My boyfriend made friends with an exterminator, Charlie, recently and I got to chatting with the guy about what he deals with. And he told me by far the most expensive treatment his company does is bed bugs.
I heard bed bugs and my nervous system spazzed out and my stomach ran for the door. Pure terror just hearing about them.
And a light-bulb went on.
People hear the term bed bug and freak out. They can get into your house and it is f*&$ing expensive to hire an exterminator to get them out effectively. This is partially because it’s hard to find them all since they can hide in cracks and partially because a lot of bug spray doesn’t work on them so the exterminator has to heat up the house for a few hours to 150 degrees to fry all of them, steam clean all mattresses and couches to, and spray specific bug spray on top of it to get the ones that managed to burrow to insult themselves from the heat.
On top of the expense, they’re terrifying! They not only are hunting you like ticks or mosquitoes, they live and breed in your nest and hunt you from there. They take away your safe space and make it theirs. It’s frightening and makes people feel helpless.
So I’m writing about them.
Because those feelings of horror and revulsion are exactly what I’m going for.
Because writers are evil that way 🙂
I’m turning the next Evie Jones into a full book, since she’s such a great character she deserves a full series, and I came up with this idea of (big bad thing I’m not going to spoil) where the bad guy needs a lot of power to do it, and I was trying to figure out how they’d gather the power.
A curse that is a cross between bed bugs and a virus.
It’s called the Egyptian Blood Bugs Curse. The blood they gather carries power from the people and transfers the extra energy (that isn’t used for the bugs moving and reproducing) to the curse caster.
The bugs reproduce and grow faster than normal bed bugs and actually travel on people (both more like a virus than actual bed bugs) so they spread much faster. They took out about five million people in Ancient Rome and it went down in history as the Antonine Plague.
So I started asking Charlie a ton of questions so I’d know how these things work, how they spread, how fast they grow, and why they’re on the rise in the US recently.
I’m going to share those with you in a different post in a bit today (so I can have the people who just care about the story here and people who just care about prevention and causes on there) so everyone can start protecting themselves and their families because these things are getting worse and the more people taking some general precautions, the less these things can spread.
If you haven’t checked out Evie yet, her first short story is up for free today.
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