Maybe it was no big deal, Whalen thought.
But it doesn’t matter now anyway. Because Kiff is dead.
Chewed by rats.
What a way to go. Poor bastard. Poor haunted —
Another ant. And another! Christ, they were like crooks breaking and entering, darting across the tabletop, looking left, right, preening their antennae, probably dropping a chemical trail for the others to follow.
This way to the eats, gang. This way.
Whalen walked into his kitchen, sliced by sunlight spilling onto the windows. The brilliant light hurt his eyes.
He reached above the refrigerator and opened a cabinet.
He moved some cans aside, until he found a big yellow and purple can of Raid ant and spider spray. Industrial strength.
I don’t have spiders, Whalen thought. But I sure as hell have ants. He grabbed the can, gave it a test spritz to make sure that it was full and ready for action. He pressed the nozzle down and the perfumy toxin filled the kitchen.
Now we’re ready for business.
Whalen walked back out to the living room.
Only now the pretzel bowl was
filled
with ants. They scurried around inside, some holding giant flakes of pretzel crust over their ant heads like trophies. Still more were climbing up the coffee-table leg, hurrying across the shiny table surface, ready to party.
“Oh, shit,” Whalen said, and he pointed the canister right at the bowl and blasted away. The jetlike vapor blew some of the smaller, less facile ants flying right out of the bowl. Whalen muttered to himself, cursing, as he adopted a side-to-side motion with his hand, spraying the whole table now, in a great are, back and forth.
He watched the ants stop dead in their tracks. If he saw any twitching, hanging on to their happily communal existence, he gave them a direct blast that left their black exoskeletons sopping with Johnson Wax’s best bug-killing petrochemicals.
“Take that, fuckers,” he said.
In a few seconds, the battlefield was still. The ants were dead.
But he looked at the floor.
God, there were some more! Damn! There were ants making their way to the table leg.
Maybe I need an exterminator, Whalen thought. Maybe this is a serious ant problem. But he remembered dealing with ants other years. They come in when it’s too hot, or too cold, or too wet, or —
Too something.
If I can get the message out that they aren’t going to fucking prosper here, why, then I’ll have the problem licked.
Sure.
I just have to find out where they’re coming from.
He licked his lips, thinking that he’d like another sip of scotch. But — he saw — unfortunately his glass had been in the bomb zone. However toxic it was before, it was far worse now.
So, Whalen thought, screw it. And he got down on his knees, on the plush blue rug, ready to follow the trail of ants back to their point of entry.
“Your Honor —” Will was standing, and he flipped through some papers he had, just to make sure that he knew what he was about to do to whom.
It was mighty easy to get screwed up when you carried a thirty-plus caseload.
“I’d like to ask for a continuance. The prosecutor’s office has agreed to supply me with copies of the blood tests and —”
The judge, a rather glitzy-looking woman, held up her hand and consulted some oracular pages on her desk.
Will stopped.
And he thought:
About Kiff. And rats. He tried to imagine what happened, how it happened, and came up with a blank.
Chewed to death
. Now, there’s a nice way to go. There’s a nice one to tell the folks at home. Your son was
chewed
to death, Mr. and Mrs. Kiff.
We think it was rats.
Shit. But then — he thought about Whalen.
And he knew that there was something going on with Whalen, something secret that he wasn’t telling Will. But Will couldn’t imagine what it could be.
Judge Feinstein looked up. “Counselor, could you approach the bench?”
A snag, Will thought. And he pushed aside the weird thoughts, the strange pictures in his head. Thinking: I’ll get to the bottom of this later.
When I call Whalen.
* * *
It was the bathroom, no doubt about it, Whalen thought. He held the can of Raid in front of him, ready to blast the little black suckers right against the wall.
He had found the ants spaced evenly, every three or four feet, trailing back to the small bathroom.
Somewhere here there’s a hole. That’s how they’re getting in, Whalen thought.
He crawled into the small room. He smelled the pungent odor of urine, the result of his own sloppy aim.
But he didn’t see any ants.
He looked up, to the ledge of the small bathtub. And he saw an ant perched there, watching him.
“Damn,” Whalen said. He slowly brought up the can — and shot the intruder off the ledge and into the tub. Whalen didn’t bother getting up to see if he was dead.
I can gather up the bodies later.
But how were the ants getting in? There had to be a hole somewhere, a crack in the tile or on the plaster. Some opening leading outside .
.
.
But everything appeared seamless.
He began to think that he had the wrong place. Maybe it’s the kitchen.
Then he looked at the cabinet below the sink. The place where he kept the Vanish. And some Lysol, a sponge.
That’s it, he thought. There’s probably a crack in the wall behind there. That’s what’s happening.
He got his can ready.
Whalen wanted to get as many of the ants as possible when he pulled open the doors.
He crawled backward a bit. He brought the can up.
Damn, I don’t like ants, he told himself. Big, black, nasty motherfuckers. And with these carpenter ants, they were big enough for him to see their mouth parts, their — what? Mandibles. Pincerlike mouth parts.
Yeah, they were nasty little fuckers.
Okay, he said. Here we go, men.
Take no fucking prisoners.
He reached out and grabbed the doors to the cabinet.
Okay. He took a breath. Then.
“Ayah!” he said.
Whalen pulled open the doors. They popped open, springing from his hands, and then flew back, nearly closing again before bouncing against the latch, coming to rest halfway open.
Then, slowly, he pulled the doors fully open, expecting a horde of the black suckers to be startled, scrambling for cover.
It was dark in there. But he saw that there wasn’t any movement. The Vanish, the Lysol, and some wizened sponges were on guard, solemn, with no signs of intruders.
Whalen was disappointed.
Maybe this wasn’t it. Maybe this isn’t their way in .
.
.
But no, he thought, they might still be coming in this way. Just can’t see .
.
.
He put down the can of spray, got up, and ran out to the living room. He opened a drawer in one end table and found a small flashlight promotional item, a gift from the Exxon gas station. He turned it on. The light was yellow, fading fast. But enough, he thought .
.
. just enough.
He went back to the bathroom.
Now he stuck the light in and — like a suspicious night watchman — he examined the inside of the cabinet. The fat curves of the underside of the basin. The coppery-green pipe snaking away from it, down, into the floor.
Yeah, that might be it, Whalen thought.
Sure. If there’s a crack, why, that would be the perfect place.
But he couldn’t see all around to where the pipe went into the floor.
I’ll have to lean into the cabinet, he knew.
Okay. And get a better look.
He leaned in, feeling his ass sticking up in the air behind him. He felt the strain on his back, and now he smelled the stink in here. The chemicals, the mildew, the rust. God knows what. The light turned from yellow to a sick orange.
Just a few more seconds of light, he thought. Just gotta see, gotta check.
His head was all the way in the cabinet now.
All the way. He could only fit one arm inside — that’s all there was room for — and he had to fiddle with the small black flashlight, trying to aim the light down, to the pipe, to where it met the floor.
And it fluttered out of his hands.
“Shit,” he said.
The light fell against one wall.
Pointing straight up.
His hand had to wriggle to get near it, to try and grab it.
He heard something.
Above his head.
He wondered whether the faucet was dripping.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
But the sound wasn’t quite like that. It was more —
Gotta get the light. Grab it and —
His hand gained another inch as he hunched his shoulder to the left and-
The sound. More like a chirping .
.
. no, a rattling. A tiny rattling sound, lots of little sounds, but so faint.
He wanted to tilt his head and look. But he could barely move. Then — funny thought — he wondered: What if I get stuck in here? Wouldn’t that be —
He tilted a centimeter. Another.
His hand forgotten — for the moment — in its quest for the light.
Another tilt.
The strain on his back passing discomfort, cruising right into pain, a broad pain that trailed from the base of his spine all the way up to his neck.
Another centimeter.
And he saw what the flashlight was so dimly illuminating. At the top of the cabinet. Surrounding the basin.
Above his head.
Something black. Moving.
His mouth opened.
He mouthed the word, but he didn’t say it.
Ants.
Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. It was a colony, a whole tribe. There had to be a queen there, and soldiers and workers and —
He quickly shut his open mouth.
He jerked backward.
Right the fuck out of here, he thought.
But he moved only the tiniest bit before his shoulder pressed against his elbow, and then against the wall of the cabinet.
Locking him in there.
The sound. The chittering, the clicking sound. Excited now. Louder.
“Oh, hell,” he said.
An ant fell on his forehead. He felt the movement of its legs, delicate, considerate, crawling on the world that was Whalen’s skull.
It moved up.
Right, thought Whalen. That’s better, keep moving. He jerked against the Chinese lock of his elbow and his shoulders.
The ant, finding nothing of interest, moved down, straight down, before deciding that it wanted to move left. Over Whalen’s eyebrow. Onto his eyelid. Whalen shut that eye.
I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.
He felt the ant circling the eyelid. Whalen was making noises now.
A terrified bleating. “Oh, oh, oh,” he said. “Oh, damn. Oh, no.” And he bucked against his lock, his stock-like trap as if he were a steer harnessed to a meat factory machine, sensing that its mooing days were over.
“Oh, oh, oh.” And then, “Oh, shit.”
The ant circled some more. And then it bit him. The pain was small. No big thing. But the ant — and Whalen pictured the pincers, the devil-like fork prongs — closed on the tender flesh of his eyelid.
It bit again. Whalen screamed. He closed his other eye.
And his scream — stupid thing, really stupid, he told himself — made the ants fall. Knocking them from their perch, their clever hiding place.
A bunch of them sprayed onto his face.
He felt dozens of legs now walking on his face. Across his lips. Up and around his ears. Into his ears, driving him crazy with the command to scratch.
Something that he couldn’t do.
And now Whalen bucked as hard as he could, pushing his knees against the floor. Pushing at the cabinet wall with his hand. And again.
Not yelling anymore, he thought. He saw what that did.
Don’t want to yell anymore.
But the edge of the cabinet, the hinges, dug into the flesh of his trapped shoulder, now cutting to the bone.
And the new arrivals — the ants on his lips, his eyelids, all over his face, and some moving down to the tender flesh of his neck — all of them began to bite.
And dozens of those bites, snapping in unison, created a feeling like tiny painful firecrackers exploding on his face.