by Jeff Strand
He finished moving the eight cents and set the transfer sheet in his "completed" bin. There were far too many sheets remaining in his in-bin. He'd probably be here until eight or nine.
It was time for a cigarette.
Trevor pushed back his chair and got up. As he walked past the high-wall cubicles toward the department exit, he stopped at Monette Odell's lair. Her job was similar to Trevor's, but as she'd explained on several occasions, substantially more complicated. She sat at her desk, typing furiously.
"Hey, Moni, you up for a smoke?"
"No thanks."
"That's cool."
Trevor often wondered if, in an alternate universe where Moni wasn't ridiculously happily married to some stud muffin who sent her flowers every Friday without fail, she'd ever consider going out with him. He certainly wasn't unattractive. He was tall and physically fit, with long brown hair and a mustache and goatee that suited him extremely well, if he did say so himself. His wire-framed glasses were stylish rather than functional (writers weren't supposed to have 20/20 vision, so he wore lenses made out of regular glass to maintain the appropriate image), and even though management had approved a business casual dress code, he made it a point to wear a tie. A tie with Bugs Bunny on it, but a tie nevertheless. He'd rank himself about a seven on a scale of one to ten.
Moni was a solid nine. She was about twenty-five, blonde, well developed, and had a low, sultry voice that made even casual comments like "No thanks" make him want to drop to the floor and start worshipping her shoes. She had the most gorgeous smile and the most perfect teeth he'd ever seen. If her husband ever turned into a complete prick, Trevor would be the first one there to console her.
"Leaving for the day?" asked Abigail Hardin as he walked by her desk. She was Winston Kamerman's administrative assistant, a middle-aged, no-nonsense woman who did wonders to compensate for Mr. Kamerman's overall incompetence the as head of corporate accounting.
"Yeah, right. I don't think so. At least it's a three-day weekend. Got any plans?"
"My husband and I are repainting our front porch."
"Sounds like fun. I might do that too."
Trevor walked over to the wooden door that led out of the department. He swiped his ID badge through the reader, then opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. Thank God they had this security system. You never knew when somebody might try to steal his backup for the eight cents.
He proceeded over to the fourth-floor elevators and pressed the down button. The building felt vacant. The other four hundred and fifty people who worked in this building probably got to leave early for the holiday, which made his mandatory overtime all the more painful. Not that he had any real plans beyond watching some movies and working on his book, but it was the principle of the whole thing. Overtime was evil.
He rode the elevator down to the ground floor, then stepped out and took a left turn so he wouldn't have to deal with the sinister security guard at the main entrance. He walked across the carpeted floor past the cafeteria to the side entrance and pushed the glass door open until whatever that little sliding thing was that held it open caught. Employees weren't supposed to use this door, but he much preferred to look at the side lawn than the parking garage while he smoked.
Trevor pulled out a cigarette, lit up, and took a deep drag. Ah, yeah. That was good. He refused to have anything to do with illegal drugs of any kind, but he was darn well going to pack his body to capacity with nicotine and caffeine.
As he took another drag, he saw a tiny red ant crawling on the concrete by his foot. He squished it. Ants were vile little creatures that didn't deserve to live. So were all insects. Chapter eighty-six of his book made a very good argument for that point of view.
Another red ant crawled up onto the concrete and Trevor instinctively took a step back. Even the biggest ant he'd ever seen wasn't more than an inch, and this one was as long as his pinky. The ant darted toward him, and he crushed it under his shoe, cringing just a bit at the loud _crunch_.
Where had that thing come from? Florida ants didn't get anywhere near that big.
He surveyed the newly mowed lawn, trying to find an anthill, or at least more of the creatures. He didn't see any right away, but ants were always in groups, weren't they? He didn't know very much about the insect world, but he thought that maybe ants were supposed to stick together like an army platoon, or something like that. He'd never been in the military, so he wasn't sure.
Trevor inhaled some more refreshing nicotine, and then decided that since he was going to be stuck here until late this evening anyway, it couldn't hurt to spend a few minutes seeing if any more of those monster ants were hanging around.
He crouched down and pulled his socks up over his pant legs, creating an argyle shield against ant bites. Then he began to walk around the Lavin lawn, searching for more pinky-sized insects.
There were quite a few regular-sized black ants crawling on the trunk of a tree. He flicked a couple of them off with his index finger, and then watched as they dutifully crawled back toward the tree through the grass. Impressive. For him, that would be the equivalent of falling something like ... a couple of miles, maybe? He wasn't quite sure, but he didn't feel like measuring the tree trunk and dividing it by the height of the ant (or were ants measured by length?) and multiplying it by his height or whatever it would take to make the calculations. It was still an impressive fall, either way.
He looked around for about five more minutes, but didn't find any more of the big red ants. It was probably some sort of mutant, or freak of nature, or something like that. If he hadn't squished it under his shoe, he probably could have sold it to Epcot Center. _Nice move, Sotter_, he thought to himself.
Trevor returned to the side entrance and saw one of the mega-ants crawling along the concrete toward the doorway. He needed a cup or something to trap it. The cafeteria was closed, so he couldn't get anything from there. He'd probably have to go all the way back up to his desk and get the Tupperware container he'd used to store the leftover lasagna he'd had for lunch ... or else pick the thing up with his bare hands.
He considered it.
Nah.
Then he figured, screw it. If there were two of them, there were bound to be more. He stomped the ant with the heel of his shoe, then walked back inside the building and shut the door behind him, briefly wondering if any ants had crawled inside while he was out exploring.
* * *
*-CHAPTER FOUR-*
Dustin Abbott had been blessed with a brilliant scientific mind, but his sense of direction was non-existent. He drove down Dale Mabry Highway, or what he assumed was Dale Mabry Highway, struggling to follow the incoherent map. At least the traffic in Tampa wasn't as bad as it was in Houston, although he was starting to get the impression that a lot of Florida people protested traffic tickets with the argument "But officer, it had only been red for a few seconds!"
He realized that he was suddenly in a turn-only lane, but couldn't get over in time and was forced to make a right onto Kennedy. He was definitely going to have to stop and ask for directions. Something to drink would be nice, anyway, so he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store.
Dustin was in town on business. Sort of. He worked in the entomology department of Texas A&M University with a specialty in _Solenopsis invicta_, the red imported fire ant, or RIFA. The stings of these insects created a very painful burning sensation, thus the name fire ants, but they were rarely fatal to humans. There were fewer than one hundred recorded deaths in the United States. People who died from fire ant bites were usually severely allergic to the venom, had been bitten hundreds or even thousands of times, and were elderly or invalid and unable to escape. An allergic 90-year-old woman confined to her bed might be swarmed by the insects and eventually die from their stings, but a healthy woman in her thirties was unlikely to suffer anything more than some pain, some swelling, and a nasty white pustule.
Except that in the past three months, at least four Tampa residents
had died from fire ant stings. Healthy people. One of them, Charles Windfall, had slipped in the shower and broken his neck as result of being swarmed by the ants. That case was certainly out of the ordinary, but understandable. But a man named Jason Eckor had been swarmed while he was on his couch taking a nap. Alerted by his screams, his wife had rushed into the living room to find him crawling on the floor, clawing at the ants that were all over his body. He died on the way to the hospital. He was thirty-one years old and a personal trainer.
The other two victims had been Denise Crossley, 18, and Margaret Draper, 40. Margaret had mild asthma, but neither of them fit into the category of people who should have had any chance of being killed by fire ants. Fire ants were aggressive, no doubt about it, but not _that_ aggressive. How were they protecting their nest by attacking somebody sleeping on his living room couch?
Last week he'd received a bizarre letter from Tyler Enzian, one of his old college professors, asking him to fly to Tampa for some extremely important _Solenopsis invicta_ research. Top-secret research. And Mr. Enzian was offering him more money for two weeks' work than he normally made in a year. They'd spoken on the phone a couple of times since then, but the only information Dustin could get out of the old man was that it would be well worth his while to show up in Tampa. Dustin was somewhat suspicious, of course, but his fifteen years as a workaholic at the university had left him with a nice big stack of vacation days, and it was certainly worth checking out.
Not worth flying for, though. Dustin's research took him all over the southern United States (the red imported fire ant was currently found in nine states from California to Florida, infesting over 275 million acres) but he'd never boarded an airplane in his life. There was no real reason for his fear, since he'd never lost any relatives to plane crashes or had any kind of traumatic experiences involving air travel, but he had the phobia, accepted it, and drove everywhere. Besides, this way he got to listen to a lot of books-on-tape.
He got out of the car, yawned, and stretched. He'd slept poorly in the hotel last night, since a couple of kids thought it would be desirable if they ran up and down the hallway until three in the morning, shrieking and giggling. If something like that happened at the hotel he stayed at tonight, he was going to call the front desk and complain.
Dustin was forty-one years old, six feet tall, and fairly lean. At his high school reunion three years ago, he'd promised himself that when his hair loss reached the point that a comb-over seemed like a fine idea, he'd shave it. Last year, he'd kept that promise, so now his black hair was in a nice buzz cut.
He'd kept himself in pretty good shape all these years, save for a brief eating binge in his mid-thirties after Betty dumped him for the taxidermist she'd paid to stuff her dead parrot. He'd had an on-again, off-again relationship with one of his fellow entomologists since then, but romance was no longer a high priority in his life. He had his bugs.
He walked into the small convenience store, grabbed himself a Snickers bar and a bottle of unsweetened iced tea, and went up to the cashier, a young guy, probably a college student. "Could you tell me where Trexler Road is?" he asked.
"Sure thing," said the cashier. "That's right off Independence Parkway. You'll need to keep going west on Kennedy until you pass the Westshore Mall, and once you're there -- "
"Just a second," said Dustin, taking a small notepad out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. "I'd better write this down."
"Oh, it's pretty easy."
"Not for me it isn't."
The cashier grinned and gave him the directions, double-checking Dustin's notepad to make sure he'd written it down correctly. "So did you just move here or are you on vacation or what?"
"Business."
"Cool. What kind of business?"
"Ants."
"Ants? Hey, I've got ants all over my yard. Me and my roommates are just renting the house, so it's not a big deal, but I was wondering the best way to get rid of those things. One of my roommates heard that you should pour boiling water all over their mounds, but he burned himself and didn't finish. That's just an old wives' tale, right?"
Dustin shook his head. "Actually, that can work. You need to use about three gallons of hot water on each mound, but it kills the ants and collapses the inside structure of their nest. I'd say it works about half the time."
"Really? I'll have to try it tonight. So what do you think is the best way to get rid of them?"
"Depends on the kind of ant. My specialty is RIFA, the Red Imported Fire Ant."
"Who the hell would import those things?"
"It wasn't done on purpose. They were brought from South America in the 1930's because they ended up in soil that ships used for ballast."
The cashier frowned. "And ballast would be...?"
"Stuff they used as weight to stabilize the ships," Dustin explained.
"Ah, okay. I think I heard that before."
"So, anyway, the ants ended up in Mobile, Alabama, started thriving, and now they've spread all over the southern United States and probably your yard."
"Bastards."
"Well, the queen _is_ kind of a tramp."
The cashier paused to ring up a young woman's purchase, and then returned his attention to Dustin. "So, seriously, what's the best way to get rid of those things?"
"In my opinion? _Pseudacteon tricuspis_."
"Is that poison?"
"Phorid flies. The females are attracted to fire ants. They zip down, quickly inject an egg into the ant's body, then zip away before the ant knows what happened to it." Dustin demonstrated this with enthusiastic hand gestures. "Then the egg develops in the ant's thorax for about ten days, sort of like in _Alien_."
"Cool. Does it burst out of its stomach?"
"Worse. The larva moves into the ant's head. Then the head falls off and the larva uses the decapitated head as its home for the next month."
"Nasty."
Dustin smiled. "Wonderfully so."
A pair of sleazy-looking guys in jeans and leather jackets that looked way too heavy to be wearing in this weather entered the convenience store, and Dustin decided that he should probably be on his way. "Anyway, good luck with the hot water treatment."
"Thanks. If you need to borrow somebody's yard for your research, especially those flies, let me know."
"Will do."
The cashier rung up his candy bar and drink. Dustin paid him, thanked him for the directions, and headed for the door. One of the sleazy-looking guys, freakishly thin with a heavily pockmarked face and dirty brown hair stepped in front of him, blocking his way.
"Going somewhere?" the guy asked.
"Well, out that door was my intention," Dustin said. Or would have said, if his mouth hadn't gone completely dry.
Dustin heard a gasp, and turned around to see the second sleazy guy, who was slightly overweight with unruly red hair, point a gun in the cashier's face. The guy in front of the door took out a gun of his own. "All right, lovely patrons of Seth's Quik-Stop, it is my great pleasure to announce that this fine establishment is now in the process of being robbed! Which of you loyal patrons would like to be our first volunteer to get shot in the head?"
* * *
*-CHAPTER FIVE-*
"Roberta, I think there's something you need to see," said Agnes, standing in the doorway.
"We're kind of in the middle of a root canal right now," Roberta explained. Zachary, lying on the chair with the rubber dam over his face to isolate the tooth being worked on, incoherently grunted his agreement.
"I know, but it's kind of important."
Roberta sighed with annoyance, but Dr. Ruiz waved her away. "Go on. I can handle it. Zachary's a good patient." Zachary grunted his agreement again.
Agnes led Roberta out to the waiting room, where Mrs. Baine, a short, fragile woman in her seventies, stood peering out the glass door.
"Oh my God," said Roberta, looking outside.
There had to be a couple of hundred ants scurrying along the sidewalk and
around the unpaved parking lot. That in itself was no big deal, except that these ants were _huge_. One of the dark red insects was crawling on the door, and it had to be the length of a business card.
"I left my purse in the car," Mrs. Baine said. "But I can't go back and get it by myself."
"Have you ever seen ants that big?" asked Agnes.
