My Interstellar Craft for a Bottle of DEET

They came, we think, in February. We don't know if it was the alien topography or the remoteness of the oil sands, but they were first seen skulking at the ice-crusted shores of the tailings ponds, stealing sulfur deposits and scraps of metal. At first we thought they were garter snakes afflicted with some terrible wasting disease, but garter snakes don't ball in masses like that on the surface. And they don't end in suction cups, either. We called them Kryptonites, after one roughneck came back to camp with a broken wrist and a wild expression: "I ain't had a drop t' drink tonight, but I swear I just got attacked by somebody's fuckin' bike lock!" When the name turned out to be more than a little prophetic, it became an awkward, nervous, self-deprecating in-joke. If they were Kryptonites, then we were Supermen. The character was, after all, Canadian in origin.

Bullets didn't work on them. Their tentacle-arm-appendage-whatever-the-fucks were too narrow to get a good bead on, and buckshot just bounced off. Michy took a shot at one with a .22, figuring that big knot in the middle was as good a centre of mass as any, and the bullet ricocheted into a stack of propane tanks. Left nothing worse than a nick in the paint on one, but after that we were told that anyone else taking a shot at one could expect to pack up their stuff and grab the first bus back to Fort Mac. Fair enough. If she couldn't plug one, the rest of us sure as shit weren't likely to. So we made sure we were always within reach of something heavy we could drop on them. It wouldn't stop them for long, just long enough to get some distance. We went back to work.

Then in May, there was The Fire. Our camp was far enough away, but the Kryptonites must have made their base near the heart of it, because about a week in they came swarming at us. Turns out we were no match for them in hand-to-cup combat either. It was like fighting an angry tangle of heavy-gauge chain wrapped in Kevlar. A few of the guys who trained MMA thought they had a shot, but how do you joint-lock something that's more or less all joints? The things didn't have eyes, but they quickly learned those suction cups fit perfectly over ours. Terry would have lost her left eye if she wasn't wearing contacts. We pushed it back in the socket, jumped in our trucks—even with only one working eye Terry wouldn't let anybody else drive hers, the stubborn bastard—and headed back to Fort Mac to evac with the rest. None of us were getting paid enough to deal with all this shit. I got a job at a foundry in town. Not much OT, but at least I had a job.

June came and went. In the first week of July they declared The Fire under control. Some of the crew went back to camp as soon as it was reopened. I stayed in the city until August before heading back up too. As unnerving as the Kryptonites were, I missed working outdoors. And my shop foreman was a fuckin' tool.

Turns out the Kryptonites ate metal, because the camp trailers had all these weird, circular bites out of their metal skins, all neat and tidy. But no spoor or dung or scat or whatever the biologists would call it. If they shit, they didn't do it where they ate. Or maybe they used the metal to build their nests, like leafcutter ants. Anyway, whatever they did with the metal, they seemed to be doing it somewhere else. There was work to be done, so I got to it.

A couple of weeks later, some RCs swung by camp. They were working with some soldiers from CFB Edmonton gonna sweep the burn looking for the last of the Kryptonites. They handed us some ,cards with cell numbers penned on the back, told us to call them if we saw anything.

"Eh, the last of?" Michy asked in her light Québécois lilt, once they'd left.

"I heard some fire spotters saw some lights floating up little more'n a week ago. Rangers found some sort of makeshift base in the middle of the burn, apparently deserted. They're gone, baby, gone." Terry winked at her, slowly, with her wonky eye. Physiotherapy, or something else?

An hour or so later, I heard a truck barreling up to the camp entrance. It was Terry's, but she was riding shotgun. Michy got out of the driver's seat. "Where is the card with the number for that Boeuf?! We caught one!"

"One what?" though I knew as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

"A fuckin' Kryptonite! Practically drove over the goddamn thing! It's sick, or hurt, so we threw it in my truckbox and locked it up!" Terry's eye darted excitedly.

Slowly, I followed Terry as she walked around, dropped the gate, and jumped into the bed. She unlocked the box and carefully lifted the lid. The thing squirmed weakly, and saliva started filling my mouth. I looked away for a moment and swallowed. Terry'd kill me if I barfed on her powdercoat.

"Did they always have those bumps?" Michy asked. I shook my head. I'd only seen a couple, but none of them had looked like that. Sure, they were kind of knobby, but their skin was smooth, and relatively taut. They looked kind of like the fingers of someone very old, if that someone had fingers three feet long, gunmetal gray skin, and double-jointed knuckles, fifty of 'em per finger. This thing looked like a plucked goose's neck, if a goose's neck was three feet long, gunmetal gray, and had fifty double-jointed knuckles. I swatted away a mosquito, and noticed three more.

"The fuck did these bugs come from all of a sudden?"

"Holy shit, it's a swarm!"

But they weren't biting us. Every mosquito within a click seemed to be converging on the Kryptonite. It writhed weakly, and then lay still. I almost felt sorry for the thing. Almost.

We watched as they covered the thing, a brownish, vibrating mass of wings. The hum alone set my teeth on edge. I jumped out of the truck bed. This time I wasn't sure I could hold back the hurl.

Michy looked first at me, and then to Terry. Her smile grew wide. "Maybe that's why they left: the mosquitoes. Imagine being made of ankles, and only having suction cups with which to scratch."