Invasive (36 page)

That's what she did then. The can did indeed jump.

And it's what she does now.

Bang.

Einar goes down.

Hannah gets up. Hobbles over to him. Einar is pushing himself up. His one leg hangs there, limp and dead. Which means she hit where she was aiming: right behind his knee.

He starts to hop forward on his one good leg. She shoots that one, too. Einar screams and drops. He curls up into a ball, sobbing.

Hannah sits down on a rock. Her body moves in waves of pain and numbness. A cold icy nothing washes over her, and then a hot, acid burn. Then back to the cold nothing again. The start of shock.

She centers herself. If she's going to live, she needs to move now. She knows that somewhere around this camp, they have a way to make a call.

To Einar, she says: “You have a phone somewhere here. Satphone or GPS tracker or something. I need it.”

He curses at her in what she presumes is Icelandic.

His breathing is fast. Which means the pain is bad. She knows because
her
pain is bad and
her
lungs are like a rabbit's. “You want to sit here in pain, fine.”

“My legs are a mess,” he says. His voice sounds weepy.

“Good.”

“You did a number on me.”

“I know.” She bites her lip to distract from the pain in her shoulder. “The ants will finish with Venla soon. And then they'll come for you. With your legs injured, you won't even be able to run
from the monsters you loosed on the world. I don't know if you're a fan of irony, Einar, but if you are . . .”

“I have a chopper coming.” He says that like a petulant child.

“And which do you think will get here first? Your friends? Or the ants? I have spray. I can use it to help you. But I
need
that phone.”

Moments pass. All she hears is the sound of the wind and his breathing. No chopper yet. No rescue for him. That silence must break him, because finally he cries out in frustration. He says: “Venla has it. She has the phone.”

Sure enough, when Hannah crawls over there, she pats down the woman's body—which now teems with ants, ants carrying away little bits of her to God knows where—and finds the phone in her back pocket.

The ants crawl up her hand as she pulls out the phone. Panic seizes her and she has to calm herself down in order to wipe them off. They go willingly. None bite. Hannah still crawls away as fast as she can.

In the moonlight, she sees Einar propping himself up with his arms. He stares at her, feral. Like he could come at her at any second.

Hannah feels around for the gun. “Don't. You can get the bullet, or you can get the spray.”

The fight goes out of him. His chin drops.

“Throw me the spray.”

She does.

And then she tries to make a call.

Three months later

H
annah Stander and Hollis Copper stand in a courtyard of bright crepe myrtles. “This is not a prison,” she says.

“Oh, but it is,” Hollis answers. “Minimum security prison for the wealthy. Guys like Bernie Madoff stay here. It's
pay-to-stay
. You pay in and you get to live like a king. A king imprisoned by his own court, maybe, but a king just the same.”

“Figures.” She adjusts her arm in its sling.

“How's the arm?”

“Hurts. Itches.” The cast goes all the way up her shoulder. Her arm was propped up on a truss for a while, but now it's allowed to hang somewhat. The bullet shattered her bones. She's got pins in there now—making her feel at least a little bit like a Terminator. “Cast comes off today, actually.”

“Enjoy your returned mobility.”

“Thanks.” She draws a deep breath. “I never did thank you properly.”

“For what?”

“For saving me that day.”

“I didn't save you. I sent a helicopter to pick up you and the Icelandic prick is all I did. It's you who needs to be thanked, Hannah.”

That day, she really thought she was dead. After getting the phone from Venla, it took her a while to get in touch with
anybody
. Local information didn't work. Hollis wasn't answering his
cell. Eventually she tried Ez's cell phone—and lo and behold, she answered. Turned out, Hollis and the others had retreated from Barking Sands and were on board a littoral combat ship—the USS
Independence
. From there, Hollis sent a chopper—a chopper that dissuaded Einar's own ride from landing (though later Einar's pilot was tracked down overseas under a false name, and was thrown into the basket with the rest of the Blackhearts contractors, all of them presently undergoing litigation and imprisonment).

Hannah spent a month in a hospital on Oahu. If you're going to convalesce somewhere, Honolulu is a fine choice. Every morning the smell from the plumeria blooms wafted in across her balcony—or, rather, her
lanai
. It didn't hurt that Ez came to Hawaii, too, for a while. She took a week, had a TA handle her job at the university. It was good just to sit and . . . be with someone. She spoke to her mom every day, too. The time difference made it hard, and every time she wanted to get on the phone with Dad, he was too tired, or wasn't having a good day, and Mom kept up that same refrain:
Come home, come home, you need to come home
.

Hannah wanted to be more involved in the case, but Hollis said no. He explained to her that she had done enough. He said
he
wasn't even involved anymore aside from giving testimony. Forces beyond their control were working with Einar to “rectify the situation.”

Speak of the Devil and the Devil shall appear—

There, walking out the door into the courtyard, is Einar Geirsson. Well, not walking. Hobbling on two trembling legs, using a cane. She and he share a look and a long silence. His mouth is fishhooked into a mean smirk.

“Can you give us some privacy?” she asks Hollis.

Hollis Copper arches an eyebrow, but silently he acquiesces. As he passes Einar on the way in he offers the billionaire a cold knife-in-the-front stare.

“He's
quite
the friendly one,” Einar says once Copper is gone. The caged billionaire is smiling, but the smile is fake. He's angry with her. Disgusted with the way things turned out. She can see it on his
face, a face covered by a resentful, contemptuous mask. His gaze is practically bestial.

It gives her some satisfaction. “It worked,” she says.

“I know.”

“The island of Kauai is free of the menace you made. Kit and Barry helped produce both the new strain of terminator ant and the engineered
Candida
.”

He sniffs. “I am told also that your friend Dr. Choi was involved.”

“They needed help and she had value as an entomologist familiar with the species Will Galassi created. Besides, she deserved the rather significant payout afforded by working for Arca Labs.” Labs that remain in operation under Einar's board of directors—independent of the Icelandic billionaire.

“Maybe I will whisper a word to the board to hire her.”

“She won't take the job.”

Einar shrugs—a dismissive
who the fuck really cares
kind of gesture. He looks her up and down. In that gaze, she can feel how much he's changed. Gone is any pretense of civility. He's stripping her down. Like a man looking at a woman he's imagining unclothed and splayed out before him. “You look well.”

“And you look comfortable here. In your cage.”

Silence between them. He finally says, “I am told that the release of the
Aedes aegypti
will proceed apace in the Florida Keys. As a test.”

“You got your wish.” All along, this was his plan. To use Kauai as proof of concept for genetically modified insects—a dangerous gambit, considering how the Myrmidon ants were themselves a GM species. But Einar's gambit was the correct one: Using the terminator ants to halt the march of the Myrmidons convinced Congress and the American people that it was time to be the master of the world's genetic destiny rather than its slave. And with that came the sweeping approval of using Arca's own
Aedes aegypti
mosquito to help combat dengue fever in Florida, Hawaii, and anywhere else it pops up in the United States.

Einar smiles. “Just as Icarus got his wish of flying very high in the sky.”

“They found Archer Stevens.”

“Did they?”

“Suicide.”

“He was a troubled man, I hear.”

“She did it, didn't she? Venla. And it was her who delivered the ants to Scottie Stevens there in that cabin. The second set of prints—it was her wearing the same exact type of Lowa boots.” Hence, she thinks, the lean to the prints—those shoes were a hair too big for her. Their poor fit led to strange footprints.

“Venla always was her own creature. I could never control her. I admired Archer. Scottie, the child, not so much.” His face is an implacable veneer.

“They'll investigate you for it.”

“Let them.”

“There's also the matter of nearly five thousand dead on the island of Kauai,” she says, her mouth a firm line. “I hope that haunts you. You turned those monsters loose on an island of people who had no way to protect themselves. Ten percent of the island's inhabitants—gone. Cut to pieces to feed your little soldiers. Does that bother you? Does it keep you up at night?”

A twitch at his lips. “A small price to pay for progress. Ten percent of the island's inhabitants—whether you're considering the tourist population there or not, I cannot say—is a
speck
compared to the seven billion people on this planet. Dengue fever sickens millions every year, killing twenty-five thousand.
Every. Year
. And that's not factoring in all the other mosquito-borne diseases, Hannah. Malaria. West Nile. Chikungunya in Central America. Zika in South America and now here in North America.” He waves his hand in the air as if dismissing a moth. “Five thousand dead? A sadness. Regrettable. But as the buy-in to allow us to save five times that many annually? Ten times that? A fleeting, forgettable price to pay so we may teach mankind that science is not our enemy.”

“
You
made science our enemy.”

“Only in the short term.”

“You're a sick man.”

“And you're a deluded woman. The world needs visionaries like me, Hannah. If men like me are not willing to be so bold, we will lose the race against ourselves. You know that. You've looked into the eye of the future.”

“If you're the hero we deserve, we have already lost that race, Einar.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way.”

She nods. “You could have been someone important. Instead, you're just another ego-fed maniac. A man who can't help but push his hand into wet concrete to leave his ugly mark. Good luck. Enjoy prison.”

“Where will you go, Hannah?”

“Where else? Home.”

She goes home. Her mother leads her into the bedroom without saying a word, and there under the covers is her father. He talks to Hannah, but the words he uses aren't words at all. They sound like another language, some gabbled alien tongue that makes sense to him but no one else at all.

“He had a stroke,” her mother says.

“When?”

“Months ago. Before you left for the island.”

Hannah feels her eyes go wet. She kneels by the bedside and holds her father's hand. His skin is dry like the paper around a cigarette.

All that time, her mother wouldn't tell her this. She pretended nothing was wrong. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“Would it have mattered?”

That stings. Because of course it would've mattered. Wouldn't it?

Dad babbles, then laughs as if he just told a joke. Hannah tries
to laugh with him as if she
understood
the joke. But her laugh rings hollow.

“How do you know it was a stroke?”

“I . . . had a doctor come.”

“When?” She stands up, suddenly angry, because this is important. “When did you have a doctor come?”

“A few nights after it . . . happened.”

Hannah's jaw clenches, and through her teeth she says, “Time
matters
with a stroke, Mom. How
fast
you act . . .” She pounds a fist into her own thigh, hard. “Damn it, you may have cost him his mind.”

“Doctors don't know what they're talking about.”

There it is. A burning ember in her heart, like a flung piece of meteorite scorched from atmospheric entry. She wants to strike her mother. Hannah wants to haul back and knock her into the next room.

She doesn't. She stays her hand. Instead she storms off into the kitchen and makes herself some tea: A comforting ritual. Meditative in its way. She picks out a teabag, gets the kettle on the stove.

Her mother follows, though, and she stands there like a bitter pill, saying: “You see now, I was right.” She reaches past Hannah, taking out a mug that says
BLACKMOORE TRACTOR SUPPLY
and sliding it across the counter to her daughter. “If all this nonsense proves anything, it's that we're balanced right on the edge of things. Those ants? That European man? The future isn't a door. It's a wall. And we're headed right toward it. I hope you see that now.”

“That's where you're wrong, Mom.” She says these words as if she believes them, though honestly, she's not so sure. But Hannah keeps on: “If you want to be scared of anything, be scared of here and now. It's the present that's frightening. The future we can fix. If we want to. But we have to
really
want it. We can't just keep our heads down.
You
can't just keep your head down. You fucked me up. Now you fucked Dad up. Maybe he was always fucked up because of you. Things could've been different, but they weren't.”

Mom looks worse than if Hannah
had
hauled off and hit her.

The kettle starts to whistle. Hannah pushes it aside and leaves. That night she sleeps in a motel about ten miles away. She has nightmares. The same ones she's had almost every night since the island. Nightmares about drowning. About being torn to ribbons by little teeth. About falling from a great height into the sea. And once in a while, not every night, she dreams about shooting Roy Peffer through the chest with a rifle. Blood sprayed on the windswept grass.

Sometimes she wakes up feeling like she's covered in ants. Or blood. Or both.

She spends the next week with her father.

She and her mother share no words.

MIAMI

A week later

It's hot. And so humid the air feels like it's gone gelatinous, like she's moving through warm Jell-O. She sits at the café, drinks an iced coffee.

He's late, but he shows.

Ray. Ray, the cocky jerk. Ray, the guy who survived a gut shot—a
miraculous
gut shot, the way it missed his vital organs. Ray, the guy who tricked her into going on a date by asking her out on what she assumed was his deathbed.

He smiles. He's lost some weight and some muscle. But his structure is all still there—broad, firm, tall.

Well,
she thinks,
let's see how this goes
. Her own advice to her mother rings in her ears:
Maybe it's time to rejoin the world.

“Hola,” Ray says.

“Hey.”

He sits down, and the date she owes him begins.