Apple Monster's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Apple Monster woke to a sound like rain, but the sky was dry. He pulled on his boots and went out with the shovel he'd sharpened the night before. Forty yards from the tree, the mound had split. A crack ran down its side like a broken egg, and ants poured out in a black flood that spread across the grass. This was not one colony. It was too much movement, too many bodies, too many directions at once. He stopped at the edge of the spill. The trail he'd seen yesterday was gone, replaced by a moving carpet that reached almost to his tree's roots. He counted three separate columns branching off toward the fence, the shed, and something past the field he couldn't see. His shovel felt useless in his hand. You did not dig a hole against a tide. Something climbed up out of the crack that wasn't a worker. She was larger than the others, deep red, with wings folded flat against her back and a small gold band at each wrist. A pale stone caught the light on her forehead. She stepped onto a flat rock and looked at him the way a landlord looks at a tenant. He froze. He had not known ants could look at anything. "You're the one with the tree," she said. Her voice was soft and even. "I've watched your lights come on at night. My workers have counted your branches." Apple Monster's throat locked. He lifted the shovel an inch, then lowered it. "You're killing it," he said. "You've been killing it for three weeks." "No." She tilted her head. Bewilderment moved across her face and settled. "We don't eat apple bark. We don't eat leaves. My scouts have brought back nothing from your tree in three weeks. Not one grain of sugar." "Then why are you on it?" "We're not on it by choice. We're leaving." She lifted one leg toward the split in the mound behind her. "Something under the ground is pushing us up. The tunnels are hot. The lower chambers are gone. My daughters are carrying eggs across your roots because your roots are the only dry path north." He looked at the flood again. Now he saw it. The ants were not climbing the tree. They were going around it. Past it. Away from something worse. "North to where?" he asked. "Wherever the ground stops burning." She looked at him steadily. "You may dig us out if you like. You'll only speed what's already happening. And you'll be alone with whatever drove us up." Apple Monster lowered the shovel to the grass. His tree stood behind him, bark unbitten, leaves whole. He had been fighting the wrong war for three weeks. Somewhere under his feet, the real one was just starting.