SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Nope.”

“They’re like locusts,” Shorty said.

“Actually, they’re nothing like locusts,” Todd said. “Locusts swoop in and eat everything. Including stuff that’s not food, like strips of dried paint off the walls. Ants are very smart and discriminant. They’ll even pick out the embryos from corn kernels before they store them.”

Shorty looked confused.

“So they don’t germinate.”

“What do you mean…‘store them’?”

“I’ll bet that corn is still out there.” Todd waved his hand at the empty field. “But the ants have taken it into underground chambers. It’s still there, just hidden away where we can’t see it.”

“Why do you think they need that much corn?”

Todd had no answer.

“Here’s another question for you.”

“Sure.”

“What do you think of Vauna?”

“Vauna?”

“I mean,” Shorty said with a giggle. “She’s an ant-loving desert scientist. And you’re a desert-loving ant scientist. That makes you…an eremophilous myrmecologist and her…a myrmecophilous eremologist.” She pushed back in her seat, letting her big words hang in the air. “What do you think?”

Todd didn’t have an answer to that question, either.

Several hundred miles to the north and west, the Aboriginal myrmecophilous eremologist was driving toward the sheep stations past Leigh Creek and Marree.

I like him fine, I guess, she thought to herself.

She screeched her ute to a stop in the red earth.

A skull, bleached white in the sun, lay in the strip of dirt between road and fence. It wasn’t human, thank goodness. It was an herbivore, with long, narrow face and two arching horns.

Another billy goat skull.

She had plenty of these. This one was already damaged, the cheek bone broken, the nasal bone smashed, the turbinates missing. The skull wasn’t worth saving, but the horns were still nice. They showed indentations where this goat had butted heads with another.

But I’m like Greta Garbo , she thought, shattering the skull against her ute’s roo bars, and extracting the horns.

I just want to be alone.

She tossed the horns onto a tray mounted over the dashboard.

It was filled with specimens.

Jasper from the Flinders Ranges. Smokey quartz from Clarendon. A strange, shiny black rock from Karoonda. It might be part of a lunar meteorite, because it was heavy and magnetic, but the shape was wrong. One side was bumpy, but the other concave and smooth, like a bowl.

All these wonderful and mysterious things she had collected, walking the land.

Alone.

Suppose I want to spend a month in the bush, so blue-tongued lizards and I can stick out our tongues at each other. Is that wrong? Does that make me a bad person?

She drove on.

She passed another goat skull and later a wallaby skull, without stopping either time.

Where she was going, there would be a lot more to collect.

If the rumors were right.

She drove on, turning at the servos and smash repair shops scribbled on her map.

Finally, she arrived at the mystery spot.

It did not disappoint.

It was a wide field of red sand, with rounded hills in the background. Studding the earth were dozens of bones. If not hundreds. Skulls, ribs, vertebrae, scapulae, tibias.

Were they human?

She would need a reference book to distinguish a kangaroo femur from a human’s. But the skulls were clear enough.

Roo. Koala. Horse. Sheep. Goat. No humans among them. Whew.

As Vauna climbed out of the ute, she approached cautiously.

The bones were covered with ants.

Had they killed all these animals?

No, she thought. The bones were too dry. No blood. White from the sun, with dark spots where remnants of muscle and cartilage had been.

The skeletons were disarticulated, the bones jumbled up.

But why were they all in one place?

Sometimes masses of animals would drown in a flash flood, and their bodies wash together. But…that would usually be a herd, the bones all one species. These were mixed. Koalas hung in trees. Wallabies and sheep did not forage together. Why would they be together in death?

Nothing made sense.

Then, in the corner of her eye, she saw something.

She thought she saw one of the bones move.

Probably from the pressure of hundreds of ants boiling up from underneath.

No.

The ants had not only dragged the bones here, but were re-animating them, with muscles and sinews made of chains of ants.

They were like massed Egyptian slaves, moving an enormous block of stone.

They had found a new application for the principle of the lever.

A frenzy of ants was pulling on a femur, erecting it like a skyscraper. Each ant clamped its jaws like visegrips around the waist of the ant in front, right before the gaster.

But the string of ants pulled too hard. The femur went vertical, then fell in the opposite direction.

But they tried again.

And then they were lifting an entire spinal column.

A swirl of ants and bones rose out of the commotion. It was an entire skeleton, perhaps four feet tall. It looked like it had been assembled from several animals, as the two thigh bones were not the same length. The pelvis was upside down, but the entire thing was moving. There was no skull, as the brain was distributed all throughout the body, in the thousands and thousands of ants.

Vauna walked among them, cursing herself. She had packed carefully, remembering to bring everything except a camera. Todd and Shorty would not believe her without evidence.

Yes, this was the thrill of discovery, but tempered with the fear of losing credibility if she shared it.

Then she felt another kind of fear.

As this monstrosity of bone and ant turned toward her, she shuddered in panic and ran toward the ute.

Todd pushed another colored pin into the wall map of Australia.

Red was current ant outbreaks. Green was where ants had been, but had now left.

Adelaide was celebrating the departure of the ants. As quickly as the ant tsunami had arrived, streaming through garages and factories, it had gone. The ants had appeared en masse, without warning.

And now, just like that, they were gone.

But they were heading north. The red pushpins formed an inverted V, an arrow pointing up through the middle of Oz.

“So what’s up there?” Todd asked.

As he asked the question, the door opened and Vauna came in.

She was still flustered, agitated.

“How was your great scientific adventure?” Todd joked.

“Uh…” Vauna calmed herself. “It turned out to be…” This experience was just too crazy to share. “A big nothing in the middle of nothing.”

“Well, that must have been disappointing,” Todd said. “But it’s good to have you back!”

“Thanks,” Vauna said, turning her attention to the Australia map. She composed herself and said: “North and a little west of here, after a long drive, is Coober Pedy. That’s opal mines and junkyards. And then, after another long drive, is Alice. Right in the dead center of Australia.” She stabbed a finger at the map. “You Yanks have a military base up there called Pine Gap. You won’t be happy when it’s overrun by ants.”

People have their maps, marking highways and airports. But other creatures have their own maps, superimposed on ours. Dogs don’t care about streets, only where other dogs are. The ancient ancestors walk the songlines of the earth, pausing to reminisce at waterholes and hidden places of spiritual power.

And intertwined in them all were the tracks of the ants.

They ran in thick rivers, millions upon millions, through the houses of Woomera and the new shops at Tarcoola.