Buzz Kill

by Jeff Jacobson

Genres: Supernatural suspense; Apocalyptic

Synopsis

An action-packed nightmarish thriller about a deadly wasp invasion threatening to wipe mankind from the face of the planet, but the author of Sleep Tight.

THEY DON’T JUST STING YOU.
 They lay their eggs in human flesh. They hatch and crawl beneath the skin. Then they grow wings and burst out of the body. A rare species of wasp from the Amazon jungle, they are unusually large, extremely aggressive—and coming to America on the next international flight . . .
 
THEY BREED INSIDE OF YOU.
On a Florida-bound plane from Honduras, a baby screams in pain. Minutes later, the wasps emerge from their human host. They attack the passengers, sting the crew, and send the plane crashing into the gulf. No one survives. Over three hundred bodies are pulled from the wreckage. Bodies injected with tens of thousands of eggs . . .
 
CALL THE EXTERMINATORS.
In a Miami morgue, the larvae feast on the dead. Then they erupt from the corpses, attacking every living human in sight. Soon they are swarming across the state, spreading throughout the country,  breeding and growing in number, size—and viciousness. Pesticides won’t stop them. But a young entomologist and a motley crew of military convicts are fighting back—using science, smoking grenades, and flamethrowers. They call themselves The Exterminators. And they’ll do whatever it takes to wipe these nasty buggers off the face of the earth—before they kill us all . . .
 
Prepare yourself for a skin-crawling shocker by Jeff Jacobson, the acclaimed master of cult horror classics like Sleep Tight, Growth, and Wormfood.
 
“A talent with an amazing ability to astonish.”
—David Morrell, bestselling author of First Blood
 

Release date: September 20, 2022

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

PROLOGUE

John Anderson was scared. Scared of a lot of things. Scared of a million things, really.

But mostly scared something was seriously wrong with his son.

Of course something was wrong with him. There was absolutely no doubt of that. John was just scared that whatever it was, it was something the doctors back home couldn’t fix. John had seen what had happened, and it wasn’t anything natural.

It was… unholy.

He had seen the abomination crawling over the infant. Had seen that awful stinger thing or whatever, poised and quivering, and the sudden strike. Had heard his son’s awful, piercing scream, then the abrupt silence.

Despite everything, all the death, all the horror from the village, the desperate flight along the road of mud through the endless jungle to the city of Tegucigalpa, God’s will had shown through, and his son was alive.

Baby Matthew was sleeping, but he was alive.

At first, there had been an uneasy relief. Their baby was only sleeping. That’s all. He was still breathing. Then, the discovery they could not wake him up. No matter how much they screamed, pleaded, or even—God help them—slapped him.

He would not open his eyes.

That’s when John made the decision to seek medical help back home.

* * * *

And here in the Honduras’s Toncontín International Airport, John was also scared the stone-faced customs officials would notice. That he would clearly see that something was wrong with the Andersons’ baby. That the official would discover their treachery, and then he would put them all in some sort of wretched, third world quarantine.

Or even worse, the officials would think that he and his wife, Shelley, were trying to trick them. That these emissaries of Christ were trying to smuggle drugs inside of their baby somehow, trying to sneak something back to the States.

This idea of being persecuted for his faith, it was ridiculous. He knew that.

But fear didn’t listen to reason.

The customs line edged forward. John resisted the urge to shift the baby carrier to his left hand and tried not to think about how the History Channel had ranked the Toncontín the second most dangerous airport in the world. He forced himself to breathe slowly, inhale through his nose, exhale through the mouth. This only made the aromas of the airport worse.

All around them, bodies seethed and roiled as if they were all one giant organism, reeking of sweat, fresh pineapples, sweet Honduras peppers, and fried iguana. John knew it was not their fault. In fact, it was precisely this ignorance of the one true Lord, this unclean state of being, this chaos, all of it, which had drawn Shelley and John to the vast wildness of the Mosquitia jungle to share the joy of Christ’s saving graces with the pagan tribes who still hid from the enlightened twentieth century.

John was also scared his wife was losing her mind.

Shelley couldn’t stand still. She kept rocking, back and forth, repeating, “God is peace, God is love,” in a kind of singsong, breathless chant, constantly fingering the crucifix at her neck. “God is peace,” on the inhale, “God is love,” on the exhale.

The Anderson family had been sent to seek out the Cáceres, a small tribe in a remote, mountainous region. The location not simply difficult to reach, but more or less impossible without a guide and definitely impossible to reach during the rainy season. While most had never actually seen anyone from the tribe, many had heard grim stories and knew enough to never seek them out. When rumors of the tribe reached the desk of Reverend William “Big Willie” Johnson, the inaccessibility was irresistible. He knew the video footage and photos would be the crown jewel in his distinguished decades of service to the Lord. He blessed the mission with the deep resources of his megachurch, the Kingdom of Faith Christian Center, arming John with professional-grade video cameras, modern pharmaceuticals, freeze-dried food, a very large bribe for a guide, and fifty English Bibles. A tad expensive, but a small investment in what he hoped would be next summer’s lucrative fundraising Cornerstones from Christ campaign.

John and Shelley also saw their missionary work as not only an investment in their future, as they hoped to settle into a comfortable life within their church back home, but as their true calling in spreading the word of God, the message of Christ’s sacrifice to the darkest corners of the globe. They’d been missionaries in Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, Tanzania. And now, Honduras.

Except this time, they brought their newborn son. For their last mission.

But God had not protected him.

Although, as John was quick to reason with himself, God’s protection was absolutely not demonstrated in any way that he could understand. The old cliché was true. No one could deny that God and his universe spun in mysterious ways. This outlook of John’s, his Job-like optimism, his resourcefulness, his relentless cheerfulness, his spirit, his talent in capturing the poor, unwashed indigenous people on video, all of it had been recognized and rewarded within his church.

And yet, for a man who had perhaps never truly felt the insidious cancer of self-doubt, John found himself under attack from a growing panic that he was defying God by taking his son back to Alabama and trusting him in the medical care of his homeland. In all his twenty-nine years, he had never, ever doubted his Lord.

He just prayed that the official would let them pass.

Because beneath all that fear, buried deep beneath the surface panic as they moved slowly through the line at customs, on their way back home—back to their church, their sanctuary of serenity, their oasis of comfortable predictability, where nothing truly awful happened, where nature was kept in check, barricaded safely behind concrete and stout fences—John was scared that his faith wouldn’t be enough to save their son.

He was scared their God had abandoned them.

* * * *

The customs official barely glanced at Matthew.

John was now scared his son was no longer breathing. He hadn’t looked at him in the last few minutes stretching up to the customs official as the line slowly unspooled, passengers either passing along into terminal 1 or being sent back for additional travel documents. He’d been worried that checking on his baby would seem neurotic, too nervous.

John wondered if he could see contempt in the official’s blank eyes. Their trip to Honduras had been neither business nor pleasure. How do you explain spiritual fulfillment to a bureaucratic cog in a soulless—Catholic at best, perhaps pagan at worst—government? How do you explain the call for evangelical Christians to spread the word of the Gospel? How do you explain the hunger of the very soul to share the joy of Christ?

Shelley had stopped mumbling her prayer and grew still, except for breathing in hitched and ragged sniffles in the stilted cadence of the chant.

The customs official, a small man with deep vertical lines crinkling his lips into a permanent sour outlook on life, glanced wordlessly at the missionaries and their baby. He rolled his stamp between the first and second fingers of his right hand like an angry cigarette. He waited for John to say something.

John gave his most benevolent smile. His wife stopped rubbing her necklace and looked down at her other hand tracing the cover of the baby carrier. Their son lay quietly inside.

Asleep.

The customs official waited until John’s eyes crept back up and made contact. The small, dark man waited an eternity, then stamped their three passports in six rolling movements, smacking the ink in sudden barking gestures that made John flinch. It reminded him of the hideous, nearly obscene spasms of the horror in the middle of the jungle.

The customs official slapped the passports down, waved them through.

John nodded his thanks, took the baby carrier from his wife, and they walked through the airport and thirty minutes later, they climbed aboard Céntrico flight number 87, a nonstop flight from Tegucigalpa to Miami. There, the Andersons would hop into a church van, and be delivered home.

* * * *

They’d been in the air fifteen minutes when the captain turned off the seat belt sign. John swallowed, tried not to vomit. He couldn’t put off examining his son any longer. He jerked the baby carrier out of the seat between him and his wife and headed for the bathroom. Shelley’s eyes never left the window, blankly staring at nothing as the edges of Tegucigalpa were swallowed by unforgiving jungle. The shock of the last eighteen hours was hitting her hard.

John found himself wishing that Shelley would just give up, and simply trust in Xanax or Valium instead of merely Jesus. He was worried that the old adage about the Lord not giving you more than you can carry was…misguided.

If not absolutely wrong.

* * * *

The light in the airplane restroom was severely inadequate. At least it was enough that he could see that young Matthew was still breathing. Thank God on His eternal throne for small favors. John lifted his son out of the carrier and laid him on the foldout diaper-changing table.

Matthew reacted to the cold, stiff plastic by clenching a pudgy left fist and breathing faster. For a moment, he looked like any other infant, caught in the stages between waking and alert. His head rolled absentmindedly back and forth; he whined deep in his chest.

John unsnapped the cotton one-piece outfit. Once white with cheerful steam trains chugging around, it was now stained with sweat and dust and blood. Shelley would never have allowed him to remain in such filthy clothing, but she hadn’t touched him in hours. John pulled the fabric off his son and recoiled at the distended, swollen belly. The skin across his abdomen was stretched taut like a drum.

John peeled open the diaper and checked.

Nothing. The diaper was clean.

This was not like his son. This was not normal.

Matthew fussed and cried more than any other baby John had every encountered. He soiled his diaper eleven, twelve times a day. His fragile sleep could be disrupted by a cough, a whisper, a sideways look. John hadn’t slept for more than three solid hours since his son’s birth. His patience was beginning to fray around the edges, like an old flag in unrelenting winds. He ran his fingers through his receding blond hair and looked everywhere but at his reflection in the foggy mirror.

Matthew’s fists shook. His legs were still.

John got hold of himself, recrossed the diaper, and sealed the right side against Matthew’s left hip. His practical and frugal upbringing held fast. No point in wasting a diaper if it wasn’t necessary.

The air rushing past the fuselage sounded unnaturally loud.

Matthew’s tongue protruded from blue lips; his arms fell to his sides. His head rolled back as his backbone shook, arched.

John heard a tiny pop inside the rib cage.

Then another. And another.

Matthew’s chest expanded, as if he was taking a deep, gasping breath, but it never stopped. The infant’s torso continued to inflate; a wave had unfurled under the skin, burbling from under the thin ribs and swelling across the stomach, stretching the diaper to the point of ripping open the sticky fastening.

John’s first instinctive thought was to fly into action at the inevitable assault of gas and diarrhea, to frantically look for paper towels, water, anything to handle the excrement sure to erupt any moment now.

This time, though, Matthew’s legs lay limp, not at all like every other time when his gastrointestinal system would evacuate his bowels with a force fit for the devil. Those times, he’d kick and holler, expel every last millimeter of watery excrement, and it would all be over in ten, fifteen seconds.

Now, his son’s eyes remained closed.

Matthew’s back arched and his head rolled listlessly back and forth; the angle of his head tilted in a horrible, painful position. Both fists clenched and unclenched. His toes, with their nails perhaps a tad too long, curled as well. But the legs remained still, paralyzed.

The bubbling continued, distending the skin of his stomach and chest, like a water balloon unevenly filled with marinara sauce. Matthew’s ribs splintered into a dozen fragments in sudden snaps, crackles, and pops, yanking John back to an unpleasant memory of a long-ago picnic where his cousins had demolished three entire fried chickens inside of ten minutes.

A shrill, tortured gasp escaped out of the infant. His lips stretched tight over a cluster of eight-month-old baby teeth. Then his head lolled back in a collapsing surrender, giving up all at once, and the rest of his body went limp.

John took a step backward, God help him, right into the door.

Some kind of insect crawled out of Matthew’s throat, up over his tongue, squirming through dry, slack lips. It quivered, flinging blood and mucus. The segmented body was nearly two inches long, fantastically slender, coated in a dark, slick liquid; it marched across Matthew’s soft face and glared out at the world through a distinctly hairless head, marked by two large blank eyes with three tiny, alien orbs in between, and a formidable set of mandibles. Translucent wings rose from the slim body, fluttered, then quivered with a speed beyond the range of human seeing.

The fast, high-pitched sound absurdly reminded John of a kitten’s purring. It carried a vicious weapon and looked exactly like a miniature version of the ungodly things back at the village. At the other end of the creature, a stinger the size of a twenty-gauge needle curved over Matthew’s closed eyelid.

Clearly a big wasp, it crouched over the infant’s forehead, watching John.

A scream locked itself in John’s throat.

Lightning bolts of blue veins erupted across Matthew’s stomach. With a sound of a boot crushing a watermelon, his torso burst open in a volcanic eruption of wasps, spitting from within the tight flesh like seeds through overripe fruit pulp. Blood and viscera hit the walls, the ceiling, the father.

John’s legs gave out as the realization of this wet explosion hit him like a claw hammer between his eyes, slamming his consciousness into a stupefied shock. By the time his ass hit the floor, his only coherent thought, a plea that this wasn’t real, that he’d ingested some sort of pagan drug, fluttered through his dimming mind. He collapsed against the toilet and blinked at the blood in his eyes.

Thirty, forty, maybe even fifty wasps crawled out of Matthew’s ruptured insides like meth-addled worms. They seemed in overdrive, unable to control their bodies, twitching and spasming, flexing their wings, filling the air with blood and a sour amniotic fluid.

John’s red flecked eyes filled with dreamy awe as he gazed up at the blood-spattered walls and his son’s twisted feet jutting from the changing table. Perhaps it was God’s mercy that he couldn’t see the rest of Matthew. Perhaps all of this was some kind of test, something like Abraham faced.

The creatures of red and black floated drunkenly around the tight restroom in looping flights, testing their wings. They clung to one another, mating, fluttering through the air like spinning maple tree seeds. Gravity eventually brought these clusters of whirring wings and exoskeletons, still wet and flexible, down to land gently on the floor, the changing table, the toilet, and John’s body. Although aware of the weight and movements of the hundreds of pinpricks, he didn’t flinch. He couldn’t. Shock had paralyzed him.

After a moment of frantic coupling, the wasps separated and explored, bumping against the walls and ceiling as if testing the limits of their new world. Within seconds, they descended over Matthew and swarmed over the infant’s corpse, sometimes so thick it was impossible to see flesh underneath.

John flung one last prayer into the universe, begging for blissful ignorance of what was happening with the wasps, but it was too late. He already knew with a sick certainty that the wasps had returned to what was left of his son’s body to feed.

Finally, the scream unlocked itself from John’s throat.

The wasps rose again, this time finding warmer flesh.

* * * *

Most airline bathrooms have a secret door handle, even if locked from the inside. If you have to open the door in a hurry, simply slide the plastic RESTROOM sign across its housing and push the button hidden underneath. This will unlock the door. Flight attendants know this; too many children had locked themselves inside.

Forty-three minutes and thirty-seven seconds into flight number 87, after hearing the horrifying screams and that strange buzzing, they opened the door.

CHAPTER 1

Andy didn’t expect the prison bus seats to be this comfortable. The Army didn’t go out of its way to make things comfortable. Especially for men such as Andrew Shaw. Sure, he’d had to wear shackles the whole time, with both his wrists and ankles cuffed and connected by a chain, but his legs hadn’t gone numb and his back wasn’t sore.

That was about the extent of the Army’s hospitality.

Just before dawn, twelve prisoners had been shuffled to the back half of the bus, two to each seat. That might work fine for third graders, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Andy, like the brass in charge were trying to shove a dozen eggs into half the carton. Two MPs waited and watched from behind bars at the back of the bus. They carried sidearms and .12-gauge shotguns. Two more were up front, along with Second Lieutenant Thompkins.

They drove south the rest of the morning.

It got boring real fast.

Mostly, Andy tried to be content looking out the window through the tiny gaps in wire almost as thick as his little finger. It would be a long time before he would have a chance to watch the world outside. Perhaps the worst part was that it looked like the outside world wasn’t much more than gas stations, fast food, and strip malls.

Fucking Florida.

At least he was halfway comfortable. For a while, anyway. Until the sun came up. Now, even though it was only midmorning, the real problem was the heat.

The bus didn’t have air-conditioning. Or at least nobody’d turned it on. And they sure as shit weren’t jumping to open the windows, as thick steel mesh covered all of them; the glass was bulletproof. And it might as well have been a goddamn cast-iron oven. Already the sun had baked the inside near 110 degrees. And as the day wore on, the temperature, outside and inside, kept climbing.

It smelled like roadkill at high noon.

Andy couldn’t understand how people could think straight not just in the heat, but in this humidity. His skin felt more like a sponge than anything. Sweat oozed from everywhere. It stung when it slid across the scrapes the handcuffs had made on his wrists; it wormed down his back and collected in his ass crack.

A different seatmate might have helped a whole lot. This guy was black and huge. He was built like the sculptor had used rough black coal and somewhere inside that coal was still on fire. When the man had stepped aboard at the beginning of the ride, the bus had squealed like a surprised goat. Even the guards didn’t want to get too close.

Maybe they put him in a seat with Andy because Andy was a little guy.

But Andy was a little guy with a shorter temper.

The giant next to him radiated heat, as if the rest of the coal was catching.

They pretended to ignore each other.

Andy hadn’t decided if the guy was an asshole or not yet.

The man’s race didn’t matter a whole lot to Andy. Andy didn’t like most people he met. He’d been around everybody the Army had to offer, black guys from both the inner cities and suburbs, scowling Puerto Ricans, resolute Mexicans, defiant Hmong refugees, and of course, good old desperate white trash. Color made no difference. Like any job anywhere, some folks you work with are assholes, some are okay. Even decent sometimes.

Nevertheless, they all had one thing in common: They were all poor.

In their minds, the military was supposed to provide a way out of the cycle of poverty. Choices were limited to men in their situation. Forget college. Deal drugs, steal shit, or drink yourself to death working at a job where your name was on your protective gear uniform. Jail, addiction, or a dirt nap. Not much fun or future in that. The military claimed to offer a clean, honest way to live. Put in a few years, sit back and collect the rest of your life. Too late, they found out it wasn’t much different than any other job. The Army was nothing but bureaucracy, red tape, tiny tyrants, and always, always their old, intimate, and dearest friend, violence.

* * * *

The bus stopped and Andy tried to get a sense of whether or not they’d arrived at the prison yet. It might have been a prison, with all the high fences and security, but it looked more like they were driving onto some kind of air base, maybe even a civilian airport.

Andy didn’t know a damn thing about Florida anyway. All he knew was that they were somewhere down near Miami. Not that he could see the ocean. Perhaps it was for the best. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see the beaches, the ocean, the bikinis.

The bus lurched through a series of checkpoints, passing booths and sliding gates with so much razor wire sprouting wildly from the top it almost looked like unruly pubic hair. Andy tried not to think about sex. Down that path lay madness.

The bus rolled out onto an empty airstrip and stopped at the far end.

Second Lieutenant Thompkins stood and addressed the prisoners. “There will be no speaking. Eyes on the floor. I make eye contact with you, I will make you hurt. I see you making eye contact with anybody else, I will make you hurt. If this is understood, give a nod while you stare at your knees. If not, I will make you hurt.”

Andy looked at the floor along with everybody else.

Second Lieutenant Thompkins stood at attention at the front of the bus and never slouched, never leaned against anything, never even shifted his feet. The minutes crawled past, dying of dehydration.

Andy blinked sweat out of his eyes.

This fucking heat.

All of a sudden, he’d had enough. They arrested people who left dogs in cars in weather like this. His temper, stunted and frayed at the best of times, was gone.

He looked up, yelled, “Hey, you think you can turn on the AC? Or at least open a goddamn window?”

Something crashed into the back of his skull, bouncing his forehead off the seat in front of him. The MP behind him, Haylock, had slipped his shotgun through the bars and jabbed him with the unforgiving end of the steel barrel. The prick didn’t even have the decency to reverse the shotgun and use the rubber-covered butt. Andy felt a warm trickle pool in his hair and drip down the back of his neck. It wasn’t sweat.

Second Lieutenant Thompkins shook his head, saying, “Let me try to explain the situation in terms you can figure out.” He zeroed in on Andy. “Speak, and I will stomp your ass and piss in your face.”

Andy sat back and was quiet, but it didn’t sit right. It was too much, overdone; the second lieutenant was going out of his way to be a hard-ass. Dumbshit didn’t understand that it was always a hell of a lot scarier not to say a damn thing. Andy wondered if the second lieutenant was nervous. Andy remembered guys like that, players that couldn’t shut up before football games, or later in basic training, soldiers as they were about to embark on exercises with live rounds.

What the hell did this guy have to be nervous about?

CHAPTER 2

When the phone rang, Jen debated whether she should actually answer or just let it go to Dr. Fletcher’s voice mail. Technically, she was supposed to answer the calls, take messages, and all the rest of the bullshit that came with being Dr. Fletcher’s intern/assistant/slave. Morning light filled Dr. Fletcher’s cluttered office and Jen had to squint to see the phone.

The caller ID read blocked.

She was in a rotten mood, and the anonymous ringing phone didn’t help.

She knew damn well she’d been blaming her mood on everything but the real reasons: the stupid malfunctioning printer, the slow elevator, the way parts would bounce out of her car whenever she hit Chicago’s monster potholes, and the inevitable realization slowly creeping up on her that academia was nothing more than a self-perpetuating circle jerk. She knew all this, and understood it was her brain’s way of blowing off steam while it avoided the true cause of her irritation.

Dr. Fletcher was going on an expedition to Peru and he wasn’t taking her.

She had no idea why.

Or maybe she did have an idea, but just didn’t like it.

Dr. Fletcher had a reputation. To everybody outside the University of Chicago and the Field Museum, he was a genuine rock ’n’ roll scientist, a brilliant entomologist, a man who had discovered over a dozen new insects, a preeminent researcher, and a Hymenoptera expert.

Not for the first time, Jen couldn’t help but wonder if it was just a coincidence that the word hymen was contained in that particular classification’s order.

Dr. Fletcher had another reputation, an open secret within the inner circles of the labs and classrooms. If you knew the right people, or if you’d spent nearly any time at all with the esteemed doctor, you’d know that Dr. Fletcher was a hedonistic, slow-motion tornado with a fondness for fame, tequila, and ambitious coed grad students.

As an ambitious coed grad student herself, Jen wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

Maybe that’s what bothered her.

She couldn’t decide if she was more insulted about this openly secret reputation, or the fact that he’d never tried to ask her out for drinks after work. He’d never tried anything, not even “accidentally” brushing up against her, like so many of her female peers. Notorious for inviting his grad student assistants on expeditions, getting them drunk on whatever local hooch was available, encouraging them to “Experiment! Seize life!” then talking himself into their sleeping bags inside the Field Museum’s tents.

Jen hadn’t been invited. Why not?

It certainly wasn’t her mind. Then again, maybe it was. She suspected she already knew more about the symbiotic relationship between wasps and polydnaviruses than the good doctor himself, but she would never admit such a thing out loud, even if her doctorate thesis would.

Then it had to be her attitude. Sure, she could always use more makeup, and instead of her usual T-shirt and bulky cargo shorts, she could instead wear too-short khaki shorts, tight T-shirts, and maybe try to flirt with him, but the thought made her nauseous. If that’s wh. . .