"Ants were in its mouth, that's why it stopped crying. It's a bad way to go; eaten alive by ants. They smothered the kid, though." Rod concluded his story. I didn't believe him.

"I don't believe you, Rod." I stood up.

"Why not, it is a true story. That is why the ant researcher people are here. They were sent by the Government to check on the ants of the valley. They are not ordinary army ants, you see. They are an unknown species." Rod tried to sound smart. I did not believe he was smart; I told him he wasn't.

"You are no smarter than Fernando. You should go steal pages from the Bibles and make paper boats that sink, like he does, and then he never floats them on water. I do not believe your story." I accused Rod. He got mad at me for saying that.

"What makes you so sure that my story isn't true?" Rod demanded, angrily.

"No mother would throw her baby onto ants to save herself; even if she hated how much it cried. She dropped her baby accidentally, while running away, end of story." I changed the ending of Rod's story. I was confident that I knew what all mothers would do while limping from ants while carrying a screaming infant that was getting heavier with each step. I was sure of my own wisdom on that one.

"People saw her toss her baby to the ants, Cabs. That's really what happened." Henry spoke up, correcting me. I hated it when he did that. We saw Fernando going by with a Bible tucked under his shirt, an entire book. I wondered how many paper boats he had made.

I had to think about anything but the horror of the ants. I led the boys after Fernando and we followed him across the wooden plank where a dock had stood. Now the old shack of a boat house was a castle with a moat. Inside we found his fleet of paper boats. He had made them for years and years, ever since he was a little boy. Normally he only took pages from the hymnals and Bibles and any other books or newspapers. They could float for a short voyage and then sink dramatically. He kept them safe in the boat house and didn't sail them.

"How many boats do you think he has made?" I looked around at all of them. It was like trying to count spilled beans or grass. There were too many to count.

"Hundreds." Rod was trying to estimate.

"No, more like thousands." Henry started guessing.

I nodded. There could be as many as ten thousand paper boats, it was my guess. It was possible that there were that many. Possibly more.

We left Fernando there to work on his boats, tearing out pages from Bibles for their hulls. Instead we went to see what the ant researchers were doing in our village. We found them set up with a field lab, looking at what appeared to be a huge winged wasp.

"It is similar to nomamyrmex; but this is so much more ancient and primitive. Like looking at a living ancestor of ants, some sort of sabertooth ant. Look at the crude wing structure on this scout, the stinger, the oversized mandibles. Its jaws look like forceps. This creature kills larger prey by stinging and opening wounds, and this one has diminutive weapons and almost no extra armor, so that it can fly on these flimsy, disposable wings it has grown." Dr. Jackson said about the ant specimen from the valley. The ants had killed several people: two lumber workers cutting in the primordial rainforest and some villagers upstream from our own village. It seemed like they were attacking now out of nowhere, or perhaps it was because their own hunting grounds were despoiled, that they were suddenly searching for food beyond their valley.

I shuddered in dread. I realized we were not much further if they had gone that far from their home. Then a boat of refugees arrived that evening, telling stories of the whole jungle fleeing from the ants as they advanced like no other kind of ant. These ones seemed vengeful, horrid, cruel. Their rampage was unnaturally scattered, like they were too far from their nests to know their way home. The sight of that empty tractor with the skeletal lumber worker, the ants moving across the hill in the sunset, kept haunting me, as I readied for bed. The jungle sounded wrong.

The sounds were not of midnight battles and calls and crickets and the usual cacophony of the jungle at night. Instead it was rustling and a reversal: where there was silence it was full of noise and when there should be noise there was fearful silence. It is like listening to music in reverse, perhaps, the sound was backwards, terrified. The horrors of the dark jungle were, themselves, horrified of what was coming on the edge of nightmares. Every creature was making a noise of fear. All feared them.

As we slept the edge of nightmares came for us through the greens. They took everything, killed and ate animals and tore apart the plants. The jungle was a churned graveyard of brown wood and gray bones, everything taken by the ants.

Among them was a singular thought, a word of command that they all obeyed. Their language was older than humans, older than the mammals they feasted on and older than the jungles that surrounded them. The valley had always belonged to them, since the Creation of the world. They were as old and relentless and as cruel as time itself. All other ants were just imitations, just mockeries of the mother species. They were the Ancient Ones, the Endless Mass. Their song had played upon the wind since the very beginning and all had feared them.

Until bold tractors and the fools of the world had blundered into their sacred orchards. Furious rage had compelled the Empress of all ants to send her armies. There would be no end to them, they were, after all the Endless Mass. The hunger and rage of the Ancient Ones could not be satisfied. The balance had become chaos and the gates of the Valley Of The Hells were broken open. Their swarm came forth.

I tossed and turned in my bed, sweating and crying, sensing the danger approaching in the darkness. I awoke just before the first glow of dawn, drenched. I had wet my bed as I dreamed of them, knowing them, seeing their eyes as though they towered over me. I could hear the silent thunder of a billion sets of tiny feet and I could feel the vibration they caused, somehow, and evil in the air. There was a smell, like turpentine, wafting on the breeze. The jungle was completely silent and this sound had woken me up from a dead sleep.

I sat perfectly still as the alien silence assaulted my ears. I had never heard the jungle fall silent before. There were moments when it was quieter, rather than louder, but never was there such a silence. My heartbeat picked up and my eyes widened. I felt like the most terrible of all danger loomed. A man set on fire enjoys a better death than someone eaten alive by them.

I knew they had arrived. They had come for us like a thief in the night. They had come all night along the river, following the trail they had marked with their scouts and spies. They knew exactly where we were and they had aimed their warrior horde in our direction. I also knew they would surround us, of course they would surround us. When we woke up it would be to find ourselves covered in them, their bites and stings, unable to escape, enemies on all sides.

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Our entire village. I knew this in my panicked thoughts. I had to scream but I could not draw enough breath to do it. Finally it happened, I heard my piercing scream split the sunrise, as I could no longer deny their creeping presence. I could see their winged scouts confirming the target, hovering all over the village and returning to the bone jungle in the darkness.

"They are here!" I heard one of the ant researchers screaming from their camp in English.

"Impossible! They came at night! Impossible!" Someone was choking in response.

Then there was a different kind of scream. Bloodcurdling and terrorized, the scream was from someone waking up under attack from the ants. Then everyone was awake.

The attack had begun. As soon as the sun was up they became fully active and began to close in on our village. A billion biters and stingers. They looked like a massive black carpet, a shadow moving at an inexorable pace. Knowing they could see me and that they were coming for me terrified me.

As I had thought: we were completely surrounded. The entire village fled to the water and soon all of the boats were gone. Somehow, not everyone escaped.

Fernando, Dr. Jackson, Rod, Henry and myself were all left behind and trapped by the ants.

"I am going to swim for it." Rod told me. He began to undress and Henry kicked off the one shoe he had put on and took off his jeans too. The boys got into the river and tried to swim after the others as they fled. I had refused to take my clothes off in front of the boys, the ants weren't close enough for that.

I was about to follow them into the water when I heard a baby crying in the village. Someone had forgotten their baby, somehow. I sighed in disbelief because there was no way anyone could forget their baby. For one irrational second I considered that it might be a ploy by the ants to lure me closer to the swarm, or perhaps I was hallucinating from the panicked evacuation.

I went back and found the kid on a well made bed of leaves and hay and a blanket. I picked it up and carried it back to the river, just in time to see Fernando and Dr. Jackson heading for the boat house.

I caught up to them and went across before Dr. Jackson. The ants were very close. They were already attacking him. There was no time for him to come across the wooden plank and so he pushed it into the water below and went down to it, trying to escape into the river.

The ants were already down there and covered him as he went into the water. He wasn't safe in the water. The ants had not eaten all of the leaves of the jungle. They had cut them and carried them. All along the edge of the water the ants rode the floating leaves. As he went through them they swarmed on him. Within seconds he was completely covered in them.

They tore away his clothing and his skin right away. They began to open wounds on him and sting him all over. He thrashed and writhed, his eyes gone, his blood seeping from opened veins. They were eating the screaming man alive. It seemed to take a very long time for him to die. Minutes of agony and howling horror and splashing kept on happening. I had to watch all of it, somehow I was fixed on the sight, unable to look away. When it was over it still wasn't over.

After he died his body kept moving, spasms and jerkiness made him twitch. He was partially in the water as they fed, even eating the meat that was submerged. He never stopped moving until he was just bones, the blackened swarm leaving the gray bones where they had eaten Dr. Jackson.

The baby had fallen asleep in my arms. I was not going to throw it to the ants no matter what. I still didn't believe Rod's stupid story, but if I wasn't holding the baby I would have swam to safety. I couldn't believe someone had left the baby behind. It seemed impossible.

I had taken it up into my arms and saved it and now it was mine, as far as I was concerned. I was a virgin-mother. I deserved to be, since I was going to die for my faith. And not a nice death, either.

I realized I was going to have to drown the baby, when the moment came. Given the choice between a death by ants and a death by drowning, I made the choice for it. The baby would die by drowning instead of ants. I calmly calculated this and looked to the water beneath the boat house.

The ants knew we were there and had left behind a mighty detachment to come for us. It was a matter of spite, something they had no dearth of. They were not just insects and they were not a force of nature. Those ants were pure evil.

They brought forth an entire fleet of boats with which to cross our moat to the boat house. The distance from the bank to the pillars of the boat house was not too great for them and their leaves they rode on. They set forward towards us, drifting very slowly on the gentle current.

"They're coming, Fernando, do something!" I looked to the man who was with me in the boat house, forgetting he was a simpleton. To my surprise he smiled as though he was aware of what I was saying and that he knew what to do. Impossible.

There was a light in his eyes, of wisdom. I had tears in my eyes, of terror and despair. I was crying and moaning in horror and he was chuckling like he knew how to make it all go away. For a moment I stared at him, wishing I could believe that Fernando could somehow save me and the baby from the mouths of the Endless Mass.

He went over to his boats and selected one of them and then went to where the ants were floating towards us on their leaves. He laughed and set the flagship of his fleet upon the glassy water. There was a very slight breeze blowing against the current that carried the ants and it had bought us some time. The breeze took the boat across the current, upstream and among the ants.

There, among the ants, the flagship went to battle. The largest of the paper boats, it pushed the leaves out of its way with impunity. The ants went berserk, nearly leaping from their own ships to the deck of the paper flagship. Once they started biting and stinging they forgot they were attacking an object. Soon the flagship was destroyed and it carried all hands to the bottom, drowning them.

The fleet of the ants, green and flat, continued towards us. As they turned from the battle with the flagship they beheld that Fernando was quite busy deploying the rest. Within minutes there were hundreds of paper boats sailing into collisions with the leaf rafts of the ants.

Fernando was a skilled admiral compared to the ants and their clumsy regatta. The paper boats collided with the leaves and drove them back, tipping them, covering them, sinking them beneath the waterlogged pages of Testament. Ants were drowning, most of them sinking as well. Some of the ants were able to trap an air bubble underneath and scramble back onto leaves, learning from the experience. They became the captains of the first leaves to make it past the boats.

Instead of attacking the paper boats the ants began to shove off of them and get around them. They were not halted by hundreds of paper boats. Fernando seemed to relish their defiance. He gestured that there were still many boats left. He had not even dented his collection.

He began to deploy them in handfuls instead of one-at-a-time. A wall of paper boats came crashing into the myrmidon infiltration. The few boats the ants could send through the fleet of destroyers were simply overwhelmed by superior numbers.

The irony that he was beating ants at a numbers game was not lost to Fernando. He pointed at the destruction his boats were causing among the green fleet and he clapped and laughed and made rude raspberries with his lips. The baby was into it too, it thought Fernando was hilarious. I could only sigh, dreading that the ants could not be defeated.

The day wore on and on and it grew hot in the boat house and the baby grew hungry. Fernando never lost his enthusiasm for the naval battle and as the ants developed new tactics, so did he. He was always one step ahead of them. Then, for no apparent reason, the ants simply stopped coming and left.

It was late in the afternoon and I looked out and saw that there were patches of them scattered all over, slowly heading back into the jungle. They were gone, depleted, finished, spent and retired. Some force of nature.

I started to laugh along with the crying baby and Fernando's absurd dance and mockery of the ants. I wasn't laughing at his ridiculous victory dance, I was laughing with him. At that moment I loved his antics.