Spraying For Bugs
Chapter Ten of The Troika
Their legs were old burnt matches.
Their legs were old burnt matches.
Their legs were old burnt matches.
Their arms were just the same.—Vachel Lindsay
It was 1997, and I was working for the city of Tucson as an exterminator. My life was fairly simple. I’d given up on being a man, and was trying to function as a public works vehicle.
I was south of downtown, driving the side streets around Stone, looking for an address. I watched for the numbers stenciled in yellow paint on the lampposts and checked them against my internal street map. My optics scanned the decaying city, translating walls and alleys, and dumpsters into vehicular simulation space. My tires rumbled over the sun-scorched gutter trash. My fender optics tracked the curbs. Traffic was sparse. There weren’t any pedestrians out, nor any drivers either. The city had grown nearly uninhabitable. The storm drains were choked, so the next winter flood would swamp the place and cripple city services for good. Piped water and wired power would recede into the fabled past. The more stubborn among the citizens were refusing to evacuate to the settlement camps. All the worse for them.
I came to Russell Avenue and braked at a stop sign beside a boarded-up library. I was the only vehicle in Tucson that still stopped for signs, but I’m a creature of habit, what can I do? A tow truck limped past me along Russell, dragging a sedan with no wheels. The tow truck had a flat. I turned onto Russell and proceeded south.
A year earlier I’d been the guidance brain in a trash truck. That was pleasant work, if you didn’t have a nose. But they ripped me out of that truck and wired me into this van. Well, ours not to reason why.
My six tires rattled over cracked cement. The pressure vent on my methanol tank was jammed, and my shock absorbers were a joke, but I was on the job, and that was what mattered to the City. I had a good spare tire but no jack. I’d lost a wiper blade, and when it rained, I compulsively dragged bare metal across my windshield. Also I talked to myself too much.
I had my service manual etched on my visual cortex—four volumes of theoretical perfection and zero tolerance schematics—no rust, no wear, no fraying cables. I used to read it in the back of my mind, for a laugh.
My only friend at this time was a municipal garage door opener who opened the door for me when I went out or came back. She told me that my problem was that I’d been a man, and now I expected too much. I wonder how she could tell.
I was driving through a city of people who stayed at home. They stayed indoors and watched television and gradually melted. That was the new virus, the melting. After they melted, ambulances with loud sirens would take their goo to the University Hospital to make sure they were dead. After they got certified, pickup trucks would haul barrels of them out to the cemetery on Oracle Drive. Then bulldozers covered them over, and then there were forms to fill out.
The city had been built by earthmovers and cement mixers and cranes. Humans could never have built it. Human could hardly live there. Humans grew buboes, sarcomas, and cysts there. Humans broke out in plastic sores, plague cankers, and growths without names there. Their wheat was full of wheat rust, no matter how their chemists poisoned it. Their water was full of cleaning supplies. If the poisons didn’t get them, they still had household pests to contend with. New improved mutant pests! Paper wasps from Chile. Amazonian jumping scorpions. Norwegian wheel bugs and killer isopods from the Malay. The humans had it tough. The ones with no houses to hide in would lock themselves in cars and starve there, or seal themselves into dumpsters with duct tape and suffocate. At least they didn’t have to worry about rats. The bugs had eaten all the rats.
But humans weren’t my job. My job was killing pests. You weren’t going to catch me catching any diseases. You’d never see me melting. Me and the digital clocks and VCRs were immune. God grants small favors for his chosen. Sometimes so small you need a microscope.
