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On the cold City streets, in alleyways and yards, and in the skies above, a diverse army of searchers looked, listened and smelled its way through the city: tens of thousands including City police, Mohawk Tribesmen, mob operatives, and human and animal zombies that searched for any sign of Tracy and Mouse. A hundred million foraging jants searched where they could, largely inside buildings and underground, including along subway and auto tunnels and a hundred miles of warmth-bringing underground steam-pipes.
As mighty as the army of searchers was, the task seemed impossibly huge and difficult. The City they searched was nearly three hundred square miles in size and featured over seven thousand miles of roads, streets, park and cemetery paths and alleyways, and over a million buildings including six-thousand high-rise buildings, over a hundred of them more than fifty-stories tall. Nor did it help that much of where they searched was covered in early winter snow. City summers were hotter now, but winters were brutally snowy. Usually the wet air from the Atlantic met the polar vortex blasts of cold from the north somewhere over Canada or New England, but sometimes the City was treated to ten, twenty, or even thirty inches of the cold white stuff.
Hank Willows, recent zombie, was since the previous night aware of the search for the kidnapped girls but was far more concerned with his own survival. This was his first winter as a zombie. With the onset of cold weather he and his little rogue jant colony were in serious trouble. Especially the human part: Hank. The underground colony itself could go dormant until spring if it had to, and that survival strategy was being seriously considered. That scenario would of course leave Hank dead-dead.
As the human part of a zombie, Hank was certainly no prize. Though at twenty-seven years old he was younger than most, and his med-tick and colony kept him relatively healthy for now, aside from that his jant colony soon concluded that they had picked a looser.
Hank had no gainful employment to pay for their survival, or highly marketable human skills that might be used to gain employment. Thus they had no human home in which to keep a jant colony warm and fed over the upcoming winter. And Hank's brain, though not too badly damaged at the time of his demise at the hands of the crew of thugs that took over the abandoned warehouse where he had been living, contributed little to the zombie's knowledge and intelligence.
Not that the little rogue jant colony was any great shakes either, Hank kept reminding them. It was a small new colony, established six-months earlier in the grassy trashy bushy wilderness next to the warehouse, when there was enough summer life there to feed them well enough. Hank first noticed them one nice fall day two months ago, scurrying about as he sat in his corner of the warehouse finishing his last quart of cheap wine.
He had heard of them and seen videos of jants of course, but until then had never personally encountered them. They were huge brown ants, with big heads and wicked looking mandibles that undoubtedly could deliver a nasty bite. He had even heard that they sometimes ate people to the bone but maybe that story was BS. He decided to make friends with them just in case, and share his little corner of the warehouse with them peacefully. He tried to avoid stepping on them or destroying their network of tunnels. Now and then he even fed them a little of what little food he had: left-over scraps from the meager restaurant left-overs that he survived on himself.
Those damned jants and Stone-Coats ate most scraps in the City nowadays, but Hank had worked a deal with a local restaurant owner: in return for doing odd jobs he got first dibs on food scraps. Then the rats and jants got their cut, and finally the stationary Stone-Coat that ate the neighborhood trash and sewerage got the rest.
But Hank had to be there to get the best stuff when the trash-bags came out of the kitchen late in the evening and were thrown into the trash bin, usually between ten and eleven PM. And Hank wasn't very dependable in terms of showing up according to a schedule, not nearly as dependable as the rats and jants. As a consequence the rats and jants got most of the food-scraps, though they had to stay away from the all-eating tendrils of Stone-Coat Nano tubes that covered the bottom of the trash bin.
For a while Hank had a regular busboy job at the restaurant, but that only led to cash, and cash led to wine, and wine led to not showing up to work, or not working when he did show up. It was a now familiar 'circle of life' for Hank. But he still got some odd jobs, and he had fixed up his warehouse home real nice, with old blankets and a nice big carton that said 'Frigidaire' on it. He was sitting pretty to survive the coming winter, he had figured.
Then the thugs came. They were the new owners of the warehouse, they claimed, and he had to get out immediately. "Bull shit," he had told them, claiming 'squatters rights'. So they took away everything he had and trashed it. When he protested that they trashed him too. He fought them with fists and feet, but his hardest blows were completely ineffective, while theirs were devastating. They left his broken body outside the warehouse for the rats and jants to dispose of.
When he woke up he was dead. At first he didn't believe it but he was soon convinced. He felt no pain though he felt weak and hungry. And he couldn't move, not at all. But so far being dead wasn't so bad.
"WITH OUR HELP YOU ARE HEALING," explained a voice in his head. "YOUR BRAIN WAS DAMAGED AND YOU HAVE A BROKEN ARM AND VARIOUS INTERNAL INJURIES. LATER YOU'LL MOVE AGAIN, IF WE DECIDE THAT YOU CAN BE OF NET VALUE TO US. OR WE'LL LET YOU DIE AGAIN AND EAT YOU. WE HAVEN'T DECIDED YET, BUT EITHER WAY IT'S A WIN-WIN SITUATION FOR US."
That wasn't entirely true, Hank later learned. The colony had recently commandeered a med-tick hosted by a passing host rat that got itself caught in a rat trap. They desperately needed a human zombie now to achieve enough status to join the neighborhood group of rogue colonies and to be tolerated by the Consortium. Hank was a lousy gamble for them but as the only available dead person he was a gamble that they had to take.
"Who are you?" he managed to croak.
"JANTS, OF COURSE. TENTATIVELY AT LEAST, YOU ARE NOW