Invasive (21 page)

S
he stands at the door at the edge of the lab. Ants have gathered at the margins beyond, unable to pass the invisible border marked by the Fluon.

The plan is about as simple as a plan can get.

Run.

So Hannah runs. She starts with a leap over the ants massing at the borders of the door, then sprints down the hall, praying to all the gods of all the world that the Fluon painted on the sides of her shoes didn't slip down to the bottoms of her shoes, because one slippery misstep and her ankle will twist.

Boom, boom, boom
—her feet carry her down the first telescoping hall, to the second bridging room that leads out to the hive room, the harvester colony, and Barry's lab. There, past them all, is the exit, and her only goal is to make it out and to the ocean beyond.

And like that, she's out. No time to stop and see if she has ants climbing up her. Her jaw tightens and her legs pump as she runs down the decking—a walkway that is covered in ants. Eyes forward. Feet moving. Ahead she sees a break in the trees—she'll take it the way you take a highway exit, and then she'll bound to the sea. But she takes another step and—

Her foot starts to skid. The Fluon isn't making her shoes slippery. All the dead ants smashed underneath them are.

Her heel tweaks, turns, and leans like a listing ship—the injury from just a day before returning like a vengeful specter. Pain screws up through her heel into her calf and she cries out, jumping off the walkway and hobbling now as fast as her ruined gait will take her.

Her foot catches on something. Everything goes blurry as the world is yanked away from her. Her elbows hit. Her forehead snaps against the earth.

Then she hears the sound. A sound like sleet
ticky-tacking
on a roof. It's loud and getting louder.

She looks, squints, sees the ground shifting. A rippling black column of ants in far greater number than she's seen yet.

No time to care about her worthless ankle. She gets her good foot underneath her and pistons it down, launching herself up. Through the brush. Her shoulder clips a bottle palm and she spins and almost falls again. The ridge drops hard to the sand below, and she has no time to make this graceful or even safe. She gets to the edge and leaps.

A twenty-foot drop.

She tucks and curls, hitting the sand hard—her body rolls forward, and she takes most of the impact on her shoulder. The air blasts from her lungs
,
and then she's up, clumsily staggering forward. The sea is only ten feet away. But around her she sees the bodies of birds. What few feathers are left are sticking up in bloody tufts. She launches herself over an albatross whose head is stripped raw, its eyes gone, its beak hanging off. The rest of it is crawling with ants.

And now, she realizes, so is she.

They're not on her sneakers, they're on her legs. As she books it forward, she swipes her hands fast at her legs—ants tumbling off the fabric of her pants and into the sand. The sea is only five feet away now—

She hops, flinging the black insects to the ground—

Four feet.

Ants on her hand and arm now, mandibles open—

Three feet.

She shakes her arm back and forth, ants flung to the margins—

Two feet.

Her ankle hurts so badly it's almost numb. But the ants from her arm are gone and once she's in the water—

One foot.

A tickle on her neck—

Then a pinch.

And then something far worse.

Hannah drops to her knees in the surf as a single ant jabs its stinger into her neck. Immediately the area grows warm. Hot. She feels woozy. Now here they come—the tickle of ants up her legs, this time getting under her jeans, on her skin. A hundred little legs tickling.

More pinching.

More stinging.

Her throat tightens. Everything starts to go blurry.

Hannah tries to crawl out to sea but her arms wobble and fail to respond. Her forehead crashes down into wet sand as the wave draws back, dragging her with it—then crashing back over her. Some of the ants wash away but others keep biting and stinging. She tries to speak, tries to cry out, but what emerges from her closing throat is only a teakettle whistle. Then there's salt water up her nose and down her throat and she's gagging, sputtering.

The waves roll in.

The waves roll out.

Her forearm is right in front of her, like a disconnected piece of meat—she can't even feel it now. Some of the ants get sucked out to sea, but some don't. They are tenacious, these little demons.

Then—she rolls over suddenly. Did she do that? She tries again to scream but she can't. A shadow over her, the sun behind it. Will's face roves into view. He whispers something to her:
Hold still
. He has a knife.

He sticks the blade into her thigh. She can't feel it. And then it hits her: It's not a blade. It's an EpiPen.

As her breath starts to return to her in great gulps, he bends down and presses something against her mouth. A white cloth. A heady, buzzy warmth spreads across her. Again her eyes lose focus, and this time she can't get it back. Everything goes slippery and it slides away, out to sea, out to sea . . .

The university buys spiders out of a van.

That's not a thing they would admit to publicly, but it's a true statement. It's not just spiders, either. Sometimes it's Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Or scorpions. Ez has even bought a few praying mantises and walking sticks that way.

The trick to the van is this: People buy spiders and they don't really want spiders. Either they buy them and get freaked out, or they buy a Chilean rose tarantula and realize they really should have bought a rock because they're about the same level of excitement.
Or
they buy one and get bit, or get stuck with the practically invisible urticating hairs that New World tarantulas can fling at you if they're feeling particularly sassy that day. (Ez has never had that problem, because Ez is a professional.)

There aren't many rescue organizations for tarantulas like there are for cutey-wootey little poochies. For the most part, people do what they shouldn't do: they throw them out into the wild (which isn't legal) or they kill them (which isn't legal, either).

Those who have some kind of conscience, though, first try to take the tarantulas back to the store. The store won't take them back. But the store
will
direct the unhappy owner to a person.

In this case, that person is Dallas Lardell, a bony scarecrow of a man who buys up unwanted creepy-crawlies from those aforementioned unhappy owners for dirt, dirt cheap.

Then he sells them.

Sometimes he sells them to other owners who can't afford a new
tarantula (Ez has always joked he should spray paint
SLIGHTLY USED SPIDERS
on the side of his minivan). Otherwise he sells them to the entomology lab.

Tonight, though, Ez is about to leave empty-handed. Dallas is pleading with her to buy another of his “many, many spiders,” even though all he has are two Chilean rose and one pinktoe. Both of which are nice, but perfectly common spiders.

“You said you had
Poecilotheria regalis,
” she says, and he gives her a pinched look like she's speaking another language. Which she is, because it's Latin, so she says, “A regal parachute spider. One of the ornamentals.”

“I think I did have one, but I sold it to a nice kid on a skateboard.” He gives her that rictus grin of a human skull that's been sitting out in the desert. “I have other spiders. Good spiders. Look, see.”

“I'm not buying these basic bitches.” Ez sneers. “Ugh. Dallas, you're wasting my time. Call me when you have something with some bite, some venom. Though, no baboon spiders. I already have the Orange Bitey Thing back in the lab.” People buy the OBTs as pets because they think they're cool. No urticating hairs, either. But then they get bit and end up in the hospital. Oops. “I'll see you, Spider-Man.”

He tries yelling after her, but she leaves him and his ratty late-nineties minivan back in the lot and heads back to campus, stopping by one of the food trucks to pick up some fry bread and a Coke. Worry dogs her steps. The university is again fucking around with the funding for the science departments. And they're playing musical chairs with the department heads again.

And then there's Hannah. She hopes Hannah is all right.

Ez tells herself,
She's probably fine.
This kind of thing is her jam. It's the rest of life Hannah can't handle.

Ez heads back inside the lab—it's evening now, the sky gone ombré. Nobody's here, really, which makes it Ez's favorite time to be here. But when she goes to flip on the lights, the office stays dark.

Flick. Flick. Flick.
She tries the switch a few times. Nothing.

The hall lights are on, so there's still power. Did both of her fluorescents burn out at the same time? Ugh, the university gets what the university pays for: not much and never enough. She steps into the room to turn on the lamp at her desk.

Something crinkles as she steps onto it.

Something that shouldn't be there.

Suddenly she's frozen in place, not sure what's underneath her foot. It feels like plastic. Like a painter's tarp.

Her eyes adjust, and that's when she sees the human shape standing ten feet away. Against the far wall, close to the terrariums.

For a moment Ez remains motionless. A grasshopper or spider in the middle of an army ant swarm knows to remain
perfectly still
because the ants detect by movement. Do nothing, and the ants continue to stream by. Move one micrometer and they tear you apart.

But she's a human and someone is in here with her and as her eyes adjust further to the darkness she sees that whoever is standing there is tall, broad-shouldered—a man, she thinks, and suddenly her brain goes to all the worst things:
campus rapist, serial murderer, a spurned student out for revenge—

She wheels toward the door. A sharp
snap
from the other side of the room—a gunshot, but no muzzle flash, no deafening ringing in her ear—and her hand blooms with pain. She reels her hand in, resting it against her middle. The end of her arm feels like it's a roadside flare, burning hot and red.

She screams as two more shots pop, peppering the wood of the door where she had been standing only moments before. Ez dives behind her desk, her shoulder slamming hard into her chair, which rolls away with a clatter before tipping over and crashing against the floor. Her legs feel suddenly wet and she thinks,
I pissed myself,
but then she sees the darkness of the stain: It's blood. Blood from her hand soaking her jeans. All parts of her feel desperate and mad and though her life doesn't flash before her eyes, the singular regret of
Have I done enough, or is this all there is?
joins the chorus.

She hears a footstep on the tarp. He's coming closer.

The desk wobbles as she leans into it. It's an IKEA desk. She put it together herself with those godforsaken little wrenches and the utilitarian instructions. The desk is a piece of shit with an unpronounceable name. And it isn't heavy.

It isn't heavy.

Another footstep. The tarp crinkles.

Ez gets her legs under her at the same time she gets her shoulder underneath the lip of the desk. She kicks off like a swimmer. The desk judders forward, skidding across the floor as her legs push and piston. The drawers rattle open. Pens and organizers and bins fall off and crash against the floor. She screams—

And hits something hard.

Desk, meet body.

As her blood spatters the floor, she gives one last hard shove—and the silhouette falls backward, into the rack of terrariums. Ez ducks down, holds both hands over her head as the rack shakes and the terrariums begin to fall: popping, shattering, a cacophony of sound. On her hands and knees, ignoring the pain jolting up through her hand to her elbow, she scrambles forward, slipping on her own blood as she crawls as fast as she can toward the window—

More gunfire.
Pop, pop, pop.
Books leap off the wall like scared toads. One crashes against the back of her neck and her jaw snaps hard against the floor but she doesn't care,
can't
care, and keeps moving—

Behind her, the man screams.

There, by the window, a standing lamp, another IKEA find with another tongue-twisting name, and her hand skitters up the pole. Her fingers find the switch.

When the light flickers on, she doesn't understand what she's seeing. The desk is shoved up against the rack of terrariums. (
The poor spiders,
she thinks,
they don't deserve the fate that just befell them.
) A man is sandwiched in between, bent over at the
waist. He's clad in black: black pants, black tee, arms painted with some kind of dark grease. Dark hair all a-muss. His face is turned toward her, cheek against the wood, frozen in what appears to be pain. His hand raises up and in it is a lean black pistol with a suppressor at the end. The barrel is a black void, a dark eye staring her down—

Then he cries out again, wincing. The hand holding the gun thuds against the desk. Ez thinks,
I really hurt him. That desk broke something inside him. Maybe an organ, maybe spinal damage . . .

But then she realizes that's not it at all. From the back of his neck, up the far side of his head, emerges a pair of hairy orange legs. The OBT—the orange baboon tarantula, the Orange Bitey Thing—crawls up his scalp and perches atop his head. Fangs glistening. Venom in.

The man's teeth grit. “It hurts, it hurts,” he keens. His eyes clamp shut.

Ez stands on wobbly legs. She holds up her hand. The middle of her palm and the back side of it are black with blood. Fresh red drips on the floor like she just dipped her whole mitt in a can of red paint. The sound that comes out of her is a wounded-puppy sound.

On the floor, scrunched up around the legs of the desk, is a blue tarp.
A murder tarp,
she thinks. He was going to kill her on it, then roll her up, take her out of here. Why? Who would want to kill her?

She staggers over to the desk, reaches out for the gun and pulls it from the man's hand. It's heavy. She points it at him. The barrel wavers and dips. “Who are you?”

“You need to call somebody. What the fuck. What the fuck.” The back of his throat makes a desperate plucked-banjo sound. “I got bit. Something bit me.”

“OBT,” she says, knowing it won't make any sense to him. Tears creep down her cheeks. “Tell me why you're here.”

“Fuck you. Fuck you. You should be dead.”

She thinks:
Kill him.
Kill him for wanting to kill her. But that emotion is like a grease fire: hot and bright and then it burns itself out. The gun wibbles, wobbles, and then Ez runs out of the office, screaming for help but all along wondering: Why? Why should she be dead? Who is that man and why is she his target?