The bed bugs arrived some time during the Great War; all the schoolchildren who were now grandparents know, but couldn't remember exactly where they had come from or why. They'd come, as nightmares often do, in the night and had never gone away. They did not flee, as most nightmares do, with the rising sun. They stayed — in barracks close enough to and far enough away from the townsfolk, sleeping away the daylight hours and swarming at night beneath the streetlamps and at still-it storefronts, their dull armor dimly reflecting the glow, and the blurry shapes of their fellows.

They weren't supposed to be called bedbugs, of course. Their real name was some strange word in a harsh tongue that people said resembled the scraping and clinking of the bugs' armor when they marched. But everyone who'd heard the name had long since died as grandparents or were still alive, but thought the words and stories too scary to pass on or to even hold in their minds as age loosened their grip on less savory memories.

The children of this generation know very little of the fears of their forebears, and play games—seeing who can get closest to the barracks where the sleeping metal insect-men stay—and whisper rhymes and stories into the night. Sleep sound, sleep tight. And don't let the bedbugs bite.

Oh, they would bite. Still, years after the cause for the occupation was lost, the bugs would 'bite' anyone out late or who was making too much noise in the dark. Life had adapted around them, but now and then a too-long, too-loud evening would draw intervention, with the heavy stomping and metallic screeches serving as enough of a reminder, setting entirely aside the slaughter that accompanied the soundtrack.

Still, years could go by without the bedbugs buzzing being anything but a bother. But the way of things with men is that they eventually come to hate even the smallest restrictions, and rebel. Thus it was with the townsfolk and the bedbugs.

People say it started with a lone teenage boy, lovesick, walked home late after an extra hour of goodbye kisses from his beloved. He drifted into the pool of yellow light from a streetlamp at just the wrong moment, and was met with the gaze of a dozen pairs of empty metal eyes. People say you could hear the screams for miles; a violent enforcement of a curfew from a long unseated former dictator. The metallic crunching of bedbugs munching.

In reality it was probably some stumbling drunkard, but regardless, the screams started the belated revolution. Long years after the Great War, this town had stayed isolated, governed by archaic metal golems; the nightmares of their ancestors.

Now the townspeople were fed up. The townsfolk took up arms, and while the bugs slept, their barracks were filled with smoke.

The bugs not clogged and burnt and killed were driven out.

The events that follow have been called a fight. A battle. People have gone so far to call it a war for the town's honor and freedom. Really, it was an extermination. By the bugs, for the bugs.

They patrol the town, still. A few travelers have brought word. They remain, buzzing beneath the streetlights on the barren roads, keeping order.