The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 16
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

The Air Raid

The mosquito net only slowed it down for a moment. It tore through it with its strong front legs, like a pair of scissors, and circled the sleeping man. Opium-dazed, the man dreamed of buzz bombs. He manned the AA gun and valiantly defended his dream while the insect, steel-sleek and precision-engineered, circled and circled, descending toward his face.
          First it crawled inside his ear. The man didn’t even twitch, even when the thing extended its proboscis and punctured his eardrum. But nothing to drink here. It stabbed and retracted three more times in irritation.
          Across the cheek, upon a throbbing vein by his hairline. In goes the proboscis, hardened metal, stronger than a hypodermic needle, through the vein and deep into the bone. The insect tried to drink, again found little. The man turned over in his sleep and the insect freed itself, wings iridescent in the morning sunlight, spreading micro-rainbows across the damp sheets.
          It circled, then settled on the left eyelid. Beneath the lids, the dreams twitched back and forth, back and forth: the V1 engines had cut off and he knew that there would be a few moments of silence before the explosions. The thing drove its needle through the lid, through the pupil and into the jelly of the eye. Ah, here it was! It stirred and stirred, deflating the eye and swirling the vitreous humor like a pot of soup. It sucked the eyeball dry and moved onto the next one. The man, collapsing, dreamed of rubbled buildings.
          When his wife found him she screamed at the sight: perforated by ten thousand needle-pricks, dry as dust, blind and deaf, with a mute tongue like a used emery board, still weakly alive and trying to disentangle himself from the sheets. Almost unnoticed, the metal thing buzzed past her, no bigger than a fingernail, gleaming. If she registered it at all in her horror, she might have thought it was the smallest drone she’d ever seen, or a BB shot from the gun of a malevolent child.
💀