Sadie awoke to splintered consciousness, her nerves frayed. The guttural snarl of a disposal’s motor thrummed in her ears, vibrating her molars. It caused enough of a disturbance to force her to lift her head slightly.

  She tilted her head, trying to define what weighed on her. A tide of writhing white larvae rose and fell all over Sadie's body, their translucent flesh rippling like a thousand popped blisters. Their toothless gums fastened on her dark clothing with leech-like persistence, sucking on her legs through her thick school stockings.

  Her clothes were turned into a sodden and heavy burial shroud as they tried to chew through her livid chrysalis, disintegrating her wear one molecule at a time. They certainly had their work cut out for them.

  "Not the worst morning I’ve had," thought Sadie, as she laid her head back into a pillow of moldering takeout boxes. She felt detached from the nuisance. The stench of rotted waste coiled around her delicate nostrils. But the reason for her frown was incongruent with her current state. She tried to remember what had happened to her.

  Fragments of memory returned slowly. The giant fluttering wings of a flouncing insect. Pubescent hands violating her space and privacy. She remembered stumbling to escape, climbing into a mad body of students reaching for her life. Cold, cracking fingers digging into her veiny neck. A sudden wave of dizziness—then oblivion.

  She felt her spirit hovering above her body, attached solely by a thick astral line. But her soul was too weary to break free.

  "They must have presumed I'm dead. But I guess dying requires too much effort."

  She brooded over her situation as she positioned her arm at the back of her head. The grubs took the opportunity to swarm her exposed sides. She bucked, sending a clump splatting against the compactor wall.

  With another jolt of her shoulder, she rid herself of some of the viscous larvae guzzling around her arm. Then she looked around her.

  The grinding blades of the infernal machines surrounding her worked in monotony. Within its steaming steel belly, plastics and debris deformed and twisted, releasing noxious fumes. A multitude of unhatched eggs were plastered all over the moving cranes. Some fell in the juncture with each lift and drop, yet the disposal churned on—indifferent to these ant sacs—grinding them down into pink pulp to nurture the born larvae.

  "A garbage disposal? That's her colony? If that's not ominous enough of things to come under her rule..." She stood up unhurriedly and found that the blobs were unhappy with her decision to move about. They crawled toward her with a purposeless hunger, instincts driving them to try consuming whatever living organism they could find.

  She’d seen that vacant hunger before—in the boys who’d cornered her at recess, all spit-slick grins and grabbing hands. Her former "classmates."

  She kicked one of the blobs, sending it squirming in the air. Sadie observed as it smashed on a pole and quivered, its squishy organs pulsating with profound obscenity.

  "I'd be damned if I serve as food for her hideous children. Let them return to the hole they had crawled out of."

  She punted another grub. It burst against a piston, innards glistening like snot. After a few minutes, Sadie laughed, satisfied—before feeling down again.

  Sadie was always slow to react. Her emotional growth was stunted by a turbulent childhood. But she was secretly angered by their violation. She had never felt that helpless in her life. A terrible fancy possessed her—that they might spread from their hellhole in a ravenous hunt for flesh. That the entire neighborhood could become infected by their loathsome presence.

  They had two arms and two legs, and even the weakest among them seemed able to overpower her. And they already form half of society.

  Rage, slow and serious, oozed through her. This was seventh-grade locker rooms again—leering whispers of boys and pulled hair. But now? Now they’d spread as some hive mind until the whole town rotted, and even her bedroom wouldn’t be safe.

  "No one will protect me. No one can. I must protect myself," she incanted.

  "My willingness to firebomb these parasites is my weapon. I will never let them touch me again."

  Her hand was trembling with vengeance. For the image of those hideous pupils was not easily banished from her mind.

  She cobbled together a Molotov. Picking up a half-empty vodka bottle from among the junk, she filled it with filthy tissues pilfered from a janitor’s cart, then used the Zippo she had in her pocket to light it up. She flung it in the midst of the gruesome horde of blobs, witnessing the faces of her attackers in the flames.

  For a heartbeat, the larvae took on every face that had ever haunted her—Chris’s smug grin, Antonella’s razor-sharp nails, every leering mouth that had ever insulted her. And then… Stuart?

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  She blinked, staring deeper into the fire. Yes. It was Stuart—cowering behind a piston, eyes flicking toward her, frozen in place.

  Rage flooded her veins. She moved slowly towards him but in her mind, she was sprinting.

  “Sadie, wait—I can explain—”

  Before he could finish, a wad of phlegm-laced spit struck him square on the left lens of his glasses, half-blinding him.

  “Screw youuuu!” Sadie shrieked, her voice cracking thirty seconds after his pitiful attempt at damage control. She was already in his face, arm raised, palm wide open.

  And then—painfully, humiliatingly slow—Stuart watched the arc of her slap unfold in what felt like slow motion. He couldn’t tell if she was actually moving that slowly, or if his mind was dragging out the moment in terror.

  Slap.

  His head snapped sideways. His cheek flushed red. He let out a high-pitched nasal scream, like a motorcycle choking on a highway.

  “Sadie, please!” he whimpered, throwing up his arms to shield his face. “I was under her spell! I wasn’t in my right mind! You can’t blame me!”

  “I will kill you,” Sadie growled, savoring every syllable like venom on her tongue.

  “But I’m free now! She rejected me! Tossed me aside like garbage—just like you! She and the other guys she picked… they flew off and disappeared into the clouds!”

  His face angered Sadie, making her feel sick.

  It wasn’t his bad breath or his social awkwardness, but his weakness of personality. The way he clung to those who mocked him, who never cared. It was that he hurt others just to be accepted—and now, having been discarded himself, he had the audacity to ask for pity.

  “You’re pathetic,” Sadie said coldly. “Get out of my face before I rip yours off.”

  He didn’t argue. He scrambled away, legs flailing awkwardly—running like a headless chicken, just like he always had.

  Once calmed down, Sadie took hold of her sling backpack and wore it crossbody. She found the missing pair of her flats and slid her moistened foot into its opening. Then she started walking home in a daze of ever-growing weariness, her saliva-drenched shirt weighing on her back as if a laughing Buddha was perched atop her pronounced shoulder blades.

  Yet as she rounded the corner, Cynthia suddenly materialized—vigorous, heavenly-drawn Cynthia, who thinks the world revolves around her.

  All honey-blonde highlights and peacoat pristine, despite the apocalypse. In her grip: Chanel No. 5 glinted.

  "Sadie, you're alive?" she asked, her voice low but intent.

  "Even in the most perilous of times, vanity prevails with you. Or were you planning to embalm my corpse with oils and perfumes?"

  Cynthia was confused by her inquiry and eyed her warily. Sadie had always seemed so colorless—a girl who lived only in the margins. Yet now there was a strange light in her eyes.

  Cynthia finally realized she was referring to the bottles in her hand.

  "Don't be silly, Sadie. This is how we will defeat the Ant Queen!"

  Sadie laughed at her response. "Will you now?"

  "Yes! It was your own idea to begin with! Have you lost your memory?" insisted Cynthia. "In the time that followed your unconsciousness, Miss Antonella held court over the city—sending out pheromonal signals that attracted males from miles around. Even I'm not capable of such a feat."

  Sadie raised an eyebrow, but Cynthia continued before being interrupted.

  "A chosen few were accepted into her hive, emerging later as transformed beings. Their relatives looked on in horror, powerless to stop the strange goings-on. Attempts to reason with or dissuade the enraptured boys failed. They seem to exist in a state beyond reason now."

  "As if they've ever had the capability of reasoning to begin with."

  "I think often of the boys from our school. They're still under Miss Antonella's spell. Do you think they are aware in their strange new existence? Or slaves to instincts beyond their control?"

  "It doesn't matter," Sadie responded as she looked away.

  "Have some empathy! Miss Antonella and Chris—they’ve... they engaged in a nuptial flight."

  "And?"

  "I thought you were smart in science, at least. Don’t you know what Ant Queens do after mating?"

  Sadie half-closed her eyes slowly when the realization dawned on her. Her dry lips curled, creeping into an unsettling smile that seemed to slowly stretch across her face—revealing an unusual satisfaction at the idea.

  She remembered their science class experiment. After consummation, the elegance of the Queen dissolved, revealing a primal hunger hidden within her charm. A haunting fierceness that belied the pheromonal attraction.

  With a sudden, swift movement of her snapping jaws, the queen ensnared her unsuspecting mate. The once-daring male ant trembled in the face of death, overpowered by the queen's relentless grip. Struggling against his imminent demise, his resistance faltered—weakened with each passing moment. The price exacted for transient pleasure was death.

  With the final morsel consumed, the queen's ravenous hunger subsided—replaced by a profound emptiness in the glass tank. An emptiness she wished to fill with her brood. She laid her sacs. Her gaze of a dozen lenses now distant and detached—as if she were fully committed to an unavoidable statement.

  Sadie also remembered distinctly that Chris did not attend that period.

  "Sadie, your silence is freaking me out. Will you join us in the restaurant's basement or not?"

  Sadie was not listening to Cynthia's frantic urging. But she assumed it was the location where they hoped to plan their operations to stop Miss Antonella from beheading, then devouring, her beloved Chris.

  "Lead the way," she finally said. Curious what they were planning, she wanted to hear more about how Chris was about to be devoured alive after being promised sex.

  The antique brown leather booths in the back of Lipetri's Italian restaurant seemed suspended in time. Witnesses to mafia deals and intense negotiations—the booths had seen it all since the place first opened in the 1920s.

  It was hardly a secretive location, but the evening's lack of light and the silent atmosphere gave it a sterling quality for important conversations.

  It was in one of these illustrious underground booths that Cynthia and Sadie met their three classmates. Two of them were sharing a plate of spaghetti carbonara, dotted with bits of bacon and cheese. The third girl, however, was seemingly irritated at Cynthia for keeping them waiting.

  Sadie started wondering what strangeness she had blundered into now. Cynthia arranged the bottles on the counter with careful attention. The perfume bottles cast multi-colored shadows across the grimy tile, illuminated by the faint glow of tawdry brass lamps.