Invasive (34 page)

Hannah moves fast—she plants her hand on Rachel's chest and pushes at the same time that she drives the side of her forearm hard into the crook behind Einar's knee. The chair tips and the woman screams as she slams flat on her back. Einar's leg jerks and he falls to the ground.

Just as the rest of the glass door shatters. The emergency radio hops off the table like a spooked toad, sending up a shower of broken plastic even before it hits the ground and breaks into pieces.

Rachel screams, a howl that drowns out any other sound. Hannah tries to shush her because it's messing with her situational awareness, and still the woman keeps shrieking and wailing, a siren of panic. Hannah snakes an arm around her head and cups a hand over her mouth. The scream continues, but muffled, at least.

Then: The sound of glass crunching. A shadow in the room.
Hannah looks up, sees a broad-shouldered man in a balaclava and black fatigues raise a rifle—an AR-15 by the look of it. She rolls out of the way as the shot perforates Rachel's back. A little spray of blood and the woman's scream is cut short.

Hannah scrambles to stand. Einar is already up, launching his hands in the air. “Wait, wait, wait,” he is saying. “Stop. Don't shoot.”

“Slowly,” the man says, gesturing at Hannah with the gun. “Up. Up!”

She stands just behind Einar. The man has no clean shot on her.

He gestures again with the rifle. “Move. I said,
move
!”

He could just shoot. But that would mean hitting Einar. And the way he's got that rifle pointed, he's making a concerted effort
not
to point it in Einar's direction. No, there's a bullet in that gun and it is reserved for her and her alone.

The realization is like a kick to the chest. The man doesn't want to hurt Einar.
He doesn't want to hurt Einar.
Why would that be, exactly?

In the time it takes her to blink, she knows what she has to do.

Hannah moves behind Einar, pulling her own pistol. She presses the barrel hard against Einar's temple.

“Hannah,” Einar says. “I don't understand.”

“He wants to shoot, he can take his shot,” she says loud enough so the shooter can hear it. “He guns you down, he can gun me down.”

But the shooter keeps his gun trained to Einar's margins.

“You figured it out,” Einar says.

“Far too late,” she says.

The shooter stands, confused as to what to do. Hannah presses the HK45 harder into Einar's temple. “Why?” she hisses in Einar's ear. “
Why?
”

“Now is not the time to dissect that,” Einar says. “Now is the time to negotiate. What will it cost?”

Her mind is frantic. Negotiate? He's cool and ever the consummate businessman; her mind feels like a tangle of sparking wires. “What?”

“How much this will cost me is what I am asking you, Hannah. What I want is for you to leave me out of this. What I want is for you to go back to the Bureau and tell them that it was Archer Stevens all along. You can do that. You can pinch their noses and lead them along like good little doggies.”

“I can't—”

“You can, and I'm asking you how much this privilege costs me. You have me at a loss. I am, as the saying goes,
bent over a barrel
. We make a good team. I like you. You're smart.
Tenacious.
What if you and I go to find Will together? Just you and me. When we find him, we help heal the world.”

“You helped cause this.”

He sighs. “The story is more complex than you know. Will did most of this without me. He designed these monsters. I am merely capitalizing on his error. Trying to turn a
frown upside down,
as it were, Hannah.”

Moments pass. Breathe in, breathe out. Her hand on the gun shakes. Sweat slicks her brow. She looks to the side of Einar's face, then to the gunman.

The gunman's gaze is flitting from Einar to the door behind her.

Then she hears it—the faint
creak
. Einar has just been stalling her. Someone else is coming up behind. On the porch
right now
.

Hannah yanks Einar backward, pivoting so that she's out of the line of fire—just as the screen door kicks off its hinges and someone else steps into the room, gun up.

It's Venla Normi.

Because of course it is.
She never died on the island, did she? Hannah goes through the last forty-eight hours. Venla was the one, wasn't she? The one who took the colonies off the atoll. The one who brought them
here
.

Hannah lets her guard slip just long enough for Einar to pull his head away from the barrel of the gun and drive a sharp elbow into her solar plexus. The air pops out of her lungs in a hard burst and the sharp pain goes fast into a dull ache—

Venla's pistol is up. Hannah stagger-steps left, just behind Einar again.

The woman doesn't take the shot. Einar spins, going for Hannah's gun. His hand catches hers. His thumb presses hard into the soft spot of her wrist. She growls and as the gun passes by his ear—

She squeezes the trigger. The weapon discharging is loud. It's like a hammer driving a nail into her ear—and so close to Einar, it's far worse for him.

He winces, shaking his head like a bee-stung dog as he pulls away from her—

Leaving a clean shot for the first gunman.

The gunman raises the rifle—

But there's sudden movement behind him.
Ray.
Ray launches himself into the man with the elegance of a falling piano. But it works—the rifle goes off, pinging off pots and pans, as the gunman goes down.

As Hannah flinches from the rifle shot, Einar scowls and throws a straight punch. Hannah turns her head aside at the last minute and the knuckled blow crashes against her cheek, staggering her. Again he's on her, air hissing through his teeth as he goes for the gun. She pistons a knee into his gut. He slams the side of his head into the side of hers. She tastes blood. She sees stars. The gun is slipping from her grip as he mauls it, crushing her knuckles against the steel receiver . . .

You're a survivor. So survive.

Hannah yanks the gun toward her own face. Einar's resistance braced him in the other direction, so this comes as a surprise to him. Soon as it's close enough, she sinks her teeth into the back of his hand. She feels his flesh part. Blood wells into her mouth.

Einar rips his hand away. Blood spatters the cabinets. He shoves her backward hard. Hannah slams into the counter, a geyser of pain shooting up from the bottom of her spine to the base of her skull.

Already Einar's running—bolting from the room, his hand cradled by his chest. Venla's got her gun back up, but Hannah isn't
about to go down like that. As she ducks and scurries, she points her own piece and fires off two more shots in their direction. Bullets chip the door frame and punch through the screen as Venla and Einar dart outside.

Hannah checks herself. She hasn't been shot. Which she's pretty sure qualifies her for miraculous canonization.

The sounds of a scuffle at the other side of the room draw her attention. The gunman has Ray pinned, rifle held fast across the man's throat. Ray's face is red and going purple—swollen like a balloon about to burst. The gunman turns at the sound of her—

She puts a bullet between his eyes.

Guilt surges against her like the sea against sand, battering her. Her knees go weak and it threatens to drag her down—but outside, the sound of an engine roaring to life draws her out of it. That followed by the noise of tires chewing driveway.

“Go,” Ray gasps.

She races outside, but it's too late. Through the trees, she spies the blur of taillights. And there on the ground are two more bodies: Pono and Moana. Blood made black in the moonlight pools beneath their slit necks.

The bullet went through Ray. If he were a whitetail deer or a pheasant or even a goat, Hannah would have a fairly precise clue where the projectile went and what it hit on its way through, but she's not an expert on human anatomy. Best she can tell is that it passed through the middle of his torso. Entered just to the right of the spine and came out just above his stomach somewhere.

His middle is sloppy with blood. His face has gone a ghostly green-gray. She wrapped up his middle with towels and bandages from a first aid kid she found under the sink, secured them with his own belt cinched tight.

It isn't much.

“Fucking Einar,” he says. His words are wet. “I knew it.
I knew it
. That thing he said to you . . .”

“Shh, don't strain. What thing?”

“He said a couple Icelandic sayings, right? The one thing about being stubborn enough to win and the other thing—”

“About survival being king.”

“Yeah, except that's not what that meant.”

“You speak Icelandic?”

“A little. He was my boss. I was trying to kiss up.”

“What was it he said?”

“Something about,
I'll show you the two worlds
. And I thought, that doesn't have anything to do with survival. First I thought maybe it was some kind of threat. Then I excused it—figured maybe I just got the translation goofed up. Now I figure it was some kind of threat.”

She looks down at her own blood-slick hands. Already the red has begun to dry to brown. The HK45 sits nearby.

“You're going after him, right?” Ray asks.

“I'm going after Will. But I figure that's where Einar is headed, too.”

“I'm coming with you,” Ray says, and then laughs as he slumps back down because no, he isn't.

“I think you need to rest.”

“I think I'm probably dead and my body just doesn't know it yet.”

She suspects he's right. A shot through the middle isn't good. If the bullet hit the liver, he might be bleeding bad on the inside. If it hit the stomach, it could lead to a fast infection. (These things learned from her survivalist mother as a child.) Injures of that sort are fixable
if
he gets to a hospital quickly. But that's not much of an option out here. The hospitals aren't open during the end of the world.

The memory appears, unasked for: Bucky the goat, the knife in her hand, Dad taking the .22 and killing the goat she accidentally mauled.

“Hey,” he says, interrupting the show going on behind her eyes. “I figure this is as good a time as any to ask: If I live, will you go out on a date with me?”

A doomed request. But she nods and forces a smile. “Sure. You survive, I'll go out with you.”

“Great. You, me, Miami South Beach. Drinks. A Cuban place. Cuban coffee and lime pie afterward. It's gonna be good.”

“I bet.”

“You better go. Catch the bad guys.”

“I will.”

“I'm gonna rest.”

“You rest.” She kisses his brow: an odd gesture from her. It feels warm, familiar, and comfortable in its discomfort—nice in how it feels like something someone else would do. Someone human. Someone who isn't Hannah.

His eyes shut gently. His chest rises and falls as blood wets the towels.

Hannah packs what little gear she can muster, then leaves.

H
annah has never hiked the Kalalau Trail. But she knows of it. The eleven-mile hike starts at the North Shore of Kauai, with a trailhead at Kee Beach, and goes around the Na Pali coast on the western side, winding across a series of peaks and valleys, over streams and past waterfalls. It is renowned for being one of the world's most beautiful hikes.

Also, one of its most dangerous.

It's dangerous for a lot of reasons. An experienced hiker will be okay, most likely, but a lot of inexperienced hikers want to take the trip, and underestimate what the hike entails. They don't know about Crawler's Ledge at the seventh mile. They don't know to bring enough water. They don't realize that with just a little rain, conditions can change in the breadth of a heartbeat—streams can become rivers, cliffs can become mudslides, visibility can go to hell and leave you blind and stranded. People have to be airlifted from the trail every year. And every year, people die. They fall off the cliffs. They get swept away by a sudden flash flood. They die from exposure.

It doesn't help that the trail has a handful of permanent—and illegal—residents. Trail weirdos and wanderers who hit the coast and aim to disappear. Hannah has encountered the same kinds of people at various points of the Appalachian Trail. Some of them are nice enough, castoffs from the world who have exiled themselves. Some of them are creepers, stalkers, maybe worse.

As morning bleeds across the horizon, she stands at the trailhead on Ke'e Beach—from here, everything looks peaceful and
the sound of the sea does its best to shush her dread, but it's futile. Hannah feels none of the excitement she would harbor if this were recreational. This isn't a choice. And she's ill-prepared. Not enough water. Not enough food. She's already tired and beaten down—not to mention the ghost of injury in her ankle. All parts of her feel like a rotten tooth whose middle has been scraped out. She stands there, stretching, trying to talk herself out of going.
Just turn around. Go home. Let someone else fix this.
She almost has to laugh.
You're just a consultant.

But the others already have their head start. She wonders how many of the Blackhearts mercs are here with Einar. She wonders how exactly it is that he ended up working with the Blackhearts in the first place, given that they seemed beholden to Archer Stevens. But they are mercenaries, after all. They work for whoever pays them.

The first mile.

Hannah hikes up overlooking Ke'e Beach as the sun's light eases across the wide expanse of brilliant blue. The serpentine curves of reef can be seen under the slowly rolling tides. Plum trees bloom. A pair of red honeycreepers chase each other from branch to branch. The breeze kicks up to a buffeting wind.

It's beautiful out here. Hannah feels suddenly small, in the best way possible. It absolves her, somehow. The world will go on. People will do as people will do. She can change none of it.

It's almost enough to make her turn around.

Almost.

She has to do this. She has to end it, get answers. This is in her power. She is alone out here, which means it's all up to her.

Her absolution blows away like dust off the trail ahead.

On the second mile, the hike begins to show its teeth. The trail begins to rise up as the pinnacle Na Pali peaks push up against the banner of the wide sky.

It's at a small stream that she sees it. There, on the ground: boot prints in the dirt.

The wind shifts then, and she smells the cigarette smoke.

Hannah reaches behind her and draws the pistol, then creeps forward, trying to suss out the direction of the smoke. The wind is coming in from the coast—the ocean now unseen behind vegetation—and the stream heads that direction. She ducks behind a tree and scans the foliage. The sharp bite of nicotine hits her nose.

A sound hits her ears, too. At first she thinks it's just the noise of the stream burbling along, but it's something else, something separate.

Psssshhh.

Then she makes him: A black shape standing just behind a hala tree. One of the soldiers. She's pretty sure he's pissing. That means she has to move fast
and
quietly.

Part of her thinks that the best bet is to hurry past him. But she doesn't want some armed and dangerous variable coming up on her back. She'll never stop looking over her shoulder.

And he may know something.

She spies a fast path right alongside the stream—flat stones and dirt. No sticks to break underfoot, no foliage to crunch and snap. She moves, light on her feet despite a twinge in her ankle, gun up. She can see the soldier's shoulder next to the tree. His body jostles—
shake, shake, shake
—and then the sound of his zipper zipping.

Her foot knocks a rock bounding down toward the stream.

The man pivots around the tree, his hand going to the gun in his holster. But Hannah meets him there, her own weapon already drawn and pointed at his head. “No,” she says. “Don't.”

He has his balaclava pulled up over his head. Dark hair is stuck to the sweat on his pale forehead. He's got his sleeves rolled up and his dark pants pulled up to his knees, too. His face is heavy, round.
Stubbled cheeks. Dark eyes. Tongue sliding over little teeth. At his feet, ghosts of smoke rise from a heel-smashed cigarette.

“Take it easy,” he says.

“What's your name?” she asks.

“Chuck U. Farley.” Then he smiles the way a little boy smiles after he wipes a booger in a girl's hair. Puckish and mean.

“Where's Einar?”

“Don't know an Einar.”

She thumbs the hammer back on the HK45. “Take a look at this pistol. Heckler & Koch. Look familiar? Look like one that belonged to one of your own? Bet it matches the one in your holster. I've already killed one of you,” she says. “I won't hesitate to kill another. Where's Einar?”

The man's throat works in a nervous swallow. “Ahead.”

“By how far?”

“I don't know.”

“Guess.”

“I don't know. I don't know!”

She tries another tack. “How long have you been here?”

“About five hours.”

If they move one to two miles an hour, they're probably at mile seven already. That's far enough ahead that despair plucks at her strings.

“How many of them?”

“Three.”

“Who? Einar, Venla—who else?”

“One other PMC.”

He's lying. She can tell. The way he flinches when he says the number. The way he licks his lips when he tells her who.

“What's their plan?”

“Find Galassi, find his research, get out.”

“And you? How about you? You here to kill me?”

He clamps shut. He's starting to get twitchy.

She says, “You're here as a distraction. Einar sent you back here to
fail. He was cutting deadweight. You're out of shape. I bet you travel slow. I bet—”

He moves fast. Going for his weapon.

Her eyes squeeze shut at the same time her finger squeezes the trigger.

Ears ringing. The devil-stink smell of gunsmoke.

When she opens her eyes again, he's on the ground. One leg kicking out, heel tapping against a flat rock. The stream burbling nearby as blood runs from the back of his head into the water.

She wants to take the gun and pitch it into the brush.

But she doesn't.

Instead, Hannah swallows her disgust and searches the body. She finds an extra magazine for the pistol, and also a suppressor. She takes them both. The gunshot echoed out loud, and it's a good bet that Einar and Venla and whoever else is out there heard it—which means they know she's either dead or on her way for them. She'll want any more shots silenced. The ammo in the magazine looks to be subsonic—even with the suppressor, she'll never get a shot to be as whisper quiet as they appear in the movies, but it'll dampen any echo and drop the decibel level.

Nearby where he was pissing, she finds a black bag. She takes a water bottle out of it and drinks a good bit, then wolfs down a protein bar before getting back on the trail.

Mile three.

Over the wider Hanakapiai Stream—the water soaks her boots and socks as she crosses—to the beach beyond.

A tent sits on the beach. Its flaps rustle in the wind. Sticking out of the entrance of the tent is a socked foot, and just past it, a hiking boot.

Hannah feels the breath catch in her chest as she creeps up to the tent and finds the two bodies inside: a man and a woman. Young.
Maybe midtwenties. She in a bikini, he in board shorts and a tank top. She's shot in the chest, he in the temple. Blood and flies. The smell of voided bowels.

Hannah backs out of the tent, gagging. The blood is still fresh enough that this was not the work of Will Galassi.

She wonders if the couple even knew what was going on around the rest of the island. Did they come here to get away from the ants, or were they already so far away from the world that they never knew what the Myrmidons had wrought?

The seventh mile is thought to be one of the hardest.

This is in part because after Hanakapiai Beach the trail goes from sea level to eight hundred feet in just over a mile. Then down again, then up again. Through another stream. Down through trees where the ground is covered in slippery scree—here Hannah takes a tumble and skins her knee.
At least,
she thinks,
I didn't screw up my ankle again
. The wind fights her the whole way. The ground is rough and uneven. The sun beats down.

By the time she gets to the seventh mile, she is worn to a nub. She moves up a series of ascending switchbacks—round, tight bends in the trail like loops of kinked bowel. Up and around, up and around.

That's when Crawler's Ledge begins.

The ledge is narrow. Two people across in the widest of spots, but for much of it, it'll accommodate only one person. On one side is rock. On the other, a drop down into a rocky valley and the gnashing waves of the Pacific.

Hannah shuffles, planting her hands on the edge of the rock. Every time she secures some rough semblance of a hold, an eerie frequency runs through her: a sudden self-destructive urge to simply
push
like a swimmer kicking off the pool wall, and fall down, down, down. Of course, maybe she won't have to—the wind whips
hard enough she thinks it might pick her up and fling her into the abyss, where the sea may swallow her.