Chapter 63: ANTS!

Chapter 63: ANTS!

And we're back. That was "Who's Got The Action," by the incomparable Dean Martin. It's just about time we got you some news. NCR officials at Camp McCarran were relieved when technical difficulties with its monorail line to the New Vegas Strip proved easy to fix. One anonymous official told us a serious mechanical failure would have been a disaster because of the age of the train and the scarcity of the replacement parts. This segment of the program has been brought to you by the Vikki and Vance Casino: Be our partners in crime. Got a request coming up for "Ain't Misbehavin'," by Fats Waller. Up next, only on Radio New Vegas.

"How're we doing, Boone?" I said into my Pip Boy. Since Boone was wearing his helmet, I'd be able to use my Pip Boy to keep in contact with him and Veronica, so long as I tuned my Pip Boy's radio to the right frequency. Might seem like a bit on the overkill side , but I thought it was a good idea to maintain communication if we were going to divide our strength like this.

"Veronica and I are in position," Boone's voice crackled over the speaker. I turned to Cass.

"You ready?" I asked Cass from over my shoulder. She pulled back the charging handle on her AA-12 with an audible click.

"I was ready t'go five minutes ago, man," Cass smirked.

"Alright, we're going in. Meet you on the inside." I deselected the transmit button on my Pip Boy, and flicked on the light at the business end of my MP5. I kept the light trained on the door as I opened it slowly.

"Still don't see what th' big deal is," Cass spoke up as the two of us entered the darkened room. As soon as Cass shut the door behind her, the darkness grew; it would have been completely dark if not for the light on the end of my gun, and the light spilling off my Pip Boy. "I mean, they're just giant ants."

"They're giant ants that explode. Besides, we go in at both ends and meet in the middle, we can cover more ground and get out quicker." I scanned the room with the light... the interior of this concrete bunker looked almost like an office, with some metal desks and a few filing cabinets. As I looked closer, there were definitely signs of fighting: bullet holes, a few blood stains on the walls and floor, and a doorway at one end of the room was blackened and scarred.

What I didn't see, however, were any giant ants.

"Fuck me, s'dark in here, innit?" Cass grumbled from behind me.

"Well that's why we're here, to get the power back on," I said aiming my flashlight at a spot near the door that caught my eye. It wasn't immediately apparent, but I was pretty sure that I was looking at a patch of dried blood - and drag marks left on the floor from something heavy being carted away.

"I thought we were... " Cass trailed off. I started to say something, but she shushed me. "Y'hear that?"

I listened carefully... and very faintly, I heard a distinct skittering sound of chitin legs moving, somewhere in the distance. I adjusted my grip on the MP5, and headed through the doorway towards the sound.

"Hey, Shea? I uh... gotta question fer ya," Cass said.

"Make it quick, I don't wanna get ambushed by these things," I replied. I looked down and saw a pair of boots, and some legs... that weren't attached to a torso. Based on the dried blood that I saw when I shone the flashlight, and the drag-marks heading deeper into the facility, I'd put caps on one of the ants biting the unlucky Boomer in half, and carrying him away to fuck all knows where. I guess if it left the legs, it wasn't all that hungry. Let's hope it's still full.

The skittering sound in the distance seemed to be getting closer.

"Can Boone'n Veronica hear us through yer Pip Boy?" Cass asked. We turned a corner, and exited onto a catwalk suspended from the ceiling. Down below I could make out the faint shapes of generators, and above us I could see lights that weren't turned on.

"Not unless I hit the button to transmit. Why?" As soon as I asked, I knew the reason and regretted telling her.

"Well... jus' wonderin' if there was a reason y'wanted me t'follow y'down here, is all... Wantin' t'spend more time with th' girl with th' nice backside, were ya?" Immediately, I came to a halt, and turned around to face her. Cass seemed altogether taken aback... or maybe it was a trick of the light from my Pip Boy illuminating everything around me with a green ambient glow, mixing with the white column from my flashlight.

"Are we really going to do this now?" I hissed through my teeth. "I think we have slightly bigger issues to worry about at the moment." I turned around hoping there would be something to shoot. Just my luck, there wasn't anything. Yet. "You already had the shotgun, and Boone and I both have SMG's. This way, both teams have one automatic weapon, and one shotgun. Simple as that. No other reason." I paused. "We'll talk about... everything else once you square shit with Veronica."

The skittering noise got even louder.Visit no(v)eLb(i)n.com for the best novel reading experience

"Yeah, well... might jus' end soon'r rather'n later..." Cass sighed. "I think we're gettin' on each others nerves more'n is healthy..."

"Yeah, I saw that spat between the two of you earlier..." A couple of spats, actually. I aimed my flashlight down the catwalk... I still couldn't see much, but I could hear the chittering of ants all around me, and it was making me desperately paranoid.

"That's been goin' on like that, th' last couple've days."

"I guess the honeymoon is over, huh?" I asked. Cass chuckled once under her breath. "That's what you were going for though, right? Didn't you say earlier about how things would just work themselves out when V realized you were a terrible girlfriend?"

"Somethin' like that, but... fuck, man... I don't want her t' hate me when everythin' s'all said'n done, y'know?"

"That's always a risk..." I said more to myself than Cass. "Hold up a sec. I think I see something..." I came to a stop and held out my arm to keep Cass from plowing into the back of me.

"Whoa..." Cass said from behind me. The catwalk came to an abrupt end, with jagged pieces of metal hanging off the end and giving the distinct impression it had been melted. About five or six feet away, I saw where the catwalk should have continued... but in between? Nothing but a very long fall. This was probably what Raquel meant when she said they explode...

"No going that way I guess..." I said. Cass leaned over the edge next to me, looking down... and then hawked up a loogie, spitting down into the darkness.

"Quit screwin' around," I rolled my eyes and grabbed her shoulder, trying to edge her away from the drop. I turned around to head back, and the light from the flashlight illuminated a six-legged mass of brown and red chitin, staring at me with glossy black eyes, and chittering with open pincers.

I'm sure I shouted some kind of expletive, though I don't rightly remember what; as soon as I saw the giant ant standing less than three feet away from me, I started acting on instinct. I remember the muzzle flashes, and watching the ant get torn to shreds. Seems Cass had the same idea, and my ears rang from the massive boom of Cass' equally massive shotgun. The two of us stopped firing as soon as the ant collapsed, its head and abdomen split open to reveal a mass of pulpy yellow meat.

"I say again, we've made contact," I heard Boone's voice over my Pip Boy's speaker as soon as my ears stopped ringing. "So far, they don't explode. Bullets are fine." I could hear various muffled pops and bangs continue off in the distance as soon as Boone finished talking.

"Yeah... got that," I said, hitting the transmit button. "I think we may have woken this place up."

"Understood. See you on the inside." The Pip Boy clicked... and then I kept hearing clicking. I stepped over the ant carcass, and shone my light on the far wall - and on the ceiling. Guards may not look up, but I do. There was a trail of ants walking on the ceiling directly above us and up the wall in a line, climbing up from the depths.

"Son of a bitch!" I yelled, slipping into VATS. It didn't take much to dislodge them from the ceiling. A few short bursts of fire from my MP5, and the three ants clinging to the ceiling lost their grip and fell down into the darkness below. One of them hit the railing on the way down, shaking the whole thing.

"C'mon, we gotta move!" I said, trying to simultaneously use the light to illuminate a path, and shoot the incoming ants. Ahead of us, against one of the walls, was a staircase leading down. With any luck, there wouldn't be any more catwalks, and we could plant our feet on solid ground.

"Keep yer light up, man! Can't see a damn thing!" Cass shouted from behind me; every time I'd shine my light on an ant scaling the wall, there'd be an explosion of noise and the giant ant would split in half in a shower of yellow gore and shattered chitin.

"C'mon, Cass..." I reached out and held Cass' face up; her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open limply. "You can't die. Don't you fuckin' die on me." What happened next... I don't know if it really happened, or if my imagination was just getting the better of me again. But Cass cracked open her eyes slightly.

"Not a chance..." she muttered, a smile creeping into the edge of her lips... then she closed her eyes again and her head hung limp.

"Go," I said to Veronica, stepping back. "Get her out of here." Make sure she survives, I didn't need to say. Veronica gave a nod, and it looked like she was about to start climbing out of the tunnels... but then she grabbed the ammo bandolier of shotgun shells draped around Cass' chest, pulled it off, and tossed it my way. I caught it midair almost without thinking.

"Here," Veronica said, wrapping the rope around her wrist and starting to climb, Cass practically draped over her shoulder. "You're gonna need ammo."

As Veronica carried the unconscious Cass back to the surface, I turned back to the tunnel... and that's about when I realized where I was. And what I needed to do. I switched my eyes back to nightvision, grabbed my discarded MP5 with one hand, and Cass' discarded AA-12 with the other.

"Alright, you sons of bitches..." I said aloud, walking deeper into the caves. "Let's dance."

"Fucking hell, it's hot down here..."

I'd been making my way through the tunnels as cautiously as I could. I was scanning the area, keeping my eyes on nightvision; I'd tried looking around with thermal for a bit, but it was so hot down here that everything just looked washed out, and I couldn't see anything. So, for the moment, everything was bathed in green.

But I could hear quite a lot. It sounded like there were ants all around - chittering and skittering and scraping against the rock and soil - but I hadn't seen any ants since the one that tried to drag off Cass. Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, I thought that I'd seen some movement, but... if the ants were around, they weren't coming after me.

"Just get it over with already..." I muttered, adjusting my grip on Cass' AA-12. I was starting to get nervous. I had to find a decent place to drop the sonic device strapped to my back, to make sure it would get all the ants in these tunnels, but... if it went down this far, how much deeper did it go?

That's about when I noticed the tunnels had changed slightly. Before, the tunnels looked like they'd been carved out of the rock and dirt by hundreds of pincers, feelers, and chitinous legs. But the deeper I went, the more the tunnels looked... I don't want to say manufactured, because that seems like the wrong word. Grown, maybe? Regurgitated? Whatever the tunnels were made of now, it wasn't carved out of rock, that much I was sure of.

It certainly didn't feel like rock under my feet. It felt organic. Almost... squishy.

I didn't get all that long to think about it, however, because at that moment I rounded a corner and was met with about a dozen sets of unblinking multi-faceted eyes connected to just as many giant ants.

Suddenly, everything about my sojourn down here made sense: I hadn't seen any ants, because they were all gathering together in a single location to strike me at once. It made a certain amount of sense, really: I remembered once that I'd seen a colony of giant ants all dogpile onto a single deathclaw to bring it down through sheer strength of numbers.

It didn't really register in my head until much, much later that I must have rated just as dangerous as a deathclaw, as far as these ants were concerned.

Strangely enough, when I rounded the corner they didn't immediately attack me. At least, it didn't feel immediate. It felt like I was staring at them for a long, long time. I think we must have caught each other off guard - either that, or my perception of time was somehow skewed and what was, in fact, only a few seconds felt like several hours. It was all very surreal.

"Fellas..." I said aloud.

My entire world erupted. Dozens of mandibles and feelers clicked and hissed in a cacophony of noise, and the mass of chitinuous bodies all moved as one, like a tidal wave of limbs and eyes. And despite the oncoming wall of death screeching its way right for my face... none of them in that first wave even got close.

I held down the trigger on the AA-12, and the explosion from the muzzle was deafening. Flash after massive flash illuminated the chamber and threatened to blind me (so much that I had to switch off my nightvision), and the noise was just exaggerated by the underground chamber until it felt like thunderclaps in my ears. Limbs and chunks of insect flew backwards... and the strange thing was, there was barely any recoil. If I tried to do this with any other shotgun, the kickback would've had the gun pointing at the ceiling after two shots.

By the time the drum magazine had been emptied, there was a pile of smoking insect parts and shredded guts scattered out in a great fan directly in front of me, illuminated only by the glow of my Pip Boy. Beyond the range of the light, I saw more movement... more of the damn insects on their way to try and claw my face off. I didn't bother to reload the drum (since I only had the one magazine anyway), so I dropped the shotgun and pulled out the MP5.

I didn't even really need to turn the light on. The muzzle flashes from the submachine gun barking out round after round into the advancing ants lit up the cavern well enough for me to see where to aim next. It wasn't the sound of thunder any more... it was more like a jackhammer, chipping away at a chunk of concrete. Fitting, given that the strobe light flashing in front of my eyes revealed chunks of chitin flying in every direction, and more following with every burst of gunfire.

By the time my MP5 ran dry, there was only one ant left still advancing on me. It crawled over the corpses of the ants that had tried to rush me, seemingly unaware of the danger. It was coming at me so fast, I didn't have time to reload. So I did the only thing I could think of: I smashed the stock of the smg against the ants head as hard as I could to give me some time. The ant seemed stunned, so I went in for the kill. I dropped the MP5, pulled the combat knife off the sheath against my boot, and jammed it down as hard as I could into the center of its skull. The ant hissed and gurgled, struggling under the knife... and then the chitinous body fell limp, joining the other corpses and chunks of ants that had tried to kill me.

"So..." I said, pulling out the knife and standing up. I was breathing heavily, but trying to steady it. "Anyone else want a go? C'mon, I got enough for all of you fucks..."

A low, deep, terrifying rumble echoed through the chamber.

Okay, perhaps asking out loud was a mistake.

From out of the darkness, a massive armored leg stepped into view. This wasn't a worker ant or a soldier ant... whatever this was, it was so very much bigger. A massive set of mandibles materialized in the air above me as soon as the light hit it; the jaws were bigger than my torso, and must have been at least 10 feet off the ground. It's legs were as thick as my own, and with each ponderous step closer, the whole cavern seemed to shake slightly.

This is not a good place to be. I don't have any ammo for the shotgun; I don't have any ammo for the MP5. I really doubt any of the three pistols on my person would even so much as chip that impossibly thick chitin, and the knife was...

WAIT.

What am I doing? The sonic device! That's the whole reason I'm down here! And if this is where the queen ant was living, then fuck it! Good a place as any!

I had to work quickly. The giant queen ant was advancing slowly, but it was still way too close for comfort. I pulled the sonic device (which just looked like a big box with a speaker on the side) off my back and set it on the ground... after backing up slightly... I opened it up, hoping that I'd be able to make sense of it under duress. Okay, you can do this. Ignore the giant jaws and the sound of clicking mandibles directly overhead... Turn the circular dial on the right, flip the two switches on the left, and hit the red button in the center.

I stepped away as soon as I hit the red button, and... I'll be honest, seeing that giant ant head with the massive mandibles so close to me made my bowels clench uncomfortably. It hissed and growled, with a thick trail of drool dripping down. Honestly, I thought I was done for. It was close enough that I wouldn't be able to run...

But then it paused. It cocked its head slightly, and its feelers went mad, twitching all over the place. The giant queen ant reared back and roared... and it was then that I almost heard a noise that wasn't quite a noise. At first I thought it was like static, but really it's like the sound you hear when there is no noise, but you can still hear something.

The queen started thrashing and howling in pain for a few seconds. There was one last gasp, and then - THUD. It collapsed in a giant mass, shaking the whole cavern with its bulk. When it stopped stirring, I heard echoes from other parts of the cavern: ants howling in pain, snarling and spitting at the sound only they could hear.

At first, I didn't really know what to think. I was still just stunned that it actually worked. Gingerly, I stepped over the myriad of ant corpses, pools of ichor, and shattered chitin, trying to get back to my discarded weapons. I tried to ignore the most massive of corpses lying there next to me... even on its side it was still taller than me, to say nothing of how long it was. It's giant swollen abdomen it had was undoubtedly the most disgusting thing I had ever -

I didn't get a chance to finish that thought. There was a sudden rumble from that massive swollen abdomen I was transfixed by, and before I knew what was happening... it exploded. It was like I was hit by a tidal wave, but... stickier. A veritable and literal flood of goo spread in all directions, hitting me like a sledgehammer to the face. For the second time this hour, I was knocked on my ass. For a few seconds, I couldn't breathe, hear, see, or feel anything except this giant mass of putrid disgusting gelatinous fluid threatening to drown me.

I sat up and tried to wipe away the disgusting fluid away from my eyes, my mouth... but it was a futile attempt, as it was everywhere. The more I tried to use my hands to wipe it away, the worse it seemed to get. I was covered in the crap... and for all I knew, that's exactly what it was. I mean, it did just come out of an ant's backside... augh, fuck. Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it.

"Phut, phut!" I spat at the ground, trying to breathe without getting any of it in my - oh fuck, it got in my mouth! Damnit!

"I... augh... I knew that was too easy..."