“Ant Food” meant pre-killed, chopped mealworms. Hawk kept hers in the ant-room, which was set aside specifically for her harmless little hobby. The mealworms grew in large, shoe-box shaped bins of bran meal and were, as usual, a bit unpleasant to look at. All the worm-writhing, she supposed. Dubia roaches were another favorite feeder insect, but Hawk sincerely did not like roaches, even the non-pest kind. The worms? She could live with the worms.

The ants got their own room, because when you actually wanted the ants to survive indoors, they tended to die. Mary Mary Quite Contrary was probably some form of ant. The room was kept warmer than the rest of the house, with heat cords and other toys that made adults (sane adults, Hawk’s mother would joke) roll their eyes. But if other people could cook their dogs’ raw food from scratch daily, Hawk could baby an ant with a heating cord.

Hawk's successful colonies were housed in elaborate, planted terrariums. They even had their own feeding dishes. She topped off their nectar and water dispensers, though they weren't quite "due" yet. Her colony of Campos (Camponautus Pensylvannus, the presumed largest carpenter ant in North America) were especially ravenous. Some of their scouts were already hanging out at the feeding spot. She did her best to put eyes on the Queens in her visible nests—she kept most of her colonies in either test tubes or artificial formicariums, so she had visuals on nearly all of nesting chambers—and then locked up the ant room. Other ant keepers weren't quite as insistent on eyes-on-Queen as Hawk was, but she'd lost more than one promising colony because she wasn't paying close enough attention to them. Her last colony of honeypots was a case in point. Mites. Why did it have to be mites?

Having cared for her pets, Hawk joined Alex for the drive to his new client's house. They lived in Sedona, as did the client; it was the setting for every western that ever imagined it was in Texas. The drive to the client’s home was short. Elizabeth Cummings owned a small ranch style with a very dead lawn. It made an interesting picture. Here was the house, built of brick and painted blue. With latex paint. Multiple layers, even. She wasn't even sure why this horrified her more than the dead lawn. The house now looked like some sort of lozenge. But no one was responsible for the grass. It had at some point been a beautifully tended lawn, because the dead plants had a dense look to them, the product of tending, fertilizer and effort. But it was dead, along with every single plant around this house, and...

"Did they mention anything about her neighbor's garden being poisoned?" Hawk said. Because the line of dying plants terminated about six feet into one neighbor's yard, and a little bit more into the other's. It wholly occupied the fenced in yard around the house.

"No. They didn't mention anything about the lawn, either. Just the back garden." He frowned. Looked at one neighbor, with their half-dead lawn patch, and then the other with the same. He harrumphed, which meant he was admitting his initial idea was wrong. That was one of the things about Alex that Hawk liked the most: he was so easy to read once you got used to the man. She'd never had a problem reading his face once she'd worked out his tells. She didn't know what his initial assessment had been. She was willing to bet it was now "get the old woman out of this house,” because god only knew what the risks were, here.

They got out of the car together, Hawk carrying her Anting bag, though she would never have admitted that it was, indeed, her kit for queen ant hunting. People tended to look at her oddly when she said that out in public. But it held all the things she'd vaguely supposed she needed: test tubes, a stack of deli cups and lids, cotton balls, bottled water, feather-touch forceps and a set of very soft paintbrushes. Looking at the lawn, she was very glad she brought it. The things used to collect ants as pets would be just as useful collecting evidence for testing.

...just...testing evidence of what?

"This is pretty impressive," she said, and bent down to poke at the grass. It was very fragile and nearly translucent, but it crumbled to the touch in an odd way that put Hawk’s teeth on edge.

Alex went up to the house and knocked on the door. He was better at this whole "people" thing. There was a kind of subterfuge to some kind of social interactions—usually the first interactions, where people are still being polite—that Hawk understood but did not enjoy or willingly participate in. It was the kind of thing that inflates one's popular accomplishments over cocktails, while the less-popular jewels in people's lives are kicked off to the side and ignored. Or maybe she was biased because most people didn't care about ants and got a little cross-eyed when she talked about her job. (Reasonable; most people would just call an exterminator if they had ants in their dresser. She put hers there, in test tubes, on purpose) At any rate, she'd rather deal with the lawn than the oddly weepy woman who just answered the door. She was already responding to Alex like a heliotrope to the sun. Everything would be fine.

The grass’s strange death disturbed her. It reminded her a bit of the fried herbs they'd serve at upscale restaurants. Except those leaves would be a strange neon green, their chlorophyll flash-fried into eternity. These were almost like tan-tinted glass. Opaque, but she could see a definition of her fingers through each blade that was more than just shadow and light. But it wasn't glass. It reminded her of burned books, the ghost of pages still there, lingering until the wind began to blow.

Poking through to the soil beneath was easy; the whole mess crisped into fragments at the slightest touch. She already didn't like this. Her first thought on seeing this lawn was some kind of pathogen, either a germ or, more likely, given how it was spreading, a pest like mites (why was it always mites?). But it wasn't mites, because nothing organic would do this to grass. She didn't even think chemicals could do this to grass. This was like...flash fried from heat. Was it all like this?

She walked to the leading edge of death in the neighbor's yard, keeping her eyes down on the ground as she walked. The blunt edges of crispy grass turned to powder beneath her feet, with a sound that was disturbingly like eating. Even calling it a crunch didn't describe it properly. It was, she thought, the auditory equivalent of trying to chew aluminum. Or maybe licking batteries. There was something strangely...acidic about all this, the smell, sound, and feel of it. She found herself thinking about Chernobyl, not the disaster but the more recent show about it, and the line echoed most often during the first episode, do you taste metal? She didn't, but her imagination provided it anyway, echoing it through her entire cranium like the worst kind of hallucination. Do you taste metal? And nothing else lept or flew or crawled away from her footsteps. Just the broken bits of something that, once, had been a blade of grass.

She made it to the line. The terminus. The place where life had ended, and the place where it still existed. She reached it with a sense of glee, the way she imagined a drowning woman would greet the air. Almost there. Almost made it. Almost out.

But the line did not make her feel better. She did not see the signs of this...whatever-it-was. She wasn't sure what she had expected. Some line of bugs, rust colored like April's awful yarn, sucking juice from the flesh of each plant like radioactive vampires? Oh, god, she'd thought the word. Radioactive. Why couldn't that just be the title of an Imagine Dragons song? But no, it was death with silent fingers and the open mouth screams of burn victims, and it would show no signs as it left its tan-shaded traces on the grass.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

It's not fucking radiation, Hawk. It's a suburban yard in Sedona. But she still began to lean low, close to the earth...and then stopped herself. What if this was a gas? Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide gas sometimes burped out of the ground right before a volcanic eruption. Your first warning would be a field of dead cattle, and the only sign would be the tracery of smoke skirting over top of heavy gasses.

If it was gas, it would have filled that house. Alex's client is still alive, or somebody is, because somebody answered the door.

She knelt across the line, one knee in, one knee out, and began poking at the difference between the living and dead grass. And she didn't have to probe at dirt and roots for very long. She found a blade of grass, sitting just beyond the boundary between life and death. There were no crawling things, no strange smells, tastes of metal. No colors out of space, so to speak. But the blade of grass began to crisp. First it gained the hot green translucence she remembered from a leaf of fried sage atop a stupid expensive plate of calamari. But even that bright color bled away. It dissipated like a last breath and left nothing but the tan husk of something that used to be a plant.

She touched it. For one second she appreciated that it was cool to the touch. Then it crumbled into nothing beneath her fingers.

Her heart was in her throat now, and her gut was rancid. She'd named the boogeyman already. She wasn't going to give it more power by admitting that she was afraid. But that was the thing about imaginary monsters. They always have a trick to them, a way to placate them back to sleep. There's a riddle to solve or a ring of gold to find, or a missing scale to fire a black arrow through. Reality does not provide these escapes. The front of its advance is armored without flaw.

She kept walking deeper into the neighbor's living yard, looking down at her feet. As she left the death-line behind her, she noted other signs of vegetable distress only as they diminished. A large number of leaves in various stages of yellowing, browning, that became a smaller and less frightening number of dead leaves, that became only what one would expect from a healthy and living tree. But it wasn't until she was nearly a hundred feet away that she found what she was looking for: the first grasshopper, a yellow-green nymph, probably third or fourth instar, that lept away from her steps.

A hundred feet, she thought. A hundred feet with no life. She was wrong. She had to be wrong. Maybe she'd missed something. Springtails were tiny to the point of invisibility. Maybe she missed one or two or two hundred of the tiny things walking over. A hundred feet with absolutely nothing living in it...that was a horrible idea.

"Hawk!" Alex shouted to her. She turned. He stood in front of the blue brick house, holding the storm door open as a pair of women, one elderly, one Hawk's age, carried something rather heavy in a sling made of blankets. And she thought, Don't be the client, and don't be dead, and waved to her husband.

"Alex. I want you to walk to me." She said.

"What?!" He looked at her like she'd gone mad.

"Come to me. And I want you to tell me when you start seeing bugs."

"What?" he said.

"Bugs. Stop when you see any bugs."

He looked at the women, and motioned to his car. And he walked towards her, looking down at his feet. She knew when he started to see what she'd seen, when the dots started to connect like a reaction gone critical. His shoulders went from his confused hunch to something more focused, and he began intently scanning layers of grass for the cloud of insects that should be escaping his lumbering footfall. Gnats and mosquitoes and no-see-ums gusting away like directed dust motes. Grasshoppers and katydids in various stages of growth winging and hopping away with a buzz. Crickets that silenced their song when you were near. By the time he crossed the death-line—was she fooling herself, insisting that it was in the same place? Or had it really advanced almost an inch since she started looking?—he was looking, not at the ground but up in the air. And he was right there, too. The air was as quiet as the ground.

She didn't have to tell him anything. He'd already seen it. Everything around his client's house was dead. Everything.

"I'm going to take some samples of the dirt and the grass and send them to..." she trailed off at his steady, urgent glare. "What?"

"The daughter has been frantic for a week because her mother is in serious decline. She's gotten a lot worse since we spoke on the phone, this is barely the same woman I spoke to. Her dog is almost dead. It's a fifteen year old basset hound, they thought he was just old, but he's crashing. We're taking him to an emergency vet."

"You need to take both those women to an emergency room. For people. Do you think the dog will make it?"

"I think it was the only way to get the old woman in the car. Grab your samples. I'm going to tell the neighbors that it might be smart for them to get their pets and get out." Alex said.

Hawk dropped to her knees and opened her kit with shaking hands. Her whole body shivered with a cellular scream. Get out. Run. Flee the numinous. Flee the Black Death. She kept the tremors down as she crunched dead blades of grass into a vial. Scooped up dirt. She wished she had time to overturn rocks in this still-unseen woman's garden, to dig through loam for earthworm and springtail and round isopods in defensive curl. She settled for a few test tubes of dirt, a deli container of grass, and...and...

The thump came nearby. A low ball of sweet grass still rustled with the passage...or rather, with the impact, because there came another. Even closer to where Hawk was sitting. She stood and went towards the object that lay quivering on the earth.

It was a squirrel, and at first Hawk thought it was gray. Then she realized that was its fur, bleaching to the same fragile, translucent state as the grass. As Hawk watched, the poor, dying thing turned its face up to her and looked up with weeping and clouded eyes. It sniffed, and split the stiffening skin of its nose. Blood poured for a few brief seconds, before death made any questions academic.

There's your sample, sunshine. She gagged, briefly...and then steeled herself. She thought, again, about Chernobyl. This time it was about the men who looked into the reactor. It was cracked open and belching smoke and they still had to look down into its glowing bowels. They died, of course. They all died. But their deaths gave their words power. A dying man with cracked and bleeding lips whispered, we did everything right, and a powerful world that wanted to bury the truth found that it could not. In part because of dying men who were seen by too many people. There were too many voices willing to say, I saw this. There were too many witnesses to make the story die. And a horrible part of this was the dying men themselves. The first ones would not have known what they were about to see. Some of them did. Their actions would be their ending. And they did it anyway.

Hawk moved knowing that she was being an insanely hysterical human. She moved, knowing that she would be laughing at her own paranoia later. That it would be a story to tell over cocktails at some educational institution at a party that would be impossible, if her suspicions were true. Look at how silly the human mind is, the height of conclusions it can jump to. Look at the academic fool, jumping to the tune of paper strings. How silly she wanted to be, a week from now. Embarrassment was now a balm.

And she moved knowing that there was a small chance she was right, and that if she was, acting now might be the difference between having a bad day tomorrow, or not having a tomorrow at all.

And that was her prayer to the insensate universe, as she reached down, bare-handed, and picked up the body of the dead squirrel. It was brittle and light, like picking up the ashes of leaves. It still had a soft, meaty core, but she still had to move as gently as possible to avoid breaking the skin. She placed it carefully inside her bag of cotton balls so that it would be protected, somewhat, and lifted the bag the way one would carry a child.

Please, let this be insanity...or let this be worth it.

And then she had to move.

Please.

Let this be worth it.