William T. Vollmann

The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…

The bartender was a fine distinguished mantis standing thin and alert and flexible with all the green grace of his species; it was very dark in there, and he never said anything, and the previous bartender (whom Mantis had killed and devoured) had never said anything, either, just pointed dryly to the cash register to indicate the amount owed for prior happiness; so nobody noticed the transition to new management; and anyhow Mantis conveyed an impression of sympathetic as opposed to apathetic acceptance and knew what was wanted and mixed very adequate drinks. The whores were nervous around him because he never pawed them or gestured for freebies like his predecessor when they gave him his share of their take (which the bugs used to buy anti-insecticide chemicals), just stared at them with his piercing bulgy eyes on either side of his green head. So the ceiling creaked and the toiled flushed and the cistern overflowed out back and life went on.

These bugs have the advantage. Not only do they outnumber us a million to one, not only do they live by alien insect creeds that attach no value to individual life, but they also retain the rectitude and purity of the underdog. And so it is that they have insidiously debauched the public mind, though we still control the larger cities. I myself have killed many bugs in my time, though of course I have never slain wantonly, only in self-defense, when no compromise could be a cure.

Well, what the hell. The situation is the same. While we have life, we have hope. While we have hope, we have courage. While we have courage, we have ingenuity. While we have ingenuity, we have flame-throwers. A state of war now exists between us and the bugs.