Coming soon to a bed near you?

Mealtime tiptoes into the home of Carmen Ramos . Three of her children, Ezequiel , 6, Eliezel , 4, and Naicha , almost 2, quietly settle in beside one another, each of them spooning clusters of Honey Bunches of Oats with Real Strawberries out of brightly colored plastic bowls.

The kids are sitting upright, in a row, down on the kitchen floor.

Carmen Ramos used to have a sweet dinette set. But she purged it from her apartment, she says, after the bedbugs took it over.

Her oldest child, 12-year-old Samuel , is absent today, frolicking at summer camp. He once spent nights for over a year sleeping in a bathtub, Ramos says, convinced that the cast-iron vessel was one of the only places where the bedbugs could not terrorize him.

Getting teary, Ramos, 33, moves into the living room and finds a place to rest. She slowly folds her body and descends onto the uncarpeted floor.

Ramos used to have a sofa of gold, burgundy , and black, with matching love seat and chair. But she had to cast them away from her flat in Roxbury's Whittier Street public housing development, she says, after the bedbugs invaded those, too. Gone, as well, are the guests she entertained on that couch ensemble. She's ashamed to invite them in, she says.

``Right now," says Ramos in Spanish through an interpreter who sits on a paint bucket, ``I can't take it anymore." With her fingernails, she attacks a connect-the-dots series of bedbug bites on her right arm, but pauses at the thought that the scratching will leave scars. Her mind returns to the kitchen. ``I have nowhere to go. I don't want this kind of life for my kids."

A battalion of bedbugs is marching through Boston, turning people's nightsheets, and their daily lives, inside out. According to a database of cases compiled since 2002 by the city's Inspectional Services Department, their pace is quickening: about three-quarters of Boston's bedbug cases have been reported in the last two years or so.

The parasites have left their trail of blood-flecked sheets in virtually every neighborhood of the Hub, from Roxbury to West Roxbury, the South End to South Boston, Brighton to Beacon Hill.

To amplify the stubborn realities of bedbugs, a regional conference is set for Sept. 16 at Bunker Hill Community College, organized by the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation and others, and geared toward tenants and property representatives.

The common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, knows no boundaries of class, race, or ZIP code, specialists say.

Local exterminators and inspectors say there have been calls in Boston to quell bedbugs in public-housing units and top-shelf hotels.

Exterminators say they've treated crowded tenements in Boston, and million-dollar manses in the western 'burbs.

Bedbugs don't dine on pizza crumbs in the corner. Like vampires, they are nocturnal creatures who thrive on human blood. Though only a quarter-inch long, bedbugs are potent troublemakers, sucking out not only people's vital fluids, but their savings and serenity as well .

``It has a psychological impact," says Dion Irish , the Boston Inspectional Services Department's assistant commissioner in charge of housing, of the city's growing bedbug eruption. ``Literally, you're going to bed every night knowing these insects are going to feed on you."

For a long time, the bedbug seemed but a mythical microbe, limited to parent-child pillow talk and the well wishes to sleep tight.

But following a rollback in the wholesale use of harsh pesticides and a rise in world travel, bedbugs in the US have recently come out of the woodwork -- and carpet ing and wall cracks.

Though they prefer to migrate to mattresses, to be close to their victims, bedbugs have been found in such odd hangouts as record albums, ceiling fans, and a hotel Bible.

In Boston, Inspectional Services has logged at least 351 cases of bedbug infestation since it starting keeping track in '02. Other cases are not reported by residents, who may mistake the bugs for fleas or mosquito e s, fear retaliation from landlords, feel a sense of shame, or be unaware that bedbugs have infiltrated their homesteads, as the insects remain in hibernation or hidden and transported by clutter.

Irish says that despite the numbers, the city has the current outbreak under control. Bedbug complaints, he says, still account for only 2 percent of his housing division's caseload, compared with 30 percent for roach-and-rodent calls and 50 percent for routine maintenance problems.

By spitting out data from computers, Irish says, city officials can pinpoint troubled neighborhoods and recidivist landlords.

East Boston, for example, accounts for 10 per cent of the city's 185 most recent bedbug cases, tallied since late 2004. So, earlier this month, the city target ed Eastie for literature drops and on-the-spot inspections.

With its high population of students and other transients, Allston-Brighton remains a hotbed of bedbug activity, registering 51 percent of the city's new cases.

During the time around the U-Haul holiday known as moving day, Sept. 1, city inspectors will be out in force in that neighborhood, aided by the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation, which has become a major citywide clearinghouse for anti-bedbug funding and information. They will help plaster discarded furniture with bright orange warning stickers -- CAUTION! THIS MAY CONTAIN BEDBUGS DO NOT REMOVE! -- and have the castoffs hauled away before students can snatch them to furnish their new flats on the cheap.

Left unchecked, bedbugs can multiply madly -- females lay up to five eggs a day -- and are regularly bitten by the travel bug. They are known to move from place to place, undetected and incognito, in high-priced luggage and ratty, abandoned sofas.

``Bedbugs are very efficient hitchhikers," says Vic Palermo , president of Ultra Safe Pest Management in Canton and Saugus, who's seen his bedbug caseload jump from three a month in 2000, when it was centered in Boston, to a dozen a week now, including suburbia. Palermo is contributing $1,000 to become a sponsor of the bedbug conference.

Once ensconc ed, bedbugs become the roommates from hell, stretching one's patience and bank account.

In a letter to her landlord, one Brighton tenant said her bedbug problem had cost her family $12,700, including $8,500 in lost wages to care for her bitten children; $2,900 on new mattresses and bedding; and $500 in moving expenses.

On the other side, the Boston Housing Authority says it treats all its vacant units for bedbugs before renting, and spokeswoman Lydia Agro says the agency spent $17,000 over the last two years at just the Whittier Street development, where Ramos lives, trying to keep the insects out. ``We take it very seriously," says Agro.

Irish says Inspectional Services understands that bedbug extermination regimens are complex and can take weeks, but maintains the city has no tolerance for landlords who drag their feet.

In the case of Ramos's Whittier Street apartment, Agro says management had trouble scheduling an exterminator for a second round of treatments, but sent one over as quickly as it could and is submitting the paperwork.

But Inspectional Services started criminal proceedings against the BHA in Housing Court this month, saying the agency hadn't filed an ``integrated pest management plan" for Ramos within the allotted two weeks.

In another instance, records show that Housing Court was on the verge of issuing an arrest warrant against a woman who'd failed to answer charges that she hadn't moved quickly enough against bedbugs in a Roxbury building cited by the city several months before.

No matter the origin of the bedbugs -- often in dispute -- the state sanitary code puts the onus on the landlord (except in single-family rentals) to have them removed.

Between the time that bedbugs are detected and destroyed -- and even afterwards -- residents can reside in an unsettled state of misery.

For days after the bedbugs ignored the obligatory ``No Trespassing" sign outside and breached her Brighton Avenue apartment, Eusida Blidgen became a wanderer in her own city.

One night this month, the 24-year-old artist says, she walked the streets past midnight, until she could crash with a relative.

Another night, she says, she slept in a vacant flat owned by another relative, a place that creaked, and reeked of fear, without electricity or working locks.

The bedbugs had entered her home with a vengeance.

Blidgen says her body was ravaged by welts that swelled beyond the size of quarters after what records show was an allergic reaction, leaving her skin blotched.

Her beloved pillow-top mattress became as off limits as a contaminated brownfield.

An official with the Hamilton Co., her landlord, says the firm has spent close to $1,000 to banish the bedbugs from her apartment, not counting reimbursing Blidgen $60 for anti-bedbug laundry treatments .

``We're not taking it lightly," says James Burke , Hamilton's director of property management.

Still, Blidgen says there's no way to truly compensate her for lost time.

Her boyfriend, she says, had for weeks refused to come over.

Her clothes are stored in plastic bags meant to barricade them from bedbugs.

She now catches shuteye scrunched up on her couch, but her sleep is fitful. If a loose blanket thread catches her skin, she squirms as if a bedbug has landed.

She is pregnant, she says, and worries how the bedbug aftereffects will affect her unborn child. Even the acrylic inspirations -- featuring vivid colors reminiscent of stained-glass windows -- that have shepherded her through hard times remain bottled up inside.

``Stuff can kill your vibe when you're an artist," she says. ``This is not me anymore."

The bedbugs in Jessica Azurdia's Allston apartment have darkened her adoles cent years.

Now 16, Azurdia might be the only teenager around who can't pile her clothing upon her bedroom floor. Her mother, a working housekeeper, won't let her, lest the bedbugs seep in.

Girl talk, she recalls, included this line from a friend, who saw one of the insects scamper across Azurdia's bed: ``You have bugs!"

To hide the bites on her arms, Azurdia would keep her coat on in class, telling those who asked, ``I'm cold."

Two years ago, she says, there were days when she felt too weak to go to school at all. She had headaches, felt sleepy, saw her skin turn yellow.

``The bedbugs were sucking my blood," she says.

One night almost three years ago, while she was sleeping, a bedbug crawled into Azurdia's left ear. She could feel it moving and scratching inside, and it made her sick. She was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night.

The bedbug was in so deep, records show, that medical personnel had to use an instrument to pluck it out.

Even as they say the bedbugs continue to creep into their flat, her family is still paying off Jessica's $449.65 emergency room bill.

``They'd like to live in peace, and not share their apartment with bedbugs," says their lawyer, Robert Warren , who is representing the Azurdias and two other tenants against landlords in cases involving the parasites.

Finally, the Azurdias are moving out.

Across town, Carmen Ramos feels trapped inside.

Despite some recent extermination of her apartment, still the bedbugs come, Ramos was saying early last week .

The bedbugs had already traipsed through thousands of dollars worth of clothing, furniture, and mattresses that she couldn't afford to expel, but did.

They had raided her children's bodies.

They had barged in on a romantic interlude with her boyfriend.

``I feel desperate," she says.

As her baby daughter draws near, Ramos notices a dark speck on the girl's blouse.

Thinking it's another bedbug, Ramos reaches out to squash it.

This time, it's only a piece of lint.

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com