Attack of the Giant Ants

The first victims are found before dawn at a corner store in the Mission district of San Francisco. A deliveryman phones in the report. Two men dead inside the shop.

Officers Belmont and Bosco arrive on the scene. Bosco young, stocky, loud; Belmont thin and weathered. The air is foggy, the sky dim gray. The store's register is untouched, but the shelves have been clumsily looted. Broken bottles and scattered snack food. Blood and wine cover the floor. The front window is smashed in. The proprietor's abdomen has been ripped open. The other man—

"Where the hell's his head?" asks Bosco, his voice rising.

Belmont finds the head on the curb outside, the neck very jagged. A stray dog is licking at it, maybe wanting to drag the head into an alley. Belmont puts the head on the shop's counter.

Inspector Ben Cuayo arrives with a pair of crime scene techs. They photograph, measure, and discuss—not touching the corpses quite yet. Cuayo observes that most of the snack packages on the floor are sweets. The shop's ice-cream cooler has been knocked onto its side. Fully cleaned out.

"Munchies," says Cuayo. He's a comfortable man with a stubbled chin, easy in his frame. He homes in on a segmented, whip-like stalk in the dead proprietor's hand. From a plant?

"See that gel oozing from its broken end?" puts in Bosco. "Maybe it's like a trippy South American vine. A drug deal. Lick the stub, Inspector. Take some home to your wife."

"She's gone," says Cuayo. "She left me." He walks outside with one of the techs.

Blood marks and wine stains on the sidewalk. But not in the shape of human feet. "The perps could've been in costume," theorizes Bosco, peering out the broken window. "Special freakazoid footgear for a cult."

"The boy's a fount of wisdom," says inspector Cuayo. "Don't know why I even show up. So what we're gonna do now, Bosco, is you stay in there and keep an eye on this place. The rest of us take the corpses to the morgue and run that stalk thing over to the lab. We'll stretch some crime-scene tape across the sidewalk before we go. And you run that videocam on your chest. In case something happens."

"Happens?" Bosco is uneasy. "You should be calling in more guys, inspector. Backup."

"Already on the way," says Cuayo. "Meanwhile, can someone bag that freaking piñata? The stockboy's head? I'm the one has to show it to his wife."

Now Bosco is alone in the shop. He dabs at a smear of stalk gel on the floor, sniffs it, wrinkles his nose. The sun's coming up; the fog is a faint shade of gold. The street is empty. In the distance, thin sirens wail. Bosco hears a scraping, a thudding, a hoarse twitter. Very close. He takes a step towards the smashed window, his expression a mixture of horror and disbelief. He begins to scream. Cut.

"Giant ants," Ben Cuayo is saying. He's in his office, talking to Roopa Banarjee, a young entomologist from UC Berkeley. She showed up as soon as the story broke. "The first encounter was at 20th and Guerrero Street," Cuayo continues. "Then they made their way to Dolores Park. Just a few blocks. We've got dozens of witnesses. They killed seven people."

"Do you have video?" asks Roopa.

"From Sergeant Bosco, yes," says Cuayo, pausing. "Our man. We lost him too."

He runs the images on his screen. Jerky, crooked shapes. A flattened insect head so large that it's hard to see. A faceted eye, a waving feeler, and then a curving mandible's jagged edge. Frenzied chirping and a wheezy roar. The viewpoint shifts wildly; the image goes dark. "The ants killed the next batch of people at a bakery on Dolores Street. And then the ants disappeared."

"These have got to be the stygian ants," says Roopa Banarjee. "What a find! From the deep Monterey shale. My research group has been studying fragments of them in the frackers' waste. So far the new species has been hypothetical."

"How do we exterminate them?" asks Cuayo.

"Flame-throwers should handle the smaller ones," says Banarjee. "But we need to take one of these ants alive, Ben. It's not an opportunity to be missed."

"For science?"

Roopa waves that off. "For money. To survive in the oil shale—thousands of feet below the surface—they'll have made remarkable adaptations. My group has found a new material in the shell fragments we've seen. Laminar chitins. Incredibly strong and extensile. I say these ants are worth billions. Let's lure one out and trap it with a net."

"Who's the lure?" says Ben Cuayo. "You?"

"I can do it," says Roopa, lifting her chin. "I'm an expert on the languages of the ants. I can imitate their gestures and their calls. Stridulation and drumming." She widens her mouth and makes a grainy sound in the back of her throat, now and then clapping her cupped hands.

"You're quite a package," says Ben, admiring her.

"I'll wear my special suit," adds Roopa. "I brought it along. My ant costume."

Roopa stands at the edge of Dolores Park, wearing a red full-body ant-suit with a pair of fake extra legs dangling from her midriff. She has a deely-bopper headband with bouncing antennae.

Across the street are the wrecked remains of the bakery-cafe where the ants attacked. Pathetic scraps of pastry litter the ground. National Guard troops stand in the street, cradling a dozen flamethrowers. A crane dangles an immense wire net.

Roopa's fellow entomologist Wilbur Shoat is on the scene, an older man with fleshy features, wearing gray chinos and a tweed coat, rumpled and professorial. He's trucking back and forth across the park's grassy slope, knees bent, nostrils flared, snuffling at the ground.

"Here!" calls Shoat. He's pointing at a tiny hole beside the playground. "Formic acid. Pheromones. Butane."

"He's nuts," says Ben Cuayo at Roopa's side "That's a ground-squirrel hole."

"We—we believe the stygian ants can change in size," says Roopa. "Their laminar chitin slides over itself like a stack of plates."

Roopa kneels beside the little hole, with the great wire net dangling overhead. The guardsmen stand in a cordon around her, flamethrowers at the ready. Roopa leans closer to the hole, her mouth wide open. She's making those skritchy chirps. Ben Cuayo can't take his eyes off her.

A little ant appears at the lip of the hole, waving its tiny feelers. Roopa waggles her tongue, bobs her deely-boppers, redoubles her chirps. The ant picks its way closer, growing larger with each step. It's the size of a rat, a cat, a dog, a cow, a car, a locomotive, a dinosaur, a jumbo jet. It gives off a whiff of ether, along with a wild, primordial tang.

"A female worker," says Wilbur Shoat, tapping the side of his nose.

Roopa is standing, resplendent in her red ant garb, deeply chirping, her head thrown back, snaking her arms like a temple dancer. The ant responds, rubbing her enormous leg against the ridges on her glistening shell, making an upbeat sound like the squeak of a violin. Perhaps she likes Roopa.

The net falls too late. It's the size of a circus tent, but not big enough to cover the ant. With a fretful milling of her legs, the ant sends the net flying. Roopa is backing away, gamely chirping her ant-songs. Ben Cuayo runs to her.

With a motion too fast to see, the ant snags Roopa's garb with a hooked foot. She draws the captive woman towards her mouth. Cuayo wildly fires his pistol's full clip into the ant's underside—to no effect. The bullets ricochet off and buzz through the air. The guardsmen have raised their weapons, but Cuayo yells at them to wait. The chances of them harming Roopa are too great.

In any case, the colossal ant isn't biting the beguiling entomology professor—far from it, she's raising Roopa upon high, seating the woman on her head. The ant drums her gaster against the ground, saws her legs, and makes a crackling hiss. She's still growing—casting a shadow across Cuayo and the guardsmen.

Called forth by the ant's drumming, a second ant emerges from the hole and rapidly swells to the same gargantuan size. The second ant has a plumper, smoother rear segment, and she carries herself with a regal air. She and Roopa's ant chirp to each other and rub antennae.

"The queen," says Wilbur Shoat.

The troops play their flamethrowers across the redwood legs of the monster ants—to little effect. Mildly irritated, all but ignoring the flames, the ants raise their heads, sampling the air. And now they head off towards the city, rocking like unsteady titans, surprisingly light on their feet.

They step across Dolores Street and clamber onto the roofs of the buildings, spurning the pawky human pathways that lie between. They proceed across Union Square and the financial district, their legs churning like giant machinery—like drill-rigs, like rocket-gantries, like monstrous dockside cranes. Sirens wail, police cars and fire trucks are broadcasting warnings to the surging crowds of screaming pedestrians.

"Ants! Ants! Ants!"

Ben Cuayo's first instinct is to speed after the leviathans. But first he has to wrap up the situation in the park. More ants are seething from that hole beside the playground. Lesson learned, the guardsmen pour torrents of flame onto the latecomers, and the ants are—exploding, bursting like popcorn kernels, going up in little puffs of flame. In two minutes, this phase of the battle is over. The ants are a heap of shattered shells. The guardsmen tear at the ground, feeding blasts of fire into the nest's branching crannies.

"Think we got them all?" Ben Cuayo hurriedly asks professor Wilbur Shoat.

"That nest runs deep," says Shoat, kneeling down to sweep ant fragments into a vial. "Roopa told you that we're calling them stygian ants? Driven from the deep shale by the frackers. Let's hope this is the only colony that surfaces."

"What about those two who got away?" asks Cuayo. "Why didn't the flames hurt them?"

"It's the laminar chitin," says Shoat. "It gets stronger when it's opened up. You'll need something more intense to explode the big ones. I just hope that Roopa—"

Cuayo jumps into his car and tears off in pursuit of the worker and the queen.

The ants are following the Embarcadero towards the sea. Roopa remains secure upon her ant's head, wedged into a nook at the base of an antenna, gripping an overgrown bristle with both hands. She's laughing, beyond fear, wholly in the moment, ecstatic over her wondrous ride. The ants reach the Golden Gate Bridge and saunter onto it, carelessly scattering the cars. Roopa's ant is in the lead, with the stygian ant queen close behind.

Helicopters with machine-guns and bazookas buzz like angry hornets, firing at will, the pilots in a panic, heedless of Roopa's safety, careless of the cars. Roopa remains unscathed in her crevice by the ant's antenna. The bullets and rockets rattle off the giant ants' impermeable shells.

Alert to every detail, Roopa senses a different threat. She chirps a warning to her ant, directing her song at the sensitive surface of the antenna's base, speaking the creature's language. The ant flattens her body, hunkering down on the bridge's pavement.

Meanwhile the proud ant queen strikes a pose, rearing up to her full height, resting her legs upon a cable and a tower. She goggles at the helicopters with her compound infrared eyes, lashes out at them with her clawed legs.

The stygian ant queen has failed to notice, or to understand, the new tactic that the frantic humans are about to launch. Moving like speeded-up cartoons, the defenders are clamping electrical conduits to the San Francisco end of the bridge cables. The city falls still, as the full electrical power of the grid is channeled into the cables.

The ant queen takes on the look of an archaic insect god—wreathed with a coruscating halo of sparks. For a moment she sustains herself, glorying at the influx of energy, but now a spot in her shell gives way. Her vast, gassy body explodes like a hydrogen dirigible, a dark skeleton amid billows of flame.

In this moment, Roopa's ant seems to vanish or to dwindle away, leaving Roopa unharmed upon the bridge, cowering behind a car for shelter from the fireball. And then all is calm.

A month later, Ben and Roopa are on a date. A plush, dimly lit restaurant near the Ferry Building. A romantic mood. They're starting on dessert.

"Whatever happened to your ant, do you think," says Ben, laying down his fork.

"She's my pet," says Roopa with smile. "She got tiny and I hid her."

Ben twitches in surprise. "Where is she now?"

"The ant is here," says Roopa, very slowly and distinctly. "Her name is Cynthia. She eats a lot." She opens her purse and brings out a little golden box with a crystal lid. Pops open the lid and sets the ant upon the table. A faint whiff of ether. The ant is large, relatively speaking—perhaps the size of a cockroach.

Ben's scoots back his chair. He's on the point of jumping to his feet.

"Oh, relax," says Roopa. "All that Cynthia wants is the rest of your dessert."

Swelling to the size of a mouse, the ant marches across the table and buries her head in Ben's tiramisu.

"But—"

"Everything's going to be fine," says Roopa. "Cynthia and her sisters didn't understand how to act. But I've been teaching her. You stick with us, and we'll do great things. Cynthia used to be a worker—but now she's a queen."​

This dispatch is a part of Terraform, our new online home for future fiction.

© Rudy Rucker 2014