Invasive (23 page)

A
cold, electric rush punches through her. Hannah sits up suddenly, her limbs stiffening, then relaxing. All parts of her feel jittery, on edge, like she just walked away from a plane crash without dying.
The epinephrine injector worked
.
I am alive.

But there's no time. She feels her face squirming and she shakes her head like a dog with an ear infection. Ants are flung from her face, and she paws at the rest still clinging to the area around her nose and eyes. Her hands come away slick and red.

She stuffs the geyser of panic back down into her gut, then grabs for the other two EpiPens on the table, tucking them into her pocket. It's time to get out of here.

Hannah barrels out of the room, still wiping ants off her arms and neck. Whatever pain she feels in her ankle is swallowed beneath the greater misery—a song sung across her skin, from hundreds of bites and stings. The epinephrine leaves her feeling hollowed out and stripped raw, both gutted and filled up with an energy as nervous and frenetic as the Myrmidons called to alarm. She turns hard to the left, heading back to the main room—the room with the winding staircase leading up to the cove. The room with all the terrariums.

When she gets there, the smell hits her like a fist. She skids to a halt.

The whole room is moving. Like something out of an acid trip, the walls shift and swell with an
arterial
pulse. Black, glistening arteries. Columns clotted with insects. Climbing down from the open door above. Through vents and out of pipes.

It's not all black, though. Hannah sees other bits amid the trails of Myrmidons: Bits of feather. Bits of skin. A piece of scalp with hair on it. At the margins of the room, along the far curve of the wall, the ants have built a mound of these bits almost six inches high. Heat and stink come off the uneven hills of sagging skin. The humidity in here is so thick, Hannah can feel it growing greasy on her already-prickling skin.

This is their nest.

Getting out means winding her way back up the stairs, past those thick columns of ants squirming like massive black serpents.
I can do it,
she thinks. She got this far. She'll just run fast. Even if her ankle snaps she'll keep pushing and pushing, because that's what she does.

As if on cue, the Special Projects lab shudders with air-splitting thunder. Thunder Hannah can feel in her teeth, thunder she can feel screaming in every ant bite and sting on her skin. And she realizes: the ants are swarming here because of the storm.

Above her the heavy shutters are keeping out the crashing sea.

Ahead of her is the big red industrial button.

It might drown her, too. But by the time that thought reaches her mind, it's too late. The heel of her hand is stabbing out—as the ants surge toward her, once again smelling the stink of her skin—and smashing the button against its frame. Above, she hears the shutters bang open.

The sea pours in.

T
he ocean burns. The salt water against all Hannah's little pricks and cuts feels like lemon juice on a paper cut times a hundred. The seawater pours over her in great pounding sheets—fists of water trying to slam her down to the metal grating of the floor beneath her feet. Already it's around her knees.

The ants collect across the gathering water like clumps of dust in puddles. They form rafts: floating black masses of insects. She thinks,
It's not killing them
. But then the water pours down over them and plunges the creatures through the froth and foam into the churning saline broth.

A sound comes up out of her: a lunatic's laugh. Triumphant and deranged.
Got you, you little bastards. Got you.

The ocean intrudes. It rises beneath her.

And Hannah swims with it, treading water as it carries her to the top.

The day before Roy Peffer's death, Dad makes ice cream. He uses goat milk for the dairy, and to cover up some of that extra goaty flavor, he adds currants picked from the bushes along the northern hedgerow. Plus a little lemon juice (no lemons grow here in Ohio, so it's something he has to borrow from the neighbor, much to her mother's consternation). And of course, tons of sugar.

It's good. They sit on the porch, Dad with his back bowed, elbows
on his knees, like he's about to get up and spring into action. Mom sits on the rocking chair. Hannah's on the steps.

They talk about dumb stuff like what kinds of animals they see in the clouds (rabbit, hippo, and somehow Dad pretends he sees a platypus). That moves into who can make the best animal noises. They do a few rounds (the best goat, the best elephant), and Hannah does a good crow, while Dad does the most amazing horse impression any of them have ever heard, so much so that they joke he must be part horse. “A centaur,” Mom says. Mom even joins in for a few rounds. Her monkey is pretty good.

Then there's silence as they sit and slurp. Hannah's got a question that's been nibbling away at her for months. So, seizing the silence, she speaks.

“Is it really gonna be worth it?”

“What does that mean?”

Hannah says, “I just figure. If everything really does go haywire”—she's not supposed to say
the shit hits the fan,
even though that's how Mom always puts it—“do we really want to be around for that? If the world is so bad, maybe it'd be better to just . . .” Here she feels Mom's gaze burning holes through her like a pair of hot needles. “Maybe it'd be better to go down with the ship.”

The question has made Mom mad. Hannah immediately regrets saying anything.

But Dad jumps in: “Hannah, it's a good question. I ask myself that from time to time.” That rankles Mom, but he speaks fast enough to cut her off before she can start waggling that finger of hers. “But the apocalypse isn't really an apocalypse. Not like we think of it. Doomsday is a bad name for it, too, because it asks us to believe that the whole thing will smother each of us like it's a blanket we all get trapped underneath. But it's not really that way.” He leans forward even more, his knees creaking and popping. “The planet has billions of people. Now, we don't know what the end will look like, okay? Your mother and I believe it'll be an end of our own devising—a true tragedy in the Greek sense. Mankind overshoots the mark and
earns its own damnation. And maybe that means global warming. And maybe global warming means—well, who knows what? Sea levels rising. Storms like we've never even imagined. Wildfires or little ice ages. Thing is, it'll end life as we know it—by which I mean, it'll end our
way
of life. But it probably won't kill all the people. Out of the seven billion on earth, what if a billion survive? Or a million? Or a hundred thousand? A fraction of what we had, but still: humanity may keep on keeping on. But the tumult that our endangerment will cause—it'll be a thing most people can't endure. And that's how people will die. But you, me, your mother? We want to be ready. We want to survive through that time of tumult. The world's going to end, but a new world will grow out of the ashes of the old, and we want to be there to help cultivate it.”

Mom wears a small, satisfied smile. Her hand reaches out and takes his, gives it a little squeeze.

Hannah smiles, too, a fake one, and tells them that sounds real smart. That night, she fears the big apocalypse that's coming. The one she's not sure they'll survive, no matter what form it takes.

Tomorrow, she'll learn that it's the little apocalypses that can kill you.

For a moment, darkness. Soon the water is over her head and she swims to the door—but now it's closed, now it won't open, and a new panic hits her. She pounds on it, but that does nothing. Then she sees that red lever by the door, and she swims over to it and pulls hard.

The door opens and Special Projects disgorges her against the metal walkway leading out. Hannah gasps, pants. It's raining. Clumsy, fat drops. Storm clouds the color of diseased lungs roll in over the island from the west.

She staggers forward, the island noisy with the sound of falling rain and the crash of the surf against the walls of the cove. Hannah makes her way to the elevator just as a wave slams into the rocks.
The hard blast hits her, almost knocks her off the platform. But she hangs on.

The elevator, thank all the gods in all the pantheons, works. On the way up, she sees ants trying to come down. Trying to return home, to their nest, to their queen. Maybe not one queen, but several? She's not sure how it works, and at this point she doesn't care. She just wants them dead.

These ants won't make it. Already the rain is picking up force. A sheet of water runs down, washing one trail away. Then another. And a third. Until she can see none on the rocks at all.

The elevator clangs as it hits the top.

The cop waits down by the cattle gate, which hangs open. A wind sweeps across the tops of the tall grasses.

Hannah stands, arms wrapped tight around her chest though it's late summer and the air is warm. She's just turned thirteen a few weeks ago.

Mom: “I don't understand why
they're
here.”

Aunt Sugi: “You know why.”

Dad hangs back on the porch. Forlorn. Staring out.

Mom: “Do we get any visitation?”

“None officially, Bell.” Bell, a nickname for Hannah's mother that nobody uses but Sugi. (Sugi, though, is a nickname everyone uses.) “But the court left it up to me and obviously, as we discussed, I'm good with it.”

“I don't know what
it
means. Be specific.”

“I mean—well, we'll talk about it. Maybe you come over on weekends to start. For a few hours here and there.”

“That's not enough.”

“But it's a start.” There, in Sugi's voice, a thrust of cold steel. Icy and declarative. It's rare to hear, so you know she means business.

Mom: “We're not crazy.”

Sugi: “It's not about that.”

Mom hisses something then, but it's swallowed up by the susurrus of the wind through the grasses. When the wind dies back, Hannah hears: “—freedom taken away.”

“You feel how you feel, Bell. We're gonna hit the bricks now.”

“Can I—”

Sugi nods. Mom comes over to Hannah.

She says, “It'll be okay.”

“I know,” Hannah lies.

“Everything that happened, happened the way it should. I'm proud of you. Dad is proud of you.”

“Why won't Daddy come over?”

“He's . . . heartbroken. Not with you. Just with the way of things.”

Hannah starts to cry.

Mom doesn't hug her so much as hold her at a distance—arms out and locked, hands on her shoulders. “Hannah, you remember one thing for me. You are a survivor.”

“Okay.”

“Say it.”

“I am . . .” But the tears grab her voice and run away with it.

“Say it aloud. You need to acknowledge it.”

“I am . . . a survivor.”

“Damn right you are.”

A kiss on the brow, and then Sugi takes her to her new home.

The storm sweeps over the island like the wrath of a vengeful god—the sea rising up on all sides and pulling at the atoll with waves like hands. The trees thrash as if desperate to escape what's coming. The rain moves from fat, heavy drops to a cascade of water from the sky above and sea spray from the sides. Soon Hannah can barely see. She shuffles as quickly as she can down the walkway, trying not to lose her footing.

It feels like a forever journey, but eventually she finds herself at the back exit of Arca Labs.

The door is closed, which means they restored power. A small triumph.

Hannah pounds on the door as a gale wind howls. There's no response. A sick, sour feeling crawls in her gut. They're all dead. They got the power working, and now they're dead. And the door is closed and she has no wristband, no RFID tag, no way to open it.

She pounds on the door again. “Please,” she says to no one, her voice drowned by the rage of the storm. “Please let me in.”

Nothing. Nobody. Just the wind and the rain and the crash of the waves.

Then she senses movement behind her. She spins around, hands up, ready to claw, scrape, and punch—

A man comes at her, and she cries out—

“Whoa! Whoa. No.” At first she doesn't recognize him—white mustache dripping rain, eyes blinking. He looks haggard. Captain Dan Sullivan. From the boat that brought her here. His white shirt is soaked through, and the shoulder is torn up—the fabric pulled away, part of his chest exposed. His skin there is blackened and burned, parts aggravated raw like meat. “Hannah.”

Holy hell.

“Captain Dan. What happened to you?”

He staggers toward the labs and slumps up against the wall. “My boat. One of yours came and took my boat.”

“Will Galassi.”

He nods. “Snuck on board as I was shoring up, then grabbed a flare gun out of the toolbox on the side and—” He tilts his chin down to gesture at the burn on his chest. He looks frustrated. Mad at himself, maybe. “Knocked me right off the boat into the water. Lucky it did, too, or I might have caught fire and been burned a whole lot worse.”