Minutes to Burn

Chapter 14

The creature felt something moving within her; it was time. Turning her head, she scanned the dark forest for a suitably protected location. She rustled through the understory of the Scalesia forest, twigs whispering against the smooth hard shell of her cuticle. The ground dipped slightly, the blanket of trees following the contour of the slope.

Suddenly, the ground moaned and vibrated beneath her feet, but she did not rear up on her hind legs; she was accustomed to the sound. The lava tube that ran beneath the stretch of the forest was catching the wind and sucking it along its innards.

About 350 meters in length, four meters wide, and five meters high, the tube had been formed centuries ago when lava had spread quickly out of a volcano crater. The surface of the lava had cooled quickly and hardened, but the inner flow had continued to rush downhill. When the lava flow ceased, an empty tube had been left behind, ringed with a hardened crust. Additional lava flows over the years had buried the tube, except for the two ends, which broke through the forest floor like gaping mouths.

Her front legs hanging before her, the creature nosed her way through the ferns shielding the southern entrance of the lava tube. They fell back into place after she passed through, camouflaging the hole.

She all but filled the entrance, her antennae brushing the ceiling. Inside, the tube was cool and damp. Water dripped against the black lava floor, the sound amplified up and down the tunnel. A few thick Scalesia roots twisted into the cave at the entrance, running along its mouth. She moved forward, pulling her swollen abdomen to the base of the wall.

Though she was close to nine feet tall, the creature was not tremen-dously heavy; most of her height was in her long, spindly legs and neck. The significant length of her body made up most of her mass, but it too was light, enabling an efficiency of movement.

Grasping an outcropping of lava with the hooks of her forelegs, she tugged on it; it would hold her weight. Moving with quick halting motions and using the claws at the ends of her legs, the creature pulled herself up the wall until she was dangling upside down from the roof of the cave. She twisted her abdomen in tight circles, and a light frothy sub-stance began to emerge from the appendages at the tip.

As she turned her abdomen in continuous spirals, she formed the ootheca, the translucent case for her eggs. Two antennae-like protru-sions on the tip of her abdomen combed the froth as it emerged. Applying discreet doses of the white material, she built a structure five feet in width, enmeshed along the length of the thickest tree root. Then she began the laborious task of inserting her eggs inside the structure, each egg laid at the base of its individual chamber. The chambers would pro-tect her offspring from predators and desiccation; they were bordered with pockets of insulating air and topped with one-way valves that would permit the fragile larvae to emerge without damaging themselves.

The creature labored with the unremitting energy of a machine, twisting through her arcane, instinctual dance. The chambers of the ootheca that were laid first began to harden. The female finally egested the last bit of froth, pinching it off neatly into a final chamber. There were eight individual chambers in the ootheca. Her abdomen swayed again, straining, but nothing more emerged.

Still upside down, she curled up, grooming excess froth from the tip of her abdomen with her mouth. If the froth hardened, it would prevent her from being able to excrete wastes, and she would die prematurely. Rolled in a complete circle, she looked like a huge green bud sprouting from the roof. She cleaned herself meticulously, her mouth worrying over her lower extremities. Finally, exhausted, she crawled back to the ground.

The creature pulled herself from the cave, breaking through the veil of ferns into the open air. A pair of smooth-billed anis lifted from a tree to her left, and her head pivoted automatically to watch them depart. They called to each other in distinctive whining whistles, as they faded into the foliage, black dots with streaming tails.

The creature moved forward, tired but oddly strengthened.

She was hungry.