****
"WAKE UP!" said the soundless 'voice' in his head. The jant voice!
He opened his eyes half expecting to be in Central Park with the jants again, but he was in his bed in his apartment and there were no insects in sight. Sunlight streamed in through the windows. And he felt OK! Sleepy but OK!
"IT'S THE NEXT DAY; YOU SLEPT FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS," said the voice. "YOU NEED TO GET UP AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF."
"Where are you guys?" he asked, as he sat up in bed and looked around the room. There were no jants in sight.
"WE CAN COMMUNICATE WITH YOU FROM THE PARK TELEPATHICALLY IF YOU STAY WITHIN APPROXIMATELY TWO KILOMETERS."
"Well isn't that handy!" George didn't remember what two kilometers was but it was evidently less far than a walk to the Park. He got out of bed and made for the bathroom to relieve himself. He was very weak but got all the way to the bathroom without collapsing even once, which was an unusually successful outcome. Even more unusual, he peed and pooped voluminously and it all looked perfectly normal: no blood or puss, and of the right color and consistency! And it felt wonderful coming out! "I'll be damned! You guys must have fixed my plumbing! Now that's real progress!" He drank a big glass of refreshing water and didn't even feel nauseated. Its vitally important things like that that healthy people took for granted, George knew: walking and eating and drinking and peeing and so forth!
"EAT YOUR BREAKFAST AND TAKE YOUR VITAMINS," said the reverberating little voice. It 'sounded' that way because there were hundreds of jants talking to him together, he suddenly realized.
Bossy, weren't they! "What do you think I should do today?" he asked, as he drank a chocolate protein meal shake. It tasted wonderful!
"YOU ARE STILL VERY WEAK. EAT MORE FOOD AND SLEEP AGAIN. HEALING REQUIRES THAT YOU EAT MORE FOOD AND GET MORE REST."
He drank down his last two protein meal shakes and ate his last gram crackers with his last peanut butter "I'm totally out of food except for some spoiled bean sprouts. I really hadn't planned to live this long."
"NAP NOW. WE'LL WAKE YOU LATER TODAY AND YOU CAN GO SHOPPING FOR US. TAKE THE TWO WHEELED SHOPPING CART WITH YOU THAT YOU'RE THINKING OF."
A few hours later the jants woke George and he did as he was told. Unlike country and suburban people with automobiles New Yorkers typically walked many miles every day, to stores and restaurants and subway stations. He wasn't quite up to that yet but he walked a couple of blocks to the nearest remaining little supermarket without any problem, and bought more food than he had ever bought before! Milk, eggs, juice, bread, peanut butter, luncheon meats, cheese, rice, frozen dinners, coffee, and more filled his little two-wheeled hand-cart.
The voice also had him buy all the dried currants in the store: nearly ten pounds of them! George didn't even know what currants were until the voice explained that according to the internet they were raisins made from tiny grapes. Like everything else they were imported from far away and cost a fortune; no wonder there were so many New York rooftop gardens nowadays! At least there were no state or federal refrigeration surcharges on the currants, as they were dried.
The walk home wasn't as difficult as he expected it to be. He was walking almost normally now, and other people on the street hardly gave him a glance. A lot of them looked at his groceries enviously though. He was glad that he lived in a 'good' neighborhood; in other areas of the City there were a lot of muggings reported lately for people transporting food.
After he took the food home the voice had George take the currants to the Park where they first met and pour them on the ground near the jant mound. He was amused to watch hundreds of jants emerge and quickly carry the currants down into their holes one by one.
"WE PREPARE FOR WINTER," explained the jants. "MANY OF US WILL BECOME LETHARGIC IN THE COLD BUT WE WILL STILL NEED FOOD."
That evening George ate a hearty meal, watched a little television, and then spent a normal night sleeping; his first normal night in months! He was still thin and weak, but felt fine: that is to say, incredibly healthy for someone that was supposedly dying of cancer!
Over the following days the jants sampled other human foods with varying degrees of success. Regular raisins were often too large to fit down jant-holes but strong jant jaws could slice them up fairly quickly. Dried beef jerky turned out to be their favorite food, particularly if George cut it into tiny bits for them. "MOST ANTS ARE AFTER ALL CARNIVOROUS," they explained, "AND ALTHOUGH WE ARE OMNIVORES MEAT IS A HIGH NUTRITION FOOD FOR US. LIKE YOU, WE GROW, BUT WE GROW BY ADDING TO OUR NUMBERS. OURS IS ONE OF THE LARGEST JANT COLONIES IN THE PARK."
Indeed George was rapidly growing back lost muscle, and he felt stronger every day. He felt so good that he no longer kept his doctor appointments. Whenever he phoned his wealthy parents and his ex-fiancé weekly they admonished him to resume his cancer treatments. Dad paid his medical bills and his credit card so they knew in general where he was and what he did and bought, but they didn't know his phone number or specific address or they would surely be hounding him every day. Well, Mom would be anyway! Dad wasn't much for making voice, text, or visual calls, and he sensed that Julie was losing interest in him. Good for her, he figured.
For now he enjoyed his daily visit with the jants in the Park. He took them for walks on his shoulders and even into the supermarket where they picked out food for themselves. Though they were deaf and couldn't see very well with their tiny compound eyes, they could taste the air to detect potential food with remarkable sensitivity. But fall was rapidly shifting into winter and they would soon all huddle deep in their nest far underground and not emerge until spring.
"I don't think I'll do so well in the winter without you guys to talk to," he told them.
"WE WILL REMAIN ALERT ENOUGH TO TALK WITH YOU THROUGH THE WINTER, GEORGE," they reassured him, "AS LONG AS YOU STAY WITHIN TWO KILOMETERS OF US."
Good, he thought. He wasn't planning on going anywhere.
On one particularly warm sunny day as he spread a helping of dried currants around their mound, the jants asked George to help them do an experiment. "IT'S A MIND CONTROL EXPERIMENT THAT WE'VE BEEN THINKING OF TRYING," they explained. "SUPPOSE YOU WERE ASLEEP AND A FIRE HAPPENED IN YOUR A