by Pete Kahle
About 15 feet in, Sal stopped, selected a joist, jammed the awl in, twisting the tool roughly.
Frowned.
The wood here was supple and new, strong and fibrous. He had to wiggle the awl violently to remove it.
Shit! If I dragged my ass all the way down here to find nothing, I'm gonna be real pissed.
Picking up the flashlight, he cast the beam ahead. The joists stretched into the darkness, out of sight. But about 10 feet away, he saw a rise in the flat earth that looked suspicious.
Approaching the mound, he saw it was actually the lip of a hole that descended at a shallow grade, then turned and vanished as it went beyond the house's foundation.
"What the hell?" he murmured, pulling himself to the edge and swinging his feet around to dangle into the pit. He slipped the awl into his utility belt, extended the flashlight’s beam as far as he could into the hole.
The ceiling and sides were rough, but the sloping floor was relatively smooth, artificial looking. With the help of the light, he could see that, as it descended, it widened, heightened into a tunnel that a man could stand comfortably in.
For a moment, Sal's heart shivered, then raced.
What if this guy's one of those perverts that kills young boys and buries the bodies down here? What if he's watching me, ready to kill and skin me? Or eat me? Or God only knows what?
Spinning, he stabbed the light here and there within the crawlspace, but he saw nothing. Nervously, he directed it back into the hole.
He felt a slight breeze stir his thinning, unkempt hair.
Fresh air.
This hole must surface somewhere else.
At that, he relaxed. Maybe the ground here was settling because it had been backfilled improperly. Maybe there was debris down there, wood left over from the construction that was attracting termites.
He sighed heavily, a little embarrassed to let his fears run away with him. Whistling, he clambered over the lip, slid to the level of the floor, stood cautiously.
The breeze was stronger here, and it carried a smell on it; sticky-sweet and warm. The light scoured the tunnel as he began walking, happy to be on his feet and not his belly.
With any luck, he thought, this'll come out somewhere in the subdivision, and I'll be able to walk out rather than crawl back.
Running his hand along the tunnel wall, he followed its curve until he was walking at a right angle from where he started. The grade became steeper, too, and he found himself digging his heels in against the incline as his pace quickened.
This is insane. There's no way that a contractor could have missed filling a hole this size. It's damn lucky the house hasn't fallen into it.
Then, he had a thought that brought him to an immediate stop.
What if the tunnel wasn't here when they were building the house? What if someone built the tunnel after the house was done?
# # #
Ten minutes of walking brought him no closer to the surface or to light. The ground still had a low, but noticeable, grade to it, and the tunnel walls began to look smoother, more finished.
And they glistened with moisture.
Clack-clack-clack-clack.
The sound was repeated, seemingly from many different locations, some near, some farther away.
Shivering in spite of the damp heat, he paused, his ears straining.
Footsteps.
His free hand closed tightly over the haft of the awl, pulled it from the utility belt.
Clack-clack-clack, he heard directly in front of him, like a child's clicker toy.
The flashlight's beam arced wildly across the tunnel, falling on a creature that Sal first mistook for a large white dog.
Until he noticed its antennae waving, its abdomen bent beneath its squat body, pointing a short stinger at him.
Sal blinked several times, his grasp on the awl slipping.
Clack-clack-clack, the thing chittered at him, its antennae waving in a vaguely threatening way.
A termite! That's a fucking termite!
It moved smoothly toward him, clacking and shaking its head furiously. Its abdomen pulsed and twitched obscenely.
Sal took two unsteady steps back, tripped and fell hard on his ass, dropping the flashlight.
The creature moved toward him again, and a stream of liquid shot from its mandibles.
Sal was no entomologist, but he'd been in the business long enough to know what that was.
Formic acid.
He pulled his legs out of the line of fire, but too late. The colorless fluid splashed onto his pants, his boots. Immediately, they began to smoke, and as Sal concentrated on this, the termite moved in.
Sal quickly kicked off his boots, which flipped through the air, still smoking, and hit the creature squarely on the head. It stopped immediately, crouched low, clacked loudly.
With the time this gained, he pulled himself to his feet, scrambled out of his coveralls. They jingled to the ground in a steaming heap.
The termite stood very still in the dim light.
His heart thumping, Sal bent to untangle his utility belt from his ruined coveralls.
As he moved, though, the termite charged.
Sal's hand closed on an aerosol can that hung from the belt. As he yanked it free, the termite's mandibles closed on his ankle.
The thing shook its head back and forth like a dog worrying a bone, ripping through skin and muscle. Sal saw a spray of blood splash against the thing's bone-white head, and agony swept over him, electrifying him.
Punching the nozzle, he brought the can around, thrust it at the termite's head.
The termite suddenly released his ankle, retreated uncertainly.
As Sal put weight on his ankle, though, he found it no longer obeyed his controls. Falling forward, he continued spraying the termite.
It made one last attempt at defense before it shuddered, its limbs rustling like dry wood, and slumped to the ground.
Sal stared at it for some time, hearing only his heavy breathing and his heartbeat in the narrow passage.
Gathering courage, he grabbed the flashlight, examined his wounded ankle. Near the joint, the sock was torn and tattered, and through it peeked a glimpse of red and—most shockingly—white. Blood pulsed from it in rhythm with his heart.
He pulled himself along the ground to the tunnel wall, feeling the gritty mud soak through his underwear. He stood shakily, favoring his injured foot.
Bending gingerly, he picked up the flashlight and the can of insecticide. Fighting the sharp, stinging pain of his ankle, he hobbled down the tunnel.
He'd gone about 10 minutes, sweeping the area before him haphazardly with the flashlight, when he realized that he was going the wrong way. Instead of heading back toward the house, he was proceeding deeper into the nest.
A termite nest. The biggest he'd ever seen.
A termite problem? If that guy only knew!
Dazed, he remembered that the tunnel had split several times during the last ten minutes, and he'd been progressing blindly since. With a rush of fear, he knew he was lost.
Looking at his ankle, it was impossible to tell now, in the dull light, where the mud stopped and the blood began. The pain had faded to a background thudding that drummed up his leg and thigh.
Oh man, am I gonna charge extra for this!
In spite of the pain, he laughed out loud at what he must look like. An enormous naked man hobbling through a muddy tunnel looking for German shepherd-sized termites. He laughed until his lungs hurt as much as his ankle, until his throat was raw and burning.
Clack-clack-clack.
He stopped laughing.
The flashlight shot up like a weapon, its beam scouring the walls. He proceeded into the left one simply because the left wall of the tunnel was primarily responsible for keeping him on his feet. Unfortunately, no more than four steps down this passageway, the clack-clacking became louder.
Ahead, he caught a glimpse of something gray, grazed only slightly by the flashlight'
s beam, as it clambered into a chamber. He heard sounds in there; wet, slurping.
Sal hesitated, debating whether or not to see what the sound was. To see exactly what he was up against.
Because at this point, he fully expected to find his way out. Because, regardless of their size, these were just termites.
And he was an exterminator.
His hands went to his waist to hitch up his absent utility belt.
He turned, thinking he might go back for it. But, he realized dejectedly, it was as gone as his memory of the route he'd taken to get here.
In defiance, he hooked his thumbs in the elastic waistband of his underwear, pulled them up snugly, let the elastic snap back to his flesh. Holding both the flashlight and the aerosol can poised, he entered the chamber.
It was smaller than it looked from the corridor, and the ceiling dropped to the point where Sal had to crouch. The creature that had darted in moments ago had its back toward Sal, occupied by its task. It seemed to be pulling a large, irregularly shaped object back with it into the tunnel.
A few bursts from the can was all it took. The termite curled up like a piece of dry paper, rattled to the ground.
As Sal warily approached it, his light revealed two things.
In its death throes, the termite released the object it had been holding with a wet Pop!
It hadn't been trying to move anything.
It had been feeding.
Before he scrambled out of the tunnel to vomit his coffee and jelly doughnuts, he saw what it was.
It was twisted and shriveled and grayish, almost entirely unrecognizable.
Except for one thing.
Sal had burned that one thing into his mind when he was 25 years old and just starting his own business.
It was a small patch, sewn on a scrap of cloth embedded in the mass.
ORKIN.
The competition.
Those two words suddenly took on a far more sinister meaning.
When he collected himself, he could hear distant chattering getting closer.
Just 50 yards down the tunnel, another, larger chamber opened. Within it, he saw three termites carrying translucent-yellow, football-sized ovals.
Eggs.
He hobbled into the chamber, spray can blazing.
Two were dead before they knew what was going on.
The third went down with an egg, crushed in its mandibles as it died. A larva the size of a potato spilled to the floor in a rush of gelatinous fluid.
Catching his breath, Sal walked into the nursery, cast the light around the expanse.
In every nook and cranny, against every wall, were eggs. The eggs got larger toward the center of the room, until finally, newly hatched larvae wriggled along the floor.
Where these larvae looked like what termites at this stage should, those nearest to Sal decidedly did not, and it took his brain several seconds to register just exactly what it was being shown.
They were pupae.
And they looked—were—human.
The things writhed on the floor, fleshy and pale, mewling liquidly. Their eyes were wide and flat, glassy black. They didn't seem to focus on anything, just moved with every jerk of their heads.
There must have been at least 200 of them scattered about.
Sal thought of the man in the house above him.
This was a move up for us.
Listening to the approaching clack-clacks of what seemed like the entire colony, Sal hurriedly fumbled with the nozzle on the can. It was a commercially available insecticide that he used for small jobs where the termites hadn't gotten into a home's woodwork. It did the same job, cost less and allowed Sal to pocket more of the profit.
With a twist of the nozzle, however, it was also a powerful fogger, capable of bombing an entire room in just minutes.
Instantly, the can hissed out an expanding cloud of gas, and he set it down in the middle of the chamber, between two of the squirming pupae.
His hand brushed against one, and even this minor touch rippled its soft, spongy flesh. Sickeningly, Sal was reminded of the man's limp handshake.
The clack-clacking became nearly deafening, and Sal followed a tunnel the light had found on the opposite wall. He limped carefully around the larvae and pupae, lest his stocking feet sink into one like it was a rotten melon.
Armed now with only his flashlight, he moved quickly, praying that the imminent destruction of the brood would prove enough of a diversion for the other termites to leave him alone in the tunnels.
Following nothing but instinct, he turned this way and that, in a bewildering series of turn backs and intersections. But his trail proved fortunate, because he found himself huffing and puffing at the base of the slope that had led to the nest. Above him maybe four feet, was the bottom of the house.
Limping up the short incline, he all but fell on his belly, began wriggling quickly back toward the pantry.
The spray can's in the pantry, and it’s got enough juice to kill the whole fucking colony.
Aching, panting and angry, he quietly pushed the small doorway open.
The pantry was dark, but pulling himself up, he reached for the light cord.
His spray can was not here.
He turned in the cramped space, frantically looking for it.
When he realized that this was not the same pantry. The other one had been fully stocked. This one was empty.
Oh, shit! This is the wrong house.
Standing outside the pantry was a man who looked very much like the first. It might have been that man. It didn't matter much. Neither was a man any way. To either side of him stood what Sal guessed were soldiers, each roughly the size of a pony. Their oversized heads ended in massive mandibles that worked menacingly.
"You have killed the brood. But, it is a minor setback. The Queen survives. We will survive."
Sal fumbled with the waistband of his underwear.
The soldiers pushed their way into the room.
Before they grabbed him, Sal yanked the light cord.
Click, and the light went dead.
Clack-clack, and so did Sal.
# # #
The man in the black suit chattered at the soldiers in irritation, his human tongue twisting in agonizing contortions to produce the sounds that once came naturally. The harsh tone in his human voice was completely lost on the creatures. Their primary arms and antennae waved in a vaguely subservient way, clicking softly where they tapped their chitinous abdomens. Inclining their hard, white heads slightly, the soldiers turned and crept back into the crawlspace.
Stupid creatures. Would they evolve to be as useful as the scouts and workers like him?
He very much doubted it.
Red blood covered his hands, streaked his dark suit.
How easy it had been, in this form, to kill. When the changes were complete, the Queen would have to find another use for the soldiers.
For, they were merely killers. The worker realized that, once evolved, all of its kind would be killers.
Just like them.
Not stopping to wipe his hands, he went to the open Yellow Pages on the kitchen counter.
His finger left a trail of blood as he ran it down the page, already smeared with similar marks, faded to rusty brown.
Exterminators.
Not only did eliminating them provide much-needed food, it removed their first line of defense; the line of defense that had always proved so damaging at this early stage.
He punched in the numbers quickly.
"We have some termites that seem to be rather hungry. Can you come right away?"
John F.D. Taff is the Stoker-Nominated author of The End in All Beginnings, the book Jack Ketchum called "the best novella collection I've read in years."
He's been writing horror for 25 years, with more than 80 short stories and four novels in print. Six of his stories have been awarded honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's Year's Best Horror & Fantasy over the years. His collection Little Deaths w
as named the best horror fiction collection of 2012 by HorrorTalk.
Recent sales have been to Horror Library Vol. 6, The Beauty of Death and Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories.
Salt on the
Dance Floor
By Nisi Shawl
Right away, that first night, I wanted her as much as I wanted him. Of course she was there in the club and he wasn’t—only his voice, and on the screen he snapped and dazzled, sparkled and spun. Her moves, so different, wafted, billowed—not completely on the beat. Yet right.
I slipped through the sweating bodies and flashing lights to where she worked it in a white skirt, ruffles falling around her knees. Arms waving and long hair rippling like the scarves she wore around her neck and waist. Hips a little heavy; large, tear-shaped breasts… I fell in, my own moves slowing to match hers. Blue fire flashed along the outlines of her pale arms, then green. Wasn’t from the lights. I must have known that then but she had finally looked at me, and I was trancing on her face, on her eyes, the only dark things about her, and they swallowed me. Whole.
So white. I wasn’t sure I was into white girls. If you had asked me in high school I would have said I wasn’t into girls of any kind. But I was at college now, and finding things out.
The music didn’t stop, but we did. Washed up in the line to the bathroom, casting harsh shadows in the fluorescents overhead. Walls between us and the main speakers subdued the beat a bit. I asked her name, but she didn’t act like she’d heard me. “I’m Draya,” I half-shouted, leaning against the hallway’s dirty sheet-metal, arcing towards her, aching—for what? For the shell’s curve of her ear?
She smiled. Her mouth drew in when she did that instead of spreading out like anyone else’s. Were her puckered lips as soft as they—
“Well? You going in or you gonna stand here an piss yer pants?”
I looked around and saw the bathroom’s door was open, with no one left in line ahead. “Sorry.” I hunched my shoulders apologetically and moved forward.
“Yeah, you are.” The smartass’s voice followed us in. The bathroom was pink, with black and silver checks. My dancer headed for the sinks and turned the faucets on full, passing her hands back and forth through the water. She cupped them together so they filled and raised them to rinse her face. No make-up?
