Invasive (4 page)

“And the ants just keep coming?”

“All the ones nearby. The machine fritzes and then the waves stop.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“Uh, yeah, terribly
amazing,
you mean. They're resistant to a lot of poisons and they're persistent—even if you kill them today, unlike other ants they won't find a new way forward. They're like zombies at a fence—they just keep swarming until they're climbing over a field of their own dead. Brilliant little buggers.”

Hannah cocks an eyebrow. Again that image hits her: ants swarming her hand as she pulls it out of the mailbox. “They're a pest, though.”

“They are. Cost millions of dollars a year. But that's on us, not them. They don't know they're a pest. They're just living.”

“Like us.”

“Yeah, but
we
know that we're a pest.”

Hannah offers up her wine. “That's as good a toast as any.”

They clink glasses. “It's good to see you, Stander,” Ez says.

“I missed you, Ez.”

Ez shows all her teeth in a big madhouse smile. “Missed you, too, Stander!
Missed you, too.
”

They talk for hours. About books (Hannah reads only nonfiction, Ez seems to read every epic fantasy novel she can shove inside her eyeholes). About school (both attended Cornell University for graduate studies). About family (Ez talks to her parents nightly, Hannah does her best with hers). The two of them get a little fuzzy with all the wine and beer. The pizza ends up a demolished mess.

Outside, Ez steals a quick cigarette (“I know, I know, don't give me that look,
Mom,
” she tells Hannah) and asks: “So, you doing okay?”

“I'm good.”

“‘I'm good,' she says in a way that indicates she is not necessarily doing that good. C'mon, Han. You can tell me. Panic attacks?”

“Under control.”
Mostly,
she adds inside her head. “I see the giant bottomless chasm of worry over
there
and I stay over
here
. It'll never go away, but I can choose to not go falling down in there.”

“You take meds for it yet?”

“No,” she says firmly. Too firmly, maybe. “I don't trust meds.”

“Says the woman who just downed, like, a half bottle of zinfandel.”

“Pinot noir. But that's not medicine.”

“Beer is my medicine. When the world seems dim and all seems hopeless, a little buzz from a top-shelf bottle of beer will set everything back on its axis.” Ez drags off the cigarette and blows smoke from both nostrils. Then she indicates the cigarette. “These are not my medicine. These are my poison. And yet: I smoke.”

“We all do things we know we're not supposed to. And vice versa.”

Ez squints and scrutinizes. “You say that like it means something more.”

“No, I just mean . . .” But her words die in her mouth.

“Go on. Tell Dr. Choi what ails you, child.”

“I told you about Dad, right?”

“Yeah. How's he holding up?”

Hannah sighs. “I think he's fine. There most of the time. But of course he won't touch medication—”

“You understand the irony of what you just said.”

“It sounds like irony, but it isn't.” She hears a bit of steel in her voice—a coldness, an anger, and she quickly bites it back. “If I'm ever sick-sick, I'll take meds, trust me. I don't consider general anxiety disorder to be a sickness. It's a thing I can deal with all by myself. Alcoholics don't need medicine to stop drinking. I don't need medicine to stop worrying. But for Dad, this is bigger than that. And Mom doesn't want any kind of medication in the house.”

“You could sneak him something. Exelon, maybe.”

“What are you, a pharma rep?”

“My aunt was on the stuff and then, you know,
died
.” Ez makes a face like she just licked a toad's belly. As if the very thought of death is both distasteful and inconvenient. Which, Hannah supposes, it is. “Hospice said we were supposed to flush her meds, but we kept them because—well, I don't know why. We just did. So, I still have the Exelon. I could get it for you.”

“I'll think about it.” If she ever tries to sneak her dad any kind of meds—even an aspirin—her mother will kick her outside the gate and lock it behind her.

“You gone home to see him?”

“No.” She must make a face. Ez seizes on it.

“That's it. That's what's bugging you. Going home.”

“Well.”

“Am I right?”

“Well.”

“I'm totally right.”

“Going home means . . . going home.”

“Ooh, a tautology.”

“But true just the same. I don't like home. I left home for a reason. But Dad is there . . .”

“Held there like a princess by your tyrannical mother.”

“She's not tyrannical. She's a good woman. Just broken.”

Ez shrugs, puts out her cigarette. “We're all a little broken.”

“I think she's a lot broken. But she's my mother and he's my father and they're good people even if they're getting it wrong.”
I just can't bring myself to get home.
Something always ends up getting in the way. Sometimes it's random. Other times, she wonders if she orchestrates it so she has to stay away.

Ez does a Chubby Checker twist on the cigarette, then picks it back up and tosses it in a nearby trash can. “I'm going to go pay the bill.”

“Let me. The Bureau can pay.”

“I don't think America's tax dollars should go toward paying for my beer tab, Stander. I'll take care of it.”

Ez drops her back at the hotel, a three-minute drive. Hannah gets out and asks, “You're okay to get started tomorrow?”

“This morning I got a box full of dead ants, human blood, and fungal skin remnants. Santa was good to me this year.”

“You're weird.”

“
You're
weird.”

“Fine, we're both weird.”

That exchange: Not the first time they've shared it. Won't be the last.

I
t's 3:30
A.M.
when her phone dings.

She's asleep—the hotel bed isn't comfortable and she needs to use three pillows to give her the support of one real pillow, but everything has caught up with her and she's down. The phone dings again and she swims up out of that dark place, hand pawing at the side table. Knocking the alarm clock over. Finding the phone. She winces against the glow.

A text:

           
Ez:
i'm downstairs

She thinks:
Stupid phone
. It's recirculating yesterday's text for some annoying reason. Digital detritus washing back up on her shore. But then the phone vibrates and dings again, making her heart jump.

           
Ez:
get dressed and meet me out front. asafp.

Hannah staggers downstairs in last night's clothes, which smell of wine and garlic and a hint of cigarette smoke.

Outside, the early-morning Tucson air is surprisingly chilly. The predawn sky is the color of gunmetal.

Parked nearby is Ez Choi's little two-door Honda. Hannah pops the door and sits and Ez gives her a look.

“These ants don't exist,” Ez says. She chucks Hannah a folder sloppily stuffed with pages and printouts.

Hannah lifts the manila folder and shuffles through the pages, trying to make sense of what she's seeing. Images of DNA sequencing, a spreadsheet of various codes and descriptions, some macro snapshots of the ants. One of those photos is a portrait of sorts: a dead-on shot of an ant's face. It's shaped like a Satanic black heart: what would be the two top curves are instead pointed, almost horned—this from the antennae. The jaws at the bottom close tight like a pair of serrated scissors tapering to hooks. Dead black eyes. Little hairs all over. Black, shiny, demonic.

“I went back to the lab last night,” Ez says, breathless with what seems to be excitement. “I had a few minutes, so I started pulling out samples. Next thing I knew, it was hours later. Your dead guy's blood was a cocktail of tryptase and histamine, which is in line with anaphylaxis.”

“An allergic reaction.”

“An allergic
over
reaction, but yeah. And I checked the skin samples: unnatural swelling beneath the subdermal layer, which is consistent. So I cracked open one of our little ant friends. It's a stinging ant.”

“Do leaf-cutters sting?”

“They do. A lot of ants do. They're Hymenoptera—same order as wasps and bees. Fire ants clamp down with their jaws, but the pain comes from the sting. We've got these ants locally, the Maricopa harvester ant—”

Suddenly, movement by the car door. A hand comes down against the passenger-side window, and Hannah's heart hops into her throat—she feels at her side for a knife or pepper spray or her keys, but the only thing in her pocket is a hotel key card and it makes her feel suddenly naked. There, at the window, is a man: scruffy, older, lizard-like skin, eyes pinched behind folds of flesh. Half his face is red with some kind of dermatitis or eczema.

Her window starts to buzz down. She looks to Ez in panic.

Ez says, “It's all right.” Then, louder: “Hey, Carl.”

“Oh. Hey! Hey, is that you, Ezzy?” His voice is hoarse. An esophagus abraded with the sandpaper of a hard life.

Ez grunts as she leans across Hannah and hands out a crumpled wad of money. Hannah spies a few one-dollar bills, a few fives. “It's me, Carl. Here's some cash.” But before he takes it, she jerks the money back. “Ah, ah, ah. You know the drill with this.”

He chuckles—a raspy, wheezing sound, like air whistling through an old rusty pipe. “Don't buy liquor.”

“Are you going to buy liquor with it, Carl?”

“No?”

“Are you lying?”

“Maybe.”

“No liquor!” she barks, then hands over the money. “Go on, get out of here, you old scamp.” She shoos him away and he kisses his calloused fingers and blows her a kiss. Hannah smells his breath: it smells, contrary to her expectations, herbaceous. Like basil or oregano. His laugh can be heard trailing away as he shuffles across the parking lot.

“That's Carl,” Ez explains. “He's local homeless. Nice guy. Drunk, but not a creeper. We gotta watch out for him on really hot days. Try to get him into shelters with AC.”

Hannah releases a stuck breath. “You were saying something about a . . . a harvester ant?”

“Right! The Maricopa harvester. The venom in a harvester ant is the most toxic in the insect world. Its LD50 value—the median lethal dose—is through the floor: 0.12. The lower that number, the less of the venom it takes to actually kill somebody. And 0.12 is freaking low, Hannah.”

“Deadliest ant in the world and it's right here in your backyard?”

Ez snaps her fingers. “See, that's the thing. It's not the most lethal because it kills the most people. It's aggressive, like the fire ant, but it's rare—you don't see many around. Which means people don't get stung all that often. Fire ants are all over the damn place and,
so, technically super deadly. A hand grenade is more lethal than a single bullet, but most people don't have hand grenades.”

With fingers like forceps, Hannah pinches the bridge of her nose. She runs through this in her head and asks, “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Look,” Ez says, grabbing the folder and thumbing through the pages. She finds what she's looking for—a close-up image of a skin fragment. It's so close-up it almost looks topographical. Ez stabs down with a finger and says, “I scraped away the fungus—which, by the way, is
Candida,
just old-fashioned, old-timey yeast—and underneath I found marks. Lines and dots, lines and dots.” Sure enough, on the skin sample: a small horizontal red line and a red raised dot beneath it. “Like with fire ants, you have the line from where they get a good mandibular grip—
chomp!
—and then they do some insect yoga and curl their bodies inward to jam their little stinger into the flesh. Injecting venom.”

“These ants stung the man. They didn't just bite his skin.”

“They definitely stung him. And the venom of these weird little monsters is as bad as the harvester ants'. It's almost the same venom: amino acids, peptides, polysaccharides. Plus the toxic, allergenic proteins
and
the alkaloids that both poison the victim and send up a chemical signal to the rest of the nearby ants.”

“So, somehow, harvester ants made their way to New York State, to a remote cabin by an even more remote lake, and—”

Ez laughs: an unhinged, wild sound. “No, you don't get it, Stander. It looks like a leaf-cutter ant and has the venom of a Maricopa harvester. This is what I'm saying: no ant like that exists.”

“Guess you got your wish?” Hannah says. The smile across her face is not meant to demonstrate happiness, but rather to temper the shock of the absurd. “Maybe you can name it after yourself.”

“It's a new species, all right. But not one that appears in nature.”

“I don't follow you.”

“This ant isn't natural. This ant was
engineered
.”