Invasive (19 page)

P
repping for the apocalypse means a lot of planning.

Much of Hannah's childhood was spent on exactly that: running drills for the end times. When the Shit Hits the Fan, you need gear. You need your bug-out bag. You need a bug-out vehicle and a bug-out location. And if your original home is compromised, you need an INCH—an I'm Never Coming Home bag. A way to survive on the fly.

By the time she was eight, Hannah knew all the exits in her home. Knew to watch the perimeter. By the time she was ten, she could whittle, could do minor rewiring of electronics, could reload ammunition, could clean and strip a gun and put it back together, could start a fire without fire-making material. By the time she was twelve she knew how to kill and butcher her own meat. She knew how to suture wounds. Knew how to make a shelter. How to forage.

She was always poised on the edge of Armageddon. Listening and waiting for everything to fall apart, for the first sign of the last days: an earthquake, a volcano, a mushroom cloud, a gunshot, the airplane of an enemy nation. At night, outside was silent (but for the cacophony of crickets and night birds), and yet in the white noise of nature she always thought she heard things: men coming through the grass or up the driveway, a squeak of a footstep on a floorboard, distant popping like the sounds of terrorism, revolution, or invasion.

The ground beneath her was solid, but her parents taught her that one step to the left, she'd fall into a pit. They all would. The end was tantalizingly close.

Now, as an adult living and working in society, she's learned techniques for coping with the persistent fear her parents ingrained in her. Ways to center herself. Breathing. Meditating. Exercise. And yet some small part of her is always ready for SHTF: shit hitting the fan.

It hasn't come yet. She's lived a somewhat charmed life. The only incident was a man who tried to attack her at a park in Washington, D.C. He came up behind her. Grabbed for her throat. She broke his arm and ran; didn't even call the cops.

The panic from that single incident felt like a poison inside her for weeks. She couldn't sleep. Could barely eat. Mentally and emotionally she felt like a cramped muscle that wouldn't loosen.

Here in the lab, she feels that way again. Coiled like a snake ready to strike. It feels good in the moment. Later, when it's all over (if it's all over,
if
she lives through it), it'll ruin her for weeks, months. But right now, she's present and bound up with the moment.

Together, they go through the list. Hannah reads it off: “We need EpiPens. Beekeeper suits. More CO
₂
extinguishers. Any of the basics we can find: flashlights, clean water, fire, food.”

Barry starts rummaging through one of the lab cabinets. “Hold on.” He grunts as he lifts a cardboard box and plops it down. “You want food, I got food.”

Ray opens the box and pulls out a protein bar. “Peanut butter, chocolate. All right.” His fingers poise to tear the plastic, but then he freezes. “Jesus fucking Christ, Barry. Really?”

“What?” Barry asks.

Hannah lifts an eyebrow.

Ray shows her. It is, indeed, a peanut butter and chocolate bar. It's also made with crickets.

Barry waves his hands. “This is what we do here! Edible bugs, man. I got the protein bars, I have a couple cricket cookies, and I have all the straight-up bug meals, too: mealworms, crickets, grubs. This is the future of eating, people.”

Ray glowers. “I'd eat you, Barry, before I eat one of these things.”

“Fine, starve then.”

Hannah sighs. “I see two extinguishers here in the lab—”

“Those won't work,” Kit says.

“Why?”

“They're not CO
₂
extinguishers. They're dry powder extinguishers. The CO
₂
could dick up our equipment or our experiments. But the CO
₂
extinguishers still line the living area. If we end up back in there, we can grab more off the walls.”

That's something. “Beekeeper suits are nearby, Ajay?”

Ajay nods. “Yes. In the honeybee room. They protect well against bees getting in the suit, but a bee stinger can still pierce under the right conditions. The ant stingers shouldn't be able to, but an ant is a fraction of the honeybee's size—I cannot promise they won't be able to get in.”

The thought of being inside a suit filling with those ants almost has Hannah cry out in panic. She swallows the feeling and says, “But it should work for temporary protection?”

Ajay nods.

“Great. The first step of the plan is twofold: find survivors and get to the radio. We're still missing about half the lab, including Einar and Will, so it has to be a priority to locate the others. The fishing boat is a value add, and with that boat and Captain Sullivan coming in, we have two ways off the island. Ideally with as many survivors as we can manage. Ajay, you and I will go get the suits. Then I'd like you to stay here and study our enemy. We need to know what these things are and why they're doing what they're doing. Fair?”

“Of course, Agent Stander.”

“Once I get in a suit, I'll head out to the Cove—”

“You?” Ray asks, incredulous. She looks back at him, irritated.

“I assure you, I can handle it. Who else is going to do it?”

Ray shrugs. “I'll do it.”

“I don't trust you,” Nancy says to him.

He rolls his eyes so hard Hannah thinks they might roll up out of
his head like a couple of pebbles. “Oh Jesus. Nancy, is there anybody you
do
trust?”

“I trust
me
.”

“I'm doing it,” Hannah interjects. “Nancy, Kit, Barry, I need you to help Ajay figure out who these ants are, but also what will hurt them. As a bonus you can figure out how to get the satellite back online in case I don't make it to the radio.”

Barry
hmm
s. “It has to be a problem with the physical dish. Which means going outside—the dish is right above us. But with the ants . . .”

“No way to cut through the top of the bubble?” Hannah asks.

Ajay says, “We do have a reciprocating saw—believe it or not, it's good for cutting through honeycomb. But it won't cut this stuff. These domes are tough.”

“So only way is to go out.” She licks her lips. “How many suits are there?”

“Beekeeper suits? Two.”

“Someone can take one and use it to go out to repair the dish.”

“Ah jeez,” Kit says, and Hannah again detects something of a New Jersey accent. Something she tries to hide, maybe? Why? In case it doesn't sound smart enough? “I'll do it. I can try.”

“Good. You can try to repair the dish, I'll head to the Cove—”

Ray jumps in: “I said I'll do it.”

“Listen,” Hannah says, turning toward Ray and holding up her hands. “I get it. You think you're a hero. But I see you. The real you. You're what, Miami? Fort Lauderdale? You come from money. You clean up nice. A pretty, pretty boy. You exercise and you're in good shape. But this isn't that. You're a talker. That's no knock against you—it's your job. Me? My parents are survivalists. I grew up homeschooled on the hundred ways the world could end. I've got this.”

Everyone is silent for a moment, then Kit whistles low and slow.

“Yeah,” Ray says, surrendering. “You got this.”

“Good. Ajay, let's go get the suits.”

Before they head out, Barry unseals the door to the bee room. He reminds them that the bees have a way out—which means the ants could have a way in. Just in case, Ajay takes the extinguisher, and Hannah takes the flamethrower.

“Cornstarch,” Barry says, giggling at his own genius. “Cornstarch is flammable. You didn't know that, did you? We keep it here because we were testing its pesticidal properties. But stick it in a powder pump with a bit of fire—whoosh. Instant flamethrower. All natural. Organic, actually.”

Organic, all-natural flamethrower. Hipster anarchist murderers the world around would line up to buy these from Trader Joe's, Hannah guesses.

She and Ajay set out. “Ants are one of your specialties,” she says. “Tell me about these ants. Our little killers.”

He sighs. “I haven't wanted to be seen as overly interested. I couldn't give whoever created them the satisfaction. But of course I am fascinated. How could you not be? These creatures are marvels of biological engineering.”

“They take skin. And not all of it. Why?”

He seems flustered. “I do not know. It is behavior like we've never seen. Leaf-cutters take clippings of plant matter in a similar way, but not
skin
.”

“They seem to start in certain places. Around the eyes. On the face. The extremities—hands and feet. They were under David Hamasaki's clothing . . .”

Ajay stops suddenly. His eyes lose focus into a thousand-yard stare. “Yes. Of course. Like leaf-cutters. Leaf-cutters take leaves not because they eat the leaves but because it is an example of ant-fungus mutualism. Ants are very good at making relationships at the micro level—farming and milking aphids, for instance, or protecting certain plants. The acacia ant desires the nectar of the acacia tree, so the ant nests there and protects the
tree from pests. I think something like that is happening here. My gosh.
My gosh.
”

“But the ants aren't protecting us.”

“No. It's not us they want to protect.” He licks his lips, suddenly energized. “The human body is not just the human body, Ms. Stander. We are an agglomeration of much smaller creatures: bacteria, viruses, mites. Increasingly we learn that our entire evolution has been governed and urged forth by a choir of microscopic flora. Viruses changed our DNA—and that's why we use viruses now to change the DNA of other creatures.”

“I don't follow you.”

“Fungus,” he says, a child's light in his eyes. “We are covered in fungus. All of us. You. Me. Right now. One such fungus is
Candida
. A variety of strains, the most common being
Candida albicans,
which exists in very small levels on our skin—though if our bodies ever go out of balance thanks to disease or obesity or even overuse of antibiotics, it can turn into candidiasis. Thrush. Or a yeast infection around or within the genitals. But in small amounts, it lives on certain areas of our body. Between the fingers. The buttocks or the genitals. And between the eyebrows and around the eyes—even more so if the person wears glasses, because the heat and friction trap and encourage the growth of
Candida
.”

“They're farming the skin for the fungus,” she says.

“Yes, perhaps. Like the way leaf-cutters use bacteria and the leaf mulch they steal to encourage bacteria growth. And they start at the moist parts of the body because that is where the yeast grows. The drier portions of skin they leave alone.”

They don't eat us,
she realizes.
They eat the fungus. And we just happen to have it all over us.
Her brain flashes back to the cabin in New York: lifting the sheet and seeing all those dead ants and those bits of skin. The stink coming off it was like sour bread baking. The air there was humid, cloying, sickly.

They head into the hive room—in here, the honeybees are acting
like Hannah feels right now: agitated, ready to engage, just moments away from swarming and stinging.

“These ants,” Ajay is saying, heading into the room, “they're like little pastiches. A puzzle made from the pieces of other, different puzzles. It's cliché, I know, but they're like little Frankenstein's monsters, cobbled together with the traits and attributes of other ants,
unrelated
ants, and—” As he speaks, he kneels down and unlocks one of the drawers at the far end of the bubble—a drawer Hannah expects to be filled with trays of honeycomb and honeybee just like the one Will showed her. But Ajay's words suddenly stop coming as he stares down into the drawer he just opened.

He lifts one suit up. A rumpled white beekeeper suit. It looks like the molted skin from an alien humanoid. “There's only one,” he says.

Fear cuts through her. “You said there were two.”

“There were. There were!”

Somebody is messing with us.
But who?

“Who has keys to this place?”

He thinks. “Any of us. All of us. Me. Will. Kit, Nancy, Barry, David . . .”

Above them comes a sudden banging sound. Hannah hears more like it cascading elsewhere. In other bubble pods. “What was that?” she asks.

“I . . . I don't know.”

She waits. Listens. Then she notices it—the hairs on her arms, moving gently. Tickled by a sudden flow of air. Her throat tightens and her jaw seizes.
No
. She looks up at the two vents at the top of the room. Each a square: twelve inches by twelve inches. “The vents. Barry must have opened them again.”

Ajay's eyes go wide. “That means—”

“The ants can get in. If they want the
Candida
from us—can they detect it on us? Is that how they find us?”