“If it can frighten jaguars and panic a herd of buffalo, then would we have the firepower?”
“Think it might be something that we’ve never encountered back home in Deathlands?”
“Possibly, I suppose.” Her face had grown pale, her emerald eyes standing out like blazing jewels. “You mean ghosts or zombies or something like that?”
“I don’t know, lover. That’s what’s so bastard difficult. If we knew, we could mebbe fight it. Remember what Trader used to say?”
“About what? Trader had a saying for every event known to man, didn’t he?”
“Faced with a real threat, he used to ask what steps we should take.”
“And?”
“And he’d answer his own question.”
Krysty smiled at him. “Come on, lover. I’ll bite. What steps should you take when faced with a real danger?”
“Fucking long ones.”
THE PATH HAD DIPPED into a narrow valley, with a small stream running along its bottom, overgrown with clumps of pallid Spanish moss.
They had agreed that they’d continue east for another thirty minutes, then review the situation again. That half hour was almost up.
“Trees are thicker,” Krysty observed. “Getting dense, like mangroves.”
“And ground cover’s longer. These tiny flowered bushes. Flowers like wax models. They’re like miniature versions of the good old daisies back home.”
“A little.” She stooped and picked some, staying crouched as she smelled at them. “Delicious. Like cinnamon cookies, fresh baked.”
Krysty held them up toward Ryan, for him to savor their smell, then cried out sharply.
“I’ve been stung. Gaia!”
It was such an everyday event in the forest, where every kind of flying insect and tick was hostile, that Ryan took no notice of Krysty’s cry, taking the flowers from her and raising them to his nose, sniffing in the delicious scent.
“Lovely,” he said.
But he realized suddenly that the woman was in some serious distress, hopping around on one foot, tugging her pant leg out of the top of the high Western boot, slapping at her leg. “Little bastard!”
“Wasp?”
“Don’t think so. I’ve Gaia! Another one’s bitten me, Ryan.”
He looked down in the grass, trying to see what it could’ve been, when he felt an electrifying stab of pain just above the top of his own combat boot, like a bad bee sting, with more burning, more acid.
“Fireblast!”
“Got you, too?”
“Yeah.” Then he saw what it was, glimpsing pinpoints of fiery light among the lush blades of grass, flickering movement by his feet.
“It’s ants!” Krysty exclaimed, seeing the insects at the same moment.
Both of them felt more bites and moved quickly away, beating at their legs.
“Keep out of the way. Must be a nest,” Ryan said. “I’ll just take a look over the crest of the hill. See if I can spot what’s seated everything out of the area.”
He made no connection between the unseen horror and the dozen or so bright red ants that were bustling through the grass, seeming to home in on Krysty and himself.
Not until he ran to the top of the ridge and looked over.
Then he knew.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was one of the most amazing sights that Ryan had ever seen in his life. He stood on top of the shallow hillside, looking down the other side, where the trees had thinned out even more, leaving what should have been a swath of fresh green grass.
Instead, there was a carpet of shifting, whispering crimson, stretching back down the other side of the slope for more than a quarter mile.
As Ryan stared at it, he felt two more bites. One of them was near the top of his thigh, and he winced at the pain, realizing that the first scouts of the aggressive tidal army of ants were already surrounding him, infiltrating his clothes, seeking bare flesh to attack.
The numbers of insects ahead of him was incalculable.
Millions.
Billions.
The figures didn’t matter. Not when you were faced with an unstoppable army of voracious killers.
Ryan glanced down at the ground seeing that there were forty or fifty of the ants darting over his boots, working their way up the legs of his pants.
Cursing under his breath, he knocked most of them off, running quickly back to join Krysty, who was crouched fifty yards away, dividing her attention between the waving grass around her and the cluster of small red lumps on her right leg, all of them just below the knee.