“You gonna stay here and argue with the Indians?” the general said casually. “Better make a decision quick. On six legs, those ants will overtake this rig like a wounded caterpillar.”
“How long till they get here?” I asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, giantess.”
My arms fell to my sides, and the general gave me a pitying look.
“An hour,” he said. “Tops.”
A gasp rose behind us, and Eugene ushered people into their stronghold.
“Well, now,” the general said casually. “This is where things get interesting.”
A cloud slid off the moon, pulling a veil of shadow from the desert. The sight scared me right to my feet. The ant was as big as a bus. Bigger. Even though I was as tall as a flagpole, its mandibles reached as high as my waist. Its sleek body glowed like oil in the moonlight as it moved right around the rails on the hillside and skittered around the hogans in frantic bursts, antennae writhing.
“That’s the scout!” the general called up to me.
“The what?”
“The scout! Every army has one. It travels ahead to mark the territory with scent so the rest know where the food is. It’s probably marking those Indians right now, making them smell enticing as a barbecue.” He cleared his throat. “If you really want to help these people, you’ll stop that thing.”
Eugene stood on one of the roofs and called out commands. “Don’t let it scent the hogans!”
Several shotguns went off behind the barricade, but the bullets bounced harmlessly off the ant’s back as its abdomen sprayed a translucent goo in its wake. Eugene clearly hadn’t expected the scout this early. He watched helplessly as it lifted its giant mandibles toward the moon and emitted a chickering sound that echoed through my giant ears and itched my brain. I clamped my hands in my armpits.
“Now is not the time to clam up, giantess,” the general called. “Just imagine that thing is my platoon of soldiers, and I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”
I couldn’t move. Those things had eaten Katie and hundreds of other people in her town. Their exoskeletons deflected bullets. What chance did I have?
“Tell you what,” the general said. “If you can drag that scout to an open area, I’ll run it over with this rig. That should put a dent in its side, at least.”
I looked thirty feet down and the general gave me a thumbs-up. Before I could second-guess myself, I took a step across the sand toward the giant ant. I took another step and tried to remind myself that I had hands the size of tabletops. I had feet the size of baby elephants.
On my third step, the ant noticed me, and my confidence evaporated. Its body was made of three round shapes held up by six spindly, jointed legs. The antennae worked like muscular bendy straws toward my chest, as if it had never seen anything like me.
And I remembered I owed these ants something.
“This is for Katie,” I said, and I ran at it, screaming.
For a moment the ant didn’t seem to know what to do. It lunged forward, mashing its wet mandibles, but when my shadow overtook it, it whirled and scrabbled back the way it came.
“Don’t let it get away, Phoebe!” Eugene cried.
I lunged forward and caught the ant’s back leg and yanked backward as hard as I could. I had hoped the leg would rip out of its joint, but it stayed put. I leaned back and started to drag the scout toward the rig, but its five other legs scrabbled forward, and we were caught in a tug-of-war.
“You’ve got this, Phoebe!” Eugene called.
I raised a fist over my head and swung it downward with every bit of fear I had in me. My hand rounded off the abdomen, like I’d punched a cast-iron skillet. The feeling vibrated through my bones and I cried out. I tried to shake the pain from my hand, but this gave the ant enough time to spin round and sink its mandibles into the arm still holding its leg.
My forearm exploded with pain, like it had been caught in hedge clippers with serrated edges. Gastric juices gushed out of the ant’s mouth, and my skin started to sizzle. The people behind the barricade gasped. My screams echoed across the desert. My eyes went wide, frantically searching for something, anything.
“The eye, Phoebe!” Eugene called. “Hit it in the eye!”
I brought my elbow down hard into the ant’s oily orb of an eyeball, which crunched, gushing like a melon. The ant shrieked as a frothy fluid gushed between the mandibles, scalding my forearm. Its jaws loosened, but refused to let go. If I tried to pull my arm out now, I’d strip the muscle and skin from my bone.
The ant and I held our position, both badly injured. My breath heaved. Its legs twitched. Its popped eye leaked onto my feet. I started to drag the injured ant toward an open area.
“General!” I screamed toward the truck. “General, now! Run it over!”
Spillane smiled and saluted me through the windshield. And then he started the engine. The rig swept up a circle of dust as it pulled back onto the highway.
“No!” I screamed. “Please! Come back!”
I had to end this fight. I had to get my arm back. I couldn’t reach the ant’s other eye without losing more skin.
“Hit its petiole!”
I was dizzy with pain, but my eyes managed to locate Eugene, standing on the hogan. “The what?”
He pointed. “The part that connects its body to its butt!”
I searched along the ant’s body, and noticed the dip between its middle and back section. With excruciating pain I wrenched my arm to the side and brought my leg around, bringing it down full force onto the connecting tube of exoskeleton, buckling it like a tree branch. The ant’s body slumped forward and fell still. I placed a foot on each mandible and pried them open, sucking through my teeth as my arm came free.
“Grab the body!” Eugene screamed to his people. “Spread the scent between the rails. The rest of you, start scrubbing that goo off the hogans!”
I ran, limping toward the highway.
“Thank you, Phoebe!” Eugene called after me, and a cry of agreement followed.
The rig was still accelerating by the time I caught up to it. I ran as quickly as my legs would carry me, my injured arm dangling at my side. The truck slowed to switch gears, and in that brief hesitation, I was just able to snag the edge of the truck bed with my good arm.
“Gotcha!” I cried.
I continued to run, lifting the truck’s back end so the tires couldn’t connect with the road. Bzzzt! My shin grazed the rotating tire, and I stumbled. The tires reconnected with the asphalt and screeched ahead. I regained my balance and sprinted faster, trying to catch the truck bed again. But the general had gained too much ground. He sped up to forty . . . fifty . . . sixty miles per hour, and before I knew it, he was impossible to catch.
I collapsed to my knees in the middle of the dark highway. “COWARD!”
The word echoed across the great empty desert as the truck’s brake lights shrank to two points in the distance.
He’d waited. He’d waited until my arm was caught in the ant’s pincers so I wouldn’t be able to catch him.
I sat in shock, my arm trembling in my lap, burned and bleeding. The approaching cloud of dust had a wet sound now—hundreds of oily mandibles.
I had fought just one ant and nearly lost my arm. How could I fight a dozen? A hundred? Four hundred? I broke down and sobbed in the middle of the highway until I heard a tiny voice say, “Don’t be scared! She’s nice.”
I lifted my face from my hands. Five Navajo children stood before me. Three boys and two girls. I recognized the girl who took the Twinkie from the kiddie pool. Her cheeks were glowing.
She stepped forward while the others kept their distance. “See? What scary thing cries?”
They must have slipped away during the chaos created by the scout.
“What are you guys doing here?” I said, standing up. “You have to go back home.”
“We want to be with you!” the girl said.
One of the boys stepped forward and punc
hed his hand. “Yeah! We watched you beat up that ant!”
The other three were silent.
“No!” I said. “Absolutely n—”
The chickering sound echoed down the highway a hundred fold as a wave of ants swept over the hill, between and around the railings, into Gray Rock. The night filled with gunshots. The kids watched in horror and awe.
Running them home now would be a suicide mission. If I was carrying them, I wouldn’t even have my hands free to fight.
“Well?” the little girl asked, hands on hips.
“I . . .”
To the south, Pennybrooke twinkled. To the north, the moon glinted off a sea of black armor. I remembered Beth’s words and wondered what I would yell at myself if I were watching all this in a movie.
Pennybrooke was empty. The houses were abandoned, doors hanging open, televisions blaring through the night. On Main Street, “In the Still of the Night” emanated from the sock hop’s jukebox and echoed down the abandoned storefronts.
I set the five kids on the sidewalk. Their hair was windblown from our sprint through the desert. Two of them had tear lines running down their dusty cheeks.
“Let’s find somewhere for you guys to hide,” I said.
They followed me through the empty streets, running to keep up with my long strides. Soon we arrived at a barbed wire fence with armed guards. The Penmark Roller Rink had been transformed into a fortress.
“General!” one of the guards called. “She’s here!”
The barricade’s doors swung open and General Spillane stepped out. He dropped his cigar and stomped on it. “Bet you’re real proud of yourself, giantess.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
He jabbed a finger toward my injured arm. “You’ve got that ant scout’s scent all over you, and you just tracked it across the desert and straight to this building. Any chance of that swarm sweeping past Pennybrooke without so much as wiggling an antenna in our direction was just shot by your brilliant move.”
I blinked at my hands. “I—I didn’t know.” My fingers curled. “You left me.”
“Yeah, I left you because if the ants filled their bellies with giantess meat, they wouldn’t come here and eat all the innocents.” He tapped his temple. “I’m strategic that way.”
Over the barbed-wire top of the barricade, which came up to my chest, I could see into the open doors of the roller rink. The lights were off and hundreds of figures stared out, silent and listening, like an unsettling diorama.
Even if I could fit through those tight doors, these were people who hated me so much they were ready to burn me alive. A small part of me had known this would end with me out here all alone.
“A-choo!”
One of the Navajo kids sneezed, and the general peered around my foot.
“Well, what do we have here?” he said.
The Twinkie girl peeked out from behind my legs.
“They ran away from home,” I said. “They need shelter from the ants.”
Just then a tiny ball of white fluff came barking out of the roller rink. I put out my hand, and Pan-Cake leapt into it. She was no bigger than the end of a Q-tip in my palm, but I could still feel her microscopic licks. Her hair was tied with tiny bows.
“Queenie? Queenie! Get back here, you disobedient thing!”
Just seeing Rhoda’s bouncing pigtails made the burns on my stomach flare.
“You,” Rhoda said, marching up to me, but stopping right beside the general. “You give that dog back this instant.”
I cupped my other hand around Pan-Cake. If I was going to die alone, I at least wanted company. If I had to, I’d hide Pan-Cake in my mouth so the ants wouldn’t get her.
A man came sprinting out of the building. “Rhoda! There you are, darling. Come back inside. The monsters will be here any moment.”
One of them is already here, I thought, glaring at Rhoda.
“Captain Penmark,” the general said. “This concerns you. These children are seeking asylum.”
“Well, they can’t come in!” Rhoda said, almost delighted. “Like you said, General, they’re covered in ant juice. It would lead them right to us.”
“No!” I said uncertainly. “They’re not. That’s just me.”
Rhoda scowled at Mr. Penmark, who scratched the back of his neck. He glanced back toward the open doors. “Either way, I’m not sure we have the room.”
The NO COLOREDS sign was still hung in the roller rink’s window.
“What do you mean?” I said. “You have plenty of space! Look, Rhoda. You can have Pan—I mean, Queenie—back. Just take these kids inside!”
I held my hand open, but Pan-Cake remained curled up in my palm, quivering at the sight of Rhoda.
Rhoda folded her arms in disgust. “I don’t want her anymore. She’s covered in ant juice. They’re all covered in ant juice. You can keep the dog and the Indians. I’ll take the roller rink.”
Mr. Penmark shrugged his shoulders. “It’s us or them, General.”
I made a fist the size of a battering ram and showed it to Mr. Penmark. “I’ll break your building’s wall down and stick these kids in there myself.”
“If you come anywhere near this building, then we’ll be forced to shoot,” General Spillane said, then looked at the kids. “And you wouldn’t want a bullet to catch one of your little friends here.”
If it weren’t for the guns trained on the kids, I would have picked up Rhoda, rubbed her all over my body, and said, There! Now you’re no better than any of us.
But Rhoda grinned at my helplessness, flipped a white braid over her shoulder, and her clicking heels disappeared inside the rink. Mr. Penmark didn’t meet my eye as he joined his daughter.
“Nothing I can do,” the general said, sounding almost regretful. “It’s private property. And I can’t put these people in jeopardy by letting these kids track ant pheromones inside.”
I looked down at the five kids, shivering in the open street. And here I thought I could offer protection to all of the Navajo people. It was just like Eugene had said. I promised one thing, and now I was delivering something much different.
Lear came striding out of the roller rink. He passed right by the general and stood before me.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
The general clicked his tongue. “Boy, that girl’s got you wrapped around her little pinkie, doesn’t she?”
Lear faced his uncle. “You can’t stop me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, son. I don’t want to command my soldiers to take my own nephew into custody, but if you’re going to try and get yourself killed, you’ll be in handcuffs faster than this girlfriend of yours can finish a ham sandwich.”
I felt Lear’s hand on my calf. “Phoebe will stop you.”
The general laughed and shook his head. “That true, giantess?”
I looked from Lear to the general to the soldiers and their guns on the barricade to the children behind me. Lucky for me I was saved from answering that question.
“Lear?”
A frail woman stood in the barricade’s entrance. Her hair was white as swan feathers, and she clasped her wrist.
Lear went to her and took her thin hands in his. “I have to do this, Mom. I knew Dad wasn’t a monster, but I didn’t say anything before Uncle Spillane killed him. I’ve regretted it every day since.” He looked up at me. “Phoebe isn’t a monster either. She’s good. And if they’re going to make her and these kids stay outside, then I’m going to stay out here too.”
Mrs. Finley touched her son’s face and turned it toward hers, trying to understand what he was thinking.
General Spillane placed his hand on Lear’s shoulder. “Come on inside, son, before you do something well and truly stupid.”
In one fluid motion Lear grabbed the gun from his uncle’s holster and tremblingly pointed it at the general’s head while he backed up and stood between my legs. Mrs. Finley gasped.
The general held out a hand. “T
hink about what you’re doing, Lear. This isn’t like you.”
“What isn’t?” Lear said, unable to keep the gun or his voice from wavering. “Standing up for innocent people you’d sooner kill than listen to?”
“I suspect you think you’re being heroic,” the general said, nodding to the gun. “But you don’t understand that saving people requires sacrifice. How do you think I got where I am today?”
“You’re right,” Lear said. He set the gun on the ground. “I’m not like you.”
The general took a step toward the gun but stopped when Mrs. Finley touched his arm. Everyone stared at one another in silence, waiting for someone to say something.
“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked the general.
“I’d seek out something made of metal,” he said, and he started to lead Mrs. Finley inside. “Ants can’t chew through it. Lock it up, boys!”
Lear and his mother watched each other until the soldiers pulled the giant doors shut, leaving him, me, Pan-Cake, and five little kids outside. A couple of the kids started to sniffle around my ankles, realizing we were being locked outside with the monsters.
Up in the sky, Daddy was grinning like a loon.
• • •
“Some of these houses have to have bomb shelters,” Lear said as we walked past the Levitt ranches with the five kids. “That should keep the ants out.”
Neither of us commented on the fact that I wouldn’t be able to fit. I’d be left out here when the sea of mandibles swept in.
Lear suddenly stopped walking, turned to the kids, and tapped his chin. “I just realized,” he said in a surprisingly chipper voice, “I don’t know any of your names.”
“Duane,” the boy who wanted to see me fight the ants said.
“Manuelito,” said another.
“Ruth,” said one of the little girls.
“I’m Maria,” the girl I knew said, and pointed to the last boy, who’d done the most crying. “That’s Connor.”
“Nice to meet you all,” Lear said. “I’m Lear, and I think you guys know Phoebe. This is her dog, Pan-Cake.” He stretched his arms out. “Phoebe has to use a really, really long leash to take her on walks.”
Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower Page 20