The Armorer was right. Already a few of the nearer insects were on hind legs, exploring the smooth bark of the mangrove with their feelers.
“You okay, Mildred?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, I’ll make it. The bite burns, like it injected acid. Probably did.”
“Thanks, ma’am,” Doc called from his perch. “Never thought I might, mayhap, end my days as live food for ants.”
Krysty had been peering above them, into the dark, leafy bows. The roots that twined beneath them all seemed to finally come together in a single main trunk. “That way,” she said. “Got to find a place they can’t come at us in numbers. Get up there and spread out.”
Ryan looked where she pointed and nodded his agreement. “Yeah. Everyone? Jak, go first.”
“Climbing on each other’s backs,” J.B. said. The place was so quiet now that he hardly needed to raise his voice for the others to hear.
The ants were forming a brazen pyramid, scrambling over one another’s bodies, gaining height.
Within a few seconds their leaders would be into the lower branches of the tree.
Jak was up and away, barely using his hands as he scampered into the upper branches. “Here! Fuckers can’t get other way.”
Ryan motioned for J.B. to go second, helping Mildred and Doc as he went. Krysty went next, leaving Ryan alone on the low, angled part of the bole of the tree. As he readied himself to move, Ryan saw the first of the questing ants appear, its feelers tasting the air. He drew the panga, waiting a moment until the whole of the creature’s body was in sight.
“So long,” he grunted, the broad metal blade slicing easily through the center of the ant’s swollen belly. A foul-stinking liquid squirted out, a few drops pattering on the skin of his wrist. Feeling it beginning to burn his flesh, Ryan quickly wiped it off with his sleeve.
Almost instantly a dozen more of the mutie insects came chittering over the side of the branch, scuttling toward him.
“Move, lover!” Krysty called from thirty feet above him.
“Yeah. Guess I’d better.”
“THIS IS what I believe is called a Texarkana standoff,” Doc said. “We can stop them getting at us, but I fear that they can make it confoundedly difficult for us to remove ourselves.”
Darkness was creeping over the land, drawing a cloak of night across the jungle. The drumming that Krysty had heard earlier had ceased. Clouds had come up and the setting sun, away behind them, was only visible as a crimson glow at the edge of the bowl of mountains.
“Could be the last hurrah for us,” Mildred said quietly. They kept their voices down once they discovered that any noise they made seemed to provoke the ants to ferocious activity.
As long as the friends watched the main trunk of the mangrove immediately below them, the mutie insects had no way of reaching them. It wasn’t hard to hold them off with the panga if they came crawling up.
It would be a little harder in the dark.
The traveling army of giant ants seemed content to wait.
The dying embers of the day shone over their orange-red bodies, making it seem that the very land was smoldering. After Ryan had killed a hundred or more, they’d suddenly ceased their efforts to climb the mangrove. Once or twice a lone soldier had attempted an attack, but its headless corpse had fallen to the earth.
J.B. had methodically checked their options, climbing to the soaring, swaying peak of the tree, to try to find out whether they might be able to scramble away into the nearby branches. But the closest was more than twenty feet away and was so slender that to jump would mean a fifty-foot fall into the carpet of ants.
He and Ryan had discussed the possibility of using some of their newfound supply of grens to try to dissipate the patient army of gigantic insects. Even a couple of burners might only kill a few thousand ants. Frags and implodes wouldn’t even scratch the surface of the limitless forces, which surrounded the tree as far as the eye could see in every direction.