Micro

Karen felt exposed. They were targets. In motion across a wasteland, without cover. A bird passed overhead, and she cringed and clutched her machete. But it wasn’t a mynah, it was a hawk circling over Tantalus, and the humans were too small to make a decent meal for a hawk-or so she hoped.

“Are you okay, Karen?” Rick asked.

“Stop worrying about me.”

“But-”

“I’m fine. Check on Danny. He looks bad.”

Danny had sat down on a stone and seemed unable to keep going. He was fondling his bad arm, adjusting the sling, and his face had gone white.

“You okay, man?”

“What’s the meaning of that question?”

“How’s your arm?”

“There’s nothing wrong!” But now Danny was staring at his arm. A muscle in his arm spasmed, tensing against the cloth, relaxing, tensing again. It looked involuntary. Danny seemed to have lost control of the muscles.

“Why is it doing that?” Rick asked, as the spasms moved in corrugated waves along Danny’s arm. The arm seemed to have a life of its own.

“It’s not doing anything,” Danny insisted.

“But Danny, it’s jerking-”

“No!” Danny shouted, pushing him away, and he picked up his arm and moved it out of Rick’s reach, cradling it with his good hand and turning his back to Rick as if he were guarding a football. Rick began to suspect that Danny had lost all motor control of his arm.

“Are you able to move your arm?”

“I just did.”

Suddenly there was a tearing, splitting sound. Danny started moaning, “No…no…” His shirt sleeve was finally coming apart. As the sleeve split, it revealed a horrible sight. The skin had become translucent, like oiled parchment. Beneath the skin, fat white ovoids rested, twitching slightly. They had a contented look.

“The wasp laid eggs,” Rick said. “It was a parasite.”

“No!” Danny screamed.

The eggs had hatched. Into larvae. Grubs. They’d been feeding on the tissues in his arm. Danny stared at his arm, holding it and moaning. The popping sounds in his arm-those were the eggs hatching…the grubs were digging…chewing through his arm…he whimpered, and began screaming. “They’ll hatch!”

Rick tried to calm him. “We’ll get you medical help. We’re nearly at Tantalus…”

“I’m dying!”

“They won’t kill you. They’re parasites. They want to keep you alive.”

“Why?”

“So they can keep feeding-”

“Oh, God, oh, God…”

Karen picked him up. “Come on. You gotta keep moving.”

They resumed walking, but Danny was slowing them down. He kept stumbling and sitting down. He couldn’t take his eyes off his arm, as if the grubs had hypnotized him.

Halfway across the ground they came to a round tube made of blobs of clay stuck together. The tube emerged from the ground, like a bent chimney.

Karen said, “I wish Erika was here. She might have been able to tell us what made it.”

They had to assume the mud chimney held something dangerous, probably some kind of insect. They gave the chimney a wide berth, ready to dash for cover if anything moved. As they passed it, the Great Boulder drew closer.

She was a mother. Like a butterfly, she drank only the nectar of flowers for her sustenance. Even so, she was a predator. She hunted for her babies; they lived on meat. Like all predators she was intelligent, capable of learning, with an excellent memory. In fact, she had nine brains. They consisted of one master brain and eight minor brains, strung out along her spinal cord like beads on a string. Among insects, she was one of the smartest.

She had mated once with her husband, who had dropped dead after having sex with her. She was a queen, who lived her entire life in isolation. She was a solitary wasp.

She emerged from her chimney and looked at the sun. Her head came out first, followed by her body. Her wings normally lay folded and flat across her back, like a folded fan. She unfolded her wings and vibrated them, letting her muscles warm up in the sunlight.

As the wasp climbed out of the chimney, the humans froze. She was truly enormous, with a jointed abdomen splashed with yellow and black stripes. The wasp unfolded its wings and beat them, thundering, and took off into the air, its legs dangling beneath it.

“Get down!”

“Lie flat!”

The humans threw themselves to the ground and began crawling toward whatever sort of cover they could find, scraps of grass, pebbles.

The wasp didn’t notice the humans at first. After she launched herself from her chimney, however, she began flying in a zigzag pattern, orienting herself for a hunting flight. During the orientation phase, she looked down at the ground, inspecting every detail. She kept a precise map of the terrain fixed in her memory.

She saw something new.

Three objects occupied the ground at the southeast quadrant away from her chimney. The objects were alive. They were crawling across the ground. They looked like prey.

She immediately changed her flight path and swooped in.

The wasp turned and dove down very fast. It chose Rick Hutter, and landed on him.

He rolled over on his back, waving his machete, while the wasp straddled him with her legs. Her wings beat over him. She caught him lightly in her mandibles.