William moved south for a job, a very good job. Some cultural variances but nothing he couldn’t cope with. He had a few months before going so he and Nadine, his wife, made a few scouting jaunts. They went around to stores and churches to see what the people were like. Didn’t seem to be too bad.

It was a pretty Georgia morning. It was warm and already a little humid. William took his coffee out on to the patio to enjoy the moment before getting prepared to go to the office. This was great, just great, William thought. So quiet and peaceful. Life was good.

Then he got not a cultural shock but an environmental shock. Ants. War ants. They scrambled onto his foot. He smiled. This happened back home a lot. The ants would crawl around his foot. It was a ticklish feeling. After a minute or so he would brush them off. Then- the cup went one way, the saucer another and William went straight back until he hit the house. His feet had, somehow, caught fire.

He brushed the ants off and not delicately. He hopped up and down on them, which was a bad tactical move. This gave the ants a chance to get back on his feet and set them on fire again. William ran to the faucet and washed them off. He practically jumped to the backdoor. Terror does that.

He stumbled up to the bathroom and ran cold water over his feet. That would help. It would have, too, if he had cold water. Thing is, there is no cold water in Georgia. Tepid was as cold as it ever got. Tepid doesn’t get it done. Not by a long shot. He yelled for Nadine to make him some icepacks. Quickly!

“What happened to your feet?”, she asked him. They looked like half-cooked sausage.

“Ants”, he told her.

“Ants? Ants did this? They must have been monstrous ants”.

“No, they were small but had to have been well-armed. I think they must have had small nuclear devices. Claws couldn’t have done do all this.”

Nadine drove him to his office. William rode with bare feet. He put on his socks when they got there, which wasn’t too bad. His shoes were a bitch. He ran as fast as he could to his office. To heck with dignified behavior. He yanked his shoes and socks off, opened his briefcase and got out the icepacks.

William never left the office that day. Wouldn’t even go to his private bathroom, in case someone came in and thought he’d gone native with the no shoes, no socks routine.

William had Nadine stop on the way home so he could get some ant killer. The clerk told him, “Weren’t no sucha thing. They was ant movers, ant bothersome but they jus' werent no sucha thing as no ant killers”.

William read about, “puts them gently to a sleep that they never wake up from”. Also, “ants go in, watch a Paris Hilton video and their little hearts stop. Caution: don’t peek”. Then he got, “Ant Slaughter. We do to ants what Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull did to Custer. We don’t pussyfoot around. One small bite and they have thirty seconds to live. We don’t put them into a coma and stop their tiny hearts. We stop them cold-dead and real sudden-like”.

That night, William looked the company up on the internet. Turns out that the EPA had closed down every one of their American plants. The EPA found that there wasn’t a living insect within five miles of the plants. Plus, the incidence of altered children was abnormally high. The product was now manufactured in Thailand, where altered children are the norm.

The FDA banned the product outright. William must have gotten one of the last boxes. Boy, talk about lucky. Hmm, have to be a little careful with Nadine for a while. Don’t want any altered, three legged, web-footed kids.

He poured the powder on the ant fortress the next morning. He was careful not to inhale any of it in. He didn’t want to end up stone cold dead. When he got home that night not an ant was to be seen. He cautiously raked the hill down. Wow! It not only killed them, it dissolved them. Then, he happened to glance over and spot a new mound by the garage. It was two feet high! They moved! The clerk was right! War is Hell. War with ants was Heller than Hell.

His head salesman told him the trick was to mix it with fertilizer and spread it all over the yard.

“That kills them?”

“Nah, nahtin’ gonna do thet. Thar jus’ about near unkillable. Jus’ makes ‘em move to your neighbors yawd”.

“Well, that doesn’t seem right. That doesn’t seem, well, neighborly”.

“Wahl, nuthin’. I suspect thet’s how you got ‘em in the first place. Thet’s the way folks ‘round heah are”.

“Well, I don’t , I mean, it doesn’t. Guess I have to buy a spreader”.