ATOMIC TALES – Strange Invaders #43: Deadly Locusts

Bluff City, Kansas (near Oklahoma) – Mid March

Agent One, Raymond “Ray” Tyler

“I’m tellin’ you, I never seen the like.” Rantz Brynner, a local farmer who was one of the strange disaster’s victims, shook his head and dug his toe into the Kansas dirt. “My whole field picked clean: not a stalk left. And my neighbors who were out workin’ the field… Just gone. I’m lucky I was visiting my sister over the border in Cherokee, or I mighta gone wherever they went. That’s why I’m meeting you fellers here in Bluff City. Just seeing that field now gives me the willies.”

Agents Four and Six and I stood at the edge of the small town with Brynner and gazed across the vast expanse of farmland west of us. The fields, largely planted with winter wheat, were already sprouting, and the warm spring air smelled of rich earth and fresh greenery.

“Tornado?” I suggested.

The farmer shook his head. “That’s what that reporter thought, too. But what kind of tornado just knocks over tractors and don’t toss ’em around, Agent Ray? What kind of twister strips the siding off a barn but leaves the big timbers standing?”

“No tornado I ever heard of.” Agent Four, Alec “Boom Boom” Murphy, scratched his head.

Agent Six, “Roughhouse” Rick Donlevy, laughed. “That’d be a trick even for an old demolitions man like you, Alec.”

Brunner frowned. “I seen tornadoes, but this is more like a wildfire ran through. Nothing burnt, though. I can’t figure it.”

“Don’t worry,” Roughhouse told him, “the U.S. Science Bureau is on the job.”

“We have experience in these kind of… situations,” I agreed. “But who’s this reporter you mentioned?”

“Some city gal. Toni… something. ‘Funny name for a woman,’ I said, but she told me she spelled it with an ‘i.’ Very nice. Good looker, too.” Brynner grinned at the memory.

Alec, Roughhouse, and I glanced at each other and all said the same thing: “Tanya.”

I cursed under my breath.

“Pardon?” Brynner asked.

“We’ve run into her before,” I explained.

Too many times, actually. When first we met, she was calling herself “reporter Tammy Rubens,” but she’s really a Russian spy named Tanya Ruhoff. She and her Soviet bosses were mixed up in this strange invasion, though how remained unclear. She’d eluded capture a couple of times.

“She still around?” Alec asked nonchalantly.

“Last I seen, she was headed out to the fields, ’bout an hour or so back.”

“Let’s go.” I jerked my thumb toward our agency Studebaker, and all three of us piled in. “Thanks, Mr. Brynner.”

I hit the gas and we zoomed away from town, headed for the denuded fields.

Noticing my white-knuckled grip, Alec chuckled. “You trying to choke that steering wheel to death or turn us into a road statistic, Ray?”

I eased off the accelerator. “Sorry.”

“It’s that Ruhoff dame showing up, isn’t it,” Roughhouse remarked. “Feels like those Russkies are always one step ahead.”

I relaxed my grasp on the steering wheel. “Which could mean they’re behind all this weirdness—despite Tanya’s denials.” I took a deep breath. “I better let Thirteen and Eighteen know what’s up.”

That morning, we’d been flown to a nearby airport by Agent Eighteen, David “the Kid” Daniels, so called because he didn’t even look old enough to drive, never mind fly. “Lucky” Lucy Ryan, Agent Thirteen, had flown escort in her Banshee. Since our recent run-in with flying giant ants, bureau planes always flew tandem.

Lucy’s confident voice came back loud and clear over our car’s two-way radio. “We’re refueled, Ray. I’ll grab Eighteen for my tail gunner and buzz up your way, just in case.”

“Roger, Thirteen. See you soon.” I’d be glad not only for the eyes in the sky, but also for the cargo in the A-24’s belly: Compound T, the agency’s newest weapon against the giant bug invasion.

Alec scanned the countryside through a pair of field glasses while I drove. “It must be that long bare patch ahead. Take your next right.”

I turned the Studebaker Champion onto the dirt road Four indicated.

“What’s that near Brynner’s field?” Roughhouse asked. “Low hills amid all this flat countryside? Weird. Some kind of berm, maybe?”

“We’ll find out soon enough.” I veered onto a farm trail angling toward our target.

We hadn’t driven too far down the rutted track when Alec yelled: “Ray, stop!”

I hit the brakes hard and skidded the Studebaker to a dusty halt. “What do you see, Alec?”

“That berm just moved.” Alec pointed and, sure enough, what had looked like just some kind of earthen barrier lurched and shook off its coating of dark prairie topsoil.

It was about half the size of our car, with a mottled brown and yellow armored shell, soulless black eyes, long antennae, and even longer hind legs.

Six’s jaw dropped. “A giant grasshopper!”

Not just one. As we watched, a whole troop of locusts emerged from the ground into the warm morning sunshine. Their tawny coloration mixed with the reddish local dirt gave them nearly perfect camouflage when burrowed in for the night.

The air filled with a weird, high-pitched keening, similar to giant insect communications we’d heard before.

In an instant, Six jumped out of the car and opened the trunk. “Grab your grease guns, gents! It’s time to rock this party!” He handed me and Alec our M3 submachine guns.

I shook my head. “We can’t fight these, Roughhouse. There are too many of them.” Already the huge insects crept our way, antennae twitching, mouth parts clicking hungrily, black eyes glaring. “Back in the car, both of you.”

Alec’s eyes narrowed as he fetched his pack stuffed with nefarious gear out of the back. “Maybe not, but we can slow them down. Rick, hand me that jerrycan.”

Roughhouse did.

“What’s your plan?” I asked.

“Drive along that creek bed. I’ll sit in the trunk and lay out a trail of gas and some stuff I brought with me. We’ll set a blaze to discourage them until Thirteen gets here.”

“Check.” I hopped into the car.

Roughhouse joined me. “I hope you know what you’re doing.” he said to Alec.

The bureau’s pyrotechnic specialist merely laughed.

He didn’t laugh long, though, because now that they’d warmed up, the locusts shambled toward us—fast. The only thing that slowed them was pausing to eat everything in their way. It looked almost like sheep stripping the landscape clean in an old Tex Avery cartoon.

I drove along the bumpy dry creek as fast as I could, while Four laid down the fuel for his little surprise and Six radioed our position to air support.

“Heavy static, but I think I got through,” Roughhouse announced. “How we doing?”

“Haven’t dumped Alec off the back yet.”

“I’m lighting it!” Boom Boom shouted from the rear. “Drive fast and hang on.”

FWOOSH!

The whole creek bed lit up like the climax of a Fourth of July celebration.

I gunned the Studebaker away from the fireworks just as Lucky Lucy’s Banshee blitzed over the swarm, dropping a load of Compound T bug bombs.

All of us whooped as the Teragon’s caustic spray filled the air, and the locusts started dissolving like snow on a summer’s day. The air stank of gasoline, gunpowder, and the vinegar odor of Compound T—an odd smell for victory, but I’d take it. I brought the car to a halt so we could watch the beginning of the end.

As the bugs died, Lucy’s voice blared over our now-static-free radio:

“Not to cut the celebration short, but the Kid’s spotted a late model blue Chevy Bel Air hightailing it from the disaster area toward Oklahoma on the county road west of you. Looks suspicious.”

“On it,” I called back. “Hop in, Alec—and hang on!”

A cloud of reddish dust billowed into the late morning air as we ripped out of the field and down the road in hot pursuit.

Between strafing runs to clean up the remaining locusts, Lucy and the Kid radioed directions.

The flat fields of Kansas and Oklahoma left our quarry very little place to hide from our 8-cylinder pursuit car, but the Chevy might have eluded us when it ditched into a tree-lined stream bed if not for our eyes in the sky.

Weirdly, our radio conked out again as we approached.

Four, Six, and I piled out of the Studebaker, grease guns aimed at the Chevy and ready to sing.

“Come out with your hands up!” I barked. “You can’t get away, Tanya!”

The Russian agent sheepishly emerged from the driver’s seat, her hands raised. The blue dress she wore looked familiar, but the short blonde hair was new.

She muttered a curse. “It was the car, wasn’t it? I knew I should have dumped the damn Chevy ages ago, but… Low on funds.”

“Fleeing the disaster scene was pretty conspicuous, too.” Roughhouse grinned, and so did Alec. Both seemed almost as pleased to catch the spy as I was.

“I liked your old look better,” I noted, indicating her hair style.

“I liked it better when we were on the same side, Ray.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Tanya. We were never on the same side.”

“Then I liked you better when we weren’t at odds all the time.”

Part of me wanted to say “Me, too,” but I resisted. She held out her wrists and I slapped on a pair of cuffs, while Roughhouse held a gun on her.

Alec checked her car. “Hey, get a load of this…” he said, cracking open the Chevy’s trunk.

Roughhouse swore. “A baby locust!”

“Explains our recent radio interference,” Alec mused. “The Teragons will be happy to get this baby back to the lab.”

I eyed Tanya, but she remained cool, as always. “A pet for your Soviet masters? Or the seed for the scheme we just stopped?”

“I’ve told you, Ray, we’re not behind this…”

My eyes narrowed. “Well, whether you are or not, one thing’s for sure: Tanya Ruhoff, by the power invested in me by the U.S. government and the USSB, I am placing you under arrest.”

THE END

About “Deadly Locusts”

More giant bugs?! What a surprise!

Ha ha. No. Clearly not.

Hopefully by now you know there will be a lot of giant insects in this series, even as we draw closer to the final Earth-shattering climax.

And yes, I believe I will be making tributes to every oversized bug movie that I’ve ever loved before this Strange Invaders set of stories is over.

This episode is obviously a tribute to The Beginning of the End, the giant grasshopper film made by the late, great Bert I. Gordon (a.k.a. Mr. BIG). It’s another film that I love unreservedly, despite having enough cheese in it to be an early—and very popular—topic for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I don’t even mind the “postcard” cutouts of buildings standing in for actual Chicago landmarks as locusts crawl all over the “city.” It’s all good to me!

Farmer Rantz Brynner is probably some kind of tribute name, but at the moment I don’t remember for what or who, as I can’t find anyone like that in the cast or the characters of the film.

I’d wanted to make the bug fight in this episode longer, but I had a lot of other story that I needed to cram in, too.

Now the long chase is finally over, and reporter Tammy Rubens, a.k.a. Soviet spy Tanya Ruhoff, is in U.S. Science Bureau custody.

(And in case I didn’t mention it recently, the name “Ruhoff” is totally a tribute to Gwen Ruhoff, the actress who brilliantly portrays agent-in-training Gigi Brock in the audio versions of Atomic Tales.)

How do you like our spy? Ray seems conflicted in his feelings What about you?

And will Tanya have any useful information for our harried heroes?

Stay tuned to find out!