Empire of the Ants (story)

I've been scratching the writer's itch lately.  It scabs over, and I pick it.  Again and again this cycle plays out until the flesh scars over.  It becomes tough, like leather.  That's what horror is, the wearing down of the psyche.  Peeling the layers of sanity like an onion until it's tough.

Deep.

Red.

Anyhow; this might be included in the next fanzine being summoned from the void.  Let me know what you think if you read it. 

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The scorched earth stretched for painful miles in every direction.  Wind whipped across the empty plane stirring up dirt devils and dusty tornadoes, a constant unyielding force that never seemed to cease.  Jaclyn wondered as it rocked her van if it was this windy in the before times, if somehow the business of life held the wind at bay.  She didn’t live in the before times, but those ancient rusted structures and tall sky scrapers people used to inhabit never failed to stir the imagination.  She liked to think that the people that lived in sky scrapers used to stand as tall and proud as the buildings they lived in, secure in their pole position in the food chain, where now people walked hunched over from the wind and the invisible burden of survival weighing down their shoulders, always staring at their feet, terrified of the danger that lies beneath.

The van was a black dot moving in constant motion through the waves of heat emulating from the hot desert floor.  In the distance it resembled an angry little tick kicking up dust and grime.  As Jaclyn saw their destination peak over the crescent of the horizon her foot pushed the gas in anticipation.  Another town, another chance; she felt a pit in her stomach thinking about the last few places they’ve “raked”, as Mike liked to call it.  Their turn out was poor to be sure, a couple of canned beans, some expired dog food, and a ripped bag of sugar crawling with bugs.  Usually they take more from a town than it takes from them, but that wasn’t the case in Bowling Green, Ohio.  Shaw, a wanderer that had been picked up somewhere in California and had rode with them for several years, a veteran “Raker” for sure, had fallen into a giant sink hole of crawlers.  Mike had described it as fallen anyways, but to Jaclyn it seemed like the earth had swallowed up Shaw on purpose, and maybe it had.  Maybe the crawlers were getting smarter.

They had stripped the screaming flesh from Shaw’s body in under a minute. 

Jaclyn despised mulling over these black thoughts.  It was better not to think of the crawlers but she could feel her mind drawn to theses little creatures that have defined her existence for so long.  All of her fears, her future, her life, were wrapped up in the constant marathon run from the crawlers.  This nomad existence was due to the fact that the crawlers always found you if you stayed one place for too long.  Mike said he heard on the radio that crawlers are attracted to vibrations.  Jaclyn couldn’t remember the last time the radio worked, so she took Mike’s story with a grain of salt, however she couldn’t argue with the logic.  Whatever attracted the crawlers was irrelevant; they always came and they were always hungry. 

As the van raced toward town, the pace picking up as it closes in, she wondered if even now the crawlers were frantically chasing the vibrations of the tires spinning on the pavement, if the miles the crawlers had to chase those tires agitated them, if they were angry with the prey that refused to stay put, refused to be eaten like it should.  She wondered if they were like wolves who took turns chasing their prey to tire it out, to conserver the energy of the pack, or if the crawlers they encountered were already at every town, perturbed at whatever noisy life interrupted their peaceful tenure as the new masters of earth’s destiny.   She had secretly held on to the hope that there was someplace on earth free of the crawlers, that they weren’t everywhere, that someday they’d roll into a new town and a parade would greet them.  Children waving blue banners from their porches as they drove slowly by,  streamers raining from some unknown source in the sky above, the mayor handing over the key to the city amongst jeers and cheers for the returning heroes.  This thought seemed more dangerous than worrying about the crawlers.  Hope was dangerous, infectious, deadly; best to just concentrate on the real, on the now. 

The reality was they were rolling into another town, much like the hundreds or thousands of dead towns they’ve seen before.  The slow crunch of gravel as the van crawls onward seems to echo thunderously off the silent houses and dilapidated store fronts lining the street.  Jaclyn saw a sign that said “MP3 players now 80% off” and wondered what a MP3 was and if it tasted good.  She could never shake that eerie feeling of walking over someone’s grave every time they found a new town to rake.  They were rummaging through the memories of a world gone by; it felt like a violation to her.  Her little band of looters was nothing more than parasitic grave robbers suckling the marrow from the bones of a dead society.  She couldn’t imagine it any other way. 

The van rolled forward and finally lurched to a stop in front of a gas station less smashed and broken looking than the buildings surrounding it, beckoning the party of scavengers like moths to a flame.  The crew moved in a dance rehearsed a thousand times before in at least as many towns.  Before the brake was even done screeching the tire to a halt the van door was open, boots on the ground.  Members ran this way and that, frantically looking for anything of value, anything to stoke the fires of survival a little longer.  Jaclyn started her stop watch; ten minutes until the crawlers came.  Ten minutes of raking whatever they could find into the van.

There were a gaggle of them cramped in that jet black van, each of them with a specific role, a role so practiced and inbred that they could perform it in silent concert with one another, never having to speak a word during a rake, never having time to think twice about the danger lying beneath the soil; the frantic advance of the crawler swarm.  Jaclyn had been siphoning gas since she was five; she could hardly taste the rancid liquid anymore when she siphoned gas from the dust choked tanks of long abandoned cars, but most of the time it never made it to her mouth, and she certainly never spilled.  Mike was good for raking grocery stores; his long arms could reach all the way to the top shelf.  Sally would take watch, she was a good climber and could easily climb trees and utility poles in search of distant dust trails, sink holes, and other tell tale signs of crawlers.  The others were “runners”, who would run back the haul to the van that Mike and the others had raked up in a pile.  It saved precious time when packing up to leave.    

4 minutes in, Jaclyn had a good run of gas tanks going; out of the ten she tried to siphon three of the tanks were near full.  She hadn’t been this lucky since Cincinnati, which felt like a millennium of dead cities ago.  Jaclyn put on a huge pearly smile, beaming from her lucky draw, when Sally took the wind out of her high.  She called out dust sightings, lots of them, in all directions.  It wasn’t possible.

Typically the crawlers came from one or two directions and converged on them.  The underground network of tunnels they had built stretched across the continent, but overlapping tunnels were practically unheard of this far away from any big city.  The crawlers would frantically bore out the tunnel as more insects crowded the space; above ground it looked like a line being drawn in the sand by a giant invisible foot.  The foot traced a line at nearly thirty miles per hour; an impossible speed underground made possible by the crawlers razor sharp appendages and pincers digging frantically at the sand, the promise of a fresh blood meal close in hand.

Jaclyn could see Sally turn a shade of green, even from twenty feet off the ground.   The crawlers were tunneling toward them from all around, something that has never happened.  She quickly topped off the van with gas as a few runners began emptying their pockets inside.  Each runner wore clothes laced with pockets for easy storage on the go, and each pocket was held together by Velcro for quick access.  As each sweaty runner piled into the back, huffing in great gulps of air, Jaclyn readied herself behind the wheel of the van for their quick departure.  She grasped the stick shift and noticed her palms glistening with sweat.  Mike was still in the gas station raking shelves for valuable supplies.  She could see wisps of dust fly glide into the not so distant sky, as if to punctuate her anxiety.  The crawlers were closing in.  

Her eyes scanned the rear view mirror; she saw the bloodshot streaks in her pupils, the wrinkles of worry at their crease, her exhaustion worn on her face despite her best effort to hide it.  Down the road the pavement began to buckle up and bend in, pulsating like a giant black vein.  Gas erupted from the crack, a brief and loud hissing noise like air being let out of a tire, and then the crawlers came, thousands of them, mullions of them, angry pincers clacking in the empty air, mandibles whipping around the ground in a fury, desperate to follow the breadcrumb trail of smell molecules to the feast they promised.  Jaclyn couldn’t make them out at first; they were too far away and the sun was too bright, all she could see a thousand tiny moving things bursting from the hole like a nightmare spawned straight from hell.

“Miiiike!” she yelled, her voice louder and more pregnant with panic than she intended.  She was supposed to be a leader; a veteran “Raker”, and here she was panicking like it was her first run.

After a few tense, terror filled moments of silence Mike finally emerged from  the dark recesses store, boxed items dropping from his arms as he tried to juggle his load, in one hand he held a bottle of whiskey and Jaclyn instantly knew what the hold up had been.  She cursed him under her breath for his foul habit.  He had to take extra time to crack the lock on the liquor cabinet.  Whiskey was too fine an item to pass up; it made for a good bargaining chip even if you weren’t interested in drinking it, but Jaclyn cursed him just the same for risking all of their lives for a bottle of dummy juice.

Mike raced to the back of the van; open arms sucked him in as Jaclyn hit the gas.  The van swayed and rocked drunkenly as she turned around in the road, weaving between spots of broken rubble, looking for a viable escape route from the crawler swarm.  She wheeled the van around dead center in the street, facing the oncoming crawler swarm.  The translucent red bodies of the insects gave her the brief impression of a river of blood flowing right at her.  She couldn’t run them over, that was a rookie mistake; their steel pincers and thorny red thoraxes would easily split the tires.  She had witnessed many Rakers attempt to turn a crawler swarm into road kill, each attempt ending in horrifying disaster.  Once she say a whole bus of Rakers flip over on top of a hill of crawlers.  The blood curdling screams of the trapped passengers being savagely torn to pieces by the crawlers had turned her stomach for weeks after the incident.  She had made more friends giving away her food rations, but these dark thoughts wore her down like the constant wind outside, roaring with the hollow anger of the world.

Rushing toward the steady stream of crawlers, she could feel the panicked eyes of everyone else in the van burning holes behind her head.  Mikey lit a Molotov cocktail, cursing as flames liked and burned his hand as he held the tipping, burning jar as best as he could in the racing van.  Jaclyn whipped the van out of the way of the crawlers the last possible second; some of the crawlers spit their noxious acid at the speeding vehicle, others were unceremoniously crushed under the screeching wheels.  The tires held..  Jaclyn patted herself on the back for asking for re-enforced kick boards for the van; the metal where the crawler acid left its scar had already begun to sizzle and molt.  Some passengers began coughing, pulling their shirts over their heads to help breath in the tight confines of the smoky van.  Jaclyn did not take notice; she was too concentrated on the road and the impossible situation before her.

 Another mound of crawlers had appeared dead in their path; she bobbed the van to the left then right to dodge a broke down truck, her hair a fury of blonde streaks as she threw her weight against the wheel.  Mikey tossed his burning cocktail at the mound, the emerging crawlers burst on fire.  Some sizzled and popped, a sound that Mikey found strangely satisfying, like the sound of revenge for all the people he used to know, all the people devoured by the very swarm hunting them this very moment.

There was a time when the crawlers first appeared when the government thought it could actually beat them.  Nobody was sure where they first came from, there were rumors that it was an experiment to cross breed giant Japanese hornets with aggressive army ants; a biological weapon that got loose like a bad Sunday morning B-movie.  The government was able to burn the swarms from the sky, victory was prematurely declared, and then crawlers began surfacing from the ground.  They adapted and evolved at a dizzying speed.  There were scattered reports of police being baffled by a slew of home murders, the culprit apparently tunneling into the victim’s home.  Then it was everywhere.

By the time they figured out the crawlers had created an underground network, like a giant continental ant hive, it was already too late.  The world was lost to the crawlers and short of a miracle there was no winning it back.

The van roared as it past another crawler mound rising out of the loose dirt floor.  There had never been this many in one town, never.  Jaclyn wondered what was different about this place, or if they were merely running out of luck.  Every escape route seemed to be cut off systematically by the crawlers, like they were being herded toward something.  Jaclyn swore as she had to throw the van in reverse again in retreat from the swarm, the chances of survival slowly dwindling with each passing minute.

The jet black van finally emerged from the center of town, passing the neighborhood and suburban areas.  She could see houses being uprooted from their foundations, breaking into thirds and falling into ground as the crawlers dug underneath them.  Street signs turned and twisted on their poles as if struck by invisible hands Jaclyn clenched her jaw as they raced down the neat rows of homes, she could see the edge of town and their destination.  They still had a chance; no crawlers were ahead of them, no dust plumes, and no warning signs. 

Suddenly the world spun.  Jaclyn briefly saw the gravel buckle under the weight of the van and drop downward.  It seemed to happen in slow motion but she never had time to take her foot off the gas.  One minute they were blazing down the street, the next they were tumbling in the air below it.  The van spun over side to side like a dryer with an uneven load.  It flipped three times in the giant pit that had suddenly appeared before it and came to rest against a boulder with a sickening crunch of metal.

Amazingly Jaclyn never lost consciousness.  She had blood in her eyes and face, sticky sweat blood that she wasn’t sure was hers.  Her head throbbed with pain, her mind reeled with confusion. She winced from the pain coming from her side; she was hoping it was just bruised.  She had tumbled over so many times she lost track of which was up and down.  And where did this pit come from?  Did the crawlers dig it and herd them toward it; like ranch hands herding dumb cattle to the slaughter?  She laughed to herself; at how embarrassed she felt, how she let everyone down, and how it was about to not matter.

The crawlers descended on the vehicle from all around.  She could hear the click-clack of their mandibles on the van like rain on a tin roof but only sat and smiled, making no attempt to get up.  It was over.  Mike began screaming beside her, wide eyed like a trapped animal.  A few crawlers had already begun digging chunks of red flesh from his right arm, his left arm pinned between the seat and crushed dashboard.  In defiance Mike bit a crawler in half, its thorax spilling fresh bug guts over his chin. Another crawler spit its corrosive acid in his eye.  Mike’s pupil boiled and burst.

Jaclyn looked around the van and was greeted by similar scenes of horror.  Pincers frantically tore at the screaming things before her; the crawlers defiling every possible part of the Raker’s bodies.  Some tore tunnels through the intestines, others came in through the anus and bore holes all the way up to the throat, emerging slick with bodily fluids.  Other crawlers seemed to latch to the face, tearing away large strips of cheek like raw hide.  She saw one crawler munching away at a severed penis and distantly wondered whose it was.  Mike’s gurgling death throe beside her let her know it was her turn.  Her true punishment was seeing what her mistake had cost; the slow and torturous death of all her friends.  What came next, as the crawlers ate her alive from the feet first, would be her release, her pardon, from the Empire of the Ants.