Oscar drove his Rid-Rite Pest Control truck up the winding, steep driveway of the old Martindale house and ground the vehicle to a stop in the dusty circular driveway. The Cape Cod-style house had once been home to Senator Abner Martindale and his family, but had stood empty for over two decades. A large sticker with a bright red SOLD blazed across the front of a weather-beaten For Sale sign, as if to proclaim to the world, “I’m back!”
He peered through the windshield at the house’s battered white façade. Large strips of paint hung off it like dead skin. The front porch sagged with years of neglect and rot from the moist Northwest climate. Tangles of blackberry brambles and ivy clogged the side yard, making it impenetrable. The thorny vegetation bunched up against the side of the house and ivy climbed greedily up the cedar siding like a living carpet. He wondered what sort of people would want the job of resurrecting this hellhole, but he was more curious about the current tenants. Oscar was an exterminator—the proprietor of pests—and he intended to spray a chemical eviction notice.
He swung open the truck’s door and stepped out onto the hard-packed dirt of the drive. The cool breeze carried a strong scent of pine from the towering firs that surrounded the property. A thick carpet of dried, reddish needles covered the mossy roof and crackled underfoot like the husks of dead insects as he trudged away from his truck. He ambled closer to the dilapidated house. Blinds still covered most of the front windows, but those left bare gave the home a gap-toothed look. He saw a baseball-sized hole in the corner of a lower window and grimaced. Aside from the insects, any number of rats and rodents might lurk inside, hungry to sink their teeth into his unprotected ankles and neck.
The guttural roar of another vehicle struggling up the steep driveway drew his attention away from the house. Another Rid-Rite truck came to a squeaking stop behind his, and Oscar felt a trickle of relief. Wes Nolan, Rid-Rite’s head inspector and co-owner, had done a run-through of the property with the new owner the previous day, and he wanted to personally oversee this job. The Martindale house was an infamous piece of property, particularly among the locals, and he was eager to contribute to the folklore.
When Oscar had asked Wes what waited inside for them, the man was ominous: “You’ll need full tactical gear.” That meant a full body suit, goggles, gas mask, “T-Rex” rattraps, poisoned bait stations, aerosol units, bait gel, live traps for skunks or raccoons, termiticide, and spike strips for any potential bird infestations. It was going to be a long day.
The inspector hoisted his considerable weight from the truck and began suiting up. Oscar did the same. “I hope you ate, son,” said Wes. “It’s one bitch-kitty of a mess in there and you might not have an appetite later.” The older man’s eyes gleamed with excitement. On the job, Oscar had witnessed the sort of human squalor most often associated with third-world countries, and he found it hard to share Wes’s zeal.
After the men zipped up their white coveralls, Wes continued. “This place has been empty near twenty-five years and somebody actually bought it,” he said, shaking his head. “Look at that window there.” He pointed to the broken one Oscar had noticed earlier, “No tellin’ how long it’s been busted. The owner says it was two, maybe three years. No one’s been out here in about that long, until recently.”
Oscar turned, surprised. “Three years? You mean nobody’s been out here? Why the hell not?”
Wes looked at him shrewdly, “You’re kiddin, right? Why in hell would anybody with sense wanna come out here if they didn’t have to? There’s a reason this place’s been empty as long as it has.”
Oscar managed a weak smile. “I figured that was just a bunch of superstitious talk. You’re not telling me grown men and women really fall for that ‘town haunted house’ crap, are you?”
The older man shrugged. “There’s all sorts of gossip that’s probably half true and mostly bullshit, but I’ll tell ya one thing. What happened in there, what Abner Martindale did to his family, was worse than anything you and me will see in there today.”
“Where are the other guys? Weren’t Rico and Jimmy T. supposed to be helping us?”
“They got pulled away to a big rat job over at the Pacific Racing Stables. A bunch of high-dollar thoroughbreds and their owners are going apeshit,” Wes said with a chuckle. “It’ll be just you and me for a couple of hours, but we can make a good dent in things before they get here.”
“Should we start with the Rexes and bait stations?” Oscar asked.
“Bet your ass. I’d grab a live trap or two. I noticed a family of coons under the porch yesterday.”
Oscar went to the back of his truck and began loading gear. The T-Rex was their rattrap of choice, and the name said it all. It was a solid black metal mouth with inter-locking teeth and a trip-plate that they smeared with peanut butter to lure hungry rodents to a snapped neck. He also strapped on his utility belt, which held small tools, a flashlight, and a caulking gun loaded with poisoned bait gel to squirt in the home’s nooks and crannies. He could hear Wes rattling around in his own vehicle.
“Gonna need some Liquid Nails and heavy-gauge mesh to close up some of the basement windows. The place is like Swiss fuckin’ cheese,” he said. “Once I take you through to show you the damage, I’ll start sealing up the exterior. We’ll gas the place last.”
They were loaded up with gear and walking toward the porch when Oscar stopped his boss.
“How bad is it in there? Honestly?”
Wes furrowed his brow in careful consideration. It was as if he had to remind himself what “bad” really meant in their line of work. Therefore, when Wes looked soberly at the young man standing before him and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a place quite this bad before,” Oscar was scared. He peered up at a second floor window and saw a void of black staring back. He also saw a wasp’s nest under the eave and filed that away on his mental “to-do” list. The porch protested noisily under the weight of the two men. Oscar guessed if he jumped, they would crash right through.
Wes produced a scrap of paper from his pocket and entered the digits from it into the keypad on the door’s lockbox. 4355. It popped open and produced a tarnished house key. He unlocked the front door and the younger man hesitated again. Wes was a patient man, but he cleared his throat and sighed, which suggested that he would not be patient for much longer. “Is it, you know, clean in there?” Oscar asked.
“Clean? Hell no, son. It’s dusty as shit and there’s some rotten furniture and other miscellaneous crap throughout. Probably gonna need to get a mold removal crew in here next.”
“No, sir. I mean, you know. The, uh, crime scene. Can you see it?”
Wes grew more somber when he realized what Oscar meant. “I saw some stuff yesterday. I mean, the livin’ room carpet has been cut away in big patches, but there isn’t anything gory in there. Not for a long time.” He looked closely at Oscar, whose color had faded just a bit. “You gonna be okay, son?”
Oscar cleared his throat. “I’m fine. Let’s just get this done and get out of here.” Wes clapped the young man on the shoulder and opened the front door of the Martindale house.
The smell hit Oscar’s nose like a moldy two-by-four and he coughed hard to avert his urge to gag. The house, which had stood empty since the first Reagan administration, was rotting from within as well as from without. The cracked plaster walls in the foyer revealed lathing in some places that reminded him of the splintered bones of a long-dead monster. Orangey watermarks on the ceiling told of a bad roof and failed plumbing; walking upstairs would be dangerous at best. Very little sunlight penetrated the tree cover, so the house had a gloomy, foreboding look inside. Oscar stepped up to the staircase and wiggled the banister out of curiosity. He was not surprised to find that it felt like a rotted tooth in an old gum.
“Jesus Christ,” Oscar whispered. “Why the hell don’t they just raze the place and start over fresh?”
“You got me,” Wes replied. “Place ought to be condemned, but I think the buyers had some sway over the powers that be in that department.”
Oscar cocked an eyebrow. “Who’s the buyer?” he asked.
“Some rich investor type from the east coast who collects supposedly-haunted houses and turns ‘em into tourist destinations for ghost lovers or somethin’.”
“Strange hobby,” said Oscar as he stifled a sneeze. Dust particles floated freely in the air.
Wes shrugged. “Come on, let’s get moving.”
The two men walked from the foyer into the dining room. Wes mostly talked while Oscar set the poison bait stations and glue paper to catch any unfortunate rodents and insects. “Strange the place is so overrun with critters. There ain’t much of a steady food supply, ‘cept the blackberry bushes, but the season’s passed. The bastards are hidin’, but they’re here.”
The man was right. The characteristic fine black spray of roach droppings speckled the baseboards and the arched entryway leading into the kitchen, as well as the curtains and windowsills. They looked like coffee grounds to the untrained eye. Several of the insects milled about defiantly in the open, in and out of the cracks in the walls.
Oscar got his first major scare in the kitchen when something wiggly dropped onto the back of his neck. “Jesus!” he screamed, as he dropped his tool bag and brushed the insect off the nape of his neck. He looked up and saw at least a dozen cockroaches crawling inside the kitchen’s fluorescent light fixture.
Wes chuckled. “I oughta start callin’ you a rookie again. You all right, son?”
Once Oscar suppressed his revulsion, he nodded. “Yeah. This place is spooking me out.” The roaches owned the kitchen. They scattered as the men worked, and several more had fallen onto Oscar’s head, neck, and shoulders, but he was able to anticipate it this time and casually brushed them off with the practiced swipes of an experienced exterminator. The white cupboards and hilly linoleum were nearly black with insect feces. The stale air of the place reeked of it, and the men decided to don their gas masks. With its expanse of counter and cabinet space, and a sizeable eating nook, the room was a gourmet cook’s dream. Oscar could picture Mrs. Martindale whipping up a pie or a loaf of bread on the butcher-block island, with flour strewn about as cheerful light spilled through the window over the sink. Perhaps their two young daughters were playing out back with a family dog scampering around their ankles. A faded plaque still hung from the backsplash above the stove. It said in quaint, flowing script “Home is where we tie one end of the thread of life.”
The view of the backyard was not as pleasant a scene as Oscar imagined in his little daydream. Rot and moisture had ruined the deck as it had the front porch. The thorny blackberry brambles he had seen from the driveway dominated the landscape back here as well. It was heading into the second week of October, and the fruit had mostly gone bad, but Oscar would not have dared eat it at its peak. He imagined it would be as poisonous as the honeycomb from a hive of radioactive bees. Although he had no logical reason to believe this, the certainty of the fruit’s wrongness remained. A rusted swing set rose from the unkempt foliage, its top support bar severely bent in the middle. It reminded Oscar of a praying mantis that had been broken in half.
Oscar noticed another glaring inconsistency with the property and asked Wes if he noticed it as well.
“You mean other than it’s filled with bugs and their shit?” Wes retorted.
“There isn’t any graffiti in here. Abandoned houses are usually full of the stuff. Kids break in and turn these places into their own little flophouses. There are no homeless folks, no hypodermic needles or other drug paraphernalia. There’s not even so much as a single beer can. Doesn’t that seem a little weird?”
Wes furrowed his brow over the top of his gas mask. “You’re right. The basement windows are broken, and that one in the front. It’s not like people would have to try too hard to get in here.”
“Exactly, so how come there isn’t any other real damage to the place? Sure it’s filthy and smells like shit, but it’s not from any transients that I can see. I don’t care what happened here. It’s strange.”
“Come on in here. I got somethin’ to show you,” Wes said, walking past him and into the room that adjoined the eating nook.
A wide circle was missing from the center of the royal blue carpeting of the main living area. A wide, brownish stain colored the wooden subflooring, and Oscar had a sickening certainty he was looking at an old bloodstain.
Wes’s knees popped like little firecrackers as he hunkered down into a squat outside the circle and pulled off his mask. Oscar did the same as Wes spoke. “Folks say Senator Martindale dressed them like freshly-killed deer. First the wife, then the little girls. He answered the door wearing their intestines like a long necklace. His hair had gone completely white, and his eyes were as dead as glass marbles. He had used the same knife to cut into his leg. His arms were all cut up too, down to the bone in some places.”
Oscar felt a chill, and a flush of irritation. “Christ on a fucking trailer hitch, Wes. How in the hell would you know all that?”
Wes’s complexion had gone an ashy gray in the room’s low light. “I play cards with Dean Lewin, who was the county sheriff back then. He was one of the first responders. Martindale made the call himself, but he didn’t actually say anything to the dispatcher. Nothing in actual words anyway. Lewin said he couldn’t even listen to the tapes all the way through because they scared him so bad. It was like a buzzing sound that tried to make speech, but couldn’t because it lacked the proper equipment. When Lewin and the boys got here, that same sound came out of Martindale’s mouth when he tried to speak. He said a few of the guys fled or puked right on the spot when they saw him standing there all draped in guts, buzzing away like that. Couldn’t right well blame them either.”
Oscar grasped for the words that could follow something so ghastly. “But…the papers. The papers didn’t say any of that. They said he murdered them and went catatonic.”
Wes let out a high, shaky laugh. “Kids like you probably don’t remember a time when the press actually used to show some respect to politicians. I’m sure if CNN and Fox News were around back then, no gory detail would’ve been spared. Folks eat that shit up nowadays, but back then, they filtered out a lot of the worst stuff. Most folks just want to forget about what happened here, but a few people still whisper about it and they’ll tell you if you ask. I’m telling you this because I think this is why there aren’t many transients in here. There’s something about this place that scares people away, even if they don’t know about its history. You can even feel it from the outside, like your guts are trying to wring themselves dry.”
Oscar nodded. “I know what you mean. I knew this place was full of bad juju given what happened. In middle school, we liked to tell stories about the Martindales to try to scare each other, but nobody ever wanted to actually come up here and poke around. Their courage would run out at the foot of the driveway. But we were just kids.”
Wes stood back up, his knees popping again. “Sometimes reality’s scarier than anything we can make up.”
“Well, at least he’s dead now.”
Wes grunted. “Yup. Shot dead by Dean Lewin himself. Martindale grabbed one of the deputies and tried to stab him in the neck. The Senator got off a lot easier than he deserved to get, though. Goddamn politicians always get off easy. The whole lot are like a bunch of cockroaches, and about as human too.” He looked at his watch. “The other guys will be rolling up before long. You finish the traps. I’ll head out and start sealing up those basement windows. We’ll do the basement last. I haven’t been down there yet. The door was locked yesterday, but the owner said he’d take care of it.” Oscar nodded and headed toward the stairs that lead up to the second floor.
The upstairs hallway of the house had a little more sunlight coming in, courtesy of the skylights that ran down the length of it. Oscar counted five doors, including the one immediately at the top of the landing, which belonged to a small guest bathroom. Roach feces littered the sink and bathtub, and a few of the insects scurried along the top of the toilet tank and out of the medicine cabinet when he opened it. The skylights had aided in the considerable water damage. The seals had failed around three of them, and dark mold festered in the recessed alcoves. Oscar pulled his mask back on as a precaution. The carpeted floor creaked loudly beneath his work boots as he crept along the hallway. He decided it was best to straddle the center as he went along, just to be safe.
The first room revealed a surprising lack of activity. In the closet of what Oscar assumed was the guest bedroom or maybe a den, there was a tangled pile of torn cardboard strips and other refuse that signified a rat’s nest, but otherwise the room was clean. He set some glue boards and a few T-Rexes.
The next room was a girl’s bedroom, evidenced by the pale pink paint on the walls and a faded wallpaper border of ballerina shoes along the top. A small galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars clung to the ceiling and walls, and several littered the floor when their adhesive had given way. With the exception of an elaborate spider web in one corner, the room was also relatively untouched by critters. He knocked the web down with a little brush he kept in his bag for just such a purpose.
In the next room, Oscar’s heart lurched. Thick strands of spider web spanned the distance between the walls. Many were broken wisps, but several were fresh, with large, plump black spiders clinging to them like living tumors. He was not afraid of spiders, but these set his teeth on edge. They didn’t appear to be female Black Widows as they lacked the characteristic red violin-shaped marking on their backs, but he didn’t doubt a bite from one of them would mean a trip to the emergency room. Or a morgue. He shut the door: he’d take care of that room later when he had help.
Oscar opened the door to the master bedroom braced for more spiders, but what he saw instead was far worse. His eyes bulged from their sockets, and for the second time that day, he dropped his duffel bag. At first, he thought the words on the wall above where the bed once stood were graffiti, but as he peered closer, he knew better. He read four squiggly but very plain letters—SCAT—written in feces.
Oscar slammed the door shut and ran back down the hallway to the stairs, his hair standing in reddish spikes and his heart threatening to burst from his chest like one of those creatures from Aliens. His boots made squishy sounds in the wet carpet, and any thought of treading carefully on the water-damaged floor had evaporated from his horrified mind, so when one of his feet broke through itthe rotted floor, he was certain the house was attempting to eat him. He braced himself before he could fall flat out and snap his leg, and scraped his palms bloody against the rough-textured walls. The plaster crumbled away and sharp slivers of lathing slid into his raw skin. He screamed out in equal parts terror and pain, “Fuck!” Supporting his weight with his elbows this time, he twisted his lower-leg slowly out of the hole in the floor, being careful to distribute his weight evenly.
At first, he thought it was an optical illusion. His foot appeared to quiver as he brought it up out of the darkness below him. Upon closer inspection, however, he realized it was a squirming mass of cockroaches covering his foot like a horrifying sock. Shrieking, he jerked his leg violently and sent insects flying in a hard, gruesome spatter against the wall. He inadvertently kicked a hole in the plaster beside him with one of his boot’s steel toes, and dozens more bugsinsects spilled through the jagged opening and began scurrying along the floor and walls. Oscar raced for the stairs. His panic made him equally mindless of the loose banister; it wobbled dangerously, but managed to hold.
Once outside, he ran until he was standing near his truck again. He bent over to catch his breath and slow his stammering heart. There were no more roaches on his leg, but the palms of his bloody hands still stung. “Boss?” he called out. Wes was probably around back somewhere, but Oscar loathed the idea of going back there.
No answer came.
He paused to get his mind back under control before he approached the house again. After a few moments, he half-convinced himself he suffered from a major case of the creeps brought on by Wes’s recounting of the Martindale story. The writing in the master bedroom (SCAT), he reasoned, was the work of a bored kid with a can of spray paint. As for all the bugs under the floor and in the walls, should he really expect different? Sure, the sheer number of them seemed abnormal, even for an abandoned house, but he was sure his panicked mind played a big part in increasing their quantity.
The scent of pine, the cool breeze, and the dapples of afternoon sunlight dancing on the driveway helped to add a bit more pleasant reality to the situation. Satisfied the wild elephant in his mind had been tranquilized, he decided to go back and look for his boss.
There was only one way around to the back of the place because of the blackberry brambles. The other side had a cedar fence running down the length of the property, and it held most of the greenbelt’s foliage at bay. Here, he only had to bend the overgrown pine boughs out of the way. He emerged in the weedy backyard next to the bent and rusted swing set. Wes wasn’t back there. The sagging deck jutted from the back of the house. It looked too dangerous to walk on, and he had no urge to feel his foot plunge through more rotted wood. Oscar circled around it, certain he would find him, Wes bent down around one of the basement windows he had come to seal off.
Near the corner of the house, Oscar found Wes’s work kit, but the window before it hadn’t yet been sealed. The black hole, outlined by ragged broken glass, looked like the gaping maw of some strange alien beast. Oscar hunkered down to see if he could view anything in the sub-level of the house. “Wes?” He wondered if the old man had gone down there for some reason, though the idea seemed ridiculous. There was no answer, and he could see nothing. Blackness swallowed whatever light filtered through the thick foliage. Oscar stood up and decided to try yelling instead. “WES!”
A faint wheezing sound escaped from the darkness below, and Oscar dropped to his knees. “Christ, boss, is that you? How in the hell did you get down there?” No answer came but the wheezing, followed by a chilling series of clacking noises. Maybe he had a stroke and he is trying to communicate by tapping a stone on the basement floor, Oscar thought weakly. The opening was not big enough for Oscar to fit through, let alone Wes, who outweighed him by fifty pounds or more. He pulled out his mini Mag-Lite, and clicked it on. It gave off weak yellow illumination, and he remembered he had needed to change the batteries. More wheezing issued from the dark. If Wes was down there, he was probably hurt. He dreaded going into the house again after what had happened to him earlier, but he refused to leave Wes behind.
Oscar sprinted through the dining room and into the kitchen to the basement door. One of his boots smacked down on one of the fresh glue boards he’d set down earlier. “Aw, shit,” he groaned. There was no getting the thing off without ruining his boot. That glue made a permanent fix onto just about anything. He stepped to the door, his boot making a plastic “THWACK” sound with every other step. The door was partially ajar.
The first few steps down into the cellar were visible, but they disappeared after that. Oscar clicked the Mag-Lite back on and flipped open the cell phone he kept in his pocket. There was no service in this rural area, but the glowing display would provide good light, illumination in the dark.
Scores of roaches and spiders scurried from the bluish white light that emanated from the phone’s display, and Oscar repressed a wave of revulsion. The stairs creaked loudly as he descended them, but they were sturdy enough to hold him. A cloying musty smell filled his nose and mouth with every breath, and he felt he’d been buried in a pile of sweaty gym socks. Spider webs stuck to his face, and he brushed them away impatiently. A sickening crunch accompanied every step as his boots crushed several bugs that were either too slow or too stupid to get out of the way.
“Hey, Wes? Answer me, goddamn it,” Oscar called out.
Nothing.
The cell phone display illuminated several lumpy shapes covered in sheets. Forgotten furniture, he assumed. The light of his cell phone had a limited radius, and consequently he couldn’t see more than a couple feet around him. He was awash in the skittering whisper of a million tiny legs scurrying across the floor. Several wriggling bodies dropped onto his head. He brushed them off with a disgusted groan, lost his grip on the phone and watched with dismay as it tumbled across the floor. An ocean of bugs fled its bluish-white glow.
The phone landed on its side and illuminated one of the basement’s concrete walls and a messy pile that lay before it. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” Oscar murmured. Stinging tears sprung to his eyes. A mountain of bones and skulls, many that were clearly human, rose up from the floor like some undiscovered Golgotha. Among them were personal effects—rotted clothing and the dull glint of tarnished jewelry. Sprawled on top of it all were two fresh human bodies, one of which was the unmistakable white-garbed form of Wes Nolan. He’d been nearly torn in half. The other was a suited man whose face was mutilated beyond recognition. Wes was lying face down with his arms sprawled out almost as if he were trying to fly away. Several large roaches and other insects were working greedily over the fresh meat.
Oscar went to the pile of carnage, attracted to it the way people are to gruesome car wrecks, but he also wanted to retrieve his phone. One of the roaches on Wes’s shoulder was about the size of a hoagie from their favorite deli, and its baleful red eyes glared at him with supernatural ferocity. Oscar slowly bent down and grabbed a long length of bone from the pile. Wielding it like an angry Babe Ruth, he swung at the mutant roach, which collided with a sickening crunch into the wall behind it.
Oscar reached down, grasped his boss’s arm, and rolled him over. The top half of Wes’s body slid lifelessly down to the base of the bone heap. His insides came along in a tangled, congealed mass. Oscar retched twice, but he could not manage to vomit in spite of his desire to. Suddenly, the lightillumination from his cell phone died, the battery likely exhausted. His Mag-Lite had finally given up as well.
There was only blackness, the whistle of his panicked respiration, and the skittering of infinite insects. Sweat soaked Oscar’s coveralls, and he felt planted where he stood as if the floor had become one giant glue board. Again came the clacking sound he’d heard from outside, the one that had spurredmoved him to come down here, only now a low buzz accompanied it, like a pair of barber’s hair clippers.
It was like a buzzing sound that tried to make speech, but couldn’t. Like it lacked the proper equipment, Wes had said. Oscar’s body contorted in a shudder.
“Zzzzzzzzzccccaaaaahhhht…Zzzzzzzzzcccaaaahhhtttt…” The clacking sound followed again.
Oscar could not tell the distance of the sound as it echoed off the tomb-like walls. His night vision stubbornly refused to kick in, and panic released his knees like oil on rusty hinges. Plopping down on the cold floor, he felt Wes’s dead and cooling body against him. Oscar gibbered as his insides squirmed like a panicking tangle of snakes. “P-p-please just… p-p-please…” Bugs crawledskittered across his legs, in his hair, and the back of his neck. He screamed to drown it all out.
A long, thin, appendage slipped into the collar of his coveralls and yanked him up with considerable strength. Another wrapped like a thin cable around his arm and flung him around in an abrupt about-face. That clacking noise came again, only it was mere inches before his face. Its breath smelled like a damp grave.
“Zzzzzzzzzzzcccccaaaaahhhhttt,” it buzzed. A burst of pain erupted in the back of Oscar’s neck as something thin and sharp inserted itself., and Hhis bladder let go. He kept his eyes closed tight, as if the opaque dark were not enough to shield from view the alien monstrosity before him. To see it would mean the obliteration of his mind.
More thin and hairy appendages inspected his hair, slid down toward the zipper of his coveralls, and began to slice open the garment with hungry curiosity as the back of his neck pulsed like a second heart. ItThe thing’s curious appendage stopped at Oscar’s thick utility belt and tugged at it, as if, and it seemed unsure how to bypass it.
Smaller roaches found their way underneath the cuffs of his coveralls and pants and crawled up his bare legs. The tickling sensation from their movement brought him tospurred him into action. Before its claws could solve the problem of Oscar’s belt and fillet him open, Oscar reached for the one thing hanging from the belt that could probably save him: his caulk gun loaded with the poisoned bait gel.
He could not see exactly where he was aiming, but his usable senses drew a good enough picture. He jabbed the tip of the gun into the thing with all of his strength. It sounded like a cracking eggshell. Pulling the trigger all the way home, he filled the hole with enough of the bait gel to kill a colony of cockroaches.
It let out an ear-splitting screech that sounded like hot air escaping a teakettle, and the clacking sound sped up to a rapid fire as the creature thrust him away. Oscar didn’t take the time to think about where it was. He turned tail and bolted back in the direction from which his terrified mind was sure he came. His adrenaline dulled the warm, throbbing pain from his neck. The open basement door gave just enough light to help him find his way, and he stumbled for it as the bug thing screeched in the far corner.
He clambered on a scrabbling carpet of bustling insects, and threw himself up the stairs, taking them three at a time until he stood in the bleak, ruined kitchen that looked like a utopia of cheer compared to where he had just been.
Oscar ran from the house into the fading daylight, and jumped behind the wheel of his truck. He turned the key and the engine roared with a sure, confident vitality that warmed his heart as he threw the truck into gear and peeled away from the house.
Before he reached the foot of the drive, another Rid-Rite truck pulled in. Jimmy T. waved at him from behind the wheel, stopped his vehicle, and stepped out.
“Yo, hombre. You done already? You look like you just saw a fuckin’ ghost, man.” Jimmy peered in closer at the sickly, white-haired man who sat hunched behind the wheel of the truck and jumped back. “What the fuck happened wit’ your hair, man? And what’s wit’ the back of your neck?” he asked in a grimace of disgust.
“You need to get out of here, and I mean get out of here now and don’t ever come back, man. Just go. Scat.”
Jimmy stumbled until his ass hit the back of his truck as if something had tried to grab at him, his face white, and his dark eyes glassy with horror. He crossed himself. “Jesus, Mary, and motherfuckin’ Joseph.”
Oscar opened his mouth, but he already knew with sickening surety what was going to come out. He leaned out the window and repeated himself as Jimmy dove back into his truck, and reversed hard out of the driveway in a streak of burnt rubber and a cyclone of dust.
“Zzzzzzzzcaaaaaaaaahhhhtttt…,” he buzzed. “Zzzzzzzzcaaaaaaaazhhhhttttt…”