By the time the nest exploded, Stan Barrimore was already well on his way. He didn't need to see the fireworks to know the battle was won. The wasps were dead, so let that fussy old bat Mrs. Miller sort their little corpses out. Or whatever remained of them, anyway. Stan had his cheque, that was all that mattered. Money in the bank.
   The explosive charge he'd used was a little thing he'd dreamed up; partly based on a Standard firework, partly a home-made variant of napalm with some detergent to help it spread. Okay, the old bint's garden probably would take a little time to recover from the devastation, but a scorched-earth policy was better by far than letting that particular strain of wasp thrive. Nasty bastards, filled to turgidity with neurotoxic venom; you could actually see the poison leaking from their barbed stings.
   Stan surveyed the road through his wrap-around shades and let the sounds of Jefferson Airplane's 'House at Pooneil Corners' take the place of his tendency towards road rage. The  song's reference to Ionesco's 'Rhinoceros' often calmed him down; Stan found that if he  viewed the rest of the human race as lumbering beasts then he was halfway to a Zen state.
   Drugs helped.
   He hated driving, hated it almost as much as he hated bugs, but Davis was refusing to drive these days and Stan needed wheels to get about. Davis was suffering from a bit of an insect freak-out after their last job, and that was inextricably linked to the process of driving so it was going to be a while before he got in the driver's seat again.
   Stan would have laughed if it hadn't meant he'd have to drive everywhere.
   Still, it was a lovely day; the windows were open; the Airplane were rocking and a colony of wasps had just bit the big one; so Stan couldn't really complain. Fat cheque in pocket; old spinster screwed up by insect mutation; two more calls to answer; two more fat cheques waiting.
   He cranked up the vox and lit up a number.
   Insect assassin and Thai grass., working together in perfect harmony.
   Smooth and groovy.
   He checked his map and made a rude right turn in front of a sports car that wanted more of the road than it deserved. Stan flipped the driver the bird as he cut the Ferrari Testostorosa up. Fucking flash Harry. Was going to end up doing a James Dean one day. As if Stan cared.
   He located the address he needed and wheel-span into their drive. Gravel sprayed all ways. Stan French-smoked and then stubbed the joint. Killed the CD and scratched his balls. Liked it so much he scratched some more.
   The house was a large mock-Georgian affair: a box with windows. Stan gave it a once over, and that was once more than it deserved. There was nothing there to hook the eye, nothing there period. Just bland brick and wasted effort. Stan had always held the belief that wealthy people ought to be made to take courses in aesthetics. He still had to find evidence that changed that view.
   As he walked towards the front door he put his arms into the overall-top that was hanging from his waist. He buttoned it up over his vast upper body, breathing in as if that could  possibly help the process.
   There was an ornate bell on the door and Stan knew it would play some nasty little tune so  instead he knocked, hard, and waited.
   And waited.
   And some more.
   Then he knocked again.
   And then gave in and rang the bell.
   'Greensleeves' rang out. Stan shook his head and sighed deeply.
   The bell protocol attended to, the denizens of the box deigned to answer. They rumbled in the hallway and then drew back two bolts, unhooked a chain and twisted two door knobs.
   Security nut. Great.
   The door opened.
   The man in the doorway was tall and lean with a gaunt face and deep-set eyes. His eyebrows had lost the ability to grow gracefully and had started reaching up towards a receding hairline, as if in a vain attempt to make up the shortfall.
   Stan smiled up at him.
   "Stan Barrimore," he said, "Exterminator."
   The man blinked down at him.
   "Marcus Holme," the tall man said, "Glad you could come."
   Stan nodded.
   "Wasps is it?" Stan enquired.
   The tall man nodded.
   "In the back garden. A huge nest. My ... daughter was stung. She ... isn't well."
   It was Stan's turn to nod again.
   "Sounds like the fire-wasp. Fever?"
   "102 degrees."
   "It'll break about one-oh-five," Stan reassured the man, "Wasp-based hallucinations?"
   "She sees them crawling everywhere. Can you do anything?"
   "Not for her, but I can kill the nest."
   "That would be ideal. I hate them. It's like having a ticking time bomb in the garden. Margery is too scared to even hang the washing out."
   "I'm not surprised, I'd be scared too. Take me to them. I take MasterCard." Stan ventured a smile.
   Marcus Holme just stared at him as if he had just grown another head.
  How come the rich got so embarrassed talking about money, as if it was something dirty that they didn't wish to discuss with the likes of him? He could feel the man's distaste emanating in waves from his eyes. Or maybe the grass was kicking in hard.
   "Shall we?" Stan prompted and the man seemed to snap to and he nodded vigorously.
   "Please."
   "I'll get some shit out of the van and be with you in three."
  Stan delighted in the way his expletive got the guy's back to set ram-rod straight, making him a good three or four inches taller. Haemorrhoidal wanker, Stan thought, already adding some cash onto his final bill.
   He went back to the van, pulled out his explosives bag, and joined Marcus Holme.

The back garden was a football pitch without the markings. Vast and flat and manicured. Striped pattern on the lawn. Plus a few scattered apple trees. And some truly vile garden gnomes. And a love-seat that was as tacky an artefact as Stan had seen for a long, long while. Skulking just inside the back-door was a timorous woman who looked to be the exact opposite of her husband. Small, dumpy, googly-eyed. And a full head of hair. Looked like a muppet Jim Henson rejected for going beyond the bounds of puppet decency.
   Or maybe the Thai grass was talking.
   Stan shrugged.
   "I don't see the nest," he said, "Is it over there by the shed?"
   He pointed at a small, ramshackle construction at the far end of the garden.
   He heard Marcus issue a deep sigh.
   "Look again," he said, "That is the nest."
   Stan's eyebrows raised and he actually had to study the guy's face to make sure he wasn't putting him on. Holme's face showed no trace of humour, just fear. Stan let out a whistle of disbelief.
   "Fucking hell," Stan said, "That is a big nest."
   "A fucking big nest," Holme agreed, glumly and this time a self-issued expletive caused him to lose the three or four inches he'd gained last time to a defeated slump.
   "Why didn't you call me earlier?" Stan asked, "I mean when the thing was still semi- detached?"
   Marcus Holme just stared at him with those sunken eyes of his and Stan found himself wondering if the man's eyes had been this hollow before the arrival of the wasp-house.
   "It's new," he said, finally, "The first we saw of it was yesterday. We were in the garden the day before and there was no sign of it."
   Stan looked at the nest and shook his head.
   "That's impossible," he said, "They can't build that fast."
   "Oh but they did, Mister Barrimore."
   "Call me Stan."
   Holme shrugged.
   "Can you still do anything?"
   "Only wipe them off the face of the planet. Will that be sufficient?"
   Holme smiled and nodded.
   "I think that would be ideal. Stan."
   "Well wait here, I need to go back to the van." he indicated the case in his hand, "Need a bigger bag."
   As Stan made his way back he entertained a momentary thought of getting in the van and getting the hell out of there.
   "Ah, fuck it." he said out loud, "What's life without challenges?"
   Knowing what the answer was. Easy.

He didn't want to take any chances, and blowing up something that size was impractical, so he took out a tube of poison, took off his shades and donned some protective gear. Thick boiler suit: extra large; thicker gloves; no openings; beekeeper's helmet. Davis always said that he looked like the Michelin man in the suit, but then Davis was a quivering nancy-boy losing the plot over a few spiders, so who was he to comment?
   Then Stan fumbled around in a chaotic sack of prototype chemicals and came out with something that resembled a diver's oxygen tank with a spray-head protruding from a length of hose.  He strapped it onto his back with some army webbing and tightened it until it hurt.
   As Stan stepped from the van he had a moment's thought that he was, as he so often was these days, getting in over his head here. The nest he had been brought here to destroy was, as he had told his client, utterly impossible. Wasps didn't work that fast or build that big. So he was dealing with another bloody mutated strain, that was as plain as the gauze on his face.
   Stan Barrimore had a knack for walking into jobs that would turn any other exterminator's shit green. This past Summer alone had seen five mutant vectors, one of which had very nearly cost him his life. Okay, he'd got laid as well, but even that memory was marred by the horrific events that had followed at the house of Oscar Finalyson. He still woke up sweating from dreams of fleas, and Davis -before his spider experience- had teased him about what he had been doing that night.
   Stan ran over the suit again to double check there were no weak spots that would allow insects egress; the last things he wanted were fire-wasp hallucinations or fire-wasp fever.
   Satisfied his defences were sound, he picked up the canister of poison and made his way back to the garden.
Holme had taken up a cautious position next to his wife. In the house. From this distance he looked uncannily like Jack Skellington from the film 'The Nightmare Before Christmas.' Stan checked the hose and nozzle of the canister, waved a perfunctory wave and set off for the end of the garden.

The Summer heat beat down on him, made almost unendurable by the protective suit. He was sweating profusely, and only some of that sweat was attributable to the heat. The fact was he was feeling no small amount of fear, but fear was okay if you didn't let it consume you -memo to Davis- because you could use it to give yourself an edge. Fear went hand and hand with caution, and caution was a good friend of survival. Of course if caution caught survival holding hands with fear there might be some friction, but friction and fear were good enough buddies they could probably calm caution down. If they didn't violence might ensue, and violence was a friend of no one.
   No one but stoned, overweight insect exterminators.
   But it was hot.
   And he was a little scared.
   Some wasps were great builders; a genetic predisposition towards architecture that made most human architects seem ineffectual and wasteful. These fuckers had to be a colony of Frank Lloyd Wrights though. It was an astonishing structure. Truly breath-taking. And the last thing Stan needed was his breath being taken; walking in the heat in a big suit took quite enough, thank you very much.
   He approached it slowly, checking the nozzle on the canister, making sure there were no loose scouts from the nest patrolling the outside of it. He knew that many species of wasp wouldn't attack unless the cells of the nest were filled with eggs, and Stan was reasonably certain that that wasn't possible -the nest hadn't been up long enough- but there was always the outside chance that these wasps hadn't read the rule book. Dale Carnegie's 'How to Sting Friends and Influenz People' might have been their required reading, rather than Hoyle's.
   The nest was unlike any Stan had seen before, and that wasn't simply the matter of scale. There was an almost mathematical complexity to the structure that struck a bum note somewhere in Stan's mind and made him once more consider turning tail and fleeing. He looked around at where Jack Skellington and Mrs. Muppet watched him from behind glass. He nodded his helmet at them and turned back to the nest. God, it gave him the creeps. And it was going to cost the odd couple, cost them dear.
   Standing next to it, Stan felt a moment of awe and terror, commingled into what Edmund Burke called 'The Sublime' but was actually more accurately summed up in the phrase 'sphincter-tightening'.  Okay, it might not sound so grand, but Stan was touching cloth and he had always despised Burke's taxonomic anality in his 'Philosophical Enquiry', so fuck it.
   His gloved hand touched the surface of the structure and ran against its textured grain, dislodging a few papery flakes. The industry that had gone into it! It was mind-defying!
   To build a nest, wasps needed to gather materials to make pulp; but this much pulp? How many were there in there? Wasps gathered pulp from any source they could -cardboard, trees, grass, weeds, reeds- and it was done by efficacious use of the mandibles, rasping the source for strips of usable material. Then it was rolled into a ball and transported back to the building site. And that was only half of the job done. Then it had to be applied to the nest, pasted into place with vomited water, tamped into place with the mandibles; uniform thickness was achieved by diligent labour and more work from the mandibles.
   The point was that all took time. Lots of time. Lots of raw materials. And a whole shit-load of wasps.
   Stan put the canister of poison down and checked the nest for holes and fissures. Close-up it didn't look like a shed, it was so much better built than that. There were no nail entry marks, no splits, no gaps he could see. The surface was rough, but looked organic, looked designed. As much as he despised the things inside, Stan couldn't help but admire their DIY project.
   He wondered how many garden enthusiasts would really bother with sheds if they had to go down to the garden centre, roll up a tiny bit of wood, take it home, vomit on it, tamp it into place and then go back for the next bit. Not many. Surely.
   Stan checked the spray-nozzle and made sure the tank on his back was switched to dispense the plastic solution he had developed for jobs such as this. Well, smaller ones than this, but he was confident there would be sufficient liquid to cover the nest. He twisted the nozzle and, starting at the base, methodically worked around the nest, making sure that not a single square millimetre was left untreated. It took an awful long time and the heat was oppressive, and the plastic solution clogged up his lungs, but when he was satisfied that he had completed the task he switched off the spray and retired to a position a few yards back and took off the tank. Next the helmet. Then the suit. Then he took a fat cigar out of his overall pocket and lit it with a Ronson lighter.
   Marcus Holme joined him and pointed at the now-shiny structure.
   "Is that it?" he asked hopefully.
   Stan shook his head.
   "That's half the job," he replied, exhaling a cloud of smoke that made Holme turn his face, "All I've done so far is seal the suckers in. Put 'em under house arrest. In ten minutes that coat I sprayed on the nest will set as hard as Tupperware. They won't be going anywhere soon, trust me."
   Holme looked bemused by this and voiced his concern.
   "So they're still alive in there?  I don't think I like the idea of them being in there. I mean they must get a bit angry. What if they find a way out?"
   Stan blinked at Holme.
   "I'm sorry, I thought I told you. That's half the job done. The next stage is the crucial one." He hefted the canister of poison in his fat hands and smiled a fat smile.
   "Toxic gas, makes Zyklon B look like Glade air-freshener. Luckily it'll be sealed up in there with the wasps, so don't worry. I just have to jack it into the nest and turn it on and it's adios muchachos."
   "You're sure?"
   "Of course. It's my job."
   "Thank God," Holme nodded over at the muppet in the conservatory who gave him an over- exuberant thumbs-up.
   Then Holme's face frosted over and took a serious cast.
Ask how much it's going to cost, Stan thought.
   "How much is all this going to cost?"
   Down to the nitty and the gritty, Stan put his shades back on so Holme couldn't see the lies in his eyes, puffed on his cigar before he made his pitch.
   "These materials don't come cheap," he admitted, "And my time even less so. I invented this process, any other pest controller would have used some pusillanimous mass-produced preparation, charged you through the teeth, and then still would have had the temerity to charge you extra when the problem recurred. Eighteen hundred pounds also buys my guarantee. It's a steal, Mister Holme; now shall I proceed?"
   Holme stood and Stan Barrimore could almost hear the whirr of cogs inside that balding head of his. But Holme nodded.
   "Anything. Just get rid of them."
   That's what they all say, Stan thought, smiling inwardly, even if they're a colony of fleas pretending to be human.
   "Well it'll still be a while before I can begin the Final Solution," Stan said, "Suppose a cup of coffee's not out of the question?"
   Holme left worrying at his lip with his teeth.
Gotcha, Stan thought.
   "Eight sugars," he called after him, "Got to look after my figure."

He drilled a hole into the nest, put the tube in, wadded around the hole with plastic gum and turned the nozzle full on. The gas hissed into the nest and Stan stood back and checked that no gas was escaping. As usual a perfect seal. He took the piss out of Mrs. Muppet's thumbs-up to Holme and waited for vespid cleansing to ensue.
   Every year seemed to bring with it a new theme to its insect incursions, and this year was no exception. The red and black fire-wasps had been around for a couple of summers, but this year they seemed to have gained a foothold in the ecology and were thriving. This nest was proof positive of just how well they had adapted to the British climate.
   Fire-wasps came from South America, or so the Min of Ag, Fish and Food would have it. Stan thought it more likely they started in Porton Down, or some other laboratory, and he was sick of blaming the rain-forests for each and every new species that arrived. Something about this wasp's venom made that very difficult to believe. It attacked the central nervous system, just like many insect venoms, but it also did something to the chemical structure of the brain. Repetitive hallucinations followed a sting, the more stings the nastier the visions. Twenty stings meant death, but that was a release from the vile images that would churn through the mind before the nervous system shut down.
   Stan had taken a sting in the ball of the thumb the year before and the most extreme case of Eckbom's Syndrome had resulted. He saw wasps everywhere, grubs too. Wriggling at the peripheries of his vision, passing in and out of his skin, on the surface of his eyes, issuing from the site of the wound by the legion. The fever had been terrifying, too. It was a dry fever, the body refused to sweat it out, and it had felt like he was about to spontaneously combust with the heat it generated.
   One tiny sting had taken a good six days to work out of his system.
   He pitied Holme's daughter for the experience she must be undergoing.
   When the cylinder was empty the hissing stopped and he was able to hear the sounds of the wasps inside dashing against the inside of the nest. Then a frantic
tick tick
 sound as the wasps started chewing at the walls of their home. As Stan watched the first dozen or so sets of mandibles broke through the wall of the nest, twitching madly. But they couldn't break through the plastic skin and it enraged them. Stan was glad the skin was so tough, these hombres were pretty fucking furious.
   He watched as the gas gathered around them.
   Watched as the struggles got less and less insistent.
   Smiled as the fuckers died.
   Waited five minutes then made out the invoice.

He jerked off to 'Anal Manor 4' and starched his sheets some more.  Dyko-bitch from hell had been dildoing some vampiric cooze, but semen spent there seemed little point in watching any more. Watching porn films for the plot was like watching the news for objective coverage of world affairs. He supposed 'Anal Manor 4' had a little Post-Modernist quiddity: pastiche, reality into image, simulacra and a sense of itself as movie, but he'd watched it to get off and even though Post-Modern theorising had a lot in common with the act he'd just performed, he couldn't take it seriously. So he killed the picture and lay there, staring at the ceiling.
   The phone rang.
   "Talk," Stan barked into the mouthpiece.
   "Stan," Davis said, "Are you in for visitors?"
   Stan sighed.
   "Okay."
   There was a knock at the door. Fucking Davis and his fucking mobile phone. Stan blotted himself with tissues, sprayed a bit of deodorant about to mask the smell and answered the door.
   Davis stepped inside and waved his hand in front of his face.
   "You been wanking in here?" he asked.
   "Fuck off," Stan replied, displaying wit that Oscar Wilde would have been proud of.
   "Easy tiger," Davis said, "I was joking."
   "Hmmm. Memo to Davis. Remind him that one of the prerequisites of the joke is for it to contain a single iota of humour. What do you want?"
   Davis sat himself down on Stan's sofa-bed and attempted a smile.
   "I've been thinking."
   "Steady on there."
   "No, really. I've been thinking about coming back to work."
   Stan blundered over to the fridge and pulled out a couple of cans of beer and handed one to Davis, popped the other himself. He sat down opposite Davis and fixed him with a sceptical look.
   "You're a nervous wreck, Davis. Take some more time."
   Davis shook his head.
   "No, really Stan, I'm over it."
   "Until the next spider, mate. Then you'll freak again."
   "I won't."
   "Do you want a glass for that?" Stan enquired as a ruse, didn't wait for an answer, moved into the kitchenette, got a glass and something else and mooched back. He handed Davis the glass and put the something on Davis' shoulder. Davis screamed and flapped at his shoulder and the tomato-top got dislodged and fell onto the bed looking green, shrivelled and utterly un-scary.
   Stan pointed at it.
   "It's a fucking tomato," he said, "Are you really ready to come back?"
   Davis looked on the verge of tears.
   "You utter, utter bastard," he muttered, "I just wasn't expecting it, that's all."
   "Yeah, well, lucky for you spiders send calling cards in advance these days to give you time to prepare for their arrival. Now are you seriously trying to tell me you're over it?"
   Davis slumped a little.
   "Well apart from the spiders, Stan. Look, if you've got a job going that isn't arachnid in origin I'm your man."
   Stan looked up to the ceiling, pretending it was the heavens.
   "Please?"
   Stan sat down next to him.
   "Look," he said, "I've got the clean-up to do on a fire-wasp extermination tomorrow. Take sections of nest, make sure the inhabitants have checked out. Are you up to assisting?"
   "Of course, thanks Stan."
   "No. Listen to the question. Are you up to it?"
   "I am. Wasps ... pah."
   "Fire-wasps, Davis, and I don't like this nest."
   "The queen won't put out? Must be losing your touch."
   Stan sighed. Humour was one of those defence mechanisms that often covered over fuck-ups waiting to happen.
   "This nest it's ... well it's big. Huge. Impossibly huge. It might not be the easy ride you're hoping for to get you back into the saddle."
   "I don't want an easy ride. I just don't want spiders. I'll be fine."
   "Just make sure you are, buddy boy. Nothing's easy in an insect nation."
   "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah," Davis sang.
   "Cute," Stan said, "Now are you going to drink that beer, or are you just waiting for it to go flat. It'd match your singing."
   So they drank beer.

Holme's wife answered Stan's insistent knock.
   "Yes?" she tremored.
   Close up she looked worse than ever. A lot of fluff stuck to her face; top lip, on her strawberry nose, tufting out of her ears, decorating the half-dozen moles she had thrusting out of her puffy skin. Stan and Davis exchanged a look.
   "We're here to finish the job." Stan said.
   Muppet looked confused.
   "Aren't they dead?"
   "Yes, but we've got to take down the nest."
   "Please, just finish them off."
   Stan nodded.
   "How's the girl?" he asked.
   "I'm sorry?"
   "Your daughter. Your husband said she was stung, that she had a fever. How is she doing?"
   Stan hadn't realised Mrs. Holme was on the brink of tears, but his questioning showed him that she had been. Her face sagged and her bugging-out eyes grew wet.  Her mouth made a down-turned crescent, then lost even that shape and became a loose bag of flesh and wrinkles.  She swayed in the doorway as if about to faint. Stan wished he hadn't bothered asking.
   "I'm sorry," he consoled, "Shall we just get to work?"
   The woman shook her head.
   "It's me who should be sorry," she confessed, "Look at me ...."
   She brushed at her cheeks with her sleeve.
I'd rather not, Stan thought.
   "It's just that Lauren isn't doing too well. The doctor says she will recover, but it doesn't make it any easier. She cries all the time, but no tears come out. I ... I ... oh god."
   Davis stepped forward and put his arm around her.
   "It'll be fine," he said.
   "I got stung by one myself once," Stan soothed, "She'll be fine."
   "The things she sees ..." the woman spluttered, "She talks about it, you know."
   "I know. I know."
   Davis furrowed his brow at Stan. The woman was leaking on him.
   "Let's go and take 'em out," Stan said.
   After a few minutes Mrs. Holme let them.

The procedure was simple. With a hand-held coring drill, Stan cut a section through the wall of the nest and drew out a sample. He was in full protective regalia, and Davis was standing behind him with a ready-glued plastic sheet so when the extraction was done, Davis patched up the hole.
   They put the sample on a piece of tarpaulin and examined it.
   They had cut out a section three centimetres in diameter and twelve in depth. About fifty cells of hexagonal construction, with only dead adults, no infants.
   Stan breathed out in relief.
   "At least we got to them before they started laying," he commented.
   Davis nodded.
   Stan took out a thin-bladed knife and winkled out a couple of dead wasps. Ugly heart-shaped  faces, fuzzy thoraxes, thread-thin waists and then a bulbous red and black abdomen. Stan poked at them thoughtfully.
   "Ready to take some more sections?" he asked.
   They took eight from random parts of the nest, to random depths. All came out the same.
   "Let's move in the demolition crew," Davis said, cheerfully.
   Stan shook his head.
   "I don't like it," he mused, "I mean in nine samples we've found a total of ..." he counted quickly, "Seventeen dead adults. That's less that two per sample. Now look at the size of this thing. How many of those bastards would it take to make this in twenty four hours?"
   "Perhaps they're deeper in the nest. I mean no perhaps, they must be. Just take a deeper sample, you'll find them."
   Stan moved his head from side to side.
   "Maybe." he said, thinking hard, "Maybe, maybe, maybe."
   "Maybe what?"
   Stan went back to studying the dead wasps they had collected. He teased at them with the blade and sucked air through his teeth.
   Then he went to his bag, rifled through it and came out with a magnifying glass. He examined one of the wasps through the glass and tutted.
   "Look at the size of the head," he muttered, "The mandibles."
   He prodded at the abdomen and the sting unsheathed beneath the pressure.
   "The sting ... recurved ..."
   He put the magnifying down and stroked his chin.
   "A heavily sclerotized integument ... much bigger head ... bastard mandibles ... no nonsense sting ... these are mean  ... these are wrong."
   He studied the wasp again.
   Davis watched him.
   "You said they had to be a mutant strain, Stan, so why the surprise?"
   The overweight exterminator laid out some more of the wasps and turned his scrutiny to them. After a minute or so he threw down the magnifying glass and banged his forehead with the flat of his hand.
   "I know what I said," he reflected, "The fact of the matter is I was wrong."
   "Wrong? How?"
   Stan made a face and tapped his lips with his fingers. Then he gave Davis the magnifying glass and lined up three wasps on the tarpaulin.
   "Exhibit A," he said, "Fire-wasp. Look at the head, the mandibles, but more importantly look at the markings."
   Davis did.
   "So?"
   "Now look at Exhibit B," Stan said, "Attend to the same details. Comments?"
   "Identical," Davis said, perplexed, "What's the deal?"
   "What indeed?" Stan whispered, "Now Exhibit C."
   Davis turned the magnifying glass on the third wasp. He studied it for a while, then switched back to Exhibit B, then back to C. He compared the two, narrowing his eyes with each glance.
   "They're ... they're different."
   Stan nodded.
   "Completely," he said, "That was my error. Look at the markings: they're much more complex, more convoluted. Look at the face: the bigger eyes, the kinked antennae. Look at its size: much bigger. This isn't a mutation we're seeing here, it's a whole other specie."
Stan studied Davis' face to see if what he was saying had hit home yet. It hadn't. Quite.
   He'd have another go.
   "Have you ever heard of cleptoparasites?" he asked.
   Davis shook his head.
   "Social parasites. They dominate other species, usurp other colonies, take control. They insert another queen into the nest, she subdues the existing monarch -breaks her- and then the new queen takes over. Rules the roost. Enslaves the other wasps with her nazi storm trooper kin and forces them to work for her."
   "So?"
   "So this nest is the product of two different wasps. A ruling elite and a bunch of slaves. Ever wondered how they built the pyramids?"
   "Not this week, but yeah, I guess."
   "Social historians have looked at the problem, but it's a waste of effort, if you ask me. The answer is so simple. SLAVES, Davis, they did it with slaves. Crack a whip and folk'll do just what you say. Or they die, and then the next bunch will do the job. That's what we've got here. Slaves. They built this thing because they had no choice. No choice at all."
   "Nazi wasps?"
   "Something like that. Look, the point is there must have been more of the invaders, but out of the seventeen we found only three are the cleptoparasites. Where are the others?"
   "I don't know."
   "Me neither, and that's what's worrying me."

A deeper drill, a similar result. Fire-wasps out-numbering the cleptoparasites by three or four to one. According to Joachim Sheven, who knew his shit, cleptoparasites subjugated a nest by overcoming the host's nest one by one. There should have been more of the new strain, many more. It didn't scan, and Stan hated things that didn't scan.
   So he worked through the evolutionary steps that had led to this hybrid colony and found himself, once more, admiring the complexity and utility of natural selection. Cleptoparasitic  wasps had to resemble their host targets, but needed to be stronger and more efficient than them. They had to be more aggressive, more wasp. Evolution, no one could predict where it was going. And that scared Stan. Insect generations were short and their evolutionary progress seemed to move so much quicker than any other animal.
   Davis interrupted his train of thought.
   "So are we going to pull this down?" he asked.
   Stan looked up at him and shrugged.
   "I don't know," he said, "We're short a hell of a lot of wasps."
   "They can't have survived."
   "I know. But I can't help thinking they have. We need something that will allow us to check for certain. Let's go."
   "Where?"
   "To the workshop. I've got an idea."
   They left the garden, watched by Mrs. Muppet. Stan tipped his baseball cap at her and nodded. On the up-nod he saw someone else watching him from the house. A small someone. In an upstairs window. Female. The daughter. He waved at her, but the girl just stood there without acknowledging him and Stan realised she wasn't looking at him at all.
  She was staring at the nest.

Back at the garden, later. Another drill, a longer bit. Drilling into the nest.
   When Stan was satisfied with the depth of penetration he got Davis to thread a length of fibre-optic cable into the hole and watched its progress on a wrap-around VR screen. He directed Davis' manoeuvrings through the nest and studied the pictures he was receiving carefully. Moving through the hexagonal cells was like playing a video game, but few programmers came up with game-worlds as consistently strange as this one. Occasional dead wasps loomed out of the shadows, in VR they were like the corpses of vast alien life-forms. With a Trent Reznor soundtrack this would be more exciting than 'Quake'. The hexagonal cells stretched on forever it seemed, and some of them had things in them.
   "Wait up," Stan ordered, "Now back up, slowly. Stop."
   "What is it?"
   "Well I'll be ..." Stan adjusted the definition of the goggles and increased magnification, "We've got larvae."
   He examined a grub in close-up.
   "Can't tell whether it's Fire-wasp or Pharaoh ..."
   "Pharaoh?"
   "We've got to call them something. Go deeper."
   Forty-five minutes of Davis paying out cable, deeper and deeper, still finding no great quantity of dead wasps, Fire or otherwise, deeper into the nest, and then the next discovery.
   "STOP!"
   Davis froze.
   "What?"
   Stan took the goggles off and handed them to Davis. Davis put the headset on and studied the scene. More hexagonal cells, tiny insects contained within. Looking utterly different to the other insects they had found.
   "Babies?" he asked.
   Stan shook his head.
   "An answer," he said, "But I don't like it."
   Davis took the headset off and studied him.
   "So what are they?"
   "I think you'll find they're ants," Stan said, "Think about this: if a species has evolved that can overtake and enslave another social group -in this case the Fire-wasps- then why can't it enslave another order of social insects altogether?"
   "What are you saying, Stan?"
   "I think these cleptoparasites have branched out. I think they've taken over a colony of ants as well as a colony of wasps. I think we've got some wasps with expansionist plans. I think we're looking at the beginnings of an empire here."
   "But where are the pharaohs?"
   Stan stroked his chin.
   "Not in this nest ... wasps ... ants ... a symbiotic ... no ... just a
biotic relationship. Ants.  Why ants? Ants live... ants live ..."
   His face bleached and he looked straight down at the grass beneath them.
   "Oh fuck, oh fucking hell. Ants nests are usually underground. What if these wasps have moved in with them?"
   Davis' eyes were wide.
   "What do we do?"
   "We get inside. We need help on this one. We'll call in the government specialists. I think this is a little out of our league.  If they are down there then they are not only meaner than fire-wasps, they are also a whole lot cleverer."
   They jogged to the house.

Inside, in the living room, Stan made a couple of frantic calls on Davis' mobile while Margery Holme watched on. Her eyes were protruding more than usual and Stan found himself unable to look at her for periods of more than a few seconds before having to look away. He knew he was no picture himself, but next to Mrs. Muppet he was Brad Bloody Pitt.
   Davis stood looking confused. He hadn't got a handle on what was going on, but he had probably grasped just enough to be getting scared. So much for easing him back into the job.
   When Stan had finished with the phone he tossed it back to a Davis who wanted answers.
   "So let me get this straight: the wasps have moved underground to cohabit with an ants' nest?"
   Stan nodded.
   Mrs. Holme gasped.
   "They ... they're still alive?" she choked.
   "I think so," Stan admitted.
   The woman looked like someone let some air out of her.
   "My god. Lauren ... Lauren said they weren't dead," she muttered, "She knew. She knew. I thought she was just hallucinating ... but SHE KNEW!"
   Stan studied her carefully, trying not to betray his disgust at what he saw. She was only about two 'boo's away from hysteria and it didn't make her any prettier. Still, he couldn't really blame her for her reaction. Her cosy suburban world, her safe suburban home and her sweet suburban daughter were all under threat now. And he was supposed to be sorting it out for her, but instead he had just phoned in an evacuation order for the whole damned street. He couldn't risk these people's lives, and had a terrifying feeling that they were still only starting to see the surface of the problem; its depths were still obscure and unfathomable.
   Mrs. Holme continued to blubber, continued to mutter: "All my fault. All my fault."
   "It's not your fault," Davis placated, "And we're going to get you all out of here."
   It jogged something in Stan's mind.
   "Where is your husband?" he demanded.
   Margery looked confused, then covered it with "At work," before moving one 'boo' closer to total collapse.
   Stan's spine prickled and he surveyed the living room, looking for something, anything, that would explain the nagging sensation suddenly worrying at his mind.
   Twee pseudo-rustic touches; Dralon suite; a television screen bigger than the window it stood in front of.
   Order: unspoilt. Suburban paradise? Arcadia. Rose-patterned wallpaper.
   His mind side-slipped. He let it.
Roses, he thought, the worm in the bud.
        the bud
the worm
               canker
the worm ...
   What are you trying to tell me?
   He looked around the room again. Pictures of dogs but no evidence of them owning a dog. Air-fresheners - rose-scented. Roses. The bud. Canker. No photographs. None.
   A thin peel of sound came from upstairs: a tiny scream.
Tiny. Thin. No dog. No photographs. What's wrong with this picture? Mrs. Muppet's hesitation, hurriedly covered. Rustic touches. Paradise. Arcadia. Eden.
   ORIGINAL SIN.
   Free-associating madly, Stan focused on that one: SIN.
Punishment. The fall. "Where is your husband?" Confusion.
   The scream shrilled again, louder, fear.
  Mrs. Muppet ran for the stairs, Davis in pursuit. But Stan's mind was chewing, tasting, salivating, digesting. It was only Davis' cry that pulled him out of the loop.
   He took the stairs two at a time, thundering foot-steps shaking the framed pictures on the walls of the stairwell. On the landing he saw Davis standing, Mrs. Holme laying like a puppet with the strings cut. The final 'boo' had laid her out cold. He pushed past an ashen Davis, into Lauren's bedroom.
   Felt the weight of fear try to crush him.
   It was a bright, sunny day outside; perfect, clear and warm. In the bedroom the dim light from the window was red; blood red.
   The buzzing sound was almost unbearable.
   Lauren lay on her bed, shaking, shivering, thrashing, clutching a floppy rag-doll to her breast. Foam flecked her lips. She hadn't inherited her mother's looks.
   Stan took a deep breath and faced the window he had been avoiding since entering the room.
   Outside, the wasps batted against the window pane.
   Thousands.
   No, more than that.
   Bulbous and red, stings unsheathed, hitting against the glass. Writhing, swarming, covering the glass and filtering the sunlight through the gaps between them; gaps that became less and less frequent as more red and black bodies joined the multitude. Mandibles scissoring, wings beating, legs scrabbling, stings drooling poison across the pane. And in between the wasp bodies writhed the dull bodies of flying ants, joining the throng, slaves, following orders. Blotting out the sun.
   It made no sense and Stan knew it.
   Knew that this was something more than a swarm of wasps and ants.
   Intuited that this would be the only window in the house that was being besieged.
   And as he turned back to the tiny figure on the bed he realised he had found the missing piece to the puzzle he had working on since making the telephone calls five or so minutes before. Seeing young Lauren -writhing, flapping her arms, her night dress wet with what Stan somehow knew would test positive as wasp-venom, her mouth opening and closing- he realised that he had been wrong again.
   A new queen had been inserted into the nest; a bigger, more powerful queen had subjugated fire-wasps, ants and cleptoparasites alike. But this queen hadn't invaded the nest physically, she hadn't needed to.
Oh my fucking god ...
Ants, wasps, bees; they communicated without speech, without writing. Many had posited the existence of a collective consciousness; a common link working at some level to organise the hive; to delegate tasks, to mobilise forces.
   A HIVE MIND! Stan would have kicked himself if he thought it would do any good. But how could he have known?
   He tried to still the girl but she was too far gone, her mind was now the mind of those things outside; she was inside  them, she was them.
   Could that really be the answer?
   Stan had read an article once in which a sexually-abused teenager had affected behavioural modifications in insects. At some level the girl's mind had transmitted a signal, a vibe, that the insects had responded to. Okay, in that case the girl had just caused frantic activity in moths and flies, causing them to behave erratically in flight and walking, but it didn't take much of a leap to use that phenomenon to make sense of this situation.
   As he held Lauren down her night dress rode up and Stan saw the bruises on her thighs that,  to him, confirmed his hastily-framed hypothesis.
   "Oh no," he groaned, "Oh you bastard. You bastard."
   The poor girl. Her father had been working on her for quite a while; some of the bruises were fading, some had almost faded. The twisted bastard. To his own daughter. All that pain, all that fear, her mind must have been going out in all kinds of directions. Calling out for help. Calling out. To anyone that would listen.
   To any thing that would listen.
   When Stan had been stung by a fire-wasp he had thought the hallucinations were a chemical reaction, but what if it had been a bridge between his mind and the wasps' collective intelligence? An equalisation between mental rates and mental states. Seeing wasps because that's what wasps see!
   The sting that Lauren Holme sustained had made that link! And she had become ... THEIR QUEEN! Perhaps she had hooked up to the queen, dominated her, overtook her. Turned the nest over to the production of ... of what? Hate?
   Wasps: feeding off her pain, off her need, off her shame, off her rage. Rage directed at ...
   "What the fuck is going on here?" a male voice demanded and Stan turned to see Marcus Holme standing in the doorway, sweat beading his brow.
   Stan let Lauren go and gestured for Holme to come nearer, as if to share some conspiratorial information. When Holme was within range, Stan punched him in the nose. Hard. And then again. Jack Skellington went down like he'd been pole-axed. He lay on the floor, bleeding, but  utterly still.
   "Jesus, Stan, what are you doing?" Davis demanded.
   Stan shook his head.
   "Save it." he snapped.
   Outside the window the wasps seemed to sense Marcus' presence in the room and made a fresh assault on the window. The buzzing intensified. Stan was sure he could see the pane bulging inwards with the weight of the wasps and ants that were pressed against it.
   "C'mon, think," Stan told himself, "Think, think, think."
   He looked at the girl on the bed.
Break the circuit!  his mind insisted.
   Stan nodded.
   Subdue the queen.
   "Davis! What kind of drugs are you carrying?"
   "Huh? Some grass. A tab of acid. Why?"
   "C'mon, Davis. You're having trouble sleeping, what are you using to counteract that?"
   "Some sleepers. Why?"
   "Give."
   "I haven't got any on me."
  "Fuck."
   He flicked a nervous glance at the window and saw that the impression of the glass bulging was now more than an impression. It was a fact. It wouldn't hold long. It couldn't. There was no sunlight, just wasps. Red and black and totally deadly.
   "Oh shit," Stan breathed, "There's only one thing for it. If I don't make it, Davis, you're going to have to kill her." he pointed at Lauren. Young, pretty Lauren; yeah Davis was really going to follow that instruction.
   Stan pushed past Davis, stepped over the unconscious odd couple and dashed downstairs. Adrenaline was beefing up his system but he was still falling short of the courage he'd need. He knew that he had something in his bag that would do it, but his bag was outside.
   And so were the wasps.
He stood at the back door and found he couldn't do it. He just couldn't. He didn't even have any protective gear on. He wouldn't last ten seconds.
   Or would he?
   Wasps of rage, they had to be directed at a single target. Holme. Child-abuser. Betrayer. If Stan was right the wasps were after Marcus Holme. He hoped he was right. he sometimes was.
   Taking a deep gulp of air to steel his nerves, he opened the back door and ran out before cowardice could gain a foothold. He took off across the garden, in the throat of a wasp-storm; millions of them filling the air.
   Stan ran. Ignored them. Well, tried to. Even though they batted against him, bounced off him, crawled on him, buzzed around him. He couldn't flap at them, he couldn't afford to enrage  them, so he had to grit his teeth and plunge through them against every instinct he possessed.   It seemed that it must be four hours later when he reached the bag. It was probably a matter  of seconds, but his mind was bent out of shape. He searched through the bag quickly, but couldn't find what he needed. A wasp tried to press its way between his lips. Another was  tickling his ear-hole. Tears of frustration studded his eyes.
Where are you? Where the fuck are you?
   The tiny bottle he was looking for was at the very bottom, but once he had it the elation  was eclipsed by a sudden doubt that his plan would work.
   The wasps were settling on him now, weighing him down. His brain felt like it was about to explode. He was on the verge of giving in to shock, and if that happened, he was lost.
Don't be such a godamned pussy! he reprimanded himself.
   And then his body started functioning on quick-time.
   He didn't even notice the dash back to the house, the utter revulsion assailed him, filling the spaces in his mind with terror beyond any he had experienced before. The stairs, the landing, wasps still crawling on him, but still not stinging. Mrs. Muppet was standing up, groggily and Stan looked at her eyes and saw something that did him no good at all.
She knew. She fucking knew!
   So he punched her on his way past into the bedroom. A wasp smeared across her face. She went down again.
   Lauren was still thrashing on the bed -her Pound Puppies duvet soaked in sweat and froth- and spider-like cracks were appearing on the glass of the window. Davis' eyes were huge and blank. Shock. Stan was on his own. He reached over the girl, wrenched the rag-doll from her grasp, doused it in chloroform and held the doll over Lauren's face.
   She bucked and fought and then the glass made a smashing sound and Stan was in another storm of wasps but he held the doll in place and then a wasp stung him on the eyelid but he continued to press the doll down and the wasps buzzed around him so loud so loud so loud.
   And then, just as he was sure he had been wrong, Lauren was still.
   And the wasps fell to the floor. As one.
   And Stan cried and fell to the bed, desperately checking for a pulse on the girl. He found one.
   She was alive.
   Just.
He picked her up, operating on autopilot, and made for the door with her over his shoulder, grabbed Davis by the arm and made his way outside. The lawn was invisible, utterly obscured by red and black bodies as far as the eye could see.
   Not dead, just unconscious.
   Chloroformed.
   By the time he reached the van the emergency teams were just arriving.

"So they weren't even married? They were brother and sister?"
   Davis was having trouble grabbing hold of this one.
   Stan took him through it in stages.
   "And their child, Lauren, was the queen. It's simple Davis. That's why the ants were working with the wasps. Kids do that, think everything should just get along, she made a new society. A child's idea of society, nothing to do with wasps."
   "But the cleptoparasites, they subjugated them: the fire-wasps, the ants ..."
   "The practicalities of idealism, my man Davis, they were just trying to put her policies into action."
   "And now?"
   Stan rubbed the pustulant sting on his eyelid. It wept red matter onto his finger.
   "She's recovering. The end of the venom meant the end of her link with the hive. She'll recover. It won't be easy."
   "And the wasps?"
   "They were wiped out. Not by the chloroform, but by the emergency team. See, Lauren had gathered together all the fire-wasps in the fucking country with her mental link. They all came to answer her call. And they all died. How come all my big commissions end in genocide?"
   Davis shook his head.
   "And how come you're not having a fire-wasp fever?"
   "Immunity. From the one I got last year. And the lack of 'hallucinations' tells me that the fire-wasps are really all dead. Nothing left for me to see. It's weird. I hated those bastards, now ... I feel bad."
   "What'll happen to the parents?"
   "He'll stand trial. She will too. Did you know that she was not only aware of what he was doing, she took Polaroids? The police found hundreds of them. The things they put her through."
   Davis sighed.
   "Sick puppies. At least insects are honest. So when do I get paid?" he asked.
   "When I finally get the eighteen-hundred Holme owes me, I guess. About ten years time. Fancy a beer?"
   "Yeah. But hold the tomato stalk."
   They laughed, then drank beer.
   A lot of beer.