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Brewing dissidence

by Yorik on 13.01.2023 in textes

The following text was submitted - and not accepted - for This World Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Horror Stories about Bugs. This text was fortunately heavily fixed by Manu <3

It started very early, when Jake was three or four years old. His mother would show him a spider, a butterfly, a moth. Look at the lovely little one, Jakey! she would say. Before she was able to finish speaking, SPLAT! Little Jake had smashed the poor bug dead. His parents, both animal rights activists, were appalled. Jake fought his way through school years exterminating everything he could find with more than four feet. Therapists were consulted, behavioural analysis sessions were tried, nothing helped. Jake appeared to simply not be able to see a bug alive.

He naturally entered a chemistry major at college and, after graduating, got hired and successfully navigated to different positions in the most prestigious chemical companies of the country, in which he was more than once praised for the great commercial successes of his audacious, although not always strictly ethical, insecticide products. Nobody dared or cared to ask him details about his recipes, as he generated considerable profit.

One day, after a series of unfortunate accidents grossly exaggerated by the local press, environmental protection activists launched a campaign against his employer. Jake was immediately fired. Among other things, he would allegedly have caused the extinction of entire bee populations and started desertification processes all over the country. Jake could not believe his eyes in front of so much hypocrisy and blatant lies.

This was only the beginning of the absurdities Jake had to endure. Another one said the whole Earth climate was changing and even sillier, these changes would have been caused by man. Some went as far as to directly link these events to the overuse of chemical products.

Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, he found that he was not alone in seeing the nonsense behind all this, and quickly made excellent friends who did not hesitate to echo what he had to say, as a Chemical Engineer, to their private networks. Jake was also growing more and more convinced that Earth was not round but flat as a dish.

Global communism would not have him, Jake decided one day. The day they would knock on his door, he would be ready to receive them as they deserved. He had enough experience exterminating vermin. Jake began to work immediately.

Early in his youth, he had discovered what would make his career so successful: the juices obtained by pressing some insects into big corn processing milling machines, then brewing them using his Dad's homemade craft beer recipe, produced a powerful insecticide. It also attracted flying bugs that happened to be in their mating season but the benefits of killing everything in its reach far outweighed the few critters smashing against the milling factory's windows.

Jake decided his new recipe would be his masterpiece. He mixed all kinds of roaches, flies, spiders, mites, and other material he could buy on the dark web. He milled and brewed until he obtained several gallons of a dark paste, the highest concentrate he had ever produced. The sound of the grinding machine was music to his ears. He could already see legions of stupid cockroaches suffocating in agony in their red uniforms.

The next day, Jake prepared his deadly trap. He emptied the whole mixture on the walls, roof and around his house. Not one would escape alive. He went to bed happy with a gas mask on his face, since he was not dumb, at the thought of the carnage to come when the Reds would try to come take him, which his friends on the Internet repeatedly said was imminent.

In the first hours of the night, several millions of insects had landed on his house. More were coming in thick clouds that seemed like black tornadoes smashing against the roof. Soon the house had vanished under a big, black, wobbly, humming mass. The roof did not hold. SPLAT!

by Yorik on 13.01.2023 in textes

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