📗Larval Haze | 2: Rotplague

Following the events of Strange Harvest, the honey must flow as life grinds on beneath the jungle's alien canopy...

Sep 29, 2023

This is Hanlon’s Reader, an independent author’s publication. Here you’ll find stories, books, essays, and other things. I’ll be tinkering away here for a while.

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📗Part II: Rotplague

Black rivulets of putrid slime seeped from each of the ancient lotus wasp queen’s pheromone glands: mandibles, abdomen, stinger. She was far past the prime of her youth, with brittle flaking scales and cracking exoskeletal armor.

Yet still, she ruled over her far-reaching kingdom of interconnected hives. Her vision had been pure and good and true; I felt a powerful, swelling sense of life, love, and pride followed by a crashing sensation of hopeless mass death.

The queen suffered excruciating pain as her innards decomposed starting from the glands. Huddled in her hive, workers and sentinels struggled to care for her—contaminating themselves and spreading the brutal plague. Before long, the queen’s entire central hive had been infected with the rotten fire. From there it raged through every other hive it touched, sparing nothing.

A word, an idea, a warning, a distilled injection of urgency and impending doom, reverberated in my thoughts and senses: Rotplague.

Being near it, smelling it, filled me with a rush of dread. As though it could infect me even now, manifest itself through memory. I wanted to escape from the queen’s royal chamber at the bottom of the hive. Had to get out. The stench filled my nose and mouth, burned my eyes and throat. I gagged, spit, coughed, cried—anything to get it out of me. But it was everywhere, thickening on every surface, building, filling, choking—blacking out my eyes—bubbling in my lungs—

Someone grabbed my shoulders.

“Goldwater?” I begged. But I couldn’t speak, it just came as a gurgle and I started to breathe the dark fluid into my lungs. I wiped desperately at my eyes, smearing the stinging oily slime deeper.

Shaken abruptly awake, I came out of it and realized I actually was choking. Spit and yellow bile covered my mouth, filled my lungs. I turned my head, coughing and puking on the edge of the bed, the floor, and the armored nullsuit boots of the person who had just woken me.

Immediately my stomach was in agony and I knew I’d torn stitches.

“Fucking hell, man,” they said. “You were seizing.”

Couldn’t respond. I just leaned back on my bed and went, “Ugghghhhhh.”

Then I passed out for a minute from the pain. Or it felt like a minute. Hurt less when I came to.

“Come on, Wes, let’s go. There you go. That oughta do it. Wait, shit was that too much—no, it’s good.”

I barely understood their mumbling. But I felt fine. Drugs? Drugs. Whew.

They were wearing a suit but no helmet. Wait, that was Warren’s suit. “No… Warren? Is that you—?”

“Hey.” They leaned in close. Not Warren, a young man. My age. Gaunt, sweaty, dirty blond hair. “Listen up. We don’t have long, especially with—well, we don’t have long. Listen. We know each other, okay? It’s me, Barkland. Here, wipe your mouth.”

Beyond confused, I struggled to keep the room steady as I used the towel he handed me to clean my face. I squinted up at him in the dim light. Messy, short blond hair, with gray-green eyes. He looked familiar, but it wasn’t clicking.

“Who…?”

“Barkland Shaw. You don’t recognize me? Yeah, I guess we’re both looking pretty rough. Uh… we both struck out with Jennalynn Ravi freshman year. No? Right, well you ought to remember this: you took the fall for breaking the new vending machine, you remember that? Back at Founders’ High?”

He leaned closer to me and slicked his hair back so I could see better. “Here, maybe like this—used to go for that swept back look. And you can see my scar up there from when Robb Glastney hit me with a hammer.”

“Holy shit,” I said when it clicked: the scar, the faded green eyes, the swept-back blond hair. He was right about the vending machine, it earned me a ten day suspension. I regretted every minute of it and told myself I should have just walked away so many times. “Wow, you look different.”

“Yeah, I was a lot fatter then, I know. And you helped me out. Didn’t know me. Didn’t need me. But you helped me. And then on top of that, taking the fall for breaking it? Legendary.” He leaned in closer, pointing at my belly. “Then, to find you here like this, mostly dead? What are the odds?”

“What the fuck are you doing here? And the nullsuit, I mean what…?”

Barkland grinned widely. “Pretty cool, right?” Then his expression dropped. “Oh, but… sorry, it’s your friend’s.”

“We were more like coworkers. And it wasn’t anyone’s fault, anyway. Quillworm got her. So what, you’re a duster now? Pillaging tech from the harvesters?”

He sighed. “Yeah, that’s where you come in. I need your help, Wes.”

The use of my first name, like we were genuinely old friends, struck me as emotional manipulation. I never went by my first name, always my last. Barkland and I knew of each other, ran in the same circles sometimes, but we were never close—I helped him out once, that was it.

I kept quiet, stared, and let him keep talking.

Barkland continued awkwardly, “And you need mine too. I think you can probably tell these guys don’t want to keep you around.”

Indirectly threatening me. “Spit it out.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Surprised at my bluntness, he raised his eyebrows. Barkland was a lot thinner than I remembered him, malnourished even, but his furtive, deep-set green eyes were the same. “Right. Well, I think you’ll be interested—uh, in my plan. We can help each other. You know, like before when you helped me.”

“I don’t remember getting any benefit at all from that situation,” I said quietly. He was hiding something. “But I certainly helped you. So maybe this is your chance to pay me back.”

Giving up on the pretense that we were reunited friends, Barkland hid a smile and raised his hands in defeat. “Alright, yeah. Yeah. I guess that’s true. But hey, the others all wanted to toss you in the grow pits after we cracked that armor off you, dead or alive. Especially Leguro. I recognized you—I put my neck out, I saved your life, and I think that still puts me on top there.”

I was going to have to pick my battles. Wishing I still had my own armored nullsuit, I relented. “Fine. Tell me your plan. Be specific.”

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He gestured at the Hive Frame and my five future lotus wasp hatchlings. “Here it is: I need you to raise these little bastards up quick and train ‘em to find and steal honey for us.”

My head tilted. Interesting. After a pause, I asked, “Is that even possible?”

He shrugged. “I think so. One of our best guys got stung by a queen a few months back. Looked pretty much like you do now. We got the eggs out of him and he went fuckin’ berserk. Took the eggs and ran out in the goddamn jungle with ‘em, no suit, not even a mask. Stumbled back in with his eyes all bugged-out blue a week later, near-dead, hallucinating. And happy. Literally crying happy tears.”

“What? Why?”

Barkland licked his lips. “He said he brought the wasp eggs to a hive. Watched them hatch. He was going on like they were his children. He’d just lie there in bed, smile on his face, his eyes all rolling around and shit. Mumbling and rambling about it to anyone who would listen. Said he could see what they saw, feel what they felt. They’d talk to him. Is that true? Can you do that?”

“I don’t know.” Didn’t want to say too much yet. Trying to deflect, I asked, “What happened to him?”

Barkland didn’t like my answer. “What were you doing just now? Dreaming?”

“No.” I turned away and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, the taste of the vile black liquid returning with my thoughts of it. I didn’t want to tell him anything. It could only be used against me. But the words were already on my lips. “More like a nightmare. Or a lotus wasp’s nightmare. Some kind of plague. Still don’t understand it, but… I’m learning. They’re… they’re intelligent, Barkland. Like us, almost. We can form a connection.”

I paused and took a breath, clearing my head to stop my stream-of-consciousness babbling. “My armor—I want it back. And we’re partners, I don’t work for you.”

He stepped to the edge of my bed and held his armored gauntlet out to offer a handshake. “The honey. Tell me you can do it. If you can’t, we’re done here.”

My turn to be surprised. I was expecting more pushback. “First, we’d need lotus nectar. Not the honey, the nectar from the red flowers on the plant. For when the grubs hatch.”

“Easy,” Barkland replied with a confident smile. “I can do that.”

I put my frail hand out to grab Barkland’s nullsteel gauntlet and we shook on it. My veins, unnaturally bulging dark blue from my skin, clearly unnerved him despite the armor between us.

He dropped out of my grasp quickly and said, “Don’t let the others know we know each other. Got it? Sort of a delicate leadership situation here. And you’re going to complicate things.”

As my old acquaintance lingered next to me, I saw my distorted reflection in a panel on Warren’s nullsuit and lost myself for a moment. Tributaries of protruding veins sprawled like tentacles across my face. And my eyes—they were like Mueller’s back in the jungle: two bright sky-blue embers glowed back at me.

“Yeah. Got it,” I whispered.

***

The Royal Lotus Collection Center was the heartbeat of Mueller’s lotus honey empire. Modest in size, it occupied a drab, unmarked industrial building at the edge of Overlook City, nearest to the dome wall. Here, all the raw lotus honey gathered by the harvester teams would be unloaded, processed, pasteurized, cooled, bottled, sealed, and packed for shipment.

To Gregor von Mueller, it was home.

His office and attached two-floor living space were thoroughly soundproofed from the hums and clanks of machinery. When he wasn’t on missions outside the dome, he resided there and tried his best to keep his nose out of things while letting the people he’d hired do the work as he expected it done. At this point, the office space itself was more symbolic than anything.

At Mueller’s age, Royal Lotus was his retirement plan. He’d built the whole business up around himself. But he wouldn’t sell it—he’d pass it on only to the right person. If he had to, he’d live there until he died.

The vision was too important.

Mueller watched the packaging plant’s security displays from his desk, his eyes sliding listlessly across the screens. He reached for the hidden drawer, his fingers finding a sleek, flattened black tube a few inches long.

He pressed the cool, contoured mouthpiece to his lips, breathed in as it hummed gently, and briefly held it. A moment later he exhaled a thin puff of white vapor tinged with luminous blue.

He monitored until the packers packed the last batch and the loaders loaded the last truck. He turned off his displays. In the darkness, the old man looked down at his shiny black lacquered desk and saw the glow of bright blue eyes looking back.

***