Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [75]
All these bugs seemed to do was eat, their meals being the scatterings of krakt and whatever pieces of dried leather they got near; they even ate bits of rubber off the bases of my shoes. They didn’t seem to be too particular about what they ate, they just consumed and consumed, and when they got food they almost instantly seemed to breed so that they could eat it faster. A few would arrive on a previously “undiscovered” property, and after immediately claiming it for their own they would eat and multiply, and only hours later they would be swarming in disgusting multitude and their object devoured. It seemed like such a short-term survival strategy, one based on the premise of abundance. When, however, they were placed within a finite space (such as four blocks of ice around them high enough so that the bastards couldn’t get out), they mindlessly continued with the same strategy of overconsumption and overbreeding. After a few hours of my experiment, the last of them had turned as cold and hard as the little snowballs they resembled. In the back of my mind, with my last sliver of optimism, I was hoping that I might write some sort of academic paper on the subject, something I would dedicate to the memory of Jeffree’s left eyeball.
Before I managed to wipe out the most recent wave of the colon bugs in Augustus’s hovel, the little bastards were able to enact a bit of revenge in the form of the holes that now perforated my nylon snowsuit. These holes caused a draft that, after a few miles of trekking through the tunnels with Augustus as my lead dog, threatened to freeze my sweat right onto my long johns. The only thing to do was to keep walking, which I did, and try to avoid slowing down enough that I lost the crucial body heat that was the key to my survival.
I had no fear that I would lose sight of Augustus as he walked on in front of me, because as he stomped forward he sucked the last remnants of Little Debbie goodness from his collection of wrappers, leaving a trail behind him when he discarded each bit of cellophane. Augustus, I now noticed, had a bit of a limp, whether from an accident or from abuse it was impossible to say, but based on how the others of his tribe derided him as we passed them in the halls, I guessed the latter. It wasn’t just a limp but a sway, an oscillating motion I found almost soulful.† The trip was much longer than I remembered it, much more vertical, and I was petrified that after we finally got to the surface there would still be the miles of trudging in the open air before we arrived at the Creole’s base camp. With time the ice around us became brighter, more solid as the mild signs of perplexing melting that plagued Tekeli-li moved farther behind us and my eyes adjusted from the subterranean dim. The wind that whistled through the frozen channel became stronger, more direct, and soon there was literally the light at the end of the tunnel. To my surprise, when I stood aboveground, I discovered that the tunnel, all but the final opening of which looked as if it had been carved centuries before, came out not a hundred yards from our Creole Mining Company camp. Ours were not the first footprints here either: the Tekelians had possessed a direct underground route to our front door all along. Putting a hand on Augustus’s hulking shoulder, I tried to ask him about this, motioning to the cave opening and then to the Creole barracks, where I could already see Garth had the lights on. Augustus looked back at me with his ghostly eyes to see what I was gesturing about, then held me in a stare for a moment before nodding slowly and deliberately, as frustrated by our language