The Hive: Invasion - Sneak Peek

“Fucking weird,” Randy declared, squatting beside the thing. 

The sun was bright this morning, but she was able to track it by sound alone, the brain-rattling bass sound increasing in its effect the closer she came.

Twisting through the woods in a pair of holey canvas sneakers and denim shorts, her legs now bore a series of criss-crossing red lines from the brambles growing in

patches behind the house.

When she thought she could bear the sound no longer, it had subsided, though remained.

Now it was almost as subtle as a heartbeat, but tangible.

After only half an hour of searching, she’d run across a line of scorched undergrowth, a crater of black soil nearly two feet around at the end of it.

In the middle of the crater, not being but sitting atop the burnt earth, was a silver sphere.

The pulsing blue light was gone, now, and Randy had walked around the thing, examining the surface of it. There were parallel etchings, barely

noticeable at first glance, but now she was unable not

to see them, like the angular lines of a circuit board. 

From her squatting place at the rim of the small crater, she found a broken branch beside her and extended it toward the thing. She gave it a gentle nudge with the ragged edge of the branch, nearly falling backward when a heavier expulsion of bass jangled her teeth as she made contact.

”So, you don’t like being pawed at, huh?  What are you? A satellite or something?”

Unsurprisingly the sphere was silent. She looked around for signs of other life,

and noticed that the woods were strangely quiet. There were no chirps of insects or calls from birds, no scratches of squirrels gnawing or rustles caused by any number of mice and other forest creatures. Only her and the sphere, and its pulsing beat.

“All right, pal, hang on.”

Now that she knew the way, it was easy to find again, but now she was prepared.

Her hands were covered up to the middle of her forearm by the thick gloves she used for metalwork, duck-walking over the lip of the crater until her feet were on

either side of the thing.

She scooped it up, and now she could feel the vibration of its pulsing travel up her

arms. She lifted it up to her eyes and turned it over, following lines of the circuit-like designs until the intersected and conjoined with others.

There seemed to be no way to open it or unscrew it, no seam to suggest a

container. Whatever it was, it appeared to be whole and not some enclosure for some other oddity.

“Alright, my little friend, let’s go home.”

She cupped it in her gloved hands all the way back to the house, the vibrations running up her arms stronger with each step, and it felt like it was pulsing in time with her heart. 

The way it coursed through her body left no part of her unaffected, and

she realized halfway home that she was actually getting quite damp, her slit

humming like the rest of her. She laughed at the thought that the sphere was the slowest, most deliberate vibrator ever built, but the hunger it left her with was undeniable.