Invasive Species (13 page)

Costa Rica

TREY DROVE FAST.

He'd gotten an old black Jeep Cherokee at the airport rental counter in San José, dented and dinged and with chipped paint and a touch of rust. The agent had been apologetic. It was all they could find for him on such short notice, in a country filled with tourists seeking shiny SUVs equipped with air-conditioning and powerful sound systems to keep the smells and sounds of the tropics out.

But it was just what Trey wanted, with plenty of power and four-wheel drive. These were the only requirements for a region whose roads were composed of mud, rutted dirt, turtle-backed all-weather gravel, and—worst of all—pothole-ridden asphalt that hadn't been resurfaced in twenty years.

Under dripping skies, he left San José behind and, weaving in and out of traffic, made his impatient way through the capital's suburbs and onto the Pan-American Highway. Driving north past steaming volcanoes and lowering clouds punctuated by flocks of circling vultures.

Trey had once planned to drive the entire extent of the Pan-American Highway. He'd begin up in Prudhoe Bay, above the Arctic Circle, and not end till he reached Ushuaia, Argentina, just north of Tierra del Fuego. Along the way, wherever he found something interesting, he'd stop. For a day or a year, he didn't know, but always knowing he'd eventually get back on the road.

At the Darién Gap in Panama, where for fifty miles the highway didn't exist, he'd abandon his car and hike through the jungle to Colombia. There he'd buy a new junker, get back on the road, and keep going.

That was the plan, but even as he made it, he knew it was impossible. What about the rest of the world? The Americas weren't enough. He couldn't drive everywhere he wanted to go. He'd miss too much.

The whole way to La Tamandua, Trey drove faster than anyone should. The cautious tourists goggled at him and swerved out of his way. Locals, keeping up on the rutted highway for a while in their old pickup trucks, laughed and honked their horns as they fell back. For twenty or thirty miles, a pair of men on Harley-Davidsons accompanied him, effortlessly keeping pace, a convoy, a motorcade, before peeling off.

Why so fast? He wondered about this later. Because Ranny had told him to, threatening to destroy the specimen if he didn't arrive by nightfall? Or because after days of sitting still in New York, he gloried in the chance to
move
?

Yes. Those were both true. But not the whole truth.

The other part: He was afraid.

And when something frightened you, your only option was to confront it. To race toward it, not to hide.

He sped past farms and villages and factories, leaving the highway and ascending on ever-smaller and rougher roads into the Tilarán Mountains. The Jeep bucking and plowing, sending up sprays of mud but staying on the road.

Two thousand feet. Four. The old Jeep's engine beginning to protest from lack of air. The clouds descending, billows of gray mist blown by a cold, fitful breeze.

He drove through the town of Rio Viejo, where Ranny made his phone calls. Then turned onto the all-weather road that ended at the lip of the forested valley where the field station was located.

The ten-hour drive had taken him barely seven. It was time for him to confront his fears.

*   *   *

THE CLOUD FOREST
as dusk neared. Low, gnarled trees whose branches hung heavy with mosses, and air plants. Philodendrons and vines climbing up moisture-slick trunks. Clouds sweeping through, coating every surface with droplets that caught the light and gleamed like gems.

A forest out of Middle-earth.

Trey parked the Jeep beside a battered Nissan—Ranny's, he assumed—in the little dirt lot carved out of the brush beside the road. If you wanted to visit the station, you left your car here and hiked down a wet, muddy trail for two miles. If this felt like too much, you were welcome to turn around and go home.

Ranny didn't want it any other way. His goal, he said, was to keep the riffraff out.

Trey climbed out of his car, then reached back in for his daypack. Before he'd taken ten steps, his skin, hair, and clothes were slick with moisture. As he walked, sure-footed as always on even the wettest, steepest trails, he heard a distant bellbird give its ringing “tonk” call from a treetop and a troop of black howler monkeys welcoming nightfall with their roars.

Eventually he spotted a brighter patch ahead: the clearing where La Tamandua stood. As he approached, he realized that the station was silent, its generator off. No music, no voices. Through a mist-streaked window, he could see a lamp burning inside, but no sign of movement.

Shifting his flashlight to his left hand, he walked forward and pulled the door open.

A puff of warmer air wafted out. Trey breathed it in. It was stale, carrying the odors of overripe fruit, cigarette smoke, and bug repellent.

And the bitter smell of the thieves.

Trey would always know, would always hate, that smell.

*   *   *

THE THREE ROOMS
—a dormitory-style bedroom, a den/office/living room, and a laboratory—were empty, of humans and anything else living. But they hadn't been empty for long. No more than six or eight hours.

The light Trey had seen from outside came from a goosenecked lamp that craned over Ranny's desk. Even as Trey looked at it, it flickered, reaching the end of its battery backup. He turned it off.

The dirty plates in the sink had once held rice and beans. What was left was congealed, but not yet petrified. Yesterday's dinner or today's breakfast.

There were two plates. One had held more food, eaten more messily, the second a smaller, neater portion.

In the station's dorm room, containing a half dozen cots, two had been pushed together. The room smelled of perfume and sweat and sex.

Ranny's clothes were piled haphazardly on shelves and slung over a rack in the corner of the room. A woman's clothes—Graciela's clothes—were more carefully folded or hung neatly on the rack. She'd brought a large variety of short skirts and colorful slacks, halter tops and sleeveless blouses.

Trey left the laboratory itself till last. It was modest, one of the smallest Trey had seen, but that made sense. All Ranny needed here was a ready supply of collecting equipment and the materials to preserve the specimens. More in-depth study could wait for his occasional trips back to better-equipped laboratories in England.

A half dozen bats in various stages of preservation sat on a work table. Amid specimens of insectivorous leaf-nosed and foxlike fruit-eating bats, Trey recognized a vampire bat, its size, oily fur, and squinting grin distinctive even in death.

None of the bats occupied pride of place on the table, though, the spot right in front of the chair. A small wooden box, perhaps a foot long by six inches wide and the same again deep, sat there. It was open. Its top, waiting to be nailed on, lay beside it.

But there was nothing inside, amid the white-foam packing material that would protect the specimen in transit. Just a depression in the foam, about three inches long. Skinny. Insect shaped.

What had happened to the specimen?

Trey took some air into his lungs. Somewhere outside in the forest, a large branch cracked and fell to earth. It made a sound like a gunshot or the breaking of a mast just before the ship goes down.

Looked at one way, all he'd learned from his search was that the two of them were out. It was nearing dusk, the time that Ranny would have been stringing his mist nets between the trees of his study area. Setting his traps for the bats he hunted and studied. Graciela could well have accompanied him.

Trey could just wait here, and in an hour or so they'd return.

That was the fantasy. But Trey knew better. He knew the reality was different.

He was going to have to go look for them.

He found the station's first-aid kit and put it into his daypack. Near the front door was a row of pegs, three of them holding hard hats with attached headlamps. He took one and put it on.

Last, he went looking for the weapon he knew would be there. It was standing in the shadows by the laboratory door: a shotgun, unloaded, cleaned, oiled, not recently used. The ammunition—a box of #9 birdshot shells—was in a supply closet in the corner of the room.

Trey took the gun and a handful of shells with him and walked out into the cold, dripping forest.

THE ABRUPT TROPICAL
dusk had fallen while Trey was inside. Rain pattered on the leaves above his head, and every once in a while a bigger drop struck his hard hat with a thump.

The bellbird had fallen silent, but in the wet darkness crickets and glass frogs had started calling. A gigantic beetle, nearly as big as Trey's hand, buzzed slowly past. It had two bright green lights shining like headlights from the front of its thorax.

The air was growing even colder. Trey knew that temperatures here could dip into the forties at night, a far cry from the sticky heat of the lowland rain forest.

Trey remembered the trails from his previous visit—he never forgot a trail he'd hiked—but, radiating out like spokes from the field station, they would have been easy enough to follow anyway. The shotgun under his arm, he searched one trail, then retraced his steps and headed down the next.

When full darkness fell, he had no choice but to turn on his headlamp. He hated using lights. They were like neon signs: For everything you spotted, a hundred things spotted you.

The beam turned green leaves gray. Shadows moved at the corners of the light, and small, unseen creatures rustled through the wet foliage at his feet. The howler monkeys roared again.

Staying patient, he moved slowly along each trail, looking for evidence that anyone had been there. Recently crushed leaves or bent stems, kicked-up leaf litter. And on the fifth trail, as he stepped into a small clearing caused by a tree fall, he caught just a whiff of the thieves' odor. That was all, and then it was gone, chased by the breeze.

He turned the lamp's beam this way and that, but could see nothing in the harsh light. Lifting his gaze, he saw that the mist had risen and a half-moon had emerged from hurrying clouds. That was enough. He reached up and turned off the lamp.

At first the darkness seemed absolute. He was blind.

Amid the forest's rustles and calls, he waited as his eyes gradually adjusted to the diffuse light of the moon and stars. When he could see the movement of a small gray salamander across the trail ten feet away, he knew he was ready.

He turned slowly in a circle in the middle of the clearing, searching for anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary. At the same time, he listened beyond the sound of the night insects and the whisper of the breeze through wet leaves.

Three times he turned before he saw it: the tiniest glimmer, detectable only through the corners of his eyes. Not the light cast by the stars or moon or the cold luminescence of a colony of forest mites. A gleam from the ground at the far end of the clearing.

And movement, too. A brief, flickering shadow obscuring the light.

Trey walked toward it.

The glow grew brighter as he approached, but only slightly. The feeble illumination it cast revealed drooping leaves, a gray-brown tree trunk, a vine twisted around the trunk like a snake. And a large, slumped form he couldn't make out yet.

He knew what it was, though.

The light he'd glimpsed was a flashlight's beam. Like the lamp in the field station, it must have been burning for hours, because by now it was so weak that he could see the coil itself flickering inside the bulb.

Ranny was lying on the ground, the flashlight attached to his belt.

Trey reached up and turned on his headlamp. The scene before him sprang into full relief, black shadows erupting. A great curassow, unseen in the foliage above, gave a harsh croak and lifted off from its roost, heavy wings making a rushing sound like the wind. The diamond-bright pinprick eyes of dozens of spiders gleamed from nearby trunks.

Ranny lay on his back beside a small tree, his collecting gear—rolled-up mist nets, cloth bags, the harness he used to climb—scattered around him. His eyes were closed, his face gray.

Trey squatted beside him, felt for a pulse. Found it after a moment, just a slight, delicate throbbing in the throat. Ranny's skin was warm, but it had a strange, waxy consistency to it, as if in some strange way it had been molten and was now firming again.

Trey called out his name, shook his shoulder, but Ranny didn't stir.

The long dreaming days.

Trey aimed his beam and saw what he'd expected to: the telltale swelling on Ranny's stomach, pressing against the inside of his shirt. Unblinking, Trey watched it. Half a minute, a minute. Nothing. Nothing.

Then . . . something moving beneath the cloth. A sinuous flutter, quickly gone.

Something coming to the surface of the skin for a gulp of air, then twisting and diving deeper once again.

Trey stood. He let the beam describe a wider arc. Knowing what he was looking for and soon finding it.

The girl lay perhaps eight feet away, on her side, back to him. Under the clear plastic rain poncho, her tight blouse, white with a pattern of flowers stitched in it, was untucked from the waistband of her short ruby red skirt. Her long brown legs were bare and slick with mist. So was her left foot, though she wore a white sneaker on her right one.

Graciela.

Looking at that one bare foot, Trey felt his fear dissipate. It was replaced by a kind of burning determination, the ice-cold certainty that always took the place of anger deep in his core.

He knew that, whatever happened, he would never be afraid of the thieves again.

As he took his first step forward, the shadows shifted. A thief moved, spiderlike, into view on Graciela's hip, then stood there, staring at him. Slender black body shining with dew, wings flickering.

“There you are,” Trey said.

The thief tilted its head at the sound of his voice, but did not otherwise react. It was waiting, Trey thought. Waiting to see what his next action would be.

He wondered if it knew what a gun was. Whether it understood what the birdshot could do to it.

Trey tilted his head so that the beam shone directly into the thief's eyes. It merely turned away from the light, watching him instead from the corners of its eyes.

For a minute, maybe more, the standoff continued. Just as Trey knew—knew!—that it was dying to come for him, he wanted nothing more than to pull the trigger and blast its body into rubble and ichor.

He lowered the beam a little. The wasp turned back to stare at him. What was going on in its insect brain? Conscious thought or only the primitive neuronal firings of a simpler species?

There was one way to find out.

He swung the shotgun down and poked the barrel into Ranny's stomach. One twitch of his finger and the larva beneath the skin would die.

Did the thief understand what he was threatening to do?

The wasp sprang a foot into the air. Before Trey could shift his aim, it landed on Graciela's bare leg, closer, facing him head-on. Its mandibles twitched and its wings made a strange chittering sound on its back.

Trey had long since learned not to ascribe human emotions to other mammal species, much less insects. Still, he couldn't help it. In this thief, he saw rage and something more: anxiety, even horror. Yes, it understood.

Trey poked the barrel of the rifle deeper into Ranny's stomach. Up the barrel and into his hand came a quivering motion from within the flesh.

The thief came for him. As he'd known it would.

Even so, even though he'd expected it, the attack was so fast, so unerring, that the wasp almost reached him. He barely managed to raise the shotgun, and if it had contained a single bullet instead of a birdshot-filled cartridge, he would have been dead.

In the headlamp's beam, he caught a glimpse, a snapshot, of the creature. Its reaching legs, green eyeshine, white stinger.

Then he pulled the trigger. The gun kicked against his shoulder. The sound of the shot echoed through the forest. The familiar odor hit his nostrils before mixing with the smell of smoke. And the thief disintegrated before him.

Trey stood still. Even over the thudding in his ears, he could hear the grunting roars of the howler monkeys his shot had startled.

Jacking another shell into the chamber, Trey put his back against a tree and waited. Ten minutes, fifteen, as his hearing returned, the howler monkeys quieted, and the dead wasp's smell hung in the air.

Nothing. Maybe the two thieves—the one Ranny had caught and the one Trey had just killed—were the only ones here. The pioneers. The colonists.

It was time to go. There was nothing he could do for Ranny and Graciela.

Go.

Only . . . he couldn't.

*   *   *

ABOUT A MILE
back to the research station. Another two up to the Jeep. All along treacherous, muddy trails, illuminated only by his headlamp.

Trey was strong, but strong enough to drag or carry Ranny—who looked to weigh about 180 pounds—all the way, and then return for Graciela? He didn't think so.

Still, he had to try.

Propping the shotgun against a tree, he bent over, got his hands under Ranny's arms, and lifted. His plan was to use some version of the fireman's carry, but he never got a chance.

As he lifted, Ranny let out a cry, a sound of intense pain. Then he said, “No!”

Trey, shocked, almost let him fall, but managed to return him gently to the ground. Only then did he see that Ranny's eyes were open.

Sightless eyes, slicked with an odd silvery sheen. They reflected the headlamp's beam, gleaming like mercury as they shifted this way and that. Random motions, as if Ranny were looking at something no one else could see.

As if he were dreaming.

“Ranny,” Trey said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

Ranny's mouth moved. The sheen over his eyes faded a little. “Trey?” he said.

“Yes. I'm here.”

Ranny was looking at him. “Trey,” he said again.

Trey said, “Yes?”

“Kill me.”

*   *   *

TREY COULDN'T SPEAK
for a moment. Then he said, “I'll get you to a doctor. I promise. He'll help. I'll—”

“No.”
Only Ranny's mouth moved. “You can't. It hurts. . . .”

“Then I'll bring someone back here—”

“No.” Ranny blinked, and when his eyes opened again the silvery shine was stronger. “They're . . . here. In here. Forever.”

He drew in a breath. “Trey,” he said. “
Please
. Kill me.” Another breath. “And . . . her.”

His eyes gleamed, and he was gone again. Back inside his dreams.

Trey sat there.

Kill me.

He couldn't do it.

*   *   *

COULDN'T PULL THE
trigger, at least. Was what he did instead any different? Any better? He never knew.

But what other choice did he have? He was out of options.

Unzipping his daypack, he pulled out the first-aid kit he'd taken from the station. Snapped it open and saw, amid the usual gauze pads and antibiotic creams and antihistamines, the scalpel he'd expected to find.

These kits always included a knife or scalpel, a holdover from the days when people believed the first, best response to snakebite was to cut open the spot and suck out the poison-laced blood. Now, even though that theory was long out of fashion, habits hadn't changed.

Trey searched through the kit until he found a pair of forceps. Then, squatting over Ranny's still form, he shoved the man's heavy, wet shirt halfway up his chest. A couple of moves of the knife, one quick snatch with the forceps, and he was holding the larva up to the light.

It was as Sheila had described: long, white, tensile, with black mandibles and large eyes and an almost unbelievable strength for something its size.

Beneath him, Ranny stirred, drew in a ragged, gasping breath, and died.

*   *   *

TREY KNEW THAT
he should keep the larva. Kill it and preserve it and bring it home.

It was important. It might tell them things they had to know.

But . . . no chance. With a movement that was like a spasm, he threw it to the ground. It writhed and twisted and bit at the earth until he ground it to pulp with the stock of his gun.

For long minutes he stood there, not moving, hearing nothing but the roaring in his ears. Then, carrying the scalpel and forceps, he walked over to where the girl lay. Graciela, with her brown legs and bare foot, her face turned away as if she'd chosen to avert her gaze from what lay ahead.

Trey rolled her onto her back, then pushed her shirt up, exposing her swollen belly.

Under her skin, something moved.

*   *   *

“NO SPECIMEN?” JACK
said.

Trey was calling from the airport in San José. He was still covered in mud and sweat, and smelled of rotting vegetation and a bitter stink he thought would never leave him.

He knew he looked like a madman. Felt like one, too.

“No,” he said. “It was gone.”

“And Ranny and the girl?” Sheila said. He hadn't known that he was on speakerphone, that she was listening.

“Gone.”

Nothing but the crackling line. Then Sheila's voice, closer. “Trey,” she said, “did you see them?”

He didn't answer.

“Shit,”
she said.

Still he didn't speak.

“There was nothing you could do.” Her voice was strong. “Remember that. Remember what you told me. Whatever happened, whatever you had to do, you had no choice.”

He was silent.

“Trey,” she said. “Come home.”