New Vegas: Sheason's Story

Chapter 63: ANTS!

And we're back. That was "Who's Got The Action," by the incomparable Dean Martin. It's just about time we got you some news. NCR officials at Camp McCarran were relieved when technical difficulties with its monorail line to the New Vegas Strip proved easy to fix. One anonymous official told us a serious mechanical failure would have been a disaster because of the age of the train and the scarcity of the replacement parts. This segment of the program has been brought to you by the Vikki and Vance Casino: Be our partners in crime. Got a request coming up for "Ain't Misbehavin'," by Fats Waller. Up next, only on Radio New Vegas.

"How're we doing, Boone?" I said into my Pip Boy. Since Boone was wearing his helmet, I'd be able to use my Pip Boy to keep in contact with him and Veronica, so long as I tuned my Pip Boy's radio to the right frequency. Might seem like a bit on the overkill side , but I thought it was a good idea to maintain communication if we were going to divide our strength like this.

"Veronica and I are in position," Boone's voice crackled over the speaker. I turned to Cass.

"You ready?" I asked Cass from over my shoulder. She pulled back the charging handle on her AA-12 with an audible click.

"I was ready t'go five minutes ago, man," Cass smirked.

"Alright, we're going in. Meet you on the inside." I deselected the transmit button on my Pip Boy, and flicked on the light at the business end of my MP5. I kept the light trained on the door as I opened it slowly.

"Still don't see what th' big deal is," Cass spoke up as the two of us entered the darkened room. As soon as Cass shut the door behind her, the darkness grew; it would have been completely dark if not for the light on the end of my gun, and the light spilling off my Pip Boy. "I mean, they're just giant ants."

"They're giant ants that explode. Besides, we go in at both ends and meet in the middle, we can cover more ground and get out quicker." I scanned the room with the light... the interior of this concrete bunker looked almost like an office, with some metal desks and a few filing cabinets. As I looked closer, there were definitely signs of fighting: bullet holes, a few blood stains on the walls and floor, and a doorway at one end of the room was blackened and scarred.

What I didn't see, however, were any giant ants.

"Fuck me, s'dark in here, innit?" Cass grumbled from behind me.

"Well that's why we're here, to get the power back on," I said aiming my flashlight at a spot near the door that caught my eye. It wasn't immediately apparent, but I was pretty sure that I was looking at a patch of dried blood - and drag marks left on the floor from something heavy being carted away.

"I thought we were... " Cass trailed off. I started to say something, but she shushed me. "Y'hear that?"

I listened carefully... and very faintly, I heard a distinct skittering sound of chitin legs moving, somewhere in the distance. I adjusted my grip on the MP5, and headed through the doorway towards the sound.

"Hey, Shea? I uh... gotta question fer ya," Cass said.

"Make it quick, I don't wanna get ambushed by these things," I replied. I looked down and saw a pair of boots, and some legs... that weren't attached to a torso. Based on the dried blood that I saw when I shone the flashlight, and the drag-marks heading deeper into the facility, I'd put caps on one of the ants biting the unlucky Boomer in half, and carrying him away to fuck all knows where. I guess if it left the legs, it wasn't all that hungry. Let's hope it's still full.

The skittering sound in the distance seemed to be getting closer.

"Can Boone'n Veronica hear us through yer Pip Boy?" Cass asked. We turned a corner, and exited onto a catwalk suspended from the ceiling. Down below I could make out the faint shapes of generators, and above us I could see lights that weren't turned on.

"Not unless I hit the button to transmit. Why?" As soon as I asked, I knew the reason and regretted telling her.

"Well... jus' wonderin' if there was a reason y'wanted me t'follow y'down here, is all... Wantin' t'spend more time with th' girl with th' nice backside, were ya?" Immediately, I came to a halt, and turned around to face her. Cass seemed altogether taken aback... or maybe it was a trick of the light from my Pip Boy illuminating everything around me with a green ambient glow, mixing with the white column from my flashlight.

"Are we really going to do this now?" I hissed through my teeth. "I think we have slightly bigger issues to worry about at the moment." I turned around hoping there would be something to shoot. Just my luck, there wasn't anything. Yet. "You already had the shotgun, and Boone and I both have SMG's. This way, both teams have one automatic weapon, and one shotgun. Simple as that. No other reason." I paused. "We'll talk about... everything else once you square shit with Veronica."

The skittering noise got even louder.

"Yeah, well... might jus' end soon'r rather'n later..." Cass sighed. "I think we're gettin' on each others nerves more'n is healthy..."

"Yeah, I saw that spat between the two of you earlier..." A couple of spats, actually. I aimed my flashlight down the catwalk... I still couldn't see much, but I could hear the chittering of ants all around me, and it was making me desperately paranoid.

"That's been goin' on like that, th' last couple've days."

"I guess the honeymoon is over, huh?" I asked. Cass chuckled once under her breath. "That's what you were going for though, right? Didn't you say earlier about how things would just work themselves out when V realized you were a terrible girlfriend?"

"Somethin' like that, but... fuck, man... I don't want her t' hate

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"That's always a risk..." I said more to myself than Cass. "Hold up a sec. I think I see something..." I came to a stop and held out my arm to keep Cass from plowing into the back of me.

"Whoa..." Cass said from behind me. The catwalk came to an abrupt end, with jagged pieces of metal hanging off the end and giving the distinct impression it had been melted. About five or six feet away, I saw where the catwalk should have continued... but in between? Nothing but a very long fall. This was probably what Raquel meant when she said they explode...

"No going that way I guess..." I said. Cass leaned over the edge next to me, looking down... and then hawked up a loogie, spitting down into the darkness.

"Quit screwin' around," I rolled my eyes and grabbed her shoulder, trying to edge her away from the drop. I turned around to head back, and the light from the flashlight illuminated a six-legged mass of brown and red chitin, staring at me with glossy black eyes, and chittering with open pincers.

I'm sure I shouted some kind of expletive, though I don't rightly remember what; as soon as I saw the giant ant standing less than three feet away from me, I started acting on instinct. I remember the muzzle flashes, and watching the ant get torn to shreds. Seems Cass had the same idea, and my ears rang from the massive boom of Cass' equally massive shotgun. The two of us stopped firing as soon as the ant collapsed, its head and abdomen split open to reveal a mass of pulpy yellow meat.

"I say again, we've made contact," I heard Boone's voice over my Pip Boy's speaker as soon as my ears stopped ringing. "So far, they don't explode. Bullets are fine." I could hear various muffled pops and bangs continue off in the distance as soon as Boone finished talking.

"Yeah... got that," I said, hitting the transmit button. "I think we may have woken this place up."

"Understood. See you on the inside." The Pip Boy clicked... and then I kept hearing clicking. I stepped over the ant carcass, and shone my light on the far wall - and on the ceiling. Guards may not look up, but I do. There was a trail of ants walking on the ceiling directly above us and up the wall in a line, climbing up from the depths.

"Son of a bitch!" I yelled, slipping into VATS. It didn't take much to dislodge them from the ceiling. A few short bursts of fire from my MP5, and the three ants clinging to the ceiling lost their grip and fell down into the darkness below. One of them hit the railing on the way down, shaking the whole thing.

"C'mon, we gotta move!" I said, trying to simultaneously use the light to illuminate a path, and shoot the incoming ants. Ahead of us, against one of the walls, was a staircase leading down. With any luck, there wouldn't be any more catwalks, and we could plant our feet on solid ground.

"Keep yer light up, man! Can't see a damn thing!" Cass shouted from behind me; every time I'd shine my light on an ant scaling the wall, there'd be an explosion of noise and the giant ant would split in half in a shower of yellow gore and shattered chitin.

By the time we reached the bottom of the stairs, we must have killed 8 or 9 of the damn things, and when I looked off in the distance, down where the generators were, I saw more on their way. There was something bugging me - no pun intended - about all this, though. These ants were about four feet long, three feet off the ground maybe? Bigger than radroaches, sure, but giants ants that small size were only workers.

We hadn't run into any soldier ants yet. Those suckers were much, much bigger.

Cass was standing over a giant ant that was wounded, but still twitching. One shotgun blast later, and everything fell silent. I scanned the room, looking for more targets. It looked like, for the moment at least, we'd cleared out the ants. I think my eyes must have finally adjusted to the darkness, because I could make out details in the shadows like generators, rubble, and shelves full of ammunition and artillery shells.

Not that I really would've needed to wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness... but since no one else's eyes were cybernetic, I'd opted to keep the nightvision switched off. Besides, one misstep with a flashlight shining in my eyes while the nightvision was on, and I'd be blinded for who knows how long. I might be fine if I switched back to normal vision quick enough, or it might burn out the cybernetics and I'd be left with no sight at all. I wasn't really interested in testing it to see which would happen.

"Boone," I said into my Pip Boy. "Looks like we're clear on this end. Where are you?"

I didn't get a response from my wrist. At that moment, a large metal door built at the top of a small concrete ramp hissed, and folded in on itself into the walls and the floor. Boone and Veronica stepped out, and I think I could just faintly make out the silhouettes of a few dead ant carcasses in the tunnel behind them.

"Right here," Boone said. Even though I couldn't see his face behind his helmet and mask (did those lenses in the gas mask always glow green, or was it just reflecting the light from my Pip Boy?), I was pretty sure he was smirking at me. Or at least the closest Boone's stoic expression could ever manage to a smirk, at any rate.

"You know, I was expecting these ants to put up more of a fight," Veronica said, shotgun resting on her shoulder. "The way Raquel was going on about them, I thought this would be more... I dunno, difficult?"

"Well, she did say they were using flamethrowers," I said, pulling the spent magazine out of my MP5 and loading in a fresh one. "They explode when hit with fire and energy weapons. There are enough of them that I can see how that would pose a problem if you were expecting them to burn or turn to ash like normal."

"I suppose," Veronica shrugged. "So, what now? Didn't Raquel say something about turning the generators back on?"

"We should probably plant the sonic device first," Boone pointed at my back. "I'm sure Fisher's sick of carrying it by now."

"Eh, it's not that bad," I shrugged, tugging on the strap with my free hand and then returning it to the smg's foregrip. "I've had to lug around heavier. We just gotta find something that looks like an ant mount - some way they could've tunneled in."

"Can we jus' plant it'n go?" Cass chimed in. We all turned to face her; she was eyeing the walls suspiciously, almost like she was afraid they were going to cave in at any moment. "I'm startin' t'get a bad feelin' about this place..."

"What, scared of the dark now?" Veronica shook her head with a smirk.

"Hey, fuck you! That's not-"

Cass didn't get a chance to finish her sentence, because the entire room - which, I feel obligated to remind you, was both underground and made out of who knows how many layers of concrete - suddenly groaned and shook tremendously. It was like the room was balanced on stilts, and someone was beating on the supports with hammers. The noise and vibrations echoed through everything, and threatened to shake my teeth out.

We all looked to each other with expressions ranging from confusion to fear when the tremors finally stopped.

"That wasn't just me, right?" I asked, as soon as my voice regained some semblance of control over itself. "Everyone else felt the room shake?"

The room shook again before anyone could respond; this tremor was bigger, and shook the room much more violently this time. Before I knew exactly what was happening, everyone was knocked off balance. I know I got knocked on my ass, at least. There was a hideous noise all around, and I looked up just in time to see the ground heave upward. The concrete crumbled and split apart from underneath, moving like waves rolling on the surface of Lake Mead and ripping to shreds like it was made out of paper.

"Contact!" I heard Boone shout over the noise... followed swiftly by the sounds of his MP5 discharging. I tried to get up on my feet, and saw dozens of feelers and chitinous legs try and push their way up to the surface through the ruined and broken concrete. I tried to take aim and fire, but it was damn difficult. The ground was still shaking, and the pieces of concrete not completely broken were completely sideways. I had my hands full just trying to keep my balance.

"Sheason!" a voice yelled out to my left. I looked up just in time to see Cass lose her balance - and her hat - and start falling into one of the freshly opened cracks in the earth. Time seemed to slow down. She reached out to me with a hand as she fell.

"CASS!" I moved as fast as my legs could carry me. Everything had simply become noise. I reached out to try and grab her but... I wasn't quick enough. My fingers grasped at nothing and closed around air. She tumbled backwards, and her head hit the edge of a piece of broken concrete on the way down. In an instant, she vanished into the darkness.

I didn't hesitate. I didn't think. I didn't have time. I just pushed off from the ground as hard as I could and leapt into the hole feet first. My feet hit an angled tunnel, and I started to slide down, my boots scraping against the loose soil. The tunnel was dark, and the only source of illumination came from the light on the end of my MP5.

I couldn't tell you how long I slid down that dark tunnel, but by the time it spit me out onto firm ground again, the noises from above had stopped.

"Cass!" I shouted, pointing my flashlight into the darkness. "CASS!" I shouted again, louder this time. I couldn't see her... this was taking too long. I flicked off the light on the end of my gun and blinked. The cavern was lit up by a bright green glow, and I could finally see everything in stark detail.

About ten or eleven feet ahead of me, I saw Cass - she was sprawled out on the ground, her AA-12 discarded at her side. She looked unconscious... but she was still moving, being dragged along the ground by her leg. Standing over her was a giant ant, but not the worker ants like we'd been seeing. This ant was big, almost five and half feet off the ground, with a midsection like a tree trunk and spikes growing off its back. Her pant leg was caught in-between its pincers, and the ant was dragging her off into the darkness.

"HEY!" I yelled. "Let her go, you son of a bitch!" It was almost like the ant heard and understood me, because it let go of Cass' leg and stared up at me with huge, black compound eyes. Its antenna twitched, and it let out a hiss from the huge mandibles on the front of its face.

I slipped into VATS and made sure every single one of my shots were aimed square at its head. I don't know how many bullets I had left in the magazine, but I know that by the time I stopped firing, it was completely empty. I don't know if I killed it or just drove it off either, because by the time I started to reload and the ant went missing, I didn't care where it had gone. All I cared was that it wasn't here anymore.

I dropped my weapon as I slid against the ground, rushing to get to her side. I cradled her head and back in my arms, trying to hold her up off the ground.

"Cass! Oh fuck, c'mon Cass! Wake up!" I tried to hold up the back of her head, and slapped her cheek several times. I had to work very hard to ignore the wet feeling against my fingers that was leaking through her hair out the back of her head... "Snap out of it! C'mon, please! Tell me you're okay, give me a sign!"

"Uhhhn..." Cass moaned low, under her breath. I could feel her try and shift, but...

"Shit... shit shit shit... I've gotta get you out of here..." I said, trying to pick her up. I wrapped her arm around my neck, and felt her stir in my grip. "C'mon... get on yer feet... can you move your legs?"

"R'you... askin' me... t'dance?" Cass mumbled under her breath. Well, that's good. If she was coherent enough to crack jokes, she couldn't be hurt too badly. Or maybe she was. It really didn't matter, either way, I had to get her out of here as quickly as possible.

"Sheason!" I heard another voice ahead of me. I looked up and was almost blinded. I blinked, switching my eyes back from nightvision to normal and saw Veronica standing in front of me - and then I saw her rushing over to Cass' side. "Oh my god! Cass! Is she... is she alright?" Veronica held Cass' face in her hands, trying to check if she was still alive.

"She's bleeding, badly. Back of her head," I said, trying to make my way to the tunnel that led back to the surface. Veronica kept pace, helping me carry her. "She might be concussed, going into shock, I dunno. I've gotta get her out of here."

"Here, give her to me," Veronica said. "I brought the rope, I can get her back up easier. You've got to plant the sonic device and kill these damn ants."

"Rope?" I tried to parse that information as I helped Veronica take hold of Cass. "Why the hell would you be carrying rope with you?" Veronica looked at me curiously, her expression only exaggerated by the green light of my Pip Boy.

"Because every wastelander worth her salt knows the most useful thing you can possibly have is a length of rope," She turned away and looked up the hole, toward the surface. "Boone! I found them! C'mon, grab the rope! Help me up!"

"C'mon, Cass..." I reached out and held Cass' face up; her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open limply. "You can't die. Don't you fuckin' die on me." What happened next... I don't know if it really happened, or if my imagination was just getting the better of me again. But Cass cracked open her eyes slightly.

"Not a chance..." she muttered, a smile creeping into the edge of her lips... then she closed her eyes again and her head hung limp.

"Go," I said to Veronica, stepping back. "Get her out of here." Make sure she survives, I didn't need to say. Veronica gave a nod, and it looked like she was about to start climbing out of the tunnels... but then she grabbed the ammo bandolier of shotgun shells draped around Cass' chest, pulled it off, and tossed it my way. I caught it midair almost without thinking.

"Here," Veronica said, wrapping the rope around her wrist and starting to climb, Cass practically draped over her shoulder. "You're gonna need ammo."

As Veronica carried the unconscious Cass back to the surface, I turned back to the tunnel... and that's about when I realized where I was. And what I needed to do. I switched my eyes back to nightvision, grabbed my discarded MP5 with one hand, and Cass' discarded AA-12 with the other.

"Alright, you sons of bitches..." I said aloud, walking deeper into the caves. "Let's dance."

"Fucking hell, it's hot down here..."

I'd been making my way through the tunnels as cautiously as I could. I was scanning the area, keeping my eyes on nightvision; I'd tried looking around with thermal for a bit, but it was so hot down here that everything just looked washed out, and I couldn't see anything. So, for the moment, everything was bathed in green.

But I could hear quite a lot. It sounded like there were ants all around - chittering and skittering and scraping against the rock and soil - but I hadn't seen any ants since the one that tried to drag off Cass. Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, I thought that I'd seen some movement, but... if the ants were around, they weren't coming after me.

"Just get it over with already..." I muttered, adjusting my grip on Cass' AA-12. I was starting to get nervous. I had to find a decent place to drop the sonic device strapped to my back, to make sure it would get all the ants in these tunnels, but... if it went down this far, how much deeper did it go?

That's about when I noticed the tunnels had changed slightly. Before, the tunnels looked like they'd been carved out of the rock and dirt by hundreds of pincers, feelers, and chitinous legs. But the deeper I went, the more the tunnels looked... I don't want to say manufactured, because that seems like the wrong word. Grown, maybe? Regurgitated? Whatever the tunnels were made of now, it wasn't carved out of rock, that much I was sure of.

It certainly didn't feel like rock under my feet. It felt organic. Almost... squishy.

I didn't get all that long to think about it, however, because at that moment I rounded a corner and was met with about a dozen sets of unblinking multi-faceted eyes connected to just as many giant ants.

Suddenly, everything about my sojourn down here made sense: I hadn't seen any ants, because they were all gathering together in a single location to strike me at once. It made a certain amount of sense, really: I remembered once that I'd seen a colony of giant ants all dogpile onto a single deathclaw to bring it down through sheer strength of numbers.

It didn't really register in my head until much, much later that I must have rated just as dangerous as a deathclaw, as far as these ants were concerned.

Strangely enough, when I rounded the corner they didn't immediately attack me. At least, it didn't feel immediate. It felt like I was staring at them for a long, long time. I think we must have caught each other off guard - either that, or my perception of time was somehow skewed and what was, in fact, only a few seconds felt like several hours. It was all very surreal.

"Fellas..." I said aloud.

My entire world erupted. Dozens of mandibles and feelers clicked and hissed in a cacophony of noise, and the mass of chitinuous bodies all moved as one, like a tidal wave of limbs and eyes. And despite the oncoming wall of death screeching its way right for my face... none of them in that first wave even got close.

I held down the trigger on the AA-12, and the explosion from the muzzle was deafening. Flash after massive flash illuminated the chamber and threatened to blind me (so much that I had to switch off my nightvision), and the noise was just exaggerated by the underground chamber until it felt like thunderclaps in my ears. Limbs and chunks of insect flew backwards... and the strange thing was, there was barely any recoil. If I tried to do this with any other shotgun, the kickback would've had the gun pointing at the ceiling after two shots.

By the time the drum magazine had been emptied, there was a pile of smoking insect parts and shredded guts scattered out in a great fan directly in front of me, illuminated only by the glow of my Pip Boy. Beyond the range of the light, I saw more movement... more of the damn insects on their way to try and claw my face off. I didn't bother to reload the drum (since I only had the one magazine anyway), so I dropped the shotgun and pulled out the MP5.

I didn't even really need to turn the light on. The muzzle flashes from the submachine gun barking out round after round into the advancing ants lit up the cavern well enough for me to see where to aim next. It wasn't the sound of thunder any more... it was more like a jackhammer, chipping away at a chunk of concrete. Fitting, given that the strobe light flashing in front of my eyes revealed chunks of chitin flying in every direction, and more following with every burst of gunfire.

By the time my MP5 ran dry, there was only one ant left still advancing on me. It crawled over the corpses of the ants that had tried to rush me, seemingly unaware of the danger. It was coming at me so fast, I didn't have time to reload. So I did the only thing I could think of: I smashed the stock of the smg against the ants head as hard as I could to give me some time. The ant seemed stunned, so I went in for the kill. I dropped the MP5, pulled the combat knife off the sheath against my boot, and jammed it down as hard as I could into the center of its skull. The ant hissed and gurgled, struggling under the knife... and then the chitinous body fell limp, joining the other corpses and chunks of ants that had tried to kill me.

"So..." I said, pulling out the knife and standing up. I was breathing heavily, but trying to steady it. "Anyone else want a go? C'mon, I got enough for all of you fucks..."

A low, deep, terrifying rumble echoed through the chamber.

Okay, perhaps asking out loud was a mistake.

From out of the darkness, a massive armored leg stepped into view. This wasn't a worker ant or a soldier ant... whatever this was, it was so very much bigger. A massive set of mandibles materialized in the air above me as soon as the light hit it; the jaws were bigger than my torso, and must have been at least 10 feet off the ground. It's legs were as thick as my own, and with each ponderous step closer, the whole cavern seemed to shake slightly.

This is not a good place to be. I don't have any ammo for the shotgun; I don't have any ammo for the MP5. I really doubt any of the three pistols on my person would even so much as chip that impossibly thick chitin, and the knife was...

WAIT.

What am I doing? The sonic device! That's the whole reason I'm down here! And if this is where the queen ant was living, then fuck it! Good a place as any!

I had to work quickly. The giant queen ant was advancing slowly, but it was still way too close for comfort. I pulled the sonic device (which just looked like a big box with a speaker on the side) off my back and set it on the ground... after backing up slightly... I opened it up, hoping that I'd be able to make sense of it under duress. Okay, you can do this. Ignore the giant jaws and the sound of clicking mandibles directly overhead... Turn the circular dial on the right, flip the two switches on the left, and hit the red button in the center.

I stepped away as soon as I hit the red button, and... I'll be honest, seeing that giant ant head with the massive mandibles so close to me made my bowels clench uncomfortably. It hissed and growled, with a thick trail of drool dripping down. Honestly, I thought I was done for. It was close enough that I wouldn't be able to run...

But then it paused. It cocked its head slightly, and its feelers went mad, twitching all over the place. The giant queen ant reared back and roared... and it was then that I almost heard a noise that wasn't quite a noise. At first I thought it was like static, but really it's like the sound you hear when there is no noise, but you can still hear something.

The queen started thrashing and howling in pain for a few seconds. There was one last gasp, and then - THUD. It collapsed in a giant mass, shaking the whole cavern with its bulk. When it stopped stirring, I heard echoes from other parts of the cavern: ants howling in pain, snarling and spitting at the sound only they could hear.

At first, I didn't really know what to think. I was still just stunned that it actually worked. Gingerly, I stepped over the myriad of ant corpses, pools of ichor, and shattered chitin, trying to get back to my discarded weapons. I tried to ignore the most massive of corpses lying there next to me... even on its side it was still taller than me, to say nothing of how long it was. It's giant swollen abdomen it had was undoubtedly the most disgusting thing I had ever -

I didn't get a chance to finish that thought. There was a sudden rumble from that massive swollen abdomen I was transfixed by, and before I knew what was happening... it exploded. It was like I was hit by a tidal wave, but... stickier. A veritable and literal flood of goo spread in all directions, hitting me like a sledgehammer to the face. For the second time this hour, I was knocked on my ass. For a few seconds, I couldn't breathe, hear, see, or feel anything except this giant mass of putrid disgusting gelatinous fluid threatening to drown me.

I sat up and tried to wipe away the disgusting fluid away from my eyes, my mouth... but it was a futile attempt, as it was everywhere. The more I tried to use my hands to wipe it away, the worse it seemed to get. I was covered in the crap... and for all I knew, that's exactly what it was. I mean, it did just come out of an ant's backside... augh, fuck. Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it.

"Phut, phut!" I spat at the ground, trying to breathe without getting any of it in my - oh fuck, it got in my mouth! Damnit!

"I... augh... I knew that was too easy..."