The Bug: Complete Season One (15 page)

A battered Ford Focus rattled to a stop on an uneven patch of ground, spluttered once, then died. It had been the fourth car they’d had to switch to on the journey north, and by far the worst of the lot. Daniel cricked his neck and groaned. He missed the 4x4.

In the front seat beside him, Marshall peered out at their surroundings. There was a house immediately on their right, two more a little back along the single-track road, and a slightly larger building dead ahead.

“Highbridge Kennels and Cattery,” Leanne read, quietly, so as not to wake Immy. “I think it’s this house here.”

“See anything?” Daniel asked.

Marshall yawned and rubbed his eyes, then looked around them again. “Like what?”

“Leprechauns,” Daniel tutted. Marshall looked at him, confused. “What do you think? Like anyone who might want to kill us!”

“Oh, yeah. Right, of course,” Marshall nodded. He leaned left and right, giving the area a good look.

There was a tall hedge blocking most of the house itself from view, but other than that the coast was clear in pretty much every direction. On the left, a vast expanse of what Marshall could only describe as ‘nature’ stretched towards snow-topped mountains in the middle distance.

The tall grasses swaying in the breeze, the irregular clumps of towering trees and the mountains themselves combined to give the impression they’d driven right into a landscape painting. If they were going to be killed by a load of angry maniacs, Marshall could think of worse places for it to happen.

“I think we’re OK,” he said, gazing out at the scenery.

“That’s Ben Nevis,” said Leanne. “Highest mountain in the UK. We did it in school.”

“Which one?” asked Marshall.

Leanne smirked. “The biggest one.”

Daniel snorted, and Marshall felt his cheeks sting. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, smiling for the first time since Lacey Crane. “It’s been a long night.”

He opened the door and got out of the car. Something scuffed across the grass behind him. He caught a distorted reflection in the car’s paintwork, then pain exploded across the back of his head.

Marshall rolled onto the dirt, holding his hands out in front of him for protection and as a gesture of his complete and total surrender. “Wait, no, please, don’t!” he yelped.

A woman, partially silhouetted by the early-morning sun, stood over him, staring down the double barrels of a shotgun. She was big and bulky, with grey hair scraped back so tightly it was almost a DIY facelift.

Her cheeks were pitted with the craters of childhood spots and her face was contorted into an expression that suggested someone had taken a shit on her top lip. Despite never having met her before, Marshall recognized the woman right away.

“What are you pricks doing on my land?” she barked. Aye, she was Hoon’s sister, alright.

“Wait, wait, don’t shoot, I can explain!” Marshall yelped.

Daniel opened his door, and the business end of the shotgun moved from Marshall’s head to his crotch. “Make another move and I blow off his ballsack.”

“Jesus Christ, Daniel, get back in the car, get back in the car,” Marshall said. The woman jabbed the gun closer to his groin. “Daniel! Shut the fucking door!”

Daniel hesitated, then closed the door again. Marshall breathed a sigh of relief. “Mrs Hoon--”

“Ms,” the woman growled, her fingers tightening on the triggers.

“Ms! Ms! Sorry,” Marshall sobbed, covering his family jewels with one hand and keeping the other raised in front of him in surrender. “I’m Martin Marshall. I’m with the police. Your brother, DCI Hoon – Robert – he told us to come here. He said he’s going to meet us.” Marshall glanced at the gun. “H-he said we’d be safe.”

Ms Hoon’s eyes narrowed. Behind her, in the car, came the sound of Immy crying. “Bob sent you, did he?”

“Yes! Yes, Bob sent us. I swear.”

Her eyes narrowed further still. She pressed the butt of the shotgun tighter against her shoulder. “I see,” she said, then she lowered the weapon and her face cracked into a smile. “In that case, we’d better stick the kettle on.”

EPISODE FOUR

Leanne crept slowly towards the wriggling shape, trying her best not to startle it. As she shuffled closer, she held her breath, preparing herself for the horrors she was about to confront. Alone, with Daniel and Marshall nowhere to be seen, Leanne made her move.

There was a
rip
as she pulled the sticky tabs at Immy’s hips and the diaper flopped open. Leanne staggered back, one hand in front of her face. Even with her holding her breath, the stench was somehow finding a way through. Leanne’s eyes filled with water and she gagged violently. Despite all the carnage and bloodshed she’d witnessed over the past few hours, the toxic green sludge in Immy’s diaper was up there with the worst things she’d ever seen.

“How you getting on?” called Daniel from the kitchen.

“Oh, God, it’s disgusting,” Leanne replied, retching. “How come I’m stuck doing this, anyway?”

“You volunteered,” Daniel reminded her.

“No I didn’t!”

Daniel took a sip of tea. “Didn’t you?” he said, but he left it at that.

Ms Hoon – who’d revealed her name was Moira, but warned them never to address her by it – swept some breadcrumbs off the kitchen counter and onto the floor. A small grey Scotty dog immediately set to work snuffling them up.

Despite initially smashing Marshall on the back of the head and threatening to shoot his testicles off, she seemed friendly enough in her own surly, shotgun-wielding way. Even while making tea and toast for her guests, she’d kept the weapon slung over one arm, ready to snap up and start firing at a moment’s notice.

“No getting shit on my floor!” Moira shouted. “I mean it, I’ll rub both your noses in it.”

There was a moment of awkward silence from next door, followed by the sound of something being wiped against carpet.

“OK,” said Leanne without much conviction.

“It’s bad enough with the dogs,” Moira muttered, sipping her tea from a cracked mug.

Marshall looked down at the mutt still snuffling around on the floor. “How many do you have?”

“Dogs? None,” said Moira.

Marshall half-laughed. “What?”

“I don’t have any dogs.”

Daniel and Marshall exchanged a glance, both suddenly quite concerned about the mental state of the woman with the shotgun. “What about that one?” asked Daniel, pointing down.

Moira gave a dismissive wave. “Oh, Bertie. Not mine. Wandered over from the kennels and haven’t got around to bringing it back yet.”

Marshall relaxed a little. “Ah, right. When was this?”

Moira spent a few seconds considering her answer. “Two thousand and nine,” she said at last. “A few others have wandered over since then. Never stayed. Strolled in, shat on the carpet, left.” She looked between them both. “Which may explain why I don’t much enjoy having guests.”

Marshall made a stab at breaking the tension. “Well, I can promise you, Ms Hoon, we’re not going to shit on your carpet,” he said, starting brightly, but rapidly losing enthusiasm as the words tumbled out. He physically winced as he reached the end of the sentence, but recovered with something close to a smile.

Moira peered down her long, slightly crooked nose at him. Silence lingered for several seconds, broken only by the sound of Leanne retching in the room next door.

“Well. I’d appreciate that,” said Moira eventually. She glanced out through the kitchen window at the expanse of garden. There was a house fifty or more yards away on the other side of a high hedge. Smoke drifted lazily from its chimney. “When’s Bob getting here?” she asked.

Marshall shrugged. “Dunno.”

Moira’s eyes narrowed. She subtly adjusted the position of the shotgun. “You are with Bob, yes? He did tell you to come here?”

“He did. Absolutely,” said Daniel. “We got separated outside Glasgow. He saved Leanne and Immy – the baby – but he couldn’t reach the car.”

Marshall nodded, his eyes fixed on the gun. “He told Leanne we should come here, and that he’d catch us up. Knowing him, I don’t think he’ll be too long.”

“Pah!” Moira snorted. “He’s a wimp. Always has been. Used to wet the bed, you know? He’s soft.”

“We are talking about the same person, yes?” Marshall joked.

“Oh, well, I mean compared to you he’s a lion, obviously,” Moira snorted. “But it’s easy to be king of the jungle when you surround yourself with monkeys.”

Marshall kept his smile roughly fixed in place. “Aye. Well, I’m sure he’ll get here soon.”

Through in the next room, Immy began to wail. Marshall leaned his head around the kitchen door. “What happened? What did you do?”

“I didn’t
do
anything,” Leanne said, holding the squirming infant and bouncing her gently. Immy’s bottom half was swaddled up in a towel Moira had donated. Her top half – the face in particular – was crimson, her bottom lip turned almost all the way inside out as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I think she’s hungry. I don’t know when she was last fed.”

“Just before we picked you up,” said Daniel, stepping through into the living room. “Abbie, you know, before she… She fed her. About half two.”

“Five hours,” said Marshall. He looked to Moira. “Is that normal?”

“How the devil should I know?” Moira snorted. “Never had children. Closest I got to one was Bob’s son, and even then I wasn’t keen.”

Marshall blinked. “What? DCI Hoon has a son? He never mentioned him.”

“You’re an employee, not his friend,” Moira said. “Why would he mention it? He lives abroad. Mother’s American. And
black
, would you believe?”

Moira shuddered. “Don’t know what he was thinking.” She looked at Daniel. “I mean with her being American, not the black thing. I have no problem with blacks.”

Daniel frowned. “Well… that’s good of you. Thanks.”

“
Chinks
, I can’t stand, but you lot are fine, by and large.”

“Good to know,” said Daniel, shifting uncomfortably. He nodded at the crying Immy. “What do we do about her?”

“Can’t we just give her cow’s milk?” Marshall asked.

“No, that’s not good for them. It can make them sick,” said Daniel.

“Well, we need to feed her something,” Marshall said. “Anyone got any ideas?”

“The shop,” said Moira. All eyes went to her. “There’s a shop, just half a mile up the main road. Little newsagent, supermarket thing. Some of the staff are insufferable arseholes, but they’ve got a baby section.”

“Sounds like that’s our best bet,” said Daniel.

“Assuming it hasn’t already been looted,” Marshall said. He looked over at Immy, whose chubby cheeks were a worrying shade of scarlet. He turned to Moira. “Can you draw us a map?”

Moira rolled her eyes. “Back to the main road. Turn left. There it is. I’m sure even you can manage that.”

“Great,” said Marshall. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Right then,” breathed Daniel. He shot Marshall a shaky smile. “Ready to go shopping?”

Amy Banks had been sitting on the end of her bed for what felt like forever, wondering when the emergency services were going to turn up. It had been around four hours since she’d called to confess to killing both her parents, and even though she’d stressed it was in self-defense, she’d expected the police to come screeching up long before now.

There had been plenty of wailing sirens in that time, although fewer over the last couple of hours than at the start. When she’d heard the first one she’d picked up her overnight bag and gone to the window, but the cop car just swept past and vanished around a bend further up the street.

She couldn’t remember if she’d heard any sirens in the past hour or so, which made her think she probably hadn’t.

Her little brother, Robin, had stopped thumping against the door of the downstairs closet a while back. Part of her – the part that still clung to the time before her entire family had tried to kill her – wanted to go down and check he was OK. The other part – a part that she hadn’t even known existed until that morning – told her to quit being so stupid.

She picked up the phone and checked it again. The line had been down since before 9 PM. Cell network had been down from a little before that. She listened to the error message on the landline, then tossed the phone back onto her bed. No change.

Amy lay back on her bed and gazed up at the ceiling. She and her dad had painted it a few weeks ago, laughing as they’d daubed each other with paint. It had been the most fun they’d had together in years, and Amy had felt… relief, maybe. She’d been his little girl until she hit her teenage years, then suddenly everything he said or did seemed to be designed solely to annoy her.

After the day with the paint, she’d realized that maybe he hadn’t been trying to annoy her all that time, and maybe – just maybe - she’d been the asshole in the situation. Maybe her dad was still the same as he’d ever been, and their relationship wasn’t broken beyond repair.

Except now it was. Now her dad was lying on the kitchen floor, his brains oozing out of his skull like old cheesecake. No amount of ceiling painting, family counselling or late-teenage soul-searching could fix things now. Her parents were dead. And she’d killed them.

Amy stood up and gave herself a shake. She crossed to the window and looked out at the darkening street below. Mr Logan, her neighbor, was picked out in the glow of the streetlights, the metal railings of his fence still sticking up through his chest. Her eyes flicked past him. She’d almost become indifferent to the sight of him impaled there. That worried her a little, if she were honest, but she chose not to dwell on it too much right now.

The rest of the street was empty. There were fewer cars than usual, and some of the houses had their front doors open, but other than that, things looked to be largely normal.

Amy leaned closer to the glass and peered down at her own front garden. She’d seen insects swarming around in the grass earlier. Thousands of them, all rushing towards her like a living carpet. There was no movement now, though, as far as she could tell, although it was hard to be sure in the gloom.

She turned away and looked around the room. Her bag was on the bed, packed with a few clothes, some deodorant and a book. She wasn’t sure if the police would let her keep any of it in prison, but she’d thought it best to pack it just in case.

Now, though, the prospect of the police ever turning up was looking pretty slim. In the hours she’d spent sitting waiting for them to arrive, she’d come around to the fact she was going to be spending the rest of her life in jail. It wasn’t the life she’d have chosen for herself, obviously, but it was the one she now faced. And the one she now deserved.

But the cops weren’t coming, she realized. Whatever had happened was bigger than just her. Bigger than her parents, her neighbor, her street. Bigger, even, than the error message on the phone line and the lack of cell coverage.

Something had happened to her town and Amy knew she could sit quietly on the end of her bed and hope someone came along to explain it to her, or she could go and find out for herself what was going on.

She gave her bedroom door a long, hard look. Patience had never really been her style. She’d only go out for a little while, she decided, and would take the back door in case those insects were still out front. Except that would mean going through the kitchen where her parents were, she realized, and panic ignited like a fire inside her. She stamped it down and clenched her fists until her heart rate began to slow again.

The front door, then. She’d run along the path and be out on the sidewalk in a couple of seconds. From there she could scope out the other streets nearby, maybe head down to the police station on Panther Way. If she came across anything dangerous before then, she could double back and hole herself up in the house until rescue arrived.

“Good plan,” she told herself, and she tried to pretend she hadn’t heard the shake in her voice.

Taking a deep breath, Amy turned the handle and pulled open her bedroom door.

Her breath caught in her throat when she saw her brother, Robin, standing along the hallway at the top of the stairs. He was staring at her, his eyes two impossibly dark pools.

Amy stared back at him for what felt like several long seconds, trying to figure out what to say or do. Before she could, she noticed movement in the corner of her eye.

All around her little brother, covering the walls and carpet and ceiling, were hundreds of oily black bugs. They squirmed and wriggled and crept and crawled in every direction over every surface.

Amy recoiled as she spotted half a dozen of the bugs on her door. She slammed it closed just as Robin launched himself along the corridor towards her, his face twisted-up into a mask of raw fury. He hit the door hard, shaking it in its frame. Amy sobbed as she pushed back against it, frantically trying to hold it shut.

“Stop!” she cried. “Robin, stop! Please!”

On the other side of the door, her little brother hissed and spat and scraped at the wood. Keeping her weight against the door, Amy hooked one foot around the leg of her chair and pulled it closer. As Robin slammed himself against the wood again, she wedged the back of the chair beneath the handle.

Cautiously, she stepped away, half-expecting the chair to fall and the door to swing inwards, but Robin’s attack on the door didn’t seem to extend to turning the handle, and the chair remained in place.

Amy backed further into the room, clutching her head, her heart rattling in her chest. Down on the floor by the door, she caught a glimpse of movement. A spindly black leg squeezed through the narrow gap between the door and the carpet. A set of pincers followed, probing the air as the bug squirmed into the room.

Amy was at the door in two paces, her booted foot raising up to waist level. She drove the foot down – once, twice – smashing the insect’s head with her heel. The bug bust open, spraying a gloopy blue liquid onto the carpet.

Another set of pincers forced their way through the gap further along. Four or five legs wriggled below the door at other points. Amy sprang away as if she’d been electrocuted, then spun on the spot, searching for something she could use to stop them.

Her eyes fell on her bag. Rummaging inside, she pulled out her deodorant can and gave it a shake. Not full, but enough.

She searched in her jeans pocket until she found her lighter. The first of the bugs was almost through the gap now. It was big – bigger than any bug she’d ever seen before. She size of her cellphone, maybe. Bigger, even. Its pincers were like tree branches in the Fall, with dozens of spindly little twigs growing from them at every angle.

Its front legs scraped on the carpet as is struggled to squeeze its larger back end into the room. Amy stepped closer, flicking the lighter until a shaky flame rose from the top.

“Get the fuck out of my room,” she hissed, pushing down the button on top of the deodorant can.

A jet of flame erupted from the nozzle and the bug let out an audible screech as the fire engulfed it. It pushed back, trying to escape the searing heat, but it was too late. Its legs curled inwards as its shiny black body blistered and burned.

She swept the flame all across the bottom of the door, blasting the seven or eight bugs at various stages of forcing their way through.

At last, she released the button. Her home-made flamethrower stopped, but the fire had already taken hold of the carpet and bottom of the door. She stared at the flowering flames in horror.

“Robin,” she whispered, then she stepped as close to the door as she dared. Her little brother was still out there, still thudding and scratching against the wood. “Robin, you have to get out!” she cried. “You’ll burn. You have to get out of the house, do you hear me?”

The snarling and scraping continued. Robin must have heard her, but whether he understood or not was a different matter.

The flames licked upwards inside the door. Amy stepped back and watched as a patch of the freshly-painted ceiling turned grey, then black. Smoke stung at her eyes and snagged at the back of her throat.

Hacking and coughing, she snatched up her bag, made for her window and wrestled it open like she’d done all those times her dad had forbidden her to leave the house. She knew instinctively where the drainpipe was, and where to place her left foot as she ducked out through the gap.

“Robin, go!” she called one last time, but the banging on the door continued and there was nothing, Amy knew, that she could do.

Transferring her weight onto her left foot, Amy clambered all the way out through the window and used both hands to catch onto the drainpipe. Smoke billowed out of the room beside her and curved upwards towards the roof.

She could still hear her brother at the door as she began to climb down, slowly, steadily, inch by inch. It had been a few years since she’d last made the climb, and—

Amy gasped as her foot slipped on the wall. Her arms jerked, her body swung, and her hands were suddenly grasping at nothing as she plunged towards the garden below.