Micro-Humanity
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The drones rose like a swarm of large insects. This drew flocks of predatory birds of all kinds that targeted them. All the assault drones were sent to protect the transport ones as well as the guns of the giants era were pointed towards the sky shooting down the birds of prey. The transport drones — also protected by the defense weapons of the nearby airport — managed to reach it and from there to get on one of the huge giants’ planes reaching safety in Phnom Penh.
Those who remained in Angkor Wat had no other choice but fighting. The ancient and huge weapons were aimed at the approaching swarms but the ants were mostly jumped into the air and not killed by their large calibers that could not stop their advance. In due course, the ants arrived and the first line of defense was swept away almost immediately. The defenders of the first line fought to the end and each of them killed at least a dozen ants and more, but the latter were so many that they eventually won.
Ants and termites seemed unstoppable, overwhelming every block and each barricade they were faced with, and after not even a day of battle the few survivors were crammed into the tower of the southern district, the only one defended by flamethrowers, the sole weapon of the giants’ era that seemed to be truly effective.
Ants and termites went on attacking despite everything, but just when the gas and gasoline reserves that supported the flames of the flamethrowers were about to run out, the insect tsunami stopped. An unexpected joy began to spread among the ranks of the survivors. Some expressed it almost hysterically, others — more cautious and superstitious — dared not give it a voice. A wise choice as a slight hum anticipated the dragonflies’ arrival.
In a few moments, they took away, torn, and threw down from the tower the defenders who were outside or lurking in the windows. Some of them entered through such windows, wreaking havoc of many humans before being shot down.
The defenders closed the windows and sealed them using steel bulkheads, thus trapping themselves inside the tower. They sent the umpteenth requests for help via radio in the hope that aid from the capital could arrive in time when the tower shook and ants began to emerge from under it. Resistance was futile and extermination was absolute.
That was the beginning of the Cambodian Syndrome — also, and more commonly, called Gea’s Revenge — that is, an inexplicable but continuous attack on humankind by insects. It had started with ants but soon many other species of insects had come together in this absurd war and, from that first time in Angkor Wat, their attacks had quickly multiplied, spreading wildly all over the globe.
Insects — and this was an even stranger and crazier thing — not only attacked human settlements but also automated systems which humankind depended upon, such as farms, power plants, plantations and they did so by cutting wires or penetrating inside robots, corroding their circuits.
Many did not resign to the lack of answers for such attacks and pursued and often made up hypotheses — of which unfortunately they were persuaded — such as plots by other states, or by some sect, or by some secret order that had developed a technology capable of controlling insects, or even the long hand of the aliens who, now that we had shrunk, no longer saw any use in us, and so on.
Actually, by that time, the only sure thing — besides the scientific and war effort of all humanity in search of a way to stop these continuous attacks — was the certainty that everyone was going to be attacked sooner or later.
To date, more than three hundred years after the big small step, the most affected states had been India, China with the whole Far East, as well as Indonesia and Australia and in that part of the world only Japan seemed a port more or less secure. Africa had also been devastated, Southern Europe was suffering more than northern Europe. The real tragedy, however, had taken place on the American continent: South and Central America had been completely overwhelmed and humankind entirely swept away from those lands.
Many, indeed almost all the fugitives from such lands had taken refuge in Texas, in Last Flame, perhaps the last stronghold against the advance of the insects that came from the south, destroying every human settlement in their path.
Last Flame had been built, or rather moved, in the middle of the country’s last oil plant and all its defenses were based on it. Eight ditches had been dug around the city where oil burned nonstop. Dozens of oil-powered flamethrowers had been placed between one ditch and another. Every citizen capable of holding a flamethrower had been equipped with it and, for months now, ammunition factories had been operating at full speed as well as those making respirators and gas masks. Yes, because — although virtually impregnable — Last Flame had a problem created exactly by what protected it: the toxicity of the fumes exhaled by oil.
CHAPTER 4 – THE PRESENT
“Hey Mexico, put your mask on if you do not want to die young!” Jenny scolded him.
Pedro looked up at her, who was trying to see beyond the curtain of flames and smoke in front of them using her binoculars “I’m Brazilian, not Mexican!” he replied, tired of repeating it every single time.
Jenny shrugged “Always Latin America it is!” she put her binoculars away and sat down, frustrated “And yet they should already be here!” she complained “Scouts spotted them two days ago.”
Pedro shook his head “I would not be so impatient for ants to arrive, you know?”
Jenny smiled maliciously “I want to see them burn, hear the crunch of their exoskeletons and smell their burnt flesh!”
Pedro shook his head dejectedly.
She looked at him in amazement “You should want the same more than everybody else, right? Don’t you want revenge?”
He sighed “It wasn’t the ants.”
“Really? And who?”
“Not who but what!”
Jenny nodded embarrassed “You are right, sorry, we must not give a sentient dignity to insects by speaking of them as if they were our equals.” She recited by heart.
Pedro nodded “It was mosquitoes! Endless swarms of mosquitoes that attacked us in our sleep, our guards were looking at the ground, we were all terrified by ants and spiders, but our end was deemed by mosquitoes.” He paused drinking a long sip of water: telling that story still troubled him “Mosquitoes had never been interested in us until then, never ever just one person had been injured that far, but, for some crazy reason, that night they decided that the moment of revenge had come.”
“Revenge?” snorted Jenny.
Pedro nodded gravely “Yes, revenge, I think they are taking revenge.”
“What for?” Jenny retorted trying to contain her perhaps too contemptuous voice out of respect “For the thousands of years when we mercilessly crushed them while they sucked our blood?”
Pedro shrugged “What do I know!” he snapped “There must be a reason for the destruction and devastation they brought!” He picked up a stone from the ground throwing it forcefully “A few hours, can you imagine it? They just needed a few hours to wreak havoc on the city and kill almost everyone with their stingers.” The memory made him shiver “If you were lucky they killed you by drying you up in less than a second, but if they just hurt you, you died all the same in less than ten seconds, but in a much more horrible and painful way: their poison made their victims swell until they literally exploded. Being forced to witness that so many times was horrible.”
Jenny, who usually never lacked words and was used to always having the last one, this time was left speechless.
Pedro had turned pale at the memory of what he had witnessed — he began to nervously scan the sky. Suddenly, he was shaken by an uncontrollable tremor and grabbed her shoulders forcefully “We think we are too intelligent or, better, we think they are more stupid than they really are, they are coming, they will find a way, they will kill us all!”
Jenny first hit him with a knee in his stomach and then slapped him so hard his head turned and he tumbled to the ground “Calm down soldier!” She shouted at him staring at him with a stern martial look “This is Last Flame! We will not fall! Never! Got it?”
Pedro, red-faced in shame, crawled away holing up in a corner “They will come!” He whispered.
She took two long steps forward kicking him behind a thigh “Shut up, you coward!” She furiously warned him “One more word and I’m sending you out to scout out there!”
Pedro fell silent without daring to even breathe in order not to make any noise.
A few hours later Jenny’s wishes came true.
Ants arrived.
Thousands stormed the inflamed oil ditch.
None passed unscathed and the few who succeeded — trampling on the corpses of their sisters — were too burnt and intoxicated to continue for more than ten steps.
Last Flame was resisting.
The siege went on for days.
For weeks.
The ants were joined by spiders and centipedes, but they too failed to pass. Last Flame inhabitants observed, intimidated by their seemingly endless number, yet proud that their city was holding the siege.
Meanwhile, the attention of the insects had also turned to other settlements that — not being so protected and prepared as Last Flame — fell under their cruel pincers and this did nothing but increase the population of refugees flocking to the city.
The rumor of Last Flame’s heroic resistance had spread throughout North America and many came from all over the former United States to contribute. After more than a year of continuous siege, the population and soldiers were practically more than doubled.
The insects had tried everything, but ants, spiders, centipedes, and others had failed to break through. From the sky, wasps and bees fell to the ground intoxicated by the fumes of oil and were killed by the soldiers. Even swarms of thousands of mosquitoes and flies tried to attack them with the same result and Pedro finally had his longed for — as well as unexpected — revenge. Last Flame was impregnable.
“We will hold out!” Jenny rejoiced while burning the eyes of a dying fly enjoying the distinctive sound — a gloomy ‘plop’ — they made when they exploded.
Beside her, Pedro lingered in breaking the stinger of a mosquito — now charred at his feet — into several parts “We killed a lot of them!” he exulted elated.
The two of them were completely taken by the unstoppable frenzy given by the awareness of winning a battle that everyone thought lost and that was how all the inhabitants of Last Flame felt.
After six more months, the insects had crossed the first burning oil ditch by extinguishing the flames using the corpses of tens and tens of thousands of them.
Jenny exulted observing them through her binoculars “Those fools will get auto-exterminated! Let them all burn! Damn!”
After the second year of siege, Last Flame recorded that chemical fumes had claimed almost more victims than the insects. Neither masks nor underground shelters seemed enough to protect the weakest of health among whom, unfortunately, there were many children. The situation was such that the city committee ordered all children under fourteen to be denied permission to leave the shelters.
The third year of siege passed without shakings. Insects went on assaulting the city but with much less force and frequency than the previous years — both from the ground and from the air. It was almost as if they smelled death, since, unfortunately, Last Flame was becoming this: an impregnable fortress that killed those it defended.
At the end of the fourth year it was clear that staying meant succumbing to the toxicity of the resources that protected them, yet nobody wanted to leave and go away as suggested by health workers. Nobody wanted to abandon the safety of the fire walls and the sky constantly covered by a blanket of stinking black smoke. Nobody wanted nor dared also because Last Flame had lost contact with all the nearby communities and cities over a few thousand kilometers and this could only mean that such communities and cities no longer existed.
The closest city was New Tawa — in the territory that was once Canada — but it was more than five thousand kilometers from Last Flame. This was no small problem since there were only two ways to safely reach New Tawa.
The first one was using one of the giants’ era planes, but — in order to do so — it was necessary to reach the airport which was a couple of kilometers beyond Last Flame’s first defensive ditch and, even if someone could reach it, nobody knew what they were going to find.
The second one was using the only heavy transport drone left capable of traveling such a distance. The fact, however, was that this drone could carry no more than three thousand people and Last Flame counted millions: so many had arrived so quickly that, by then, no one knew how many were surviving within its walls of perpetual fire.
“Sometimes I think it would be better to try our luck and get to the airport.” Pedro complained as he was watching the toxic fumes rise towards the dark sky.
Jenny sighed: sometimes Pedro’s defeatism exasperated her beyond the limit.
He went on lowering his gaze “Better than staying here waiting for certain death from this unhealthy air.”
Jenny sighed again but said nothing. She knew that Pedro was basically right, but she was not ready to accept it yet and, above all, she did not want the man’s plaintive nature to infect the rest of her men “Get back Corporal!” she ordered in her authoritative voice, whispering threateningly “Keep such opinions to yourself, the last thing I want is to have discouraged soldiers at my commands, got it?”
Pedro straightened his back “At your command Captain.” He answered in a martial voice even though his gaze was clearly saying “You know I’m right.”
Jenny let him be “Ready for the patrol!” She ordered and the twenty soldiers under her command got up, took their machine guns, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers and followed her. They were trusted men and women of whom she was proud — they would follow her anywhere and had distinguished themselves on the field several times fighting with courage and a pinch of recklessness against any threat the insects had thrown against the city, in particular when they had led the counterattack on the front line of the attack as the ticks, exploiting a forgotten ledge, were about to climb over the third ditch.
The patrol — that is the scouting along the second protective ditch — began and ended as most current patrols: quietly. And the quieter the patrols, the more nervous Jenny became.
Pedro, who knew her best, placed a hand on her shoulder “Our shift is over now, come on, let’s have a drink, it will do you good, it will help you relax.”
She looked at the burning ditch one last time and then nodded, following him “Someday this will all end, won’t it?” she whispered to him.
He nodded with a melancholy smile “Yes, as it started it will end, yes, it will end.”
After the usual couple of rounds of beer, they collected their stuff and headed towards the barracks —nothing more than a large pavilion crammed with bunk beds with five beds on top of each other, but they were calling it ‘home’ at the moment.
On the way, Pedro was still laughing at the bad joke that Jenny had played on the young bartender Jack who, having a terrible crush on her, accepted everything, blatant as few have ever been in the history of humanity, when she stopped abruptly.
Pedro turned again laughing “What’s up? Feeling guilty? It would be high time!” he said, laughing even louder.
She got to him with two quick strides plugging his mouth “Shut up! Listen!”
Pedro immediately fell silent and tilted his head to one side trying to listen, then shrugged.
“Don’t you hear a…” alarm sirens began to scream “strange hum?”
Pedro instinctively took his flamethrower up, looking around in alarm “What’s going on?”
Jenny pulled out her Captain binoculars pointing it towards the hum that she had heard.
Pedro pointed a finger in the same direction “That cloud seems to move against the wind.”
Jenny silently waited for the binoculars to focus and identify what was coming towards them and then turned pale “Grasshoppers!” She whispered, petrified “Grasshoppers!” She repeated and, putting her hands in her hair, she shouted “Grasshoppers swarm! All sheltered! Run to the shelters, quickly!”
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