“Shoot!” Culdesac screamed, knowing that he was running right into their line of fire. It was better to get shot than be torn apart. A constellation of muzzle flashes opened up before him. Bullets whizzed by his head, the sound making his ears curl. He was about to hop into the first foxhole, but he could feel the creatures right behind him. So he jumped over it instead. He heard the ants pulling the soldiers out, tossing them aside, before a hail of gunfire brought them down.
Culdesac bounded into the second row of foxholes. On either side of him, the soldiers continued firing. At his feet, a dog cowered under the lip of the trench. There was no time to discipline him, so Culdesac ripped away the dog’s rifle and began shooting. The next wave of Alphas rose over the carcasses of the others and continued to advance. Some were so delirious with the poison that their tongue-like organs hung from their open mouths making them resemble giant mechanical dogs.
Culdesac drained his first clip and inserted another. He aimed for the base of the skull. Things slowed down. He pointed and fired, the muzzle flash followed by flesh and shell bursting from his target. When one creature flopped over dead, legs in the air, Culdesac lined up the sight and found another.
An Alpha attacked the trench to his left. The recruits huddled in terror as the ant straddled the foxhole. Culdesac fell backward as he shot the Alpha in her thorax and abdomen. Hot blood spilled onto the floor of the trench, but the monster kept moving. Culdesac rolled over and crawled away while the soldier behind him was snatched up.
The colonel got to his feet and broke into a run. He made it to the far end of the trench and climbed out. To the west, he spotted a fleet of old yachts and fishing boats anchored near the shoreline. A new swarm spilled out of them, made up of his own kind, other animals who fought for the humans. They splashed through the knee-deep waves, rifles raised. To him, the invaders resembled a virus taking over a host cell.
Culdesac’s soldiers were in total disarray. Everything broke down into split-second snapshots: an officer shooting a private for running away; a cat holding her bloodied, amputated tail as she fled screaming from an Alpha; two dogs carrying a wounded comrade — so mutilated that the species was unclear — only to be trampled by a rampaging Alpha with her head torn off.
The Queen is dead, he thought. The Queen saw everything, but she did not see this. He was sure of it. The translator had linked him to her so intimately that he could sense her departure. Her absence created an emptiness in the universe, a void that would pull in everything he knew and believed and loved. It was not supposed to be like this. She was supposed to protect everyone, to make sure that the humans never hurt anyone ever again. He strained to hear her echo. He waited to feel the grip of her sadness around his throat, around his heart, the despair that he had the privilege of sharing with her. The burden that made him strong. He had promised to swallow her pain for her, to martyr himself so that she could be whole again. She told him that together, they were whole. But there was no hope now. She was gone. Culdesac, the bobcat with the forgotten name, was alone again, his people torn from the earth once more.
Someone yelled in his ear, asking what they should do next. He knew then that this would be the day he died. It was neither liberating nor frightening. It only reminded him of how much he missed the hunt.
DROPPING IN FAST from above, Wawa could see the flamethrowers as she waited to touch down. The soldiers waved the tongues of fire over the hordes of ants. Great orange snakes lashing out, gobbling up the Alphas. Some of the creatures had been driven so mad by the oleic acid that they continued to purge their sisters even while they burned.
Wawa landed hard, about fifty yards from the ant columns. She tried to remove her machine gun from its holster, but the wind flipped the parachute on top of her. The square-headed major had told her to ditch the parachute first, then worry about everything else, and she had already forgotten. By the time she untangled herself, the Black Hats were stampeding past her, each trying to get a shot at the writhing Alphas before the oleic acid wore off.
She had to run through a wall of smoke in order to find the rest of her pack. The second wave of Black Hats — armed with machine guns instead of flamethrowers — opened fire on the ants. Some of the creatures seemed to finally understand that they had been hoodwinked, but their sisters continued to pull at them, keeping them from launching a counterattack.
Of all the noises competing for her attention, there was one that Wawa could make out clearly.
Laughter.
As the ants stumbled about, mortally wounded with amputations and great bleeding punctures, the humans pounced on them. One of the men was so zealous that he leapt onto the back of a dying Alpha and shot her in the head. When the insect rolled over and pinned him to the ground, his comrades made a few jokes before helping him out from under the carcass. “What, are you hiding?” someone said.
One of the soldiers came across a decapitated ant head and kicked it toward another Black Hat. Startled, the second man shot the head, prompting the prankster to laugh hysterically. “Shut up,” the second man said.
Everyone moved toward the other end of the Island, where Culdesac’s forces were waiting. To advance, all the Black Hats had to do was get behind a wall of ants as the insects traced the chemical signature of the oleic acid all the way to the animals’ foxholes. The marauding humans made a curious sound as they rushed ahead: “Woo! Woooo! Wahooo!” It was like dogs howling, but out of joy instead of warning or despair.
The humans climbed over the dead ants and stormed the fortifications. The animals were already in full retreat to the sea. Even though Wawa sprinted as fast as she could, she could barely get close to a living enemy. She saw a number of animals cut down from behind as they retreated. There were even a few tending to the wounded who were shot on sight. She pointed her gun in the air and fired so she could say that she was at least contributing to the ruckus. The hard ground did not sop up the blood. By the third foxhole, she appeared to be wearing red socks. But she kept running with the others, a mad avalanche bristling with guns.
Up ahead, the landing party had arrived on a nearby shore. The pitch of the yelling descended an octave, remaining in a sustained “Yeaaaaaah!” A few of the humans took a break from shooting to hold their rifles in the air with both hands in celebration. The Black Hats shouted to their incoming allies.
“Get yer ass over here!” someone yelled.
“Welcome to the party!”
Wawa could see the forces unloading from the ships, marching down gangplanks or rowing to shore in small boats. The reinforcements made their way down the beach, cutting off the only avenue of escape for Culdesac’s forces.
The Black Hats came to a halt at the foot of a hill. They spread out, trying to find cover. A bullet whizzed by Wawa’s head, prompting her to hide behind the abdomen of a dead Alpha. Except it wasn’t dead. Still on its side, the beast turned to face her. Panicked, Wawa fell on her tail while firing madly until the ant’s head dropped once more.
She got to her feet and saw that the Black Hats had surrounded a cave. There was so much gunfire coming from it that the opening itself looked like the barrel of a gun. The shooting stopped, and a few cocky humans attempted to storm the entrance. Three shots in succession took them all out. More firing ensued. The animals inside the cave were barricaded behind sandbags and had plenty of ammunition.
Wawa was about to make a run for a spot closer to the action when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She spun around to find Mort(e) staring into her eyes. “You were easy to find,” he said.