The Bug Man

By Rob Hood

At the present time on our planet, there are several million different species of insects. Almost one million of them have been identified. Insects perform a vast number of important functions in our ecosystem, but not all are welcome. A number of six-legged animals can be found in the home and can be eliminated by the usual pest control companies. This story deals with a different type of pest, men that abuse women. The Bug Man, Walter Walthorpe, deals with both six-legged and two-legged varieties and has some very different ideas on how to eliminate them........

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rob Hood
• Release date: Aug 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310587535

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THE BUG MAN

Copywrited 2013 by Rob Hood

PUBLISHED BY: Rob Hood

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Prologue

St. Paul, Minnesota

Even as a small child, Wilbur Walthorpe was always considered different, just a little bit on the odd side. His father, to whom Wilbur was a complete embarrassment, would always tell his friends, Sometimes, I think the kid is in a rowboat, with only one oar in the water.

Wilbur's hair, like fine straw, would stick up and point in every direction, as if it were full of static electricity, and would remind you of a young Albert Einstein. To make matters worse, Wilbur was short, obese, had bulbous eyes, and his head was almost perfectly round. He resembled a human likeness of Charlie Brown, the little kid in the Peanuts comic strip. To complete this picture, he was nearsighted and chose to wear large, thick, black horned-rimmed glasses that were almost twice as big as they needed to be. In school, he was labeled by all his class mates as the funny looking, four eyed, fat kid .

If his parents had any extra money at all, they would have placed him in a school for the mentally challenged.

However, Wilbur, unknown to his parents, or anyone else for that matter, was anything but mentally challenged. The fact was that he was on the edge of sheer genius. His memory was just short of being photographic. He was a tenacious reader and totally absorbed everything he read, particularly the things he liked. He just looked dumb. His soft, white, lumpy body, didn’t look like it was built for any type of strength or endurance, but for some unexplained reason, he was as strong as an ox.

For whatever reason, he kept all these things to himself. He intentionally flunked every class he took while attending school, except for chemistry and biology. These two classes are where he chose to excel. Many times, he could be found staying after class and experimenting with different mixtures of chemicals in the chemistry lab. On one particular occasion, he almost burnt down the north hall of the school. On another, he landed over half of his classmates in the hospital quick care center due to a mixture of poisonous gas flumes. He was eventually expelled from this class, but his obsession with chemistry didn’t stop there.

Wilbur dropped out of school in the middle of the tenth grade and got a job at one of the local fast food restaurants. His parents let him move into the basement of their home, where he spent most of his time reading chemistry books. His father laid down the law about conducting any experiments in the basement, under the threat of permanent eviction.

Wilbur rarely came upstairs from The Dungeon, as he referred to it, except when he went to work. He always left by the back door, never saying hello or good-bye to anyone. His mother would bring his meals on a tray, leave it on a shelf at the top of the stairs, and knock twice on the door. The empty tray was always replaced back on the shelf after he finished eating.

Wilbur kept only one light burning in the basement, which he never turned off, day or night. It was a 40-watt bulb attached to a single cord hanging from a rafter in the middle of the ceiling.

The basement stayed at the same temperature year round, damp and musty. Once a month, Wilbur would open one of the egress windows and air the place out, whether it needed it or not. Anyone with a sense of smell would have to admit that it definitely needed it, especially during the hot and humid summer months.

At the end of each week, every Friday morning, Wilbur would leave his dirty laundry in a basket at the top of the steps on his way out to work. His mother would have his clean clothes neatly folded and stacked back in the basket in the same place where he’d left them, when he returned home that evening.

The 50 year old wooden shelves in the north east corner of the basement, was where his grandmother had kept her canned fruits while living with his parents before she passed away. It was now lined with books dealing with every sort of poison known to mankind. Most of these books were stolen from the various public libraries around town.

Wilbur had devised a way to get the bar-coded books through the security checkpoints. He would take his oversized Star Trek lunch pail with the false bottom he’d built into it into the library, find his so called free book of the month, wrap it in a double layer of tin foil, place it under the false bottom panel in the lunch pail, put his sandwich back on top of it, check out an unrelated book with his library card, and then make his exit through the security stands. On occasion, the security guard would ask him to open his lunch pail, which he always did with a smile, offering the security guard part of his half-eaten sandwich. His collection of the so-called free book of the month, now numbered somewhere close to a hundred.

Wilbur spent every free waking hour pouring over these books. At the end of a three-year period, he surely could have qualified for a Masters Degree in Chemistry, if he’d been attending any accredited college.

Looking through one of the small egress windows in the basement, especially at night, and from the outside, one would picture this little obese man with the straw hair and huge horned-rimed glasses, hunched over a stack of opened books on a small wooden desk in the middle of the room. The one dim bulb hanging from the ceiling, casting its grotesque shadows everywhere, would remind anyone of the old black and white 1950s horror movies.

Wilbur's most recent interest in the field of chemistry was toxicology, the study of poisons. He spent countless hours researching different poisons, and why and how they worked. He became extremely fascinated with bugs, all types of bugs, where they came from, how they survived, where they lived and for how long, but most of all, his interest centered on what killed them.

Wilbur wasn’t surprised when he discovered that the best way to eliminate bugs was by the use of various poisons. The thing he found most interesting, was how the poisons had to be changed often, because some of the bugs would eventually become immune to them over an extended period of time. These two interests, bugs and poisons, would soon set Wilbur free from his paper hat job at the fast food restaurant.

Over time, contrary to his parents’ wishes, many experiments were performed in the Dungeon, and Wilbur had developed several poisons that would never have to be replaced if they were used to kill bugs. All of these poisons were deadly, and so far, two of them were clinically untraceable. In the future, Wilbur would only use these last two poisons for what he called, his Special Services.

Chapter One

May 12 --- Several years later.

It was a little after ten in the morning when Larry Marshall returned to his living room.

A storm that started a little after three in morning was now ending. The thunder had been so loud at times, it literally shook the house, and the rain came down by the bucket-full. Larry always loved the Midwest storms, but this one somehow scared him. Maybe scared wasn’t the word, but it sure made him nervous. To his relief, as he stood staring out through the picture window, he could see portions of dappled light spreading across his front yard, as the Sun made an attempt to come out. The weather was beautiful after an early spring storm, the air was cool, clean, and fresh; the perfect time to go fishing, his favorite pastime, and he planned to do that today. The fish were always biting after it rained.

He spent the first two hours of the day working in the garage on a new set of shelves for the laundry room in the basement. The word ‘work’, might at this point be somewhat used out of context, as Larry spent more time drinking beer, than working on the shelves.

This was how Larry, now retired for almost a year, spent most of his time, drinking beer. For the last twenty minutes or so, he’d been feeling a little dizzy and nauseated, but he’d chalked those feelings up to the cheap beer that he’d bought at the discount liquor store last week. The dizziness continued, so he plopped down in his old leather lounge chair to relax. He leaned over, picked up one of his monthly fishing magazines off the floor, and started flipping through the pages. He thought about going to the kitchen and getting one of his, so called, good beers, but changed his mind because he still felt dizzy.

Larry’s wife, who was eight years younger than he was and still held a job, had been on his back for the past three months to finish the shelf project. Now understand, Larry was not a complete slacker, but his problem was that he would start ten different projects, and never finish one. This didn’t make him a bad person, but it sure gave his wife something to complain about. He’d told his fishing buddies that the complaining was day and night, never ending, and assured them that he was not stretching the truth to any degree. He told everyone that she complained so much that he sometimes wished he could be rid of her, and then his retirement would consist of just fishing and drinking beer.

Each time someone would ask him how long he he’d been married, he replied, Ten beautiful years, thirty three altogether.

In a conversation with the pest control man just a half an hour earlier, and while he was installing the shelves he’d cut, Wilbur made this statement, along with several others including, Sometimes, I wish the old bag would leave the house and never return. Another favorite was, The more time I spend with the old Blister, the less I can stand her. In fact, she gave me so much grief the other day, I had to haul off and slap her a good one. Just to set her straight. Sometimes, that’s just what they need. You know what I mean, don’t you fellow? he said to the Bug Man.

The Bug Man just nodded his head as he continued to spray around the baseboard in the laundry room. This was not the first time the Bug Man had listened to Larry's ranting and ravings about his wife. Nor was it the first time this man had admitted to hitting his wife. In fact, if the bug man had kept track of these statements, and he did, it totaled nineteen times. Far too many times to let it ever happen again.

These statements that were made over and over by a man married to his wife for that amount of time, regardless of her complaints, and from what he saw, the Bug Man was sure she had a reason to complain, were totally unacceptable in the mind of the Bug Man.

Say, why is it that you’re wearing a mask today? I’ve never seen you wear one before. Larry asked the bug man.

The Bug Man gave him a muffled answer, Doing this day in and day out, it sometimes makes me a little dizzy in a closed in space, so once in a while, I wear a respirator, but you don’t have to worry, the little bit I spray here won’t hurt anything but the bugs.

Right