He should have been trying to fly home or, at the very least, doing something to convince the two titans he wasn’t a mere mindless bug deserving only their contempt.
Instead, Brad hovered on his tiny insect wings and luxuriated in the overwhelming presence of the two stable hands. It had been moments like this that had been his motivation for conducting his ill-advised Chronivac test.
The red-haired man expelled a cloud of smoke from his lungs, directing the smoke toward the insect that inexplicably insisted on hovering only inches from his face.
His action took Brad completely by surprise. The little bug had been so caught up in horny feelings as it buzzed around the two masculine titans that it had gotten seriously careless.
The smoke itself didn’t bother the bug, due to insect respiration functioning quite differently than the inhalation of air into a pair of lungs, but the density of the sudden cloud did confuse and disorient him, which turned to full-blown panic when Brad heard the other man’s voice boom at an alarmingly close distance.
“There’s another one!”
He’d definitely overstayed his welcome.
Brad felt the turbulence as a giant hand slapped at him as he tried to zigzag his flight away from the titans. The giant hand sent the smoke cloud swirling into gentler eddies, as it slowly dawned on Brad that the smoke had been concealing as well as confusing. Now the concealment had been stripped away.
The red-haired giant saw exactly where he was. A pair of enormous green eyes narrowed and locked onto the airborne insect.
Brad felt another giant hand slap at him.
“Please. I just want to get home.” He buzzed, regretting his earlier decision to stay and enjoy some “fly on the wall” time with the behemoths. “Just leave me alone.”
He shot out of the dissipating cloud of smoke, determined to get away.
His flight had taken him lower, and now he found himself flying around waist level with the titanic man, which was far too close.
With a twitch of his wings, he flew higher, faster, and felt certain he had managed to get safely away from the giants.
He hovered briefly and decided to fly toward home, away from the colossal barn and his dangerous fellow humans.
He veered his flight path and zipped away from the giants at top speed when he promptly slammed into a sticky network of filaments between the barn wall and the mounting of a light fixture.
“No!” Brad buzzed and squirmed. “Oh no!”
His tiny insect form had blundered into the sticky strands of silk that now held him fast and secure as he fought against blind panic.
He recognized the web. Only moments earlier, he had watched another fly, trapped in exactly the same manner, in the same web, struggle helplessly. He had turned his back, flying away, unwilling to wait out the gruesome spectacle, which was now repeating itself with horrendous similarity. He could only buzz in disbelief and dismay. How could he have been so stupid, so careless?
The red-haired man leaned closer for a look and watched approvingly as the web’s weaver descended on a thin silken cable.
“Looks like this little pest is in for a world of hurt,” he sneered.
“Oh no! No!” Brad’s wings buzzed with desperate urgency. “No! Please! Help me! Please!”
The red-haired man’s friend coughed and spit on the ground before dismissing the buzzing insect’s dilemma with a shrug.
“It flew right into that cobweb,” the man said with a dismissive shake of his head. “Dumb bug!”
Brad heard the utter lack of empathy and writhed with renewed desperation. as he realized that the two big clods were his only hope. He had to get them to see that he was different!
“I’m not a bug! Please! I’m not a…”
The spider ducked closer and interrupted Brad's pleas, injecting a paralyzing venom into the bug with its fangs.
Brad’s blood, if a fly ha has any, froze in his veins, if a fly has any.
He barely moved as a creeping paralyis took hold. The wings all but ceased their buzzing. Legs twitched with random spasms. His faceted eyes blurred.
The ghastly spider spun him round and round, encasing him in a cocoon of silk. As his insect form was rotated in the spider’s clutches, he noticed an adjacent cocoon and could just make out another housefly wrapped up in a silken pouch.
The well-fed lurker could keep them fresh in its larder until it again grew hungry. Only then would it inject them with the special venom that would liquify their insides into a slurpable goo.
The men began to lose interest in the minor spectacle of the fly helplessly struggling against its fate.
“Please! You can’t leave me here!” Brad’s plea was manifested only by a soft shivering of his wings. “Don’t go!”
The red-haired man’s friend, without so much as another glance, stepped back inside the barn, leaving his friend to study the tiny cocooned bug, which continued to vibrate the cocoon with its feeble efforts.
The man inhaled deeply on the last of his cigarette, bringing the tip to a red-hot glow.
“I’ll do you a favor, you little fucker,” the man said as he sought out the web-weaver tucked into a crevice.
Poor Brad heard the sickly sizzling as the man incinerated the tiny arachnid beneath the smoldering tip of the burning cigarette. The man gave the cigarette another twist before tossing it on the ground and grinding it out under his boot.
The trapped fly weakly tried to flick its wings. If the man could only take the next step and free Brad from…
In a shock, the man turned and followed his friend into the barn, the cocooned fly all but now forgotten.
“No!” Brad wailed wordlessly as he began to realize the man’s unintended cruelty. It wouldn’t be a quick if gruesome death.
"Come back! Please come back. Don't leave me here!" Brad was left to wordlessly plead.
He was doomed to twist with every breeze, tucked into the prison of the silken cocoon, adjacent to other insects in identical states.
His tiny cocoon vibrated meekly, unobserved.