The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale | Page 3

of these sometime, he thought. He looked at Sheila's picture. He put the gumball in the pocket of his Armani suit jacket.
Then he went to look for Vampire.
* * *
"Hi," said Stan, looking around a corner of a cubicle on the seventeenth floor. "I'm Stan."
"Yeah, whatever," said the occupant of the cubicle, not looking away from her monitor.
"No, really, I'm Stan, I'm the CEO here."
"Yeah, I believe you, so? What do you want, a medal?"
"Well, uh," Stan said. "So what are you up to?"
"I'm storyboarding the Mr. Gumball Saturday morning cartoon pilot, and I'm past deadline, and I'm paid shit, Mr. CEO."
"Oh, OK." Said Stan. "I won't bug you then."
"Great," said the cartoon storyboardist.
"Hey, by the way, you don't know where the sysadmins and stuff are though, do you?" Stan asked.
"I thought you weren't going to bug me, then."
* * *
After many such adventures, Stan found himself in the third sub-basement of the gumballs.com building, close to despair. It was 8pm, and his building pass expired at 9.
Suddenly, faintly, from far off, Stan heard the sound of horrible, ghostly shrieking and rhythmic pounding.
Thank God, Stan thought, heading toward the sound. And indeed, as he got closer he could tell he was listening to one of Vampire's thrash goth trance doom CDs.
Stan had feared that, like Pringles, Vampire might suddenly be wearing a suit, but as he emerged into Vampire's blacklit cavern, he saw that Vampire was wearing knee-length jet-black hair, a black trenchcoat, fingerless studded leather gloves, and giant surgical-steel ear, nose, lip, and tongue piercings, as always. Perhaps he was surrounded by an even larger array of keyboards, monitors, and machines than yesterday, but it was hard to tell.
"Vampire!" Stan shouted over the music. "Am I glad to see you!"
"Hey, man," said Vampire, lifting a hand in salutation but not looking away from his monitor.
"So, hey, what are you up to?" said Stan, looking for somewhere to sit down. He started to take a broken monitor off of a folding metal chair.
"DON'T TOUCH THAT!" Vampire shouted.
"Oops, oops, sorry," said Stan, backing off.
"No problem," said Vampire.
"So, ah, you were saying?" Stan said hopefully.
"Lotta new machines coming in," said Vampire. "What do you know about NetBSD 2.5 routing across multiple DNS servers?"
"Absolutely nothing," said Stan.
"OK," said Vampire, and nodded.
Stan waited a little while, looking around. Finally he spoke again. "Ah, Vampire, ever heard of a, the, this is going to sound silly but, the Ant King?"
"Nope," said Vampire. "I knew an AntAgonist once, on the Inferno BBS."
"Oh," said Stan. "But, um, how would you go about finding out about the Ant King?"
"What search engines have you tried?" asked Vampire.
"Well, none," said Stan.
"Well, try Google, they're good."
"OK," said Stan. "Um, Vampire?"
"Yeah?"
"I don't have a computer anymore."
Vampire turned and looked at Stan. "You poor bastard!" he said, and pointed. "Use that one."
* * *
The Ant King was sound asleep on the sofa, cans of Dr. Pepper littered around him. Sheila got up gingerly, took off her sneakers, and held them in one hand as she crept for the door, clutching a Dorito in the other.
It was a lucky moment. Sheila passed several of the Ant King's henchmen (who were all bald and stout and wore identical purple fedoras) asleep at their desks, and threaded her way through the dark rooms of the Ant King's lair to the tunnels at the edge of it. She stopped at the mouth of the biggest tunnel. Far off, she could hear running water.
Something moved in the darkness beyond, a great hulking shape. Sheila moved cautiously forward. With a horrible dry clicking and rustling, the gigantic Black Roach of Death scuttled forward.
With trembling hands, Sheila fed it the Dorito, as she had seen the Ant King do, and reached up to pat its enormous antennae. Then she slid past it into the passageway.
She walked forward, into the darkness. Ten steps; twenty. Nervously she chewed, and blew a bubble. The bubble popped, echoing loudly in the tunnel. Sheila froze. But there was no movement from behind. Carefully she spat the wad of gum into her hand and pressed it into the wall. Then she moved forward. Thirty steps. I can do this, she thought. Forty.
Suddenly Sheila was terribly hungry.
I'll eat when I get out, she thought grimly.
But that didn't seem quite right.
She searched her pockets and found another Dorito. She lifted it to her lips and stopped. No. No, not that. Something was troubling her. She let the Dorito fall to the ground.
I didn't prepare properly for this, she thought. This isn't the way you escape. You need a plan, you need resources. Anyway, there's no rush.
She began creeping back down the tunnel.
It's not so bad here anyway, she thought. I'm all right for now. I'll escape later. This was just a test run. She stroked the antennae of