A bus, its horns blaring, its driver white-faced, passed her with an inch to spare, its tailwind rocking the scooter. Then a motorcycle came at her, the driver invisible in his helmet. She swerved, but not enough, and he struck her a glancing blow. She recovered, he didn’t, and he went skidding off down the highway, the motorcycle sputtering and whining, and she heard his faint, sad cry as he ripped along the pavement.

Then an eighteen-wheeler hit the motorcycle and the rider, amid great clanging and crunching and roaring.

Overhead, a helicopter sputtered and spun inside a raging cloud of what must have been more of the metallic insects.

She was away, but now having to speed between onrushing lanes of cars with just millimeters to spare on each side of her. There was no way to return to the other roadway, no way to stop, no way to escape, and she thought that she might have escaped the bizarre people and the insects only to be killed by a morning rush that had not even the slightest idea that anything was wrong.

An opening appeared between her and the shoulder. She swerved the scooter, shot across the pavement and onto the gravel, then off it and into the brush. Throttling back, she brought the Vespa to a stop and, as soon as she did, heard more sound from above.

At first, looking up, she didn’t understand what she was seeing. What was this spinning, popping, whining mass of the insects doing? But as it twisted and turned and screamed like an engine gone mad, she glimpsed a red stripe inside the mass, then an area of whiteness, and understood that it was a helicopter that had entirely been covered by the things.

An instant later, it came spinning down and hit the ground hard fifty feet away, the impact causing it to bounce and turn over on its side, busted rotors cartwheeling past her head with a horrifying screech of tearing metal. Dozens of the insects were crushed, and the rest rose up and swarmed into the sky, a silver column in the golden lace of the clouds.

The helicopter lay there, an impossible, crushed little thing with a few of the insects still crawling on it … with movement inside.

Her first impulse was to jump on the Vespa and just ride, but then a woman’s long arm came out the shattered window of the upward-facing door, and her hand scrabbled along the surface, seeking to open it from the outside. Toward the rear of the shattered fuselage, a spray of fuel came out.