The Mission

by Amanda Lorien

 

The colony was dying, the queen desperate for food. 

 

I climbed up the side of the door, terrified, but determined to be the hero.  Peering through the holes in the screen into the Great Indoors, I spied our salvation – the crust of a peanut butter sandwich! 

 

My excitement quickly faded as I remembered the last disastrous mission to the Great Indoors. A small army of us had come early in the morning, before the heat was too oppressive and the sun too blinding. We hadn’t found much, but a few measly grains of rice were better than the starvation we were experiencing at home.

 

We transported the morsels quickly across the slick, cold ground, a long line of us in perfect formation, following the Commander’s orders to perfection.

 

And then, disaster. 

 

A long white tunnel hovered above us in the sky and an unnatural wind blew backward from the mouth of the tunnel. As the tunnel roared, most of our party was sucked into its black depths, crying in terror and pain, limbs and antennae twisting in unnatural ways. The rest of us were flung into chaos, dropping the precious food and scurrying to shadow. Even then, the machine found many of us in our hiding spots and whipped us upward to our deaths. I was one of the few to survive, though the last to return to the colony. 

 

As I now peered through the screen into the Great Indoors, I realized that I was shaking. In a surge, the terror of our last mission had returned: memories of the cries of my comrades flying to their deaths, the aches of old injuries never completely healed, the humiliation of returning to our queen defeated and empty handed.

 

I realized that I preferred starvation. I turned and climbed down.