Part 1

Rookfall sagged in a huge hollow between two ancient, blackened Appalachian ridges. The landscape trapped the hollow in a perpetual fog that lay stagnant on the town. Nothing of note to visit there. The town had no landmarks outside of the rusted-out cathedral of a factory on the edge of town. Erms Components once fed industrial machine parts all over the country. For thirty years, it also fed the town. When the pills hit town, most workers preferred getting lit up at home to showing up on the production lines. One winter, everything stopped. The machines were remotely shut down mid-shift, and the paycheques stopped. Workers who hadn’t had their brains liquified by the pharmaceutical apocalypse waited a week before they started stripping the copper out of the walls of the factory and gutting the machines for cash at the scrapyard.

Sheriff Ortho had been there long enough to see the life and death of both the factory and the town. His chopped-out-of-wood face reflected his age and the culmination of years of late nights at the station fueled by burnt, slow-drip coffee. He didn’t believe in curses; he did believe in patterns. Thefts weren’t new. Anything worth something got taken and sold for oxy money over the last couple of years. But this was different. People weren’t stealing money, guns, or even other people’s stashes anymore. Silverware, door hinges, baby monitors, a shoebox of old birthday cards, a busted alternator from a truck that hadn’t run since the Reagan administration. This new rash of stealing itself was strange enough, but Sheriff Ortho couldn’t wrap his head around why no one was selling the stuff. He had ins and contacts at every pawn shop in the county, and no one was reporting anything turning up.

Ortho found the first pile of missing items by accident. He’d been following up on a missing persons report for a former line worker from Erms. Ortho tracked some boot prints a couple hundred yards away from a logging trail from Wilder Haine’s last-seen location. A clearing opened up, choked with the rhododendron that grew all over Appalachia, its waxy leaves showing signs of mould growth from the late frost, making them look embalmed and visceral. That’s where he saw it all.

Objects meticulously stacked like some grim offering were all over the place. Rusted tools, a kid’s shoe, broken picture frames, busted-up wind chimes, all carefully arranged in a large geometric spiral. At the centre of it all was an enormous honeycomb oozing thick, dark liquid onto the ground. The smell didn’t hit Ortho until he saw it. It smelled both sweet and wrong, like syrup left in a hot car.

“What in the hell…” Ortho muttered to himself as he spat, the tobacco under his lip staining the ground. His thought was interrupted by a buzzing overhead. Something passed over him that was big enough to cast a shadow over a large part of the clearing. His brain originally registered it as a large swarm of bees, but that wasn’t right. Bees have the sound of a thin, nervous whine. This buzz was deep and intentional in its bearing. When he looked up, he caught the briefest glimpse of something disappearing into the canopy above him. It was too large, and its body gleamed in incomprehensible shades of red and sunset orange. The wings shimmered in slick, oily flashes in the sunlight. Its scale and presence felt wrong, too large for the world around it. It was gone as fast as he saw it. He stood there, slowly losing his mind over the fact that that thing looked like a giant carpenter bee to him. His radio chirruped, bringing him back to reality.

“There is some whacky shit going on at the hospital, Sheriff.”