Insect Queen, Part 7 by Anonymous

Note:
This is a story entry for the Writing Contest.
The 10 participating writers will remain anonymous until 20 November.
For more information on the contest timeline, visit this post.

Related Work & Context: Alternate Ending for Insect Queen

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Lana Smith awoke with a harsh intake of air to a gentle beeping and the shrill sound of creaking, warping metal. Her chest and shoulder muscles felt painfully tense, and her jet-black insect eyes fluttered with bewilderment for a moment before adjusting to the sanitized golden-white room around her. As she came back to herself, she recognized the familiar space that she now called home – a long, low room with hexagonal patterns painted all along its walls and ceiling, a nightstand packed with reading material to her left, and a long row of baby cribs filled with snoozing infants lining one wall to her right. She also recognized what she had just seen for what it truly was.

“Just a dream,” she said shakily, willing herself to relax as she wiped a cold sweat from her brow. With a touch of sulkiness, she frowned and added, “... That dream.”

It was a dystopian world she’d dreamed of many times before – one where her babies were born aggressive and flying, seeking out unsuspecting women, latching onto their faces with extended probiscises and pumping them full of mutagen, making them bug-women freaks endlessly swelling with offspring… making women everywhere just like her. It was a world overpopulated by humanoid insect queens and their progeny, with humanity on a quick path to extinction. It was… fortunately enough… also an improbable fever dream, and it just wasn’t true. Nothing about her condition was contagious, and it never had been. Her babies were not aggressive or dangerous, and they never had been either, nor did they have needle-noses to even administer a dose of… of… whatever it was. Even if they were impressively mobile compared to normal human babies. What she hated most of all was that even as the dream registered as a nightmare to her lucid human half, she often woke up from it feeling strangely excited… and aroused.

Probably just another example of ‘bug-brain’ messing with my head… she thought, antennae wiggling. Anything it can imagine to fill the world with more offspring. With more… more children… Wait. Hold on. What’s that beeping?

She looked around before noticing a red light blinking on the locked steel door at the opposite end of the room, and she looked down to see the intercom button on the chair next to her blinking as well.

“Oh!” She quickly picked it up and pressed the button. “Hey, sorry. I fell asleep.”

“Miss Smith, this is Agent Williams. May I come in?”

“Sure. Most of the babies are asleep anyway. Just close the door quickly once you’re inside.”

“Of course.”

With an electric squawk, the steel door opened, and a tall, straight-backed agent in a black suit and black shades stepped inside. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair, a trim moustache, and a stony and stoic face – a figure straight out of someone’s conspiracy theories. Yet, his presence never failed to inspire Lana with relief.

Heh… I wonder what I inspire him with, Lana thought with a touch of self-deprecation. I’m sure I’m something else to look at…

Lana was seated on a custom-made, open-backed chair she jokingly called her “throne,” and it was where she spent most of her day. Moving about was simply too difficult for a woman in her state. Lana’s current appearance was a strange mixture of the ordinary and the bizarre. She kept her light-brown hair in a short pixie cut nowadays, and wore a loose red sweater, floral capris pants that tightly hugged her generous hips and thighs, and houseshoes… but there the normality ended. Her eyes were jet-black without a hint of white or colored iris, and they were compound and faceted for anyone who cared to look closely enough. Antennae protruded from her forehead, and her custom-made loose sweater had two extra sleeves for her lower, second set of arms, identical to her upper ones. Her sweater was also dimpled on the front by an overabundance of feminine bulges – four E-cup breasts resting atop and at the sides of a spectacularly massive, bulging pregnant belly that stretched her sweater tight and looked big enough to contain full-term quints.

What really “stole the show,” though, was Lana’s flesh-colored insect abdomen resting freely on the floor behind her and rising nearly to the level of her shoulders when seated. Once barely a small fatty bulge at her tailbone, the ridged, oblong, pill-shaped mass had swelled to the size of a couch with her fertilized eggs and was now easily the single largest organ in her body, big enough for the rest of her to fit comfortably inside it. The fleshy sac was attached to her lower back by connective tissues of muscle, bone, and cartilage the size of a man’s bicep, full of nerve endings and major arteries. It was part of her now, and it always would be. Lana had reached this huge size and achieved a sort of equilibrium shortly after arriving at the facility, with her pregnant belly incubating her eggs for a time after they were squeezed out of her ovaries and into her womb, only to be pushed from there into her bug abdomen, where they would be nurtured and gestated for several more weeks. Her abdomen’s size would grow and shrink depending on where she was in her fertile cycle, but it never got much smaller than a love seat or more larger than it was right now. She was due to birth again very soon, though she tried not to dwell on it too much.

As Williams made his way over, Lana heard a buzzing sound from the cribs across the room that perked up her motherly instincts. Two infants shook themselves loose from their blankets, and wings sprouted from their backs. They looked almost like normal one year olds, only with their mother’s peculiarities – black eyes, four arms, a little bug abdomen the size of a kid’s football atop their bottoms, and of course, those bright, translucent, retractable wings. With a little hop and a buzz, they darted into the air and then toward Lana, and specifically toward the bottom of her sweater. Quite familiar with this routine by now, Lana lifted all four arms as they landed in her lap, and watched with a smirk as they burrowed their heads beneath her sweater and began to crawl up. She felt two hungry little mouths attach themselves to her nipples and begin to greedily suck – one going after the top-left, the other after the bottom right – and she exhaled as her milk let-down started and her brain was flooded with dopamine. She held each baby up by its bottom with one of her arms, more for her sake to keep them still than for theirs, and gave Williams an embarrassed little wave with one of her free hands as he joined her.

“H-hey there, Williams,” she said, trying to paper over the maternal euphoria she felt from being suckled.

“Miss Smith,” he said with a curt, polite nod. His eyebrows furrowed and he adjusted his shades as he looked down at her chair. “... Bad dreams again?”

“What? How did you…” Then Lana looked down at the arm rest and cringed. “Ah, shit. I’m so sorry.”

The reinforced steel connecting the chair’s right armrest was bent and warped almost sideways… Lana’s handiwork, a stress reaction to her "contagious queen-pocalypse" nightmare. She’d bent it like a plastic straw. She gave it a blase, unamused look. Whatever its other consequences, her transformation had also left her able to lift over nine times her own weight, and she was freakishly strong.

“Sorry. I’ll try to do better about that.”

“As long as you don’t give my arm or one of our orderlies that treatment, it’s no problem. Armrests, we can replace. But… I don’t know if it will give you better dreams, but I’d like to talk over several bits of good news with you. Care to take a walk with me after your children finish eating?”

It would be untrue to say her “eyes lit up,” but a big smile spread over Lana’s face at that invite.

“Yeah, of course!”

She pressed a button on the console next to her, and the section of floor her plump, egg-packed abdomen rested on rose up just a little – revealing it was actually a hidden pallet with wheels.

***

Lana’s walk down the facility’s long, quiet, isolated hallways was slow by necessity due to her size, but she enjoyed being up and about, and she also enjoyed her present company.

Agent Williams wasn’t the one who first found her that night a little over a year ago, naked in the woods, her pregnant belly and abdomen so enormously swollen with eggs that she couldn’t move, whining as her body shuddered and convulsed and popped out children at a desperate rate. That dubious honor went to a female hiker who immediately fainted, then ran away screaming from the scene when she woke up, only to eventually call for help. But Agent Williams was the first one that night who treated her like a person, even in that moment when she bore little resemblance to one.

“I–I can’t make it stop!” she’d choked, an insectoid buzz humming in her throat. Her huge, rounded belly convulsed, and two off-white eggs shaped like a grain of rice but the size of newborn babies popped from the seeping, throbbing end of her growing bug abdomen. “I can’t stop!”

He’d merely adjusted his shades as other agents advanced behind him and said, “We know. And it’s all right. I know it’s hard to imagine right now, ma’am, but… you’re going to be all right.”

Williams had done his best to deliver on that promise. They took her to this strange, secret government facility for cryptids and “profoundly unusual individuals,” where they hooked her up to an IV for a while to allay her ravenous hunger. They also made sure her babies were well-cared-for and allowed to regularly nurse or be bottle-fed once they began hatching. They brought in a therapist to help talk her through the strange instincts that had come with her transformation… the behaviors that had her acting more like an insect than a woman.

That last one was… a challenge. It still was. Lana and her therapist jointly came up with the term “bug brain” to describe these urges, and it took some experimentation to figure out what to do about them. Obviously, giving into “bug brain” completely was dangerous, and what had landed her naked and birthing in the woods. However, they found that attempts to completely suppress it had results that seemed just as bad.

For a while, they tried to keep Lana away from her eggs and babies, thinking that the sight of them might trigger her subconscious urges to nest and breed, but that only seemed to make her restless and even violent. She had to be sedated a time or two to keep her from beating a guard unconscious. She’d also swing into crushing bouts of depression, and environments too synthetic and “manmade” seemed to keep her anxiety high. The doctors’ talk of finding some way to completely sterilize her also brought on such frenzied, angry, instinctual panic in Lana that they had to immediately promise to swear off that idea as a condition of being allowed to leave the room in one piece.

Through trial and error, they finally discovered that what contributed most to Lana’s well-being was balance. Like it or not, Lana was no longer fully human… but she was also far from being completely insect, either. By giving into her “bug brain” instincts and humoring them on little things, it gave her human side the mental fortitude to assert itself on bigger issues that mattered. So the scientists and agents at the facility gave her a regular supply of sticky, sweet snacks and heavy meals, allowed her to feed herself as her instincts led her, and kept many of her eggs and at least about a dozen of her children near her at all times. They also painted her room with a beehive pattern and installed lights that mirrored natural sunlight and moonlight. They also warmed Lana up to the idea of not stopping her endless state of pregnancy and recurring births, but of significantly reducing their number. Lana the human woman badly wanted to stop giving birth to 50-75 baby-filled eggs every six weeks… Lana the giant insect became restless at the idea of birthing any less. However, the two Lanas seemed to be gradually coming to a compromise position that something like six to a dozen new babies in such a time frame might be sufficient, and that was what the scientists treating her were working toward as they tested fertility-suppression drugs. That testing was still “early days” at this point, though, and seemed a distant prospect as Lana tugged her enormous abdomen along behind her on its wheeled platform.

“I wanted to tell you that your ex-boyfriend, David, was recently institutionalized in an asylum for the criminally insane.”

Lana stopped in place, and her antennae wiggled in surprise.

“Huh? But David’s not insane. A selfish, horrible asshole, maybe, but not in…”

She suddenly noticed that Agent Williams was staring her down – her, in all her insect-queen-mutant-thing glory. She scowled and mentally kicked herself for starting to defend him.

“Anyone who would inject a person with an unknown mutagen like he did to you is not well and shouldn’t be trusted among the general public. To be honest, the reason I said ‘criminal’ is that he was tried and found guilty for your murder. You need to be ‘dead’ for right now, Lana, and he is the person most responsible for your old life ending forever. We didn’t feel bad framing him considering there’s some truth to the charge.”

“Yeah… you shouldn’t,” she said darkly.

Her lower arms supported the underside of her swollen belly and her upper arms rubbed the top as she felt some eggs shift inside her, and she smothered a grunt as a little contraction pushed three of them through her “tailbone” into her abdomen with a little jiggle. As she breathed in, the idea of David in a straight jacket with his freedom taken away suddenly had a lot of appeal.

“That was also convenient for our purposes here,” Williams added. “Besides being a criminally-insane asshole, David does happen to be a brilliant scientist who now has nothing but time on his hands. We might have dropped a hint to him that the amount of time he gets to see the sun each week will have a direct correlation with how useful he makes himself in working on our fertility suppression drug project. Heh…”

A crooked grin grew on the Agent’s face, something so rare that it made Lana smirk also.

“What has you so amused?”

“Just thinking that your ex did have a genuine mental breakdown for a few minutes when we were interviewing him and divulged one fact. He was not pleased when he found out he wasn’t the father of all of your eggs.”

Lana burst out laughing at that when she imagined Dave’s shocked, stricken face. Serves him right, the possessive ass. He’d falsely accused her of adultery many times during the latter half of their relationship when he got on her nerves and she tried to create some temporary distance between them, and his insulting paranoia was a big part of why she finally dumped him. She saw some poetic justice in the notion that the first time she’d really “cucked” him – even if it was after their relationship was essentially over – had such spectacular and productive results.

As she held her huge belly, Lana briefly reflected that the actual man who had gotten her pregnant was some one-night stand… an accountant named Jeremy, or Jimmy, or something like that. She remembered him being pretty hot, but if Lana knew then what she knew now – that her body had hoarded and stored all the semen she squeezed out of him that night in a special sack, a new organ attached to her uterus that would keep his sperm nurtured and lively inside her for decades, squeezing it directly onto her eggs as she ovulated and keeping her permanently fertilized, pregnant, and full of his babies for the rest of her life – she might have picked a baby-daddy who was just a little more exciting.

Oh, well. At least you made really beautiful kids, Jeremy…

Lana held her heavy belly carefully and resumed her waddling walk as Williams waved her over toward a large window.

“I also wanted to tell you that we’ve received approval from our higher-ups and the Congressmen privately briefed on the matter to pursue the plan we discussed about the island.”

“Really?!” Lana blurted, grinning broadly. “Oh my god, that’s… That’s great!”

“Yes, we’ve got it narrowed down to two options and are just doing some final research. But it should be a viable plan, once we… er, stabilize and regularize your condition.”

In that moment, Lana didn’t even mind the fact that Williams didn’t use the word “cure.” It used to bother her, but by now she had become resigned to the fact that there was no cure for her condition. What had happened to her was not a disease, but a metamorphosis, and there was no going back. But to live in the open air – and to feel the sun and the wind on her back and belly and face again! Lana was so pleased she almost buzzed.

The agency’s “island plan” had to do with their intentions to find a more permanent and suitable home for Lana and her ever-growing brood of children in their current state. It turned out that the United States government owned some uninhabited islands in the South Pacific that had been abandoned in the 1950s in preparation to test atomic bombs, only for them to move to different locations with the people never coming back. They were big enough to support some small settlements, but so remote and far from any other landmass that neither Lana nor her babies would be able to escape to another island if they went rogue and tried to fly off on their own. There were still a lot of “unknowns” about her babies, and it would not be prudent to allow them to mix with normal humans outside those working in this agency until those questions were answered.

The biggest question mark had to do with her kids’ future fertility… or possible lack thereof. The vast majority of Lana’s eggs seemed to hatch cute little bug-girls, with only about 20% being boys. If their biology mirrored that of hive insects, it might mean most of Lana’s daughters would not be fertile at all – “workers” of a sort – with only a handful of “queen” candidates needing close watching. But if all of the girls were as fertile as her, that could mean serious trouble if their fertility wasn’t suppressed with medicine, and the same might be true of her sons. They had plenty of time to work these things out and prepare for multiple scenarios – but it was a concern, and one that made the “remote Pacific island” option attractive to the government as a failsafe.

As Lana thought of these things, she waddled closer to the window where Williams stood, and suddenly realized she was looking down into the nursery. Nearly a thousand cute, chubby little insectoid babies – swaddled in cribs, crawling on the ground, crawling on the walls, buzzing gently in the air – attended by hundreds of masked nurses caring for them filled the space.

Lana’s heart pounded with excitement as she surveyed the nursery through the glass, shuffling in place and rubbing her thick thighs together as she felt herself getting wet with both desire and excitement. These adorable babies were hers, the product of all her nesting labor over the past year. Her precious babies… her spawn… her brood…! But these were not enough, not nearly enough! She had to make mooooore!

Lana gasped, then groaned loudly as she almost doubled over where she stood, her four plump breasts jiggling in her shirt as all four arms flew to clutch her rounded belly. She felt her sensitive womb convulse and swell outward with a surge of new eggs from her throbbing, hyperproductive ovaries, and then contractions pumped eggs into her swelling insect abdomen – not gently, but violently, desperately. She gasped as she felt the dimpled end of her abdomen start to tingle and twitch, and she feared she’d start giving birth in the hallway at any second. Suddenly, strong arms shaking her by the shoulders snapped her back into the present.

“Lana! Lana, get ahold of yourself!” Williams said. Calling over his shoulder to some unknown camera, he barked, “Close the blinds, damn it! She needs less maternal stimulus!”

With a quick whir, steel shutters hid the scene of the nursery full of children from view, and Lana heaved deep, ragged breaths, still fighting her “bug brain” instincts for control. She felt the arms holding her shoulders grow more gentle in their grip, and a man’s deep voice spoke to her softly.

“My name is Lana Smith…” he began.

Lana blinked, recognizing the start of the mantra – another product of the past year, one she’d worked out with her therapist. One that often helped.

“M-my name is Lana S-Smith,” she said unsteadily, pressing her eyes shut tightly. “My name… is Lana Smith. I am a woman. I am not a bug. My life… may be different, but it’s… it’s still mine. I have a future. And I can steer it…”

“... if I just focus,” Williams finished for her, his meaty hand resting on her shoulder.

She opened her eyes cautiously and straightened her posture with difficulty. Her belly was so huge now – noticeably larger than when she left for her walk. She’d pumped herself up with quite a litter for the next batch of eggs, and pushed even more than that into her ridged abdomen, which also looked strained and taut. It felt very… full. She felt little contractions still seize at her taut belly, and she buzzed with exhaustion. The birth of another huge clutch of eggs was surely in her very near future, and there was no undoing the fact that she had sped it along considerably just now… but at least now she could get back to her room where she had some privacy, as opposed to popping out her shelled offspring here in the hallway like some kind of animal. Little steps… little micro-exercises of control. It might not be much, but perhaps it could all add up… someday.

“Sorry, I should have been more considerate about where we stopped to talk,” Agent Williams said. He offered Lana his arm. “Ready to get back to your room?”

“Y-yeah… I’d probably better.”

As Lana took his arm and started on the walk down the hallway back to her quarters, her huge, hyper-fertile insect abdomen dragging behind her on its wheeled cart, she straightened her posture and tried to look on the bright side. What she said in her mantra about having a future… she really meant and believed it. Lana hoped it would be a bright one, even if it was strange.

Still, she couldn’t help but feel impatient for the arrival of some of those fertility-suppression drugs that might take some weight off her poor, egg-swollen bug butt. The edge of her mouth quirked with a smile.

… And getting my own private island won’t hurt, either.