Feeding Frenzy: Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 1
Lucille pulled into the station just in the nick of time. The hood of her Buick erupted in smoke as the scent of burnt motor oil poured over its sides and spilled onto the concrete. The car sputtered and coughed as though it had just lit up a cigarette for the first (and last) time. Then it gagged and shut down completely. Lucille got out, slammed her door shut and glared at it. She turned towards the derelict ruins.
Just another forlorn station with its no-name gas and boarded up windows, strewn with bits of siding that were once attached. No services for 40 miles. She wondered just how this place had even qualified. It seemed like an alien world, or someplace in a long-forgotten dream, filled with the lazy, hazy glow of the afternoon sun. Or maybe it was just the smoke dissipating. A mechanic sauntered over to Lucille, illuminated from behind like a religious icon. She squinted into the sun in order to watch him approach.
He was a regular grease monkey. Old oil stains canvassed his rumpled, light blue uniform with the subtle nuances of a Rothko painting. Over his right front pocket, some heavily embroidered letters spelled out the name Tom Jones in a font way too fancy for such a seemingly blue-collar kind of guy, or such a desperately needy place, for that matter.
Lucille stared at him. He was a younger man, in his early thirties, although she guessed him to be in his mid-to-late forties. He had an ancient, stale air about him, the sort that settles upon someone who’s lived his whole life in some god-forsaken backwash of a town, scraping out a meager existence in a place that may as well be dead. In fact, he was exactly the sort of person you’d expect to find in a place like this. And yet there was something unnerving about him. Perhaps it was his dark, vacant eyes. Lucille looked into those hollow eyes searching for some sense of spirit and kept coming up with nothing. No spark, no flame, no sense of higher being. She started to feel woozy, as if she were drowning, and turned back towards the Buick.
“What’s da trouble, Ma’am?” he rasped. His dry voice crackled, prematurely aged with too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.
“It’s been leaking oil,” Lucille said, “a lot. And lately it’s been overheating…”
“You gots worse problems than some leaky oil,” he drawled, giving the simmering Buick a long, cold stare. “I reckon we’re gonna have ta take ‘er apart. See what’s da trouble.”
“How long will that take?”
“A couple ‘a days. Maybe e’en three or four. She’s in a bad way.”
“But I’m on my way to Portland for a wedding,” Lucille gasped. “And where would I stay?” Lucille cringed at the thought of having to stay at the decrepit gas station with its creepy mechanic and disheveled facade.
“There’s a mo-tel, up da road a’piece. I can take you up there, if’n you want.” The mechanic gestured at a brown, rusted out old Ford pickup parked alongside the poorly maintained gas station.
“A couple of days, huh? I guess I’d better get a room, then.” Lucille sighed. “Sure, take me to the motel.” She liked the idea of staying here, in this nowhere, about as much as she relished the thought of climbing in a rusted-out old truck with the vacant-eyed mechanic, but she didn’t seem to have much choice.
Neither spoke a word as they wound up and down the once paved road. The road had fallen into a state of disrepair and was little more than chunks of pavement and gravel-filled potholes now. They circled through the small blip of a town cutting from the gas station across what must have once been a main road. The town was a dump. A couple of large brick buildings had fallen in on themselves, bricks and debris littering the broken-up sidewalk. The skeletal framework of a long burned-down structure swayed ominously in the breeze.
The motel was just another worn building on the other side of the town, attached to a small hole-in-the-wall diner out front. Paint peeled from a large wooden sign near the road that informed would-be travelers of VACANCY. The lot was empty except for an old white Cadillac. It was parked next to the office with the keys casually tossed in the driver’s seat. T-E-L flashed in pink neon above the office door. Lucille still couldn’t stop thinking about the mechanic’s eyes, like dark, hollow pools.
“I’ll call for ya once I figures out what’s wrong with da car,” the mechanic called out hoarsely. And then he turned and drove off.
“Probably just my imagination,” she whispered, avoiding his gaze. She shook it off to the breeze and hesitantly stepped inside the motel office.
The office was empty. Two worn, olive green chairs welcomed guests, but they were anything but inviting. One was littered with cigarette burns while the other harbored a foul, rotting stench and a large inexplicable rust colored stain. The veneer had begun to curl from the check-in desk, exposing the poorly maintained particleboard underneath. A sign sat at the edge of that desk, hand-written in black permanent marker: RING BELL FOR SERVICE. Lucille tapped the silvered dome and a long-silent chime sounded as if to awaken the entire town to her presence. Or what was left of it anyway.
A large, heavy-set woman, in her late forties or early fifties, emerged from a back room, leaving the door ajar. From behind that door, a television echoed some late afternoon talk show, but Lucille couldn’t make out enough of the murmur to be certain which one. The woman slowly waddled up to the front desk, her periwinkle tent of a dress gathering behind her knees, and looked at Lucile. Her skin was a waxy pallid gray, lifeless and void of color, except for her face which was coated in several layers of thick, bright makeup.
“D’ya wanna room for ta’night, honey?”
“Yeah. My car’s broken down and I needed someplace to stay the night.”
“Tom bring ya by, then? Good lad, he is. He’ll fix ‘er up, jus’ like new. How many nights ya gonna need?”
“I don’t know. Depends on how long it takes to get that car up and running. I’m going to a wedding in Portland the day after tomorrow, so hopefully…” Lucille stopped dead in her tracks. Her heart raced and sweat began to form on the palms of her hands, making them clammy. She felt her face flush.
The check-in woman had the same gaze as the mechanic, the exact same hollow, empty stare that seemed to penetrate her very soul. Lucille wanted to scream or run or do something, anything to get out of this god-forsaken place. But she just stood there, unable to move. She waved some flyaway hairs from her face with her left hand, steadying herself so not to tremble.
“Just tonight, I guess,” she whimpered, trying to sound self-assured. “I’ll play tomorrow by ear.” Lucille hoped to be long free of this creepy, backwash nothing of a town by then.
“A’right then, honey.” The check-in woman smiled wide with painted ruby lips. “Room 3, on your left.” She piled a key on the counter under her pale fat hand. Lucille grabbed it and hurried out.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
So, now that it’s getting cold, here on Nightmarish Nature we’re going to talk about a different kind of terror – the starvation diet. It’s winter, and food is becoming ever scarcer, so many creatures will slow down to conserve energy. Let’s take this a step further to the sleep of the damned… But I’m not talking hibernation, or settling in for a sort of long winter nap version of seasonal affective disorder on steroids. No, I’m talking hummingbirds.
Sugar Rush
Hummingbirds are about the polar opposite of what you’d think of when you talk about inactivity. They’re more the picture-perfect speed demons. And yet, due to their crazy high metabolisms and constant need to refuel by consuming all the nectar and insects they can get their little beaks in or on, they have near death experiences on a regular basis. Even during the summer at night whenever the temperature falls too low. It’s like all their systems have to go offline for a bit just so they can survive.
Energy Suck
Essentially a hummingbird burns so much energy that he can die in less than eight hours of not eating. The little sugar daddy needs another fix just to keep going. This lifestyle is a far cry from the Energizer bunny. Essentially he has to enter a torpor state in sleep so he doesn’t succumb to his own starvation diet. Not every time, but when the temperature drops or food is scarce.
A hummingbird in torpor may, by all accounts, appear dead. He can be frozen in place, his tiny feet clasped rigidly around a branch as if rigor mortis has sunk in. He can be cold to the touch and unresponsive. He can face upwards, unmoving, breathing and heart rate slowed to near indiscernibility. He can even be hanging upside down, oblivious to the world. In fact, the hummer’s heart rate can reduce to almost one tenth of his waking state, and his temperature can drop by ~5o degrees Fahrenheit (~ 30 degrees Celsius).
Miracle Mavericks
Honestly, as shown in this article on Journey North, this ability to exercise such fine control over metabolic rate on a nightly cycle makes the hummingbirds more marvelous than terrifying, switching between cold- and warm-blooded. And they are very well-adapted to their eating regimens, especially given their diminutive size. But such is the cost of burning so much energy to keep going without much room to store fuel. Like I said, a strict starvation diet.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
This time on Nightmarish Nature, in honor of Thanksgiving, we’re exploring scads of scat! And not just because of the aftermath of all that eating we’re going to be doing, given that everything that goes in must come out eventually. But because turkeys are weird.
But, how weird?
Apparently, the shape and size of a turkey’s poop can tell you the sex and age of the bird. Male and female birds poop different shaped turds, and bigger ones with age. Your poop can’t do that, we’re pretty sure. And no, we don’t want to check, even if it does come in a whole host of rainbow colors with all the dyes in our food nowadays. Keep your weird quirks to yourself.
Fecal Fetishes
Vultures have very acidic scat that helps to keep their feet and food clean of bacteria from hopping in and around dead things. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a step up to us, but I guess if you’re a carrion crawler you take what you can get. At least you’d know where it’s been I suppose, and that’s more than you can say for some of your long dead food sources…
Rabbits must process their food twice in order to break down the grassy matter they digest (like cows chewing cud). And so they eat their own partially digested matter, the cecotropes they produce after the first digestion. This isn’t true poop per se, that fecal matter comes after second digestion, but it does work its way through the same way.
And that brings us to koalas. They are one of only a few mammals that can eat eucalyptus leaves (and are closely related to wombats, one of the other two). Koala offspring eat their mother’s pap, which is a specialized form of poop that allows the baby to transition from nursing milk to eating solid leaves. It is green, smeary, mushy, and can get everywhere. Just like you’d expect.
We aren’t exempt.
For all that we have learned to be poop averse, a lot of animals eat others’ scat and glean a lot of nutritional value from their detritus. It’s not just your dog raiding the cat litter box and then licking you in the face. And we humans have even fought wars over rights to seabird guano, which was used as a form of fertilizer in the late 1800s.
Anyway, that’s the scoop on poop for now. Maybe we’ll revisit this load later on, seeing as how there’s still plenty of content here.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
Yeah yeah, the insects tend to get ALL the attention here on Nightmarish Nature. But honestly, this one takes the beefcake. It’s the New World Screwworm Fly, and it’s as terrifying as the name suggests. And they aren’t limited to the Americas, there is an Old World version as well, as they can be found pretty much anywhere tropical or seasonably suited.
Revolting Little Buggers
The Screwworm Fly is a parasitic fly larvae that burrows into its host to feed, named because it seems to screw deeper and deeper into the flesh over time. This process is called myiasis and do NOT look it up online, you WILL regret it. They blur those images out for very valid reasons, trust me (and not because of pornographic content). And these maggots will continue to burrow en masse, rather than staying put as a botfly larvae would.
Do Not Do an Image Search on Screwworm Myiasis, Like Seriously – You Will NEVER Unsee That
The female Screwworm fly lays her eggs on an open wound or orifice of her chosen host… And not just one egg or a couple of eggs, no – hundreds, even thousands of them. Let’s let that sink in a bit, shall we? Or screw in as it were. Although any warm-blooded animal is a prime target, cattle are a fly favorite, costing millions of head of cattle to this sick and disgusting horror annually. And if beef isn’t on the menu, Fido or even yourself might be.
The Great American Worm Wall
In fact, this particular feature here on Nightmarish Nature is so terrifying that the United States has made agreements with all of Central America, even including countries that do not generally share its interests, in order to create a “Great American Worm Wall” to prevent them from spreading back into the United States. I’m not going to go into all of the creepy and juicy details of this bizarre science fiction freak fact, you’ll just have to watch it here on Half As Interesting’s YouTube channel.
Essentially, the Worm Wall is a complicated byproduct of scientists studying radioactivity on the flies’ maturity as well as the flies’ sexual lives and using this information against them to nearly eradicate the species and banish it from much of its former range. So, Peter Parker, if you thought everyone was messing with your love life before, be glad you weren’t bitten by a radioactive Screwworm.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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