“I hate grapefruit,” the Colonel muttered all of a sudden.
Cromwick rolled over from a push-up position and looked around. “What?” he asked, knowing that it was just them two in an otherwise empty gym.
“Can’t stand ‘em,” Colonel continued, but more aggressively through gritted teeth and with darkness in his eyes.
Cromwick looked around, wondering if he had missed someone in the room that Colonel was speaking to. Still no one but the two of them. “Ok, weirdo. You gonna finish your set, or are you gonna call it quits early again?”
Ever since Colonel’s dishonorable discharge from the armed forces a decade ago, he’d turned into a colossal slug of a man. Unkempt hair dripping with dirty oil and skin slimed by constant sweat, he even left a trail in his wake just like a slug would. He’d been exercising with Cromwick for nearly a week, trying to regain some semblance of a man, but every day so far, he’d stopped after only a few minutes.
“Hello? You still here?” Cromwick asked, annoyed at Colonel’s silence.
Cromwick watched as Colonel’s broad shoulders repeatedly rose and fell. Colonel’s breathing grew heavier, sounding more and more like a growl with each breath. Cromwick stood to approach, but before he could make it to his feet, Colonel lifted a fifty-pound plate. “I said I hate them!” he screamed as he hurled it at Cromwick.
Cromwick leapt out of the way, but not before the plate struck his right knee, shattering it like an egg underfoot. He collapsed to the ground and howled in excruciating pain.
The shriek brought Colonel back to reality and the darkness faded from his eyes. It was his turn to look around the gym this time. Empty. Well, empty, except for the wailing friend before him who was soaking the ground with his tears. Colonel hobbled his enormous, bloated body over to Cromwick and gasped when he saw that his knee had become inverted. “Oh, God, what happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” Cromwick bellowed through painful sobs. “Why would you do something like that? I’m done! I’m ruined! I’ll probably never walk the same again, let alone run!” It was clear that despite the pain, Cromwick was already concerned with how this would affect his self-centered obsession with exercise.
Colonel stood over Cromwick, mouth agape, with no recollection of what Cromwick was speaking of. “What are you talking about? I’ve been here the whole time, with…with you!” He felt like a crazy person, explaining where he’d been and what he’d been doing when Cromwick had also been there doing the same thing.
Rage suddenly took over, overshadowing all of the other feelings Cromwick was experiencing. His face twisted in anger as he realized what was going on. “No. No! You’re not going to pull your PTSD bullshit on me!” He winced and cried out as a twinge of pain resurfaced. “You can manipulate everyone else in your life, but not me, you…you bastard!”
It was true, Colonel had fabricated an elaborate story years ago to support his claims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Something involving strangulation by a snake in the swamps. And most of his family and friends had bought right into it. There were, however, a few that saw right through Colonel, Cromwick being one of them. But the thing that Cromwick was missing was that Colonel wasn’t lying in this moment. He genuinely didn’t know what had just happened or what was going on presently.
“Oh, don’t you dare bring my trauma into this. If I’m not mistaken, it seems that I have the upper hand right now, so I’d be very careful – “
“What’s that on your neck?” Still trying to steady his breathing from his bones-to-dust knee injury, and wiping his tear-streaked eyes for a better look, he asked, “Are those…ants?”
A look of surprise formed on Colonel’s face as he turned away to conceal a black trail of ants running up the side of his neck, and into his ear. He covered his mouth with a hand and whispered something that was unintelligible to Cromwick, then turned back. “Nope,” Colonel stated, and Cromwick saw that the trail was gone.
Cromwick looked back at Colonel’s neck, “Where’d they go? Wait, what is going on here?” He closed his eyes to absorb the situation. Had he really seen an ant trail leading into his friend’s ear? Yes, he had, it couldn’t be denied.
Cromwick shook his head to clear away the crazy. He looked at the space where his knee used to be. He looked at Colonel, who seemed to have gone crazy himself, claiming that he didn’t know anything about chucking the weight at him. He looked back at Colonel’s neck and, instead of ants, he saw a mess of silverfish crawling up into his hairline.
He put a finger to his chin, then asked, “Do you like grapefruit?”
Colonel narrowed his eyes at Cromwick, thinking it was a trick question. “Yes, of course. I love it. What does that have to do with anything?”
Cromwick grew hysterical and began laughing uncontrollably, forgetting about the pain from his crushed knee. “Isn’t that the question of the year!” His pupils began dilating and retracting repeatedly as the ant trail formed once more on Colonel’s neck.
If Cromwick was said to have gone insane, it didn’t compare at all to what was happening to Colonel. When Colonel was serving overseas ten years ago, a small population of brain-eating ants had made their home in Colonel’s ear. And it wasn’t that Colonel was unaware of it; he’d grown lonely in his time on the battlefield, as soldiers often do, so he’d welcomed the company. Those ten years gave the ants ample time to grow their small population into a thriving colony, eating away at Colonel’s brain meat the entire time without Colonel even knowing it. It just so happened that the results were finally coming to a head here and now in this small gym, Cromwick being the unfortunate victim.
The ants began funneling into Colonel’s ear in a hasty fury, forming a second trail into his other ear as well. As if sensing a mocking tone in Cromwick’s hysteria, the ants tore at the scraps of Colonel’s brain with increased intensity. Colonel’s face twitched as the darkness returned to his eyes and the ants took control. “You dare laugh at my loved ones?” he said in a supernaturally deep voice.
Reflecting on the strange and nonsensical series of events that had led up to this moment made Cromwick laugh all the harder. Just minutes ago, he was enjoying a workout with his friend. But now? Cromwick guffawed, “Sure, Colonel, your loved ones. I’m laughing right in their f – “
Cromwick’s mockery was silenced by Colonel’s fist plowing into his mouth. Colonel stretched out his other arm toward the sky and closed his blackened eyes. He took a deep breath and millions of ants filed out of every orifice of his swollen body. As they rushed down Colonel’s arm and into Cromwick’s mouth, a tear streaked down Colonel’s face as he softly whispered, “Welcome to your new home, my sweets.”
Just then, an enormous insect, larger than Cromwick, descended above Cromwick’s flailing body. It was the queen of the colony, come to establish her territorial authority over her new home. Golden rays radiated from the queen as boiling liquid metal flowed forth from her mouth all over Cromwick, of which the ants felt no effect. Cromwick writhed in pain as the metal burned away at his body. Colonel’s arm, still being halfway down Cromwick’s throat, was also covered in the scalding metal, but the ants had eaten away at his pain receptors, so he felt nothing.
As the metal cooled and hardened over the remains of Cromwick’s now lifeless body, it took some time for the smoke of burnt flesh to clear. When it did, Colonel noticed that the metal had curiously left an elaborate network of tunnels fit for the ants’ use for many generations to come. He gazed up toward the queen. She gave a subtle nod in his direction, and Colonel knew that he had done her proud.
Eager to expand the colony to other parts of the world, an out-of-his-gourd Colonel dropped to his knees and surrendered his spirt to the queen’s will. The queen took hold of Colonel’s remaining arm with her mandibles and they flew east to a new land where they could find another useless gym addict to remove from the world and transform into a colonized dreamscape.
