The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 18

Chapter 18: Disaster (Part 2)

The first one came when about seventy percent of the harvest had been brought in. Darker than an ordinary grasshopper, with longer legs. Somebody crushed and killed it. Someone else shouted not to bother—that they had to keep harvesting.

Torches were lit. It would barely be a drop in this ocean, but it was something.

The women and children went into the houses and tried to cover any cracks with mud or cloth. The houses were dark inside, but they were sternly warned not to light any fires, and also to have food ready that could be eaten as is. They were ordered to kill any insects that got through the cracks.

At Nianzhen’s house, there was too much to fit, so they started storing grain in the shrine. There, the cracks were so packed with earth that hardly any air got in.

Every house worthy of the name was sprinkled with pesticide, not that they knew whether it would do any good. The tents had too many openings to serve as storage areas. Instead, they would be temporary evacuation points for the villagers.

Basen carried a huge net. It might once have been for catching fish, but he swung it around over his head with tremendous speed, gathering up grasshoppers within it. Then he dumped them in a huge bucket of water, killing them.

Chue passed out leather pouches. Instead of food, they contained sweetened goat’s milk. She was preparing for a long battle.

Nianzhen wore several overshirts, and the other villagers imitated him.

Rikuson was going from house to house, reassuring the villagers whose anxious voices he could hear through the air holes. Any time he found bugs entering through a gap, he would crush the insects and fill the gap. The duck pecked at the grasshoppers and then spit them out again. Inedible, perhaps.

Then the villagers started screaming.

Everything seemed to grow darker, passing from bright and clear to ash, and then a gray that reminded Maomao of a rat, until everything was practically black.

It was impossible to open one’s eyes, never mind walk. Bugs bumped into people, bit and tore at them. People couldn’t open their mouths; it was all they could do to cover them with rags. Their layered overshirts were ripped and torn, and the beating of wings drowned out every other sound. A droning noise overwhelmed everything, so that it was impossible to tell what someone else was saying. Soon, even the screams couldn’t be heard anymore.

Maomao covered her face with her hands, then opened her eyes the slightest bit. She could see Basen, still swinging the net over his head. It filled almost instantly, whereupon he slammed it against the ground. The bucket had long ago overflowed with grasshoppers.

One man had gone mad from the bug bites. He howled at the top of his lungs and swung a torch in one hand and a scythe in the other. It did him no good; the grasshoppers survived his counterattack and continued to assault the villagers.

Chue crept up to the crazed man and swept his feet out from under him. The moment he was on the ground, she bound him with a rope.

Rikuson was still running from house to house, shouting. Some people were driven out of their minds by the disappearance of the light. Others were sane but simply couldn’t hear him.

Fire burst from one of the houses, and an elderly woman and some children came rushing out of the otherwise sealed structure. One of the kids held a flint.

The freshly harvested wheat in the house was perfect fuel, and the fire burned readily. The parched air of the dry season made conditions even better for the flames.

Basen reacted immediately, giving one of the posts of the house a kick. The place was barely more than a shack to begin with, and it promptly collapsed.

Maomao could hear Basen shouting, although she couldn’t catch the words. Maybe he was saying that the water source was too far away to fight the flames and they needed to destroy the house. He was in his element in moments of crisis.

He had already practically knocked the place down on his own; now he rushed over with the bucket full of floating grasshoppers and emptied it over the house. Chue spirited away the snotty children and the old lady to the tent. It was crawling with grasshoppers, just like everywhere else, but it was better than being outside.

How much time had passed? Maomao didn’t know. It might have been thirty minutes. It might have been hours.

Everyone in the village quaked at the bugs, the like of which they had never seen; they reviled the creatures, and—

“Maomao!”

She thought she felt someone tap her on the shoulder. She turned and found Rikuson. Grasshoppers were chewing on his hair, on his clothes. She reached up, thinking to brush them away.

“Please, stop making pesticide. Your hand will be useless!”

She looked at the hand she had raised; it was red and swollen.

Oh...

Her concoction couldn’t provide any relief from this swarm. She’d been mixing up pesticide and spreading it around as fast as she could, putting it everywhere she could think of, but it was never enough; the grasshoppers just kept coming.

Why? Why didn’t it work?

It did work. There were simply too many of them. The starving insects even ate the poisonous herbs. They bit people, chewed on clothing, and even tried to consume house posts. As if that weren’t enough, the bugs that had fallen to the ground began eating each other. There were too many of them, and it had driven them into a frenzy.

Maomao was pretty far gone herself, desperately grabbing every herb that could help fight the insects and stewing them up. Grasshoppers floated in the huge pot. Maomao pulled up plants roots and all and threw them in. Was her hand swollen from tearing plants out of the ground barehanded, or from the toxic qualities of the pesticide?

Rikuson looked at the sky, still dark with the swarm. The insects were everywhere, but he seemed to be looking somewhere beyond them, above them.

“They say disaster drives out disaster... We should be so lucky.”

Maomao didn’t know what he meant, but she stared into the darkness herself.

“Ow!” she exclaimed. Something hard had smacked into her. She looked at the ground, wondering what it could have been, and found a lump of ice.

The pain came again, on her back this time, then on her shoulder.

Thock, thock, thock.

The air had gotten very cold.

“Hail?” she said.

Between the large chunks of ice and the freezing air, the grasshoppers began to move visibly slower.

“Disaster drives out disaster, huh?” Maomao said. No, this was no disaster. This was a gift from heaven—not a conclusion Maomao would normally reach. “Yes! Fall! Let it hail on us!”

Now her madness was speeding in another direction. She leaned forward, as the hail fell among the swarm. Not a rain dance, as it were, but a hail dance.

She didn’t feel the pain of the bugs biting at her, nor of the hail striking her. She was too full of the wish, the hope, that something, anything, might happen to help them with this numberless swarm of insects.

Thock! She felt an especially heavy blow, right to her head this time.

“Maomao!”

She remembered Rikuson running over to her, but then everything went black.