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When Lily Gefelty got out of bed on the morning of the big game, she looked out the window to see what kind of a day it was going to be. She discovered that it was the kind of day when a million beetles crawl out of the ground and swarm the streets, forecasting evil.

She didn’t know about the evil yet, of course. She just saw the million beetles, brown and restless, dropping from trees and mobbing fire hydrants. She was not usually disgusted by beetles or anything else. But these did not seem natural.

She went to look up beetles online. Her eyes narrowed. She blew her bangs off her face. No question: It...