The moment was mine; the time was now. I dropped from the body of the dead ant and ran for all I was worth. I wasn’t totally sure where I was, but I knew what direction the ant was initially running, so I went that way, too. I was certain that was the way to my family, and that’s where I wanted to be. My flying feet hadn’t pounded the dirt more than a dozen times before some strange ant scooped me up in its jaws and sprinted faster than I could ever have run. The mosquitoes and the spider were busy. As I looked behind, I could see that one of the mosquitoes was already in the super-quick jaws of an ant. For some reason, one for which I have no explanation, I had a memory flash of a panda bear trying to catch flies with chopsticks.
*****
32. Other Battles
This ant sprinted along the tiniest of paths. I had not seen these hallways before, so I assumed he was taking me to the safety of my family through a back, perhaps a secret, way. At any rate, the ant obviously knew where it was going. These paths were so tiny that the black spider couldn’t possibly pass through, and neither could the mosquitoes fly. I could barely see a thing, but the size of the tunnels made me feel slightly safer in one respect. The immediate problem was that my shoulders constantly scraped the walls on both my right and left sides. That hurt! Even so, I had no other choice except to add that experience to the other cuts, scrapes, bruises, and recent injuries that were probably still bleeding. When the glowing goo was available, I could see just how small these passages were, but not much of the glowing slime grew in these tiny tunnels. I could hear nothing; nor could I see anything. The one thing I could sense beyond the ant that carried me was the rumbling of the earth. It was similar to what we all had experienced during our first battle with the jumping spiders. It was also enough to tell me that something else was going on. Something was attacking the ants!
The ant that carried me ran ceaselessly, for what seemed like hours. More likely, it was only minutes before he broke into a larger chamber. That was my first hint of the intensity of the battle, but it was enough. What I saw was beyond description. Mosquitoes buzzed through the chamber like planes bombing Pearl Harbor. Tactically, that seemed to add confusion to the battle and provide a distraction to the ants that slashed at the flying beasts instead of the more dangerous spiders. The spider threat was much more perilous now that the jumping spiders and the bulbous ones had joined forces. Speed, strength, and now size were stacked against the ants. As my ant hurried through the melee, I could only cringe as I watched ant after ant die as a result of the poisonous bite of any single spider. The new bulbous spiders bit, crushed their enemies, and threw ant carcasses across the cavern. I watched a few spiders die. The ants had figured out that three or four of them could win against one, but the spiders had also figured that out.
I recognized this cavern! I had been in it before, several times actually. We were close to my own cell, and we were close to my family. My ant continued to sprint. For some reason, he had not been attacked by the other spiders. The mosquitoes found us, though, and began to buzz us as we ran. Three! Four! Five of them flying all around. Behind me! In front! To my sides! At first, it appeared that these flying menaces intended no harm. That thought probably gave me a false sense of security. In fact, what they did was attract attention. I became aware of that just a little too late as one of the flying beasts decided to aim its sticker right at me. The air fairly sizzled as it whooshed in for the kill, and there was nothing I could do about it. My ant saw it too, and it skidded to a halt in an effort to create a near miss. At the same time, I saw an ant’s tusks erupt from a mountain of fighting insects and grab the mosquito in mid air. Three more ants launched themselves into the air and hit the struggling mosquito broadside. All of them toppled to the ground; one tumbled over the other in a massive, rolling ball of legs and wings. In the end, the ants sped away to rejoin the ruckus. The mosquito didn’t. The extra attention caused the riot to move in our direction. Ants by the hundreds moved in on me. Spiders moved too. The fight raged on, but over the battle’s roar, I heard it. I heard the cry.
“Hannah! Hannah!”
Grandpa stood in the doorway of our prison and waved to me, yelling my name again and again. I was home! That’s when it happened. Grandpa took two steps outside of the prison. I suppose the ants that normally guarded us were involved in the fight; at least one of them would normally have been there to stop Grandpa from leaving. Two mosquitoes were on him in an instant. Both mosquitoes landed and simultaneously brought Grandpa to the ground. I remember the whole thing in slow motion. I remember every wing beat, the position of every mosquito leg. I remember the panicked looks on the faces peering out the doorway. I remember that one mosquito pinned Grandpa to the ground. The second stabbed him right in the center of his chest. I remember the mixture of pain, and fear, and sorrow on Grandpa’s face right before he closed his eyes.
“Grandpa!” I screamed. But I was too late. What happened next seems, even today, to be a dream. The mosquito that held Grandpa to the ground looked directly at me right after I yelled. I don’t know if it heard me or if it smelled me or what, but I know it sensed my presence. I know that it intentionally turned to look at me. It stared directly into my soul right before it took flight. That must have signaled several more of the things to launch and head right for me, attacking me, trying to kill me—again. I saw several spiders move in my direction too, and I saw the giant legs of at least two of those black spiders stomping toward me. That’s when everything went red and black. What must have been a million ants swarmed directly over me. Immediately, six million legs interlocked leg-to-body to form a living tunnel that led directly past Grandpa and into my cell. The ant that still carried me sprinted toward the relative safety of that cell. I watched Thomas and Brian drag Grandpa. My ant deposited me in my room just a couple of seconds after the boys got Grandpa through the door. The living tunnel dissolved as quickly as it formed, and just as suddenly, the attackers retreated. I could see from the doorway that ants, spiders, and mosquitoes lay in towering stacks of dead. The surviving ants immediately began to clean the mess and remove the dead and injured. Our cell was, once again, guarded by those that held us prisoner. And Grandpa was on the ground—dying but not yet dead.
*****
33. Grandpa Dies
Thomas, at least, tried to do something while all the rest of us just stood there like inanimate, eye-bulging Gumbies. None of us knew what to do, and all of us were in shock. Thomas tried to stop Grandpa’s bleeding and keep him comfortable. I guess he picked that knowledge up from television or from the internet. Where else? “Grandpa,” he said, “you’re going to be alright. Just stay still. Be quiet. Don’t try to speak.” Thomas sounded exactly like a script from some television hospital show. When Thomas opened Grandpa’s ragged and blood-soaked shirt, our eyes must have bulged like the rounded side of a helium balloon. The hole in his chest was as large as a water main. It was truly a wonder that Grandpa was still alive. We could hear the sound of gurgling blood in Grandpa’s labored breathing; foaming ooze streamed from both corners of his mouth. I’ll never forget that, Debbie. We all knew what was happening. We all saw pending death in Thomas’s eyes when he turned them away from Grandpa and toward us. Grandpa knew, too.
“Hi, Little Girl.” The words bubbled through blood-soaked lungs. Grandpa opened his eyes and looked directly at me. It wasn’t difficult to see his pain. It was evident in the sagging skin beneath his eyes, in the sweat that soaked his forehead, and in his trembling lips.
“Hi, Grandpa,” I sobbed through flowing tears. “I’m sorry. They used me as bait. I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t even know it was happening.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay. No guilt, Little Girl,” he whispered. “I didn’t see it, either. I was just so happy to see ya. None of us knew where you’d been taken or if you were safe.” The words struggled through the hole in his chest and the blood in his lungs. The simple matter of talking sounded more difficult than anything Grandpa had ever done. We heard the gu
rgling first, then the cough that ended in choking and spattered blood.
Thomas was still working, trying his best to control Grandpa’s bleeding, but there was really nothing anyone could do. We all waited for what we knew the next few minutes held.
Grandpa’s eyes rolled. He turned his head so that he could see all of us one more time, so that he could talk to us one last time. “Remember what I’ve taughtcha over the years,” he choked through blood and very slight breath. “Follow your hearts. Fight for what you believe in. Fight with passion. But, above all, fight for family.”
Grandpa looked straight at Brian. “Remember. You. Make good choices.” That was it. The last thing he said. We listened as Grandpa’s final breath caused him to choke; then he was gone. Thomas closed Grandpa’s eyes. Had Grandpa said something to Brian while I was gone? I didn’t know. But, for now, it made absolutely no difference.
Grandpa died peacefully. We all cried. We cried for hours, for what seemed like days, until we eventually slept from fatigue and grief. I remember hearing something just as I was too exhausted to remain conscious. Clicking, so solid, so intense that it was almost a hum. Another chant. The ants, too, knew that Grandpa was gone.
But it was Sarrah’s final words that closed my eyes. “The orb told us that one wasn’t going home.”
*****
34. Upon Waking
I was the first to wake up and the first to realize that Grandpa’s body was missing. Grandpa was gone! I distinctly remember wanting to scream. The sound had positioned itself against the back of my throat, but it resembled a smothered gargle when I tried to release it. I’m not sure what held that scream in. Maybe the dryness of my throat. Maybe fear. Maybe even the fact that the others were still unconscious, still inescapably captured by emotion-induced sleep. I was beginning to think that escape of any kind was a good thing. I began to wish I was still asleep, but then I noticed that Thomas was moving, just beginning to wake. As he was, so was that damnable earth beginning to quake so hard that it drew my attention from Grandpa’s absence. I was definitely beginning to hate that. Every time the ground shook, something horrific happened. This time, however, the quake was worse than we had ever experienced. The glowing slime began to fall in large splotches, and large boulders began to vibrate loose from the walls and ceiling. This was going to be dangerous. Really! A major understatement! It was already dangerous! Thomas was suddenly fully awake, startled into conscious by the unquestionable strength of this quake. Sarrah and Brian were about to be.
Almost instinctively, Thomas glanced quickly and methodically toward every corner of our cell. He studied every wall, every crack, and every crevice quickly, but thoroughly. He was doing a very rapid assessment of our present state of danger. It didn’t take long for him to realize this could be more than devastating; it could be downright deadly. The falling rocks and boulders were the largest ever. Thomas looked at the ceiling just in time to see the enormous stone working itself loose, and it was directly above both Sarrah and Brian. Thomas hollered and pointed, “Brian!” Brian, still barely alert, looked straight up, saw the falling boulder and immediately rolled to his right. Debbie, I remember seeing Thomas’s face as clearly as I can see that tree. His short hair, now darkened by a few days of dirt, slid forward to shrink his forehead. His eyes squinted in concentration, then closed. He rolled to his feet, cocked his legs, and was gone. Thomas rocketed through the air. He landed on top of Sarrah like a splash of quicksilver, cocooned his arms and legs around her, and rolled to the left and out of the way of the falling boulder. That giant rock hit the ground and bounced higher than my head. It thundered downhill, alternately rolling and bouncing, finally smashing into a wall of our cave and leaving a huge depression in what wasn’t very soft dirt. That boulder would surely have squashed both Sarrah and Brian. We would have lost them both. But, the reality of the situation was that we had survived—so far. We were still alive. Grandpa may have died, but we had not. We needed to move, though, or we would soon be joining him.
So, move we did. Those of us who had them grabbed our weapons and headed for the door. Brian tried to take mine, but this time I wasn’t giving it up. He stole Sarrah’s, instead. But, since Thomas was actually lugging her like a sack of potatoes, that was just fine. Sarrah was beginning to stir, but she still wasn’t fully aware of our situation. We were lucky to get as far as the door. Rocks, no, boulders were falling all around. Many barely missed us, and they wouldn’t have if we weren’t so adrenaline charged and alert. The ground shook constantly with more energy than ever before. Rocks and great chunks of earth fell from walls and ceilings at our every step. It soon became impossible to dodge the onslaught. Sarrah and Thomas both got hit more than once by rocks that gave a glancing blow. In fact, I think the pain actually brought Sarrah back to us, and Thomas was able to put her down so that all four of us could run on our own. So far, Brian and I managed to escape the barrage, and that was by pure luck. The earth shook so much we could barely stand, let alone skip and dodge. Once again, we believed that if we stayed in our cell we would surely die. The door was immediately ahead, and we were met there by ants that wasted no time in capturing us and getting us the heck out of there. We didn’t fight this time. It was ants to the rescue, and every one of us knew it. In fact, Brian didn’t waste precious time waiting for the ant to pick him up. He mounted his ant and rode it like a horse, hanging on for dear life right behind the beast’s head. Outside the prison, the scene was nothing less than astounding. In my short life, I had already seen hordes of mosquitoes, autumn gatherings of lady bugs, migrations of butterflies, and hatches of caddis flies, but I had never seen anything like this. Never had I seen so many bugs, or so many kinds of bugs, gathered in one place. Spiders! Pseudoscorpions! Ants! Springtails! Grasshoppers! Mosquitoes! More. They were clamoring all over each other, each fighting the other, flinging body parts, slurping up half-digested intestines, stinging, biting, stomping, jumping, killing and dying. Who could win such a battle? Winning or losing aside, the battle raged. The ants that carried us scurried past most of the fighting, or at least they tried to. Brian hung on as tight as his arms and legs would allow as he rode that ant like a bronco through what seemed like acres of dead and dying bodies.
Somehow, in the confusion of the skirmish, the mosquitoes sensed our presence and soon began buzzing us. Once again, this seemingly harmless attack was really a signal to the much larger spiders. After a few seconds of being buzzed by the mosquitoes, I began to feel the earth tremble. More, I could see it shake with each pounding step of one giant spider that was heading directly toward us. Every step it took caused more stuff to fall, caused our ants to trip and slow, caused more mosquitoes to buzz us with ever-increasing intensity. The spider drew within inches of me. I could see its mouth parts and, if I wanted to, I could have counted the hairs on its gross legs that now waved in the air so close to my face I could smell their rotten filth and the death they stepped on. I thought we were dead, but in just the nick of time, the ants ducked into those same small, dark tunnels as before. Brian ducked just in time, too. He was riding a lot higher than the rest of us and had to be much more careful. I think that if ants breathed through their mouths, Brian’s death grip around his ant’s neck would surely have killed it. Nevertheless, we were all safe for the moment. Nothing else could get in those small tunnels, or so I prayed.
I soon realized that we were in the same small tunnels I had been in earlier; we had to be heading back to the maple tree. We were. That became quite clear as we exited the tunnels and broke into the light. I knew where we were, but I still could not believe my eyes. Even today, nothing compares. In all the movies I have ever watched, in all the pictures in all the history books, I have never seen such a mass of death and destruction. I couldn’t help but wonder what would make all this loss so important. Out in the open forest there were even more kinds of bugs and insects: beetles that seemed to serve a purpose similar to tanks, huge dragonflies with so much size and speed they could as eas
ily have been passenger jets.
The ants that carried us headed straight to the maple tree and the coliseum. A horde of mosquitoes saw us from the air. I wasn’t certain how they saw us so easily when other insects didn’t, but every time our location was discovered, the mosquitoes were the culprits. Thomas later told me that it was because we were warm blooded; the mosquitoes could sense the heat. Anyway, the damned flying horde headed our direction. I suddenly knew what the pagan warriors of old felt when they raised their eyes to a sky darkened by millions of Roman arrows. My God, Debbie, I thought we were dead for sure.
*****
35. Resurrection and Pure Evil
The mosquitoes came at us from every direction, this time with an intention far more devastating than raising a signal. There was no escaping the fact that we were about to die. All I could do was duck and try to dodge their aim. Just as I released what was my life’s most bloodcurdling scream, the butterflies came out of nowhere. Hundreds of them, all over the place, all above us, all boasting brilliantly colored wings. “What the…” I heard Sarrah yell. Before she could voice the rest of the question, the answer became obvious. The next mosquito offensive found butterfly wings rather than ant-riding, warm-blooded people. It was the neatest sound ever. Thump….thump….thump.thump.thumpthumpthumpthumpthththththuumppppp. I instinctively knew what I had heard, and I looked up to see butterflies with mosquito tubes stuck harmlessly in their wings. Living shields that protected us from an onslaught of enemy arrows! From somewhere beyond the remaining horde of mosquitoes came the dragonflies. I heard them first; I even felt their wings vibrate the air. I could easily have believed that some general had mobilized the entire air force. The scene was truly unbelievable, like any of what I’m saying is believable, anyway. Each of the dragonflies was a hundred times larger than a mosquito, at least twice as fast, and much more maneuverable. They could fly like hummingbirds: up and down, back and forth, and super fast. Besides size, speed, and maneuverability, the dragonflies had one more unique weapon. They used their legs to form a basket under their hulking bodies. They flew directly at the mosquitoes and literally used their legs to snare those enemies right out of the air. With the mosquitoes fully enclosed in this airborne trap, the dragonflies simply bit their bloodsucking heads off while still in flight and dropped the headless bodies to the masses below. After each drop, they returned to the foray for more; their attacks were perfectly successful. On the ground, at what were apparently cleaning stations, thousands of insects that met Grandpa’s description of pseudoscorpions snipped the heads off still-living mosquitoes stuck in butterfly wings. Red ants, which were far smaller than the warriors we were used to seeing, jerked those bodiless heads from the butterflies’ wings, stacked up dead bodies, and allowed the butterflies to return to the air. Similar ants, or those not busy repairing wings, scampered through every crack and crevice cleaning up debris of all kinds: bodies, wings, heads, limbs, all the victims and spoils of war.
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