Invasive (28 page)

The car revs and jumps like a nettle-whipped pony. “Sounds like fun,” Hollis says.

“I'm just trying to be open kimono with you so you'll be open kimono with me.” The car shoots around a bend, and suddenly they're off the airfield and coasting along the beach toward what looks like a little town. “The frisky fuck we dealing with here, Agent Copper? I'm told you know a thing or two.”

“Not enough, but I know some.” Hollis gives up the goods. No strategic reason to withhold information. He tells him about the dead body in the cabin, about Arca Labs, Einar Geirsson, the atoll.

“Shit. Geirsson—the billionaire? He lives here on Kauai, doesn't he?”

“It's one of his many homes.”

The little town grows into view. Hollis has seen its like before. It's a base town. Gas station, barbershop with the stripy twisty pole, diner, McDonald's (there's always a McD's). And houses. Houses identical to one another except for the color of their siding. These houses are up on stilts, cars and Jeeps parked underneath.

“Listen,” Cole says. “We're prepared for a certain level of shitfall. We are loaded for bear here with some top-shelf weaponization. We operate MATSS. We run and test new drones alongside UAV systems like Coyote and Cutlass. Aegis Ashore is up and running. We test and maintain damn near any kind of missile and missile system you can imagine—”

“You got any artificial intelligences here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Good to hear.”

“What I'm saying is, we're prepared for someone to come along and try to knock us down or take our toys. We're ready for NBC attacks. But this is something above and beyond, Agent Copper. I don't know that we're prepared.”

Hollis gets a flash of the skinless corpse surrounded by all the dead ants.
You're not,
he thinks. “Pesticides should do the trick in the interim,” he says.

“Not the shit we got, hoss. We're getting reports of our men trying to use it on those damn things and most it does is slow 'em down. They stop, swarm in this squirming pile of
ant orgy,
and then they keep on coming. Like something out of a nightmare.”

“Fire? CO
₂
extinguishers? Poison? I'm no expert—listen, how bad is this? You got a couple ant colonies to exterminate—”

“A couple? Shit, Agent Copper, you
are
behind the times. You wanna know how bad it is, well, I got some maps to show you.”

7:00
P.M.

The Roc, aka the Range Operations Complex.

Big rectangular building. Not unlike a beige shoe box, except made of concrete. On the ground floor is a big open space, where someone has set up a table. Around it are laptops, radios, a few tablet computers, some books. A whiteboard stands at one end, and at the other, a corkboard on an easel, pinned to which is a map of Kauai. Around the table mill a variety of sailors and soldiers,
a woman with tired hound-dog eyes in a sharp-shouldered suit, and a nebbishy man with horn-rim glasses that fit uncomfortably on his face, given that one of his eyes is buried beneath a bulging white bandage.

Just behind all of it is a giant missile. More than twenty feet long. An SM-3, as Cole explains it. “A missile killer. A bullet you fire at another bullet to knock it out of the air.”

But that, of course, is not why they're there.

Cole updates everyone. The island is in full quarantine. Folks can come in, but nobody out. The number of the dead is now just over two hundred, and the injured at twice that. They expect that number to grow, perhaps significantly. Some of the dead and wounded are due not to the ants directly, but to how folks have chosen to respond to the invasion: gasoline, fire, poison. One “numbnuts” tried to shoot them with a twelve-gauge and blew the front of his own foot off.

Cole outlines their existing response mechanisms: local police and fire are on rescue detail. The Navy here isn't geared up enough for a wide military response, nor has that been authorized, but they're running support and backup. Hospitals are staffed up extra, but Kauai doesn't have real profound medical support. They'll get military nurses and doctors to come in and do triage, but that won't happen right away.

The doctors have noted that epinephrine injectors do the trick
if
the victim is rescued from the swarming ants in time. But the hospitals are stocked with only a couple of hundred such auto-injectors. Steroids and Benadryl can help, but won't reverse anaphylactic shock. Which means FEMA will have to airdrop in medical supplies. They'll know more after midnight.

Cole does introductions.

The scrawny sort with the one eye behind a bandage: Jeff Tanzer, associate entomologist at the University of Hawaii. “Actually,” he corrects, “I'm from U of Wisconsin, I'm just here lecturing. But they said you needed a bug guy.” Cole starts to speak, but Tanzer jumps ahead of him: “Not that I'm qualified. For any of this. This is way
above my instruction level.” Again Cole starts to speak and Tanzer cuts him off anew: “And my eye, if you're asking, it's just Lasik.”

“Thank you for all . . .
that,
” Cole says with a stiff smile.

Next up is the woman: Francine Roston. A representative for EAS, Empyrean AgroScience, GmbH. She says, “We have a vested interest in the Garden Isle. It has been an ideal testing ground for various GMO crops and our synthetic pesticides. In fact, I am here to note that we have one such pesticide not yet on the market—not even through testing, as yet, for the EPA's comfort level—that might work on these ants. It's a pyrethroid mix, Diazinethrin—synthesized from chrysanthemum and oleander. It's very, very safe. For us, not
them
.” She laughs, an awkward, robotic sound. “Of course, we'd need to rush approval of the pesticide—”

Cole thrusts up a finger. “Thank you, Ms. Roston.” He introduces a few of the sailors and soldiers around the table: Chief Petty Officer Jana Wu; Seamen Hurwitch and Hornshaw, who helped Hollis deplane and turn out to be nearly identical gingers; and Ensign Deltura.

Then he introduces Agent Hollis Copper as “the man who's going to fix all this shit. Isn't that right, Copper?”

Hollis blinks. Well, uh-oh. Thing is, he hasn't felt precisely
together
since all that bad news went down last year. The reason he brought in someone like Hannah is because he no longer feels properly equipped to handle the job.

He doesn't say all that, though. What he says is: “I'm an investigator. Not a problem solver. But one thing I am good at is getting the right people to figure things out.”

He tells Cole he needs to get Ez Choi on the line. And then he needs to find Hannah Stander.

8:00
P.M.

Cole says no to sending anyone out to get Hannah. “We got a helluva storm brewing out that direction, Agent Copper. Can't go
losing men and equipment in that. Right now they're saying it'll shift north by morning. We'll send someone then.”

They try to get Ez on the line. A cop answers, and Hollis learns she's been attacked in her office. Unfortunately, whoever attacked her escaped.

Hollis now speaks to her in a quiet voice at the far side of the room, leaning up against a tall, him-sized stack of file cabinets. The others watch expectantly out of range. “You don't have to do this,” he tells her.

“I'm okay,” she says, even though she's clearly not. She's been crying. He can hear the nasal sound of her voice from swollen sinuses. But she's pulling it together, and that's what counts. “I'm looking at the e-mail now.” A pause. “Jesus, Copper. These are how many died?”

“Uh-huh. And we've got more numbers coming in.”

“You know where the ants came from?”

“Not really.”

“What did Hannah say?”

“Hannah's off right now trying to find out whatever she can.” He prays that his words are true.

Ez sighs and pops her lips, clearly thinking. “Can you get me locations? Addresses? Of the people who were hurt. Or better yet:
where
they got hurt.”

“Sure. It'll take a few hours, but I can get some administrative folks on it.” He pauses. “Listen, we have somebody here who might have a solution. Wanted to run it by you.”

“Shoot.”

“Woman here from EmpAg, she wants to spray the island—”

“No.”

“You didn't even let me finish my sentence.”

“You don't have to finish it. She wants to spray it down with some kind of hellacious chemical. Some high-octane pesticide. Lemme guess. A pyrethroid?”

“Yeah, that's right. Why? Is that bad?”

“It isn't good. No pesticide is really all that awesome, and what you're looking at here are long-term ecological effects.”

“I think an invasion of killer ants is its own
much worse
ecological effect.”

“Hawaii is a surprisingly unspoiled ecological niche. It's paradise for a reason, Copper. Spraying will hurt humans, too. You'll see cancer rates skyrocket. Birth defects. Hormonal imbalances and disorders. It's fucking
poison,
dude.”

He sighs. “I know. But a little poison here is better than these ants.”

“Can you hold off? Let me think about it.”

“I can buy some time. Until morning, maybe.”

“Not enough time.”

“Gonna have to be, Dr. Choi.”

“Shit. Shit! Okay. Just get me the information. I'll work on it.” She hangs up on him.

10:00
P.M.

Young naval yeomen bust their butt-bones getting the data together. Some of it is already on the map there on the wall, but it's imperfect. They make it perfect.

Hollis sends it off to Ez Choi. Then he crosses his fingers.

11:45
P.M.

Hollis can barely keep his eyes open. But he's got reports. Each is the same but different, all over Kauai: a new injury, a new sighting, ants in Poipu, in Waimea, Lihue. Starting to come in from Princeville, Hanalei on the north side.

He runs the numbers in his head. Fewer than seventy-five thousand people live here on Kauai. Plus tourists of an incalculable number. What happens when they lose control of this thing? Hell, did they ever have control?

Cole clears his throat, and Hollis startles. “Phone, agent.” Cole jabs the cell toward him like it's a knife.

It's Ez. As Cole walks off, she says, “There's a pattern.”

“Tell me.”

“The deaths and injuries cluster. Your people did me a favor by putting in times of the reports. It isn't perfect—I mean, reporting times and actual times are never the same—but you can see that there's a thing going on here that's like a bullet hole in glass. A center point, and then the cracks spreading out.”

“So it has a start point.”

“It has
multiple
starting points. Check your e-mail.”

He heads over to the edge of the conference table and pivots a laptop toward him. He logs on to his e-mail. Ez has done this by hand, then scanned it in—probably with her phone. She tells him, “I would have done it at my computer, but I'm still at the police station. You're looking at five nexuses. They're at, let's see—”

But he sees them and starts rattling them off: “Waimea, Poipu, Lihue, Kapaa, then Princeville.”

She says, “The highest concentration right now is in Poipu.” That's the primary resort area in the south. “Then it's in descending order, counterclockwise around the island. The only outlier there is Waimea—but I think that's because it's not a huge population center.”

“A boat,” Hollis says. “Someone took a boat around and did this.”

“That would be my best guess, yeah. That would keep whoever did it relatively safe from the ants onshore and allow him or her to move quickly and stealthily around the margins of the island.”

“You think any more about our little problem?”

She hesitates. “Yes. If there were a way to evacuate the island, that would buy us time . . .”

“Is that an option? Be serious now. Because if even one of those things gets off this island . . .”

“A single worker ant getting off-island isn't apocalyptic because it wouldn't be able to start a new colony.” She pauses. “Unless . . .
Some species of ant can turn existing workers into queens. Not exactly sure how, but a pheromone thing, I'm guessing. Like how in
Jurassic Park
the dinosaurs switch gender like frogs. What's the saying?
Life finds a way.
”

“This is a goddamn horror show, Ez.”

“I know.”

“We're gonna have to spray.”

“Give me till morning. I'll find a solution.”

“I'll try.”

Midnight

Gabe Landry bobs on an inflatable raft in the middle of the hotel pool. He's soggy and cold. In his left hand he's got a pool skimmer—whenever he drifts closer to the edge of the pool, he pushes himself gently back to the center. In his right hand, he's got a water bottle. He takes the last few drops from it into his mouth. He's thirsty. And he's pretty sure he's not supposed to drink pool water but damn if he's not about to start soon.

A body floats nearby. A young woman. She's already starting to swell, her skin covered in little bites. She came running toward the pool as the sun was setting. Covered in little black specks. Shadows moving across her skin, undulating like waves. She slipped on the side, cracked her head on the ground, then rolled into the water. The ants drowned. She did, too.

The screams have mostly died down, though. So that's something.

Gabe looks toward the rising wall of the Outrigger Resort hotel. Balconies—sorry,
lanais
—face the pool and the parking lot beyond. One of those rooms was his. Didn't face the ocean. He and his girl didn't want to spend the money and now he wishes they had.