Seventh Sanctum Writing Challenge #2: The Ants

“The story must have a giant at the end.”

I woke up to the sound of a scream. Seconds later, I felt the unmistakable sensation of earth moving beneath my body. Sitting up, I looked around and noticed that one of the two other sleeping bags—the one that had my daughter in it—was empty. My wife was already getting out of her sleeping bag, screaming out the last word I would ever hear her say:

“HAILEY!”

We named her after Eminem’s daughter, because the club my wife and I met in was playing an Eminem song when we first started speaking to each other. If it had been a boy, we would have named the baby Marshall. Neither of us particularly liked Eminem, but the song we were introduced during was special to us.

If you asked me to name it, I wouldn’t remember.

“Raina, wait a minute!” I exclaimed as my wife started to move away from our fire. “What are you doing?!”

Raina didn’t answer. She broke into a run, parting the surrounding forest of grass by force. I leapt into a standing position, nearly falling into the dimming fire we’d made from a couple of shards of rock, some twigs and a goddamn miracle. It had been a while since any of us were granted a chance to see each other’s faces when the sun was down. The horrors of the world seemed to be so much smaller, even though we knew, but none of us would admit, how dreadfully enormous they were.

I ran after Reina, but my leg had been injured from an incident a few nights ago and I could only limp and scream Raina’s name as she screamed our child’s name and didn’t slow her pace. So I did what I could, I tracked her by the sound of her voice. I felt for rumbling, willing myself to feel something except for the beating of my heart and the fear in my stomach just below it. The organs of my torso seemed to be in conspiracy against me, trying to make me suffer a heart attack before I could perform the miracle we would need to get us out of this.

We knew these things were able to attract humans by using a sweet scent and a cooing, warm, vaguely human voice. Back when we had been traveling with another family, all of us saw firsthand one of their to napping children get up, sniff the air, and start walking in a direction that led us to one of the monsters. So we tried what we could, we improvised some earmuffs every night by using a little mud—if there was none available, we tried to wet the dirt with our spit—and we hoped our child would just sleep on through instead of waking to the temptation of the nice-smelling air and taking the ear covers off to hear the cooing sounds.

The wrench in the whole system was Reina. She refused to tell our daughter what might happen to her if she hears or smells anything funny. She didn’t want our child to grow up scared of the world, or to not be able to fall asleep for fear of the monsters outside the grass walls. I tried to reason with her. Living in fear was still living, until we could make our way to, if not some form of civilization, a surefire way to keep out of the view of the monsters. Besides, we didn’t even know how much Hailey knew. We put mud on her ears every night, and while she didn’t complain to us, I could see in her eyes how little significance the ritual bore in her little mind. She was just a baby, for God’s sakes, a pale little blond of 6. I knew her 7^th birthday would be next week by the small slashes I made on the backs of my arms.

The screams stopped. No screams from Reina, and nothing up to that point from farther away, nothing to indicate that Hailey might still be saved. But I kept running as fast as I could, except now I was feeling around in front of me with both hands while trying my best to hear for any sounds of breathing, or struggling, anything that would alert me to something nearby. I would even take one of the monsters—at least then I would know that my family was probably dead and that I could soon join them. As much as waking up to find ourselves in this horrific mockery of our world was traumatic, having my family with me made the whole ordeal tolerable.

I heard a sound off to my left, something like the sound of a sob or a choking noise. My heart started to sink. All the nonsense I tried to tell myself about it being better to know than to not know had just turned into exactly that—total nonsense. Total horseshit. At least when I didn’t know, I had hope that things might turn out in my direction. I found the source of the sobbing sound, and could tell by the timbre that it was Reina. She was on her knees, curled up into a ball on the ground, the smell of her congealed sweat over the course of several days striking me in the nose as I felt for her shoulder to grip. I didn’t know why she was crying, but the worst recesses of my soul told me I actually knew exactly why.

“She’s gone, Leland,” Reina said, the sound of her whisper loud as a boom of thunder, as if she had petitioned God Himself to play her voice to me from the heavens above. I didn’t know why she believed that, but I also knew it didn’t matter. I had been preparing for this moment, and it felt exactly how I thought it might feel if I didn’t prepare at all. Nothing could have made this go down any smoother. My mouth opened, and nothing came out. Not even a breath. There were foul-tasting words on the surface of my tongue that I wasn’t sure I could say. I wanted the silence to break, but I was afraid of what might break it if it wasn’t me who did it.

“She’s gone. I can’t find her.”

As Reina sniffled, my mind reconvened its contents so quickly I flinched. Reina was guessing. She was falling into a despair she nearly dragged me into as well. I felt angry, happy, sad, and worst of them all, I felt the time that was slipping through my hands while I was busy feeling emotions with the mental breakdown that called itself my child’s mother.

I gripped Reina’s shoulder a little tighter. Just enough to get her attention. “Get up. We have to look for our daughter.”

“You’re hurting me,” sniffled Reina.

“We have to look for our daughter,” I repeated, a little more loudly, a little more quickly.

“She’s gone, Leland.”

I tried to be patient. “We don’t know that yet. Don’t just give up.”

“She’s dead… and it’s because of me…”

“Sweetheart.” I bent down to talk more directly to her. I didn’t like the way Reina was talking. Not only was she giving up on Hailey, she was giving up on herself. When she did that, she was giving up all of us. The whole damn world, as far as I was concerned. “Sweetheart, this isn’t on you. This isn’t on any of us. I know there’s a chance that Hailey might be…” I tried to stifle a sob, but it came out with the word “dead.”

“I know she might be dead, but we’ve got to keep looking. What if she isn’t, and we just leave her alone out there?”

I felt Reina shift around a bit, but she didn’t say anything.

“What if she is, and we spend the rest of our lives listening for noises, wondering if that’s the daughter that died already? We owe it not just to her, but to ourselves, to know. Know, or die trying.”

“What kind of life is this, Leland?”

I felt Reina brush my hand off her shoulder. She stood up. Some confidence was returning to her voice. “This isn’t a life for our girl. Running every day, scraping the leftover fruit off of cherry pits, rooting through bushes, listening. Not even talking. That’s the worst part, Leland. We can’t even talk anymore. We listen for the cooing, or for the voices of real people, or for grass moving. We do it from morning ‘til night, and when we get to bed I can’t stop hearing the same screams play in my head and there’s nothing I can do or say or think about to get them to stop and when I do sleep I dream of blood and grass and all the fucking grass…”

Reina’s voice broke up until she was crying and gasping. I embraced her. “I didn’t realize how much it mattered for us to speak to each other,” I said. “I thought just being together was enough.”

“It is!” Reina exclaimed through her patchy voice. “It was. But I… we never even talked about why this was happening. It was just boom, one morning it started…”

That was true enough. We woke up in our house surrounded on all sides by thick, tall grass when one of the monsters burst through a wall and sent us careening for the front door. We ran away from so many monsters those first few days, we barely had time to catch our breath, never mind speak to each other. We didn’t grab anything from our house, and we’ve been wearing the same clothes on our backs for so long, they’ve torn and frayed all along the edges and place in-between. Eventually, we were going to have to start going around naked, and that thought was no comfort since the air was already starting to get a pronounced wintery bite to it.

“We need to look for our daughter,” I said firmly. Reina stopped crying and cleared her throat. I wasn’t sure if that meant a yes or a no, so I told her again, and after that time I heard a meek “yes,” which I presumed was the best I was going to be getting for the time being.

It occurred to me right when we started searching that I had no idea how much time we’d been asleep before this particular incident got going. It felt like we’d slept for a while, because I felt wide awake, but the only way I’d know for sure was to let the adrenaline subside, and at that moment it was the only think keeping me from complete despair, or madness, or whatever that creeping feeling was that occasionally rubbed lazy circles on the shores of my consciousness. I noticed the sentences in my head, the ones that I saw written out in green LCD, were starting to run on longer and longer, until they were the size of paragraphs. I had an inner monologue that couldn’t help itself but to babble like a madman in fear and desperation.

Reina was tired. I knew she was tired. She was the one between the three of us who shared her food. The child needed it first, of course, and I took second because Reina and I agreed early on in these last couple of months—the rare conversation we did have—that I would need to protect the family not necessarily from the monsters, but from other people who might want to harm them for some reason. How were we to know, after all, what was going on in the hearts of others who were suffering like us? In the same way everyone deals with grief differently, everyone deals with horror and survival differently. Some crazed thrill-seeker without the weapons to back it up could happen to be traveling in the same patch of super-grass as us one day, and decide that a murder or a rape would be in his best interests.

It’s not like I was some body-builder. But I was the best my family had.

Reina and I called for Hailey’s name, to no avail. Every time I stopped expecting to hear a response, I remembered how suddenly disaster visited us, and how it could be taken away with the same speed. Even Biblical plagues—which this felt so much like—had their time before they were removed from the earth. What if this was all to test some wayward follower of a higher power, some rogue agent of God who needed just a little bit of convincing to do the will of his maker, and instead of simply localizing his punishment to the one foolish, straying man, God decided to show him a world of twisted, Godless agony, roamed by massive insectoid creatures and the frightened men and woman who shielded their children in vain before being consumed?

Another run-on. I was getting worried about my mind. What good would I be as a father to Hailey if I let my own mind wander off? If I couldn’t even look after the thoughts confined to my head, I didn’t deserve to be the caretaker for the sweetest girl on the planet. Little Hailey. I don’t believe I’m saying this as a father, but as a person, when I say that she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on this planet, and was so from the second I laid my eyes on her. Even covered in blood, red-faced and shrieking its way into a big, open, unfamiliar world, there was an angelic quality about her that just captivated me.

Reina was right. She was too good for the world that was here for her now.

The grass itched my feet. It itched them incessantly. I had lost my shoes several weeks ago in the process of throwing them at one of the horrible stalking beasts, and even as we were running, Reina chastised me on how stupid that was. I couldn’t help but to agree. There were a whole litany of things I could probably step on in a strange new world like this. If there were bug monsters, why not poisonous spines sticking out of the ground. I even considered going back and getting them. I have no idea what I would have wanted with shoes that were probably in the stomach of a giant insect, but I felt naked without them.

I bumped into Reina. She had stopped again. I rolled my eyes, thinking this might just be another one of her mini-breakdowns, until I heard it too. The unmistakable sound of a coo. One of the beasts was nearby. The rumbling was low at first. Reina and I got closer to each other, afraid to lose each other’s touch. No matter how many times this happened, day or night, we never got used to it. And I reckoned we never would.

Grass parted near us. I could hear it coming from the right. We turned together, both apparently thinking the same thing at the same time—“I want to see it even though I can’t and it won’t matter.” Instinctively, Reina started to back up, and I reluctantly went with her, but I knew when push came to shove I wouldn’t be running. This was going to be the moment of terrible knowledge. Is our daughter alive or not?

When I felt a leg brush up against my arm, I pounced, lunging elbow first at the horrible creature, hoping it wasn’t trying to approach me backwards. Were that the case, I might have felt the sharp stab of the creature’s stinger penetrating my skin, its thin, reedy, metallic weapon of choice pumping enough venom into my body to eat my insides as I was still alive, rendering me paralyzed and subject to the monster’s whims. An image flashed in my mind of my daughter impaled through the stomach and out the other side by the monster’s stinger, and I fought back tears as I lunged again, my elbow having missed the creature the first time.

It was possible to kill these things. I had done so once before. The truth was, these things were like enormous ants. The average human being would be just a little shorter than one that stood on its legs upright. Beyond their bite and their sting, they were relatively fragile if one could either get them in the eye or penetrate their exoskeleton with something like an elbow or the heel of their foot. It took a lot of strength applied to one of a handful of spots to really defend oneself against the giant ants, and even with the daylight on my side, my chances would have been slim. Here, they were practically impossible.

Reina did her best to help me. She started by feeling along the ground, sifting through the grass to find a piece of rock buried beneath, something she could either use herself or hand me. A strong blow to the head with a rock tended to completely turn the tide of a battle with one of these things around. When that failed, she tried to simply get to the side of the creature, feel for it, and once she felt it shift to one side or the other, she would do her best to tell me whether it was to my left or right so I could get a better chance of aiming at it. These things liked to shift and back away and do things in a general defensive posture, seemingly aware that their stingers and their teeth were only going to get them so far.

Except this time, Reina didn’t do that. She started crying again. I wanted to kick the living shit out of her. I was within seconds of being mauled by a giant ant, and she was taking this as her opportunity to have another one of her little emotional breakdown sessions. I knew it was hard. I knew we confronted death almost every single day we existed in this new world, with these drooling, mindless monsters who couldn’t be bargained with, who couldn’t feel anything except the pure, distilled instinct to feed and breed, but we were supposed to be the better creatures. We were supposed to be smarter. Yet we were allowing our advanced emotions get in the way of our advanced rationing.

“Leland,” she called to me, “I found her dress.”

I stopped.