The Nest by Kenneth Oppel Page B

had to wait for a bit. When the operator answered, I started gabbling.
    â€œThere’s wasps outside my house, a ton of them, and they’re trying to get in.”
    â€œYou say you’ve got a wasps’ nest outside your house?”
    â€œThousands of them, and they’re swarming allround the windows and they’re trying to get inside. We’ve got a baby, and—”
    With every word I knew how crazy it sounded.
    â€œSir, this number is for emergencies only. It sounds like you need to call an exterminator.”
    â€œYou don’t understand—” And the line went dead. At first I thought she’d hung up on me. But when I tried to call again, there was no dial tone. The wasps had chewed through our phone line.
    Back to the baby’s room to check on him— scritch, scratch, scritch —then I raced to my own room and grabbed my cell. The battery was dead. I started tossing stuff all over the place, searching for my charger—and saw a single wasp on my wall.
    Quietly I sat on the bed and watched. It was just one wasp. But how had it gotten inside? Slowly I shrugged the knapsack off my right shoulder, unzipped it just enough to reach in and pull outthe flyswatter. The wasp wasn’t very high up. I walked swiftly toward it and whacked the heck out of it. Three, four smashes, and it fell. I stamped on it with my heel and felt it crack.
    When I ran out of my room, I saw three more wasps on our big air-conditioning unit. That was how they were getting in. Somehow they were flying through the whirling blades of the outside fan unit without getting chopped into bits, crawling up the hose and then out through the slats of the hall unit. I grabbed the Raid and blasted them. Coated with white foam, they dropped off the wall so I could crush them.
    I turned the power off on the air conditioner, and the slats automatically angled shut, but not before a couple more wasps slipped inside. I swatted them, then duct taped over all the slats. That was good. We were safer now. We were airtight.
    In the baby’s room— scritch, scratch, scritch, scaraaaatch . But none had gotten through yet; there were still no wasps on the walls or ceiling. Careening downstairs to the coatrack, I found the cloth baby carrier thing. I ran back up, trying to put it on. It was complicated and took me a while to get the straps figured out with the knapsack in the way.
    Carefully I lifted Theo from his crib and slid him against my chest into the carrier. It was tricky to get his floppy legs into the right slots, and then his arms. He woke up a little and started to murmur, but I shushed him and rocked up and down on my heels. Hummed some of the songs Mom used to sing to me. He settled back into sleep, his wet little mouth parted like it was awaiting food.
    I tightened all the straps and the neck support so his head was nice and snug and wouldn’t lollaround. He needed to be with me now. I couldn’t keep leaving him alone, even for a second.
    Without the air-conditioning, the house was heating up. But I liked Theo’s weight against me, his heat. It made me feel less alone. He was part of me, and I felt stronger somehow. Vanessa would be back soon, or my parents, and they’d see the wasps swarming outside and they’d call and get help.
    Scritch, scratch, scritch, scaaaa-raaaatch.
    I parted the blinds. My stomach swirled. Outside, wasps teemed against the glass and wooden frame, three or four deep. It looked like chaos, but quickly I saw how hard they were working. In some places they’d gouged their way so deeply into the wood that you could see only the back half of their bodies.
    â€œSteven,” said the queen over the monitor, and I jerked. I’d forgotten about her. “This really is awfully inconvenient for us. And unfortunate, too.We could still turn this around if you’d just be reasonable.”
    Baby against my chest, knapsack against my back, I went downstairs