Part 3

Images flooded him. The town. Rookfall was alive, and the factory was thriving. The streets were alive with cars and families. The image shifted to the town now. Empty and looted. Grey and decaying. The next image presented the streets overflowing with thick viscous liquid, houses hollowed out into chambers, people moving in slow purposeful lines carrying chunks of honeycomb. Rookfall was a hive with the Mother as its queen.

“No.” Ortho barely managed to rasp out. The Mother’s head tilted. Its eyes created a new impossible feeling in him, with even more pressure crushing him. Just the act of her taking notice and really looking at him created a physical change in the environment. A change in how life itself worked. Ortho knew she didn’t approve of a worker who resists. It wasn’t a thought he had, but a message violently and angrily delivered into him.

He didn’t remember deciding to do it, but Ortho drew his gun and fired three rounds at the Mother. With the vibrations and the humming, the gunshots sounded small and distant compared with their usual crack-and-boom. All three rounds hit her thorax and bounced off.

Wilder screamed over the blaring cacophony, “You can’t hurt her, Sheriff. Nothing can.”

The buzzing surged to a terrible volume and an impossible physical force. Small shapes of bees rose from the ground and the trees until Ortho’s vision was almost completely blacked out by their combined mass, and the air became a buzzing, living thing. They converged on him and stung him relentlessly.

After the first couple of stings, Ortho stopped swatting them away and cursing at them. The more they stung him, the clearer he could hear the Mother of the Woods.

“TAKE. GIVE. BELONG.”

The message felt good and right and reassuring and gave him hope for the future. More images fluttered through his mind. She needed materials to build the hive. The people of Rookfall were tearing their homes apart and bringing the debris into the woods. Ortho saw people carrying doors, chunks of drywall, car windshields, and human bones. He saw the children in town with honey-slick mouths, running down the street, pushing hospital gurneys. They were all going into the woods to serve the Mother. Like they always should have.

A week later, Special Field Agent Travors found Ortho’s car at the head of a logging trail. The only thing stranger to him than finding an abandoned sheriff’s vehicle with no tires, the doors ripped off, and all the lights and electronics fitted out of it, was the equally ransacked and deconstructed town he just drove through. The FBI field office received a request for assistance from one of the local sheriffs a few towns over. According to him, all the residents just up and abandoned Rookfall and several other towns nearby with the same story: the towns were trashed and a strange collection of random items was missing. Travors looked into it and found strange reports from Rookfall General before it went silent that seemed to mark the start of whatever this was.

He followed the logging trail for a little while. The ground itself was not treacherous, but the scattered items made walking difficult, and the place looked like the debris of some enormous plane crash or like a bomb had gone off in a junkyard. There was junk everywhere. A set of jumper cables, Ortho’s radio, half of the sign from the fast-food place, machine parts, roof shingles. It looked like Rookfall was a million-piece puzzle that someone put together and then smashed out there in the woods.

The dull hum Travors could hear from the road wasn’t really getting louder. It was more like surrounding him and swallowing him more as he kept walking. He had the sensation of walking out deeper and deeper into the ocean. Eventually, he came to a clearing where a mountain of junk awaited him. Standing there, he hadn’t the faintest idea why someone would do this. He had even less of an idea how many people and how long it took to compile all of this. The mound of junk was easily thirty feet over his head at the highest point that he could see.

The utter strangeness of all this struck Travors hard. First the town, then the sheriff’s car, and now this. The reports of multiple people, as far as the next county over, having the same strange dreams about sweet smells and voices promising them they won’t be alone anymore. It’s all just so strange and…

“Shit!” Travors slapped at a bee that stung his neck, but he missed it and immediately lost track of it. His train of thought dissolved as the pain of the sting subsided just as quickly as it came on. He leaned down and picked up a teddy bear near his feet that had one of its eyes pulled out. He walked over and gently added it to the pile.