The Colony

Underneath every suburban backyard lies a dense jungle engulfed in an infinite violent turf war between various low-tier ecosystem organisms. Like any war, the reasons for battle stem from the quest of obtaining natural and artificial resources. Suburbia is a perfect ecosystem to thrive because all of these humans are crammed into cookie cutter houses next to each other. The spacial challenge that humans face requires the use of a community dumpster at the end of the cul-de-sac, instead of using individual trash cans. An American on average throws away 98% of all commodities within the first six months… That means for us this dumpster is all we would ever need to survive for thousands of generations. 

The first attack occurred while me and five other workers were scavenging for the carcass of a caterpillar near the edge of the jungle. We had just gotten him secured on top of our backs when the rustling came from the sky. It was a matter of seconds before we spotted the first massive brown meteor. Barreling down from above in a spiraling motion, the brown unidentified flying object plunges in the mud next to the shriveled up caterpillar. We stand frozen in shock, and before we can react, another fat round meteor drops on the dead caterpillar's head then bounces off, crushing the two workers stationed below holding that end up. This blows the rest of us back out from underneath the carcass and we stagger to get back up and over to the body once more. If we had freedom of thought, we would let the caterpillar rot and get the hell back to the colony. However, we only have instinct, which is commanding us to continue with the mission and bring back the food. 

The remaining four of us struggle but hoist the caterpillar onto our backs and proceed back the way we came but are soon met with a wall built from hundreds of the fallen beige round objects. It was only when a giant gray rodent with a huge furry tail jumped down from above, cracked open the nut and started eating it, that we realized it was an earthly organism, not extra-terrestrial. We would never make it over this wall with this much weight on our backs. We would have to walk to the edge of the jungle into the white desert. As soon as one of us dies, the colony sends a recon team to investigate the incident. When multiple casualties happen simultaneously, the scent of pheromones is so strong, the colony sends an army of a few thousand to prepare for a conflict.

Within the hour, our reinforcements arrive to take over the caterpillar carcass, which by this point has a foul smelling green pus oozing from the hole where its head used to be. Its underside has two hard flat shells stuck to it, held onto its body like a sticky tar by the fluid of the workers who met their demise from his bloated corpse. The army begins to march through the white desert. It has a smooth but firm marble texture and every so often the march gets interrupted by a long crack in the surface, causing the line formation to dip then rise back up again. On the fourth canyon, as we are marching back up to the flat part of the barren concrete wasteland, a large shadow begins to tower over the fleet of marching workers. 

The grinding noise of hard plastic rolling over pavement gets immensely louder as the towering figure covers the entire army with darkness. As the sound of screeching brakes comes to a halt, A big metallic sticker on the machine that reads “Big Wheel” begins reflecting a beam of sunlight near us and settles on a group of five or so workers. There isn’t a single foot moving at this point as all eyes are turned on this small crowd, like some spotlight on Broadway. At first,  the hard shell on each of their bodies begins to fade from a light brown to a dark brown, then to a charred black. They crackled like popcorn in an explosive flash. The flame in the matter of seconds melted the bodies down into one gelatin murky puddle. 

The human commandeering the big wheel must have caught the explosion out of the corner of her eye because she stands up from the seat and comes over to rub her finger in the ash of my fallen comrades. After rubbing the cremated remains on her jean shorts, she sprints back to a blurry building in the distance. The stench of pheromones sends the crowd into a frenzy, all instinctual wiring malfunctioning in the wake of chaos.

No order was resolved before I heard the clucking sound of shoes slapping heel to toe on pavement. As the girl comes into focus, I notice a box she’s holding in her hands. She throws the box down on the pavement next to the big wheel and begins to sit and the front reads “Sherlock Holmes Investigative Playset, includes deerstalker hat, clue notepad, aged cherrywood pipe, and magnifying glass”. As she begins to remove the plastic mold from the cardboard box, I see a pink and white emblem on the front of the box read in bold letters “Ages 5+”. If I had thoughts and I could speak I would say “you don’t look a day over four, much less twenty-one for the pipe”.

Although the plastic mold is soft and its contents inside could be easily taken out, the young kid tears it in half, dropping all of the items on the white pavement. There is a pause, then a hand reaches for the magnifying glass.  As she wields the instrument to her side, she positions herself with the sun at her back. That’s when the heat beam began to scorch earth and anything in between. 

The beam gets hotter and hotter, then finds its first 100 or so workers. If you’re lucky, the beam will instantly cauterize off your head or abdomen swiftly, but most self ignited were burned alive to a crisp. The scattering of thousands, running like headless chickens, causes more bodies to burst into flames from close contact.  The bright red fiery snake zigzag’s around the workers with no particular methodology, leaving a path of death only a divine power could be capable of creating. The smell reaches a putrid level that signals all in the area to begin a furious rampage.

As the remaining thousand of us charge towards the shoe, piled over top of one another in a big cluster, a trail of fire follows closely behind. The cluster we form is about a foot away from the feet when the lightning bolt of fire slowly fades away. A thick patch of cumulus clouds have covered the sun, and has given us the perfect window of opportunity to strike. We aren't a very typical family within our species because we have the defensive capabilities to both bite and sting our victim. We worked our way up to her ankles and calves before the shrieking and screaming started. Chomping and chomping, while digging our asses into the skin as deep as possible, we hung on with all of our strength as the girl was flailing and thrashing her legs around before feeling the entire human being tugged. 

An older man is clenching her forearms as he drags the sobbing child across the driveway to the blurry building just outside of our vision. He appears to be in his late 30s’, has a shiny baldspot, and is wearing a tie so loose the knot hangs near his belly button. He notices the terror and agony from pain on his daughter’s face and decides it might be in his best interest to pull her from her hands, so he himself doesn’t have to endure that level of pain. Her legs start to swell with large red welts that resemble tumorous tissue. The back of her knee caps become so engorged that with each leg kick, her range of motion becomes narrower and narrower. 

The dragging stops, as the sound of a flowing stream becomes audible in the distance. A jetstream of cold water from a watering hose runs down from upper legs with so much force and splashback that we start flying large distances onto the desert and grass. Drowning, exhausted, and wounded, I dragged my body for what felt like several hours back to the colony. I find little survivors on my journey, but come across dozens of drowned, crushed, and burned fellow coworkers in the dark of a new moon.

A heinous monstrosity had beaten me back to the colony. The smoke, the smell of kerosene, the small passageways of the colony providing sealed exits while the blaze cooked everything inside like a casserole in the oven. The father found our motherland and unleashed the same pain we had given his daughter. You can’t blame him for scorching earth when he was only acting on instinct, as were we when we feasted on those pair of legs like last supper.  I gaze and soak in all the death of everything I know and have known, disbelief in the total genocide placed in front of me. Even the queen is dead, but unlike Britain, when our queen dies, the rest of the colony perishes along with her. As my days are numbered, I search the dense wild jungle for a new home… a new colony.