The Red Mites of Mars

Mars opened its first store in 2070. It had been colonised since 2040 and over the thirty years it's pioneers had carved out a unique Martian lifestyle for themselves. They were different. Apart. Other.

So it was inevitable that the culture, food and fashion born on Mars would one day be a commodity that Earthlings would want and pay for. Hence the Mars store.

By 2075 they were everywhere. Mars was cool and people wanted to be a part of what was happening. Going red was what they said.

As the stores did well so too the Mars recruitment bureaus. They were packed as youngsters flocked to join the newbies, heading for the red planet to make a new life for themselves away from the overcrowded, overheating World.

Cities had risen from the crimson dust in a rapid expansion of real estate on Mars. Demand had to be met and business was booming. The planet's scarlet surface was bristling with cranes as new settlements came on stream under new domes. These newly-created atmospheric domes had made it all so much more possible. So much more achievable. It had been inevitable really.

Earth was a mess. Globally warmed. Massive population. Water wars. Air corrosion. Unstable systems, man-made and natural. Animal extinctions on a mass-scale. Half the world's peoples on the move to escape the hottest parts. A move to the shadows. A shift to the affluent North.

The stores from Mars were dotted across the North too. They stocked a myriad of items which were strange to the people of Earth but very familiar to the colonists of the red planet.

One of the shops' biggest sellers was Mars Moss grown on Martian dome farms. This reddish green vegetation had incredible moisturising qualities for dry skin especially as the World was heating up. It could absorb up to ten times the amount of moisturiser that a standard Earth moss could and apply it better on the skin.

As the temperatures rose on earth, overheated and and desiccating wealthy people flocked to the the Mars stores for this fabulous cooling Moss.

The store owners continued to sell colonists' art and crafts, together with Martian technology like the air conditioning unit, but it was the farmed moss that made them rich.

Moss was imported to Earth in vast quantities. As demand increased so too did standards decrease and the mosses were greedily ripped from wild populations outside the protective domes. 

The biggest outcrop was on the slopes of Olympus Mons, which up to that point had been protected under the colonists' strict conservation laws.

The wild mountain vegetation was shipped Earthside with scant regard for contamination. Branded as a new natural super-product from the red peak, it sold like hot cakes among the the desperate affluent people of Earth, who wanted it's even more soothing qualities no matter what the cost.

As time went on it all went swimmingly well for the Mars merchants. They got richer and fatter. But then talk of something in the wild moss began to surface. Something creepy. Something crawly.

The first official sighting of what was in the wild plant came when a diligent young girl cornered something coming out and prudently captured it in a glass jar, which she took to the nearest Mars outlet. 

The thing in the jar was peered at. Poked. Perused and cut in half. It was conclusive. It was a bug. A tiny red mite to be precise, as small as a pin-head and strong as hell. Under the scope it had a tiny shell-like round scarlet body, ten red eyes, a hundred crimson legs and huge pink serrated jaws clearly made for sawing and scraping.

No-one knew what it ate on Mars, although scientists believed it to be connected to the thin and scant chalks around Olympus Mons. Perhaps it ate the chalk. More certain was it's shelter from the hottest parts of the day. The Moss. That is how it had come to Earth.

Mars Stores put out a video-banner across the cities of the World. There is nothing to be alarmed about. The red mites will simply die on Earth as they have no access to the chalk of their own planet. Please continue to buy the wild moss. Simply shake out any mites before use.

And so all the imported mites were scattered across the settlements of Earth.

But they didn't die.

The mites thrived in the oxygen-rich Earth air. They grew cleverer and discovered a new and endless source of living calcium.

The first cases went unnoticed, happening as they did in cemeteries. The dead don't complain.

It was another incident which happened to be tele-videoed live across the globe that shocked and repulsed the peoples of the World.

Live on video a news reporter had brought a large crate of Mars Moss on set to test the number of mites that might be in there. He opened it up and began to shake the clumps. Instead of falling to the sheet laid out on the floor the insects leapt onto the man. Before he had chance to retaliate thousands of red mites covered his face and body. He fell to the floor screaming.

The mites got redder as they snipped off his clothes and like tiny surgeons cut through his soft skin along its entirety. 

The newsreporter yelled in agony. His female colleague clambered up onto the sofa shrieking in disbelief. 

With a million snips the creatures peeled back the man's skin revealing his living frame writhing like a gutted fish. Sickeningly fast they cleaned away his glistening muscle, sinews and fats. The mites then freed the still-twitching red-soaked skeleton, ripping it away from the remaining stubborn tendons in a shower of steaming blood.

As the swarm hefted the skeleton on its shoulders the man's final agonised view was of his own eyes being pulled out of their sockets and the optic nerves trailing from his skull like streamers. 

The man's bodiless brain was still aware of the feeling of floating for a few more seconds before it switched itself off for good in a nightmare of disembodied pain.

The mites carried the carcass off-set and into the street. A brave cameraman continued to follow and a horrified global public watched with a terrible morbid curiosity.

The camera filmed the carried skeleton as it made its way into the largest Mars store, the Mega Mars. It was met with hundreds, maybe thousands of other bloody frames being brought there by millions of Martian mites.

Sadly the cameraman wasn't spared and his own camera continued to roll as he was degloved and swept off to the Mega, all watched live by a mesmerised population.

For the next year the same sickening micro-surgery occured across the globe, as the voracious mites filleted and boned the peoples of the Earth, dragging their clicking booty to the nearest Mars Megastore.

It was in one such store that an intrepid kid unearthed the shocking truth about the skeletons and managed to get a report out to the remaining population before being stripped.

The bones were being fed to the Queens!

The workers got the brains and the spinal cords, which they pounced on like dogs.

Slowly but surely the human population of Earth dwindled, so everything else got boned too. Fish. Frogs. Cats. Elephants. Crocodiles. Blue Whales. Sparrows. Spiders. Everything. For the Queens to use.

From the carnage, the mite Queens had created a vast network of huge calcareous shells. Eventually these outcrops joined together to form a massive hard plate.

From Mars it appeared that Earth was now white, a planet of bone, shining like a new gigantic moon.

The Martians looked on in horror and thanked God for their bio-domes and the docile mites Mars had miles away on Olympus Mons.

The last Earthlings, holed up in the Kennedy Rocket Base, prepared for evacuation. Billions of red mites encircled the compound. The survivors' only chance was to get to Mars and live normal lives again under the colonists' first and biggest dome.

Guided by Martian Control, the ship entered the thin Mars atmosphere and the access window was opened in the dome's side to allow passage.

It was only then, as the window closed and the rocket was landing that Mars Control saw that the refugees were not alone.

The ship's outer skin was teeming with red mites and wedged in the exhausts was a vast Queen. It landed with a crack and eyed the colonists' home with insectoid relish.

Screaming out her orders, the Queen sent its army of mites out into this new world of fresh clicking bones and waited.