Story about a small South American town allegedly threatened by swarms of Giant Hornets...
The Piranha
The South American Goliath Hornet is a cousin of the Asian Giant Hornet. Both are territorial and will attack at the slightest hint of provocation, a problem for other animals, and people, who are not aware that they tend to build hives in any environment that offers stability and access to sunlight. This means that they can nest almost anywhere; moreover, once aroused they are relentless in their pursuit of a perceived attacker. While the Asian variety is primarily a predator of bees and other wasps, its larger relative is known to prey on small to medium sized animals, particularly in the Amazon basin, where the Goliath hornets have been known to attack game birds, rodents—even those as large as Capybaras—and in extreme cases, livestock, including Sheep and Goats. Although many people are stung every year by these gargantuan insects, there is no evidence that they have ever preyed on humans. Nonetheless, their aggressive nature and resourcefulness indicate that such a possibility is not entirely out of the question.
Coleman's Compendium of exotic creatures
Before the founding of the small town of San Cotegas, in the 1850's, in the jungles of northern Argentina, there was a hardy band of Indians who inhabited much of the lower Amazon delta called the Cochitos. This small, loosely tied, confederation of fish and bird hunting people, worshipped a local deity who became the namesake of both the town, and the Indians themselves. Cochitas was both a symbol of fecundity—through whom the world would renew itself each night, as the moon chased the daylight out of the sky, only to retreat, in turn, to make room for the rays of the reborn sun—and the source of the world's power over men and animals. Nowhere was this power more in evidence than in the legend of Cochitas and Los Parana's, which told of how this all powerful figure slew the creatures for which the tribe reserved its most fearful nomenclature—not the fish (actually referred to as La Parana') but the easily aroused hornets, who often measured the equivalent of 3-inches in length, with stingers as long as the sharp arrow tips that the Cochitos used in their ritual hunting excursions; and which provided the poison that they utilized, quite sparingly, to paralyze small monkeys and voles that would later be exchanged as elaborate gifts for wedding celebrations, after being stuffed and mounted. In the original story—enshrined in the 19th century Franciscan Codex, a record of Indian practices and beliefs made just before the last surviving members of the tribe disappeared into the jungles—Cochitas tricks the hornets by shape-shifting into one of them, and then consumes the insects, "as one would eat a fruit hanging soft and ripe from a Mango tree, with great slovenliness and celebration."
In fact, the Indians made much of the deity's complete disregard for etiquette—or humility of any kind for that matter—as such circumspection in daily affairs was reserved for men, whose power in the world was sharply limited. Cochitas, on the other hand, as a superior being, could act with impunity; in fact, such behavior, and the exploits which often went with it, were considered honorable—a way of conveying divine status. Conversely, for a man to engage in such oversights of ritual etiquette was considered the highest form of arrogance, and would often lead to temporary ostracism from the tribe. In all of the tribe's history, however, this had never actually occurred; the Cochitos knew their place as custodians in their riverine jungle world, guarded it zealously, but always rendered onto the gods what was rightfully theirs: the proprietary responsibilities of ownership.
Such distinctions would have been all but impossible in the frontier environment of San Cotegas. It was a town that had the look of something never completely planned-out, and already in decay at its boundaries, in the face of the inexorably advancing jungle, whose fertility was in contradistinction to the town's mustiness. The inhabitants of San Cotegas however, had been known for their independence and acquisitiveness, at least in matters of business; where almost half of the municipality's always fluctuating population worked as wild-cat oil speculators and fur traders, spending the majority of their time on the river, or in the jungle, surveying locations and setting traps. This frontier spirit, continued throughout the Twentieth century, and may have gone on longer, had the town survived its own solution to an ancient dilemma.
Modern San Cotegas, had a new hospital on its north end, the neighborhood where most of its population chose to live, and was bounded on its southern tier by a large muddy lake, also named after the Indian deity, Cochitas. This lake had probably existed since the end of the last ice-age—when glacial melting, far to the north and south, pumped local river valleys full of runoff water caused by rising sea-levels. Along its entire perimeter, except for one small portion that had been turned into a boat ramp and walkway, the lake was surrounded by a large swampy area; a fertile nesting ground for numerous bird species, and the notorious South American Goliath Hornets—some of whom had apparently survived the deity's famous gorging episode centuries earlier, at least according to certain local story-tellers.
During the preceding months, there had been numerous tales, some no doubt exaggerated, about the aggressive behavior of these tireless insects. There was the often repeated claim, assumed to be axiomatic, that on several occasions these voracious eaters of carrion were witnessed, in large rotating swarms, attacking geese and ducks; and in seconds, quickly reducing their victim's to little more than motes of softly floating blood-covered feathers. Then there was the rumor that the disappearances of several people had probably been connected to the hornets, particularly in light of their odd habit of feeding nocturnally. This latter characteristic did not appear in any of the literature, but the annals of the town—as was borne out in countless local newspaper headlines—were filled with anecdotes about a "shrill nighttime, buzzing;" sometimes followed by loud screams or gurgling sounds, and then, only silence. Such stories of course had never been proven, and the correlation was circumstantial at best, but there was one intriguing connection.
San Cotegas, like many towns along the northern perimeter of Argentina, is dominated by an economics of scarcity. The product most often unavailable—conversely, always in high demand across the entire region—was soda-pop. The soda brand, most sought after by the locals, was Fanta Orange; and, it was almost never in stock at the municipality's one market. The nearby hospital did, in fact, have two soda machines; but, in local memory, neither had ever been in working order. There was one reliable source of carbonated beverages however, and that was an old run-down, drink machine—from an era when the refrigerated contraptions only took change, and in the case of this one, mostly American quarters—right at the end of the walkway, adjacent to the boat-ramp, on Lake Cochitas, in a spot where the loud chain-saw buzzing of the Goliath Hornets, was usually quite audible. Both of the alleged victims, had been voracious consumers of this beverage; and, in the case of one, had become quite obese and perhaps diabetic, as a result of this habit. It was also known that each one was given to taking long walks in the evenings, which would usually include a visit to the soda-machine—a gaggle of American quarters fished out of pocket, for the occasion, with a jangling that any wary entomologist automatically knew, would annoy the temperamental hornets nearby. Unfortunately, neither of these men had any formal knowledge of insects and the town itself had no experts amongst its ranks. This would later be viewed as a problem.
Not long after the disappearances, which had thrown the ordinarily undaunted denizens of san Cotegas into a panic, a television station based in far-off Buenos Aires, sent a team of camera operators and reporters down to check on the story. On the morning of their arrival—with camera equipment and personnel all stuffed into a Jeep Cherokee, after a 10-hour drive through some of the roughest terrain in the country—the news team couldn't find anyone in the vicinity to interview. In fact, the boat launch, and the entire area for miles around, had been completely abandoned. They waited around for several hours, and were on the verge of driving back to the capital when a small boy—who could not have bn more than ten or eleven years old—walked up to the soda-machine, very casually, and began stuffing the change compartment full of quarters. The assembled news-team went into action.
"excuse me, young man, aren't you afraid to come here alone; I mean, with the hornets and all?"
"I come every day, to get Fanta for my mother—it's her favorite drink."
"Aren't you concerened about being stung or attacked?"
"Yes," the boy responded, "but I am here all of the time, and I haven't been stung yet."
"What's your name?"
"My name is Antonio!" replied the boy, assertively.
"Antonio, doesn't your mother know how dangerous it is to come here on your own?"
"My mother works long shifts at the hospital, and the soda machines do not work—this is the only place that we can go for soda-pop. I get her at least 6-cans and put them in this bag," he said, excitedly taking a plastic garbage bag out of his pants-pocket and unfurling it before the reporter.
"Do you know anyone who has been stung?"
"No, but I have heard about people being killed by the hornets."
"You mean the two men who disappeared here, recently?"
"I don't know who they were, actually, but they talk about it a lot in town." Replied the boy, quite matter-of-factly.
The news-people, wanting desperately to get a story more substantial than was likely if this were their only interview, made arrangements with the boy—using a candy bar, as a soft bribe—to contact his mother at the hospital, so that they could interview her, and perhaps even track down a local witness or two, if they got real lucky. They piled into the Cherokee, and drove out to the other side of town, across the tracks of the national railroad, past the modest 3-room houses that comprised the bulk of the residential area; and, along the main drag, filled mostly with night-clubs and coffee-bars that advertised free internet access—a draw in a community of laborers and speculators, most of whom had actually come from other parts of the country to make their living.
A large group of people, some with news cameras and equipment, others carrying small lap-tops, made their way through the hospital corridors. Everything was white, and redolent with the odor of cleaning fluids and antiseptics. Once at the nurse's station, Antonio ran ahead to find his mother, his arms loaded down by a box full of sodas and sandwiches—the latter, another enticement from the news crew, who did not want to leave without a very good story. She soon came out of a side room, labeled "Cantina," with a clip-board in her hand; she was on her break, and was dressed in ordinary clothes, like most of the physicians at the hospital.
The reporter started right in: "Ms. Do you think its advisable to send your son, alone, into an area known to be infested with dangerous insects?"
"Look, there's a lot of hysteria in this town about these hornets, but the thing that will cause our doom won't be the bugs by the lake, but the panic in the mayor's office."
"How many patients do you have in this hospital, who have been victimized by the insects?"
"Not one, so far as I know," she said affirmatively, surprising the reporter, slightly, with her self-assuredness.
"Do you have any statistics regarding the number of insect stings in this area?"
"I don't have any, and I am not saying that these hornets aren't dangerous, only that the danger is highly exaggerated."
When the news team got back to their motel that night—a modern roadside building, with good air conditioning, access to vending machines, that had everything but soda-pop (their own supply purchased at the lakeside machine) and clearly, as the crew would brag over and over again, the most modern thing in an otherwise dreary frontier town—they knew that there was no real story, just some wild rumors, most of which could not be verified. At about 2-am, the phone in the reporter's room suddenly began ringing, when he picked it up, he could also hear sirens going outside—as if the town were under siege from a foreign army. It was the mayor of San Cotegas, and he was adamant that the reporter should gather up his team and drive down to the municipal building as fast as they could—he had an emergency, and he wanted them to help spread the word. The reporter knew that politicians in small towns were usually tight-lipped, and hostile towards outside media—secrets always being better than information—and that this could only mean that the mayor was actually scared, but of what?
Once inside the building, the team was hustled into a conference room, which, from the boxes of Orange Fanta, piled up in back, was also used as a storage room for the town's soda-pop supply, and which suddenly appeared to be far more plentiful than the suspicious fact of a single functioning pop machine would indicate.
"Gentlemen, and ladies—" said the mayor, as if in prelude for a news conference—although the only one's there were the members of the news team, with one other man present, a bearded professorial looking type, with disheveled clothes, who was, presumably from the town's single newspaper.
The reporter interrupted, "Sir, are those cans of Fanta in the boxes behind us?" he shot off quickly.
"Those are not boxes of soda-pop; no, those are supplies stored in soda-pop boxes," replied the mayor.
"Can we look sir, I mean to verify?"
"No you cannot, and that isn't why I called you here—there is an emergency—"
"But if we can't look, how do we know that the soda pop shortage is not a hoax, or a way to induce demand, perhaps kept from you by a subordinate?" The reporter added this last part, disingenuously in the forlorn hope that the mayor might leak something important about what appeared to be a far greater scandal than some rumors about predatory hornets.
"Listen, those boxes have, supplies, in them, supplies for emergencies, and I can't, I can't let you look at them, because it would be dangerous; it would cause contamination to the air—and, please don't ask me anymore questions about this. I called you here because of a real emergency—a small child disappeared this afternoon, in the vicinity of the lake. He was last seen in a car that had run out of gas, not far from the boat ramp; probably, not long after you and your crew left the area. When his mother came back, on foot, from a hike to a local petrol station, the baby was gone. We've had some crews out searching, but I sounded the alarms—I want this kid found, before things get worse, and I want to know what happened here."
For the next two days, the entire town, it appeared, was fanned out, across the lake area searching for the little boy. While the distant sound of the Goliath Hornets, buzzing in swarm, could be heard, at no time, was any group attacked, or even threatened by the insects. The reporter, silently took in this information, when it was discussed that evening, in a hastily assembled lean-to used as a headquarters for the search operation.
The next morning, the crews fanned out again, along different, but intersecting paths across the lake area—while dredges began the grim work of digging through the lake bed itself. Still, no one seemed to be having any luck finding the child; and, although nobody mentioned it, they all knew that when they did find him, it was unlikely that he would still be alive. Sometime after lunch, the word went out that a skeleton, rather than a body, had been found. The proportions fit the description of the baby almost precisely, although the child had been two young for dental plates to have been used, in lieu of inaccessible DNA-testing equipment, to provide proof of his identity. However, the remains were fresh; and stranger still, running along the length of some of the bones, were gnaw-marks, that were apparently made either by some scavenger-animal; or, just as likely, the hornets themselves—whose large mandibles were ample enough to allow them to make exactly those types of indentations, or so everyone thought, as there were no entomologists on the scene. This was shocking to everyone, how could a child, lost for one day be reduced to skeletal remains? There was only one suspect that could do that to a carcass so quickly: the hornets!
A few people, however, including the reporter, began to harbor doubts; as would only become apparent to most, much later in time. The mother who had purportedly gone to get gas, while driving in the proximity of the nearby abandoned lake area, had been alone with her child for weeks. In that time, no-one had seen either of them, and only the mother's own story placed them anywhere near the that location on the day before. It was also true that nobody in the news crew had seen an abandoned car on the road leading from the lakefront back to town; moreover, the lost child had not even been reported missing until later that evening. Finally, the proprietor of the petrol station—who almost never gave out, or kept, receipts—could not remember whether he had seen the boy's mother that afternoon or not. He did mention, however, that she was a frequent and loyal customer; "after all", he exclaimed to the policeman who interviewed him, "She lives all of the way over past the hospital on the other side of town." This location, as everyone knew, was as far as one could go from the lake and still be in the municipality of San Cotegas. However, given the panic at the moment when these things were being discussed, the only conclusion drawn from this was that the hornets, had indeed, attacked and eaten the woman's child; and, it was further surmised, had done so from a lack of wild food sources, owing to some un-noticed natural change in population levels. These explanations seemed facile to the reporter, even as they were being offered, but in town they were accepted as axiomatic, and as proof that something very radical had to be done to rid San Cotegas of this insect menace.
The plan that the mayor—along with several advisors, including the fire chief—came up with was ambitious and, in the minds of some, a little bit extreme. The hornets would be smoked-out in a controlled burn of the swamp. Fire-teams, arranged in a wide circle, would carefully monitor the flames and make sure that they did not spread past the swamp's boundaries. An outlying ring of specially clothed exterminators—replete with large machines to both dispense and blow normally dangerous amounts of powerful insecticides toward areas identified as insect habitat---would form a back-up team to both supervise the second part of the operation, and to insure that no unforeseen problems emerged. Everyone on site was to be equipped with state-of-the-art toxic-fume masks, and all of the necessary equipment. Nothing was to be left to chance. "The hornets [had] to be killed," the mayor asserted in his brief speech in front of the assembled 'fire-extermination teams,' the next morning; adding, that the hornets were, "a threat to everyone and everything in the area." Finally, quipping memorably, that "the town will kill two 'bugs' with one stone by solving the local mosquito problem as well..."
As the groups assembled for the operation, the reporter and his crew took positions well behind the exterminators-unit, and what the news team already referred to as, its "toxic-cloud-blowers." The mayor, now linked in everyone's mind, with this make-or-break-a-political-career operation, was on hand for both interviews and photographs. As the fires started, everything seemed to go according to plan: a wall of thick smoke soon emerged and covered the entire swamp area, but everything seemed to be under control, and soon the crews were using rakes, hoes, and judiciously applied water from small hoses attached to distant fire trucks, to slowly put out the blaze, so that the second part of the process could commence. The extermination crews, taking their cues from the fire-teams, began to turn on their machines. Nobody, however, had bothered to check on the likelihood that an errant ember, or spark from the fire, now presumed to be largely extinguished, might ignite this airborne cloud of insect poison as it was blown by numerous kerosene powered fans into the center of the swamp area. Nor was anyone mindful of a certain legend regarding the rebirth of an ancient tribal deity.
Against all expectation, this ignited a sudden firestorm, with a swelling rapidity too fierce to allow more than a few of the protectively clad firemen and exterminators to escape. Within less than an hour, the entire swamp, and the lake, had become engulfed in violent flames, and those who could escape—including the reporter and his crew—went directly back to San Cotegas, already filled with smoke and dust blown by the advancing flames, to assist in the evacuation. The hospital was already emptying out, as even those patients who could not ambulate, were hurriedly helped into gurneys and wheelchairs and moved right out into the street. Those who were lucky found waiting cars, trucks or ambulances, even a city taxi, or bus. For everyone else, there was nowhere to go, but into the nearby hills, which overlooked the north side of town, and were as far from the lake as one could get without taking to the already clogged highway on foot.
In the end, the town itself, even the hospital, burned out like a remnant of an urban firebombing, was gutted and reduced to a charred ruin. When the reporter took several officials in a small plane, almost one week later, to inspect, assess and report on, the damage, all were stunned into silence by the devastation. Almost nothing, except the hospital, was left standing, and for several square miles there seemed to be few signs of any life. The plan had worked—nothing remained that could possibly attack, sting, bite, or eat anything or anybody. The hornets, and every other creature, including people, were gone. The area had been rendered sterile, and safe for re-inhabitation.
At that moment, near the lake, by the black powdery remains of what had once been, and would soon be transformed back into, a large swamp, above a few hardy shoots of embryonic jungle foliage, a buzzing was heard—a single hornet began hovering over the charred landscape; then two, then another and another, and finally numerous other stragglers, until the sound become as loud as the turbines from a large plane's engines. This time, however, the noise did not arouse or even disturb the town, because the town was no longer there. Cochitas had gorged himself in the flames and had been reborn, and then moved on. The hornets, however, had never left.
JZRothstein 10/8/2013
Short story by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
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Written on 2014-02-15 at 20:30
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The Piranha
The Piranha
The South American Goliath Hornet is a cousin of the Asian Giant Hornet. Both are territorial and will attack at the slightest hint of provocation, a problem for other animals, and people, who are not aware that they tend to build hives in any environment that offers stability and access to sunlight. This means that they can nest almost anywhere; moreover, once aroused they are relentless in their pursuit of a perceived attacker. While the Asian variety is primarily a predator of bees and other wasps, its larger relative is known to prey on small to medium sized animals, particularly in the Amazon basin, where the Goliath hornets have been known to attack game birds, rodents—even those as large as Capybaras—and in extreme cases, livestock, including Sheep and Goats. Although many people are stung every year by these gargantuan insects, there is no evidence that they have ever preyed on humans. Nonetheless, their aggressive nature and resourcefulness indicate that such a possibility is not entirely out of the question.
Coleman's Compendium of exotic creatures
Before the founding of the small town of San Cotegas, in the 1850's, in the jungles of northern Argentina, there was a hardy band of Indians who inhabited much of the lower Amazon delta called the Cochitos. This small, loosely tied, confederation of fish and bird hunting people, worshipped a local deity who became the namesake of both the town, and the Indians themselves. Cochitas was both a symbol of fecundity—through whom the world would renew itself each night, as the moon chased the daylight out of the sky, only to retreat, in turn, to make room for the rays of the reborn sun—and the source of the world's power over men and animals. Nowhere was this power more in evidence than in the legend of Cochitas and Los Parana's, which told of how this all powerful figure slew the creatures for which the tribe reserved its most fearful nomenclature—not the fish (actually referred to as La Parana') but the easily aroused hornets, who often measured the equivalent of 3-inches in length, with stingers as long as the sharp arrow tips that the Cochitos used in their ritual hunting excursions; and which provided the poison that they utilized, quite sparingly, to paralyze small monkeys and voles that would later be exchanged as elaborate gifts for wedding celebrations, after being stuffed and mounted. In the original story—enshrined in the 19th century Franciscan Codex, a record of Indian practices and beliefs made just before the last surviving members of the tribe disappeared into the jungles—Cochitas tricks the hornets by shape-shifting into one of them, and then consumes the insects, "as one would eat a fruit hanging soft and ripe from a Mango tree, with great slovenliness and celebration."
In fact, the Indians made much of the deity's complete disregard for etiquette—or humility of any kind for that matter—as such circumspection in daily affairs was reserved for men, whose power in the world was sharply limited. Cochitas, on the other hand, as a superior being, could act with impunity; in fact, such behavior, and the exploits which often went with it, were considered honorable—a way of conveying divine status. Conversely, for a man to engage in such oversights of ritual etiquette was considered the highest form of arrogance, and would often lead to temporary ostracism from the tribe. In all of the tribe's history, however, this had never actually occurred; the Cochitos knew their place as custodians in their riverine jungle world, guarded it zealously, but always rendered onto the gods what was rightfully theirs: the proprietary responsibilities of ownership.
Such distinctions would have been all but impossible in the frontier environment of San Cotegas. It was a town that had the look of something never completely planned-out, and already in decay at its boundaries, in the face of the inexorably advancing jungle, whose fertility was in contradistinction to the town's mustiness. The inhabitants of San Cotegas however, had been known for their independence and acquisitiveness, at least in matters of business; where almost half of the municipality's always fluctuating population worked as wild-cat oil speculators and fur traders, spending the majority of their time on the river, or in the jungle, surveying locations and setting traps. This frontier spirit, continued throughout the Twentieth century, and may have gone on longer, had the town survived its own solution to an ancient dilemma.
Modern San Cotegas, had a new hospital on its north end, the neighborhood where most of its population chose to live, and was bounded on its southern tier by a large muddy lake, also named after the Indian deity, Cochitas. This lake had probably existed since the end of the last ice-age—when glacial melting, far to the north and south, pumped local river valleys full of runoff water caused by rising sea-levels. Along its entire perimeter, except for one small portion that had been turned into a boat ramp and walkway, the lake was surrounded by a large swampy area; a fertile nesting ground for numerous bird species, and the notorious South American Goliath Hornets—some of whom had apparently survived the deity's famous gorging episode centuries earlier, at least according to certain local story-tellers.
During the preceding months, there had been numerous tales, some no doubt exaggerated, about the aggressive behavior of these tireless insects. There was the often repeated claim, assumed to be axiomatic, that on several occasions these voracious eaters of carrion were witnessed, in large rotating swarms, attacking geese and ducks; and in seconds, quickly reducing their victim's to little more than motes of softly floating blood-covered feathers. Then there was the rumor that the disappearances of several people had probably been connected to the hornets, particularly in light of their odd habit of feeding nocturnally. This latter characteristic did not appear in any of the literature, but the annals of the town—as was borne out in countless local newspaper headlines—were filled with anecdotes about a "shrill nighttime, buzzing;" sometimes followed by loud screams or gurgling sounds, and then, only silence. Such stories of course had never been proven, and the correlation was circumstantial at best, but there was one intriguing connection.
San Cotegas, like many towns along the northern perimeter of Argentina, is dominated by an economics of scarcity. The product most often unavailable—conversely, always in high demand across the entire region—was soda-pop. The soda brand, most sought after by the locals, was Fanta Orange; and, it was almost never in stock at the municipality's one market. The nearby hospital did, in fact, have two soda machines; but, in local memory, neither had ever been in working order. There was one reliable source of carbonated beverages however, and that was an old run-down, drink machine—from an era when the refrigerated contraptions only took change, and in the case of this one, mostly American quarters—right at the end of the walkway, adjacent to the boat-ramp, on Lake Cochitas, in a spot where the loud chain-saw buzzing of the Goliath Hornets, was usually quite audible. Both of the alleged victims, had been voracious consumers of this beverage; and, in the case of one, had become quite obese and perhaps diabetic, as a result of this habit. It was also known that each one was given to taking long walks in the evenings, which would usually include a visit to the soda-machine—a gaggle of American quarters fished out of pocket, for the occasion, with a jangling that any wary entomologist automatically knew, would annoy the temperamental hornets nearby. Unfortunately, neither of these men had any formal knowledge of insects and the town itself had no experts amongst its ranks. This would later be viewed as a problem.
Not long after the disappearances, which had thrown the ordinarily undaunted denizens of san Cotegas into a panic, a television station based in far-off Buenos Aires, sent a team of camera operators and reporters down to check on the story. On the morning of their arrival—with camera equipment and personnel all stuffed into a Jeep Cherokee, after a 10-hour drive through some of the roughest terrain in the country—the news team couldn't find anyone in the vicinity to interview. In fact, the boat launch, and the entire area for miles around, had been completely abandoned. They waited around for several hours, and were on the verge of driving back to the capital when a small boy—who could not have bn more than ten or eleven years old—walked up to the soda-machine, very casually, and began stuffing the change compartment full of quarters. The assembled news-team went into action.
"excuse me, young man, aren't you afraid to come here alone; I mean, with the hornets and all?"
"I come every day, to get Fanta for my mother—it's her favorite drink."
"Aren't you concerened about being stung or attacked?"
"Yes," the boy responded, "but I am here all of the time, and I haven't been stung yet."
"What's your name?"
"My name is Antonio!" replied the boy, assertively.
"Antonio, doesn't your mother know how dangerous it is to come here on your own?"
"My mother works long shifts at the hospital, and the soda machines do not work—this is the only place that we can go for soda-pop. I get her at least 6-cans and put them in this bag," he said, excitedly taking a plastic garbage bag out of his pants-pocket and unfurling it before the reporter.
"Do you know anyone who has been stung?"
"No, but I have heard about people being killed by the hornets."
"You mean the two men who disappeared here, recently?"
"I don't know who they were, actually, but they talk about it a lot in town." Replied the boy, quite matter-of-factly.
The news-people, wanting desperately to get a story more substantial than was likely if this were their only interview, made arrangements with the boy—using a candy bar, as a soft bribe—to contact his mother at the hospital, so that they could interview her, and perhaps even track down a local witness or two, if they got real lucky. They piled into the Cherokee, and drove out to the other side of town, across the tracks of the national railroad, past the modest 3-room houses that comprised the bulk of the residential area; and, along the main drag, filled mostly with night-clubs and coffee-bars that advertised free internet access—a draw in a community of laborers and speculators, most of whom had actually come from other parts of the country to make their living.
A large group of people, some with news cameras and equipment, others carrying small lap-tops, made their way through the hospital corridors. Everything was white, and redolent with the odor of cleaning fluids and antiseptics. Once at the nurse's station, Antonio ran ahead to find his mother, his arms loaded down by a box full of sodas and sandwiches—the latter, another enticement from the news crew, who did not want to leave without a very good story. She soon came out of a side room, labeled "Cantina," with a clip-board in her hand; she was on her break, and was dressed in ordinary clothes, like most of the physicians at the hospital.
The reporter started right in: "Ms. Do you think its advisable to send your son, alone, into an area known to be infested with dangerous insects?"
"Look, there's a lot of hysteria in this town about these hornets, but the thing that will cause our doom won't be the bugs by the lake, but the panic in the mayor's office."
"How many patients do you have in this hospital, who have been victimized by the insects?"
"Not one, so far as I know," she said affirmatively, surprising the reporter, slightly, with her self-assuredness.
"Do you have any statistics regarding the number of insect stings in this area?"
"I don't have any, and I am not saying that these hornets aren't dangerous, only that the danger is highly exaggerated."
When the news team got back to their motel that night—a modern roadside building, with good air conditioning, access to vending machines, that had everything but soda-pop (their own supply purchased at the lakeside machine) and clearly, as the crew would brag over and over again, the most modern thing in an otherwise dreary frontier town—they knew that there was no real story, just some wild rumors, most of which could not be verified. At about 2-am, the phone in the reporter's room suddenly began ringing, when he picked it up, he could also hear sirens going outside—as if the town were under siege from a foreign army. It was the mayor of San Cotegas, and he was adamant that the reporter should gather up his team and drive down to the municipal building as fast as they could—he had an emergency, and he wanted them to help spread the word. The reporter knew that politicians in small towns were usually tight-lipped, and hostile towards outside media—secrets always being better than information—and that this could only mean that the mayor was actually scared, but of what?
Once inside the building, the team was hustled into a conference room, which, from the boxes of Orange Fanta, piled up in back, was also used as a storage room for the town's soda-pop supply, and which suddenly appeared to be far more plentiful than the suspicious fact of a single functioning pop machine would indicate.
"Gentlemen, and ladies—" said the mayor, as if in prelude for a news conference—although the only one's there were the members of the news team, with one other man present, a bearded professorial looking type, with disheveled clothes, who was, presumably from the town's single newspaper.
The reporter interrupted, "Sir, are those cans of Fanta in the boxes behind us?" he shot off quickly.
"Those are not boxes of soda-pop; no, those are supplies stored in soda-pop boxes," replied the mayor.
"Can we look sir, I mean to verify?"
"No you cannot, and that isn't why I called you here—there is an emergency—"
"But if we can't look, how do we know that the soda pop shortage is not a hoax, or a way to induce demand, perhaps kept from you by a subordinate?" The reporter added this last part, disingenuously in the forlorn hope that the mayor might leak something important about what appeared to be a far greater scandal than some rumors about predatory hornets.
"Listen, those boxes have, supplies, in them, supplies for emergencies, and I can't, I can't let you look at them, because it would be dangerous; it would cause contamination to the air—and, please don't ask me anymore questions about this. I called you here because of a real emergency—a small child disappeared this afternoon, in the vicinity of the lake. He was last seen in a car that had run out of gas, not far from the boat ramp; probably, not long after you and your crew left the area. When his mother came back, on foot, from a hike to a local petrol station, the baby was gone. We've had some crews out searching, but I sounded the alarms—I want this kid found, before things get worse, and I want to know what happened here."
For the next two days, the entire town, it appeared, was fanned out, across the lake area searching for the little boy. While the distant sound of the Goliath Hornets, buzzing in swarm, could be heard, at no time, was any group attacked, or even threatened by the insects. The reporter, silently took in this information, when it was discussed that evening, in a hastily assembled lean-to used as a headquarters for the search operation.
The next morning, the crews fanned out again, along different, but intersecting paths across the lake area—while dredges began the grim work of digging through the lake bed itself. Still, no one seemed to be having any luck finding the child; and, although nobody mentioned it, they all knew that when they did find him, it was unlikely that he would still be alive. Sometime after lunch, the word went out that a skeleton, rather than a body, had been found. The proportions fit the description of the baby almost precisely, although the child had been two young for dental plates to have been used, in lieu of inaccessible DNA-testing equipment, to provide proof of his identity. However, the remains were fresh; and stranger still, running along the length of some of the bones, were gnaw-marks, that were apparently made either by some scavenger-animal; or, just as likely, the hornets themselves—whose large mandibles were ample enough to allow them to make exactly those types of indentations, or so everyone thought, as there were no entomologists on the scene. This was shocking to everyone, how could a child, lost for one day be reduced to skeletal remains? There was only one suspect that could do that to a carcass so quickly: the hornets!
A few people, however, including the reporter, began to harbor doubts; as would only become apparent to most, much later in time. The mother who had purportedly gone to get gas, while driving in the proximity of the nearby abandoned lake area, had been alone with her child for weeks. In that time, no-one had seen either of them, and only the mother's own story placed them anywhere near the that location on the day before. It was also true that nobody in the news crew had seen an abandoned car on the road leading from the lakefront back to town; moreover, the lost child had not even been reported missing until later that evening. Finally, the proprietor of the petrol station—who almost never gave out, or kept, receipts—could not remember whether he had seen the boy's mother that afternoon or not. He did mention, however, that she was a frequent and loyal customer; "after all", he exclaimed to the policeman who interviewed him, "She lives all of the way over past the hospital on the other side of town." This location, as everyone knew, was as far as one could go from the lake and still be in the municipality of San Cotegas. However, given the panic at the moment when these things were being discussed, the only conclusion drawn from this was that the hornets, had indeed, attacked and eaten the woman's child; and, it was further surmised, had done so from a lack of wild food sources, owing to some un-noticed natural change in population levels. These explanations seemed facile to the reporter, even as they were being offered, but in town they were accepted as axiomatic, and as proof that something very radical had to be done to rid San Cotegas of this insect menace.
The plan that the mayor—along with several advisors, including the fire chief—came up with was ambitious and, in the minds of some, a little bit extreme. The hornets would be smoked-out in a controlled burn of the swamp. Fire-teams, arranged in a wide circle, would carefully monitor the flames and make sure that they did not spread past the swamp's boundaries. An outlying ring of specially clothed exterminators—replete with large machines to both dispense and blow normally dangerous amounts of powerful insecticides toward areas identified as insect habitat---would form a back-up team to both supervise the second part of the operation, and to insure that no unforeseen problems emerged. Everyone on site was to be equipped with state-of-the-art toxic-fume masks, and all of the necessary equipment. Nothing was to be left to chance. "The hornets [had] to be killed," the mayor asserted in his brief speech in front of the assembled 'fire-extermination teams,' the next morning; adding, that the hornets were, "a threat to everyone and everything in the area." Finally, quipping memorably, that "the town will kill two 'bugs' with one stone by solving the local mosquito problem as well..."
As the groups assembled for the operation, the reporter and his crew took positions well behind the exterminators-unit, and what the news team already referred to as, its "toxic-cloud-blowers." The mayor, now linked in everyone's mind, with this make-or-break-a-political-career operation, was on hand for both interviews and photographs. As the fires started, everything seemed to go according to plan: a wall of thick smoke soon emerged and covered the entire swamp area, but everything seemed to be under control, and soon the crews were using rakes, hoes, and judiciously applied water from small hoses attached to distant fire trucks, to slowly put out the blaze, so that the second part of the process could commence. The extermination crews, taking their cues from the fire-teams, began to turn on their machines. Nobody, however, had bothered to check on the likelihood that an errant ember, or spark from the fire, now presumed to be largely extinguished, might ignite this airborne cloud of insect poison as it was blown by numerous kerosene powered fans into the center of the swamp area. Nor was anyone mindful of a certain legend regarding the rebirth of an ancient tribal deity.
Against all expectation, this ignited a sudden firestorm, with a swelling rapidity too fierce to allow more than a few of the protectively clad firemen and exterminators to escape. Within less than an hour, the entire swamp, and the lake, had become engulfed in violent flames, and those who could escape—including the reporter and his crew—went directly back to San Cotegas, already filled with smoke and dust blown by the advancing flames, to assist in the evacuation. The hospital was already emptying out, as even those patients who could not ambulate, were hurriedly helped into gurneys and wheelchairs and moved right out into the street. Those who were lucky found waiting cars, trucks or ambulances, even a city taxi, or bus. For everyone else, there was nowhere to go, but into the nearby hills, which overlooked the north side of town, and were as far from the lake as one could get without taking to the already clogged highway on foot.
In the end, the town itself, even the hospital, burned out like a remnant of an urban firebombing, was gutted and reduced to a charred ruin. When the reporter took several officials in a small plane, almost one week later, to inspect, assess and report on, the damage, all were stunned into silence by the devastation. Almost nothing, except the hospital, was left standing, and for several square miles there seemed to be few signs of any life. The plan had worked—nothing remained that could possibly attack, sting, bite, or eat anything or anybody. The hornets, and every other creature, including people, were gone. The area had been rendered sterile, and safe for re-inhabitation.
At that moment, near the lake, by the black powdery remains of what had once been, and would soon be transformed back into, a large swamp, above a few hardy shoots of embryonic jungle foliage, a buzzing was heard—a single hornet began hovering over the charred landscape; then two, then another and another, and finally numerous other stragglers, until the sound become as loud as the turbines from a large plane's engines. This time, however, the noise did not arouse or even disturb the town, because the town was no longer there. Cochitas had gorged himself in the flames and had been reborn, and then moved on. The hornets, however, had never left.
JZRothstein 10/8/2013
Short story by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
Read 1097 times
Written on 2014-02-15 at 20:30
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