Invasive (18 page)

M
oving out of the living area and into the labs feels like an out-of-body experience. Hannah leads, and the others follow in a cluster facing outward. Their movement is slow and deliberate. Nancy's the one who opens each door with her wristbound RFID chip.

The labs are eerily still and quiet. Only hours before, Arca was a functional place. Now all they can hear are the ants crawling on the walls and in the ducts. They see them, too: crossing in front of them or above them in trickling columns. One of the lines of ants is carrying forth tiny, wrinkled bits—she knows what it is. Skin. The only question is to whom those morsels of flesh belonged.

The cafeteria makes that answer both easier and harder to answer.

“Oh God,” Kit says, covering her mouth.

They'd been eating breakfast when it happened. Chairs are overturned, food is on the floor. Bodies sit slumped against tables or on the ground with their arms splayed out as if reaching for something or someone. Hannah wonders: Did the ants come out of the vents here, too? Did those gathered think that the ants crossing the carpet were Arca's own harvesters? Did someone laugh it off or try to crush one or brush it away?

Now the dozen or more who fell to the ants are covered by them. Black, writhing masses of insects. The
sound
is intense, like a thousand little rats chewing drywall into a wet paste. She shudders. The way the ants swarm, the way the bodies shift beneath the throng . . . It's not just that the victims are still alive. It's that the
sheer weight of the ants is making them move: the rise and fall of the swarm on still-living bodies.

The air draws into Hannah's lungs and stays there—it's like she cannot release it. She feels a kind of existential panic. Not just a panic for her or those around her, but for the fragility of life. It's the same feeling she gets any time she passes roadkill on the highway shoulder—a deer blasted into two halves by a speeding Peterbilt or a possum practically erased, all its margins ruined by a half ton of speeding Detroit steel. Life is woefully short. Flesh is vulnerable. The only future we're all guaranteed is one where everything ends.

Hannah and the others stand at one end of the cafeteria, knowing their only goal is to get to the other end. The ants, well involved and industrious, have not yet discovered them.

“What the fuck do we do?” Ray asks.

“I don't know,” Hannah says. It's not the answer she wants, and all her muscles tighten.

“We leave,” Nancy says. Quiet as the others, as if fearing to spook the ants into swarming toward them. “We go back the way we came. The helicopter—”

“The pilot is dead. I saw him in the water.”

“Then the boat. We go to the boat.”

“Boat's not here yet. Won't be for four or five hours.”

“Not that boat. There's another one. A blue-water fishing boat we keep at the Cove. Diesel. We have it just in case.”

Ray says, “I'd say this is damn sure a
just in case
kind of moment.”

“There may be others here,” Hannah says. “Some of them may even be in the lab. We can't just abandon them.”

“We can,” Nancy insists. “And we must.”

“I agree,” Ajay says. “We have a real chance here. To survive.”

Ray scowls, casts about an angry glare. “No, Hannah's right. We gotta look. She looked for us and now we're out here.”

That surprises Hannah. Earlier, when he suggested they leave David there, she thought he was just another self-interested survivor.
Like my parents,
she thinks. Over time she's come to feel this
way about Mom and Dad: so interested in their own survival, they've completely rejected the existence of other human beings. Community means nothing, only the survival of the family unit matters. And it always makes her wonder: Would they save themselves before saving her?
Put your oxygen mask on first before you help your children . . .

“You're just doing it for your boss,” Nancy says.

“He's your boss, too. And I'm not doing it for Einar only. I'm doing it for . . .” Ray's voice trails off. “Barry.”

“Barry? Why Barry?” Nancy asks.

“Because he's right there,” Ray says, pointing.

Sure enough, across the room, through the door leading to the lab: there's Barry's face. Peering through the porthole glass, moonlike. He smiles—a desperate, mad smile.

“Shit,” Nancy says.

“We need to get across there,” Hannah says, suddenly irritated at Nancy. “My extinguisher's almost out. I don't know that we can do it with just yours, Kit. Any ideas? We can't just run for it.”

But nobody has time to answer. Because across the room, the door opens, and Barry bolts like a tumbling boulder straight into the cafeteria, screaming as he runs.

The vagrant runs right toward Hannah across the meadow, the tall grasses blowing. He's got something in his hand. A knife, maybe. It's Roy. Roy Peffer. The town crazy. Weirdo. (Everyone makes up stories about him—but Hannah isn't supposed to know those stories because she's not supposed to stay in town long enough to talk to the others.) Roy is saying something as he runs, yelling it, but the wind carries his voice back over the field, to the fencerow and beyond.

Everything seems slow. His running. His yelling. Hannah's heart—a fast beat slowed to a crawl. It was such a nice day, too.

The sound of a gunshot.

Roy Peffer hitches, his left shoulder—no, his right, because he's facing her—dips down, but he keeps on keeping on for another three, four steps. His hip pivots as his one leg gives out. Whatever's in his hand goes spiraling. He falls as the blood starts to spread across his breastbone. Then the grass swallows him up. Disappears him as if he never existed at all.

Hannah blinks.

All of it is gone. She's in the cafeteria at Arca Labs and Barry Lowe is charging into the heart of the room. He's got something in his grip. Something heavy that needs two hands to carry.
Another fire extinguisher,
Hannah thinks, but then Barry whips around and what emits from his extinguisher isn't a cold white cloud meant to put out fire but
fire itself
.

Great bursts of flame sear the air. Barry screams, “Come on come on come on!” He moves in a half circle, turning his fire toward the ground and,
whoosh, whoosh,
spitting more fireballs. Above his head, a white particulate dust shimmers in the air like the faintest snow.

Kit gives Hannah a look, and they nod to one another. Fire extinguisher up, Kit moves into the room, discharging CO
₂
at any ants that come toward them. The others follow close after. As they get nearer to Barry, Hannah taps Kit on the arm and gestures behind them, and Kit circles around to the back, covering their rear as Barry handles what's ahead of them.

Together, they move toward the lab through a gauntlet of black ants and human bodies. Some of the ants are charred and smoldering. Some have not been tempted from their human prizes. Hannah doesn't think Barry burned any of those poor souls, though she wonders if there'd be a mercy there. One victim lies with her head to the side on the table—Lila. The girl with the ladybug freckles. Her tongue is thrust out and resting on her lower lip. It's covered in a rime of dry saliva. An ant dances on the end of it. Another ant skitters up her nostril.

The girl's eyes blink.

Hannah chokes back a sound as, behind her, Ray urges her forward. They move to the lab door. It hisses open and then shuts behind them.

Hannah shudders. She can't shake the feeling of ants crawling all over her. She can't shake the image of that girl's face. Staring at Hannah as the colony claims her and all her freckled skin as its own.

T
he door that leads out of the cafeteria doesn't go right to the labs. It goes to another of the telescoping tunnels, and the lab is still another door away.

No ants here. Not a single one.

Barry is bent over, hands planted on his knees. Gulping for air. At his feet is what he had been carrying: a metal container with a plastic nozzle sticking out like a mosquito's proboscis. The nozzle's end is puckered with white powder. Jutting up from the bottom at a forty-five-degree angle is a metal rod duct taped to the base. At the top end of it, taped into its U-shaped bracket, is a lighter.

Impressive,
Hannah thinks.
An improvised flamethrower.
She remembers making all sorts of weapons as a kid. Spears. Traps. A bang-stick out of a broom handle, a spring, a ballpoint pen, a shotgun shell. The only flamethrower she'd ever made was the simplest kind: a can of hair spray and a Bic lighter. Mom encouraged everything but that one.
Fire,
the woman said,
isn't something you control, no matter how much you think you do.

Hannah crawls out of her own memories and looks up to see ants swarming on the other side of the cafeteria door. Lines of them crossing the glass of the porthole window, meeting each other in the center. A bullet hole in glass, engineered in reverse.

But they're not coming in.

She says as much aloud.

“Yeah,” Barry says. “I sealed off the lab HVAC vents. I'll show you.” He gets up with a grunt and blearily heads toward the lab entrance.

“This is fucked,” Ray says. He grabs Hannah by the elbow. “This is them, isn't it? These are your monster ants.”

She nods.
My ants. My demon ants.

“Thanks for saving our cans back there.”

“Thanks for backing my play.”

Nancy gives them both a look like a pair of hypodermic needles.

“Fuck you, Nancy,” Ray says.

“Fuck
you,
Ray.” Ahead, the door opens for Barry. “We could've gone for the boat. Or even just waited in the ocean till this all blows over.”

“We saved Barry.”

Kit jumps in: “I think Barry saved
us
.”

Barry gives a goofy smile, but one tinged with lunacy and exhaustion. Then, suddenly—movement near Hannah's elbow. Something skittering. She gasps, pulls away—just as Barry reaches in and scoops up Buffy, the praying mantis.

“So,” Barry says, smacking his lips together. The mantis runs up his hand and perches on the pad of flesh at the bottom of his palm. “Here's the sitch. I locked down the HVAC vents from here to the back of the lab—into the bee room, the ant room, and my lab. I also sealed the doors to the bee room and the ant room because I can't control the exit points. Bees and ants have a way out, which means our new invasive friends have a way in.”

Hannah asks, “How are the vents sealed?”

“Electronically,” Ajay answers.

Barry nods. “Yup. I used the network to seal them off. It means it's going to get hot in here. No AC.”

“Phones?” Hannah asks. “We could use the satphones from David's office.” Even just saying his name, she sees how the others react. Grief and shock warring in their eyes. He meant something to them. Nothing will bring him back, though, so she says: “David is gone. We have to accept that and move on.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Barry says, swallowing hard. “Okay. Okay. The phones are a problem.” He reaches into one of the lab counters and
pulls out the two remaining satphones. Hannah doesn't understand the problem until he flips his hand. The back of each phone is open. The battery packs are gone.

“Somebody did this to us,” Ray says. “On purpose.”

“
Putang ina mo,
” Nancy says. “Who?”

“It's Will,” Ajay says. “Will did this. I
never
trusted him.”

“You're fucking nuts!” Kit says. “Will is a puppy. He's one of the few nice guys I've met. Maybe
you
did it, Ajay. Maybe it's one of us in this room.”

“Maybe it's Einar. He's not here, either,” Nancy says. She throws up her hands. “I see that look. Don't be naive. He isn't like us. The way he watches people. He's like that praying mantis. Cutting people apart as he looks at them. Ready to take your head if he needs to.”

“Everybody calm down,” Hannah says. “Doubt and suspicion won't help us. We need to focus on next steps.”

“Maybe it was you,” Nancy says.

“It wasn't me, Nancy.”

“Oh, sure. You come waving your hands around, talking about some ant we made, and then next thing we know: Here they come. Marching into our lab. Killing us off one by one. Guess that was just some kind of coincidence, hm? Or
maybe
you came here planning on killing us all in order to cover up your own—”

“
Whoever did this,
” Barry yells, “they
also
sabotaged our satellite.”

“That means no Internet?” Hannah asks.

“Bingo was his name-o. Means no communication off the island at all. Except for what's at the Cove.”

“I told them about the boat,” Nancy says, sour-faced.

“The boat has a radio. That's our only shot.”

“Why is the boat all the way out at the Cove?” Hannah asks.

Kit runs her hand through her hair and sighs. “Best place to dock it. The dock here is right on the fringing reef. The tide goes down and the boat will sit on the reef and hurt the coral—or the boat hull.”

“Our priorities as I see them are as follows,” Hannah says. “We need to get to that radio so we can send out an SOS and get word out to Captain Sullivan. If Dan docks and comes onto land without warning, the ants will take him. We need to get off the island, either with Sullivan or using the Arca fishing boat, or both. We have—” She looks at her watch. “About five or six hours before a storm is coming in, right? And Sullivan should be here in around four hours. Any of this not making sense?”

“Sounds legit,” Ray says. Everyone else seems on board. Nancy grumbles but nods.

“Good. That means we've a very short window to create favorable conditions for our survival and escape. Let's figure out how we get clear of this island alive.”