Chapter 144 - Clacking Mandibles

  It took us two days to get everything ready for the mission I had in mind. I wanted badly to push ahead faster, but there simply wasn’t time to get everything required ready. The real barrier turned out to be the damned chicken, of course.

  There was a lot of chicken on those bones, and I could only Animate it once. If I tried right away, I was going to get a zombie chicken, and the smell threatened to be lethal! We had almost five hundred zombies running around, which was plenty bad all by itself, but the chicken probably massed about as much as all of them combined, and then we’d stripped it of a good chunk of its meat, leaving the remainder very exposed to wild animals, rot, and decay.

  It reeked. Nobody wanted to go anywhere near the carcass. Nobody wanted to have it join a defensive line.

  Fortunately, it did attract a lot of wildlife overnight. When we got up the next day, a solid chunk of the thing was gone, and there was a long line of house-cat sized ants running to and from the thing, leading off into the distance somewhere south of us. These weren’t as huge as the ones I’d faced near the cemetery, but their pincers were still big enough that we kept well clear.

  Hey, they were doing us a favor. We probably needed to find that nest and clear it out, but in the meantime, they were doing a lot of hard work for us, so I was inclined to leave them alone for a while.

  “Industrious little bugs, aren’t they?” Clay said as we watched from a safe distance while they steadily dismantled what was left of the chicken.

  “Yeah, and these are the little ones. The bigger ants are something else,” I replied.

  Kara shivered. “Yuck. I never cared for bugs of any size, but big ones like this are just evil-looking.”

  She wasn’t wrong. The sight of so many above-average sized insects tickled something in the human hindbrain, I figured. It didn’t bother me too much because I’d spent hours fighting ants that were a lot bigger than these, but most people wanted nothing to do with oversize bugs.

  “We’re gonna have to find that nest and clear it out,” I said. “They’re only going to get bigger as they rank up, and eventually they’ll be stealing regular chickens, cows, children…”

  “Grownups,” Kara added. “The other ones tried to eat me, after all!”

  I flashed her a smile. “You did fall into their nest.”

  “That was not my fault!”

  Clay ran a hand through his hair. “Well, we could find the nest now. You think these little ones drop crystals? They show as tier one to me, so I guess that means yes, right?”

  “They read as tier one to me, too,” I replied. “My guess is yeah, they do. Could be a nice collection of crystals for us.”

  “I know you wanted to get going on this mission you came up with,” Clay said. “But this might represent an even easier way to gain a lot of crystals quickly. If we can clear the nest, that ought to give us a lot of additional crystals, right?”

  “Sure. Makes total sense to me,” I replied. I summoned Sue, who came stomping over to join us. As soon as she was there, I used Flight to hop aboard. “Might as well find out where it is now, so we can deal with it after they’ve eaten all the chicken parts. You two want to come?”

  “Sure,” Clay replied.

  “No thanks,” Kara said, waving her hand. “Not interested in falling into another ant nest. Once was more than enough.”

  “Okay, you can stay here, keep an eye on things,” I told her. “If you see them trying to walk off with any bones, do me a favor and put a stop to that?”

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “And how do you expect me to do that?” Kara demanded.

  “I don’t know. Step on them? They’re not that big,” I told her.

  We left her behind looking thoroughly outraged at the idea, and rode Sue down the highway a bit until we hit a spot where the ants left the road, veering east into a patch of trees. We followed the trail, keeping a respectful distance from the steady stream of ants moving in both directions. Two long streams of the creatures, one heading back out toward the rotting kaiju, the other headed back to their nest with chunks of meat in their jaws.

  We were careful to stay far enough from the columns that they ignored us. We didn’t want to disrupt their efforts, after all; they were doing us a solid. At the same time, we had to figure out where they were going so we could come back and wipe them out before they did turn into a problem.

  Finally, we reached our destination: a mound of dirt in the center of a stand of tall birch trees. I stared through the trees, trying to make out what I could. “We’re not going to get Sue through there without making a lot of ants really angry.”

  “I agree. Plus, we don’t want Sue falling through into the nest again,” Farnsworth said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that ants don’t fly, and even if they do notice me hovering over their entry, they probably won’t be able to do anything about it.”

  “Makes sense. Be careful?”

  “You know me!”

  “That’s why I worry,” he groaned.

  I laughed as I took off, zipping from Sue’s back toward the trees. I went up to about twenty feet, high enough that I’d be well out of reach for the ants. I scanned the trees for threats as I passed through them—I still vividly remembered the giant spiders nesting in a collection of trees, and wouldn’t this be a great place for them to get free snacks? But it was all clear. Even the ants weren’t climbing the trees much, just a couple of them halfway up trunks. Lookouts, maybe? I approached with care.

  And I was surprised with what I found. The last ant nest I invaded had a massive entrance and a few truly large tunnels. They’d been big enough for Sue to walk through. The entrance had been huge, looking more like the opening of a cavern complex than a home for ants.

  This one looked way more like what I was used to seeing. There was a ten foot high pile of sandy soil mounded up. The ants scurried up and down the slope, diving in and out of a small hole at the top in steady streams. This hole wasn’t nearly as large as the others, though. I was fairly sure that I could fit through it, but Sue’s foot wouldn’t even fit. It would be a tight squeeze for a person, and I’d have to go in either feet first and not see where I was going, or head first and hope nothing bit my face off.

  The opening was just too small for us to easily assault the place, and that meant the tunnels within were probably that wide at most. If I was guessing based off the scale of the other nest, this one would have a lot of places that even someone as slender as me just couldn’t reach at all.

  Killing the queen was going to be an absolute pain in the ass.

  A few of the ants sitting on nearby trees were taking notice of me as I hovered there, clacking mandibles together and starting to grow agitated. I figured discretion was sometimes the better part of valor and zipped skyward once more, flying high enough that I was no longer a threat, and they stopped worrying about me. From there I went back to Sue, landing next to Clay.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “We have a problem.” I explained what I’d seen, how the opening, and therefore the tunnels, weren’t big enough for us to go in there after them.

  “Not sure where to go from here. Can we find some really large cans of Raid?” I asked.

  He laughed, then shook his head. “We probably could. I’m sure there’s enough Raid around the city to make that work, if we gathered enough up. But it might not penetrate to the bottom. We need that queen dead. More than that, we clearly need a repeatable solution, since this is the second next you’ve found. If there are two, we can count on there being more.”

  “Huh. Well, we could kill a bunch of the smaller ants and I could cast Animate on them,” I said. “Then we’d have our own little army of small ants ready to go in there. The chicken killed a bunch of my zombies, so I could replace them with ants.”

  “How many? Fifty? Fewer, I think, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Probably not enough to handle whatever is down there. They’re all tier one, these ones we’re seeing. But there are probably stronger ones below, right? And the queen is stronger still?”

  “Most likely, yeah,” I said. He was right. Fifty ants wouldn’t be enough, and I didn’t want to dump all my human zombies, because they were building our walls for us. Without them, it would take a hell of a lot longer to make the farm defensible. “Sounds like that’s out, then. Back to the Raid plan?”

  “No, there’s other ways of dealing with ants,” Clay said. “You ever watch those YouTube videos where people deal with big ant nests?”

  “The ones where they pour molten metal into the ground?” I asked. “I always thought that was a little mean. Although I guess I could make an exception for ants big enough to bite my ankle off.”

  “Yeah, there’s those. But the molten metal thing doesn’t always reach the bottom of the nest. It’s like burning a nest out. Works sometimes, but often doesn’t. We want something more sure than that.”

  He had his eye on something, a tower standing about a hundred feet away. What was it? A big, round thing on the top of a tripod of trusses. A water tower? I looked at him, then back at the tower, and started getting a feel for what he had in mind.