That night Andy dreamed of his childhood. Tarzan cavorted through the trees high above a forest, where he swung from vine to vine. Beneath him the earth was rent in much the same manner as it was in Sonora. But where in Sonora the darkness hid everything from the visible eye, Tarzan’s gaze pierced the shadow, revealing converging armies of Ant Men, Golden Lions, Leopard Men, Snake People and Winged Invaders, just as they’d appeared on the covers of his old, cherished paperbacks.
These creatures, first introduced to Andy from Edgar Rice Burroughs books and the unauthorized Barton Werper volumes, glittered in the darkness as they stared back at their Lord of the Jungle nemesis. But fear found home in their eyes. Tarzan was too much for them. He’d done battle with each of their ilk and cast them back into the dusty confines of their paperback prisons long ago.
Andy turned in his sleep and groaned happily, safe with the knowledge that as long as Tarzan watched over them, he’d be safe.
Then he awoke to screams.
He twisted free from his blanket and crashed from his upper bunk six feet to the concrete floor. The claxons and emergency lights had sent everyone into frenzy. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed his boots, and struggled into them as he tried to hop and run at the same time. The door to the bunker had been left open to let in the breeze. As he approached it, he bumped into the guy in front of him who’d stopped to stare at the sky.
A hundred black silhouettes shot from the Rift into the night, tracer rounds from the Vulcan cannons stabbing them as they rose. Great black insects with glowing orange wings; each was as large as a World War II Japanese Zero. Rising, falling and slashing sideways, they twisted and twirled to get away from the fusillade of angry rounds fired from the air-cooled Gatling cannons.
Transfixed by the aerial death match, everyone jumped as a Predator drone strafed the action, unleashing its payload of three Hellfire missiles that exploded in awesome tornadoes of orange, red, and green fire.
They stood for ten minutes watching the life and death struggle as the creatures tried to make their way free of the Rift. Each man wore only boots and underwear, expressions agog at a sight that only made sense to little boys with Tarzan dreams who spent their Saturday mornings watching cartoons.
While everyone’s eyes were on the creatures, Andy’s gaze rested on the darkness from whence they came. He felt the Rift watching him. The great gaping hole in the earth was like the eye of that Serbian soldier who’d held Andy’s life in his hands. The capriciousness of Andy’s existence wasn’t lost to him. He wondered if the soldier of his memory wouldn’t decide to fire, the bullet transporting through time to jerk him back to that moment where he’d die and be buried in the ditch with all the other villagers.
One minute the night was filled with unearthly screams and the sounds of battle, the next all was silent. Two Predators took off south after something, but otherwise everything was still. Sometime during the battle the claxons had been turned off but Andy hadn’t noticed until now. The desert was now eerily quiet. The only sound was the breathing of the soldiers standing in the doorway of the bunker, all in rhythm as they stared into the night.
Finally someone chuckled.
“Let’s get some sleep.”
They turned and headed back to their bunks. Andy remained motionless, unable to simply turn off what he’d seen. The others pushed by him, and as the last of them headed for slumber, Andy reached out and grabbed him.
“What was that?”
The man looked Andy in the eye and grinned. “The tarantulas exploded. No problem.”
Andy didn’t get any sleep after that.
Tarzan had returned to rule his dreams, but he was no longer the King of the Jungle. Where he had once strutted across the great branches of the forest’s ancient trees, now he skulked from shadow to shadow. It wasn’t the Leopard Men or the Ant Men that he feared, nor was it the Golden Lions or the Snake People that sent his heart racing. He was afraid of what he couldn’t see, what he couldn’t know.
A roar came from somewhere in the forest.
Tarzan crouched and peered sideways.
What was it that set him so on edge?
He squatted there for a time. When he finally moved, he was more like a monkey than a great ape.
“What the hell did he mean when he said ‘the tarantulas exploded’?”
Leon Batista looked at him and spat tobacco juice along the ground. “Where you from you don’t know tarantulas?”
“Upstate New York.”
“They no have tarantulas there?”
Andy shook his head.
Leon spat again. He said something in Spanish that was lost to the constant desert breeze.
Andy paused from checking the ignition line of the mine. He’d been to thirty-seven countries and forty states. He’d even been to Antarctica when he’d had to do an exposé on penguin rustling by Japanese fishermen. He felt the need to demonstrate his worldliness to Leon, but forced himself to hold back. He was supposed to keep his head down and his identity secret. As far as anyone was concerned, he was an Army reservist who’d survived Iraq, gotten into a fight with an off-duty cop in Phoenix, and wanted something more than a regular nine to five. He was a convenience store clerk with saving-the-world dreams.
“Tarantulas? You know… big fucking spiders?” Batista asked as if Andy were a child. He waggled the fingers of both hands like spider legs.
“Yeah. I’ve seen them.” Andy mimicked, “Big fucking spiders.”
Batista glared at him for a moment, then continued. “There are these wasps. They lay their eggs in the tarantulas. Tarantulas no move anymore, then one day poof! Tarantula explodes with baby wasps.”
Andy felt his grin slip into something akin to stupefaction. There was a wasp that laid its eggs in a tarantula? He felt his mouth moving before he could stop it. “What are these wasps called?”
Batista rolled his eyes. “Maricone. Where the fuck you been? These are tarantula wasps. Sometimes call them tarantula hawks.” Leon made flying gestures with his arms. “Big fucking spiders. Big fucking wasps.”
“Yeah,” Andy repeated, “big fucking wasps. And last night? Were those tarantula hawks?”
Leon Batista laughed and shook his head. He choked on a mouthful of tobacco juice and convulsed before he was able to spit it out.
“Last night wasps? Those were Rift wasps. Those were gigantesco. Like airplanes, no? You get bit by them, not like the real ones. You’ll walk around thinking you okay, then your stomach gets bigger and bigger and—”
Andy nodded. So if the wasps were increased in size because of the Rift, then he could only imagine how large the tarantulas had to be. He took one more look at Batista, who seemed to be reading his thoughts.
“Big fucking spiders.” The man nodded and waggled his arms. “Bigger than me. Bigger than you. Like Cadillac.”
Andy closed his eyes.
Spiders the size of Cadillacs.
Swell.
A sort of manic normalcy prevailed after that, if you can call regular sorties of giant tarantula wasps into the night sky normal. For someplace like Upstate New York, it would have raised an eyebrow. But for those around the Rift, a few wasps here and there were the least of their worries.
Every other night the wasps would escape containment and try and fight their way to freedom. And every other night, the combined might of the Rift battalion would hurl them back whence they came. During the battles, mine tenders like Batista and Andy would ensconce themselves in the emergency bunker, well away from the action. The first night they’d been too afraid to leave their sleeping bunkers. That one transgression was allowed. But since then, they’d always hot-footed it to the emergency bunker. It was bigger anyway. They quickly became inured to the shrieks and sounds of combat. Great games of spades, old Doug Clegg novels, and even sleep took up their nights as they waited for the battalion’s inevitable victory.