Zombie Ants

The forest had grown unnaturally quiet over the past few weeks. No birds sang, no deer rustled through the underbrush, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The only sound was a faint, relentless clicking—a chorus of tiny mandibles gnashing in unison. It started with the ants. Not the kind that marched in orderly lines toward picnic crumbs, but something far worse. Cordyceps, they called it once, a fungal parasite that hijacked ants’ bodies, turning them into mindless husks driven to spread its spores. But this wasn’t the Cordyceps of old textbooks. This was something new, something mutated, something that didn’t stop at ants.

The first signs appeared in the outskirts of the abandoned town of Hollowridge. A hiker’s grainy video showed a swarm of ants—thousands strong—crawling over a dead raccoon. Their bodies twitched unnaturally, legs jerking as if pulled by invisible strings. White tendrils of fungus sprouted from their heads, swaying like antennae. The raccoon’s corpse shuddered, then moved. Not alive, but animated, its flesh peeling away as the ants burrowed deeper, eating and puppeteering at once. The video cut off with the hiker’s scream.

By the time the authorities arrived, Hollowridge was a ghost town. The ants had spread, and they weren’t just eating insects anymore. The mutation had jumped species barriers, adapting with terrifying speed. Dogs, cats, foxes—anything with a pulse became prey. The fungus didn’t just kill; it enslaved. Victims didn’t stay dead. They staggered through the woods, flesh rotting, driven by the ants that crawled beneath their skin.

Deep in the forest, a lone stag stood as the last sentinel of a dying ecosystem. Its antlers gleamed in the dim light filtering through the skeletal trees, its breath fogging in the chill air. It had evaded the swarms for weeks, its instincts honed by a world gone mad. But the ants were patient. They didn’t chase. They waited.

It began with a single ant, its body glistening with fungal threads, scuttling up the stag’s leg. The deer flinched, stomping the ground, but the ant clung tight, mandibles sinking into flesh. Then came another. And another. A black tide surged from the leaf litter, a writhing carpet of clicking, twitching bodies. The stag bolted, crashing through brambles, but the ants were already inside—crawling under its hide, burrowing into muscle. The fungus spread fast, threading through veins, hijacking nerves.

The stag stumbled, legs buckling as the ants took control. Its eyes, once wide with panic, dulled to a milky haze. A low, guttural moan escaped its throat—not its own voice, but the sound of the colony within. The swarm converged, thousands of tiny jaws tearing into its flanks. Blood pooled on the forest floor, soaking into the soil as the ants feasted. Chunks of flesh sloughed off, revealing bone, yet the stag’s body twitched and lurched, forced upright by the fungal puppet masters. The ants didn’t just eat—they hollowed it out, leaving a shambling shell to carry their spores deeper into the wild.

By nightfall, the forest was silent again, save for the clicking. The stag-thing staggered onward, its antlers now crowned with fungal blooms, a grotesque monument to the new order. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled—unaware it was next.