Rewrite the Apocalypse dream (by Dee Cari) novel Chapter 366

Chapter 366 Cleanup

Chapter 366 Cleanup

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Four hours of sleep, a steady supply of rejuvenation water, and a lot of silent chewing later, the tear felt almost human again. They passed canteens around the circle, drinking deep, and the aches in the bones faded to dull echoes. While the others scraped the worst of the grime off their armor, Levi came cross the field to report to Briggs and Joanna.

“The last of them are dead, Boss. Every straggler. We lost no one.” He rubbed his face. “A handful of soldiers hurt, mostly bites and broken bones. Michelle and Warren have them.”

Joanna let out a long breath. It should have felt like victory, but a sobering thought sat in her chestinstead. If her base weren’t built so high on the ridge, if her team weren’t as strong as it was, the swarm/would have slaughtered every person she had sworn to protect.

“Good work, Levi. Keep the walls manned.”

He saluted and jogged back toward the gate. Joanna stood, rolled her aching shoulders, and looked at the black tunnel mouth. “Alright. Let’s finish this.”

She went in first. Briggs and Julian flanked her, and the rest fell in behind, boots scraping on packed earth. The late afternoon light followed them for a few yards, then thinned, then vanished entirely, and Briggs lit a flame in his palm to push back the dark.

The tunnel went deep. It sloped downward in long, winding curves, the walls slick and smooth, polished by countless ant bodies. The air grew thick and damp, then thin, heavy with the sour smell of rot and something sweet underneath. Jolie’s breathing turned shallow. Fletcher muttered about how his lungs were filing a complaint. No one laughed. It felt like the tunnel went on forever.

Then the walls fell away.

They stepped out onto a ledge overlooking a vast, domed cavern, and Joanna’s stomach turned over.

The nursery stretched out below them, wider than the base’s entire courtyard, its ceiling lost in shadow. Every surface was covered in honeycombed chambers, thousands upon thousands of them, stacked in tiers up the walls and across the floor. Each one held a pale, glistening egg or a fat, squirming larva. They pulsed and wriggled in the dim orange light of Briggs’s flame, a sea of translucent white bodies, soft and blind, mouths opening and closing in hungry silence. The sound was a wet, whispering rustle, millions of tiny bodies shifting against each other. The sweet rot smell was overwhelming now, thick enough to taste. Pale nurse ants, smaller than the soldiers, scurried between the chambers, tending the brood, and froze as the light hit them.

“Millions,” Allen whispered. “There have to be millions.”

“Then let’s make sure there are none,” Joanna said.

Briggs stepped to the edge of the ledge and flung out both arms. Fire roared from his hands in a rolling sheet, washing down the tiers like a wave. Eggs burst with wet pops. Larvae shriveled and blackened, their tiny shrieks rising in a high, thin chorus, and the stench of burning fat and scorched chitin rolled up in a choking cloud.

“Spread out!” Joanna shouted. “Leave nothing!”

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Chapter 366 Cleanup

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The team fanned along the ledge and down the ramps. Julian’s lightning crackled across the floor, arging rough chamber after chamber, bursting clusters in blue-white flashes. Glacier slammed his palms info the ground and a wave of killing frost raced outward, freezing nests solid so that they cracked like glass under Fletcher’s boulders. Kailee’s wind funneled Briggs’s flames into the upper tiers, driving the five into every hidden crevice, while Jolie’s vines tore through the lower chambers, ripping the honeycomb apart. Allen cracked the cavern floor open and sent whole sections of nursery collapsing into the dark. stood at the center, nose bleeding again, turning the panicked nurse ants on the brood they’d been prosting.

Joanna dropped from the ledge and waded into the thick of it, her sickle sweeping through rows of chambers, splitting them open, trampling what spilled out. The larvae squealed and squirmed under her boots. She didn’t slow. She didn’t look away.

It took a long time. The fires burned down to smoldering embers, and the smoke hung in the cavern like fog. When the last pale body stopped moving, the nursery was silent, a blackened ruin of charred wax and ash. Millions of lives, gone.

Joanna stood in the middle of it, chest heaving, covered in soot. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the crackle of dying flames and the slow drip of something from the ceiling.

“That’s it,” she said at last, quietly. “No more ants.”

Allen sealed the tunnels behind them once everyone was out, bringing the ceiling down in a slow, grinding collapse until the black mouth was nothing but a heap of rubble. Joanna looked at it for a moment, then gathered her team into her space and took them back to the base.

The courtyard was a different place than the one she had left that morning. Scorch marks streaked the stacked shipping containers along the wall, and shell fragments lay in drifts around the gate. But the people were already moving. Mothers had brought the children up from the bunker, and men and women hauled debris in wheelbarrows, welded dented container plating back into place, and scrubbed yellow- green stains from the steel. Someone had found a bucket of paint and was already redoing the door of a battered container in a bright, defiant yellow. Soldiers with bandaged arms were being fed in the cafeteria line. The place was tired and bruised, and it was eager to rebuild.

Joanna had barely taken three steps when Caleb crossed the courtyard and threw his arms around her, not caring in the slightest about the grime and gore coating her from head to toe.

“You did well, Joanna,” he said quietly against her shoulder. Then he pulled back, and the warmth in his face tightened into something grimmer. “Unfortunately, I can’t recommend rest.”

Her heart sank. “What now?”

“Shane’s caves are in an uproar. Once I picked up a few of their threads, I followed them.” He glanced toward the ridge. “A lot of them are about to run. They know the swarm is dead, and they know what that means. I recommend you get over there. Now.”

Joanna’s jaw set. “What are we dealing with?”

“A group with a lot of background in chemistry. That’s where the neurotoxin and the pheromone came from. But only a handful of ability users. Most of them are ordinary people with good training and no way to fight you.”

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