Call Me Buzz

I awoke to the sound of thumping. It was the sound of something solid and metal striking the walls of my downstairs living room.

TUNK… TUNK… The sound was steady, but slow. It seemed methodical, like someone had broken into my home strictly intending to wake me up in the most obnoxious way possible.

I threw a robe over my pajamas and slid into my cat slippers. The entire outfit had been a present, and I wanted to honestly say I'd used them when next I met the generous gift-giver. Wearing them to bed exactly once technically counted as "use".

TUNK… TUNK… TUNK…

The next thing that occurred to me was the strange colors that had been cast across my room. Orange… Green… it was as if the Sun itself had turned into a giant cosmic kaleidoscope, painting my walls and floor with strange parallel lines.

I adjusted my vision slightly, just enough to check the source of this maddening alteration without losing sight of the bedroom door. The window… It was covered by some heavy, motionless swatch of fabric, striped orange and green with daylight barely breaking through.

TUNK…

I grabbed the phone and started dialing, but when I lifted the receiver to my ear there is no sound. No ringing, no dial-tone, nothing. At that point, I thought the money spent on my idiotic night-time attire would've been better used toward a mobile phone.

In searching the closet, the most menacing thing I managed to turn out was an umbrella. At least the tip was sharp, and in a pinch I could have pretended to be Mary Poppins. Nobody would shoot a proper English nanny, right? Honestly, my main concern was getting past the intruder without being noticed. I was in no mood for absurdist swordplay.

TUNK…

I opened the bedroom door slowly, inching it only a crack before the heavy, corrosive smell of pesticide assaulted my senses. It was like being sprayed directly in the face with a can of "Off" bug repellant, which had happened to me in the Scouts. You can trust me on this.

Covering my nose and mouth as best I could with the fuzzy, vaguely scented fabric of the robe, I moved out into the hallway. At first, I kept my body low, thinking I could move under the cloud of noxious gas… but I soon realized there was no escaping the odor.

"Skitter, skitter."

The haggard, raspy voice of what sounded like a redneck hillbilly echoed from the living room. He sounded contented as he followed with a small, gasping chuckle.

"Skitter, skitter, skitt!" He laughed, then coughed.

As I descended the stairway, I looked across the foyer at the front windows. They, too, were covered in the same striped fabric I'd seen before.

My entire house was tented.

Realizing this was most likely a case of someone having the wrong address, I allowed myself to relax to the slightest degree. I kept a firm grip on the umbrella, point outward, and moved for the front door.

The door was still locked, just as I'd left it. Whoever had come to fumigate the wrong home had clearly entered through the back… but how? Did he find the hidden house key under the planter, or did he simply break in?

"Skitter, skitter, there goes a whole litter!"

The laugh echoed through the lower level of the house again as he… whoever HE was… went back to thumping the walls. I flung the front door open and met with the very orange and green sheath that now enveloped my castle.

I pulled at the tent… reeled in great armloads of fabric… I lifted and stretched and tried to tear at it, but to no avail. For every length of striped barricade I removed, yet more would follow. It was as if there truly was no end to the thing.

What's worse, as I touched it, I could feel tiny irregularities in its surface. The raised lines that resembled veins. The great mass was warm to the touch, but I decided that was surely due to the morning Sun.

Seeing no alternative, I turned back toward the living room. My head was spinning at this point, and I was feeling disoriented. Furniture seemed foreign to me, and the color of the walls was off… or was it just more light filtering through the tent? I was pretty sure I'd never owned a plaster bust of a Minotaur, and the portraits on the walls seemed to be old-timey photos of posed corpses rather than my family.

"H-Hello?" I called out.

TUNK—

The sound abruptly stopped.

"Hello, I'm the owner of this house, I think there's been a mistake…?"

Silence prevailed for a few moments, then the ruckus continued.

TUNK… TUNK…

I wobbled closer and closer to the archway into the living room, unwittingly stepping out of my slippers.

"Hey! Whatever you're doing, I demand you stop! I did not hire you!"

I rounded the corner into the living room and set eyes upon the cause of all the recent turmoil. He stood about six and a half feet tall, with a slender build. He wore a puke green jumpsuit with vibrantly orange gloves and boots. His hair was black, oily, spiky, and the band of a gas mask cut through it at the rear.

On the man's back were two large metal canisters marked with "DANGER!" and "HOT!" respectively. A tangled and knotted rubber hose lead from the tanks, down to a pistol-like spray nozzle on his work belt.

TUNK…

He was driving a metal rod into the wall. He had left behind at least two dozen holes across the surface.

"STOP RIGHT NOW!" I demanded, finding my spine somewhere in the throat-scalding haze. Seeing the spindly, hunchbacked man gave me a better sense of who I was dealing with. The fact he was a professional just doing his job made it a touch easier to issue commands.

"Aw puddin'!" He spat out as if it was a profanity, "Stop breathin' my gas!"

"What?"

"Gas ain't fer people. I say, stop breathin' it!"

Seized by the insanity of the moment, I closed the distance between the Exterminator and myself. I pointed the umbrella, my trusty foolproof umbrella, directly at the base of his neck.

"Who the Hell are you?"

The question went unnoticed as a horde of cockroaches widened one of the holes and flooded onto the floor. They were easily as large as horseshoe crabs, and they skittered in every direction the moment their pointed brown legs met the floor.

"Skitter, skitter, skitter!" the man wheezed as he casually backed toward me a bit. He pulled the nozzle from his belt and began spraying the insects. The strange amber goop that emerged from the end of his weapon was unlike any poison I'd seen before. Instead of causing the bugs to keel over dead, it simply glued them to the spot.

A blob of the steaming hot matter dashed against the sash of my robe. When I began to study its nature, a familiar scent broke through the cloud of death all around me.

It was BBQ sauce.

"Tell me RIGHT NOW," I screamed, "WHO… ARE… YOU?"

The man turned on his heels, and though he was easily a head or more taller than myself, I found his face directly in mine.

Behind the smudged, yet relatively clear goggles of the gas mask, I could see mostly blackness. There were four or five pool-like eyes, reflecting what little light there was across their polished surfaces. Barb-like hairs jutted out from his dark flesh, most of which were bending against the restraints of the eye-shield.

He pulled the mask from his head, lowering it down around his neck. At that point, I could clearly see his anus-like mouth… a simple orifice that puckered like he'd just eaten a lemon whole. This hideous visage was also painted with the skull-like markings of a bald faced wasp.

His response to my query was brief, and yet behind those words resided a potent threat.

"Call me Buzz."

My eyes flicked from the abomination's face, down to the patch sewn onto the chest of his jumpsuit. There it was. "Buzz".

I ran from the room, and after trying to escape through every door and window I could find, I ended up cowering in the upstairs closet. The things hanging in here with me are NOT my clothes. They sigh and whisper and I think their tattered ends quiver whenever I dare to stir.

Buzz works his way from room to room, pounding the walls, choking, and occasionally spouting odd rhymes. Just when I think he's about to find me, I hear his heavy boot steps turning, scraping, toward another random room.

The insects… enlarged silverfish, earwigs, centipedes… everything you'd expect to see living under a rock… they're slowly piling up in my hiding spot. They're trying to hide with me. They're trying to HIDE IN ME. If I fall asleep, I nearly suffocate on thick foreign bodies that think they're tiny enough to slip down my gullet.

The poison is everywhere. I'm weak, I can't stand on my own for long.

I wish it would just kill me already…

"Skitter, skitter, this one tastes bitter!"

TUNK… TUNK… TUNK…

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