“Rick!” Karen shouted, running toward him, machete raised.
He couldn’t breathe. The mandibles had driven the air out of his chest. But somehow they didn’t cut through him. The wasp was being gentle.
Then she curled her abdomen underneath her and brought her sting forward, aimed at Rick. Armor plates at the jointed tip of her abdomen pulled apart, and two soft fingers, covered with sensory hairs, emerged, waving and wagging. These soft fingers were the sting palps. The palps dabbled over Hutter’s neck and face, tasting his skin.
She liked what she tasted.
The sting happened very fast. Two stingers inside a sheath emerged from a hole beneath the taste palps. As the sheath drilled into Rick just under his armpit, the stingers lanced into him, first one and then the other, sliding back and forth in tandem as they worked inward.
Rick felt the needles go into him. The pain was extraordinary. He gasped.
Karen threw herself at the wasp, her machete swinging, but she landed too late. The wasp went airborne, carrying Rick gripped in her legs. Karen saw him kicking his legs, but then his body went limp.
The wasp landed on the chimney, then pushed Rick inside, down the shaft of the chimney, butting him forward using her head. She went down the chimney after Rick, her striped abdomen disappeared down the chimney, the sting going down last.
Huddled in the sandy area, Karen and Danny debated what to do.
“Rick’s dead,” Danny Minot said.
“How do you know?” Karen King said.
Danny rolled his eyes.
She wished desperately for Erika Moll; Erika might have information about the wasp. “He could still be alive.”
Danny just groaned.
She racked her brain, trying to remember what she’d learned about wasps in Entomology 101. “That was a solitary wasp, I think.”
“So what. Let’s go, please.”
“Wait.” That college class she’d taken on insects…“Solitary wasps—they’re female, of course. They build a nest for their young. They paralyze their prey, I think. But they don’t kill their prey. They feed it to their young.” She had no clue as to the exact species of wasp she was dealing with, or how it really lived.
“Come on!” Danny got to his feet and began walking away.
Karen unsheathed her machete.
“What are you doing?” Danny said.
“Rick saved my life,” Karen said.
“You’re insane.”
She didn’t answer. She pulled the sharpening stone from her belt and drew it across the blade of her machete. “That bitch has Rick.”
“No, Karen! Don’t!”
Karen ignored Danny. She opened the pack and took out a radio headset and a headlamp. She took out another headset and flipped it at Danny. “Put that on.” She stood up and rushed over to the chimney. Then she spoke on the radio. “Copy me, Danny?”
He was lying on his stomach in the shade of a small plant. “You’re crazy!” he shouted at her on the radio.
She put her ear up to the chimney again. It was made of dried clay and it smelled odd. Insect saliva glue. She could feel a slow thrumming sound under her feet—the wasp’s wings beating underground. There was a nest down there. The thrumming continued for a while. Then the sound began to move up to ground level, coming closer. The wasp was climbing up the chimney out of its nest.
Karen stood in the shadowed side of the chimney, trying to blend in.
The wasp’s head emerged as Karen flattened herself against the chimney. Two semicircular compound eyes looked at her. She felt sure she’d been noticed, but the wasp didn’t react; instead, it took off. Airborne, the wasp flew back and forth in a Z pattern, orienting itself, and then sailed off straight into the northwest sky, aiming for distant hunting grounds of its own choosing.
When the wasp had dwindled to a point and vanished, Karen took a step backward and drove her machete into the chimney, hacking at it. She bashed the chimney to pieces, breaking it down, keeping an eye toward the northwest, fearful the wasp might reappear. But the sky remained empty. She cleared away chunks of mud and then jumped feet-first into the tunnel.
“Don’t leave me!” Danny shouted.
Karen adjusted her headset and beeped him on the radio. “Can you hear me?”
“You’re going to die, Karen. I’ll be left with no one—”
“Call me if you see her.”
“Ohhh…”
“Clear. Over,” Karen said, and snapped off. She would have to move fast, try to find Rick and bring him out. The wasp could come back at any time.
The tunnel had round walls lined with hardened clay. It trended steeply downward. Karen descended feet-first, crab-walking on her hands and elbows. It was tight in here. Daylight filtered in through the entrance behind her, but the light dimmed as she proceeded deeper underground. She switched on her headlamp. The tunnel smelled of something pungent but not unpleasant. It was probably the mother wasp’s pheromones, she figured. The smell came mixed with a rancid stench, which grew stronger as she went deeper underground.
Suddenly she came to a falloff. The tunnel turned straight downward here, plunging into a vertical shaft. Claustrophobia almost choked her as she looked down it. It was a dark hole that seemed to go down into nothingness, with no apparent bottom. Rick is down there, just my luck, she thought. Well, he saved my life. It’s a debt I have to pay. And I don’t even like the guy.
She twisted her body, struggling against the tight walls of the tunnel, and sat herself at the lip of the shaft, letting her feet dangle. She lowered herself into the hole and began descending the shaft, pressing her hands and knees against its walls to provide a friction grip. She definitely did not want to fall. If she got wedged in the shaft, she might not be able to get out. The thought of being trapped in a vertical shaft while a giant wasp descended upon her…no. Don’t think about it.
Out in the open air, Danny Minot tore open the pack and searched it for food. He had to keep his strength up. Not that it mattered, he was dead anyway. He took off his radio headset and placed it next to him. And began inspecting his arm. It was so horrible.
The radio was talking at him. He picked it up. “What?”
“See anything?”
“No, no.”
“Listen Danny. Keep a lookout. If you see the wasp, tell me so I can get out. It’s in your interest.”
“I will, I will.” He fastened the radio on his head and propped himself up in the shade with his back against a rock, facing northwest, where the wasp had gone.
Karen reached the bottom of the chimney. It widened slightly, then made a sharp horizontal bend. She crawled around this bend, and the tunnel opened into a chamber. She flashed her headlamp around the chamber. Many tunnels—about two dozen of them—radiated from the chamber in a starburst pattern. Each tunnel ran into darkness.
“Rick?”
He was in one of those tunnels. Probably dead.
She crawled into a tunnel. After a short distance it ended at a wall. The wall had been built of rubble crammed loosely into place, plugging the tunnel—grains of sand and gravel glued with saliva, with spaces and gaps between them. She shone her headlamp into a gap in the rubble, trying to see what lay beyond.
She realized the gaps in the rubble were breathing holes. Because something alive was in there, past the rubble. The rubble door was a kind of stopper or plug with holes in it. Crunching, slurping sounds filtered out through the holes, along with a clicking noise. A rotting smell wafted from the holes, too. Something hungry lived in a room beyond the rubble, something that ate continually.
“Rick!” she called. “Are you there?”
The clicking stopped for a moment, then resumed. There was no other response.
She put her eye up to a gap and pointed her light in. It fell over a glistening surface the color of antique ivory. The surface was creased into segments. The segments were moving past the gap, one by one; this went on for a while, like a subway car moving past an open
ing. She could hear breathing, but it wasn’t human. What frightened her was the size of the thing in there. It seemed as big as a walrus.
There were many more tunnels to investigate. She crawled back into the main chamber and headed into the next tunnel, and tried to see through the blockage of stone and dried mud that clogged it. “Rick?” she shouted. “Can you hear me?”
Danny Minot’s voice came over her headset, faint and crackly, because she was so far underground. “What’s happening?” he said.
“I reached a large chamber. The chamber breaks into at least twenty tunnels going off in all directions. Each tunnel leads to a cell. There’s a larva in each cell, I think—”
She whacked at a rubble-door with her machete, and began chopping through mud glue. “Rick!” she shouted. “Are you in there?” Maybe he can hear me but he can’t talk. Or maybe he’s dead. Maybe I need to get out of here. Just give this a try. She hacked out the wall, enlarging the opening until she could get her body through it, and she crawled into the cell.
The cell held a wasp grub larger than she was, an obese blob that hissed, breathing heavily, with a blind, eyeless head. Its mouth was bracketed by twin black cutting fangs. The mother wasp had provisioned the cell with food for her infant. There were two caterpillars, a koa bug, and a miserable-looking spider. At that moment, the wasp grub was feeding on the koa bug, an insect with a shiny green carapace. The room was strewn with broken pieces of insect armor, stripped of flesh. There were also three whole heads of insects, uneaten and reeking of decay.
Karen edged her way into the cell, keeping away from the grub’s wicked-looking mouthparts. It was busy rooting into the koa bug.
She listened. She heard whispers of air moving through the holes in the exoskeletons of the food items. Good. This meant the food was paralyzed but was still alive. So Rick could be alive. As for the paralyzed spider, its abdomen rose and fell as it breathed, but otherwise it remained deathly still, its eight eyes glazed over.
The grub shook its head, yanking strings of koa bug meat in its mandibles, and it sucked the flesh down like spaghetti. The koa bug was breathing, too.
Karen resisted an impulse to stab the larva. She wanted to kill the horrible thing, but she pulled back. The wasp grub was a part of nature. This was no more evil than a lion cub eating meat provided by a lioness. Wasps were the lions of the insect world. They did good things, they kept populations of plant-eating insects in check, just the way lions kept an ecosystem healthy. Even so, Karen did not like the idea of a wasp eating Rick.
She crawled out of the cell, and made her way into the next tunnel. She shouted into the breathing hole, then cut it open and went into the cell. Here she found a mature grub polishing off its last caterpillar, having eaten everything else.
“Rick!” she shouted. The soil deadened her voice. He could be anywhere around here, above, below, off to the side, hidden inside a cell.
Her headset crackled. “What’s happening?” Danny.
“I can’t find Rick. This place is a maze.”
She broke into another cell. It contained a cocoon spun of silk. An unborn wasp, visible through the silk, curled up tight, soon to break out of the cocoon as an adult. As her light played over the cocoon, the wasp shivered. She got out of there, and jammed rocks back into the door. That was the last thing she needed: a newborn wasp wandering around in here, armed with a stinger, no doubt.
“Rick! It’s me, Karen!” she shouted. She held her breath and listened.
No sound reached her ears except the chewing of the grubs and the beating of her very frightened human heart.
Rick Hutter lay inside a cell in total darkness, unable to move or speak. The sting had paralyzed him, but he possessed all his senses. He could feel lumps in the dirt floor pressing into his back and legs. He could smell rotting insect flesh. He could not see the grub that lived in the chamber, but he could hear it perfectly. It was eating something, making crunching, sucking noises. His breathing went on normally. He could blink his eyes when he wanted to—he could do that much by his own will. He tried to move one finger, and wasn’t sure if the finger was moving or not, he couldn’t tell.
Help. Somebody help me.
It was just a thought.
He realized that the wasp venom had paralyzed only part of his nervous system, the sympathetic nerves, the nerves that are controlled by conscious will. His autonomous nervous system, the unconscious part, continued to function normally. His heart was beating, he was breathing fine, all systems go. But he couldn’t will his body to do anything. His body was like an engine stuck in idle; he couldn’t seem to find the controls or press the accelerator. Something hurt, and for a little while he didn’t know what it was, until a warmth spread underneath him as his bladder emptied automatically. He welcomed the relief.
The venom was a wasp’s version of refrigeration. It kept the prey alive and fresh until it was eaten.
The crunching and slurping activity continued near his feet. The grub seemed to be nearly finished with its meal, because he could hear a rattling sound of broken pieces of exoskeleton being shoved around. The grub was nosing at the scraps of its meal. He could hear crackling noises, scraping sounds. So the grub had jaws. He dreaded the first touch of those jaws. He couldn’t stop wondering which part of him the grub would eat first. Would it start by chewing on his face? Or would it bite off his genitals first, or burrow into his abdominal cavity?
Despite the horror of his situation, Rick Hutter felt strangely bored. Paralyzed in the dark, he had nothing to do except imagine his approaching death. He decided he’d better focus his mind on the things that had made him happy during his life. This might be his last chance for memories. He recalled wading into the surf at Belmar, on the Jersey Shore, where his family had spent a week at a motel each summer—what they could afford. His father had driven a delivery truck for a convenience store chain. He remembered standing on the driver’s seat of his father’s truck when he was five years old and telling everybody he was going to be a truck driver just like his dad. He saw himself opening the acceptance letter from Stanford and reading it with complete disbelief…a full scholarship at Stanford. Then graduate school at Harvard, again on financial support. He saw himself in Costa Rica, interviewing an old lady, a curandera, as she brewed a healing tea from the leaves of the Himatanthus tree.
His mind turned to the lab. One night he had been trying to extract a compound from the Himatanthus leaves. Karen King had been working late, tending an experiment with her spiders. They had been alone in the room together. They had worked side by side at the lab bench, right next to each other, without saying a word, the air thick with mutual dislike. But their hands had brushed by accident…Maybe I should have tried to hook up with Karen that night…of course, she probably would have punched me…
A dying man thinks mostly about missed sexual opportunities. Who said that, anyway? It might really be true…
He began to feel sleepy…drifting off…
“Rick!”
Her voice woke him up. It came faintly through the earth.
I’m here, Karen! he shouted, in his mind. But he couldn’t make his mouth move.
“Rick! Where are you?”
Hurry up! There’s a Hoover with jaws in here with me.
Karen’s light flickered briefly, the first light he’d seen in a long time—and was gone. Total darkness swallowed him again. She had moved on.
Come back! he shouted in his mind. You missed me!
Silence. She had gone away.
Then, in the darkness, the horror of horrors arrived. Something moist and very heavy slid over his ankle, pressing his foot into the ground. It’s not happening. Next he felt the segments of the larva bumping over his leg, bump, bump, bump. No! The segments were sliding over his stomach, now, then sliding over his chest, squeezing the breath out of him. No! Please, no! The wasp grub lay on top of him now, its weight pressing down on him, suffocating him. He could feel the grub’s heart beating, thumping agai
nst his chest. He heard a moist clickety-click. Those jaws were starting to work.
Click-click. Snip-snap. Snick.
The light returned. A ray shot into the cell. It revealed the black cutter knives flicking around a queerly soft mouth like a pale anus. Right in front of his face.
Karen was shining her headlamp into the cell. She saw the scene. “Oh, my God, Rick!” She began hacking at the rubble in the doorway, flinging stones aside.
The teeth brushed against his forehead. The grub was nosing around, looking for a soft spot to begin chewing. It tapped its teeth over his shoulder, leaving a streak of drool. He felt the teeth prick his nose. And the moist mouth brushed across his lips like a kiss, spewing out drool. It made him cough and choke, automatically.
“Hang on—!”
Hurry, this bastard wants to give me a hickie.
She got through the opening and threw herself at the grub, kicking the grub with both feet, pushing it away from Rick’s face. “You leave him alone!” she shouted, and thrust her machete into the grub. The grub gasped, a hiss coming out of its airholes. Karen pulled out the blade and raised the machete and swung it, beheading the grub in one blow. The blob-like head slopped away while the decapitated body went into a spasm, and began whipping back and forth in reversing C s. Karen continued to stab and slash at the beheaded grub, but that only seemed to intensify its thrashing.
She got her arms around Rick and dragged him out of the chamber, leaving the headless grub thumping the walls. A strange odor chased them.
That’s bad, Hutter said silently. That’s an alarm pheromone.
King realized it, too. The dying larva was screaming for help, wailing for its mother in the language of scent. The scent was filling the nest. If the mother detected it…
Danny’s voice came on. “What’s going on?”
“I have Rick. He’s alive. Stand by, I’m bringing him out.”
Rick was like a sack of potatoes, a dead load, but her strength was incredible. She had got Rick and she would fight to the death before she’d give him up now. Dragging him, she crawled through the big chamber, heading for the vertical shaft…
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