Wawa kept running. Mort(e)’s nubby fingers were still digging into her shoulder. “Let go of me!” she said, ripping away from him.
“Fine! Just keep running!”
She stopped and was about to head back for the dog. Mort(e) tried to restrain her. “There’s nothing you can do for him,” Mort(e) said.
“Not him,” she said. “I want to kill one.”
“No! We need to—”
She brought the axe up with both hands, shoving him away. “Just one, I said!”
Wawa searched the area for a target and found one within seconds: an Alpha landing on a nearby jeep, spraying acid on the canvas roof, causing it to disintegrate into a cloud of foul-smelling vapor. The soldier inside — a cat — fired through the hole in the cloth. A bullet tore through the ant’s wing, but the creature could still fly. She latched onto the hood.
Wawa took off. She was at the rear of the jeep before the ant’s antennae detected the movement. Launching herself from the bumper, Wawa drove the point of the axe into the ant’s neck. The weapon sank into the exoskeleton but missed the vulnerable brain stem. The Alpha’s jaws opened and snapped shut. Wawa wrenched the handle clockwise, breaking the neck in a grinding crunch.
Wawa had been taught that these monsters were her sisters, and that they were all joined together in a war with the humans. She gazed into in the compound eye of the insect. Her scarred face — miniaturized, multiplied — stared back.
The weight of the dying Alpha shifted as her abdomen, operating on its own, aimed its acid port at Wawa. It shot out a burst of fluid, barely missing her leg. She could not kick it away — her feet were planted in order to keep the ant from latching onto her. There was no telling when these things were dead. Wawa had once seen a decapitated ant head shear off a human’s leg at the shin when he tried to kick it away.
“Help me,” she said to the frightened cat, who sat trembling in the front seat of the jeep. The soldier bolted. He was barely a kitten, probably a runaway who joined the military to get some food. Before he made it twenty feet, an Alpha dropped on top of him, breaking his spine before carrying him away.
The abdomen sprayed again. This time, the jet of acid hit the door of the jeep. The metal sizzled.
Wawa felt the vehicle rock as Mort(e) hopped onto it. He grasped the axe handle with her and planted his foot on the Alpha’s abdomen. With the added leverage, Wawa and Mort(e) were able to pry the handle toward them until the creature’s head broke off. The body squirmed before toppling over.
Wawa tore away the shredded rooftop and climbed into the driver’s seat, throwing the axe into the rear. Mort(e) jumped in next to her. She stepped on the gas pedal. The jeep lurched to the side as it rolled over the Alpha’s thorax.
She sped to the gate, where an Alpha attacked the single soldier left defending a watchtower. It was a dog. Out of ammunition, all she could do was swing her rifle at the monster. When the ant prepared to fire acid at the tower, the soldier hurdled the railing and jumped the twenty feet to the ground below. Anticipating the move, the ant pounced on top of her, pinning her to the ground. The dog stopped moving.
Mort(e) picked up the axe and leaned out of the passenger side. “Drive,” he said.
The vehicle accelerated. Mort(e) swung the axe, the digging the blade into the Alpha’s neck. The head flipped upward, landing on the hood of the car. It lay upside down against the windshield, its jaws opening and closing. Frantic, Wawa turned on the windshield wipers and then switched them off. Mort(e) leaned over the glass and, with the top of the axe, knocked the head off.
They were through the gate, heading away from the base. Wawa adjusted the rearview mirror. Mort(e) placed his hand over it. “Don’t,” he said. “Keep driving.”
Chapter Fifteen: Run
The effects of the translator began to wear off. Mort(e) could feel the knowledge dripping out of his mind like water leaking out of a pair of cupped hands. He had entered the phase that Yojimbo described as “deflating.” Part of him would miss the things he had learned. It was hard to go back to being a mere mortal after knowing almost all there was to know.
He was trying to recall some of the Queen’s trials and errors in Alpha breeding when the jeep ran out of fuel somewhere in the abandoned farmlands to the west. They were still too far from the mountains, where Mort(e) believed they would be safer. At least there, the ants would not be able to pop right out of the ground. On either side of the road, fences marked fields that were littered with dead crops. The humans who had fled in this direction could not have lasted very long. There was nowhere to hide.
After abandoning the jeep, Mort(e) and Wawa walked in the doomed footsteps of the humans. Their shadows grew longer. Wawa seemed almost catatonic after hearing about Mort(e)’s meeting with Briggs, the messages from the Vesuvius, his supposed role as the savior, and the possibility that Sheba was still alive on the Island. That was a lot for one day.
They took a badly needed break. The deflation had left Mort(e) nauseated. Now there were only questions with no answers. They simply trailed off. Did Wawa/Jenna kill her master, or simply escape, or …? Was Archer’s original name three successive squeaks … (eee-eee-eee)? And what did the Queen do with Australia again?
An enormous traffic jam clogged the road ahead, another relic of the war that the Bureau had not yet sponged away. A long line of vehicles stretched to the horizon, growing so dense that Mort(e) and Wawa had to squeeze between car doors and fenders, weaving their way through a metal graveyard. Mort(e) surmised that the traffic must have come under attack from both the front and the rear. Several drivers had panicked and tried to move forward onto the grassy shoulder and the empty oncoming lane, forming a bottleneck. Wedged so closely together, many of the humans must have been unable to exit their vehicles, so they smashed the windshields and climbed out. The glass was everywhere, and many of the cars had dents the size of human feet. Several windshields had been smashed in rather than out, suggesting that those people who were unable or unwilling to break out of their cars were stuck waiting until an Alpha pounced on the vehicle.
Wawa pointed her snout toward a bunched-up blanket lying on the road between a van and a convertible with the roof torn off. The blanket covered the body of an old woman lying face down, decomposed to a skeletal state. Her white hair was still curly. Most likely, this one expired en route, and her overly sentimental family hoped to bury her somewhere, still believing that they would have a chance to do so, and that it actually mattered. It was possible, too, that the marauders were so busy chasing down every last EMSAH-infected human that they simply left her behind. The only way she was spreading the disease now was through her eye sockets. All that she knew, and learned, and loved, had died when her heart stopped beating, and her bloated human brain dried out, and all its contents fell away, spilling onto the asphalt.
There were overturned cars up ahead. The ants had sprung a trap for these refugees. The humans fled, only to run toward a new anthill bursting through the highway. Mort(e) pictured it: the ants rising, Alphas supported by hordes of their smaller sisters. Rivers of insects, spraying from a hideous fountain.
He tried to think of something else. Their immediate survival seemed like a good start. As odd as it felt, spending the night near the hollowed-out ziggurat was probably the best idea. Mort(e) thought that he may have been one of the few people in the world who would not be scared to go near an old anthill. Hiding near this place could buy them some time.