Invasive (30 page)

Hollis sleeps in tiny increments on a cot near the conference table. Fifteen minutes here. Another fifteen there. Punctuated by reports. And radio crackles. And police scanners. Sometimes, though, his sleep is bitten in half by his own nightmares rising up out of his resting mind.

MORNING BRIEFING

6:00
A.M.

Cole gives the rundown. All the emergency shelters are bursting at the seams. Here the shelters are used for hurricanes and tsunamis (and in rare instances, earthquakes). They're set up at schools, homeless shelters, humane society buildings, a few neighborhood centers. Hotels have some shelters, too, in their basements, and a lot of tourists have holed up there.

“How are they keeping the ants out?” Hollis asks.

Cole says, “Jeff there had the idea that ants won't cross certain materials. Cinnamon. Chalk. Vinegar. Dish soap. Problem is, we have reports of that failing. Either the ants find a new way in—even a crack
in the wall is an opportunity for these little bastards—or they've been adapting. Building bridges with their own bodies over the obstacles. So I just told folks: cans of goddamn Raid will do the trick.”

The associate entomologist gives a sheepish half smile. “That'll do.”

Hollis thinks,
This dipshit doesn't know dip from shit
.

“But these monsters
are
learning to adapt,” Cole says. “Figuring out how to get over bodies of water, for one. And they climb into trees and then let themselves free-fall onto people passing underneath.” He sighs. “We're gonna have a hellacious time cleaning up these bodies when—if—we get this sorted. There are already reports of some shelters that failed entirely—swarmed by these damn things. Rooms full of bodies.”

They're flying in medical supplies and they're sending out rescue teams of sailors in CBRN suits, carrying either tanks full of pyrethroids or plain old Raid bug spray. Some, Cole says, are carrying flamethrowers—a joke suggestion at first, but sure enough, it “flames 'em up real good.” Cole notes that in the north end of the island, where it's pretty wet, there's little danger of setting anything on fire.

“What's next?” Hollis asks.

Roston, the woman from EmpAg, says, “We spray.”

Hollis gives a look to Cole. Cole says, “What do you want, Agent Copper? You want these things dead or alive? Hell, man, this spray is the same thing pest control guys use. Same thing for home use.”

Copper nods. “Just let me talk to Dr. Choi first. Okay?”

“You go ahead. But they're loading up the sprayers now. Our boys fly in thirty. You better bring me something big if you figure on stopping 'em.”

“I got nothing,” Ez says. She sounds on the verge of tears. “Do you know how hard it is to kill ants? Fuck, man, Argentine ants have formed a supercolony that spans three continents and has more
than half a billion members. Even the smallest colony has to be wiped out down to the queen or you just don't know. I mean, these colonies aren't established yet, so if you could find
each
colony and target them individually—”

“We don't have that kind of time.”

For a little while, she says nothing. At last she says, “Okay.
Okay.
You do what you gotta do. But, hey. Before you go, they got a lead on the guy who attacked me. I guess he checked into a hospital because he thought he was dying. Cops came for him and he busted his way back out of the hospital—went out a window, landed on an HVAC unit, and then hobbled off. But they got him on video.”

“I'll talk to the police. See if we can't get an image of his face. I have some friends who can maybe do something with that.”
Some friends who are not necessarily in the Bureau.

“Thanks, Copper.”

“Get some sleep, Dr. Choi. And a meal. And a week's vacation.”

The C-130H flew in from Hickam on Oahu. It is fitted with a MASS—Modular Aerial Spray System. The sprayer can dispense chemicals over a wide area. They use it to disperse oil spills. And to eradicate invasive plants.

And to spray pesticides meant to kill an insect population.

The two pilots, Pam Jaffe and Llewellyn McCoy, joke sometimes—as they do right now during precheck—that they're the ones spraying chemtrails. Mind-controlling the masses. Turning them all gay with their gay spray. Or whatever something-something global-warming anti-Christian CIA NSA conspiracy wank you feel like going on about, because all those New World Order junkies think that the chemtrails in the sky are something sinister, and they froth about it on the same Internet forums that play home to the nutballs who think the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 was an inside job.

Pam and Llewellyn like to joke a lot. They also like to fuck each other. They're planning on getting married in the fall, but nobody knows that yet—they're not going to make a big thing of it. A beachside ceremony. Not much family. A local hippie minister. It'll be cool. Except for the part where they probably won't be allowed to fly together anymore. And if she gets pregnant—“I want six kids,” she told him, “because I had five brothers and I think it's good to have a big family”—then everything will change anyway.

For now, everything's going as planned. At least, as much as it can be, given that they're having to spray an island to kill off some weird-ass invasion of legit killer ants. “Sounds like a B-movie,” Llewellyn remarked.

But the two of them have seen their share of the apocalypse in the last few years. And not just the two of them. The C-130H has a respected crew comprising a pilot, a copilot, a navigator, a flight engineer, and two load masters (though today, only one load master is present because of short notice, and no flight engineer). Llewellyn and Pam have another joke about who is the pilot and who is the copilot, and then they also like to say it really doesn't matter (but Pam is the pilot). Today the crew is Pam, Llewellyn, Deshaun Michaels (the navigator), and “Red” Robins (the load master). They were together when the shit hit the fan at the
Deepwater Horizon
spill. Goddamn BP. And they flew over New Orleans after Katrina, spraying for mosquitoes. That was its own special brand of scary: rivers where roads should have been, boats broken against one another, pleas for help scrawled across bedsheets on rooftops by people who knew they had been forgotten.

They do their prechecks. Everything looks good. The truck out there is filling up the sprayer with the help of Red. Deshaun's got their course plotted out for most efficient coverage of the island and so he's taking a quick snooze.

Pam and Llewellyn give each other's hands a little squeeze.

Hollis rushes to the radio. They've found Hannah.

Cole's been talking to a pilot, apparently. Maybe Einar's own pilot, he's not sure. Someone named Sullivan. Hollis gets on the mic, asks to talk to Hannah. Cole says he gave the pilot the scoop.

And then Hannah gets on the line. “I've never been so glad to hear from you,” she tells him.

“I'm glad to hear from you, too, Stander. Where the hell are you?”

Hannah gives him a quick rundown: they left Kolohe about a half hour ago. Island overrun by the Myrmidons—the ants. Most of the people at the lab are gone. The colonies have been stolen.

That's where it started,
he thinks. Arca Labs. And yet he still feels like he doesn't have a clear picture of what's going on. Who did this? Einar? A competitor? Someone inside the company or outside it? Everything feels slippery.

Hollis tells Hannah the ants are here on the island and that he's here, that people are dying—

The radio crackles. Her voice starts to break up.

“Hannah? Hannah?”

“—opper—there?”

“Hannah, stay with me. Ez was attacked. The island here is overrun. People are sheltering in place and there's an island-wide quarantine. Don't land here. Land somewhere else,
anywhere
else. I can get you clearance at Oahu, I can—”

But she's gone. All that's left is the whisper-hiss of low static.

Cole says, “Could be the storm. Interference. Wouldn't think too much about it. If they're about two hundred miles out, won't be long before they set down on one of the other islands.”

“Yeah. You're right.” Hollis nods like he believes that. His gut, though, has gone sour.
Something's off. Something ain't right.

That's when he hears the explosion.

All clear. Llewellyn goes to wake up Deshaun. He tries to shake his crewmate awake—

And Deshaun falls to the side. Blood pools around him from a bullet wound in his chest.

Llew is about to open his mouth and yell for Pam, but a man in a black mask and fatigues appears from behind the corner and fires two silenced rounds into his chest and one into his head.

The man is joined by a second, also in all black. They shoot Pam in the back of the head before she can even stand up. Her blood and brains spatter the console.

The two men then leave, but not before lifting Pam's head and placing a small brick of Semtex underneath it. It is not the only present they leave behind: they have already planted three other similar devices.

As they head toward their boat on the Barking Sands beach, the man on the right holsters his pistol and removes the detonator.

His thumb hooks around the trigger and—

8:30
A.M.

The toxic cloud has yet to disperse, though it has lessened. The black plumes rising from the ruins of the C-130H have dissipated to a gray, eye-burning haze. The fires have at least gone out.

At the Roc, two rooms down, they've got two bodies laid out on tables. Two dead men in black fatigues. They were caught moving toward a boat that, in the chaos of an island under siege and in the fawn light of the morning, everyone had missed. Their egress was denied. A firefight ensued. The men were shot, killed.

Hollis sits forward, his hands planted on his knees, pressing down so hard he half expects the kneecaps to grind to dust. Their chance to spray is gone for at least twelve hours, until another MASS-equipped plane shows up and the pyrethroid can be mixed and loaded onto it. All the while, more death, more ants, more nests, more panic and madness and uncertainty.