him, and as the last of them headed for slumber, Andy reached out and grabbed him.
“What was that?”
The man looked Andy in the eye and grinned. “The tarantulas exploded. No problem.”
***
Andy didn’t get any sleep after that.
Tarzan had returned to rule his dreams, but he was no longer the King of the Jungle. Where he had once strutted across the great branches of the forest’s ancient trees, now he skulked from shadow to shadow. It wasn’t the Leopard Men or the Ant Men that he feared, nor was it the Golden Lions or the Snake People that sent his heart racing. He was afraid of what he couldn’t see, what he couldn’t know.
A roar came from somewhere in the forest.
Tarzan crouched and peered sideways.
What was it that set him so on edge?
He squatted there for a time. This time when he moved, he was more like a monkey than a great ape.
***
“What the hell did he mean when he said ‘the tarantulas exploded’?”
Leon Batista looked at him and spit tobacco juice along the ground. “Where you from you don’t know tarantulas?”
“Upstate New York.”
“They no have tarantulas there?”
Andy shook his head.
Leon spit again. He said something in Spanish that was lost to the constant desert breeze.
Andy paused from checking the ignition line of the mine. He’d been to thirty-seven countries and forty states. He’d even been to Antarctica when he’d had to do an expose on penguin rustling by Japanese fishermen. He felt the need to demonstrate his worldliness to Leon, but forced himself to hold back. He was supposed to keep his head down and his identity secret. As far as anyone was concerned, he was an Army reservist who’d survived Iraq, gotten into a fight with an off-duty cop in Phoenix, and wanted something more than a regular nine to five. He was a convenience store clerk with saving-the-world dreams.
“Tarantulas? You know big fucking spiders?” Batista asked as if Andy were a child. He waggled the fingers of both hands like spider legs.
“Yeah. I’ve seen them.” Andy mimicked, “Big fucking spiders.”
Batista glared at him for a moment, then continued. “There are these wasps. They lay their eggs in the tarantulas. Tarantulas no move anymore, then one day poof! Tarantula explodes with baby wasps.”
Andy felt his grin slip into something akin to stupefaction. There was a wasp that laid its eggs in a tarantula? He felt his mouth moving before he could stop it. “What are these wasps called?”
Batista rolled his eyes. “Maricone. Where the fuck you been? These are tarantula wasps. Sometimes call them tarantula hawks.” Leon made flying gestures with his arms. “Big fucking spiders. Big fucking wasps.”
“Yeah,” Andy repeated, “Big fucking wasps. And last night? Were those tarantula hawks?”
Leon Batista laughed and shook his head. He choked on a mouthful of tobacco juice and convulsed before he was able to spit it out.
“Last night wasps? Those were Rift wasps. Those were gigantesco. Like airplanes, no? You get bit by them, not like the real ones. You’ll walk around thinking you okay, then your stomach gets bigger and bigger and—”
Andy nodded. So if the wasps were increased in size because of the Rift, then he could only imagine how large the tarantulas had to be. He took one more look at Batista who seemed to be reading his thoughts.
“Big fucking spiders.” The man nodded and waggled his arms. “Bigger than me. Bigger than you. Like Cadillac.”
Andy closed his eyes.
Spiders the size of Cadillacs.
Swell.
***
A sort of manic normalcy prevailed after that, if you can call regular sorties of giant tarantula wasps into the night sky normal. For someplace like Upstate New York, it would have raised an eyebrow. But for those around the Rift, a few wasps here and there were the least of their worries.
Every other night the wasps would escape containment and try and fight their way to freedom. And every other night, the combined might of the Rift battalion would hurl them back whence they came. During the battles, mine tenders like Batista and Andy would ensconce themselves in the emergency bunker, well away from the action. The first night they’d been too afraid to leave their sleeping bunkers. That one transgression was allowed. But since then, they’d always hot-footed it to the emergency bunker. It was bigger anyway. They quickly became inured to the shrieks and sounds of combat. Great games of spades, old Doug Clegg novels and even sleep took up their nights as they waited for the battalion’s inevitable victory.
Then one day visitors