Gokiburi
Three shots rang out in the darkened building, deafeningly loud in the empty corridor. Metal grazed metal and sparks danced into air, all but one missing the mark.
Squelch.
Dark ichor sprayed out from under his boot as he brought it down on the monstrous insect, and Harry had to turn his head briefly in disgust. What should have been a sense of triumph was completely overwhelmed by the sickening crunch of exoskeleton. He dragged the sole of his boot along the grated floor as he backed away from the fresh kill, scraping off any remnants that he could. The things reeked—as bugs often do, if one was so unlucky to catch a whiff—an unpleasant musky smell, but elevated to the nth degree. The gore that oozed out of them was a hue of dark red, and that was something new. They bled like any animal, any human would. Not the typical bug guts one might expect from such a critter, if one had any expectations of gigantic cockroaches. Harry shuddered and let the queasy feeling in his stomach pass before turning back to face the long stretch of hallway.
He felt anger now—mostly at himself, for his panicky trigger finger—and also because of how fast these critters were. While his marksmanship was still piss-poor, he had noticed some improvement in his first few hours of using a handgun. On some things, at least. The things he had not yet given a name: the short, grey things that lumbered through the halls, slow and noisy as they approached with fair warning, and the skinned dog-like things, and even the screaming flying things. The air screamers.
But the roaches were difficult to lock on to, and indeed seemed built purely to waste precious ammunition. His first run in had been with a pack of no less than three, and two danced circles around his feet at a dizzying rate of speed, while a third had the audacity to try and climb up the side of the leg of his jeans, feelers twitching, legs scuttling, pincers snipping.
His mouth set in a grim line at the memory. They also happened to bite. And that one had.
I'll kill every single one of you bastards I find, he silently promised.
He cocked his head to the right and strained his ears. Thick swirls of fog rolled along the empty street, obscuring the view in either direction. James's grip tightened instinctively on the thin plank of wood he held in his right hand. He brought it up to his shoulder and clenched both hands firmly onto it like a batter at practice. There was a sound coming from up the road—he heard it for sure now. Something strange. Like a metallic high-pitched grind, combined with a whistling pop. It was growing closer...
And then it stopped.
He strained his ears again. Had it been another one of those brown straight-jacketed things? They shuffled along with a low gurgling that was now familiar to him, but he'd never quite gotten used to the screeching that they emitted once he'd dropped one to the ground, nor the manic kicking that sent them flailing around at an unusual speed; and their tendency to fly out from underneath parked cars, sending him into a jolt of panic. No, this sound had been different.
He inched his way up the cracked pavement, staying parallel to the sidewalk and storefronts, and keeping the sound of his footsteps in check. A white van materialized up out of the fog, parked on the corner of the street. He gingerly dropped to one knee beside the back right tire, intent on getting the drop on whatever it was this time.
"Aagh!" he screamed, and fell backwards in an ungraceful stumble. A giant, grinding, whistling cockroach had flown out from under the vehicle. He retrieved his dropped plank and bashed the thing into a stain against the road in a panic of repetitive blows.
Oh god, what next, he thought, clambering back up to a stand.
James had never been a fan of insects, particularly large ones, but a newly grown phobia was beginning to eat away at his already fragile mind. He imagined himself trapped in a dark place, surrounded by hundreds of them. He shivered and banished the thought as quickly as he could.
Nothing that horrible could ever happen. Right?
"DAD!"
Harry burst into his teenage daughter's room at roughly the speed of sound. Few things ever got to him these days, but the one thing that always sent him springing into action was the sound of her voice crying for help.
"Dad, oh my god it's so grossss!"
"What is?" he demanded, feeling a bit miffed. From the tone of her voice, he'd half-expected an intruder to be climbing in through her window at that very moment. But he'd found only her, standing up on her bed, holding onto a rolled up teen magazine and brandishing it like a deadly weapon.
"Look under the desk, it ran under there," she pointed frantically.
Harry snatched the magazine from her grasp and knit his eyebrows together in concentration. He lifted his leg and kicked the chair out from under her desk. A two inch long brown insect scuttled out from beneath it. He tossed the magazine over his shoulder and opted for his boot instead. It flattened the bug with a nauseating crunch.
"Damn, Dad," she muttered. "I mean, I thought you were just gonna trap it and take it outside. You know, like you do with spiders."
Harry glared back over his left shoulder at her with an intense stare, unbecoming of her normally calm and collected father.
"All roaches must die," he replied coolly. He turned and made his way out of the bedroom door, pulling the knob and closing it behind him.
Heather sighed deeply. She longed to move back into their old apartment on the outskirts of the city. At least the roaches there had been polite enough to wait until dark to go scurrying about the house.
Fin