I shivered in the cold morning air and inched closer to the dying fire. Of all the camps we had all over the area, this high mountain cave was my least favorite. By far the safest since the cold kept the big bugs away, it was freezing and damp, it stank of bat poop, and the smoke from our fire hung in the air and choked my lungs. The smell of the cave mixed with the cloying scent from the floral wax candles we burned all around us to keep the smaller, biting insects from eating us alive in our sleep.
This was it.
This was my life.
When Dad and Lexis came up with their crazy plan to hatch a Queen bug that wouldn’t be hostile to us, I thought he was crazy. I knew what those things could do.
I was only six years old when they raided the camp we thought was safe. I had never seen them up close before. The land all around the big Hive was empty of the dangerous bugs, and the patrols from there had slacked off in the years since the Queen had conquered everything around. We got complacent.
Our camp was in a pine forest on the edge of a wide river, one of the few above-ground branches of the waterway that honeycombed under the whole area. The fields around it were thick with berry brambles and a tall, thin plant we could grind into flour and bake into flat bread on a hot rock. Mom was teaching me how to do it, pulverizing the little seeds in a stone bowl. There were all kinds of crustaceans in the rivers that cooked up sweet and juicy. Life was good.
The bugs attacked in the dark on a moonless night.
They were blind, and the darkness meant nothing to them. Their sense of smell and vibration was better than sight. We never had a chance.
Our population had grown a bit by then. We were almost up to a hundred people scratching out a living on a world ruled by insects. A lot of the women had multiple children by then as we started to feel safe enough to have them. My mom had just had twin boys, and I doted on my baby brothers.
We weren’t totally stupid. We had sentries stationed all around our camp. They should have seen the bugs coming across the field. Should have cried out a warning. Only one of them managed to screech out a dying call as the soldiers overwhelmed them from all sides.
Everyone jumped up from where we slept under the low-hanging boughs. The darkness was chaos as bugs appeared from every side. People were screaming, but usually not for very long.
Someone grabbed me from behind and dragged me out toward the river.
“No! Mom and the boys!” I cried, but the arms kept pulling me away from the center of camp.
I saw them go down.
In the flickering light of fires from all around the camp, almost everything was a silhouette, but only my mom would have been carrying a baby under each arm. She was running from the massacre behind her. Men fought the bugs with the bladed weapons we made out of everything we could find on the planet. Some people had spears tipped with sharp metal, scrounged from the old wreckage of our ships during the pollen storms that kept the bugs away.
We thought those weapons would help us. But in the dark against an enemy that was taller and faster, that could “see” in pitch darkness and was armed with a venomous stinger, we were like mosquitoes fighting back against a colony of bats. Our blades rarely found their marks. Their stings rarely missed.
My mom ran through this chaos. Dad let go of me and raced toward her, shouting back at me as he went. “Get to the river! Swim downstream!” It was our escape plan from this camp: swim where the bugs couldn’t follow and run when the river ducked underground.
Dad made it about three steps away. He thought I didn’t see what happened, that he had been blocking my view, but I saw. One big soldier scuttled by. It didn’t even turn a glance at my Mom, just swiped her with its tail in passing. The sting caught her in the back, and she pitched forward. Somehow she held onto my brothers as she fell.
Dad was still bolting towards her. He must have known he couldn’t save her, but the boys . . . they were just babies. Their cries blended in with the screams of the night. Before he could get anywhere near them, another bug came and scooped them up, skittering back into the forest.
“Dad, no!” I screamed, and I don’t know if he heard me, but he turned around and dashed back to where I was standing, frozen by the edge of the water. Without a backward glance he grabbed my arm and jumped with me into the river. We swam away from the carnage with the few survivors.
That was nine years ago. What did the bugs do with my baby brothers? Did they take them back to their huge, evil Hive and raise them as slaves like all the rest? Did they use them to incubate their horrible maggots? Did they eat them, or just leave them to die alone in the forest?
I huddled by the fire now, thinking back on that night, like I did every night when the fire burned low. The caves here were safer, but there was nothing to eat. We stockpiled as much as we could carry from the lowlands, but we couldn’t live here forever. So we traveled, migrating in an ever-changing pattern, trying to stay one step ahead of the bugs that could destroy what was left of us on another dark night.
Dad’s plan was crazy. But it might be our only chance. And that idiot had blown it.
I shook my head and burrowed deeper into my covers. The thick seal-hide wasn’t soft, but piled on top of layers of woven silk, it was warm.
A figure burst into the cave mouth and we all jumped up, reaching for our weapons. My knife was in my hand before the seal-hide hit the ground.
But it wasn’t a bug. It was Daniel, one of the men that had stayed behind with the larvae at the prairie Hive.
“He’s back!” he said, and I looked around in confusion.
“He’s back,” Daniel repeated, stepping into the firelight. “He brought the Queen back. We’re saved!”