Chapter 1 - The Darkening Sky
The sky over Dry Creek did not fall all at once; it dissolved.
At first, the sun turned a bruised, unnatural orange, as though somewhere beyond the horizon a mountain of dried grass was burning without flame. The air grew thick and greasy, carrying a smell like crushed weeds and hot tin. On the porch of the Martinez farmhouse, eight-year-old Mateo pointed his small, dust-stained finger toward the northern ridge.
"Papa," the boy whispered again, his voice cracking with a terror that belonged to someone much older. "The clouds have legs."
Tomás Martinez stepped off the bottom porch plank, his worn leather boots sinking an inch into the powdered topsoil. He shielded his eyes with a calloused hand. What his son called clouds was not a rain front. Rain brought the dark, cool belly of thunderheads, the scent of damp ozone, the clean promise of survival. This was a crawling wall of bronze and brown, miles wide and hundreds of feet high, humming with a vibration that settled deep in the marrow of Tomás’s teeth.
Across the valley, the warning spread not by phone lines, but by the frantic clatter of iron wheels and shouting. On the neighboring farm, Frank Higgins was attempting to drive his John Deere tractor into his barn, his face red under his felt hat, screaming at his two teenage sons to wet wool blankets and cover the cabbage patch. At the general store three miles down the dirt road, Mr. Miller stood on the wooden steps, slamming his heavy storm shutters closed, his heart hammering against his apron as the midday sun vanished behind a curtain of living shadows.
The grasshoppers had arrived.
It was the great plague of 1934, born in the drought-parched wastes of the Dakotas and fattened on every green leaf between the Missouri River and the Rockies. They did not fly so much as drop—billions upon billions of heavy, yellow-striped, hungry bodies falling out of the sky like a hail of iron nails.
They struck the tin roof of the Martinez barn first with a sound like thrown gravel. Clatter-clatter-clatter. Within ten seconds, the porch planks, the fence posts, the dry dirt of the yard, and the leaves of the single stunted peach tree near the well were completely covered under a writhing, two-inch blanket of insects.
"Get inside!" Elena screamed from the kitchen doorway, grabbing Mateo by the collar and pulling him backward into the shade. "Tomás! Inside!"
"The chicks!" Tomás shouted back, his voice swallowed by the deafening, dry roar of a hundred million vibrating wings. "The pen!"
He ran toward the makeshift shelter he had spent three frantic days building from scrap lumber, rusted chicken wire, and flattened oil drums. He expected to find horror. He expected three hundred and thirty-seven tiny, delicate creatures smothered under a mountain of heavy bugs, trampled and suffocated in the dark.
Instead, when he threw back the heavy canvas flap covering the pen’s entryway, Tomás stopped dead in his tracks.
The chicks were not hiding. They were not suffocating.
They were fighting.
For three weeks, the three hundred and thirty-seven surviving chicks had known nothing but crushed corn sweepings, dry flour dust, and the meager grass seeds the children managed to scrub from the dried creekbed. They were lean, long-legged, and perpetually ravenous. To a two-week-old chick, a three-inch grasshopper dropping from the sky was not a terrifying monster of the plague—it was a mountain of fresh meat.
A large grasshopper landed with a dull thud on a wooden crossbeam inside the pen. Before its wings could fold, a speckled chick darted forward, snapped its beak over the insect’s head, and gave a sharp, violent jerk of its neck. The grasshopper thrashed, but the chick swallowed it whole with a fierce, gulping motion, its throat swelling as the prize went down.
Beside it, three pullets were tearing apart a plump female grasshopper, fighting over the fat abdomen like wolf pups over a bone. Another dozen chicks were leaping into the air, catching the fat bugs mid-flight before they could even hit the dirt.
Tomás stood in the eye of the storm, his mouth open, dust settling on his tongue.
Outside the pen, the world was being devoured. The grasshoppers were eating the paint off the house siding. They were chewing through the cotton clothesline Elena had strung between two posts. They were stripping the leaves off the willow trees until nothing remained but stark, pale bone-white twigs. They fell into the wells; they jammed the radiator grilles of cars; they crawled over boot leather, eating the wax straight off the seams.
Inside the pen, a wild, rhythmic frenzy had taken hold. The chicks did not retreat. They moved in an organized, feathered tide, their sharp eyes tracking every movement in the air. Every time a fresh cluster of grasshoppers fell through the wire mesh, fifty small beaks met them with lethal precision.
Elena crept out to the doorway of the barn, holding a heavy wool blanket over her head to shield herself from the raining insects that pelted her face and neck.
"Tomás!" she cried out, her eyes wide with terror as she looked at the dark sky. "We have to lock the house! They’re coming through the chimney!"
Tomás turned to her. His face was covered in a film of grey dust, but his eyes were blazing with a light she had not seen since the bank had taken their cattle two winters ago.
"Elena!" he yelled back over the deafening roar of the swarm. "Get the boys! Get the buckets! Open the side wire!"
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"What?!" she shouted, thinking the noise had driven him mad.
"Open the wire!" Tomás repeated, running to the corner of the coop and tearing away the bottom wooden lath that held the mesh to the ground. "They aren't dying, Elena! They’re eating!"
