Invasive by Chuck Wendig

Author:Chuck Wendig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Hannah still remembers the yellow jackets. Running like a fool behind the generator shed, not realizing what she was doing or where she was going—she stepped right on that hole. The wasps came out of that thing like demons out of hell, sensing their one chance at escape. They knew to come right for her. Her eyes swelled shut. Her throat felt tight.

It was her father who rescued her. He heard her screaming. Next thing she knew, he was swooping her up in his arms—getting stung himself—and running back to the house, calling for her mother.

Later that night, Hannah sat hunched over the side of their porcelain claw-foot tub as Mom dabbed pink blobs of calamine lotion all over her with a cotton ball. She told her mother, “I’m scared now.”

Mom asked what she was scared of.

Hannah said, “Wasps. They might come for me again.” She hadn’t yet encountered the ants in the mailbox, but when that time came, it would only prove to her what Mom told her that night.

Mom said, “Hannah, the world is not ours. We think it is, but it isn’t. The greatest lie we tell ourselves is that we are in control. Those wasps didn’t care about you. Didn’t care who you were or what you wanted. They’re not mean. You scared them. They attacked, and that scared you. They’re simple creatures, which is what we try to be here. Simple survives. After human beings are long gone from this planet, those wasps—and flies and butterflies and cockroaches and all the other crawly things—will still be here.”

“That makes me sad,” Hannah said, wincing as Mom smushed another glob of lotion against a swollen welt. “I don’t want us all to die.”

“I don’t want all kinds of things, but that doesn’t change what’s true. We all die, Hannah. And when we do, it’ll be the bugs that eat us down to the bone.”

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