Stinger by Bruce McAllister

By the time Jerry lost his sister to one of them, and Hernando his older brother, we were sure we knew where they’d come from. After all, we all knew smaller versions of them—”tarantula hawks”—Pepsis grossa—those big wasps that fly just above the high desert’s sand and gravel looking for tarantulas and trapdoor spiders to sting, paralyze, and lay their eggs in. We’d grown up seeing their shiny black bodies and orange wings cruising the sands, looking for living cradles for their young, and, kids being kids in our desert town, had captured more than one at some point. It wasn’t easy. You didn’t want them to sting you. They were a big wasp and the pain was excruciating, but you also weren’t what they were looking for, so they accepted their fate in your mason jars and cricket cages.

Our town isn’t far from a big Army base and its testing facilities, so we thought of all those 50’s-science-fiction-flicks: “Radiation!” If the ants in those flicks could get huge, why not these wasps?

There’s comfort, when you lose people you’ve grown up with, people you love, in trying to figure it out—trying to understand why it happened. It gives death meaning.

But then Keith, who has the only grocery store in town, found out by talking to his uncle, an Army colonel at the base, that nuclear tests have never been done there. Ever. Not even secret ones. “There would be evidence—melted this and that, craters,” his uncle said, “and there isn’t any. Sorry, boys. You can live here just fine. Think I’d be on that base if it weren’t safe?”

At Kenny’s Bar later Keith offered: “A government experiment?”

“Stupidest weapon ever,” Al said.

“A mad scientist’s?” Keith wasn’t going to give up.

“That makes even less sense,” Rosie said.

“Global warming,” Tony suggested brightly.

“What the hell does that actually mean?” I countered.

No one had an answer to that.

When Hieu’s wife was taken—in broad daylight on Main Street, the creature hitting her at fifty miles an hour, picking her up and taking her away—we jumped in our trucks and followed. When the thing dropped her not far from the highway, making sure she was still alive for its eggs’ sake, her left leg was broken and she was stiff as a board and her eyes were wide open, but she had a pulse, really slow, and was breathing even if barely. You could see the stinger mark on her belly, and the other, bigger wound where the creature had pushed its eggs into her.

What hospital to take her to? Ely was sixty miles away, and the poor girl had a raging fever, a red streak growing from the stinger site toward her heart, and we didn’t think she would make it. And if she did, the eggs would have to be removed before they hatched, and we had no idea when that would be. She’d need surgery.

The eggs started hatching as we drove her to the urgent care clinic in Gabbs ten miles away, the young pushing against the inside of her stomach. She wasn’t supposed to die, but she did. Maybe human beings aren’t as hardy as spiders. Our town’s one doctor, Hal Pageant, was in the cab with us. Hieu was holding her. Hal checked her and nodded, which meant she was gone. We stopped the truck, removed her before the babies could break through her skin, and placed her gently as we could at the side of the road, glad her parents weren’t there to see it. Then we set fire to her with the gas can in the truck bed. She burned. The creatures inside her burned, too, without a sound, and we drove back to town not saying a thing, waiting for Hieu to cry. He just turned and stared out the window.

I know you want an explanation. We all do. But some things—like the beginning of the universe and life on earth, or why you—the person you are—are here—you can’t really explain and never will. You just have to live with it, eggs and all. And you never know. Tony’s kid, Joseph, sixteen, loves animals, has one of the hatchlings from the body of a drifter we found a week ago on Route 50, and the boy is teaching it things, would you believe it? They’re not just giant, nasty insects driven by a desire to keep their kind going, it seems. They’re smart. It recognizes his voice and even mimics what he does, rubbing its legs together and making sounds when he talks to it, and follows him room to room on its wobbly little legs. He feeds it fruit because that’s what the Pepsis grossa eat when they hatch. Yesterday it took to newborn wings for the first time, hitting lamps and vases in their living room, but staying up somehow, and always coming back to him. Joseph’s father stands by watching in wonder, letting them be. Tomorrow, Joseph says, he’s going to town to see if it will follow him in the car. Someone may try to kill it, sure, he says, “but I’ll do my best to protect it.”

“Of course you will,” I tell him. “That’s what we humans do with babies,” I say, wondering what they’ll try next since we’re probably not working out all that well for them. We die too quickly, and we’re raising their babies to like us, for Pete’s sake.

Cattle, sheep, coyotes, big dogs?

I’m thinking of Cliff’s herd of sad, raggedy-assed Herfords just up the 50, poor things.

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Bruce McAllister short fiction has appeared over the years in the SFF&H magazines, “year’s best” volumes and original anthologies; and has won or been short-listed for awards like the National Endowment for the Arts, Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Shirley Jackson. His most recent novel is THE LOCUS finalist fantasy THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE SEA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC.