"Thanks, ma'am," Doc called from his perch. "Never thought I might, mayhap, end my days as live food for ants."

Krysty had been peering above them, into the dark, leafy bows. The roots that twined beneath them all seemed to finally come together in a single main trunk. "That way," she said. "Got to find a place they can't come at us in numbers. Get up there and spread out."

Ryan looked where she pointed and nodded his agreement. "Yeah. Everyone? Jak, go first."

"Climbing on each other's backs," J.B. said. The place was so quiet now that he hardly needed to raise his voice for the others to hear.

The ants were forming a brazen pyramid, scrambling over one another's bodies, gaining height.

Within a few seconds their leaders would be into the lower branches of the tree.

Jak was up and away, barely using his hands as he scampered into the upper branches. "Here! Fuckers can't get other way."

Ryan motioned for J.B. to go second, helping Mildred and Doc as he went. Krysty went next, leaving Ryan alone on the low, angled part of the bole of the tree. As he readied himself to move, Ryan saw the first of the questing ants appear, its feelers tasting the air. He drew the panga, waiting a moment until the whole of the creature's body was in sight.

"So long," he grunted, the broad metal blade slicing easily through the center of the ant's swollen belly. A foul-stinking liquid squirted out, a few drops pattering on the skin of his wrist. Feeling it beginning to burn his flesh, Ryan quickly wiped it off with his sleeve.

Almost instantly a dozen more of the mutie insects came chittering over the side of the branch, scuttling toward him.

"Move, lover!" Krysty called from thirty feet above him.

"Yeah. Guess I'd better."

"This is what I believe is called a Texarkana standoff," Doc said. "We can stop them getting at us, but I fear that they can make it confoundedly difficult for us to remove ourselves."

Darkness was creeping over the land, drawing a cloak of night across the jungle. The drumming that Krysty had heard earlier had ceased. Clouds had come up and the setting sun, away behind them, was only visible as a crimson glow at the edge of the bowl of mountains.

"Could be the last hurrah for us," Mildred said quietly. They kept their voices down once they discovered that any noise they made seemed to provoke the ants to ferocious activity.

As long as the friends watched the main trunk of the mangrove immediately below them, the mutie insects had no way of reaching them. It wasn't hard to hold them off with the panga if they came crawling up.

It would be a little harder in the dark.

The traveling army of giant ants seemed content to wait.

The dying embers of the day shone over their orange-red bodies, making it seem that the very land was smoldering. After Ryan had killed a hundred or more, they'd suddenly ceased their efforts to climb the mangrove. Once or twice a lone soldier had attempted an attack, but its headless corpse had fallen to the earth.

J.B. had methodically checked their options, climbing to the soaring, swaying peak of the tree, to try to find out whether they might be able to scramble away into the nearby branches. But the closest was more than twenty feet away and was so slender that to jump would mean a fifty-foot fall into the carpet of ants.

He and Ryan had discussed the possibility of using some of their newfound supply of grens to try to dissipate the patient army of gigantic insects. Even a couple of burners might only kill a few thousand ants. Frags and implodes wouldn't even scratch the surface of the limitless forces, which surrounded the tree as far as the eye could see in every direction.

"Outwait them" was J.B.'s best offer.

Ryan didn't have anything much better. "If they're still here through tomorrow, then we have to reckon they'll stay here forever. Or for long enough."

"But they'll starve," Krysty said.

Mildred knocked that one down. "Army of ants like this could survive days. If they just use a small part of their force to scavenge around for food for the others, they can outwait us. We have those food-tabs, but in heat like this we're sweating about a pint of water an hour."

"How long could we survive?" Doc asked. "Until tomorrow night?"

She nodded. "Probably. But we'll be in poor shape by then."

Ryan sniffed. "So, the only chance is to try and run through them. If we can keep going, and not fall, our speed could get us through and out the other side. Unless anyone's got a better idea, we can try it at dawn. Mebbe drop a gren or two to give us a head start on them."

"Why dawn?"

Ryan looked at Jak. "Can't risk it in the dark. False step, twisted ankle... and goodbye was all she wrote. Wait longer and we just get more tired. Dawn's the best moment."

Nobody agreed with him out loud. But then again, nobody disagreed either.

Both Krysty and Jak had excellent night vision, but the darkness in the jungle was so intense that neither could even see the ground. The blackness was so smothering that it wasn't even possible to see an outstretched hand.

The ants stayed quiet. Ryan organized everyone into a double sentry watch, keeping the guard in pairs to make sure there was no sleeping. If a dozen or more of the creatures below succeeded in sneaking up the tree under the cover of night, the venom of their bites could be enough to prevent any worthwhile defense.

Ryan and Krysty took the four hours that ran from early morning to the first pallid hint of the false dawn.

"Sure I heard drums again, around midnight," Krysty whispered.

"Same direction?"

"Think so. Northerly."

"If we make it out of this, we can go take a look."

She touched Ryan gently on the arm. "Just in case we don't, tomorrow," she began.

But he reached for Krysty's face, finding her lips, and laid his hand across her mouth. "No need, lover. We both know what we feel about each other. Doesn't take words. If we get chilled in the morning, then it'll likely be quick. But I don't reckon on going. Not yet. Got too much living to do, lover."

She held his hand and breathed a kiss into his palm. "Fair enough. We'll make it together. Like you say... we both got a lot of living still to do."

The layers of the night peeled back with an imperceptible slowness and subtlety. Ryan suddenly realized that he had caught a faint spark of fire from Krysty's long red hair.

"Dawn's coming," he announced.

Chapter Seventeen

"My daddy was a Baptist minister, in a town outside of Montgomery, Alabama, until the Klan burned down his church and him inside it. He taught me how to pray, and this time I guess someone must have been listening in."

Mildred sat on the lowest branch of the mangrove, feet dangling over the bare earth. The heels of her sneakers rubbed against the main bole of the massive tree, which was scarred and torn by the serrated mandibles of the ants.

The army had gone, vanishing silently in the black middle of the night. It left nothing of itself behind, other than a swath of utter desolation, fully eighty paces wide and stretching in two directions as far as Ryan could see — toward the mountains, now visible as rounded silhouettes against the opalescent pink light, and back toward the river and the distant redoubt.

The trees remained, though some of the smaller ones had been stripped of leaves. Every flower and shrub had been devoured down to the ground, and every blade of lush grass had disappeared. The earth itself had been trampled flat, from the pounding of tens of millions of feet.

Ryan had wakened J.B., Jak, Doc and Mildred, showing with a wave of the hand that they'd been saved from testing themselves against the mutie ants.