Nichang looked over the devastation, the fallen in his ranks, the furry bodies of dead Voles spread across the jungle like discarded trash. His soldiers had succeeded in protecting the innocent; none of the females, children, or elderly had perished. But as he surveyed the casualties, he couldn’t overlook the tremendous cost the battle had exacted.
One of the Ice Beetle children, a female, had found a bottle, a relic of her former home. She raised it to her lips, trying to draw some form of sustenance from it. But the bottle was empty. Others meandered listlessly, walking in circles, shocked with defeat. Most just stared straight forward, sitting on rocks or reclining against trees.
“Attention please,” Nichang shouted from where he stood on a knoll opposite the ice cavern entrance. Beetles turned their boulder frames to look up at their military commander. Nichang, injured in several places from the fighting, stood with as much poise as he could manage.
“Do not be disheartened,” Nichang said. In his mind, he fumbled for the right words to say in the face of such annihilation. “Although the cost has been great, we stand victorious today against the Voles. Hundreds of their numbers lie all around us, stinking and dead, a testament of the steel within us.”
Another tunnel collapsed. A rumbling clatter came from the ice cavern entrance.
Nichang went on: “Some have sacrificed their lives. Our home stands in ruin due to a new weapon. We are hungry. We are tired. But today I ask you to remember who you are. You come from a divine order. You are sons and daughters of Tyche the God of the Ice. Perhaps it is time for us, as an insect colony, to be tried. Perhaps it is time for us to taste the bitter herb of humility. Perhaps Tyche the God of Ice has decided to test our mettle. To that I say we will walk up. We will rise to the violence of our enemies. We will rise to the overland challenges that we now face. We will rise and become greater.”
Many of the Ice Beetles nodded in solidarity.
“Today is not our first day of defeat,” Nichang continued. “And today is not the last day we will find ourselves licking our wounds. But there is another thing about today, the most important thing, in fact. Today is the day that the Ice Beetles prove their strength.”
Someone in the crowd shouted, a non-verbal roar of agreement. Others joined the shout. Someone else sawed his spicules together, creating a high pitched, grinding whir. More joined in. Soon, hundreds of Ice Beetles showed their unification with a mighty accord of sound that could be heard from miles away.
Nichang looked on in wonder at his people, folding his top pair of rakes over his chest. His heart told him that there was no way a species such as theirs could ever taste defeat, not truly. But his head said something else. They had to find cover soon. They had to get underground. The Voles would be back. And when they came, they would bring hell with them.
Chapter 6
Meanwhile, Somewhere on Earth...
Shana Perkinson, with her eyes magnified by a pair of far-sighted spectacles, looked down her nose at Twana as she hung her backpack in her locker.
“What’s that smell?” Shana asked, wincing.
Twana put a hand over the lipstick case pennant under her shirt and forced a smile. “What smell?”
“You smell like a dead mouse or something.”
“Keep your nose out of my business,” Twana said. She gathered up her science books and headed to class.
It was frog day. Mr. Murphy wore a white lab-coat. He stood at the front of the science room, a long wooden pointer in one hand. As he lectured, he aimed the pointer at a set of anatomical diagrams fixed with magnets to a white-board at the front of the class. Earlier in the semester, Mr. Murphy had held up one of the hundred or so bottles he kept on the shelves in the back room, a small glass jar filled with formaldehyde and a dead frog. “If you are really good,” Mr. Murphy had said, “I will let you cut one of these open some day.” Most of the kids had winced at the promise. Some of them had smiled, practically rubbing their hands together in glee.
Mr. Murphy stopped lecturing and put his hands on his hips. He cocked his head to one side and panned across the class with his blue eyes, his mouth stern and fixed. “Can I get two volunteers?” A few kids raised their hands. He pointed out a duo of students, then pointed to a long table at the front of the room, lined with row after row of jars, each containing a frog. “Hand them out if you please.”
As his volunteers went to work, placing a jar on each desk, Mr. Murphy told the rest of the students to open up their dissection kits.
Twana untaped her kit and unrolled it on her desk. She used a white towel in the kit to cover her work surface. She opened a little plastic bag of tools, a wooden plank, a handful of push pins, a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, and a tongue depressor.
After his volunteers had finished distributing the frogs, Mr. Murphy explained the process of conducting a frog autopsy. Twana thought that dissecting a frog would gross her out. But she actually found the whole process interesting. First, following Mr. Murphy’s orders, she pinned the frog to her wood plank, belly up, driving the push pins through its appendages and spreading it out like a star fish.
She used the scalpel in her kit to slice open the frog’s belly from head to crotch. One by one, with Mr. Murphy as a guide, she explored the frog’s inner parts, its lungs, its heart, its intestines.
As she worked, she realized that the stench that had wafted around the room when the students had first drawn their specimens out of the formaldehyde had flagged off. She thought about Shana and her comment about smelling a dead mouse. She touched the little lipstick case sized bulge under her shirt and looked around the room. She’d been wearing Bieber’s finger for over 12 hours now. Twana hadn’t noticed the smell; she’d grown used to its company. But if the finger drew the wrong attention, she didn’t know if she could come up with a convincing explanation.
She waited for Mr. Murphy to turn his back then took the pendant off her neck. She opened the plastic tube, checked both ways, and poured in enough formaldehyde from her specimen jar to submerge the finger. She snapped the lipstick case shut and restrung it onto her gold chain. She’d have to seal the case later with superglue, but for now she had taken care of the foul smell and acted to preserve the finger at the same time.
Pleased with her ingenuity, she finished up with her frog autopsy.
At the end of class, Mr. Murphy walked the room, row by row, his pointer in one hand and a slate in the other. He checked each student’s project and wrote grades on his slate. He lingered for an extra minute at Twana’s desk, looking over her work. “This is a fine autopsy,” he said.
Twana smiled up at him.
“You’re incisions are clean, your dissections are precise. You have talent, young lady.”
Twana beamed and touched the little bulge at her chest beneath her shirt. Although Twana couldn’t see it, she knew that Mr. Murphy wrote a big fat A next to her name on his slate.
Chapter 7
After school, Twana watched television with her ma until Butch came home. She sat on the ratty couch, holding her ma’s skeleton hand. She looked over at her mother in the glow of the TV. Her cheeks looked so hallow. Twana remembered when her mother had taken her to the park to push her on the swings. She remembered when Ma had even invited a few nice men over for dinner sometimes. But those days had gone away as her mother’s habit had turned into the beast that had taken over both of their lives.
Twana thought about the brochure in her sock drawer just up the hall. NEWlives Rehab and Counseling Center, the brochure read in big, red type on its cover, next to a logo that looked like a golden snake crawling up a crucifix.
Twana wanted to help her ma, but help didn’t come cheap. She had looked at the brochure many