Laura looked down at the ground, although she otherwise stood tall. “Are we going to get in trouble then?”
“It’s kind of hard to get you in trouble for something that, on the record, never even happened,” Larson said.
“So we’re not going to be able to tell anyone about any of this?” Laura asked.
“Of course not,” Larson said. “If you don’t want the government to disappear you somewhere, you’re going to need to keep quiet about this for the rest of your life.”
“But what about Chicago?” Murky asked. She wiped her cheeks to get rid of some of the tears, but more just replaced them. “He deserves to be remembered for what he did, doesn’t he?”
“Uh, who’s Chicago?” Agent Larson asked.
“The dinosaur,” Laura said. “And yeah, he does. He saved our lives in the end. He probably saved yours, too.”
“I suppose there might be something that could be done,” Larson said as she looked at the ruined and wrecked mass of earth and concrete that had once been Kettle Hollow’s only intersection with a stoplight. “The government is going to have some rebuilding to do if they want to keep the townsfolk quiet. I don’t see why we can’t put a statue of your friend at the center of it as a memorial. We just couldn’t put anything on it explaining why.”
“I… I think that would be good,” Murky said through a series of sniffles.
“George!” someone yelled from the confusion of townsfolk and soldiers. Henderson turned toward the sound of his given name and saw his father running straight for him. Henderson stiffened like he was afraid his dad was about to yell at him, but instead the man ran right up to his son and hugged him hard.
“I’m so proud of you, George,” he said.
“It’s Henderson,” Henderson said. “I prefer that to George.”
His dad pulled back and looked Henderson in the eye. He must have seen something there more grown-up than he’d expected, because he nodded. “When did you start going by that?”
“I’ve been going by that for a long time, Dad.”
“Then that’s what I’ll call you.”
“Agent Larson?” one of the soldiers asked. “What are your orders now?”
“Orders? Why would you be asking for orders from me?” she asked.
The soldier actually looked sheepishly at her. “The general and most of his subordinates were either eaten, crushed or blown up,” he said. “You’re now the highest-ranking person here, even if you are technically a civilian. For the moment, you’re completely in charge of Project Subterranea.”
“Then until someone higher up says otherwise, we are shutting everything down,” Larson said. “No more attempts to weaponize any of this.” She began issuing orders to the remaining military people, having them pull back from the ruined center of town and escort the townspeople to the makeshift camps they had set up around the outside of the town limits. Surprisingly few of the people of Kettle Hollow complained about not being able to go directly home. Those homes would have been ransacked when the ant people came out of the portal to take them, making the houses little more than bad reminders right now of what kind of hellish night they’d all had. Everyone followed the military without question, and many were already nodding along as men in camouflage explained that they were all going to have to agree to a cover story if they wanted to continue the rest of their lives without mysteriously disappearing. Everyone was so lost in their own issues that no one, not even Agent Larson or their parents, noticed that the four kids who had saved them all weren’t immediately following.
Laura, Henderson, Jesse, and Murky stood in the ruined street where, twenty-four hours ago, there had been Kettle Hollow’s only stoplight, and twenty-four minutes ago there had been a glowing blue portal to some other kind of world.
“You know, it’s kind of sad that no one outside of Kettle Hollow is going to ever know this happened,” Henderson said.
“Probably can’t be helped,” Laura said. “If everyone else knew what was possible, and what the government had been doing…”
“No, not that,” Henderson said. “I don’t care a single rat’s fart about that. I mean that no one will ever know that we’re the awesome ones who saved everyone. At the very least, Agent Larson should give us a secret medal. Or a million dollars.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d prefer the million dollars,” Jesse said.
“Yeah. Forget about the medal,” Henderson said. “That’s lame.”
“Maybe we can at least convince them to give us all new bikes,” Murky said through her continued sniffles. “Henderson, you might even be able to convince them to give you a Murray X20c.”
“Screw that,” Henderson said. “If the military is going to reward us, I’m asking for a Skyway T/A. If the government is paying, I might as well go for one of the best, right?”
Finally they followed the rest of the group, laughing and trying to forget for now everything they had just endured. For now, the town of Kettle Hollow was once again deserted.
In the center of it all, in the ruined mess where the single stoplight had once been, a hole about a foot and a half wide opened in the dirt. Unlike the portal that had been there earlier, this one wasn’t surrounded by shimmering blue light. It was a perfectly ordinary hole in the dirt, unremarkable in almost every way except for the thing that was now crawling out of it. An ant, roughly two-foot long and with eight legs instead of six, scurried out of the hole and looked around itself as though bewildered and uncertain of where
