Feeding Frenzy: Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 2
Last time on Feeding Frenzy…
The motel room seemed decent enough. It was clean, although the air had a dank, stale quality about it. There were no lingering cigarette fumes, despite the fact that it had once been a smoking room. The curtains were drawn and the early evening sunlight filtered in, reflecting off flecks of dust in the air to a hazy yellow fog. Lucille plopped her weary self on the bed, clutching her purse, and gazed out the window. The sun had just begun to set and a sinister shadow started to creep over the town.
“This is ridiculous,” she said, trying to calm her racing heart. Trying not to think about the vacant eyed mechanic or the large, graying woman at the front desk. “You’re just seeing things. You need a bite to eat.”
The sun had begun to sink further behind the horizon when Lucille closed the curtains, flicked on the lamp, and left the motel room. She locked it and briefly contemplated going into town for supper. But it was still too creepy, especially with the first hint of night’s shadows lingering over the derelict town like dark, outstretched fingers. And she didn’t recall passing anyplace that looked like it would have anything to eat. She wasn’t sure she wanted to walk that far in the dark just to find out, and she certainly didn’t want to call for a ride. She wandered around to the back of the office, to a small open room labeled VENDING between the office and Room 1.
The room was bathed in sickly green light as a fluorescent hummed above. The vending machine sat with its back towards the curtainless window facing the decrepit town. Lucille stared into the depths of the metal springs, contemplating whether to get a probably stale pack of five powdered donuts or a bag of Cheez-Ums. A flash of movement caught her peripheral vision as she dug around in the depths of her handbag. She glanced out the window.
A number of ghostly looking figures passed in the dusk, all with the same dark, empty pools for eyes that seemed to absorb light and hope like black holes into some alien abyss. She recognized two of them: Tom Jones, still wearing his oil-stained powder blue uniform, and the large heavily made-up desk clerk who had checked her in. There was also a thick bearded man whose graying black beard seemed to both accentuate and hide his unusually thick and angled jawline, a taller older man whose easygoing agility surprised her due to his frail-looking countenance, and a balding diminutive hunchback.
The setting sun accentuated their disheveled facades as Lucille hid behind the snack machine, fixated on them. The others were even more distant than Tom and the woman she had already encountered, their hollow stares focused dead ahead as they wove through one another in an odd dance, like they were swimming through the air. Even though Lucille was certain that they hadn’t seen her, they passed the vending room slowly and rhythmically, as if cued in to her presence. And then, all at once, they wandered away disinterested. Lucille dashed to her room without anything to eat or drink and bolted the door from within.
Suddenly the most terrifying scream sounded from the outdoors. Lucille slid to the window and peeked around the drab curtain to see the mob of ghostly figures had grown tighter and was thrashing and flailing about. They were just at the periphery, at the edge of the parking area. She hadn’t realized that they had come so close to her room after she had lost track of them. There was something in their midst, brown and cumbersome. The shape was hard to make out, maybe a deer, or a donkey, or a small horse or cow. They circled it in unison, as if sizing it up and preparing their next move.
In a flash, the older man rushed forward, head butting the creature. It struck back with a blow to his head, a jagged hoof springing out of nowhere. Blood pooled all too briefly at the site where hoof had met flesh before fading and being reabsorbed into the man’s forehead. His ashen flesh seemed to close over the spot, refocusing the blood to a throbbing, pulsing vein that protruded from its midst. How was he not taken down? A blow like that should have felled him, especially at his age… Lucille fixated on him as he stood staring ahead, motionless, as if an hourglass spinning through its recalculating sequence begged for more time to process what had just happened. All at once, his eyes grew wide and pooled black again as he lurched his head to the side. He leapt in a coolly calculated strike and struck the creature again, this time in the ribs. It fell to its side as he bowled it over.
Lucille watched in horror, mouth agape, as she saw Tom Jones’ black eyes grow wide and bright as he descended upon the fallen brown form amidst the mob. His jaw seemed to unhinge itself as he leapt into the fray. The others followed suit until soon there was a writhing mass of pallid grey flesh and tattered old clothes engulfing whatever was in their midst. Lucille’s heart sank in her chest like a dead weight, filled with dread and racing with fear. She watched Tom emerge from the writhing mass of bodies with what appeared to be blood dripping down his mouth and onto his shirt. He pushed his hand to the back of his neck and cracked his jaw back into place before he looked up, his eyes returning to the hollow and distant black they had been when he first laid eyes on her. She shrank back into the room as his gaze turned to meet hers before he brushed himself off and sauntered away.
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.
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