. Things you couldn't even begin to imagine. Secrets about how things were ‑‑ before. Ah, Wraith, you have no idea. No conception. . . .The things that have happened, that have been done to us. By the bugs, sure, but not just by the bugs. . . .We built mechanical automata, Wraith. Robots. Built by committees, each one specializing on some small component. Software. Hardware. Pumps. Pulleys. Gears. Springs. Levers. Dark designs! Too many moving parts. Whatever. Committees, and teams of committees, sometimes working together, usually not. And teams of committees succeeding other teams of committees over the years, until finally there were no human beings left who could really claim to know how any of the robots worked anymore. But that wasn't the worst of it. It was afterwards, when we forgot that it is imagination that is the real human genius. We insisted that human beings behave more and more like robots, and that robots behave more and more like human beings used to behave. Crazy stuff. Insane! Robots growing personalities that were being urgently hammered out of their operators. Robot repairmen, that's what we were becoming. Flesh squeezed down into tight-fitting niches, ratcheted down, torque down, souls dripping out. . . .The bugs are. . . .The bugs are just. . . .Well, in a way, that big tank brain is right. Hairy walking mountain range. In a way it doesn't matter, these questions about the bugs, but in a way it matters tremendously. More than anything. Because if we don't understand the enemy, then how can we resist them? How can we fight them? What? Are you surprised? Does it scare you? I'll tell you a secret, Wraith. I'll let you in on a little secret. There are still some human beings who imagine taking this world back from the bugs! Does that surprise you? No doubt. No doubt. They've crushed the life out of just about everyone. The humanity. But they haven't been completely successful. Some of us. . . .But I shouldn't tell you about all those things. They like to divide us and conquer us. Pick it out of you, infiltrate the cell system, track us down, round us up, exterminate us like so much vermin. Sting you with their talky poisons. Spray you in the face with stink acids. Filthy legs in your face and ears, on your tongue. The bug mind, now. . . .the bug intellect. No one wants to talk about it. Think about it, though. Just consider it, that's all I ask. That's all I'm asking. Consider the possibility. Entertain an idea. Surely there is such a thing. There must be. There must be! Because no one can tell me that the bugs did all this with only the loose wiring of insect neurons. Nonsense! No. There must be a. . . .a. . . .What shall we call it? I don't know. Strategy? No. Uh. . . .Philosophy. That's it. A bug philosophy. A unifying theme to account for how the bug sees the world through its malevolent faceted eyes. Yes. That's what we need to understand. Come to terms with. That's the holy grail. Know what matters to the bugs and you're half way to overthrowing this hell-on-earth termite hive empire they've built up. . . .And I know some of it, Wraith. Yes. I've figured some of it out. And you know what? I'm going to let you in on some of these secrets. Yes. You. You know why? You know why I am? Because they're going to separate us. That's what he meant, telling the Marketeer, telling him what they're going to do. Divide and conquer! That's one of the things they do, and it's all part of the pattern. The scheme. The philosophy. And when they do, who knows where we'll go? Who knows where we'll end up? No one. Here one day, gone the next. That's why we have to share ideas like this. These ideas have to get around. Disseminate. Spread the seeds, tiny little seeds that one day may come to fruition. That's our dream! My dream. So I'll tell you, and maybe it'll make sense to you, and maybe it won't, but the truth is, it doesn't even matter. The idea's the thing. Maybe someday you'll tell it to someone else, see? And by then, by then, well, maybe you'll have figured out a little more, or someone will have told you a little more, and you'll pass that on, too. And the word will get out, see. Everyone will share. Everyone will learn. And someday we'll all have the information we need to defeat them. Someday. . . .Well. It's this. A lot of people ‑‑ most people, I guess ‑‑ think the bugs are just dumb bugs. But they're not, of course. It's just that they have a strange logic, a crazy logic, a way of viewing the world that is alien to the human way. Alien, yes. . . .This crazy logic, this bug philosophy, that's what's made them successful, and I'll tell you what it's about. One word. Ready? Okay. Stochasticism. There. That's it! That's the great secret I've figured out about the bugs. Stochasticism. You know what that means? It means there is power in behaving randomly. That's their great strength. Beautiful, isn't it? I mean, think about it, think about these bugs, what they do, how they do it. Everything seems so random, right? Always random, unpredictable. But it's their very randomness that gives them strength. Do you get it? You take enough bugs, give them a sufficient reproductive index, and the value of the individual collapses to nothing. Not to nothing, but almost to nothing. Of course that minute, almost infinitesimal amount of value is all that matters finally: it is the real driving factor when summed up cumulatively. But each one, each individual, is almost irrelevant. Almost. So one bug dies. So what? Twenty more rise to take its place. Thirty, forty, fifty, whatever. Hercules and the Hydra. But. What they do to us is, they blind us with their random actions. We never know what to expect next. Beautiful! Brilliant! They are not predictable, and we can't anticipate them. You think that's accidental? You think that's because they're just bugs? No: that's adaptation, my friend. That's strategy. The bug philosophy. So, to combat it, what do we do? That's simple to see. Any jackass can see it. Meet them, match them, strength for strength. We abandon our linear thinking and adapt. We grow shrewdly stochastic in our attacks. No more pinpoint accuracy in our targeting. Surgical strikes. Nonsense! No. Guerilla warfare. Mind games. And ahh. . . .another thing. These entires. We'll have to do something about them. Something strong. Serious. They're not human. Your big guard buddy's right. They're low, and they have to go. Them, with the women in concentration camps. Breeders. Naturally that's how the bugs are going to look at things, but that's not how human beings ought to look at things. . . .Things I could tell you, Wraith. Things that have been done. Done to me, and to others. To you too, I guess. I tell you, it could drive a scientific mind to seriously consider turning to black magic. And you and I, Wraith, we have scientific minds, technical minds. Logic. Rational. So you know what I'm talking about. Seriously it could! And besides that--"

David heard little or none of what the Professor was saying. He was thinking: Good razorblades are rare. They're hard to come by. Not sharp. They find them out in the wastelands somewhere, but they're always so dull. Rusted. Someone has to chip away as much rust as they can and then find a way to try to sharpen them. I wonder how they do that. What's it like, I wonder, being one of the wild men out combing through the broken cities and rubbish heaps in the wastelands. Always having to worry about being ambushed by bugs, or by other scavengers. Finding their own food and water. I wonder why the bugs tolerate them. No real threat, I guess. Always sick. In a way, they might as well be bugs themselves. Maybe they are. People turning into bugs out in the wilderness. Could happen to anyone. Even this Professor. Talks a lot. "People who talk a lot do so to stave off introspection which would lead to self-loathing," someone told me once. Who? I don't remember. Remember his booming voice, though. Almost. "Free market exchange of goods and services." Saved me when I was sick. All these buzzing thoughts I carry around that came from other people, like a clutch of eggs laid in a trusting brain. Hatch over time, fill your mind up with a filthy hive of buzzing invaders, feeding on your own thoughts, perhaps. I wonder whether the Professor is a real person or a bug disguised as a real person. He looks like a person (or something like a real person). Infestation. Dirty. But maybe I am not an authentic person. Ever think of that? Sure you have. Maybe you can't judge. Unreliable. Maybe I am not even here. None of this is really happening except for my hunger, and all else is hallucination. Someone else told me that, too, I think. Can anyone be authentic when their thoughts are hungry, parasitic ideas caught from strangers? Viruses. I don't think my hunger is a hallucination or a viral disease. I think I am authentically hungry. But am I a person or a bug? The bugs are not constant. They are not predictable. They change. "The only dependable hallmark of the bug is its mutability." Disease. "Sometimes a certain species of bug is predominant, sometimes another species." "Ecological succession." I've heard some say maybe they change into each other. Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. Maybe there are no different species of bugs. No one knows. If they can change into each other, can they change into persons? Humans growing exoskeletons, and bugs housing gangly old mister longbones deep back in the flesh. And/or. Transformations. Mutations. Plasticity. Mutability. And the big one. Can a bug mind mutate into a person's mind? If I had a bug's mind, would I know it? Could I know it? I don't know. I wish I had a razorblade. A sharp one. I would slit open my stomach and look to see whether I have human or insect internal organs. Spiracles and booklungs. Cicadas uneasily sleeping, dreaming cicada dreams, and maggots creeping slowly about within my ribcage, gnawing lightly on ligaments. Seven year locusts in no hurry to reach maturity. Warm womb human guts, protected from too much coldness, too much that's too real out there. Break forth. Through the skin or up the windpipe? Exit through bellybutton and nipples. Tickling leg parts and antennae. Waiting for wings to dry.

The Outlaw at his side stirred, sitting up from where he had been lying on the damp earth. David watched him moving like a landslide in reverse, all that brawny inertial mass sliding upwards against the wall. The Professor was absolutely silent now. David could feel the sensitive, marginally hysteric young man acutely attentive to the stirring giant.

Jolly green giant. Beanstalk. Jack.

The Outlaw was still a little bit groggy when the entires came for them. The Priest put up a great noisy, wet fuss. He was the first they took, attaching the shockpoles to his ringcollar and dragging him out of the cell. He was wailing and trying not to go, but he had no choice. When he was gone no one said anything.

The entires had to take them out of the cell one at a time because of the tightness of the spiral passage back up to the surface. After the Priest they took the Professor, and then it was the Marketeer's turn. When these were gone and they were waiting, the Outlaw hummed an unmelodic tune. In a little while his humming mutated into the words of what sounded to David like a real song:

No me moleste mosquito

No me moleste mosquito

No me moleste mosquito

Why don't you go home?

They came and took the Outlaw away, and David was the last of the prisoners still sitting in the underground cell.

The round room was quiet, with only the scratching sounds coming from above. It made no difference to him. After a while ‑‑ no telling how long ‑‑ the entires came for him. They attached their poles to the tight-fitting collar around his neck. Up he went with them, up the spiral ramp.

It was a bright and cold, early morning when they brought him outside. The sun was a remote white-hot ball just coming up over the horizon. It was so bright it hurt his eyes.

The entires marched him for a little distance through the compound. They came to the gallows and he was conducted roughly up the steps. He saw the other four already there, each one of them now shackled and under the control of a single entire. These four breeders stood in a short row behind their prisoners. All the prisoners, standing side by side, were now stripped naked, except for their ringcollars and chains. The fat Priest continued to make a blubbering scene, but the others were quiet, watching everything and nothing with various degrees of evident dispassion. He could see though that the Professor was on the verge of panic, his reptilian tongue smacking wildly across his lips, hollow eyes darting under heavy lids.

The entires paused to strip off his filthy smock, ripping it from his skeletal, ghostly pale body. Then they fastened the cold shackles on him, so that his hands were closely cuffed behind his back, with another very short, taut chain connecting them to the leg irons that held his feet so close and tight together.

He looked around while they were attaching the chains. This was easy because now his body was essentially recurvate from the pressure of the chains. The camp's shabby buildings were low and widely-spaced. He could see all around beyond the high fences. There were no mountains or hills, only vast, flat, brown wastelands running for miles in all directions. The sky was a brilliant, hard, blue color. He saw no bugs. You almost never saw them anyway. Especially, he thought, when it was so cold and bright. They favored warm, damp places where minimal light could penetrate.

It was a very cold and bright and crisp and clear morning, everyone's breath around him coming in frosty white blasts. Everything seemed especially solid to him. Except for the Priest, no one was speaking or making a sound. The fat, naked Priest was not speaking but praying desperately, madly, incoherently, his eyes rolled up in his head, or staring unseeing up into the zenith of the celestial dome.

Finishing with the chains, the entires prodded their prisoners forward into position on the trap doors.

Two entires came forward in front of them on the platform. One by one, these two pulled the nooses down and proceeded to tighten them around the throats of the prisoners, taking care to ensure that their great loops rode up above the iron ringcollars. The rope felt thick and rough against David's throat. The Priest's warbling went on unchanging, and now he heard the Professor begin to warble, just a little. When all the nooses were secure, these two entires descended from the gallows. David heard fiddling around behind their backs, and he felt the last shockpole being detached from his collar. Then the last of the entires left the elevated platform.

The entires assembled below the scaffolding, standing there in a close group, as though trying to keep warm, looking up at them. They were grinning. Amused. He noticed suddenly, looking down at them, just how pudgy they were. They looked to him like bloated pigs. Globs of fat rolling behind their eyeballs in lieu of brains. Bugs liked them that way, he thought. Slow to run away. It was probably something in their diet.

David realized at length that the entires were laughing and jeering at the condemned prisoners awaiting death on the gallows.

The axe-faced Professor lost it. "There's been a mistake!" he cried out. "I'm not supposed to be here. I haven't done anything!"

The entires roared with laughter.

It seemed strange that they should do so, David thought. Entires did not live longer than forty years, tops. Bugs let loose the pincers on them. David had never seen one, but everyone knew about them: swarming foot-long silver segmented bugs ‑‑ silver shredders ‑‑ with hundreds of legs and muscular bodies and mandibles like slashing steel needles. Strip an entire down ‑‑ even these fat swine-men ‑‑ to a skeleton in less than half an hour. But entires were too much like the cut prisoners, he thought, never casting their thoughts too far ahead into the future. Breeding concerns were instantaneous concerns.

"The imperative hormonespeke," someone had said.

They were only a few feet away below him, and judging by appearance, some of them would probably be facing the pincers within a year or two, David guessed. But this morning they could only mock their captive cuts arranged side by side up on the gallows.

Oddly, David realized he could not hear any of their taunting. His ravaged mind had found a clear and hollow, bright focus where everything glittered. His skin tingled with electric awareness of every mildest puff of air. The entires had no place in such a vision. They were immaterial. Phantoms.

There came a powerful odor, repellent, and he knew it was from the simpering Priest. And then the Marketeer began to cry, and to curse, and to plead for his life with the entires below. Strangely, David could not make out precisely what the Marketeer was saying, either.

The Outlaw, who stood on David's immediate left, hissed: "Get a grip, man! Don't let these spawns of bugs steal your dignity!"

The Professor's appeals to justice falling on deaf ears, he now switched tactics and began lecturing the entires, his voice emerging extremely high-pitched. He was saying something about shared humanity. Making an angry, futile, intellectual appeal, or a protest. The entires' laughter was redoubled, and they began taunting him particularly cruelly, remarking especially his shrunken genitals. On the other side of the Outlaw, the Marketeer quieted down.

David tried to focus on dying, but he found this to be a curiously difficult prospect. The world was so bright in the dawning sunlight, and the sky was too sharply blue. No longer could he feel the cold morning.

Soon I won't be in this world, he thought. It will happen any second. The entires will get bored of the mocking game and spring the trap doors and we'll fall. How long will we choke before. . . ? He did not know how to feel about any of it. He could only think about how blue the sky was.

Some time later, he didn't know how long, the little knot of entires broke up and they ascended the steps. They attached their poles to the prisoners' collars.

The Marketeer began to vomit when the noose was removed from his neck.

"Be brave, man!" the Outlaw said. "Don't give them the satisfaction! One day we'll slit all their throats and feed their guts to the dogs. One day, man!"

The Professor had quit pontificating. He looked like a building had collapsed inside his skin, David saw. His skin was remarkably white, like a statue in a museum.

The Priest cried and burbled on and on, inarticulate.

The entires took them all down. They sprayed down the Priest with blasts of icy cold water, and then they dressed them in new smocks. Afterwards, they were removed to solitary cells.

David never saw any of the other prisoners again. A few days after the incident of the gallows he was loaded onto another lorry. For three or four days it rattled into the southeast, eventually arriving at a res in Georgia. There was more to eat in Georgia than there had been in Minnesota. He was up to about a hundred and forty pounds when he passed away a few years later in a cholera outbreak. They said he was a productive worker (or something like one) and cremated his body, afterwards scattering its ashes in the fields.

The End.