Pest Peeve

Matt Casey knelt down on the floor and used his index finger to scoot the cricket onto a stiff piece of paper. It went with little fight, that was the easy part, now to make sure it didn't hop away before he got rid of it. He'd just discovered the little pest a few moments ago, before that he'd never known them to have any crickets in the apartment, or for that matter, any place he'd previously lived. He headed over to the nearest window, lifted it open and dropped the insect out onto the stoop and closed the window again.

"Okay," he called out, "It's gone."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm positive, you can come down now."

He turned around and looked, and tried not to laugh, at the sight of his friend and roommate, Kelly Severide, standing on the coffee table. Uncertainly, the Squad lieutenant set one foot on the floor, then the other.

"If you ever breathe a word of this to anybody at 51, or anyone anywhere," Kelly threatened.

"Calm down, your secret's safe," Casey said, though a small titter broke loose.

Kelly glared at him.

"I'm sorry, Kelly," Casey tried to take on a straight face but wasn't quite succeeding, "I didn't know you were scared of crickets."

"I'm not, I just don't like them."

"I don't like spiders either, but I don't start climbing the furniture when I see one," Casey replied.

"I got no problem with them when they're outside where they belong," Kelly replied defensively, "it's when they start getting inside the house that's the problem."

Casey still didn't get it. He'd never known Severide to be scared of anything, certainly not bugs.

Kelly looked at him through the corner of one eye, huffed, and told him, "When I was a kid we used to get crickets in our basement, one here, one there, no big deal, live and let live, right? One night I go down to get something for my mom, and there's a cricket writhing around on the floor, and then it just stops moving...and then...something, this...parasite, this worm that's skinny as a thread, starts coming out of the cricket, both ends of it start coming out at once...and I didn't have any idea what was going on, so I went upstairs and got Benny...by the time we got back down there, the thing had grown 2 feet long. It looked like something out of an alien movie, and I figured if it could get that big that quick, that it'd just keep growing and growing and probably be 20 feet, so I ran out of the basement. I don't know what Benny did but he brought it up and flushed it...and so every time I went to the bathroom I kept thinking it was going to come back out of the toilet. So Benny explained that that thing would have to swim thousands of miles to find its way back there, and by that time it would've dropped dead from exhaustion anyway, so I was able to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without having to wake him up. I've never seen anything like that since, but every time one of them comes into the house, I remember it, and I can't stop thinking 'Is it going to happen again?'" He looked at Casey and said dismissively, "I know it's a dumb thing to get hung up on..."

"If I'd seen something like that when I was a kid, I wouldn't sleep for a month," Casey said, suddenly feeling that he understood the way Severide's mind worked a little better now. He sighed and suggested, "I'll make a deal with you, I'll get rid of the crickets if you kill the next spider that gets in here that has the leg span of a coaster."

"You got it," Kelly replied.

"But to kill two birds with one stone," Casey added, "I don't think it'd be a bad idea to bug bomb the place tomorrow before we go on shift, then it'd have all day to work and for the smell to die out."

"Good idea."