Invasive (26 page)

Where would he keep that?

“I don't know! Listen to me, I don't know. You have to believe me. Maybe he kept them at the Cove. Or maybe they're here somewhere. I can't say. Because I don't know. Why are you doing this to me? I am being persecuted.”

You did lie to us, though, didn't you? You knew answers to our questions and you withheld those answers. Why didn't you just come out and say something?

“I couldn't. I couldn't! Will made me complicit, but I didn't do it. I didn't do
this
. You can't hold me responsible for any of this. I won't hang. Not again.”

Not again?

But that question he doesn't answer. He just dissolves into shoulder-hitching sobs. Face buried in his hands. His elbows digging so hard into his knees he's surely leaving bruises. The interview, it seems, is over.

They keep it quiet. Huddled in the corner of the lab, near the autoclave: Einar, her, Barry, and Kit. Nancy sits in the opposite corner, sullen. Ray hangs near Ajay. Watching.

They discuss what to do with him. Einar thinks he could be useful. Useful in translating his findings. Helpful in figuring out how to stop this thing.

Barry's an optimist: “Ajay's a good guy. I trust him to do what's right.”

Kit goes the other way: “He's always been selfish. He hogs equipment. Secretive about notes. Don't trust him.”

“I don't trust any of you,” Nancy says from across the room.

Hannah turns to Nancy and starts to say, “I see irony is alive and well—” when from the other side of the room, Ray cries out. Ajay is up, a blur—something gleams in the man's hand. Even as Ray moves toward him, he's suddenly staggering back—and there's a spray of blood as Ray goes down.

Ajay wheels toward them. Feral. Like an animal forced to the back of its cage with a shock prod. A shard of glass is in his hand. Hannah realizes with horror:
From the broken beaker, the one that fell off the counter
. Nobody ever cleaned it up. Nobody even thought about it.

Ajay screams at them: “I won't hang for this—”

Hannah moves fast. Running toward him.

“I won't hang!”

She knows what's coming and she's too slow to stop it.

Ajay sticks the glass shard into the side of his neck and twists. A sprinkler hiss of blood arcs up across the wall, the window, the equipment. Ajay pulls out the glass and sticks it in again just as Hannah catches his arm. She presses her thumb hard into the center of his wrist. The glass, now greasy with his blood, falls away and hits the ground with a
kssh
.

The wound pumps fresh red. Hannah clamps her hand down, applying pressure. The blood underneath her palm is greedy and insistent. With her other hand she grabs a bunch of rubber lab tubing off a nearby counter and slides the loop down her arm to her elbow. Then she starts looking for something,
anything,
to hold against the wound. Something she can bind there to stop the flow.

Ajay starts to shudder violently. The color is gone from his face. Everything is the pallor of the inside of an ashtray. Then he starts to spit up blood.

Hannah doesn't know what that means. She's not an EMT. Her
parents ran her through homemade tracheotomies, how to get air back into a deflated lung, how to set a broken bone and keep it still with a homemade splint. But this is too big, too messy. Did he cut his own esophagus? Is there an air embolism? That can happen, can't it? She screams out for someone to get her a first aid kit.

But then someone's there, behind her. Pulling her away. It's Ray. Again and again he says, “It's over. It's over. He's gone.”

Ajay is gone. He slides out of her hands. A lifeless, bleeding thing that hits the floor. Dark blood pooling.

Hannah can't look away.

Eventually Kit finds a first aid kit and gives it to Hannah. At first Hannah wants to ask,
What do I do with this?
Ajay's dead.

But then she realizes: Ray is bleeding. He held his left arm up to protect his face and the glass shard did a number across the underside of his forearm. A six-inch gash—clean, smooth, like the cut of a chef's knife.

Hannah cleans the injury. Bandages. Medical tape. All around her, piles of bloody paper towels. Ray acts like it's no big thing, so she acts that way, too.

As she's finishing up, a shadow darkens them both and there stands Einar. “The storm should pass by morning. We should spend some time tonight gathering things we need to take. Printing out Ajay's notes, for instance. Then we should endeavor to get a few hours of rest. We learn. We survive. We leave.”

T
hey move Ajay's body into the nursing station and close the door.

They eat protein bars and crunchy crickets and crunchier mealworms in silence. Barry says he might have some leafy greens in the back that caterpillars might eat, but Nancy says, “No. We'll all get diarrhea.”

So bugs it is.

Barry stays off to the side, printing documents from Ajay's folder. By the end, he's got a pretty good stack.

Einar encourages a round of sleep. Ray says he's too hopped up and his arm hurts too much, so he'll keep a lookout for any ant intrusions. Captain Dan volunteers to join him.

Hannah's bone weary, and sleep hits her like ocean waves. She drops out of consciousness. Then suddenly she'll feel ants on her—climbing up her arms, tickling her legs, pinching the skin beneath her fingers, ripping free a mask of flesh from around her eyes and nose and mouth. Every time, she jostles awake. Gasping. Crying out. Every time she sees Ray and Captain Dan. They shush her and tell her it'll be okay.

Sleep and wake. Sleep and wake. Again and again. Hannah curls up into a ball in the corner. She weeps.

A hand on her shoulder. Captain Dan. “We'll get through this,” he says. “We'll be all right.”

Somehow it helps.

Hannah sleeps.

Morning. The light across the floor is a watery, washed-out pink.
A new day,
Hannah thinks. A day of escape.

Everyone wakes and moves fast. They gather their things. Take bathroom breaks. As they move around her, Hannah says in a loud voice: “We have no more EpiPens. If you get bit, that's it.”

Barry says as he passes, “Sounds like something on a lab safety poster.”

“Take weapons,” she says. “Extinguishers. The flamethrower. Anything else you can think of.”

Nancy suggests going back through Arca, just to see if anyone is left—but one step into the cafeteria tells them no. The smell there is like a living thing. Hannah feels a fist of bile forming in her throat, and it doesn't help that she imagines exactly what that regurgitate will comprise: bug parts. She chokes it down and closes the door.

Nancy does no such thing. She turns back in the extensor hall and bends over at a forty-five-degree angle to start puking. Hands on knees. When she's done, she sobs.

They go out through the back.

The storm has gone, but it has left chaos in its wake. Palm fronds everywhere. A carpet of leaves. Broken flora. Everything sodden and dripping. It's eerily quiet but for the tumult of waves. No birds. No wind. No voices. The air is surprisingly cool.

As Hannah steps outside, she looks in every direction. At the ground, in the trees, behind her to the pod. She half expects a plague of ants to come rising up. A sweeping blanket ready to disassemble them and carry them back to a new nest. But the ants are gone.

They move down the walkway, through the trees, toward the lagoon, where the helicopter awaits. The lagoon's blue waters are stirred turbid by the passing storm. Shadows moving underneath, hard to see.
Jellyfish,
Hannah thinks.

Einar points. “There. The pilot.” A cruciform body bobbing a hundred yards out. “His name was Nils.” He turns and walks back up the beach, away from the helicopter.

Hannah calls after him. They don't have time for this. But he ignores her. Instead, he goes to a battered bush—one whose hibiscus flowers are softened and wilted by the rain and wind. Petals like a ruined crinoline dress. He bends over and reaches out—

He jerks his hand back suddenly and Hannah thinks:
He's been bit.

But then he laughs. With his free hand he swats at the air, still chuckling. “A bee,” he calls. “A honeybee, hiding behind the flower. Clinging to the stem like a scared little thing.” He turns and begins to walk back down the beach, and a shadow passes over him: a cloud gone over the sun.

Einar makes the sign of the cross, then delicately tosses the soggy flower into the lagoon. “May you pass into the next life, Nils.” Then, to the rest of them, “Shall we take a helicopter ride?”

T
he
whup-whup-whup
of rotors cutting sky.

Nobody says anything as Captain Dan takes the Bell Relentless through its checks and lifts it gently into the air.

It's too surreal, Hannah thinks. The cabin is the height of luxury. A koa wood table in the center. Soft gray leather couches. Windows as tall as Hannah. The ceiling is an art piece: two curved lengths of wood laid over each other, each shaped like a smaller amoeba nesting in a larger one.

She thinks back to the Kia rental she had. The stench of cigarettes and the Febreze used to cover it up. This helicopter smells like a new car.

Einar smiles. Pride beams from him. She thinks:
He's an idiot.
No. Not an idiot—an
egomaniac
. Whether it's pride at owning this fancy helicopter or pride just for managing to survive the chaos, Einar has lived a charmed life. He's smiling, she thinks, because this only confirms for him his manifest destiny as the smartest, richest man in the room. And then she thinks:
What might he do with that pride?
Could
that
be why he's smiling? Because of what he accomplished here without ever getting caught? She reminds herself to keep an eye on him.

Whatever the case, Hannah herself can muster no such pride. Because she doesn't know what happens next. There are hundreds of colonies—maybe thousands, featuring
hundreds
of thousands of ants—missing. Taken by whom? For what purpose?

Einar slides back the top of the table in the center, and from it rises a collection of food and drink: bottled water, sodas, beers,
chips, pretzels, fancy candy bars. They pounce on this desert oasis. Twisting caps, tearing wrappers.

“It's not bugs,” Ray says. It's the first thing anybody says.

Suddenly they're all talking. “What is this?” Barry asks around a mouthful. “Oh God in heaven, a dark chocolate bacon bar.”

Einar nods. “Vosges chocolate. Out of Chicago. It's a bit odd for my tastes—I'd rather Amedei, as I consider them the finest chocolatier in the world—but I am glad you like it.” He has a bottle in his hand, and begins pouring flutes of champagne. Hannah hears her mother's own stern survivalist voice inside her own when she protests:

“Drinking alcohol now is unwise. We need our wits—”

Kit waves her off. “I need to get crunk is what I need.” She laughs around a mouthful of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. “God, I hated these as a kid. I hated these
last week
. But now it's like a gift from the gods.”

“Hannah,” Einar says, thrusting a flute of bubbly in front of her. “Surely we can celebrate this little bit?”

“No,” Hannah says, turning it down.
I'm not interested in celebrating anything yet.
Survival here is the bare minimum, and they haven't even properly achieved
that
. “But you guys go ahead.”

Einar shrugs and offers a toast:

“Skál!”

Ray reaches in for a beer, then pulls his hand back, crying out. Something skitters across the tops of the food packages.

“God
damn it,
” Ray curses. “Barry, you had to bring that thing?” There, poised like a praying monk on top of a bottle of soda, is Buffy the mantis.

Barry looks stung. “What? She ate her share of ants. She did good. Didn't you, girl.” He sticks out his finger and she runs up it, clinging to his forearm.

“Careful,” Nancy cautions. “We might eat her if she gets too close.”

Above them, the intercom crackles. “Radio's working,” Captain Dan says. “Hannah, I got someone on the line for you.”

The Bell's cockpit is mostly digital: four screens across, left to right. Various readouts. One satellite map. One radar. Dan looks comfortable in the seat, like he's always been the pilot of this fancy ride. He gives her a headset—and suddenly, there's Hollis's voice in her ear.

“I've never been so glad to hear from you,” she says.

“I'm glad to hear from you, too, Stander.” The relief in his voice is plain to hear: “Where the hell are you?”

Hannah gives him the CliffsNotes version: They left Kolohe about half an hour ago. Island overrun by the Myrmidons. Most of the people at the lab are gone. The colonies have been stolen.

“They're here,” Hollis says. “On Kauai.”

“The ants?” she asks, panicked. Everything feels like it's falling out from under her.
No, no, no.
“Are you there? On Kauai?”

“Yeah. They're everywhere, Hannah. People have died—” The radio crackles. His voice is lost.

“Copper?” She adjusts the headset, finds a volume control, tries spinning it up and down to see if anything happens. “Copper, you there?”

More broken words: “—Ez attacked—”
Ksssh.
“—sheltering in place—”
Fzzt, fzzt.
“—island-wide quarantine—”

And then that's it. He's gone.

She pulls off the headset. To Sullivan, she says, “Signal's gone.”

“God damn it.”

“The ants are there. On the island.”

Sullivan grips the flight stick with white knuckles. “That means we don't know what we're flying into?”

“No, we don't.” She looks out the front windshield. It's just ocean out here. No islands, nothing. Just a flat line. The white chop of the waves drawing jagged lines across the wide-open blue-steel sea. “Maybe the ants have taken down communications. Shit! I don't even know where Hollis is.”

Dan says, “He could be at Barking Sands. That's a Navy base there. Got an airport, and it's snugged up against the Pacific Missile Range Facility. I'll see if I can get clearance to land there—that'll put you in Copper's lap. So to speak. But I gotta be honest, maybe it'd be best if we take this chopper to another island. We have the fuel—head past to next island over, Oahu, and—”

“No. I need to go to Hollis.”

“And take all of us with you?”

She wants to yell at him,
Well, you came this far
. But her anger is irrational. She'd be putting these people in danger again. That said, she doesn't want to let them out of her sight, either. Hannah sighs and rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I know, it sucks. But hopefully the base is safe. At the very least, you can . . . drop me off and then be on your way.”
Or Hollis can detain you for questioning. All of you.
“I have to tell the others—”

Two of the cockpit screens suddenly go dark. “Oh, what the hell,” Dan says. He gives them a bump with the heel of his hand. They flicker on, then offer up a graphical glitch before going black once again. “This is what you get flying a prototype chopper. Gimme an old-school Sikorsky any day of the week—”

Hannah shushes him. “You hear that?” she asks. She can hear a faint sparking.

He cocks an ear. “What is that?”

“Maybe an electrical malfunction.”

Then both of the screens come back on. Dan harrumphs. “Guess we're back in business.”

Something moves across the screen. No. Not across it.

On
top
of it.

One little ant runs corner to corner.

Hannah moves fast. She reaches down, starts trying to help Dan out of his straps. “Get up, get up,
get up
.”

The captain doesn't understand. He pulls away from her. “I don't need to get up, I need to figure out what's wrong with the—”

The screens go dark again. Below the cockpit, near Dan's legs,
a panel rattle-bangs, then drops loose on a pair of hinges. A fat bulging bubble of Myrmidon ants
extrudes
out, breaking apart as it falls—

All over Dan's legs.

And up his arms.

“God damn it, shit, God damn it, get them off of me!” He starts flinging his hands, shaking them furiously. Hannah works to get the belt off him, but he's thrashing around too hard, he won't sit still—

His words of panic liquefy to a throaty shriek as the Myrmidons start biting him. The ants dot his cheeks. His lips. They clamber into his screaming mouth. It's over. Hannah realizes that now. She pivots away from the seat, launching herself back through the door. Already the others are up, drawn to the alarm of Captain Dan screaming. Einar's face is a grim mask.

Hannah never gets to tell them. The Bell shifts hard to the left. Her head cracks against one of the windows.

Moments of darkness stitched across a blurry streak of colors. Her innards do loop-de-loops as the helicopter dips and jerks. She braces herself against the wall.

Screams spin and whirl around her. Out the window, she sees those white lines of the wave tops coming closer—

We're crashing,
she thinks.

And then they hit.