Is it just me, or are there more ants than usual this year?" Joanie asked. She was throwing stones at the bungalow roof to try and chase away a three-foot-long drone which had landed there by mistake and was attempting to inseminate our chimney.

"It's nothing to worry about," I said. "CNN says rising and falling ant populations are normal; this is just an unusually bad spring." Down the street two other drones were having a standoff with the man next door's poodle over a scrap of rancid beef from a garbage can, and another was poised on the roof of a car, denting the metal with its weight; the rest of the flock were circling, vulture-like, on the air currents above the town, sniffing for the queen.

"Seems like we've been having a lot of those lately," Joanie said. She'd finally managed to peg the drone on its shiny bronze rump with an egg-sized rock, which connected with a satisfying doink and left a mark on the big insect's thick chitin. It shook its head distractedly, then, with a what-was-I-thinking air, flew off into the cloudless sky to rejoin the others.

"It's probably the climate change--" I started to say, but we were both interrupted by a contralto screech rising behind us.

"THEM! THEM! THEM!"

"Oh God," Joanie said with an eyeroll. "It's the Ant Lady."

"The what?" I was turning to face the source of the screaming. It was a thin old lady, stringy grey hair about her face, clutching a filthy ancient doll with a plastic head and hands and a ragged pink cloth body, standing in front of the house next door. I could see blinds going up and startled faces crowding the front windows.

"The Ant Lady," Joanie repeated. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the house, the screen door banging tinnily behind us.

Q, the third housemate, had woken up, either due to the screaming or the noise of the drone, and was wandering into the hall in his undershorts and Aperture Science T-shirt, scratching. The nickname was a university affectation that he'd nagged all his friends into adopting, and, once he’d finally realised how stupid it sounded, he couldn't manage to get rid of it. "What's going on?" His black puff of hair radiated out in all directions, uncombed; his eyes were bleary, his chin unshaved. He suddenly focused, looked out the living-room window. "Oh, her again. Ant-THEM! for Doomed Youth."

“Groan,” Joanie said, rolling her eyes ostentatiously.

"Should we call the police or something?" I asked.

"Nah, she'll be done in a minute," Joanie said, and indeed the noise was already fading. I looked out the window myself, through the cheap sheers the landlord had stuck us with, and saw the old lady, quiet now, wandering purposefully towards one of the two-story houses further down the street.

"So what's the story?" I asked, as Q wandered into the kitchen and switched on the kettle sleepily.

"The Ant Lady?" Joanie settled down on the sofa. "Q, if you're making coffee, do me a cup, OK?" Q grunted. "Yeah, it's sort of sad. She was one of the victims of the original ant infestation."

"Really?"

"Yeah, it was actually not too far from here, just a few miles up the road. She was only a kid at the time, but she lost both her parents to the ants, and the shock sent her crazy. She couldn't say anything but "Them!" for months, apparently. They put her in rehab and then a foster home, but she never really totally recovered. Anyway, she was in and out of institutions most of her life, but managed to get married and have at least one kid somewhere along the way. When they cut the budget and closed the mental hospital she was in, they sent her to live with her daughter. She's harmless, mostly. She's even OK with the ants most of the time. Don't know what set her off today, I guess it’s the mating season, with all those drones everywhere."

"Great, we'll be hearing that scream for weeks," Q handed Joanie a coffee, draped himself hairily over the armchair, and dug about for the remote control.

"Should have put that in the ad," Joanie smiled apologetically at me. "Housemate wanted, female preferred, non-smoker, quiet neighbourhood except for the crazy ant lady."

"It's OK," I said. The house was an easy commute to the university, where I was a less-than-enthusiastic graduate student and tutorial assistant in epidemiology. Joanie and Q were coders at a local software company, which accounted for the furniture-lite, tech-heavy state of the living room. The neighbourhood had once been a postwar suburb, but urban sprawl and demographic changes had made it something less easily definable, a mix of original residents hanging on to properties bought in the fifties, sixties and seventies, students and expatriates renting cheap and reliable properties, and, in the wake of a few rumours that the area was about to gentrify, property speculators buying up old bungalows to demolish and turn into McMansions for millionaires. Our neighbour to the west was a quiet man in his eighties with an overly aggressive black poodle, our neighbours to the east were a small, cheerfully noisy knot of twentysomethings from somewhere in the Ukraine, war refugees on a two-year contract to the abovementioned software company. "So, the original breakout was around here? Wow."

"Yeah, you can still visit the site,” Joanie said. “Not much to see, though, just a hole in the ground. Not even an interpretive centre or a gift shop."

“Wonder what caused it?” I asked.

“Communists, they said at the time,” Joanie raised a sarcastic eyebrow. “Caused a standoff with Khrushchev or somebody. Later on, they blamed the aboveground nuclear tests.”

Q pointedly turned up the volume on the TV, drowning us out with a news report on the civil wars in Romania and Poland.

"Seems like Russia's determined to rebuild the damn Soviet Union," Joanie remarked.

"It can do what it likes," Q said, as the report switched to one on the ongoing slow collapse of the European Union. "None of our business."

"Even if the UN ..."

"There's no way the President's going to be stupid enough to commit troops anywhere," Q said. "Public wouldn't stand for it. America stands alone, all that shit. Anyway, who’d fuck with Russia these days?"

I left them to it and went back to my room to work on my thesis. By the time I'd emerged from the stacks of demographic data on leprosy outbreaks since the Industrial Revolution, the dispute had been resolved and the participants were nowhere to be found.

*     *     *
The next day was Monday, and I went into the university as usual. Instead of going straight to the computer lab, though, I went to the library to look up the original ant infestation.

There it was, in newspaper and video. It's become so easy to take the ants for granted: some places are more populated than others, but they've spread pretty much everywhere in the world since the fifties. I remember feeding one in St Peter's Square on an undergraduate trip to Italy, amused by the way it would hold the tiny bread pieces in its huge mandibles. But here were the reporters, incredulous and almost hysterical about these giant insects. Pictures of attack survivors, including several of a pigtailed little girl, eyes stary with trauma--the Ant Lady as she was, I realised. Finally relief, as it was discovered they were vulnerable to flames, more relief when people learned that they wouldn't attack unless directly provoked, reports of trials of various poisons and sprays. People learning to live with a new threat. Occasional retrospective, ten-year-anniversary stories, twenty, then thirty years; others when some local bully went too far teasing one with a stick and got a near-fatal bite. I realised I'd been reading and watching all morning, and it was nearly one.

Going down to the sandwich shop, I checked my phone and read my messages, then the headlines. It was the usual low-level stuff, a few good news items about animal conservation in Africa and the President outlining a strategy to make America number one through the 3-D printing industry, balanced by others about the ongoing civil wars in Central and Eastern Europe, a retrospective piece about the Russian annexation of the Ukraine a while back (reminding me momentarily of the neighbours), and a subtextually-xenophobic piece about the number of refugees--political, economic, sexual, or just plain bombed-out--from the Middle East, Pakistan, Europe, North Korea, fill in the blank, and whether we could afford to support them. An item on some kid—born in the USA, with Afghani parents—who’d been arrested with a knapsack full of homemade explosive at a rock concert in upstate New York. A political analysis arguing that the President had benefited in the polls from the domestic rise in economic growth, but needed to be careful to keep the electorate on side once people got comfortable again. Articles on climate change, on the increase in reported drone and worker numbers this year, with a warning to motorists that, however satisfying the squish, it wasn't exactly good for the car to drive directly into an ant.

When I got home again I noticed a line of workers stretching from across the street and running through our yard, busily carrying scraps of some kind back to the nest. Q was sitting on the front porch, tablet on his lap, fast-food cartons at his feet, a home flamethrower close to hand.

"Couple of the little bastards tried to force the kitchen window earlier," he explained. "They're riled up over something."

"I was reading about them today instead of working," I sat down on the steps, accepted a french fry. "Never really thought about them much before now, but it's interesting. Nobody seems totally sure what caused them, or why."

"Nuclear testing, I'm telling you," Q said. "Nevada. Area 51. It all makes sense. So what's your angle?"

"Dunno," I said. "Maybe ..." I considered my thesis. "I was thinking I might run the numbers, try and plot increases and decreases in ant populations, see what I can come up with."

"You got the time for that?"

"Sort of," I said. "I've still got teaching, but I'm waiting to get access to some data from the University of Edinburgh, so I can afford a side project for the next week or so."

The insect line gradually broke up and the participants pattered away in different directions. We watched people coming home, parking their cars, going in for dinner. A couple of the Ukrainians came back laden with bags of strange-looking ingredients and, not long afterwards, a pleasant odour of starchy comfort food wafted across to the porch. Down the block, I thought I saw the tottering figure of the Ant Lady, but I couldn't be sure.

*     *     *
Now that I'd become aware of her presence, I kept noticing the Ant Lady everywhere. I'd probably seen her a dozen times before; I'd moved into the house in September, but I kept weird hours, so it wasn't too easy to get to know people in the neighbourhood. But now I kept seeing her; walking to the dinky little corner store, being helped into the passenger side of a car by a stout fortysomething who was presumably the daughter, wandering up and down the street on some unknown errand.

One day, though, when I was at the store buying milk, spaghetti, and cheese, I felt someone behind me. Turned, and there she was, just a little too close.

"We may be witnessing a Biblical prophecy come true," she said, matter of factly.

I was too surprised to be polite. "Uh, what?"

"And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the earth," she said, nodding. It sounded like a quote, but I didn't know from what. The Bible, I guessed. “Even the smallest of them have an instinct for industry, organization, and savagery that makes us look feeble by comparison.”

I took my basket of groceries resolutely to the cash register, where the fat man who ran the store smiled a bit and shook his head knowingly. "That everything?" he asked. Then, quietly, "Don't worry, she's a regular here, I'll make sure she gets home okay."

“Thanks,” I said.

“Used to be a good neighbourhood,” the fat man shook his curls as he ran my purchases through the ancient scanner. “Everyone looking out for each other. Still is, mostly. Problem is, those damn immigrants--” he suddenly stopped, realising he might have said something very stupid.

“It's OK,” I reassured him. “I'm from Seattle.” I hated myself for condoning his racism, however implicitly, She's Asian but she's from Seattle, she's One of Us. Wanted to mess with him; tell him, casually, about how my parents, refugees, spent their new American lives in a frustrating Catch-22 system of paranoia, called communists by their neighbours, bourgeois traitors by their families, having to run the gamut of mysteriously declined job applications, office-temping jobs well below their degree level, patronising bosses too polite to say what the stoners downtown would, slope, chink, commie. To this day, my mother is still convinced that she’s under surveillance from both the FBI and the Chinese Communist Party. But I'd had a long and tiring day and didn't really want to become one white guy’s object lesson in multiculturalism.

“Yeah,” he said with relief. “People like those Polacks at number seventeen.”

My smile got a little bit tighter. “I think they're basically harmless,” I said, handing over my credit card. I was also certain they were Ukrainians, but didn’t think pedantry would help.

“Oh, I'm sure they are,” he said. “But it's, well, we've got all these Polacks, and ragheads, and Koreans, and what have you, coming over and taking jobs Americans could have had. You know. Working for that software company, too,” he shook his head. “We’re teaching them to hack us, is what we’re doing.”

“I don’t think it works like that,” I said, thinking of Joanie and Q, but he still wasn’t listening to me anyway.

“And who knows who they're talking to? Sending an e-mail home to mom, and she sends it on to the Taliban, next thing you know. ...” He shrugged expressively. “Oughta arrest them all. Don’t send them back. Lock them up for good so they can’t blow anything up. Anyway, have a good night.” I took my bag, nodded to him, and, feeling there could have been some way I might have handled that better, left.

*     *     *
"So, you still working on your ant project?" Joanie asked. Outside the living room, the rain hit the windows hard. A distant backbeat and some high guttural lyrics were faintly audible from a stereo system to the east.

"Kind of," I said. "I've got a few rough correlations. The first breakout was in the 1950s, yeah. There were pretty regular large infestations across the country until the early seventies, then they seem to settle down. A couple rises in the eighties, then pretty much nothing until 2001."

"Why 2001?"

"Not sure," I said.

"I remember the surge in 2001," Joanie said. "Mainly because it was my fifth birthday, and my Dad arranged an outdoor picnic, which we obviously couldn't have." She smiled. "Wound up having a picnic on the dining room floor. Lotta fun for a kid."

"But the numbers drop again round about 2007ish," I went on, "then, well, it turns out you’re right, there’s been a steady rise for the last few years."

"Like I said, climate change?"

"I've been trying that," I said. "Working with air pollution stats, radiation levels, global temperature rises. Not much correlation with air pollution or temperature; some with the radiation levels, but it's not really consistent. It's just crazy enough that I'm going to start trying economic growth and syphilis infection rates next."

"How about Internet penetration?" Q looked up from something he was doing to a Raspberry Pi.

Joanie snorted.

"No, really," he said. "It's as good as anything else. And it was round about the turn of the millennium that the general public really got hold of it. Eternal September, all that."

“Eternal September was in 1993,” Joanie pointed out in a you-dumbass voice.

"Anyway, there was a dip in ant numbers in the 1980s, right when home computers were taking off," I said. "Seems to me like the Internet's just been gaining in participants since it started, not rising and falling. Besides, how the hell would Internet use affect ants?"

"I don't know, maybe they feed off the wifi or something," Q said. "Whatever."

*     *     *
I fell into the local habit of avoiding the Ant Lady. If I saw her at all, I just smiled a greeting and hurried away, like everyone else.

About a month after the incident at the grocery store, I made a final effort to communicate with her. I was sitting out on the lawn doing some marking when she strolled past, her usual peculiar little smile on her face, carrying a newspaper blaring the usual warning about the Balkans.

"Hey," I said, impulsively.

She looked up at me, wide eyes startled. I could see a bit of the little girl from the 1950s, there in the suntanned and wrinkled face.

"How you doing?" I went on, already regretting the effort to make conversation. "Lotta sunny weather for the time of year," I ploughed on. "Good for the lawn I suppose."

The lady quirked her smile and shrugged.

"So what's your name?" I asked her.

The Ant Lady leaned in, conspiratorial. "The enemy," she said.

"Uh ..." I was a little spooked. "Your name is 'the enemy’?"

She shook her head. "We haven't seen the end of this. We've only had a view of the beginning of what may be the end." She smiled, then spoke as if quoting. “When we entered the atomic age, we opened the door to a new world. No one can predict what man may eventually find in that new world.”

I took a chance, risked her screaming. "You mean the ants--"

"Mom!" The daughter was bearing down on us. "I'm glad I found you. She wasn't bothering you, was she?" she asked me in a pleasant tone which could equally imply that I had been bothering her.

"No," I said. "Name's Kara Chong, I'm new here. Moved in a few months back." I stuck out my hand, clumsily. "Just thought I'd be friendly, say hi."

The daughter smiled a tense, suspicious smile that made my radar go off. Suddenly remembered a playground chant some kids had made up in fourth grade, Kara Chong you don’t belong. "I'm afraid my mother doesn't talk very much," the daughter said. "She's harmless, but modern life confuses her a bit." She shepherded the Ant Lady away; the lady glanced back once, eyes knowing pinpoints. I didn't think anything confused her at all.

I went away with the nasty, insulting little chant earworming in my head.

*     *     *
I carried on working on the ant correlations for a while. But then the data came through from the Edinburgh Medical School and it was back to correlating leprosy outbreaks. The talk around the faculty was mainly about upcoming exams, a predictable scandal in which one of the professors left his wife for a graduate student who left him for a tenure-track post in Queensland, and the disintegration of Europe, about which everyone had an opinion, none of them informed. Life returned to normal, Kara Chong once again belonged, and the ant correlations began to gather virtual dust in a corner of my cloud drive.

Then, one Sunday, I got up as usual--late, but earlier than Joanie and Q, who had stayed up till 3 AM with some shipping deadline. Went out into the kitchen, opened the fridge. Light didn't come on. Checked the stove, the lights. Nothing working.

"Power outage," I said to no one in particular, switched on my phone. No signal.

"Great." I made myself some cereal, went into the living room. The wifi router was silent and dark. I cursed the fact that I hadn't charged up my tablet the night before; I had maybe four hours of work time at most. Although perhaps my laptop ... I tried to remember how much data I'd backed up offline.

"What's going on?" Joanie joined me in the living room.

"Some kind of power outage," I said. "Landline's out too."

Then, in the distance, we heard them.

A series of booms, faint, like someone beating a tympani, an irregular rhythm. I put down my bowl, almost dropping it, ran out to the porch. A flash of light on the horizon.

Abruptly the power surged back on. The TV squawked into life, tuned to CNN as usual. A serious-faced man speaking urgently, urgently. I caught the words cyber-attacks and enemy powers and foreign hackers and terrorism and public utilities. I caught the words Pearl Harbor and Nine-Eleven, and loss of American lives. Commentators came on, hastily assembled with words like refugee policy and enemy within and Eastern Europe. Sudden cut to the President in front of a podium, looking earnestly and resolutely at the cameras and drawing breath to speak.

And then, they came.

Boiling from the ground, surging, a living flood of chitin rushing out of the earth and onto the streets, thousands upon thousands of ants, flowing over everything. Joanie let out an inadvertent cry, jumped back in the house and banged the door. I heard her rummaging for the flamethrower against an auditory backdrop of Presidential platitudes. Looking to the side, I realised that Q had left the flamethrower on the porch. I grabbed it, then, with some half-formed idea in mind of what to do, I stumbled forward, down the steps, out onto the lawn, in my T-shirt and shorts and flip-flops, staring, staring at the return of the ants.

That was when I smelled the smoke.

I turned around, saw. The blaze had caught thoroughly, was licking at the gables and the awning. The tide of ants reared, parted around the conflagration. On the lawn, two of the Ukrainians were chattering round a third, who was lying on the ground, moving feebly, making irregular small moans; a fourth was trying, in confused and accented English, to call 911. I saw the old man to the west start forward, then stop, a complicated look on his face, help them warring with what if they're terrorists? His dog was barking urgently, unheeded.

I started forward myself, only to find my arm gripped painfully, like an ant bite. Looked. The old man to the west hanging on, his kind eyes suddenly burning, threatening, his thin frame not pitiable anymore but tough as wire. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, suspicious, hostile. Kara Chong you don’t belong. Kara Chong you don’t belong.

Footsteps, more hands grabbed me. Roughly pulled the flamethrower from my grip and twisted my arms back. I saw the lights on the police car before I was slammed up against it. Behind me, the old man was speaking to them, almost wheedling. “She did it! She started the fire! The chink girl! I saw her. Look, she had a flamethrower!”

I looked frantically back. Q and Joanie were standing there, openmouthed. “Help,” I gasped, but they just stood there. Did they believe the old man? Or were they afraid they’d be arrested too if they said something?

I looked the other way and saw the Ant Lady.

She wasn't screaming, she was smiling, that little knowing smile from before. She had an anti-ant flamethrower in her hands, and was gazing, not at the surging insects, but at the burning house, the shifting noise of falling beams, the terrified Ukrainians on the lawn.

Nobody, of course, was paying any attention to her.

“Them,” she crooned. “Them.”