Chapter 23 - The Right Thing

  We ran into a few more ants as we descended the steps past one floor after another. I stabbed each with my spear as we came across them, taking them out. Alex was two steps behind me, tapping each one in turn to collect the crystals. He had the right idea there. We were going to need as many of those stones as we could get our hands on. That much was obvious.

  What felt more uncertain was where things were going. Was this the new normal? We were going to have weird monsters attacking us every day from here on out? How the hell were people supposed to survive in an environment like that?

  I remembered seeing funny memes on Facebook, stuff like “pick which of these fantasy worlds you’d want to live in!” I’d always looked at those lists and chuckled to myself, because no matter how much fun those worlds seemed in books and film, the reality was you’d have to be completely insane to want to live in any of them. Think about it; who in their right mind would want to live in Middle Earth or Westeros, where the odds of something or someone nasty taking your head off with a sword were always fairly high?

  Not me. And yet, there I was.

  We hit the found floor of the stairwell and caught another ant crawling through the doors, which had been propped open by a very dead human. The body had belonged to a nurse or doctor, judging from the scrubs. Whoever they were, they were definitely dead. It was one of those cases where you clearly didn’t need to check for a pulse. The person went down while trying to escape into the stairs, and their body kept the doors from shutting, allowing ants to flood the stairs.

  “You see anything on the stairs going down?” I asked.

  “No movement that I can see. I’m betting the nurse we ran into went up, and the ants we fought just followed her,” Alex replied.

  “Let’s go see if we can find the source, then,” I said.

  I stepped over the body, carefully moving into the hallways beyond. Sure enough, we’d found more ants! There weren’t so many of them here, though; just a few, scattered around the floor and the walls.

  As soon as they saw us they raced our way like we were their favorite food. I smacked the first one with the butt of my spear, smashing it. Alex crushed another with his bat. I did what I could to keep them off of him, to attract their attention. The whole ‘can’t bite this’ aspect to my Natural Armor was a gift that just kept giving, and I was enjoying my semi-invulnerability.

  We pressed on after killing the latest crop of ants, following the trail of damage they’d left. Planters had been knocked over, chairs bitten, the carpet ripped up here and there. Everywhere they’d been, the ants left their mark, so it wasn’t too difficult to follow them back to the source. That turned out to be a rear exit for the building, opening back into the same courtyard area where we’d burned the bodies, earlier.

  The doors leading out were stuck open, the bodies of crushed ants showing how they’d forced their way in. They’d sacrificed some of their own to prop the doors, allowing the rest of their number free access to the hospital building. More shouting came from outside, so I figured this wasn’t over yet.

  “Let’s see what’s going on out there,” Alex said, his bat up on his shoulder like he was ready to hit a grand slam.

  We stepped through the propped doors into the breezeway, then into the warm September night beyond. I don’t think either of us were ready for what we found out there, though.

  The moon cast a pale white glow on everything, broken up by the orange and red glints left by guttering flames here and there. The hospital must have maintained a small fire in the space, maybe for light. When the ants struck, they sent chunks of burning wood flying in all directions. Some of that had caught other objects alight. In one spot, the lower branches of a bush were burning. In another, a broken plastic chair had guttering flames where it had partway caught fire.

  But taking up most of the attention was the massive hole in the center of the courtyard.

  The ants had come up through the grassy area, punching upward through the soil. From the looks of things, they’d erupted explosively into the area, sending soil and rocks flying when they pushed their way out of the dirt. Ants still poured from the hole in the ground, rushing toward the crowd of humans trying to push them back.

  I saw Tom out there, and then spotted Gary as well. Each of them had big poles that looked like they’d been mop handles in a prior lifetime, both with some sort of blade strapped to one and. We were back to basically fighting with pointy sticks again, only this time Mother Nature had a lot of oomph of her own.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Come on,” I told Alex. “Let’s go kill some more ants.”

  We rushed in. I stabbed one ant that was trying to lunge at Tom’s ankle, stopping it in its tracks.

  He turned to me. “Thanks, Castle. There’s a lot of them, but we’re driving them back.”

  “Alex and I took out the ones that got upstairs,” I replied.

  “They got in? Damn. Good work there.”

  We went back to killing, but it wasn’t easy. There were too many of them for us to just wipe the floor with them. Even resistant as I was, and strong as I was, there was just a limit to how quickly I could crush the things.

  A cry of alarm from my right caught my attention. One of the hospital workers over there went down with a yelp, then a scream as the ants grabbed her by the ankles and started dragging her toward their tunnel.

  I was moving before I could think too much about it. A quick leap carried me half the distance in a single bound, landing atop an ant with a crunching sound. I rushed forward, smashing one of the ants attacking the woman with my spear, then stomping another. More of them swarmed forward like a flood.

  “Run!” I shouted to her. “Get clear!”

  She was sobbing, and a quick glance told me why. Both her ankles were slashed apart and bleeding from numerous ant bites. Still, she was a fighter. She grabbed the ground in front of her and started dragging herself back toward the line of fighters. If I could hold the ants off just a little longer, she’d get clear.

  Then a sing-song shout caught my ear. “Here I come to save the day!”

  I glanced toward whoever it was and saw…Gary? He’d dropped his weapon and rushed in toward the woman who’d been attacked. Gary slid to the ground beside her, struggling to get a shoulder under her arm so he could drag her clear. The guy’s heart was in the right place, but unlike me, he wasn’t impervious to harm from these things!

  “Gary, get back! There’s too many—I can’t hold them!” I warned.

  He ignored me and kept trying to help the woman. The man had guts, but was not the best in the common sense department.

  Worse, the distraction gave the ants the opening they needed. Four of the things swarmed me, biting down on my boots and calves. There was only pressure, no pain. They still couldn’t get through my skin, and I was glad for that. But it turned out this time, they weren’t trying to.

  Instead, they twisted, two of them yanking one way while the other two pulled in the opposite direction. I went down hard, smacking my head into the ground and knocking all the wind out of my lungs.

  Like that was a signal, the ants made another hard push. Dozens of them rocketed forward. A bunch grabbed onto me, pinning me in place. They had my legs, my arms… They crawled over my chest and face, trying to find something they could injure. So far, my Armor was holding its own, but I couldn’t count on that working forever. I tugged at the ones holding my arms but could barely move them. There were just too many!

  The rest rushed past me, straight toward Gary and the woman he’d been helping. Out of the corner of one eye I saw him turn and spot them coming. He had her up and moving, one of her arms draped over his shoulder as he fought to get them back to the line of fighters.

  I saw it in his eyes when he realized he wasn’t going to make it.

  He could have escaped if he wasn’t weighed down by someone who’d been badly wounded. But Gary didn’t just drop her to save himself. Instead, he grunted with effort as he scooped a hand under her butt and lifted her into the air, tossing her toward the waiting defensive line. She landed on the grass with a cry of pain, but she was surrounded by friends. She was going to be fine.

  Gary, on the other hand, got swarmed.

  A dozen ants grabbed onto his legs, yanking them out from under him. He cried out as their jaws bit into his skin. Then the ants that had his legs started dragging him back toward the hole in the ground. He cried out, screamed, and scrabbled at the dirt, trying in vain to slow his steady slide. More ants grabbed onto him, speeding the process along.

  I couldn’t just let them take him! “Gary!”

  Adrenaline surged, and I managed to twist my wrist enough to break one ant in two. The hold on my right arm was just a little weaker now. I crushed another with my fist.

  A bat came crashing down on two ants pinning my left arm, and suddenly I could move again. Using both hands I crushed every ant around me as fast as I could, killing one of them after another. I grabbed one that climbed onto my face, tossing it into a wall in disgust.

  Then a hand reached down to me. I looked up and saw Alex’s face grinning down. “Need a hand?”

  I took his hand and used it to lever myself back to standing. “Thanks, man.”

  “You saved me. It was time for me to return the favor,” Alex replied. Then his grin vanished. “That guy they grabbed… They took him into their tunnel.”

  I looked toward the entrance to the ant nest. The ants were pulling back. Either they’d had enough fighting for one day, or something, but whatever the case, they were leaving. The surviving defenders were letting them go, too.

  “Tom! They took Gary,” I called out.

  He shook his head. “I saw. It’s sad, but at least we saved who we could.”

  “He wasn’t dead, Tom. We might still be able to save him,” I said.

  “And risk more lives down in the darkness? I don’t think so,” Tom snapped back. “I’m in charge of security. It’s my call. I won’t risk more people trying to save one man.”

  I wanted to snarl something back at him, but I just couldn’t. He wasn’t wrong. Half his people were already wounded. The rest were looked exhausted. They’d be overrun and slaughtered down there in the dark.

  But I wouldn’t.

  I started toward the hole in the ground, snapping my spear back up. I’d need it for the light, at least.

  “Castle! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tom called out.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. “The right thing.”

  Then I kept walking.

  “We’re not going in after you, if you go down there!” Tom shouted.

  I ignored him.

  Alex caught up with me. “You sure about this?”

  “Nope. You sure you want to come?”

  “Yeah, I think I will,” he replied, flashing me a smile. “Doing the right thing isn’t something enough people aim for. Let’s.”

  With that, we both stepped up to the gaping black hole and stepped forward, falling into the dark earth.