Invasive (16 page)

Ajay says: “You cannot tell anyone I told you. I'll lose my job. I'll lose access to the work. Arca owns it, owns the patents—”

“I understand. We'll figure it out.” No need to tell him now that she
has
to tell someone. That's her whole purpose for being here.

“Tread carefully. Einar is protective of this work. Even if he isn't responsible, if he thinks this will blow back upon him . . .”

“I will. Let me ask you: Who here could have done this? Who could have really made those ants, Ajay?”

“Only one,” he says. “Will Galassi. He is your artist.”

The air is almost robbed from her lungs. She manages a stiff nod. “Thank you.”

H
annah runs.

She runs despite her ankle. The pain there remains in recession—now it's only a twinge that snaps like an electric charge from the sole of her foot to the heel. It's small and she chooses to ignore it. Her mother once told her that pain has power over us only when we let it. That sometimes you have to ignore it in order to do work. In order to stay alive.

Hannah carries with her the satphone—snatched up again on her way out, not long after she returned it to its charging cradle. The day is bright, golden, blue—but out there, beyond the margins of the sea, hanging over the horizon sits a faint darkness. A coming storm.

It is now 10:00
A.M.
She has six hours before the boat takes her away.

She runs toward Special Projects. Looping the island. Feet pounding the walkway boards.
Whump, whump, whump, whump.
Theories run laps in her head as her feet work. Did Einar dispatch his competitor, Archer Stevens? Or did Archer Stevens dispatch his own son—accidentally or on purpose? And where does Will Galassi fit into all this? If he truly is
the artist,
then what does that mean? Did Einar hire him? Did Archer? Or is he all on his own? She needs to see Will again. Needs to probe at his edges, see what she can tease out. And she needs to talk to Hollis, too. He can help her put the pieces together.

She looks down at the phone, and as she slows her run to a jog, she calls Hollis again. He doesn't answer, so she leaves a message on
his voice mail: “I need to talk to you. Contact me ASAP.” She lets him know she talked to Ajay, then cuts herself off before the voice mail does it for her.

She runs through the trees, past the orchids. Toward the ridge that drops down to the beach, the ridge where birds nest. This morning the birds are squawking and shrieking loudly. Something about the cries is primal. It cuts right through her.

She watches one bird fly up into the sky in a clumsy spiral. Then it hitches and jerks, and plummets back to the earth.

Hannah slows to a stop. She watches birds big and small erratically flapping about. Nearby, not ten feet off the walkway, a big white bird with a long, sharp beak stabs at the ground—
tack, tack, tack
. It's got a nest nearby.

Then it shrieks and flies off.

A morbid curiosity sticks in her like a gaff hook, pulls her closer. Hannah steps off the path. The hard volcanic ground is sharp beneath her feet. The seabird's nest is a mound of dirt and pebbles—some shells, some sand, too—and she sees shapes in the center. Baby birds. Squirming about and screeching.

Another step closer and she sees.

The baby birds are bloodied. Feathers torn off in patches. Skin, too, in places. One is missing an eye. Another has its beak part of the way off. A third has only one foot—and then she sees the foot, gently sliding across the porous dark rock almost as if floating . . .

It's not floating. It's being carried.

Ants. Black ants, so black she did not see them against the surface of the volcanic ridge. Panic seizes her in a gauntleted grip, threatening to crush the oxygen right out of her lungs. Instantly, the feeling of formication trickles over her—
hand inside a mailbox, black ants showering the top of her arm, winding along the little hairs, crawling between fingers
—and she takes a quick step backward, shuddering—

Ants on her sneakers. A dozen of them. Heading toward the sock.

No, no, no—

She juggle-steps backward, almost twisting her ankle again but
recovering at the last moment. She lifts her feet one after the other, shaking them, then wiping and swatting with her hands. Ants fall, tapping against the walkway, and she stomps them as they hit. She
feels
them give way—a slight pressure, then a zit-pop and a wet crush. Ants surge toward their fallen colony mates. As she staggers, the satphone in her hand slips—slick now with sweat—and bounces against a rock. The battery case on the back springs off; the batteries pop and roll.

Nearby:
thud
. A seabird—a white petrel—slams into the walkway, flapping about like one of its wings is broken. Squawking in pain.

Ants, maybe a dozen, swarm over it.

The bird stops thrashing and goes still.

More ants crawl up from the ridge and over the edge of the walkway.

Toward her. Marching in little streams.
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah . . .
Hannah stifles a scream. The rock glistens as if wet. It's not wet. It's the ants: the sun is gleaming off their burnished black exoskeletons.

Hannah turns—she moves to the phone, but it's too late. Ants are already upon it, crawling over it. Coming toward her.

She does all that she can do now:

Hannah runs.

Invasive species (n)

An invasive species is a plant, fungus, or animal species that is not native to a specific location (an introduced species), and which has a tendency to spread to a degree believed to cause damage to the environment, human economy or human health . . . Biotic invasion is considered one of the five top drivers for global biodiversity loss. —
Wikipedia

H
annah runs.

She is ten years old.

Her hands are covered in blood.

Her father is screaming her name.

Rewind.

Five minutes before. Hannah is kneeling in grass matted into mud, the tips of her shoes stuck in the wet ground. Her father is behind her to the left, rubbing circles into her back. Her mother stands in front of her. “Don't coddle her through this, Hugh.”

“This is hard. You know it's hard, Belinda, come now.”

“Then she shouldn't have named it.”

Under Hannah's right arm, a six-month-old goat. Bucky. She called the animal Bucky because he's a funny little thing who bucks and kicks out his back hooves like he thinks he's a rodeo bronco even though he's really just a tiny goat.

In Hannah's left hand is a butcher knife.

“We can use the rifle,” Dad says.

“No,” Mom says. “We won't waste the bullet. And a goat's head is hard. The shot has to be just right.” She leans forward, now speaking for Hannah's benefit: “Besides, she needs to know where her food comes from. She needs to feel it. This is how we eat. This is how we survive.”

“It's okay if you don't want to do it,” Dad says to her.

“
Hugh.
” It silences him. It always does.

The goat wriggles in her grip. Little bleats:
behh, behhh, beh
. Small hooves smooshing prints into the mud.

Mom reaches out, holds Hannah's shoulders and squeezes. It's meant to be caring, she thinks. Reassuring. “I love you. You can do this.”

Hannah thinks:
It's like they taught you. You've seen Mom do this a hundred times.

She's seen Dad do it, too—though he never seems to do it well, and he never looks happy doing it. Mom is the champion at it.

She hears Mom's voice in her head:
One day I'll die, Hannah, and you'll need to know how to do this.
A surge of sudden anger as Hannah's imaginary response rises within her:
No! One day I'll just go to the grocery store like normal people do and buy it with money I made at a job.

Mom doesn't think that will be an option in the future, though. Banks will fail. The climate will ruin everything. Maybe superstorms. Maybe a terrorist attack. Maybe a bioweapon will go off on purpose or accidentally—or some new strain of flu will leap from a bat to a pig to people, or it'll be war or overpopulation or, or, or. An endless cascade of reasons why grocery stores may not exist in the future, near or far. A host of objections that lead to this: Hannah has to learn to kill and butcher an animal. To survive.

Eyes on her. Mom's eyes. It's a hard stare, but a kind one. Mom believes she can do this.

Hannah can't disappoint her mother. She makes a noise—an unanticipated, grief-struck cry—as her right elbow jerks hard, the arm slicing across Bucky's throat.

The goat makes a loud, ragged bleat. It's cut short quickly, but the sound startles Hannah. She does what she's not supposed to do—

She lets go.

The goat bucks and hops, jumping away. Blood soaking its white front. A hiss of arterial spray peppers Mom's face, dotting her glasses. She takes it in stride, doesn't even clean her glasses, instead growls in the back of her throat and goes after the goat. She's already talking about how she told Hannah not to let go, and she wonders aloud if the cut was deep enough and Dad is suddenly yelling about
how they should have gotten out the .22 like he said, the old bolt-action in the barn, and Hannah stops listening. Even as her father reaches for her, she ducks his grip and she runs, hard as she can.

Crying. Hands bloody. The knife dropped somewhere behind her, stuck blade-down in the ground like a surrendering flag.

T
his is how we survive.

Feet on the walkway: pounding with the surf, thudding with her heart. She thinks:
I dropped the satphone. I need it.
But it's too late to go back.

Hannah heads in the direction of the Cove—Special Projects. Maybe Will is there. Or Einar. They'll know what to do. Won't they? Are they prepared for this? Or the darker thought:

Did they make this happen?

She rounds the low point of the northern tip of the island, and as it starts to rise back up again, skids to a sudden halt—

A body. On the decking. Fifty feet away. Facedown. Hannah calls out before she even sees who it is—

The body moves. Shifts. She puts more gas in her tank and hard-charges toward the figure, her ankle sending out pulses of pain with increasing frequency.

It's Kano. The young man. His body moves again. But it's not his body moving. It's his clothing. A ripple of shirt fabric and then ants stream out from underneath the sleeves and the neckline and the bottom hem. They move in little rows, carrying bits of something.
Carrying bits of Kano,
she realizes. Swatches of him. Skin bits, chewed raggedy. Marching them in the other direction.

She winces, knows she shouldn't do it, but reaches out with a long arm and grabs a hank of his hair and lifts up his face—

It peels away from the deck. Sticky blood pools. Around the top of his face is a reverse superhero mask: all the skin around the eyes and the bridge of the nose has been clipped away. Ants dangle from
the wet muscle and fleshy edges like sailors hanging off the lifting stern of a sinking boat, their jaws holding them there like little vise grips.

They begin to drop off his face:
tick, tick, tack,
one by one.

And they begin to move toward her.

They
all
do now: they leave Kano's feet and begin to swarm toward her. Antennae searching the air. Heads up. Jaws working.

Hannah turns, falls on her ass. She begins to backpedal as they stream closer and closer, too fast, a sudden carpet of them rising from his body and moving like a rippling tide. She tucks and rolls off the walkway, then uses that small momentum to get to her feet.

Behind her, the sound of more shrieking, warbling birds.

Ahead, the ants pour forth. The trail of them goes all the way to Special Projects. Through the trees. Off the walkway. A little crooked stream of skin flags carried onward. The wind dies back and she suddenly smells the stink of piss and voided bowels. Her stomach churns.

She thinks:
Go back the other way
.

But the ants are coming from that direction, too. They're
everywhere
.

So as the ants
tick-tack-click
toward her, she takes a running jump and vaults over the walkway—and over the ants. She lands heel-first in a patch of sand, and almost goes akimbo. But somehow she leans forward, her arms reaching out for balance—and she makes another jump—

And jumps over the edge and into the blue waters of the lagoon.

Hollis tries calling that number back, but nothing. Doesn't even ring. He tries the numbers of the other phones there, and still, nothing. He e-mails Hannah with the same message he sent her before:

Call me. 911.

Then he tries to e-mail David Hamasaki—he keeps it brief.
Have Hannah call me ASAP.

But that e-mail goes out and bounces right back: No server, SMTP not found (whatever that means), blah blah blah.

He listens to Hannah's message again:
I need to talk to you. Contact me ASAP. Spoke to Ajay Bhatnagar. He said our ant contains more than just Arca marker genes. It contains other proprietary material . . .
Then she ends it, and that's it.

It's been a hard year for Hollis Copper. The world doesn't even know how hard it was. Most folks in this country think the downing of Southwest Flight 6757 is open and shut. And the politicians like it that way because that narrative is easy: domestic terrorists sought to bring down the plane (so goes the story) in order to start a new civil war in the country. Tea Party types. Wack jobs. It had a chilling effect on a lot of the hard-right rhetoric, which Hollis thought was a pretty good side effect—but the other effect, the one that scares him blue, is that Congress used that as a battering ram to gain greater domestic surveillance powers.

Which, of course, is how all this started in the first damn place.
It wasn't any domestic terror group that brought down that flight. It was a self-aware surveillance program designed for the NSA. And a group of hackers Hollis recruited helped bring that artificial intelligence down. (Or so he hopes. He still wakes up with the fear that the program, Typhon, is out there somewhere—hiding in networks like a forgotten disease ready to one day roar back and kill them all.)

Hollis went through hell to make all of that happen. Got his ass kicked raw in some horror house in West Virginia. Then had to endure six months of secret tribunals just to figure out what happened (and he's not sure the entire picture is clear for any of them to see). Not to mention watching how the government spun the whole story—and how the media helped. Now everyone is willing to give up a little more of their freedom for what they feel is protection. A snake biting its own tail. Chomp.

So, Copper going back to the FBI was supposed to be like a vacation for him. Back on the job. Working again as an agent on things he
understood
. Crime is easy to figure out. Even serial killers have an ethos. A blueprint of some kind: emotional, intellectual, whatever.

But now he's worried.

On the desk in front of him lie file folders of all the staff present at Arca Labs. None of them has pinged his radar. None are criminal. None have demonstrable mental health issues—or at least issues that have left a paper trail. Though he hasn't done a deep dive. He doesn't even have the
resources
for a deep dive. The NSA might.

It hits him. He doesn't need the NSA. He just needs some old friends.

Hollis picks up the phone, punches in a number.

A gruff voice answers: “I'm told this is Hollis Copper calling me, but that can't be right, because the Hollis Copper I know wouldn't ever want to talk to an old crazy man like me.”

“And yet here we are. Hello, Wade.”

Wade Earthman grunts and chuckles. “Hello, Hollis.”

“I need a favor.”

“I like favors. Especially when it means the Federal Bureau of Privacy Invasion owes me one. What do you need?”