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.
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
