Micro

The grub shook its head, yanking strings of koa bug meat in its mandibles, and it sucked the flesh down like spaghetti. The koa bug was breathing, too.

Karen resisted an impulse to stab the larva. She wanted to kill the horrible thing, but she pulled back. The wasp grub was a part of nature. This was no more evil than a lion cub eating meat provided by a lioness. Wasps were the lions of the insect world. They did good things, they kept populations of plant-eating insects in check, just the way lions kept an ecosystem healthy. Even so, Karen did not like the idea of a wasp eating Rick.

She crawled out of the cell, and made her way into the next tunnel. She shouted into the breathing hole, then cut it open and went into the cell. Here she found a mature grub polishing off its last caterpillar, having eaten everything else.

“Rick!” she shouted. The soil deadened her voice. He could be anywhere around here, above, below, off to the side, hidden inside a cell.

Her headset crackled. “What’s happening?” Danny.

“I can’t find Rick. This place is a maze.”

She broke into another cell. It contained a cocoon spun of silk. An unborn wasp, visible through the silk, curled up tight, soon to break out of the cocoon as an adult. As her light played over the cocoon, the wasp shivered. She got out of there, and jammed rocks back into the door. That was the last thing she needed: a newborn wasp wandering around in here, armed with a stinger, no doubt.

“Rick! It’s me, Karen!” she shouted. She held her breath and listened.

No sound reached her ears except the chewing of the grubs and the beating of her very frightened human heart.

Rick Hutter lay inside a cell in total darkness, unable to move or speak. The sting had paralyzed him, but he possessed all his senses. He could feel lumps in the dirt floor pressing into his back and legs. He could smell rotting insect flesh. He could not see the grub that lived in the chamber, but he could hear it perfectly. It was eating something, making crunching, sucking noises. His breathing went on normally. He could blink his eyes when he wanted to-he could do that much by his own will. He tried to move one finger, and wasn’t sure if the finger was moving or not, he couldn’t tell.

Help. Somebody help me.

It was just a thought.

He realized that the wasp venom had paralyzed only part of his nervous system, the sympathetic nerves, the nerves that are controlled by conscious will. His autonomous nervous system, the unconscious part, continued to function normally. His heart was beating, he was breathing fine, all systems go. But he couldn’t will his body to do anything. His body was like an engine stuck in idle; he couldn’t seem to find the controls or press the accelerator. Something hurt, and for a little while he didn’t know what it was, until a warmth spread underneath him as his bladder emptied automatically. He welcomed the relief.

The venom was a wasp’s version of refrigeration. It kept the prey alive and fresh until it was eaten.

The crunching and slurping activity continued near his feet. The grub seemed to be nearly finished with its meal, because he could hear a rattling sound of broken pieces of exoskeleton being shoved around. The grub was nosing at the scraps of its meal. He could hear crackling noises, scraping sounds. So the grub had jaws. He dreaded the first touch of those jaws. He couldn’t stop wondering which part of him the grub would eat first. Would it start by chewing on his face? Or would it bite off his genitals first, or burrow into his abdominal cavity?

Despite the horror of his situation, Rick Hutter felt strangely bored. Paralyzed in the dark, he had nothing to do except imagine his approaching death. He decided he’d better focus his mind on the things that had made him happy during his life. This might be his last chance for memories. He recalled wading into the surf at Belmar, on the Jersey Shore, where his family had spent a week at a motel each summer-what they could afford. His father had driven a delivery truck for a convenience store chain. He remembered standing on the driver’s seat of his father’s truck when he was five years old and telling everybody he was going to be a truck driver just like his dad. He saw himself opening the acceptance letter from Stanford and reading it with complete disbelief…a full scholarship at Stanford. Then graduate school at Harvard, again on financial support. He saw himself in Costa Rica, interviewing an old lady, a curandera, as she brewed a healing tea from the leaves of the Himatanthus tree.