Like Ants to Honey

Chapter 1/1

"You think this is a first contact scenario?"

Tom Evans, coming back into the East Point Wilderness Station from a stint of surveying the town of Secord Landing in the valley below through his binoculars, entered the cabin's kitchen just in time to hear Frank Nesbitt's shout of consternation and disbelief. The heavy-set blond botanist was standing beside the coat rack near the back door and glaring at their colleague, Yosef Mustafa, who was sitting at the kitchen table with one elbow resting beside a cup of half-finished mint tea. Outside the net-covered windows, propped open to let in the mild air of a late spring evening, the forest susurrated with unusual noise: rustlings, shiftings, mutterings and soft screeches. Too many dogs and cats packed into too small a space, high above their usual habitats in more civilized areas. Alarums and excursions, as Shakespeare would have said.

Yosef, long-shanked and usually almost painfully soft-spoken, was gazing back at his huskier teammate calmly. In spite of having moved to Oregon from Yemen only a year ago and still having occasional trouble with the English language, he was one of the most talented and quick-minded ornithologists Tom had ever met: it was he who had first noticed, three days ago, that bird species from much lower elevations were appearing in the high mountain zone where the wilderness station was located. Initially this had been a source of puzzlement, significant in some enigmatic way but not particularly ominous. Events over the subsequent seventy-two hours had turned it into the first syllable of a profoundly alien sentence.

"Yes," Yosef said softly, acknowledging Tom with a fleeting glance of his mild dark eyes. "That is precisely what I am proposing."

With an equally swift glance Tom took in the details of Frank's appearance: light jacket and hiking boots, a travel bag in one hand, and most importantly, the keys to one of the station's Jeeps in the other. "Planning a little trip, Frank?"

"My sister's in Portland, damn it!" Frank's turned belligerent blue eyes on his boss. "Not answering her email or or cell phone. I can't just sit here while she's..." He trailed off with a little chopping gesture of frustration at his own lack of knowledge.

"Yes," Yosef repeated. "That is the question, isn't it? While she is WHAT, precisely? While everyone is... what? All over the world the animals are running away from the cities as fast as their legs can go; people are running into them, toward the silver pillars. 'Beautiful', the broadcasters say before the news feeds go dead. 'Inexplicable', the Internet says, and then they go silent too. But they are in cities, and that is where the pillars appeared, yes? And now even the outliers are not updating."

"There could be a thousand explanations for that," Frank protested. He tightened his grip on his travel bag. "We're not learning anything sitting up here, with nobody answering their damned phones. And if Janice needs me, I'll be damned if I'm going to waste any more time!"

Yosef nodded. "Yes, I am thinking time is something we do not have much of anymore."

Tom held up both hands. "Hold on, Frank. Let's talk this over, huh? Rushing off half-cocked isn't —"

"Fuck half-cocked!" The botanist's tension, which had been building up over the past three days, exploded in a roar. "The black bastard's right about one thing: Something's gone rotten, and we've got to DO SOMETHING!"

Tom winced at the racism, but decided to let it pass. At the moment there were bigger fish to fry. The frenetic light in Frank's eyes wasn't merely anger: it suggested outright mental derangement. "We're just going to talk, okay? Five minutes either way won't make much difference, will it?"

Yosef made a low sound that could have been amusement. But more importantly, Frank, after another couple of seconds of glaring, dropped the bag on the floor before crossing his arms with a petulant scowl. "Okay, Tom. You've got your five minutes. But damn, this better be good."

Instinctively Tom looked to Yosef, the only person in the room who seemed to have even an inkling of what might be going on. Yosef's trace of a smile faded away, and he closed his eyes briefly as if thinking.

After a moment he said, "You see a new house. Beautiful, big, perfect to your needs. But," he made a skittering gesture with his fingers, "you also have ants. Many ants, everywhere. So what do you do?"

Tom, who'd had an uncle with a house foundation like a sieve, answered at once: "You mix up some sugar water and start laying traps."

"Yes!" Yosef's eyes opened wide and his bright grin lit up the room. "Yes, that is it. Precisely! But that only works in the short range. There is a thing you have here..." He tapped his forehead with his clenched fist, a habitual gesture when particularly frustrated by the English language. "You hang them in gardens during parties, to attract insects. They emit this sound, this musical note only —"

"Bug zappers." Tom felt a frisson of ice chase down his spine. "You think that's what this is? You think those pillars are...?" The thought was at once appalling and far too plausible.

"That smoke rising from the centre of the city, you think it's the sign they're having a party?"

The chill became a shiver. "No. No, I guess I don't."

"It is worse than that." Yosef gestured toward the binocular case slung over Tom's shoulder. "What of Secord Landing?"

Yesterday there had been movement in the town, cars and people, and lights in the night. Today... "I didn't see a living soul. Or a whole lot of cars."

Yosef's thin smile held a trace of humour and much sadness. "They have heard the Call." He nodded toward the noise beyond the cabin. He glanced at the butterfly in its glass prison; the insect sat on its twig, idly flexing its wings. "But not here. Not yet."

Tom wondered, briefly, how long a wave of the kind Yosef was proposing would be held off by five miles of linear distance and two hundred feet of elevation. Frank, still looking unimpressed, countered: "Fine, smart ass... so why the mass animal migrations away from civilization if this thing is supposed to be an attractant?"

Yosef shrugged. "Animals will vacate an area when an earthquake is about to strike. Their senses are sharper. Maybe they smelled this bait or heard this note, and they know what it means. So they ran."

Tom felt the first faint throb of a headache. "Smarter than we are, eh?"

"Perhaps. Or it is by design. The bait only appeals to organisms above a certain level of intelligence. The higher the intelligence, the stronger the pull."

Frank emitted an explosive snort that turned the throbbing behind Tom's eye sockets into a dull drumbeat . "That's crazy, and you both know it! The whole thing's..."

He kept talking, but Tom couldn't hear him. The pounding in his head was rapidly becoming a pulse of heat, the soul of desperate longing made manifest. Blindly he turned toward the west, dimly aware that Yosef was rising and also turning, turning, turning toward the holy place, the sweetest song, the source of all that was bright and nourishing and needful...

His last free thought, as the sound of thousands of animal feet moving east continued around them, was that Frank was going to be going to Portland after all — and he was going to have a lot of company.

THE END