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.
“Rick!” Karen shouted, running toward him, machete raised.
He couldn’t breathe. The mandibles had driven the air out of his chest. But somehow they didn’t cut through him. The wasp was being gentle.
Then she curled her abdomen underneath her and brought her sting forward, aimed at Rick. Armor plates at the jointed tip of her abdomen pulled apart, and two soft fingers, covered with sensory hairs, emerged, waving and wagging. These soft fingers were the sting palps. The palps dabbled over Hutter’s neck and face, tasting his skin.
She liked what she tasted.
The sting happened very fast. Two stingers inside a sheath emerged from a hole beneath the taste palps. As the sheath drilled into Rick just under his armpit, the stingers lanced into him, first one and then the other, sliding back and forth in tandem as they worked inward.
Rick felt the needles go into him. The pain was extraordinary. He gasped.
Karen threw herself at the wasp, her machete swinging, but she landed too late. The wasp went airborne, carrying Rick gripped in her legs. Karen saw him kicking his legs, but then his body went limp.
The wasp landed on the chimney, then pushed Rick inside, down the shaft of the chimney, butting him forward using her head. She went down the chimney after Rick, her striped abdomen disappeared down the chimney, the sting going down last.
Huddled in the sandy area, Karen and Danny debated what to do.
“Rick’s dead,” Danny Minot said.
“How do you know?” Karen King said.
Danny rolled his eyes.
She wished desperately for Erika Moll; Erika might have information about the wasp. “He could still be alive.”
Danny just groaned.
She racked her brain, trying to remember what she’d learned about wasps in Entomology 101. “That was a solitary wasp, I think.”
“So what. Let’s go, please.”
“Wait.” That college class she’d taken on insects…“Solitary wasps-they’re female, of course. They build a nest for their young. They paralyze their prey, I think. But they don’t kill their prey. They feed it to their young.” She had no clue as to the exact species of wasp she was dealing with, or how it really lived.
“Come on!” Danny got to his feet and began walking away.
Karen unsheathed her machete.
“What are you doing?” Danny said.
“Rick saved my life,” Karen said.
“You’re insane.”
She didn’t answer. She pulled the sharpening stone from her belt and drew it across the blade of her machete. “That bitch has Rick.”
“No, Karen! Don’t!”
Karen ignored Danny. She opened the pack and took out a radio headset and a headlamp. She took out another headset and flipped it at Danny. “Put that on.” She stood up and rushed over to the chimney. Then she spoke on the radio. “Copy me, Danny?”
He was lying on his stomach in the shade of a small plant. “You’re crazy!” he shouted at her on the radio.
She put her ear up to the chimney again. It was made of dried clay and it smelled odd. Insect saliva glue. She could feel a slow thrumming sound under her feet-the wasp’s wings beating underground. There was a nest down there. The thrumming continued for a while. Then the sound began to move up to ground level, coming closer. The wasp was climbing up the chimney out of its nest.
Karen stood in the shadowed side of the chimney, trying to blend in.
The wasp’s head emerged as Karen flattened herself against the chimney. Two semicircular compound eyes looked at her. She felt sure she’d been noticed, but the wasp didn’t react; instead, it took off. Airborne, the wasp flew back and forth in a Z pattern, orienting itself, and then sailed off straight into the northwest sky, aiming for distant hunting grounds of its own choosing.
When the wasp had dwindled to a point and vanished, Karen took a step backward and drove her machete into the chimney, hacking at it. She bashed the chimney to pieces, breaking it down, keeping an eye toward the northwest, fearful the wasp might reappear. But the sky remained empty. She cleared away chunks of mud and then jumped feet-first into the tunnel.
“Don’t leave me!” Danny shouted.
Karen adjusted her headset and beeped him on the radio. “Can you hear me?”
“You’re going to die, Karen. I’ll be left with no one-”
“Call me if you see her.”
“Ohhh…”
“Clear. Over,” Karen said, and snapped off. She would have to move fast, try to find Rick and bring him out. The wasp could come back at any time.
The tunnel had round walls lined with hardened clay. It trended steeply downward. Karen descended feet- first, crab-walking on her hands and elbows. It was tight in here. Daylight filtered in through the entrance behind her, but the light dimmed as she proceeded deeper underground. She switched on her headlamp. The tunnel smelled of something pungent but not unpleasant. It was probably the mother wasp’s pheromones, she figured. The smell came mixed with a rancid stench, which grew stronger as she went deeper underground.
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
