James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

The noise of the insects was astounding, drowning out the yells of the sec men, who were laboring in their armor. Most had dropped their blasters, but they still struggled toward safety through the cloud of locusts. There were so many pulped bodies on the track, that it had become slippery and dangerous.

Now that he had a moment, Ryan saw that the insects were like large grasshoppers or cicadas, pale green, about three to four inches in length.

“Gaia!” Krysty panted. “Living nightmare time.”

It was becoming difficult to see the rest of the party as they struggled toward the bullet train.

J.B. and Mildred had made it, and Doc was just being helped up one of the ladders, his grizzled hair dotted with a dozen of the locusts.

“By the Three Kennedys! This is exceeding high on the list of the most disgusting experiences of my long and eventful life,” he panted.

Yashimoto appeared from the fog of insects, hesitating as he saw that the hand offered to him belonged to Ryan Cawdor. But he finally seized it and was hauled aboard, Hideyoshi right behind him.

The sec men were lumbering out of the seething cloud, several of them on the ragged edge of hysteria, brushing frantically to remove the locusts from their clothes and hair.

Ryan moved forward into the nose cone of the bullet train, peering out through the smeared armaglass, seeing the land around disappearing under wave upon wave of the voracious insects. He heard a loud cracking and saw a thick branch of a sycamore snap off under the weight of thousands of locusts.

Krysty was at his elbow. “It’s dreadful,” she said, having to raise her voice to be heard above the constant pittering of the tiny bodies striking the metal shell of the locomotive.

“Least they aren’t killers,” Ryan said.

“Speak too soon.” Mashashige pointed to where one of his sec men had ignored the warning and had stopped about fifty paces off, barely visible, looking as if he’d become terminally disoriented. He stood still, arms flailing at the air, eyes staring wildly, mouth open in a scream of panic and terror.

“I’ll help him,” Jak shouted, but Ryan reached out and gripped the teenager by the arm.

“No. Doomed. Stay here, Jak, or you’ll go under with him. Too late.”

The wretched guard was on his knees, his face masked with the locusts, dozens of them forcing their way into his open mouth, crawling up his nose, suffocating him. As the rest watched in horror, he slipped down and rolled on his back, where his whole twitching body became carpeted with insects.

Hundreds of the locusts were finding their way inside the wrecked train, but they were only a tiny drop in the vast ocean of hopping, vibrating creatures.

J.B. had taken off his fedora, flapping at the insects, brushing them from his clothes. He removed his glasses and wiped them on a white kerchief.

“How long they going to stay here?” Mildred asked.

Mashashige had recovered his composure. “Normally it only takes an hour or so to strip all vegetation from a region. Once they have fed, then they will move on again.”

Outside there was the occasional noise of breaking branches as the shrubs and trees collapsed under the unimaginable weight of the swarm.

The train was coated with the insects, all of the windows covered in a shifting layer of gray green.

“Makes my skin crawl,” Mildred said, shuddering. “Like being inside a huge creature.”

“It was a good idea to run here,” Hideyoshi said to Krysty. “We saw what happened to a man caught in the out-of-doors open. It might have been more dying.”

IT WAS AN HOUR and thirty-five minutes by Ryan’s wrist chron, before the uncountable swarm of locusts completed its feeding and took to the air again, circling and rising, gathering together, blotting out the sun again before moving off in a southwesterly direction.

The shogun led the way out of the security of the bullet train, climbing down into a changed landscape.

Thousands of the insects had died during their brief stay, their brittle corpses blanketing the earth, crunching underfoot as everyone moved among them.