It also made her glad Chicago was on her side rather than theirs.
From inside the gate, Murky could now hear what might have been shouts or screams. A lot of them definitely sounded human, but many others were chittering and screeching that Murky could only assume were the ants. She would have urged Chicago inside to investigate, but she didn’t need to. He dashed through the gate all by himself, snarling at any of the ants that got too close and ripping holes in their shells with his powerful claws if they got too close.
They didn’t get far down the initial hall of the city before they ran into the scuffle that had been causing all the racket and alerted Chicago. There was a fight going on between the ants and the people of Kettle Hollow, and while the townsfolk didn’t seem to be armed with anything but a couple of jagged bones, they weren’t putting up too bad of a fight. Lots of children, and even a few adults, were screaming and cowering in fear, but most of them were going bare-knuckled into battle, knowing that their lives literally depended on it. But even though the people looked like they were making the ants work for every ounce of spilled blood, it was obvious that they wouldn’t be able to continue on like this for long.
“Good thing I’ve got a velociraptor, then,” Murky said aloud to no one in particular. “Chicago, charge!”
She dug her heels into the dinosaur’s sides and spurred him forward, but he did all of the rest of the work. Murky wouldn’t have known where to even begin when attacking astride a velociraptor, but Chicago’s instincts took over and he ripped through a large number of the ants before they even realized that they were now fighting a battle on two sides. Some of the ants shrieked and made smells that Murky assumed were their version of orders to retreat, but there weren’t many places for them to go. They were caught in a pincer between the dinosaur and the townsfolk, and they were getting crushed in between.
“Murky!” she heard Laura call out from on the other side of the ants. “I told you to stay put!”
“I got bored!” she said honestly, then, less honestly, “and also, Chicago got worried and wouldn’t let me stay behind.”
“Murky!” Henderson called. “Get Chicago to back up!”
“But if I do that, the ants will be able to move this way!”
“Duh! And so will we!”
“Oh. Right. Got it,” Murky said. The problem was, she wasn’t sure how to make a dinosaur she was riding back up. Was there something she was supposed to say? Was she supposed to try to lead him around? She touched him on the top of the head and tried to turn it back the direction they had come, which thankfully he seemed to understand. He whipped his tail around to take out a few more ants, then started running down the hall back to the gate. Most of the townsfolk followed immediately, although some were obviously hesitant about following something that looked like a giant wingless bird of prey. There were ants starting to come from back in the direction where they had just been though, and that convinced the stragglers to fight their way past the remaining ants in their path.
Chicago and Murky burst out of the gate with the people close behind them, and Chicago immediately went for the path he had originally come down. At the top, Murky managed to get him to stop moving long enough to let her off and find Laura, who gave her the warmest, tightest hug the two sisters had ever shared. The townspeople came to a stop, milling around on the ledge and the slope, most of them anxiously looking back at the gate of the giant ant city as though expecting an army to come pouring out after them.
After waiting a number of moments and the ants still hadn’t done so, even Murky began to feel uneasy. A couple of ants came out to look at them, but as soon as they saw the direction the townspeople were heading, they ran back inside as though they were the ones that were scared.
“Laura, why does something about this give me a bad feeling?” Murky asked.
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “But that feeling? I’ve got it, too.”
Chapter Fourteen
The townspeople all went at least far enough down the tunnels to be out of eyesight of the ant city, and it was there that they finally took a moment to express their relief, as well as where Murky got to have her reunion with her parents. After a few minutes, Mr. Turnbull, the grouchy pharmacist, came up to the head of the group and started speaking. “Now that we’re out of there, let’s go.” He started walking and most of the people followed, although Laura, Murky, Jesse, and Henderson all took umbrage at his attitude.
“You don’t need to be a jerk about it, Turnbull,” Henderson said.
“The hell I don’t,” Mr. Turnbull said. “I’ll be damned if I have to follow a little punk like you any more than I have to.”
“Hey, we’re the ones that came all the way down here by ourselves and then kept every one of you from being ant food, didn’t we?”
Mr. Turnbull shook his head. “Probably despite your own best efforts at failing, I’m sure.”
“Hey!” Henderson’s father grabbed Mr. Turnbull by the shoulder and gripped the older man tightly. “That’s my son you’re speaking to, and he just saved us. If you keep speaking to him like that, I can make sure you get un-saved really quick.”
Henderson’s jaw dropped as he stared at his father in amazement. “Dad?”
Henderson’s dad looked at him with a combination of sadness and joy. “I’m proud of what you did today, George. If we don’t get out of this, I just want you to know that.”
Murky didn’t think she had ever seen Henderson look that close to crying, but he quickly hid it before anyone else could see.
Several young men had been carrying old Mrs. Harmsen, who normally needed a wheelchair, but they called out for the others to stop. “We have to take a break,” one of them said. “I’m not used to carrying an entire person this far.”
“I need a break from him as well,” Mrs. Harmsen said. “This young man smells funny. He smells like, before we were taken, he might have been…”
“We can’t stop,” Laura said to them. “I don’t know exactly how long we’ve been down here, but we have a time limit.” She gave everyone listening a brief version of everything Agent Larson had told them about what was going on, ending with the imminent threat of the military forcing the portal closed with them all on the wrong side.
“I highly doubt that’s true,” Mr. Turnbull said.
“If my kids say it’s true, then I believe them,” Murky and Laura’s mom said.
A younger kid came up to Murky and tugged on her shirt. “How do we get out?” he asked.
“Just follow us,” Murky said. “We’ll lead the way. We know which direction we came from. We just need to take a left at the giant carnivorous mushroom, then go up and to the right after the dinosaur cavern.”
“It was up and to the left at the dinosaurs.”
“It was definitely to the right.”
Harry Lupin, who managed the local Piggly Wiggly, gaped at them and scoffed. “Dinosaurs? Killer mushrooms? You have to be making that up.”
Henderson gave him an exasperated look. “Seriously, did you or did you not see that we’re travelling with our own velocity ratter?”
“That’s velociraptor,” Jesse corrected.
“Whatever. It’s obviously a dinosaur and it’s walking right next to us. Please tell me that not everyone becomes stupid like that when they become an adult.”
There was a lot of petty bickering after that, but none of the adults tried to act like they were in charge anymore. They could be in charge again once they all made it back to the surface. For the moment it was the four kids that had found their way down here, and they were the only four who knew exactly how to get back.
Murky thought they probably made quite the sight, an entire small town’s worth of people walking through the glowing green caves. A lot of them had been injured when the ants took them, but no one dared slow down after what Laura had said.
Henderson gestured for them all to slow down a little as they got closer to the place where they’d encountere
d the killer mushroom. “I don’t think we’ve thought enough about this,” he said to Laura. “How are we going to get past that thing again with so many people this time? The first time we barely made it through with our lives.”
“I’m still just making up all of this as we go,” Laura said to him in a conspiratorial whisper. “Maybe Chicago will be able to help us again.”
Except, once they got back to the place where they clearly remembered fighting the killer mushroom, they found it gone. Except it wasn’t completely gone. There were still pieces of it, especially chunks of the rubbery tentacles and root-like structure. But most of the giant fungus was gone, and it didn’t look like it had somehow got up and walked by itself. There were clear signs of violence. Various tendrils looked like they had been ripped apart by something large and strong, and there was a disgusting goo on the ground in places that Murky thought might have been the liquid she’d seen in the mushroom’s stem.
“Something bad happened here,” Murky muttered. Chicago made a soft noise in response that almost could have been agreement.
“Doesn’t seem so bad to me,” Henderson said. “Anything that gets rid of that monster plant has to be good for us.”
“Monster fungus,” Jesse corrected. “And I don’t know. Whatever did this, it could still be around. And do you really want to meet something that could completely destroy a creature that almost killed us so easily?”
The four of them agreed that they didn’t, but none of them told any of the others that something capable of ripping up giant monster mushrooms might be lurking around. Instead they continued on, again expecting some rather interesting reactions from the townsfolk when they came to the cavern of the dinosaurs. But that was empty too, even if it didn’t seem to be the sight of some kind of fight like the space where the mushroom had been.
“Where did they all go?” Murky asked, half to her friends and half to Chicago.
“There’s a few of these tunnels that look like they might be big enough for the dinosaurs to hide in,” Jesse said. “But I’m betting it wouldn’t be a comfortable fit.”
“So they all ran away,” Henderson said. “What exactly could be so scary that it could make a tyrannosaurus run away screaming in fear?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not something I want to meet,” Laura said.
“Hey,” one of the townsfolk said. “You kids mind telling the rest of us what you’re whispering to each other that is making you turn so pale?”
“Oh, nothing,” Laura said. Unfortunately, Murky was pretty sure everyone could tell she was lying. Being the typical good girl that she was, Laura didn’t have a lot of practice at being convincing when she lied.
“We just need to get moving, is all,” Henderson said. From him, a lie sounded much more convincing. “We don’t have much further to go, but we’re probably really short on time.”
Even though every single person in their very long train was tired, exhausted and traumatized, they all picked up their pace. It wasn’t until they passed the shattered remains of Agent Larson’s communicator device that Murky began to have a suspicion, and it was one that her three main companions obviously shared with her.
“The thing we saw in this tunnel,” Murky whispered to them, “I think maybe that’s what ripped apart the mushroom.”
“And scared away the dinosaurs,” Jesse said.
“And also probably why the ants aren’t trying to chase after their dinner,” Henderson added. “Whatever it is, it’s something they didn’t want to mess with.”
“Do we still not have any idea what it even was?” Murky asked.
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “Maybe. We’ve got giant ants and giant aphids. Based on that and what we were able to see of the creature when it passed, I have an idea, but I’d rather not say it. I kind of hope I’m wrong.”
“Oh come on,” Henderson said to him. “You can’t just leave us hanging like that. Tell us what you’re thinking.”
“Have you ever heard of an ant-lion?” Jesse asked.
“No,” Henderson responded.
Somewhere behind them, deep within the caverns, they heard an ungodly screech much like the one they had heard when they’d first come down. Everyone from town turned to look in the direction of the sound with terror on their faces.
“You may not have heard of one,” Jesse said, “but I think you just heard one. Everyone, I think maybe it’s time to run!”
Even though an entire town’s worth of people started running down the tunnel, it wasn’t the sort of panicked free-for-all that one might have expected. No one trampled anyone else, and no one was left behind. Children too small to run effectively were picked up, multiple people assisted with Mrs. Harmsen, and anyone who fell was given a hand up and a push to keep them going. Even with each of them helping each other though, some just couldn’t move as fast as others. A few near the end were struggling. Murky, with Chicago by her side, went to the back to help. Jesse and Henderson went with her, and Laura came back just as the front portion of the group reached the bottom of the deep pit that would lead them back to their own dimension.
“The portal’s still open!” Laura said. “We may still have a chance to do this.”
“Um, I don’t think we’re going to have that chance for much longer,” Henderson said. “Look!”
He pointed back down the tunnel. Something was coming, something huge. Something that blocked the light behind it. Something with giant, over-sized mandibles at the front of its head.
Something that was going to be here any second.
Chapter Fifteen
Laura got separated from the others on the desperate run up the stairs, so she somehow ended up near the front of the line of townspeople as they spilled out over the glowing blue edge of the portal. It was tough to tell who was more surprised: the townspeople who suddenly had guns stuck in their faces, or the soldiers, who had given the town up for dead and were now surrounding the portal, doing whatever preparations they needed to blow it closed. There was some frantic shouting from the soldiers, but it stayed fairly organized until the unholy scream of a monster echoed up from the bottom of the hole and caused both military and civilian alike to start running away from the edge in chaos.
The vast majority of the townspeople got out of the hole and over the edge of the portal before the creature came up. Murky wasn’t sure which direction to run, so instead she just stayed near Chicago and let his fearsome snarl scare away anyone that came close to trampling her. Mr. Turnbull ended up being the last one on the stairs, but he never got a chance to step over the blue line that separated the dimensions. The monster came up behind him and snatched him up in its jaws before rearing up and giving everyone in town a clear view of the thing that had been pursuing them.
Murky had never seen an ant-lion before, so she could only assume that Jesse was right in his assumption that this was some kind of cosmic mutant version of one. It towered almost two stories over everyone, and that was with a significant portion of it still down in the hole. It was mostly insectoid, but just like the ants and aphids, it had more legs than it was supposed to. Unlike the other extra-dimensional bugs though, it had at least ten legs that Murky could see. But the truly terrifying aspect of the creature, the part they had only gotten the barest hint of earlier, were its massive, out-of-proportion mandibles clicking at the air. The mandibles crushed Mr. Turnbull into paste, allowing the creature to more easily consume its prey.
Chicago growled next to her. He almost looked like he was aware that Murky was in danger and didn’t want to let anything happen to her. He took several steps forward, putting himself between her and the beast.
“Chicago, no! Please don’t do it!”
There was no doubt about it this time. As the velociraptor turned its head to look at her, Murky was positive that it completely understood what she was saying, or at least the sentiment behind her words. It even did something that might have been a response this time, a guttural and sad sound from
deep in its throat. Then it turned back to the massive ant-lion and hissed a clear challenge.
The creature finished gulping down Mr. Turnbull, then started scanning the running townsfolk for its next victim. Multiple soldiers were running toward the portal, their guns firing, but none of the bullets seemed to phase the enormous ant-lion. Chicago rushed up to the swirling glow at the edge of the portal and jumped, his mouth wide and ready to snap. His jaw latched tight and hard on one of the ant-lion’s legs, causing an audible crack of chitin to be heard. The ant-lion screeched and shook its leg, but Chicago held tight.
“It’s distracted!” one of the soldiers yelled. “Everyone, aim for the head and eyes!”
The air erupted with gunfire, and Murky screamed as she saw one or two errant shots hit Chicago. Even though the dinosaur winced and flailed in pain, he still held on, and the ant-lion was so preoccupied with him that it seemed to barely notice the bullets hitting it.
While the townsfolk ran screaming in terror and the soldiers confusedly shot at anything that didn’t seem human, Laura saw Agent Larson trying to command several troops off to one side and ran toward her. Larson saw her coming and tried to wave her away.
“Kid, this is seriously not the best time.”
“You said something earlier about ordinance to close the portal,” Laura said. “You have to use it now!”
“Are you crazy? The plan was to destroy the entire town, and to do it from a distance. We can’t do it while everyone is still right here!”
“If you don’t do it or something like it, then that ant-lion thing is going to escape and get out into the world,” Laura said. “If you’ve got the means to blow it up, it might be better to try doing it now than if it makes a beeline for Milwaukee or Green Bay!”
As if in response, the ant-lion pulled its enormous body up further out of the hole and used one of its legs to swipe at a group of more official looking soldiers. One of them tried to call out an order, but before he could complete it, they were all swept aside and flung through the air, some of them right into the ant-lion’s snapping mandibles.
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