get any more of those nasty things."
Jesus, I thought. What am I going to do?
The dog was okay, though she stopped sticking her face into the bathroom. Her
nose was a little shredded, but like my finger there was no permanet damage. The
way she looked at me after we finished dabbing at her snoze with peroxide, it
was like a kinship. We both knew what it felt like to have something try and eat
you, and it had nothing to do with sex either.
Saturday and Sunday are Maggie's days to sleep late, since she gets up with me
at five during the week. I'm an early riser even on the weekends, generally
dozing on and off for awhile, then getting up and leaving Maggie to rest for a
few more hours. That's the time I do a few things around the house -- whatever
can be done without much noise -- take care of business, so to speak. If there's
nothing that needs to be done, I'll just watch television, cartoons or maybe an
old movie on cable.
Pre-dawn Sunday I had business to take care of. I stood outside the bathroom
door in near darkness, staring into that little room with no better light than
what came from a feeble nightlight in the kitchen. But it was enough. My hands
held sophisticated hunting tools: a piece of paper and a glass jar with a lid.
If I couldn't kill it, then I'd catch it and trust my gut feeling that there was
only one of those creatures, a mutant. A single indestructible beetle-thing in
this whole fucking world and it had to be in my house -- life's a real bitch
sometimes. What I did know for a fact was that there wouldn't be just one for
long and I had to catch that thing before it gave birth.
I'd tried this same gig Saturday and gotten nowhere, though I hadn't given up
until I'd heard Maggie moving around in the bedroom. I figured what I needed was
live bait.
Taking my house shoe off was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, next to
actually putting my sweating, defenseless foot down on the cold tile of the
bathroom floor. If it wanted fresh meat, it would have to come out almost to the
door; I couldn't bring myself to get any closer than three feet from the tub.
I felt it before it attacked -- some kind of primal sixth sense kicked in and
saved my ass, and I'm not fool enough to claim I wouldn't have screamed if it
had bit me again. I smacked that jar open-end down on the floor so hard it was a
damned miracle it didn't shatter. Then I just knelt there, breathing hard, water
dripping off my head like it was ninety-five in the sun instead of a
winter-chilly morning in a dark bathroom. Vibrations ran through the jar and
into my hand, making my skin crawl and dread pulled my lips thin as I slid the
paper between the jar and the floor and flipped it upright, twisting the lid on
without bothering to take away the paper. I was too afraid.
At about the same time as I switched on the light, I thought how silly it was
for a grown man to be afraid of an insect. Mandibles clicking, the thing in the
jar started slamming against the glass in a futile attempt at escape and with
both relief and revulsion, I saw the egg sac was still connected and throbbing
with unborn life.
Maybe my fear wasn't so stupid after all.
