It seemed like such a nice pumpkin, the perfect type for making a jack-o-lantern.   In that first week of October, my wife Jennifer and I were driving home from the store when we saw the old man by the side of the road.  We had never seen him there before, but he had an impressive display of pumpkins for sale so we stopped and bought one.  It seemed like such a nice pumpkin, and for a couple of days it was.

“George, come quick!” Jennifer shouted.

            I found her standing on the front porch, staring at the pumpkin we had bought two days earlier.

“Something just came out of the pumpkin, “she said, visibly shaken.

            I looked at the pumpkin and saw a hole the size of a quarter in its skin.  The hole appeared to go down deep into the vegetable’s innards.  As I watched, something began to poke out of another spot on the pumpkin and then emerge into the afternoon light.  For a moment, I thought it was a cockroach, it was the right size and color, but then I noticed its large pincers and assumed it to be some sort of beetle.  A third hole began to form, and then a fourth.  The whole pumpkin was infested.  The bugs, perhaps as many as fifty, darted away as soon as they had emerged, moving too quickly to inspect in detail.  When the last one had gone, the pumpkin looked deflated.  With the sheer number of holes in it, the pumpkin would be of no use for anything now.  Out of curiosity, I cut open the top and found the gourd almost completely hollow.  More disturbingly, the insides seemed rotten.

            Over the next few days, we caught sight of the bugs again and again.  At first, we only saw them outside, but it wasn’t long before they started to appear in the house.  I tried to look the insects up online, but only found articles on squash bugs and spider mites living in pumpkins, neither of which matched the creatures I had seen.  Still, I wasn’t sure there was any reason to be concerned.

                        Then, one night, Jennifer shook me awake.

“Wake up.” She prodded me, “I felt one crawling on me just now.”

            She had managed to shoo the bug off of her, but the incident had distressed her.

“I’ll call an exterminator first thing in the morning,” I said.

            I drifted back asleep, but woke again an hour later.  This time, it wasn’t my wife, but my own sense of something crawling on my right arm.  Before I could even react, I felt a sharp pain where the bug had been crawling.  Reaching for the light, I found a layer of skin missing from a spot on my arm, presumably torn off by the bug which was now scurrying away.  I cursed, but not seeing any blood I decided to go back to sleep.

            The next morning I woke up and called an exterminator.  I then went to the bathroom to inspect my wound from the night before.  The spot where I had been bitten looked darker now, so I assumed there was more to the bite than I had previously realized, and that it might be infected.  I cleaned the wound and put a bandage on it and hoped that would be enough.

            Remarkably, I had managed to get a same-day appointment with the exterminator.  The truck pulled up late morning, and a man walked up to our door.  His nametag said his name was Wes.

“You’re lucky you called when you did.  We’ve gotten a dozen calls since yours, all about the same bugs.  If you’d called later, you’d have to wait a day or two,” Wes explained.

“So, do you know what the bugs are?” I asked.

“Not a clue.  From your description and others, we couldn’t figure anything out. But…” Wes tapped the canister of poison he brought with him, “Whatever they are, this’ll kill ‘em.  You don’t have any pets right?”

“Not currently.”

“Good.  I’d also advise you guys to stay out of the house for a few hours.”

            Knowing this, Jennifer and I went out to lunch after the exterminator had left.  We went to a café near our house and ordered food and drinks.  Mr. Browning, the old man who owned the café, noticed the bandage on my arm.

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“Let me guess.  You bought one of those pumpkins from that weird old merchant?” Browning asked.

“Yeah.  You too?”

“Seems like half the neighborhood did.  Bite hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.  It didn’t look so bad last night, but now…”

“Has it started to rot yet?” He asked.

“Rot?” Jennifer’s eyes widened.

“Yeah.  Kinda like those spider bites.  The skin gets all dead and stuff,” the café owner explained, “I guess it hasn’t yet.”

            I ran to the bathroom and pulled off the bandage.  Sure enough, the area had turned gray and disgusting, much like of a brown recluse spider-bite.  It no longer hurt, but itched like poison ivy.  I put the bandage back on and returned to my wife, having lost all appetite.

“It’s pretty bad,” I told her.

“You should call Dr. Carpenter and have it looked at,” Jennifer advised me.

            I took her advice and made an appointment with the doctor when we got home.  We didn’t see any of the bugs for the rest of the day, but soon we began to spot them again.  Two days after the exterminator’s visit, I met with Dr. Carpenter.  He told me he’d seen several bites like mine in the past week, but that all he could really do was prescribe some broad spectrum antibiotics and hope for the best.  On the third day, the insects made their next move.

            I woke up that morning and went to the kitchen for some breakfast. What I found was that every piece of fruit in the house had holes in it, and upon closer examination what was left of the insides was rotten.  The bugs had gotten to all of it.  Not only that, but boxes and bags of dry goods had been torn into, with their contents scattered around.  So far, the mites hadn’t eaten anything in the house, and I’d assumed they were living off of plants.  With the half-eaten fruit and pointlessly destroyed foods, something about this felt more like an act of vengeance than hunger.  I shook the idea off as soon as it had occurred to me.  Bugs didn’t have the capacity for calculated revenge.

            Over the next week or so, Jennifer and I tried just about every commercially available method of pest control we could find, though the shelves of every store had already been cleared of most pest control products.  As it turned out, not a single roach motel or over-the-counter poison worked on the insects.  More of the bugs seemed to be showing up now.  One day, Jennifer opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink and found the walls black with the pests.  This did make them easier to kill by hand, at least.  When there was only one of the bugs running around, they were too fast to swat; but when there were dozens, it was easy to get one or two before the rest got away.  Both of us also found several more necrotic bites as time passed.

            The first death in the community came in mid-October.  Old Mr. Browning’s café had been closed for a couple of days, and no one we talked to knew why.  Finally, his son came to town, worried because he hadn’t heard from his father.  What the younger Browning found in his father’s home was a corpse, half-eaten and decayed beyond all recognition.   Even though Mr. Browning had only been dead a few days, his corpse looked as if it had been lying undiscovered for months.  Like the other things the mysterious pests had consumed, his body had rotted unnaturally quickly.  Tiny holes covered the body, where the bugs had burrowed through, eating their fill.

            After Browning’s death, public alarm increased.  Jennifer and I decided to call the exterminator again, but were told it would be December before they could send anyone out, and that they couldn’t guarantee any of their treatments would work on the bugs.  With no other options, we began to adjust our lifestyle around the mites.  At night, we stayed under our blankets, completely covered, to discourage the insects from crawling on us or biting us in our sleep.  We started keeping all our food in either the fridge or metal containers that the bugs couldn’t pierce.  Still, they must have been finding food somewhere, as they kept multiplying.

            A few more deaths were reported in our neighborhood, always a single person, no family or roommate living with them, always half eaten and rotten.  Much of our local plant life started to die out as well, as the bugs fed on parts of it and left it to rot.  No one could explain how the bugs worked exactly, but wherever they ate decay seemed to follow.

            They eventually made it into the fridge.  I’m sure how they did it, but the pests managed.  It seemed like nowhere was safe for our food, or for us.  The insects kept finding new places to hide and attack from.  Our neighbors reported similar problems, and nobody seemed to have any luck keeping the bugs at bay for long.

            Eventually, we reached a breaking point.  It happened one day when I opened a cabinet in our kitchen, and bugs came pouring out onto me.  There seemed to be at least a hundred of them, spilling out from above.  I let out a scream.  If Jennifer hadn’t been there, I probably would have joined Mr. Browning and the others in death.

“What the hell?” Jennifer yelled, running towards me, “Get off of him!”

            Jennifer ran towards me, swatting at the bugs.  Between the two of us, we managed to knock most of them off and chase them away, but I definitely had a few more bites than before.  The bugs scurried off as they hit the floor, returning to their hiding places.

“George.  We can’t keep doing this.” Jennifer said, “We need to leave.  At least until someone finds a way to deal with these things.”

            And so, on October 31st, Halloween, we packed our bags and abandoned our home.  We always intended to go back, but I doubt we ever will.  A few days after we left, the entire neighborhood was evacuated.  Some government agency blocked off the area, citing a dangerous invasive species as the reason.  They’ve attempted to stop the bugs from spreading to other areas, and so far they’ve been successful in slowing them down.  However, I’ve heard rumors from other neighbors about the bugs popping up elsewhere, and I know why.

            That first night away from home, Jennifer and I stayed in a cheap hotel before heading to stay with family.  I’ve never told anyone this, but when I opened my suitcase, I saw a few of those bugs climb out and scurry away.  When the government was evacuating people, they were very thorough to make sure none of the pests snuck out with the civilians.  But, for those of us who left earlier, no such precautions were taken.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who made this mistake, who helped spread this blight to other areas, but that doesn’t absolve me of my guilt.  I know for a fact that whatever terror this infestation brings, it was partially my fault.