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

“You’re religious, eh?”

“Yeah,” Todd said, “I like to think of myself as Christian but not crazy. Is that ok?”

“Oh, yeah, Todd,” she said. “When I was growing up, the only education we got was from a missionary.”

“Nice to know we did something right.”

“So my question is this…I thought you were supposed to be stewards of this land.”

Todd nodded. “Yeah, we are.”

“Then how do you reconcile that with preparing chemicals to kill millions and millions of God’s creations?”

“Yeah,” Todd said, slowly and pensively. “Good question. I once calculated how many ants I’ve killed. Twelve billion, more than one for every man, woman and child on the earth.”

“That can’t feel good.”

“No,” Todd said. “But you know what’s even worse? The torture. For science. I’ve chopped off legs and antennae, or else crossed the right and left antennae and glued them in place, to see what will happen. It really messes them up.” He exhaled deeply. “I’ve also pulled off their heads to see how long they’d keep biting and gnashing.”

“That’s pretty gruesome,” Vauna said. “As a summer intern in a micro lab, the first time I autoclaved a flask of bacteria—a hundred billion individuals—I felt pretty bad. Does it make you feel like you’re committing genocide against the ants?”

“Oooh,” Todd said. “That’s a powerful word.”

“Yeah, as a member of a race that’s been on the receiving end, I don’t use it lightly.”

“Nor I,” he said, “as a member of a race that’s doled it out.”

“So, as a Christian,” Vauna asked, “how do you feel about all the killing God commands in the Old Testament? How do you reconcile that with Jesus as a symbol of love?”

“Oooh, heavy questions.” Todd was silent for a few moments. “This is something I’ve thought about a lot.”

“Your conclusions?”

“I once heard a sermon about deciding what Bible character you wanted to be like,” Todd said. “And I chose Joshua, who travels to another country to do God’s work.”

“Really?” Vauna was shocked. “The guy who committed most of the atrocities?”

“No, no!” Todd protested. “Let me explain. People don’t like the idea of what happened in the Old Testament, because they don’t like the idea of sin. The bible isn’t like what happened in Rwanda…”

“Or here in Australia?”

“Right!” Todd exclaimed. “There’s no justification for that. But…In the Bible, it’s not about the color of your skin. It’s about the color of your soul. In the Bible, death works both ways. Cities of sinners are destroyed. But when the Israelites, God’s own chosen people, go off the rails, they’re destroyed, too, and God sends the Chaldeans to smite them. And God destroyed his own Son when He took on the sin of the world.”

“So…” Vauna asked, “are the ants sinners?”

“Well, yeah!” Todd thought for a moment. “They kill, they steal, they covet their neighbors’ homes and storehouses. When fire ants sweep in, they wipe out ninety-eight percent of the native ant species. That’s genocide.”

“Brutal.”

“Yeah, nature is brutal.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the sky.

“We are the Chaldeans,” Todd said. “We’re the scourge of God, weeding the garden, putting things right. We are at war.”

Vauna was silent.

She cuddled up against him, but he wondered if she really thought his words merely proved him insane.

The river of ants came.

The desert ants came, with bristles on the backs of their heads to keep sand off their necks. The imported turtle ants came, with their huge dish-shaped heads. The leaf cutter ants came, with tiny minim ants riding on their heads to ward off predators.

The ants came, in a river five miles long and a mile wide.

And Pine Gap was ready for them.

Todd had settled on the sharpshooter chemicals, having not received permission to unleash Attila the Hun. The U.S. military picked up canisters of these compounds from his lab in San Diego, then flew them across the ocean to Sydney, and then to Alice.

The black plastic traps were not available in sufficient numbers, so they used disposable Petri dishes, sent up from Adelaide and down from Darwin.

The toxins were mixed with honey and blackberry extract and dispensed into the dishes, which were hand-placed in the sand every few feet, by soldiers walking the outskirts of Pine Gap and Alice.

Lieutenant Osborne was worried that all this effort was like pouring a single cup of coffee into the ocean. Wouldn’t the poisons be too dilute?

No, Todd reassured her. A hundred parts per million should be enough.

He didn’t have to wait long to see if he was right.

The river of ants came to Pine Gap, and then suddenly it stopped when it reached the ring of bait traps.

The ants were like thirsty travelers who, having marched across the desert, paused to luxuriate at an oasis.

They rushed over the shallow lips of the Petri dishes and swarmed the sweets. And the poisons.

For several hours, the ants bunched up at the line of traps, with no desire to go further. They were enjoying themselves too much.

It was as if the honey and blackberry made an invisible force field.

Then all the food was all gone.

And the ants moved forward as a single super-organism, past the line of traps toward the second barrier, the water moat.

Todd, watching on video monitors, was completely disappointed.

Maybe they should have let him unleash Attila the Hun. Maybe they needed more time for the poisons to work their way to the queens. Maybe he had under-estimated the number of ants. Maybe by an order of magnitude. Maybe he needed ten or a hundred times more poison to get them all.

He turned away from the monitor, turned away from Vauna and Shorty. He couldn’t bear to see their disappointment in him.

The ants, having no emotions, did not revel in their victory over the bait traps, but simply moved on to the water moats.

These held them for a while.

The ants tried to cross the water, which was six feet across, in chains made of ants. Yes, many would sacrifice themselves, drowning, but other would walk across their dead bodies to the other side. But these were washed away in the water’s currents.

The ants also tried to cross using leaves and twigs as little boats. These, too, were washed away.

Walking the perimeter, Lieutenant Osborne was pretty happy about the success of the moat until she felt an itch on her neck. At first she thought it was just formication, the false sensation that an ant was crawling on you.

No, she realized. It was a real ant. Dropping from a tree branch spanning the moat.

“Sergeant Kelleam!” she shouted into her comm. “I ordered all the trees chopped down!”

“We did, ma’am!”

“What about this one I’m standing under?”

“Well, that one shades the commander’s office.”

“He can lose his tree or he can lose his base! I want flame throwers here right now!”

But before the torches arrived, streams of ants rushed the tree. Once some had discovered this avenue, they all knew. They swarmed the branches, crossing high above the water moat, and dropping down on the other side.

Next was the final line of defense, the moat filled with gasoline.

The ants approached this moat cautiously. In a coincidence of chemistry, some of the hydrocarbons in the gas smelled like the chemicals the ants used as alarm pheromones.

So the ants snapped their jaws and sprayed poisons at the moat, as if it were an enormous enemy ant.

Then they started bombarding it with clods of dirt. If they kept this up, they could cross it without having their feet ever touch the foul liquid.