An hour later, they took a break beside a stream. Cigars were smoked, water boiled for tea.
Over the next ridge, Chel promised, lay their final destination. The trip was nearly over. There’d be food and beds, a roof over one’s head. All the comforts of home.
Still, no one could quite relax. Even Stuart, who had little in the way of jungle instinct, was convinced they were not alone. There was someone out there lurking, observing him and the band of guerrillas. He felt this not just because the Mayans were thoroughly spooked: he could actually sense eyes on him. That primitive, ingrained intuition. You knew when you were being watched. You just knew. He’d experienced it in London and had assumed it was the Jaguars keeping tabs on him — although it had in fact been Xibalba as well — and he was feeling it again, now, strongly.
The guerrillas were preparing to move out again when Zotz noticed the ants.
He drew everyone’s attention to the insects quietly, calmly. Remaining unflappable whatever the circumstances was one of Zotz’s defining characteristics.
“They’re big ones,” he said. “Everybody keep still. Let’s see where they’re going.”
The ants marched in a column, a dozen abreast, trickling out from the undergrowth like a leaking liquid. They were big, each the size of an infant’s finger, and they were red-brown, the colour of dried blood. They were coming straight towards the cluster of men, thousands of antennae and legs bristling.
“ Sauba ants,” Chel murmured. “Don’t let any get on you. They’re leaf cutters. Very sharp mandibles, very powerful too. They’ll give you a nasty bite and won’t let go.”
Then another of the Mayans let out a hiss of dismay.
“There’s more,” he said. “Coming the other way. Look.”
A second column of sauba ants appeared from the opposite direction. They headed towards the first as if on a collision course. The guerrillas were sandwiched in between.
“This is ridiculous,” said Chel. “This doesn’t happen. Ants go outwards from the central nest. They send out foraging parties in a radial pattern. You don’t get two lots at once like this.”
“No one told that to these ants,” Stuart remarked. “Maybe they’re from different nests.”
“Who cares?” said Tohil. “I’m not hanging around. I’m going that way.” He pointed to the side, away from both ant columns. Then his face fell. “Oh, fucking balls. There’s even more of them.”
A third contingent of ants had appeared, approaching perpendicular to the other two. The guerrillas backed away, gathering in a huddle at the stream’s edge, clutching their weapons. All at once blowpipes, even guns, seemed wholly inadequate. You couldn’t deter ants with a bullet or a dart.
The three columns of ants met and merged in the middle of the clearing. They became a single, almost perfectly circular carpet which expanded outwards as more of them fed into it. The perimeter of the carpet crept towards the guerrillas’ feet.
“Cross the stream,” said Chel.
His men didn’t need to be told twice. They splashed through the knee-deep water, retreating to the far side. There they waited to see what the ants would do next.
Watching the insects, Stuart felt a horrified fascination, which he saw reflected in the expressions of the Mayans. Whether or not what the sauba ants were doing was standard practice for their species, there was something uncanny in the organisation they showed, the precision with which they coordinated themselves. It could of course be pure coincidence that they’d flowed in and overrun the space where a group of humans had happened to be sitting. But there seemed an element of deliberateness, even vindictiveness, in their actions. They’d not simply taken over, they’d ousted and occupied.
And that wasn’t the end of it.
Out of the scurrying ground-swirl of ants a pillar began to rise. It grew upwards, ant clambering over ant to add to it. Moments later a second pillar sprang up alongside. Each was several inches in diameter, and they climbed in parallel to a height of a metre or more.
Then ants at the summits of both formed horizontal chains which reached out towards each other. The two chains joined, locking into position, and hundreds more ants charged up the pillars and got busy constructing a central pillar on top, this one oval in cross-section and as thick as a watermelon.
“I don’t fucking believe it,” Stuart said in English. The Mayans didn’t understand the words, but they recognised the tone well enough and echoed the sentiment in Nahuatl.
The central pillar mounted and swelled before branching out on either side. The ants were now building downwards as well as up. Two new long extrusions descended while a third, a sphere, formed in the middle at the top. It was obvious — eerily obvious — that the ants were working according to a specific plan. This was no random agglomeration. It had purpose and design.
Chel was the one who identified it first — saw the pattern, the overall aim.
“A figure. Fuck my mother, a human figure.”
And it was. It could be nothing else. Thousand upon thousand of the sauba ants had come together to create a life-size mannequin, a shifting thing composed of hard little bodies whose exoskeletons glittered dully in the sun. The head was bulbous, the limbs stocky and featureless, but it was unmistakably a representation of a person.
All of a sudden the ten-foot span of the stream didn’t seem wide enough. Stuart wanted to be as far away as was humanly possible from this… this thing.
Then the ant mannequin raised an arm towards the guerrillas.
As one, the Xibalba men responded with an involuntary communal groan of horror. Stuart joined in.
That was when Ah Balam Chel, who had the lightning gun and more presence of mind than most, decided enough was enough. He slapped down the l-gun’s charge lever. He rotated the setting dial to maximum. The men beside him were still giving voice to their dread, and the ant mannequin still lifting its arm with appalling, zombie-like slowness, the sauba ants clambering over each other. A light winked blue on the side of the lightning gun, signalling readiness. Chel took aim and pulled the trigger.
The plasma bolt blasted the ant mannequin, dead centre in its body mass. One moment there was a rust-coloured figure on the other side of the stream. The next, it had disintegrated into several thousand individual components. Ants and bits of ant sprayed everywhere like confetti.
The parts of the mannequin not directly hit by the l-gun collapsed. The carpet of ants in which the figure had stood recoiled, a shockwave passing through it in concentric ripples. Order became chaos. The sauba ants dashed in all directions in a mad panic. They disappeared into the undergrowth they had emerged from, a marauding army put to rout. In less than a minute all that remained of them was a scattering of body parts on the ground — charred abdomens, frazzled thoraxes, tiny exploded heads, legs fried to a crisp.
It was a while before anybody could speak.
“We imagined that, right?” said one of the Mayans. “Please tell me we did. Too damn long in the forest. A mass hallucination.”
“I wish it was,” said Zotz.
“What the hell is going on?” said Tohil. “I mean, that wasn’t just ants. That was… ants gone crazy.”
Stuart looked at Chel.
“I don’t think,” the Xibalba leader began, “that that was anything. Ants can arrange themselves into structures. It’s been recorded. Bridges across crevices, between trees, to reach food or prey. Huge ball-shaped bivouacs that serve as temporary nests while they’re migrating. This was just that.”
“But it looked like — ”
Chel chopped Tohil off, his voice an axe. “It didn’t look like anything. We thought it did, but it didn’t. Our minds made us think what we were seeing was a particular shape, but that was an accident of vision. The tendency people have to — what’s the word? — anthropomorphise things.”