Come Summer, The Unique Dallas Explosion
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
(Originally published in Funny Maundering magazine: July 20xx. All rights reserved.)
Nature is full of examples of animals and plants that spend years building up energy, emerging to spread, and then dying off. Cicadas, certain species of bamboo, walking crepe myrtles. There are also the examples of organisms that drastically change their physiology based on environmental stresses, such as mandrill baboons or cannibal morph salamanders. With one exception, humans are exempt from this sort of mutability, but that one example can be found in the thousands through the greater North Dallas area every summer. And their numbers are growing.
Every July 4 weekend, the cries start. The skittering in the shadows. The unsuspecting victims. At grocery stores, drugstores, and superstores, casual shoppers wanting to beat the summer sun peel themselves out of their vehicles and attempt to stagger inside, unaware that flocks of relentless predators watch their every move. As they reach the door, they find themselves mobbed by dozens, surrounded and cut off from any possible escape, with maddened, frantic shrieks being the last thing they hear.
“It’s HOT. It’s HOT.”
According to Dr. Misha Niles, professor of Exonormal Biology at St. Remedius Medical College, the phenomenon of the North Dallas Shrieker is one dependent upon the unique conditions of the Dallas area. “The Shriekers start out as normal people, sort of. The North Dallas area is particularly full of the morphs: the former high school and college Mean Girls and wannabe Mean Girls who settled down into suburbia and found themselves increasingly irrelevant. Their children are all in their forties and fifties, their grandchildren are graduating from college, and their great-grandchildren think they’re creepy and smell funny. Their fellow Tri-Delts are all dying off, new members don’t want to hear stories of the great SMU and Baylor parties of the 1960s and 1970s, and their lives now circle waiting for the mailman to bring junk mail and watching the latest Martha Stewart episode. The only contact they have with fellow humans is with the occasional visit from failchildren who need their bank account and credit card information ‘to help take care of you,’ and when spring and summer temperatures get too high to get out and shoplift at Neiman Marcus, they attach themselves to the couch and metamorphose.”
The process is quick but drastic. The lips and teeth fuse into a sharp beak. Fingernails and toenails turn into claws capable of tearing rents in aluminum. Vestigial wings grow out of the back, just above the shoulder blades. The eyelids go white and pink, much like a gelada, and fuse into a permanent resting Shrieker face. Most of all, the vocal chords and larnyx change shape to echo the distinctive cries: Shrieker calls have been documented traveling as much as two kilometers without augmentation, and at close range can shatter glass. With the metamorphosis complete, the Shrieker goes out, looking for prey.
Dr. Niles notes that a very valid reason exists for the Shrieker’s obsession with summer heat. “Remember that the last great glacial maximum ended only 18,000 years ago, so some remember when there was a chance of snow and sleet in Dallas all the way into July, and snowdrifts and piles could remain until the end of August when fresh snows arrived. They’re like Devil’s Hole pupfish, supremely adapted to a world long gone, and about as inbred. Eventually, with continuing human-caused climate change, the last will fade out, especially with the demise of local shopping malls and other refuges, but until then, we have to deal with them and their messes.”
Contrary to popular impressions, Shriekers do not exclusively haunt the front of grocery stores and shopping malls: some are famed for walking into garden centers and craft shows, attracted to the sounds of large crowds, and loudly and inarticulately howling until the entire crowd stops to pay attention to them. A very well-documented case in Denton, Texas involved a shopping mall pet shop in the 1980s, with the Shrieker cornering staffers every day with screams of “Where are your condors?” for nearly three months. The overwhelming majority, though, hang from their toes over retailers with regular traffic, dropping in front of started shoppers to shriek “It’s HOT” over and over, blocking both entrance to the store and escape to the parking lot, until the victim succumbs to the weather and the Shrieker can feast.
Most efforts at Shrieker control are mixed at best. In bad years, spraying and bombing cut back the larger infestations, but new ones move into the area, attracted to the relative quiet. “Some years,” Dr. Niles notes, “the best thing anyone can do is stay home and leave them be. The parking lots just sound like pterosaur rookeries, and they smell even worse. And when they complete their life cycle when school starts again and they start dying off in the hundreds…well, the lot sweepers have their jobs cut out for them. For most of that time, everyone learns to enter stores just before dawn, when they’re asleep and before they wake to demand free samples from nearby coffee shops, and to hold their breaths when leaving for the night. Many stores set up cots in the back so stockers and cashiers don’t have to go home before dark.” Efforts to develop effective Shrieker repellents, either for individuals or for infested areas, continue with limited success, with the understanding that some scents, such as those of skateboard parks and retro video arcades, tend to set off whole flocks of Shriekers with homicidal fury. Efforts to monitor their spread also continue, with outlying flocks forming now in the suburbs of Frisco, Plano, and the crater that used to be Allen.
Surprisingly, this may not be the only case of human dimorphism in the Dallas area. Many of the Shriekers’ children may themselves become completely sessile, attaching their buttocks to walls or floor of their current residence with a powerful glue in front of a television or computer, growing a structure comparable to a leafhopper catapult to throw their feces when angered, startled, or forced off Reddit. Most remain until the house or apartment building is demolished, burns down, or disintegrates, and some gather in colonies and collectives analogous to barnacles or gecko nests commonly known as “deglers.” As with Shriekers, no known treatment exists for fully metamorphosed deglers, but moving colonies, one sheet of plywood at a time, has been performed successfully to break up severe infestations, with special efforts to monitor them after relocation to prevent “incidents.”
And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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