James Turnbow

Philo said, flapping his arms in exasperation.

They want to go to war?

I hustled toward the room where they kept the hazardous chemicals.

We'll give them a fucking war.

I remembered what Wade had been working on before his death, but quickly dismissed it as too slow.

Another idea came on its heels, an idea incorporating Wade's final project and the mystery pathogen that had taken his life.

Too dangerous.

Instead, I thought about all the experiments I had done on the insects and all the reports left by the previous researchers.

Nothing had worked to kill the colony, but that didn't mean the workers wouldn't die.

If we could hold them off for long enough, I could figure something out.

I wouldn't stop trying until I did.

I stepped into the room and looked around, eyes fixing on two pesticide sprayers hanging on the wall.

While the foam was harmless to humans, the stuff in those two wearable sprayers wasn't.

The caustic liquid had quickly killed the worker ants in previous experiments.

It was the queens who refused to die.

I smiled as I pulled a sprayer off the wall, slipping the tank straps over my shoulders.

I frowned as the ants kept coming.

Most of them headed toward Philo and me as we backed toward the woods, but a column had already reached the security building.

The pesticide seemed to slow them down, but it didn't kill them.

When we'd experimented with the stuff months ago, it had killed them.