Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  Nyramba walked a ways without answering. Then he gave Trey a sidelong glance. “That is not the only reason.”

  Trey waited.

  “The majizi and the hunters, they want the same things. Bushmeat. Monkey meat.”

  Still Trey was silent.

  “They will not accept anyone else in their territory,” Nyramba said. “Unless—”

  “Unless what?” Trey said.

  Nyramba gave him an amused glance. “You know the answer,” he said. “You’ve figured it out.”

  He was right.

  * * *

  THEY WALKED. THE forest grew darker. The trail was a muddy, winding stripe alongside a lowland stream strung with waxy white flowers and mushrooms that smelled like rotting meat, like death. Ndele, stumbling, struck dumb by his fate, needed more encouragement from the deputies, so progress was slow.

  “Not so much farther,” Nyramba said. “Twenty minutes, perhaps.”

  “How many have you brought here?” Trey asked.

  “Fourteen. So far.”

  Trey kept his face a blank, but Nyramba smiled anyway.

  “That many,” Trey said finally, “from Kinyare alone?”

  The police chief laughed. “No, only one from the village before this. Mattias, who assaulted women, and would not stop.”

  Trey said, “From where, then? I don’t understand.”

  “Why must all bad men come from our village?” Nyramba was still smiling. “The world is full of those who deserve to be condemned.”

  When Trey was silent, he went on. “The first four came from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Together, they had probably killed a thousand people here in Uganda and in Sudan. Another was a member of Al Qaeda, plotting against our president. Fool! Another, from the town of Inomo, has not been able to stay away from young boys. Children, I mean.”

  He stopped and faced Trey. “Tell me,” he said. “What else should I have done? They had to die. Should I have let them die without purpose? Without use?”

  Trey didn’t answer.

  “And, at the same time, let the innocent get taken by the majizi?”

  * * *

  THE END OF their trail was a small clearing not far from the stream. Ndele was only half conscious by now.

  There was the stump of a fallen kapok tree beside the trail. Someone had plunged a large spike deep into the stump and attached a chain to the spike. The deputies attached the end of the chain to Ndele’s manacles, shook them so the chain clanked, then stepped back. The prisoner didn’t even test the strength of his bonds, merely lay back with his eyes closed.

  Their job done, the deputies went past Trey and Nyramba and back down the trail. Their faces were expressionless, and they were walking fast. They didn’t look back.

  Trey watched until they were out of sight, then said, “How did you choose this place?”

  “It is where I first saw the majizi.” Nyramba sighed. “Emmanuel, a bushmeat hunter, he was here.”

  Trey drew in a breath through his nose. He thought he might have caught the slightest whiff of the familiar scent.

  “Are they here now?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Nyramba looked around. “Somewhere. They always stay downwind. And you only see them when they want you to.”

  Then he stiffened. “There.”

  Trey followed his gaze. Saw one thief, two . . . four of them. Two moved to hover over the trail, right at eye level, perhaps fifteen feet away. Two others flanked them, one on a small bush to the right, the other half hidden in the foliage on the left.

  Standing guard. That was what those two were doing. Cleverly, too, using a formation that didn’t allow you to keep your eyes on all of them at once. You couldn’t kill them all with one shot—not even with #9 birdshot—or strike them down with a single blow.

  If you killed one, or even two, the others would reach you before you had time to adjust or protect yourself.

  Trey stood still. The two that were hovering seemed to be looking straight into his eyes.

  “You interest them,” Nyramba said. There was an edge to his voice that might have been alarm. “We must go.”

  Trey didn’t want to take his eyes off the wasps. Most of all, he wanted to see what would happen next to the prisoner, cowering beside the stump.

  “Now,” Nyramba said.

  Still Trey was reluctant to leave. The same reluctance that had pulled at him when he stood beside the thief colony in the Casamance. Looking over his shoulder as he walked, he watched as the thieves swooped toward Ndele. One landed on the prisoner’s shoulder and skittered around behind his neck, while the second perched on his ragged white shirt just above his belly.

  The trail curved and Ndele was out of sight. Still Trey hesitated, wanting to go back, to see it through till the end.

  He felt a hand on his arm. “No,” Nyramba said. “They do not like to be watched.”

  Trey turned away, listening as intently as he could for any sign from the hidden scene behind them.

  But he heard no sound at all.

  * * *

  “NOW I WILL show you something else,” Nyramba said. “If you think you are strong enough to see it.”

  Trey didn’t reply, just followed as the older man led the way back up the trail. This time, though, they turned onto a smaller path that headed west through wet, silent forest.

  Less than a quarter of a mile down the path, Trey heard the clanking of chains ahead and some deeper, grittier noises he couldn’t identify. Sounds that grew louder as the two of them approached a bend in the trail.

  “Slow,” Nyramba said, his voice and expression both grave. “Take care.”

  Trey nodded and stepped around the bend. Then he stopped where he was, his heart giving a convulsive leap in his chest.

  Ahead stood another stump, another spike, another chain. Another prisoner. Two adult thieves guarded it from low-hanging branches, alert but not alarmed by Trey and Nyramba’s appearance.

  But the similarities to the last scene ended there. This prisoner was a naked man, his body filthy, his skin covered with oozing cuts and scrapes, his stomach grotesquely swollen. He was standing in the middle of the path and staring directly at Trey with a silvery gaze. His chin was slicked with blood—maybe his own—and his breathing came in tortured grunts.

  The last terrifying madness, the old book had said. Confronted only at your own mortal peril.

  Trey thought about the colobus monkey at the thief colony in the Casamance. The way it had gotten to its feet after being stung. Its bared teeth as it had come across the clearing at him.

  “What is in the venom,” he said, “that causes this?”

  “You have seen it before?” Nyramba asked, stopping a stride behind him.

  Trey didn’t reply. Calculating the length of the chain, he stepped forward to get a closer look.

  “Any farther,” Nyramba said, “and I will be returning to Kinyare alone.”

  Trey said, “How near is he to the end?”

  Before Nyramba could answer, the prisoner straightened and, without any warning, leaped forward to the limits of the chain. Gasping and growling, more blood spilling from around bared and broken teeth, he reached for Trey’s throat with his right hand.

  Trey, holding his ground, saw that the prisoner’s left arm, the one attached by the chain to the stump, was dislocated at both the elbow and shoulder, turned nearly inside out. But the man—the host—seemed to feel no pain.

  “At this time,” Nyramba said, “they will kill you if you try to harm the young. And sometimes even if you do not.”

  As if called, the wormlike creature nesting inside the snarling man came to the surface. Trey saw a flash of white in the black circle of the airhole before it retreated deeper into the tunnel of flesh.

  The host ground his teeth, yanking at the chain, g
rasping with clawlike fingers. Pink froth dripped to the ground.

  Trey turned away. Nyramba was watching him closely, something in his expression that might have been amusement.

  “You asked a question,” the police chief said. “After the final sting, the convicted grow worse and worse, but they only become like this at the very end. This man’s punishment will likely end tonight, and then he will have peace.”

  Trey didn’t speak, just walked past him and back along the trail. Behind them, the prisoner howled at the sky.

  * * *

  “SO . . . FOURTEEN.”

  Thomas Nyramba smiled. “Fifteen now.”

  They were back in his office, drinking Nile Specials.

  “And the thieves, they stay away from the people of the village?” Trey said.

  A nod. “We have made a treaty, and both of us respect it.”

  Trey listened to the language, the choice of words, and thought of what Jack’s response would have been. It was all about survival and procreation.

  He said, “But what happens when you run out of . . . offerings?”

  Nyramba laughed. “What? Run out? People are bringing us”—he paused, searching for the word—“troublemakers from every town that the thieves have left alone so far. Four more will come tomorrow from Fort Portal.”

  He sat back in his chair, still smiling. “We will never run out.”

  “Is the same thing being done in other towns?”

  “Of course. Where it is needed.” He gave a shrug. “But none of us will ever lack for people who, like Ndele, deserve what they get.”

  Trey was silent.

  “And you in the United States?” Nyramba said. “In New York? What is your response?”

  Trey shook his head. “There’ve been very few reports so far anywhere yet, and none in New York.”

  “There will be.”

  “I know.”

  “And when there are, when the majizi come,” Nyramba said, “you Americans will do the same things.”

  Trey was silent.

  Or worse, he thought.

  “Or worse,” Nyramba said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jabiru Wetland Preserve, Queensland, Australia

  “YOU LOOK OLDER,” Christopher Gilliard said.

  Trey looked at him. He’d been thinking the same thing: Some last spark of youth in his brother had been extinguished since they’d last seen each other. He’d always been more solid, more settled, than Trey, but now time had thinned his sun-bleached hair, broadened his paunch, and lent his face the solidity of encroaching middle age.

  He was thirty-nine. Trey was thirty-six. Neither of them were kids anymore.

  Only one of them had chosen a life that allowed him to pretend he was.

  Christopher said, “When were you last here?”

  Trey thought back. With all the traveling he’d done, all the countries he’d visited, he’d made it to this corner of northern Australia just a handful of times, most recently three years ago. Actually, closer to four.

  “Too long,” he said.

  “And it took all this to bring you back here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Christopher turned his head to look over the wetlands he’d been hired to preserve, to protect. He breathed in through his nose, and though there was no smell other than that of damp earth and waterweed and, from farther away, dust carried by the wind from the Outback, Trey guessed what odor his brother was searching for. He’d been searching for it himself.

  “You can’t stay here,” he said. “You and Margie and the girls.”

  Christopher didn’t reply at once. Trey saw the corner of his mouth twitch upward and caught a glimpse of the boy he’d adventured with in a dozen different countries while their parents were otherwise occupied.

  Still without looking at Trey, he said, “Yeah? How about you? You don’t stay anywhere. You spend your whole life running. Do you feel safe?”

  Trey was silent. After a few moments, Christopher did turn his head. There was affection in his expression, and amusement, too. Even after all this time, he was still the big brother, Trey the child. And they both knew it.

  “The world’s too small,” Trey said at last.

  “For you. For most of us, it’s just right.” Christopher smiled. “And anyway, I think you’re missing something: I’m safer from those bugs than you are, no matter how far or fast you run.”

  Trey blinked. “You are? Why?”

  “Because they need me.”

  * * *

  THEY WERE STANDING on a grassy bank, the freshwater marsh at their feet stretching toward a row of forested hills in the distance. The calm surface was green with algae, silvery where the sun caught it. Black swans and Australian teal and magpie geese paddled across the water and dabbled in the weeds, while lily-trotters ventured across giant lily pads on long-toed feet.

  Not just swans and geese relied on the marsh for water and food. Driving in, Trey and Christopher had passed a big gang of gray kangaroos near the preserve entrance. Honeyeaters and other small birds flitted in the underbrush, and a flock of cockatoos clad in graveyard black circled overhead, letting loose with mournful honking cries.

  The wetlands were a human creation, kind of. They had been here for thousands of years until the Europeans colonized the area during the nineteenth century. In an eyeblink, the flow of water was diverted, put to other uses, and the wildlife died out or went elsewhere.

  On Trey’s last visit, Christopher had explained the system of damming and water diversion that had restored the original marshes. Now he said, “These days, we need to keep pumping or the wetlands will dry out again.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  He gestured again, this time taking in not only the green hills that bordered the marsh, but what Trey knew lay beyond. The vast Outback, hundreds of thousands of square miles of searing heat and spiny grassland and red-rock desert, where wildlife was scarce and water almost nonexistent.

  “These bugs of yours, they value the wetlands,” he said. “Like every living thing, they need water. Also food and hosts for their young, both of which congregate here. This is an oasis for them, too.”

  Trey saw where he was going.

  “If it weren’t for me and my team,” Christopher said, “the oasis would vanish. The bugs don’t want that.”

  Trey thought about Thomas Nyramba, so certain that he and the majizi understood each other. That, like two warring societies, they’d reached a deal.

  Trey had seen nothing to prove Nyramba wrong, or Christopher, either. Not exactly. What neither of them seemed to understand, though, was that the deal wasn’t between two equal partners. It wasn’t a treaty, signed and witnessed and understood, that happened to exist between two different species.

  No. It was the same deal as the one enslaved ants made with their captors: We’ll do what you command. In return, you’ll let us live.

  For now.

  “How do you know this?” he said to Christopher. “How can you be sure?”

  For a long time his brother didn’t answer. He stood without moving, and when he finally spoke his eyes stayed fixed on the glimmering surface of the marsh.

  “Brian Pearce,” he said. “He managed the preserve along with me. They killed him—or, I guess you’d say, used him. When he died, I sent the rest of the staff home and shut this place. Two days later, the pumps broke down.”

  He watched a heron stalk along the shallows, hunting for fish. “I couldn’t stand it, to let it all go to hell. So I came back, just me, and fixed what was broken.”

  His expression bleak, he waited long enough that Trey said, “And?”

  “And they watched me, the whole time I was here working. Six of them, maybe, or eight, when I was outside, at least two whenever I went in.”

  Trey made a sound in his thr
oat.

  “Yeah.” Christopher managed a grin. “I’d prefer not to live through another day like that one, ta very much.”

  He shook his arms and shoulders. “Anyway, they figured out what I was doing, or at least that I was necessary to this place, and since then they’ve left us alone. All of us. I can tell they’ve taken a few of the kangaroos, and who knows how many smaller mammals, but they’re hands-off the humans for now.”

  He tilted his head and laughed. “I guess I owe my life to these waters, just as much as the lily-trotters, ducks, and herons do.”

  Then he turned his back on the wetland. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you at home.”

  Trey said, “Okay.”

  Christopher paused and added, “And also, Margie and the girls would love to see you.”

  Trey smiled and nodded, but Christopher looked a little embarrassed.

  He was embroidering the truth, and they both knew it.

  * * *

  MARGIE GILLIARD WAS tall and willowy and blond, with a firm jaw, blue eyes, and a no-nonsense manner. She greeted Trey with wariness, her behavior reminding him why: She’d always worried that whatever wanderlust infected him would spread to his brother. But she seemed pleased enough to bring him a beer and insist that he stay for dinner and the night.

  He accepted the offers. “Thank you.”

  Her eyes betrayed a glimmer of amusement. “Well, we could hardly make you stay in a hotel, could we? You’re Kit’s brother.”

  “I hear unspoken words,” Trey said, smiling. “‘Even if not much of one.’”

  She laughed. “You’ll do,” she said, “until someone better comes along.”

  In the living room the seven-year-old twins, Jaida and Nicole, long limbed and tan in shorts and T-shirts, stopped playing a video game to look him over. They claimed to remember him and proved it by recalling the time he’d dropped a pitcher of water that had shattered all over the deck outside.

  Despite the years, they seemed comfortable with him in about thirty seconds. Trey found himself remembering—with the same surprise he always felt—that he enjoyed being around children. He often found it easier to talk to them than to adults.