Ah, the 1950s were great for movies weren't they? Especially movies where nuclear radiation was barely understood, but the imagination of what it did fuel the imagination. Ever since I watched the 1954 classic horror/sci-fi movie THEM! where ordinary ants were exposed to atomic radiation, I wondered what had happened to the little girl who was in shock after seeing her family killed by giant ants, so I decided to write my own ideas.
Enjoy, and please tell me what you think!
The Girl who Survived THEM!
As she studied the giant form of the ant in front of her in one of the museums of LA, Amanda couldn't help but shudder as she remembered the nightmare that she had tried very, very hard to forget. But try as she might, she could still remember the scent of formic acid, and remember that terrible high-pitched chirping of the ants as they spoke to one another while they crashed into the wall of the trailer using their mandibles to rip and tear the outer wall as if they were matchsticks.
She didn't know what was making her torture herself in this manner, but she had seen exhibits like this before; some of them were large enough to show life-sized models of the ant colony in the New Mexican desert derived from the photographs Dr Patricia Medford had taken when she and Sgt. Ben Peterson, one of the police officers to find her in the desert when she had managed to survive the savage attack on her family trailer, and FBI agent Robert Graham who'd gone down into the nest to find out if any of the ants had survived, but also to find out if any new queens had managed to flee the nest before it was gassed.
The ant was a reconstruction, of course - it was based on the photographs and of the studies performed on dead ants that had been killed some nineteen years ago when the last three Ant Queens were destroyed in the sewer drains of Los Angeles, but the girl looking up at the model before it could tell it was a fake despite the artificial tufts around the plastic carapace.
Oh, there were real and preserved ant corpses scattered in museums across the country - they'd been recovered from the nests in Los Angeles and in New Mexico, but you were more likely to encounter one of these reconstructions because many of the ants were probably being cut up or had been cut up and were now in some archive or something like that.
But Amanda Ellinson knew it wasn't real because the familiar scent of formic acid was not present. The ant had no smell.
Amanda sighed as she looked at the ant, her mind churning with the memories.
She didn't like the ants displayed like this, it was bad enough seeing their preserved corpses, the ones that had been pulled from the storm drains or the nest in New Mexico - she could understand the thought process behind them; many people, especially in cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago hadn't had to deal with the terror created by these things when they emerged in New Mexico all those years ago, and while the later generations themselves hadn't experienced that time where humanity's very existence was on the cusp of being truly threatened by another race completely different from humans themselves, they would never have to deal with what she had had to deal with.
Amanda remembered those traumatic weeks when she had been found in the desert - it was unbelievable that a threat of the scale faced nineteen years ago began with, what to the New Mexico police, a series of unexplained disappearances and events - once she had been forced out of her catatonic state when Dr Medford had exposed her to the fumes of formic acid.
Amanda made a face as she remembered coming out of her catatonic state; she had been so stunned and petrified by the savagery of the attack on her family that she had felt as though she were walking around in a dream, but while Medford's method of getting her out was somewhat brutal, she was grateful to him that she had been snapped out of it because Amanda had reached the point where she hadn't wanted to come back to the real world.
She had screamed "THEM! THEM! THEM!" until she had found herself in the arms of several people, but she had bene too terrified and caught up in her terror she hadn't been able to concentrate on who was around her, and then she had been whisked away to grow up with her aunt, and she had been taken to a number of psychiatrists when her nightmares had grown out of control and virtually overwhelmed her. She had been so inconsolable she had barely been aware of the incident ('battle' was too dramatic in her mind) in L.A, but a regimen of two years of therapy and sessions with the child psychologist had helped her heal, though the scars around her mind would probably never heal.
Amanda thought more about her healing process. It had been hard at first, but she had managed to get in touch with Dr Medford before his death; he had been part of a scientific unit that had been set up to study the mutation of the ants, and to discover ways of detecting and fighting another outbreak in case it appeared.
Medford had worked long and hard to make the world realise the testing of atomic weapons was a bad idea. Some of it was not in vain, but while many of the more sensible countries had accepted Medford's work, some of the rest had carried on with their 'research.'
It was a slippery slope, so many people had been killed by the ants when they had emerged from New Mexico. Every single time there was a nuclear test, the newspapers, radio, and TV stations reminded the world again and again of the way the ants had appeared - Amanda wished they didn't, it was bad enough there were exhibits like this one, but she could understand why the media were doing it; they wanted to scare people with the memories of what had happened years ago, tell them that a new terror was just around the corner, and she hated them for it.
Looking at the reconstructed ant in front of her, Amanda was about to walk away and carry on looking through the exhibit - it had taken years of her life before she reached the point where she could come into a museum and see an exhibit like this without throwing a fit, but that didn't mean she had to like them - when she sensed someone near her, and she turned to find herself looking at a teenage boy.
"Hard to believe these things existed," he commented.
Amanda frowned as she listened to his accent. It sounded english, but she couldn't be sure.
"They did exist," she said shortly, hoping he didn't push the matter. She was about to walk off but the boy stopped her.
"Were you around then?"
Amanda ground her teeth together, disgusted by the both's lack of tact. "I was," her voice was grim, but anticipating the boy's next insensitive question, "do you want me to tell you what happened, how I was one of the first victims of Them?"
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"Mama and papa had put me and my brother to bed when they attacked. Mama had just finished reading us a bedtime story, while papa was reading a newspaper; he was a Special Agent with the FBI, and he deserved a great vacation. We had already visited other parts of the country, spending time with one another, going to see different movies while spending time camping so we could enjoy the scenery and wide open spaces.
"I was drifting in and out of sleep, but I could hear my parents speaking softly together though I couldn't tell what they were saying. It doesn't matter anymore. The window of the trailer room I shared with my brother was open, so we could hear the sounds from the outside; we had heard the howls of coyotes, the roars of mountain lions, and the sounds of small sandstorms…. but the sounds that we heard that night…..they're gonna haunt me for the rest of my life.
"It was a chittering, high-pitched sound, and it echoed through the air. Did you know the sound itself could be like a gentle whistle through the air, or if you're close to it, the sound is more urgent, and it sounds as rapid chittering like machine gun fire? It started out silent, distant, but it was loud enough for my parents to take notice. My dad listened to the sound as it drew closer. I got out of bed, followed closely by my brother.
'Daddy,' I said, my voice hitching in my throat as I was forced to recall the attack which has been sitting in my worst nightmares since I was a little girl, the same nightmare that had seen me go through years of treatment and therapy to get over, though I knew it was never going to happen. 'What's going on?'
"My daddy was standing by the door, looking out into the darkness, trying to see what was out there. He didn't look at me even as I asked my question, and our mum came over to me and my brother, sending a look at daddy. She tried to look reassuring, but I could see she was just as worried as we all were. Then daddy screamed, "There's something….moving out there, something…something big….. Oh my god! Quick-!"
"But whatever my dad was going to say was drowned out by the sound of my mother screaming when a massive black thing went through the door. I screamed in terror myself when a massive black head with cold, sightless eyes appeared in the doorway, knocking my parents off balance shoved its way inside the trailer, while the wall shook as it was torn as the mandibles of the ant tore their way through before massive chunks of the trailer were torn away with a sound like someone munching on a spoonful of cornflakes in the morning.
"I screamed as daddy found his gun, and started firing at the massive creatures, mama was yelling "Kill them! Kill them!" but he wasn't having much luck. It would be years before I realised that daddy had been firing at the wrong parts of the ant's bodies. He should have been shooting their antenna's but he wasn't. The sound of my mother and I screaming, mixed with the sounds of the ants as they communicated with one another, and the sounds of daddy's gun.
"When the entire wall was chewed off - no, pulled off, mamma and I screeched in fright as the ants started swarming into the trailer. Daddy realised he couldn't do anything else, so he decided to get us out of the trailer to safety, but it was hopeless. They got mamma first; I didn't see it happen, it was too dark, and the lighting in the trailer was useless. I heard her scream in pain and panic as the ants lifted her and carried her off. Would you want the same thing to happen to your mother? Would you?"
"Daddy fired more rounds, but he was then captured and I remember him screaming as one of the ants had him in its mandibles, and I could still hear him as his waist was crushed, but then everything went blank. I don't remember what happened, or how I managed to escape from the trailer, but somehow I managed to escape without the ants chasing after me. I was found in the desert the next day by two police officers who'd been called in to investigate a disturbance involving the trailer, I never caught the details and they don't really matter now, do they?"
"I was in a catatonic state, and wandered around the desert, but I felt it was all some terrible dream. I came out of the state when I had the smell of formic acid shoved up my nose. I jumped out of my chair, screaming "Them!" and I was taken in by my aunt."
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Amanda glared at the boy holding onto her. "Now you know, I survived Them. They killed my family, and my surviving relatives and I watched as the army destroyed the rest of them. They did exist, they existed because of our stupidity and carelessness."
The boy had been rendered speechless by her story, and his dumbfounded surprise gave Amanda the means to yank her arm away from his grasp and she hurried away. He never called her back but it was doubtful she would have gone back to him even if he had tried.
Amanda had to get out of there, quickly as the memories she had worked so very long and so very hard to bury surfaced. But she knew that it was futile; tonight she would be having nightmares of enormous black segmented bodies, clicking mandibles, and the stink of formic acid. She would be having nightmares of Them!
The end.