Hot & Humid: Episode 2 (Bushcraft or Bust) by Mike Bristane

Author:Mike Bristane [Bristane, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bristane Books
Published: 2024-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

After going on a search and destroy mission around the cabin, we killed a few more flies perched in odd places, almost like they’d been planted there to monitor us. They were all the same—robotic in nature; equipped with tiny cameras that could only have been manufactured in some advanced, futuristic facility straight out of a Spielberg film.

“Are you all thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked the girls. We had squeezed together on the couch to study squashed robot bugs in plastic baggies.

“Definitely extraterrestrial,” Carly said, peering through the magnifying glass at one of the squashed oddities in her hand. “What else could it be? I’ve never seen flies—or even technology, for that matter—anything like this before the world went to hell. I mean, look at all these tiny wheels. They’re not even shaped like gears, and they seem to be floating, spinning left then right, perfectly in sync, tick tock, tick tock… Geez, and there are tiny metal balls zipping across the surfaces, like atoms just big enough to see with the naked eye. Just barely.”

“Could be military,” I suggested. “The world’s smallest drone is about three times the size of one of these flies. The miliary even admitted to having drones the size of a hornet.”

“Okay, Luke,” Carly said, sounding like she thought this was a debate. “But would they disguise them to look like flies, then have enough of them left over to send them on missions in the woods to spy on some lonely wilderness instructor’s cabin?”

I chuckled, genuinely amused and glad to be relieved of some of my anxiety. “No, I guess not. And who are you calling lonely?”

She gave me the cutest, puffy-cheeked grin. “Guess neither of us is lonely anymore.”

I smiled back. “Guess not. Okay, look. Let’s expand our minds. Talk motivation. Drive. Incentive. Carly’s right that the military wouldn’t deploy tiny, expensive drones disguised as flies across the American Midwest. If they wanted to study invaders, they’d send drones somewhere more populated, maybe cities. So, if it’s galaxy-traversing aliens doing all this, why the hell would they dose us with shroom powder, whatever that was, and set tiny cameras loose in a forest?”

“To watch us and learn about us?” Maddie ventured, trying to talk and chew her lower lip at the same time. “I mean, what if this invasion of earth, this extermination of the human species, whatever it is… What if they’re monitoring the whole thing to make sure it’s done right? Like spying on an enemy country during a war so you can land bombs correctly or target the right… you know, targets.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “They’re spying on us, maybe to see what kinds of defenses we might come up with. Maybe they plan on inhabiting this planet once we’re all gone. Strange that these bugs would fly all the way to a cabin in the woods. I mean, I’m sure cities and towns came first. We were probably an afterthought.”

“Maybe they sent bugs everywhere,” Carly said. “A few happened to get lost in our neck of the woods.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.