The Nest

by Kenneth Oppel

  The queen’s abdomen twitched. “Don’t be absurd. You think we can just leave him on someone’s doorstep in a wicker basket? This baby is meant only for you and your family. And, Steven, you’re forgetting the most important thing. There is only one baby.”

  “There are two!”

  “There is one, and only one will live.”

  “I didn’t want any of this!” I yelled in fury. “None of it!” I was suddenly sobbing, tears and snot all over my face. “It’s not fair! I didn’t want this. I didn’t ask for this!”

  “Of course not,” she said, stroking my face. “Of course you didn’t. But here we are, and things would be so much better if you were at least honest with yourself, Steven.”

  I stepped away from her. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you really like being afraid so much? All your nightmares. All your lists and worries and compulsions. Is that fun, Steven? I don’t think so. Do you? Imagine if we could have helped you.”

  “You mean replaced me!”

  “Oh dear, oh dear, it always comes back to these silly terms you use. Wouldn’t it be nice to be normal and sleep without hiding under the covers and wishing you could disappear into the floor?”

  “I don’t do that anymore,” I lied. I hated how she knew so much about me. I felt invaded.

  “I know all about you, all your little bits and pieces, from when I stung you. We could still help you, you know. Your case isn’t so severe. We can make little adjustments.”

  “Adjustments . . .”

  “A few little tweaks and twokes. To help you be more of who you are, make you who you really want to be. All you have to do is help us.”

  I felt my chest ache at the thought. Normal. More of who I wanted to be.

  “You could do that?” I asked.

  “Absolutely.” She stroked my face. I let her.

  “I open the window and the screen and you come in. . . .”

  “Yes, we’ll come in and we’ll be carrying your baby very gently. It’ll take a lot of us, but we’re very strong, surprisingly strong when we all fly together. We can carry a lot.”

  I remembered the wasp I’d seen on the outdoor table, hefting the enormous dead spider.

  “We’ll place the baby in his crib, and we’ll tuck him up, and there he’ll be.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  I needed to know everything. Every step. I looked up again at the baby’s open eyes. There was something else in them that I couldn’t name. It wasn’t innocence. This baby wasn’t waiting to learn right or wrong, good or bad, love or hate. It already knew. It already had the answers to everything. There was nothing that was weak about this baby, there was nothing this baby would suffer.

  “We’ll put Theo in his crib,” the queen was saying. “And then I’ll give him a little sting—sort of like a smack on the bottom to get him breathing, to bring him properly to life.”

  “And the other baby?”

  “What other baby?” the queen asked.

  “Stop doing that! Theo . . . the one already there! Theo now in his crib!”

  “When we leave, we’ll take the broken parts away with us.”

  “Broken parts?”

  “Well, why would you want to keep them? It’s just clutter. We always clean up after ourselves. Haven’t you had workers in your house fixing something and they leave all their mess behind? Terrible. Debris and bits and pieces they didn’t use. That’s not how we operate. We leave everything just as we found it, only much, much better.”

  “No, it’s not—it’s not right.” I stepped back from the queen’s antenna, but it snaked after me. “You can’t just take away our baby like he’s trash. It’s not right.”

  “It’s not like we don’t put it to good use,” she said indignantly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We take it back to the nest.”

  For a moment I was hopeful. Stupidly I said, “And take care of it?”

  “No, no. The workers eat it. They’ve been working like slaves, haven’t they? You’ve seen how hard they work! They need their reward. It’s only fair. Quite a feast it makes.”

  The baby smiled down at me. Maybe it was just a gas grimace, or maybe it was having a dream of glory before its birth. But I knew, absolutely I knew, that this perfect baby didn’t care about our little Theo. It didn’t care about me or anyone else. It couldn’t, because it was so perfect that it wouldn’t even understand what it was like not to be perfect. It could never know weakness or fear.

  But I could. Because I was broken inside too. And in that instant I decided that this perfect baby would never replace my brother.

  I said, “I won’t help anymore.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes. We have a contract.”

  “I didn’t sign anything!”

  “You don’t need to. A spoken yes is still a contract. And we honor our contracts, don’t we? Or where would we be? People saying yes when they meant no, and no when they meant yes? That’s no way of running a society. And we want a good orderly society. That’s why we make our babies so perfect. Only a perfect baby can make a perfect society.”

  “I’m not helping!” I shouted. “I—do—not—say—yes!”

  I expected her to be angry and show me her stinger again, to squeeze out a larger drop of venom. Why hadn’t she stung me earlier? The only answer I could think was that she needed me. Just like she’d said, they couldn’t do this without me.

  “Steven. If you don’t help, he’ll die.”

  “No! If I help, our baby will die!”

  “This baby is your baby. Why can’t you see that? This is your baby, only healthy, only without flaw and blemish! This is our gift to you! You’re hyperventilating, Steven. Remember, deep breaths, just like Dr. Brown told you.”

  “I’ll tell my parents!”

  “Oh! Good heavens, such an idea! Please go right ahead. I can tell you exactly what will happen. They’ll send you straight to the psychiatric ward for assessment and pump you full of sedatives and antipsychotics and start debating your diagnosis. Maybe schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or who knows what other concoction they’ll invent for you!”

  I knew she was right. I had to keep it all locked up in myself, spun and sealed like in a cocoon.

  “Now,” the queen said, “tomorrow is Thursday, and we’ll be calling on you then. Be ready.”

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON DAD WAS AT WORK, AND Mom was out at some kind of parental support group. Vanessa was walking Nicole to a birthday party and then doing some errands before picking her up and bringing her back. I was alone in the house with the baby.

  I knew that whatever the wasps were going to do, it would be at night and I had to be ready. Theo was taking his nap, and I was downstairs in the kitchen with the baby monitor on. I got a pen and piece of paper—and stared at it, trying to form a plan, trying to think of a list of things that might help, that I might need.

  Over the baby monitor a voice said: “Steven.”

  My breathing stopped, the air corked in my throat. It was her voice, the queen’s. This wasn’t right; it wasn’t nighttime. I wasn’t dreaming yet. I forced a breath into my lungs.

  “Steven.”

  I changed the channel on the monitor. There was a flare of static and then:

  “It’s time, Steven. Open the baby’s window and remove the screen.”

  “No.”

  I didn’t even know if she could hear me through the receiver, but she said:

  “You agreed, Steven.”

  “I changed my mind. I told you! How many times do I have to tell you!”

  “Steven, I really must insist that you open the window for us. The baby’s ready. You wouldn’t want to hurt the baby.”

  Theo. I grabbed the monitor and bolted upstairs to his room.

  “There’s a good boy,” the queen said over the monitor. “It’ll all turn out right. You’ll see. And we can help you, too, just like I promised. You’ll be so much better. No more lists and prayers an
d hand-washing and fears.”

  Theo was sleeping peacefully in his crib. I walked to the window, raised the blind—and with a gasp let it drop. Beyond the glass was a swarm of pale wasps, as thick as mist. I could hear the faint thrum of their wings.

  “Steven. All you need to do is open the window now. We’re ready to bring your baby inside.”

  I wasn’t ready. My thoughts were sharp, useless little shards of glass. I pulled in a breath, one more.

  I ran. From room to room upstairs, I checked every window was shut tight. I hammered downstairs and did the same thing. We’d had the air-conditioning on for a week solid, so all the windows were already shut, but wherever I could, I pushed the sashes down harder or cranked the handles tighter.

  I raced back up to the baby’s room to check on Theo. He was still sleeping soundly. Beyond the window I heard a slow scratching. Parting the blinds, I saw the windowsill and frame carpeted with wasps, their mandibles working at the wood. One little scrape after another. They were being very methodical. One would chew off a strip, then step aside so a fellow wasp could take her place and scrape away along the same gash, making it deeper and wider.

  “We can chew our way in, Steven,” came the queen’s voice over the baby monitor.

  “It’ll take forever,” I said. There was the window to get through, and then the mesh screen.

  “There are so many of us.”

  I ran to my room and pulled on my jeans and thickest socks. I laced tight my high-top sneakers. I pulled on a sweatshirt and a hoodie. After grabbing my knapsack, I belted downstairs to the basement. My eyes flew over the cluttered, dusty shelf where we kept all our old paint and chemicals and junk. I grabbed two cans of Raid and a flyswatter. In soggy boxes and plastic bins, I found some old swimming goggles, a pair of flowered gardening gloves, and two rolls of duct tape, and I threw it all into the knapsack. From the ground-floor medicine cabinet I took my EpiPen and zipped it into my bag too. I slung the pack over both shoulders and cinched it tight.

  Outside each window I passed, I saw the pale tracery of the wasps. If I paused for even a second, the pattern would thicken into a darker mass, like wisps of storm cloud. How could there be so many? Were they just following me from window to window, or were there really millions of them, enveloping the entire house?

  I wondered if I could bundle the baby into a blanket, bolt out of the house, and go to one of the neighbors. Would the wasps follow me? I peeked out the tall skinny window beside the front door. They were already there. The moment I opened the door, they’d be all over us. They’d sting me and sting me, and then the baby—and lift it away to their nest and eat it.

  I checked the back door. Same thing.

  Running upstairs to the baby’s room. From outside the window:

  Scritch, scratch, scritch.

  The familiar hot flush of panic coursed through me. I wasn’t thinking very well. Someone would see, wouldn’t they? Outside, someone would see all these swarming wasps and call the police or something. But maybe their bodies were so pale you couldn’t see them from the street, from a passing car.

  I grabbed the hall phone, dialed 911. I got a voice menu with a lot of choices. Ambulance? Police? Fire department? I chose fire department and had to wait for a bit. When the operator answered, I started gabbling.

  “There’s wasps outside my house, a ton of them, and they’re trying to get in.”

  “You say you’ve got a wasps’ nest outside your house?”

  “Thousands of them, and they’re swarming all round the windows and they’re trying to get inside. We’ve got a baby, and—”

  With every word I knew how crazy it sounded.

  “Sir, this number is for emergencies only. It sounds like you need to call an exterminator.”

  “You don’t understand—” And the line went dead. At first I thought she’d hung up on me. But when I tried to call again, there was no dial tone. The wasps had chewed through our phone line.

  Back to the baby’s room to check on him—scritch, scratch, scritch—then I raced to my own room and grabbed my cell. The battery was dead. I started tossing stuff all over the place, searching for my charger—and saw a single wasp on my wall.

  Quietly I sat on the bed and watched. It was just one wasp. But how had it gotten inside? Slowly I shrugged the knapsack off my right shoulder, unzipped it just enough to reach in and pull out the flyswatter. The wasp wasn’t very high up. I walked swiftly toward it and whacked the heck out of it. Three, four smashes, and it fell. I stamped on it with my heel and felt it crack.

  When I ran out of my room, I saw three more wasps on our big air-conditioning unit. That was how they were getting in. Somehow they were flying through the whirling blades of the outside fan unit without getting chopped into bits, crawling up the hose and then out through the slats of the hall unit. I grabbed the Raid and blasted them. Coated with white foam, they dropped off the wall so I could crush them.

  I turned the power off on the air conditioner, and the slats automatically angled shut, but not before a couple more wasps slipped inside. I swatted them, then duct taped over all the slats. That was good. We were safer now. We were airtight.

  In the baby’s room—scritch, scratch, scritch, scaraaaatch. But none had gotten through yet; there were still no wasps on the walls or ceiling. Careening downstairs to the coatrack, I found the cloth baby carrier thing. I ran back up, trying to put it on. It was complicated and took me a while to get the straps figured out with the knapsack in the way.

  Carefully I lifted Theo from his crib and slid him against my chest into the carrier. It was tricky to get his floppy legs into the right slots, and then his arms. He woke up a little and started to murmur, but I shushed him and rocked up and down on my heels. Hummed some of the songs Mom used to sing to me. He settled back into sleep, his wet little mouth parted like it was awaiting food.

  I tightened all the straps and the neck support so his head was nice and snug and wouldn’t loll around. He needed to be with me now. I couldn’t keep leaving him alone, even for a second.

  Without the air-conditioning, the house was heating up. But I liked Theo’s weight against me, his heat. It made me feel less alone. He was part of me, and I felt stronger somehow. Vanessa would be back soon, or my parents, and they’d see the wasps swarming outside and they’d call and get help.

  Scritch, scratch, scritch, scaaaa-raaaatch.

  I parted the blinds. My stomach swirled. Outside, wasps teemed against the glass and wooden frame, three or four deep. It looked like chaos, but quickly I saw how hard they were working. In some places they’d gouged their way so deeply into the wood that you could see only the back half of their bodies.

  “Steven,” said the queen over the monitor, and I jerked. I’d forgotten about her. “This really is awfully inconvenient for us. And unfortunate, too. We could still turn this around if you’d just be reasonable.”

  Baby against my chest, knapsack against my back, I went downstairs to check the windows again. Same as last time—within seconds of my appearance, there was a dark vapor of wasps swirling, waiting.

  I kept moving, my eyes sweeping the walls and ceilings, keeping watch. When I got back to the upstairs hallway, I froze. There were four, five, six wasps on the ceiling, not moving. From the spare bedroom a seventh appeared, crawling over the top of the door to join the others.

  There must have been another hole somewhere, some way they were getting inside. Where? The windows were all shut tight. How, then?

  The wasps were too high for me to get with the swatter, so I reached into the little gap I’d left open in the knapsack and pulled out the Raid. I reached high and blasted them. They didn’t even try to fly away. They were just stupid worker drones. But after I’d trampled them for good measure, heard their bodies crack, I realized I was using up too much Raid. There were thousands, and I had only two cans.

  I fought back my panic with little sentences.

  Be more careful.

  Use the flysw
atter whenever you can.

  Raid is only a last resort.

  They were coming from the spare room. Cautiously I stepped in and saw another wasp emerge from the walk-in closet. This one I got with the swatter. I pushed the closet door wide and took a few paces inside. I pulled the chain on the hanging lightbulb. On either side of the closet were rows of clothes, and underneath, bins with winter things. In the center of the ceiling was a hatch. I’d never thought of our house as having an attic. Really it was just a crawl space. A few years ago some guys had gone up there to blow in some insulation.

  I stood very still for a bit. I couldn’t hear anything. But I didn’t like the look of that hatch. It didn’t look snug. Wasps must have been crawling through the gaps. On the floor by the shoes was a plastic footstool, but it wasn’t high enough to get me up to the hatch. I left the closet and brought back a chair. I took out my duct tape.

  Standing on the chair, I laid a strip down along the first side of the hatch. It jiggled. It really wasn’t tight-fitting at all. As I taped down the second side, I pushed too hard, and the hatch popped up and turned a bit so it wouldn’t slip properly back into place. I reached up with my fingers and tried hurriedly to jiggle it around, but it was tricky, with the baby, and my knapsack and my careening heart.

  To get a good grip I had to push the hatch up even more—and the harsh light from the bare bulb blared right up into the crawl space. A flash of dark rafters, and bits of paper and foam insulation coating the floor, and off to the right something so out of place, it took me a second to understand what I was looking at.

  It was like a mountain of gray animal excrement. It rose from the timbered floor into a series of sloppy peaks that fused to the rafters. All across the papery dead surface of this vast nest were pale wasps. Thousands of them, motionless, not making a sound. I jerked backward so fast, I nearly fell off the chair. I knocked the lightbulb so it swung crazily, throwing light then dark into the attic, light and dark, and that was when the sound started—the terrible buzzing, so angry and loud that it plowed almost every thought from my head.