I made it to the surface. On my umpteenth journey through the tunnels carrying my heavy load, I successfully evaded all the enforcer ants and their mind-altering sprays of pheromones. I dropped my heavy boulder and surveyed my surroundings. Towering vegetation surrounded me like a tropical jungle. Looking skyward, I could just see a bright disk hanging in the sky over the green canopy.
I followed an endless wall of white-painted concrete. I had emerged from the smallest of cracks in the concrete , so I knew I was close to my home. I couldn't go back the way I had come, however, or I was sure to get blasted back into happy servitude with those damned pheromones the enforcers were so happy to dispense.
I scurried on my six legs along the base of the wall. If I kept near the wall, I wouldn't risk getting lost in the jungle that was my yard. I shouldn't have put off the first mowing of spring. I was still thinking of other household tasks undone when I almost stumbled into the path of a creature as big as a train.
It wore thick armor of overlapping scales in a yellow and black pattern. It made intense speed on not six limbs but multiple pairs of paired limbs that helped it cross the uneven surfaced like one of those Martian probes you see on television. I could not tell what was the head from what was the tail, except it was moving toward me at full speed. I clicked my mandibles in panic and veered to the side, deeper into the stands of towering plants that arose from the earth.
I let the strange creature pass, watching its huge body undulate as it covered ground at such a high speed it was soon out of sight, swallowed by the jungle.
I felt the three legs on my left side suddenly begin to slide as loose sand and pebbles cascaded away from me. I looked down and saw that the loose earth was sliding into a deep pit. The circular pit opened into the ground between two tree-like flowers with enormous yellow heads atop trunk-like stalks that rose some 100 feet or more into the air.
I moved away from the edge of the pit, but my movement seemed to increase the collapse of the fine sand and earth beneath me. I slid over the lip of the pit. Well, I was perfectly good at scrambling through tunnels, so I began climbing. As I climbed, however, the pit continued to collapse. Then I heard an awful rasping sound and turned. At the base of the pit, waiting mercilessly, I spied a horrible armored creature looking like it had stepped out of an sci-fi alien film. Only the front section of its body showed, but what really got my attention were the serrated mandibles it clicked. The fearsome appendages looked twice as long as my tiny ant's body.
I remembered a creature from my boyhood... something known by the absurd name of a "doodlebug." But then I remembered its other name. Ant-lion, one of the most fierce predators in the world of insects.
I clicked my mandibles. "Please! No! I'm not a real ant!"
I continued to slide inexorably toward the waiting jaws.
"Oh shit! Help!"