Читать книгу The Milk Chicken Bomb - Andrew Wedderburn - Страница 16

And then there’s the Ant People. The Ant People come and twist the tops off all the fire hydrants. The Ant People bite trees in half with their giant ant jaws; the trees fall and cut power lines, crush cars. People run around in the street, Help! Help! they all scream, while the Ant People storm through the aisles in the supermarket, smash all the ladders at the fire hall. The Ant People start fires. Their six buggy, hairy legs and their squishy, slimy abdomens. They build an anthill in the parking lot of the recreation centre out of mattresses and car seats, chesterfields, deep–freezes. The anthill towers up into the sky and everybody cries and hides. Why, oh why, they cry. Why did these awful Ant People come? When will they leave?

I hide in the gully, in the old tool shack. I cover the windows with some classified ads and make a fire, like Mullen’s dad taught me. Building up a little teepee out of twigs. It gets pretty loud at night, down in the gully, with all the burning and shouting and eating alive up the hill. I cover myself in old newpaper and the red sky shines through my newspaper curtains. I wonder if Mullen and his dad got away from the Ant People. I bet them and the Russians hightailed it out, drove up on the sidewalks in Mullen’s dad’s pickup truck, running over Ant People, kicking them in their six ugly eyes when they tried to climb on the running boards. I bet they’re all the way up to the Yukon by now, sleeping under the stars, in the box of the pickup truck.

The Ant People won’t come into my gully; it’s too narrow and tricky. I ought to be pretty safe here for a while. It’s too bad when everybody’s dead and gone, but sooner or later the anthill will collapse in on itself, trapping all the monsters inside. It’ll be them hollering, shrill ant hollers. I’ll roam around town, through all the broken buildings. I’ll eat dry cereal in the empty IGA. I’ll be pretty sad, I figure, being all by myself.