The Colony: A Novel (20 page)

“That’s odd,” Paul said and strolled to a back door leading out to the street. “Why didn’t he run to the exit instead of the sink?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Does it matter? All we need is a queen.”

Paul scrutinized the back of the room, which was featureless except for the airtight fire door and two windows painted shut. “The ants had to come from the hallway in front of the room.” He spoke with the befuddled tone of a TV crime-scene investigator as he followed the man’s soapy sneaker prints. “These footprints go to the washers. Then they stop and go to the sink. Why did he walk to the washer instead of running out of the building?”

“Yo, Sherlock,” Kendra said. “You’re an entomologist, remember? Think Ant.”

“Right.” Paul nodded. “Ant.”

She let out a weary breath. “It’s morning. We must have missed them.” She felt hot and zipped open the heavy white suit. Something caught her attention, and Kendra pointed with her chin. “Paul, check out that washer near the body. I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like a head.”

A mop of reddish brown hair was pressed against the circular glass. Paul walked to the washing machine and tugged on the handle. Out flopped the snout of a dog, curled up tight inside the metal drum.

“Collie,” Paul said and looked over at the dead man. “He must have been trying to save Lassie here from the ants.” He lifted the dog’s limp head. “Suffocated, I guess.” He bristled and then refocused his thoughts on the room. “So I guess we look for pipes, vents, holes. If they’re hiding in the walls, this is probably the best place to find them.”

Kendra nodded and pressed her palm against the wall. She put her ear against the cold plaster and listened for any sounds of activity.

Paul tracked a pipe that stretched across the ceiling to a dark alcove by the hallway. Below the pipe was a wall vent, about six feet from the floor. He called to Kendra, “Hey, over here.”

She followed him into the shadows.

A four-foot ladder splattered with paint was folded up in the corner, and Paul pried it open. He dragged it under the vent, climbed the rungs and removed the iron grating with a hard shove. The opening was small, but he managed to reach an arm inside and then tried to fit his head. Dust rained down on his hair.

“Forget it. This building must be a hundred years old,” he said, coughing. “There won’t be any passageway big enough to fit the two of us.”

“How about a colony of twenty-two million ants?” said Kendra, drumming her fingers on her cheek. “
Think.
They may have been bred to attack a city, but they can’t escape their nature.”

Paul sat down on the stepladder and closed his eyes. He considered everything he knew about Siafu and then said, “So where in this building do we find the equivalent space of a fifty-foot hollow tree trunk?”

Kendra’s face brightened. “I’ll tell you where.”

CHAPTER 33

DING.
THE ELEVATOR BELL
broke the ghostly silence in the lobby as the gilded doors parted, revealing a roomy interior paneled in chestnut brown. Paul and Kendra stepped hesitantly inside, relieved to see that the small light fixture was still working.

Paul unhinged the stepladder and positioned it under the trapdoor screwed to the ceiling. “Are you certain about this?” he asked.

“‘Certain’ will not be in our vocabulary today.”

Paul shook his head and climbed up to the escape hatch. He used a penknife to turn the screws. The lid dropped and dangled from its hinges. He stared up at the darkness, listening to the quiet, then peered down at Kendra. “You ready?”

“I’m fine. You’re the one about to risk a face full of killer ants,” she joked.

He flipped his hood, not amused, and zipped it tight. “Gimme the flashlight.”

She handed him a bug vacuum as well. It was a pistol-shaped device, but when extended, it looked more like a
Star Wars
light saber.

Paul poked his head through the opening. The elevator shaft was dark and he strained his ears, listening to the silence through the plastic head cover and raising his flashlight skyward. The bright beam dissolved in two hundred feet of darkness. He lowered the light and it settled on the walls.

That’s when his cheeks lost color and for a long moment Paul didn’t dare move, or even blink. Millions of ants covered the elevator shaft. Their black armor shined like marble in the shaking light of the beam, as the colony moved slowly and methodically in wavy columns like slithering deadly snakes.

Paul blew out a breath of air and ducked inside the car, slammed the door and held it closed with all his might. He was beginning to hyperventilate. The bug vacuum dropped to the floor and he threw off his hood.

“What?” Kendra asked.

“They’re in there! All over the place.
Jesus
.” He tightened the first screw with trembling fingers.

“I knew it,” she declared. “Well, get up there.”

“Get up there! Are you crazy?” Paul backed down the ladder and wrung his hands together, willing them to stop shaking.

“Did they react to you? Show any signs of aggression?”

“I don’t know, Kendra.” He closed his eyes and breathed through his nose. In the dark recess of his mind he could see them crawling, slowly. His brow furrowed. “No, actually, they didn’t seem to notice me.”

“Then they’re in down mode, right? Like the ants in your lab?”

“Maybe.” He cast a troubled eye at the hatch door. “We can’t really be sure.”

“You seem to forget why we’re here,” Kendra said, zipping her suit. She flipped her headpiece and started up the ladder herself.

Paul grabbed her wrist and eased her back down. “Okay, okay,” he gave in. He climbed to the top and turned the screw, gazing down at Kendra through the crook of his elbow. “But if I hear even a lip smack from those buggers, I’m out of there.”

She reached up and handed him the bug vacuum. “Fair enough.”

Paul slid the vacuum through the hatch, along with the flashlight, and zipped his hood once again. “Wait till I get up there. If it seems safe, I’ll tell you to press the button. We’ll look for the queen floor by floor.”

Arms braced, Paul hoisted himself onto the roof of the elevator, landing on his chest and skimming across fifty years of dust and grease. He got up on his knees in the filthy white suit, surrounded by darkness and millions of imaginary legs racing toward him. He shivered and flipped the flashlight to lantern mode. The shaft became awash in light.

Paul stood ready to retreat, but the ants were fairly still. At least he saw no outward sign that they were preparing to attack, so he began looking around. The elevator roof was less than ten feet across. In the center, two thick cables operated the car from an electrical box at the top of the shaft, while four thin wires secured each corner for balance. The air was musty with a metallic odor of gears and machinery.

Paul grasped the grimy cable and moved to the wall, close enough to reach out and touch the ants if he wanted to. He didn’t. Yet fear turned to fascination when he observed the colony up close. The ants were passing bits of food, carrying eggs to a nest made from their own bodies and disposing dead ants into a makeshift burial site, formed by thousands of legs linked together. They were busy with all the duties of ordinary ants but Paul was watching them from inside the colony, and he found that extraordinary.

“What’s going on?” Kendra’s voice came from the elevator.

“Shhhh.”

“What do you see?”

“Would you hush?”

Paul shifted his attention back to the ants, with a glint in his eye and a growing sense of excitement. He examined them closely through the plastic window of his hood. At that moment, the Siafu Moto were not a weapon but a colony like any other. It’s what he wrote about, spoke about; it was his passion. A society based on equality and cooperation. If people could emulate ants in this regard alone, they could be saved from certain extinction. He wondered to himself if perhaps the ants were here to teach us a lesson.

“Do you see the queen?” shouted Kendra.

Paul’s thoughts evaporated. “Hold on.”

He orbited the beam of light over thick layers of insects. If they were anything like ordinary Siafu he would find the queen laying eggs under a large mound of protective soldier ants. The mound would be easy to spot. Sometimes they were as big as soccer balls. Paul surveyed the area for another minute, until he was satisfied that the lobby level was clear.

“Start her up,” he yelled softly down the hole.

Kendra pushed the button for the first floor. Instantly, sparks exploded from above. Like shooting stars, they soared gracefully through the air and then burned into cinders halfway down the shaft. Ants scrambled out of the electric box, where they bit wires and crammed gears.

Unaware of the malfunction, Paul rode the elevator car on his knees. When it stopped gently, he climbed to his feet and lifted the lamp to the wall, when a noise startled him. He turned to find Kendra pulling herself through the hatch.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She got to her feet, equally covered in grime. “You didn’t think I was going to miss this, did you?”

“No.” It was an honest answer.

Wide-eyed and mouth gaping, Kendra strolled across the roof of the car. “Just look at them,” she gasped. “This is what it’s like, being on the inside.”

“Yeah, I feel it too.” He smiled like a young boy finding the most remarkable bug for his collection. “I’d forgotten the allure of nature’s most coveted secrets.”

“Too busy cashing checks.”

“Ouch.” His face pinched. “That hurt.”

Kendra crouched lower, examining them closely. “They seem normal enough.”

“Yet for some reason, they’re oblivious to us.”

“So much for your theory they attack in groups.”

Kendra held up her flashlight to a nest, where hundreds of ants linked together to form an oval bed three feet across. There was no sign of a queen, but thousands of eggs were being coddled and licked clean by nurser ants: small, delicate capsules, waxy yellow in color, yet transparent enough to distinguish the wormlike larvae inside.

“Paul, take a look.”

Below the nest were broken eggshells and a multitude of pink, squirming newborns. Adults crawled over the brood, checking each one like a new mother trying to find her only child in a sea of look-alikes.

“Trophallaxis,” Paul said with a sense of awe. The ants were regurgitating liquids into the mouths of the juveniles. “Not something you see in the field every day.”

Kendra nodded. “Maybe if we observe them long enough, we’ll learn something useful.”

“I think we’re better off finding a queen and getting the hell out of here.”

There was a sudden knot in his stomach and he backed away. The light spread over a mass of crawling winged ants. They moved restlessly in circles over one another, occasionally lifting their wings and catching air.

“Alates,” he said anxiously.

Kendra took a closer look. Although the ants were indeed future queens, they were useless for her purpose, as their glands wouldn’t secrete the proper pheromones until the nuptial flight. “It won’t be long before they take off.”

“So now we have to worry about flying monsters.”

Both of them scanned the elevator shaft with renewed alarm.

Kendra stood on her tiptoes, trying to get a better view of mysterious movement along a section of wall. “Bring the light closer. There’s something here.”

Paul held the lamp over her head, illuminating a mound of ants in the shape of a football. They moved slowly, in a tightly packed huddle.

“Hallelujah. It might be a queen,” Kendra said.

“All right. You get ready with that bug vacuum. I’ll try to sweep them off.”

“Seriously?”

“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

She nodded and stepped out of his way.

Paul held up a gloved hand, pointed like an arrow ready to strike. He took several deep breaths and raised the lamp higher. Kendra swallowed hard and held the vacuum in a tight grip to steady her hands.

Paul struck swiftly into the center of the mound and scooped out a layer of ants. They felt soft and light against the white glove. He winced and danced on his feet as they all sprinkled to the floor like sand.

Ants scattered from the mound and the prize they coveted came into view.

It was a hand. A left hand, adorned with a platinum wedding ring. It was cut ragged at the wrist, the flesh chewed off and bones pulled apart.

Paul gagged and dropped the flashlight.

Kendra fell back in silence.

The hand plunged down the shaft.

“Well. That was fun.” Paul checked his glove for stragglers. He tried to wipe the sweat from his brow, but instead left a smear of grease on the plastic window of his hood. He walked to the hatch. “I’ll take us up a floor. You keep an eye out for Her Majesty.”

Kendra nodded, speechless, as Paul lowered himself into the car. She braced her knees and steadied herself as the elevator began to rise. She picked up the lamp and the bug vacuum, as the car passed the third floor, then the fourth, then the fifth.

“Paul, stop!” she yelled.

The car didn’t stop. In fact, it was gaining speed.

Paul was pushing every button.

“It’s not stopping, Kendra!” he yelled back.

Suddenly sparks were shooting everywhere. Kendra ducked as they pelted the elevator. Five floors from the top, Paul noticed the bright red
Emergency
button and pounded it with his fist. The elevator screeched to a bumpy halt.

They both fell to their knees.

“Shit,” he winced.

Kendra could hear pain in Paul’s voice, but it was another sound that kicked up her heart rate. It started at the top of the shaft and traveled down in waves: the same angry chimes she’d heard in the street.

Kerka kerkosh keka kerkosh kerka kerkosh kerka kerkosh

In a flash, ants were streaming down the walls, the entire colony on the move. The sound bounced through the shaft and became deafening. Kendra pressed the hood against her ears and looked up to see ants spiraling down the heavy twisted cable, straight toward her. A few dropped to the floor, right by her knee, and she kicked them, brushed them away with her shoe mitts. She scrambled backward like a crab and her hand clipped the flashlight. It rolled to the edge and down the shaft, taking the last bit of light and leaving her in darkness.