Excerpt from We Are the Ants by Shaun Hutchinson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I doubt I'll ever know for certain.

Sluggers don't speak. During those long stretches where my body is beyond my control, I often wonder how they communicate with one another. Maybe they secrete chemicals the way insects do, or perhaps the movements of their eyestalks is a form of language similar to the dance of a bee. They could also be like my mother and father, who communicated exclusively by slamming doors.

I was thirteen the first time the sluggers abducted me. My older brother, Charlie, was snoring his face off in the next room while I lay in bed, translating my parents' fight. You might believe all doors sound the same when slammed, but you'd be wrong.

My father was a classic slammer, maintaining contact with the door until it was totally and completely shut. This gave him control over the volume and pitch, and produced a deep, solid bang capable of shaking the door, the frame, and the wall.

Mom preferred variety. Sometimes she went for the dramatic fling; other times she favored the heel-kick slam. That night, she relied on the multismash, which was loud and effective but lacked subtlety.

The sluggers abducted me before I learned what my parents were arguing about. Police found me two days later, wandering the dirt roads west of Calypso, wearing a grocery bag for underwear and covered in hickies I couldn't explain. My father left three weeks after that, slamming the door behind him one final time. No translation necessary.

• • •

I've never grown comfortable being naked around the aliens. Jesse Franklin frequently saw me naked and claimed to enjoy it, but he was my boyfriend, so it doesn't count. I'm self-conscious about being too skinny, and I imagine the sluggers judge me for my flaws—the mole in the center of my chest shaped like Abraham Lincoln or the way my collarbone protrudes or my tragically flat ass. Once, while standing in the lunch line waiting for shepherd's pie, Elle Smith told me I had the flattest ass she'd ever seen. I wasn't sure how many asses a twelve-year-old girl from Calypso realistically could have been exposed to, but the comment infected me like a cold sore, bursting to the surface from time to time, ensuring I never forgot my place.

Part of me wonders if the sluggers send pervy pics back to their home planet for their alien buddies to mock. Check out this mutant we caught. They call it a teenager. It's got five arms, but one is tiny and deformed.

It's not really deformed, I swear.


When the sluggers had finished experimenting on me that night, the slab I was resting on transformed into a chair while I was still on it. During previous abductions, the aliens had locked me in a totally dark room, attempted to drown me, and once pumped a gas into the air that made me laugh until I vomited, but they'd never given me a chair. I was immediately suspicious.

One of the sluggers remained behind after the others disappeared into the shadows. The exam room was the only section of the ship I'd ever seen, and its true shape and size were obscured by the darkness at the edges. The room itself was plain—a gray floor with swirls that gave it the impression of movement and that was illuminated by four or five lights beaming from the shadows. The slab, which had become a chair, was obsidian black.

My limbs tingled, and that was how I realized I could move again. I shook them to work out the pins and needles, but I couldn't shake the impotence that rattled in my skull, reminding me that the aliens could flay me alive and peel back my muscles to see how I functioned, and there wasn't a goddamn thing I could do to stop them. As human beings, we're born believing that we are the apex of creation, that we are invincible, that no problem exists that we cannot solve. But we inevitably die with all our beliefs broken.

Excerpted from We Are the Ants by Shaun Hutchinson. Copyright © 2016 by Shaun Hutchinson. Excerpted by permission of Simon Pulse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.