Micro

Suddenly she came to a falloff. The tunnel turned straight downward here, plunging into a vertical shaft. Claustrophobia almost choked her as she looked down it. It was a dark hole that seemed to go down into nothingness, with no apparent bottom. Rick is down there, just my luck, she thought. Well, he saved my life. It’s a debt I have to pay. And I don’t even like the guy.

She twisted her body, struggling against the tight walls of the tunnel, and sat herself at the lip of the shaft, letting her feet dangle. She lowered herself into the hole and began descending the shaft, pressing her hands and knees against its walls to provide a friction grip. She definitely did not want to fall. If she got wedged in the shaft, she might not be able to get out. The thought of being trapped in a vertical shaft while a giant wasp descended upon her…no. Don’t think about it.

Out in the open air, Danny Minot tore open the pack and searched it for food. He had to keep his strength up. Not that it mattered, he was dead anyway. He took off his radio headset and placed it next to him. And began inspecting his arm. It was so horrible.

The radio was talking at him. He picked it up. “What?”

“See anything?”

“No, no.”

“Listen Danny. Keep a lookout. If you see the wasp, tell me so I can get out. It’s in your interest.”

“I will, I will.” He fastened the radio on his head and propped himself up in the shade with his back against a rock, facing northwest, where the wasp had gone.

Karen reached the bottom of the chimney. It widened slightly, then made a sharp horizontal bend. She crawled around this bend, and the tunnel opened into a chamber. She flashed her headlamp around the chamber. Many tunnels-about two dozen of them-radiated from the chamber in a starburst pattern. Each tunnel ran into darkness.

“Rick?”

He was in one of those tunnels. Probably dead.

She crawled into a tunnel. After a short distance it ended at a wall. The wall had been built of rubble crammed loosely into place, plugging the tunnel-grains of sand and gravel glued with saliva, with spaces and gaps between them. She shone her headlamp into a gap in the rubble, trying to see what lay beyond.

She realized the gaps in the rubble were breathing holes. Because something alive was in there, past the rubble. The rubble door was a kind of stopper or plug with holes in it. Crunching, slurping sounds filtered out through the holes, along with a clicking noise. A rotting smell wafted from the holes, too. Something hungry lived in a room beyond the rubble, something that ate continually.

“Rick!” she called. “Are you there?”

The clicking stopped for a moment, then resumed. There was no other response.

She put her eye up to a gap and pointed her light in. It fell over a glistening surface the color of antique ivory. The surface was creased into segments. The segments were moving past the gap, one by one; this went on for a while, like a subway car moving past an opening. She could hear breathing, but it wasn’t human. What frightened her was the size of the thing in there. It seemed as big as a walrus.

There were many more tunnels to investigate. She crawled back into the main chamber and headed into the next tunnel, and tried to see through the blockage of stone and dried mud that clogged it. “Rick?” she shouted. “Can you hear me?”

Danny Minot’s voice came over her headset, faint and crackly, because she was so far underground. “What’s happening?” he said.

“I reached a large chamber. The chamber breaks into at least twenty tunnels going off in all directions. Each tunnel leads to a cell. There’s a larva in each cell, I think-”

She whacked at a rubble-door with her machete, and began chopping through mud glue. “Rick!” she shouted. “Are you in there?” Maybe he can hear me but he can’t talk. Or maybe he’s dead. Maybe I need to get out of here. Just give this a try. She hacked out the wall, enlarging the opening until she could get her body through it, and she crawled into the cell.

The cell held a wasp grub larger than she was, an obese blob that hissed, breathing heavily, with a blind, eyeless head. Its mouth was bracketed by twin black cutting fangs. The mother wasp had provisioned the cell with food for her infant. There were two caterpillars, a koa bug, and a miserable-looking spider. At that moment, the wasp grub was feeding on the koa bug, an insect with a shiny green carapace. The room was strewn with broken pieces of insect armor, stripped of flesh. There were also three whole heads of insects, uneaten and reeking of decay.

Karen edged her way into the cell, keeping away from the grub’s wicked-looking mouthparts. It was busy rooting into the koa bug.

She listened. She heard whispers of air moving through the holes in the exoskeletons of the food items. Good. This meant the food was paralyzed but was still alive. So Rick could be alive. As for the paralyzed spider, its abdomen rose and fell as it breathed, but otherwise it remained deathly still, its eight eyes glazed over.