Buzz Driver

The drilling from upstairs began at eleven last night.  A bit late, thought Graham, but maybe it's an emergency or a short job that they want to get done before bedtime.  Eleven's not unreasonable on a Friday night for most people. 

Graham was 62 years old and worked as a bus driver.  He had just finished a week's training on the new Wright Eclipse Gemini and had finished the day at noon to give him a good rest before his eight am shift began. The bus was a dream to operate in reality: smooth, gearless, almost self-driving in fact.  The price tag however, around the three hundred thousand pounds mark, made him anxious.  He had scratched his first bus twenty years ago at the start of an otherwise unblemished career and, though his record no longer showed it, incidents like that lived long in the memories of his colleagues.  Githa Kathandara had driven off with a cocker spaniel once after the owner failed to come up with exact change and that still earned her the name 'Rustler' amongst her colleagues. What's more, she had brought that nickname with her from Reading, over eighty miles away!

The drilling ceased at ten to midnight and Graham breathed a sigh of relief.  He had gone to bed at a quarter past following a nice milky Ovaltine.  Splashes of lavender essential oil on his pillow he checked out the specialist public transport pornography site he had been told about the other week by Flash Gary and had the smoothest, burstingly good wank to cctv footage of young men and couples pleasuring themselves on the back seats of various vehicles.  Smiling at the memory of the seats on the  Optare Solo, he slopped the tissues into the bin beneath his bed unit and closed his eyes for six and a half hours of good quality napikins.

Brrrzzzzzzzz!!! Brrrzzzzzzzz!!!

Jerked awake, scared he was back on the M4 in Winter, stuck overnight in pitch black catatonic jam, Graham stared at the alarm clock for a few seconds till the numbers swam into shape. 01:33 - the same time the North Circular Late arrives at the stop behind Cineworld on an ideal run.  What the HELL were they thinking, running the drill upstairs at this bloody hour?  He lay there in the dark a couple of minutes waiting for the drone to subside, staring up in the ebon gloom.  Only the buzzing got louder, and then louder yet. A particle landed on Graham's nose, making him sneeze.  A few particles more then, as he stared in horror, a small circle of light appeared in the darkness above his bed.  The bastard had broken through!

Graham sat bolt upright and opened his mouth to yell blue murder at the idiot above him when the hole, wider by the second, revealed itself by its own light to be made by a flipping ENOURMOUS WASP!!!  A rigid saw-toothed tube on its hind parts sawed desperately at the plaster and lath at an alarming rate whilst the buzzing noise, heretofore assumed to be some ASBO neighbour's hammer drill, came directly from the behemoth's wings.  Graham stared transfixed  as the hole became wide enough for the lower segment of her abdomen to lower through the hole, leaving the saw apparatus dangling inches from the pillows.

Graham, by now splayed in a marsh formed of his own terrified effluent in the corner of the room, whimpered insanely clutching Mr Jolly, the little brown teddy he had always kept since childhood.  He could not move, could do aught but stare as the saw-part revealed itself to be an ovipositor of near two metres in length as it swelled and bulbed like the balloon sculptor's art laying one after another of writhing hell maggots upon his Egyptian cotton bed spread, these then tumbled to the shagpile like hungry macaroni and spilled ever further towards him, screaming now in terror quite beyond the semblance of what a normal human should present...

Eight o'clock came and went, the shift supervisor down at the depot checked her board again and scratched her head.  Graham was one of their core drivers, he had never taken a sickie and it was rare for him to even be cutting it fine for a shift, let alone late.  Climbing the three steps to the control booth she cribbed his number from the chart on the wall and dialled his home number.  The set rang once then to be replaced from the other end by a dreadful screaming, weeping drone.