Invasive (22 page)

H
ow much do you remember about that day?” Will asks her.

Hannah sits at the table at Arca Labs and thinks. “I remember almost making it.
So close.
I had gone to the beach and made the jump. My ankle was twisted, sprained, though I worried it was broken, and I
almost
made it.”

“Then they were on you. The ants.”

“Yes. And I thought I was dead.” She has to take herself through it one step at a time because it's all muddy, confusing. Even existing here and now in the present is hard.
Establish a beachhead,
she thinks. “Establish a beachhead,” her father would say when teaching her to play checkers and, later, chess. “Like in the war. Just get your soldiers out there in position before they die.” He was never in a war, but his own father was. Her grandfather, a man who died before she was born. She has to blink hard to push those memories back. “Then you came along. You stuck me in the leg—”

“An EpiPen.”

“Right. And then—”

“A cloth over your mouth.”

Establish a beachhead.
But what's her move, here? Tell him she doesn't trust him? That she knows he's a killer? Or keep it secret? All she says instead is:

“Why?”

“I needed you.”

“Why?”

“Do you think I did this? That I'm a killer?” he asks.

Yes. I do. I don't trust you.
“You're an artist,” she says.

He laughs.

“You do think I did this.”

He reaches for her throat. She pulls away, but he has her.

“I still do,” she chokes past his crushing hand.

“Even though I saved you?”

Even though,
she thinks, but her words won't come.

“The ants are everywhere now.” He stands up suddenly, the chair legs barking against the floor. “It's going to be a global catastrophe. An ecological nightmare. Once they get entrenched . . .”

He pulls her closer. Her throat burns. She tries to pull away, but can't.
He has me drugged. My limbs won't work. What did he do to me?

He keeps on talking. “Someone sent the colonies all around the world. Every continent. Countless countries. It's a kind of genetically modified terrorist attack. We still have time—not much, but enough—to undo what's done before they get established.” He's pulling her around the table now, closer, closer, even as she gags. “But all you want to do is talk about whether or not I'm guilty of the act of creation. We're all guilty of that. Creation and destruction are our human instincts, Hannah. You know that. It is who we are. You think we'll pick a side, like we'll figure out if we're good or evil, but it's really that we're both.”

He's next to her now. Bending toward her. His hand lets go of her throat and she's left gasping. Then his hand moves under her chin, lifting her mouth toward his. “Is this okay?”

“No,” she says. And yet she doesn't pull away. His lips find hers. A rasp of his unshaven face against hers, red and raw—his tongue in her mouth as they lean together—something small and delicate runs from his mouth to hers.

A tiny ant. A scout.

Hannah tries to pull away, but Will's hand finds the back of her head and clamps there, a vise grip at the back of her skull. Her teeth crash against his and pain goes through her jaw as a column of ants begins to surge up out of his mouth and into her own, down her throat, and once again she can't breathe—

Hannah moans in pain. That sound becomes a sudden, mournful wail as she tries to stand. Pain crashes through her ankle like lightning and she cries out.

Vertigo throttles her. She blinks back the dizziness and leans forward and plants her hands on a wall—no, a window—to stave off the tide of disorientation.

No, it's not a window, either. Or, rather, it's both wall and window. A Plexiglas wall. At the far end there's a door, not quite three feet tall. Clear Lucite hinges. A metal lock, the knob and fixture on the other side.

It takes her a second, but then it hits her. Hannah is inside the mosquito cage at the Cove lab. Inside Special Projects.
That was just a dream.
Or a hallucination. In the center of the room she's looking into is the steel table. Under the table is her bag. On top of the table is a trio of EpiPens.

She looks around. Inside her cage, she sees no mosquitoes. Outside, though, are ants. Just a few, as they were back in Arca. Lazily moving about—a line of them here, a line of them there, winding around like crooked cracks forming in the walls.

Hannah tightens her hand into a fist and slams it against the clear wall, but she has almost no strength. Her hand falls dully against the plastic.

It must be loud enough, however, to act as a summoning. The ants begin to wind toward her. They climb up the plastic and converge into one teeming, seething mass. Up from the bottom, down from the top, in from each side. Fear twists inside her.
I shouldn't have done that.
Were they attracted by the sound? Hannah wonders. Or was that simple movement—her hand against the Plexiglas—enough to cast her scent into the air? Tears burn at the corners of her eyes as she backs away against the wall—the sense memory of them crawling all over her is renewed, as if it's happening here and now.

The ants climb up to the mesh at the top, a mesh blessedly too tight and narrow for them to crawl through. Their attempt to enter is thwarted.

She crumples, wiping away tears.

But it seems Hannah has summoned more than the ants. Will Galassi strides into the room, hands behind his back. “Hello, Hannah.”

“These are yours, aren't they?” Her eyes follow a trail of the ants winding drunkenly in front of her. “These little demons.”

He smiles. “
Myrmidones bellicus.
The Myrmidon ant.”

“Warriors. These ants are your warriors.”

“You know your mythology, then.”

“And my Latin.” In the myth, a Greek king, Aeacus, lost his people to a great plague. As Aeacus was one of the sons of Zeus, he asked the god to help him repopulate, and Zeus obliged. He said he would make the king's people diligent, hardy, and ready for war: and so he rose them up from ants Zeus found on his sacred tree. Men made from the smallest creatures. Industrious. Zealous. And excellent at following orders. Their exploits were told in
The Iliad:
they fought for Achilles, the brash, egomaniacal hero.

“They are my warriors, yes.”

“Are you their Achilles?”

He turns away from that, almost as if it offends him. “No. I'm no hero. At least, not the kind you think.” But here Will turns toward her again, giving her the side-eye.

“You can't help it. Being proud of this.”

“Pride is dangerous.”

“And yet, there it is. Twinkling in your eye.” She presses her forehead against the plastic. The ants crawling there are reduced to blurs, and she resists recoiling. She has to appear tougher than she is. “You created them out of nothing. That takes some skill.”

He shakes his head. “Not out of nothing, no. Each ant—really, every living thing—is just a series of building blocks. All the way down to the chemical level. Remix, rearrange, redo. They're not a whole new life-form, even though science would dictate they are. I consider them an
homage
.”

In the silence between them, she hears the crackle of the ants crawling.

“So why do it? Just to see if you can?”

Now he turns toward her. “No. Well.” He pauses and his mouth purses. “Maybe at first. But then I started to see it for what it was: A way out. For us. For . . .” He sweeps his arms across the air above his head. “For people. Human beings, Hannah, don't you see? It's time for us to go. We need to be euthanized before we do too much damage. Nature understands that kind of sacrifice. Wolves go off to die alone, away from their pack. They know their illness or age brings weakness, summons other predators, other packs. But we humans have clung too long to this planet, and now . . .”

“We're ruining the planet. That's what you're saying.”

“Of course.
Of course.
” He leans in, only inches from the plastic. “You talk about it in your own work. The race toward that one door. Angel and demon, evolution and destruction. Hannah, don't you see? The race is over. The devil won and
we're the devil
. All our sins—greed and pride and vanity and gluttony—oh, they've served us well, but what about the rest of the world?”

The ants seem unperturbed. Hannah notices that none crawl upon him.
Why?
She thinks to keep him talking so she can figure this out. “You're right. The air is sick. The oceans will boil over. Fish floating on top of the toxic algae. Bees, dead because we poisoned them. We're not good curators. But we can fix it. We've fixed it before. Look, the Dust Bowl of the thirties—that was an apocalypse. But once we committed to change—to let natural agricultural processes come back, to develop rangelands and new tree development, to—”

“
No.
” That word, sharp as a nail driven through wood. “That was small. This is . . .” He's frustrated now, nostrils flaring. He seems to find his center and speaks again: “Mankind is always going on about the things that will end us. We talk about meteors like the one that hit the dinosaurs and wiped them out. But
we
are the meteor. We're seven billion people and counting, Hannah. Breeding like rats and roaches in the walls. It's our drive. It's our nature. To keep procreating. We want more, more, more. More food, more money,
more land, more everything. We're bacteria running rampant in a petri dish. We're a
parasite
in an unready host.”

Hannah hears her mother's voice in her head:
The end is coming, Hannah dear. We don't know how. But ten to one says we make it happen.
“So, this is it,” she says. “These ants, your little Myrmidons. You let them out to destroy the world.”

“To destroy
people,
but to
save
the world. It's elegant, isn't it? A tiny little creature like the ant also possesses the largest biomass of any animal on earth. They have survived cataclysm and ruination. And they have maintained. It's perfect. If anyone deserves to end the Age of Man, it's them. They've earned it.”

“You're sick.” Those two words come out angry, but she's not entirely convinced. He is sick, yes. But maybe that doesn't make him wrong.

“I'm not sick. I'm clear. Clear about the state of things. Clear about our place in this world.
Clear
about what must come next if
anything
is to come next.”

“Who was the victim, then? By the lake, in New York? Just a test case? Just to see?”

Will goes dreadfully silent. His mouth forms a dire line. “Aye, but there's the rub,” he says. “I didn't do it. I didn't kill him. I let the ants out only after someone stole most of my colonies. I had one barrel left and I just thought . . . to hell with it.” He frowns. “You know, I had a plan. Once. A well-orchestrated release of the Myrmidons: I would send them to various locations around the world, places the ants could establish strong, capable colonies. But I never had the strength of conviction to do it. Someone else did, though. I guess I should thank whoever that was.”

“You're lying.” But she can tell he isn't. “If not you, who? Who did it? Einar? Ajay?
Who?
”

But that is a question he seems disinterested in answering. “I have to go, Hannah,” he says. “The boat is coming soon. And not long after that, a very bad storm.”

“Wait.”
This is a death sentence.
“You're leaving me down here to die. You said you admired my work.”

He puts his hand onto the glass, like she's a prisoner and he's her lost love. “I do admire it. And I will continue to. I'm not killing you. I'm
saving
you. The ants can't get in here. You'll be clear from the storm. Ride it out. And then, whatever happens from here, I want you to tell the world. Tell them what I told you. Let them know why this is happening.” He smiles: a bit cheeky now, like this is half a joke. “You're my prophet. My prophet in the truest sense of the term: a mouthpiece for all to hear the truth.”

An ant dances onto the edge of his finger. Hannah watches, breathless, as it runs down the length of the digit, over the knuckles, to the hand. “It doesn't care about you,” she says, bewildered.

Will nods. Then he picks up the ant with his other hand. He grabs it between thumb and forefinger. Its legs tickle the air.

He crushes it.

A rush of sound like a rain shower. Ants swarm him from the floor. They go up his body. Under his clothes. Run in panicked streams along his jawline and down his arm. All of them head toward a single terminus: the end of his hand, where he just crushed one of their own. They move in such masses that his entire hand disappears beneath them.

She sees now that there is not just one size of ant; rather, she sees two. Some of the ants are smaller than the others. A third of the size.

None of them bite. None of them sting.

Will smiles. He relaxes his hand, and Hannah watches as the ants carry their dead comrade away. Down the line, receding away from his hand: it's like watching a glove disintegrate.

“How?” she asks.

“That's my little secret,” he says. “Good-bye, Hannah. I've got to go home. I hope you get to go home someday, too.”

He retreats from the room, ants falling off his hand as he walks away. Hannah screams herself hoarse as he goes. She slams herself into the Plexiglas until she melts against it, collapsing into a numb, weeping heap.

H
annah has no idea how much time passes. An hour. Two. The minutes crawl like ants up glass. She spends time trying to kick out the door. The ants come after every kick and every slam of her good foot against the hatch and its hinges. Ants fling off to the ground with each hit, summoning more with their distress.

Eventually the pain in her ankle is too much. She sits. Simmers in futility and rage. Ants recede like a tide, gone back out to wherever it is they go.

Hannah imagines the others. Kit, dying. Einar, bleeding. Nancy, maybe overtaken by now. Stung and skinless. Will did this to them.

But that's not all of it, is it? He was telling the truth when he said someone else killed the Stevens boy. And didn't Einar say something about seeing barrels here? She looks around, straining to see. There's the door—and a big red lever next to it, which she expects opens it—but no barrels. At least, not in this room. If they were here, and what Einar told her wasn't a lie, they're gone now. Who would have taken them? Einar? Then why did he come back to the lab at all? Could there be someone else? A third party, nameless and faceless?

A sense of helplessness threatens to reach up from underneath and pull her down. And that only makes her more furious—because now she's racked with helplessness and the fear that Will Galassi may be right.

The world
is
in a bad place. Mankind isn't. Crime is down. Hunger is down. But that improvement is its own kind of strain. People have given themselves the time to breathe and a path to
do better through industry, science, technology. The more we learn, the more we burn, the more resources we chew through like termites through healthy wood. Trees and land and dirt. Sky and sea and all that dead dinosaur juice beneath the ground. We're poisoning the world with our productivity. Seven billion people—and counting.

We're not the meteor,
she thinks.
We're the swarm.

Maybe this is for the best. Let the ants come marching. Let them sweep over the world like the biblical deluge, their jaws flexing, their antennae searching, those little legs going
ticky-ticky-tack
across the dirt and the stone. She imagines it: swarming men and women in their homes, their cars, at work. They'd act like any other natural disaster: they'd take the old, the young, and the infirm first. Her mind wanders to an infant in the crib, big glassy eyes looking up at the mobile above her head, fat fingers searching as the ants come marching two by two, hurrah . . .

Hannah makes a sound: a wild, feral noise. She squeezes her eyes shut so hard she thinks they might never again open, gritting her teeth and forcing those thoughts out of her head.

She repoints her mind to something altogether more academic. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s. She mentioned it to Will for a reason. For the better part of a decade, Americans reduced a lot of the middle of the country to a dust-choked wasteland. They hurried to cut down all the grasslands, but those grasses had acted as windbreaks and kept the soil healthy and balanced. Suddenly everything dried up fast. Big dust storms—like billowing clouds from the Devil's own mouth—rolled over the land like boulders.
Black blizzards,
they called them. Everyone thought it heralded the end times. For America. Maybe for the whole world.

But action changed it. Drastic action taken in FDR's first one hundred days. The government planted more than 200 million trees. They worked to teach farmers advanced agricultural techniques: crop rotation, soil health, how to prevent erosion. The government paid farmers to learn and work the new ways. They slaughtered
millions of pigs that were a drain on the region, and they fed the pigs to the hungry.

It didn't work at first. Years went by without change. But by the end of the Dirty Thirties, the practices had their effect. Rain returned to the region. The dust storms rolled back to the hell from whence they came. Life began to grow anew.

Hannah stands up. Something vibrates up through her feet—a low rumble. Thunder, she thinks. Whatever storm was on its way is almost here. She stands up on her tippy-toes, ignoring the pain in her ankle as best she can. Her fingers feel along the top margins of the glass wall—tickling the mesh as ants crawl on the other side of it. The mesh is soft metal. She can't push it out from here. She doesn't have enough leverage.

The pain in her twisted ankle is coiling around her leg and tightening, so she sits for a moment, breathing. She takes off her sneaker. Her ankle isn't swollen. It's not hot to the touch. It hurts, but it's not broken.

She opens up the laces to put the shoe back on and curses her stupidity. Shoelaces are a survivalist hack. Her parents taught her how to build shelters, bandage wounds, make rafts—all using shoelaces. Hannah's own laces are high-test: made of paracord 550. The same cords are used to suspend jumpers from their parachutes. She remembers when astronauts fixed the Hubble telescope using this stuff.

These shoelaces are going to save her life. Or end it, if it goes wrong. Because the ants are still out there, aren't they? She's going to have to work fast.

Hannah undoes the shoelace from her left sneaker. She takes each end of the shoelace, and uses her teeth to pinch the aglets tight, to little points. She stands again on her tippy-toes, wincing against the pain in her ankle, takes one of the aglets, and presses it hard against the mesh, trying to get it into one of the very small gaps between the fine wire. She blinks back sweat as another roll of thunder thrums through the ground and the walls.

Push, push. The mesh strains, tenting outward. And then:
Pop.
The end of the shoelace thrusts through.

Hannah pulls the shoelace needle back out, and then an inch over, does it again—push, push,
pop
. Back out, and again. Five holes.

The ants begin gathering on the glass wall once more. Some begin meandering across the ceiling. Walking, then pausing to detect the changes in the air. The scent of Hannah crawling along those air currents.

Hannah works the shoelace back through the first hole, and then hooks it toward the second hole. It's hard to redirect it back, and she has to squeeze the tips of her fingers on her right hand through that second hole, little pincers searching out the shoelace—

The ants gather. They creep closer. She imagines them all over her. Biting and stinging.
No.
She can't go there. Not now.

Stitch. She grabs the aglet of the shoelace, pulls it through.

Then the third hole.

She can hear the ants' little feet now.
Click, click, click.

Fourth hole.

The ants are beginning to crawl up the bottom of the mesh. Hannah sees hundreds of them rising from the floor. Coming up the glass. Eager. Interested.

Finally, through the fifth hole—

The ants crawl up over the mesh. Hannah bangs the mesh with her hands. Ants shudder and fall. Again she hits it, again,
again,
until most of them pitter-patter back onto the floor.

But they keep coming.

The ends of the shoelace dangle through the first and fifth holes in the mesh. Hannah coils the hanging ends around her hands, then braces herself against the wall. She pulls with both hands. Muscles straining. She draws up both knees until she's suspended by the shoelace, holding tight. She gets her shins against the glass—

The ants start pouring through the holes.

Hannah pushes hard with everything, letting her weight do the job—

The mesh moves. One hard shift—a
rip
as it pulls away from its mooring. Something tickles her knuckle. An ant. No time to stop. No time to think. Just push with knees, pull with arms—

Hannah cries out as the wire mesh wrenches away and she falls backward. The flat of her back slams into the floor. The air rushes out as her lungs close like a pair of clapping hands. Her mind scrambles like a rat on fire:
Get up, get out, get up, get out
.

Ants are churning through the gap.

Hannah springs to her feet, ignoring the pain that corkscrews up through her heel and back into her ankle. She snatches up the shoelace. The ants come across the ceiling, down this side of the glass wall.
They're coming. Run.

She takes three good steps and then springs up, grabbing the lip of the wall. Ants crush and smear beneath her fingers and palms. The Myrmidons begin to swarm her now, down her fingers, along her forearms as she pulls herself up through the gap even as she knows it's already too late, even as she feels their pinching mandibles closing on her skin like staples—

She draws herself through the open space—through a moist, squirming hole of black ants—and falls down on the other side. Her esophagus tightens like big hands are choking it shut. She gets up as her tongue swells in her mouth. Her hand hits the side of the steel table. Her legs skid out from under her.

Pain in her shoulder. Pain up her ankle. Ants up her neck. Under her ears. Under her shirt. The sound of her breathing becomes the sound of a milkshake sucked up through a bent and broken drinking straw—a wheezing wetness.

Her finger moves, an inchworm among ants—There. An EpiPen auto-injector.

Hannah rolls over—her lips fall open because she can't get them to close, but her teeth clamp and she feels the ants over her cheeks, her mouth, her teeth. A mad thought bubbles to the surface:
It's all just protein
.

She summons everything she has. Pushes all her energy into
the arm that lies flat on the floor, the auto-injector curled weakly into her fist. She draws up not just her energy but the voices of her parents, all the ghosts of those who have come and gone, all the feelings of inadequacy and fear and uncertainty about the world in which she lives, all the urges she has to live despite whatever this world will one day become, and she sings through her teeth and pushes her heels hard into the floor and—