Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  So why did he always say it? Harry thought he knew. The point was to make the old guy feel better about himself, to help him justify going ahead and telling Harry what he needed done.

  What the Big Man needed done.

  Okay. Thought about that way, it made some sense. “’Course,” Harry said. That wasn’t enough, so he added, “You know me and my guys. We don’t talk.”

  Harry knew he’d still have to wait while the COS wrestled with his fears and needs. Usually after about fifteen seconds, the latest tale of woe would come pouring out.

  This time, though, the hesitation lasted longer. Much longer. Long enough that Harry actually found himself saying, “Hey, you still there?” over the secure line.

  “Yeah.” The old guy’s voice sounded different, like he was having second thoughts.

  “Then talk.” Now Harry’s curiosity was piqued. Usually the call involved some brushfire that needed extinguishing before it could bring the Big Man down. Harry would listen and roll his eyes. Only in public life, and only in this country, would the sort of thing he was asked to clean up require much more than a laugh or a shrug.

  Squashing some figure out of the past with a new claim of presidential drug use. (Regardless that the Big Man had been open about his “youthful indiscretions.”) Stoppering up some new embarrassment perpetrated by the First Lady’s alcoholic brother. Infiltrating and sterilizing some group of fringe nuts killing time by developing theories that the Big Man was a Manchurian Candidate.

  Easy stuff.

  “Call me back when you got the cotton wool out of your brain,” Harry said and made to disconnect.

  “Wait—”

  Harry waited. He’d always intended to wait. He was interested.

  Then, as the chief of staff finally began to explain, more than interested. As the stream of words, delivered in a rush, went on, Harry felt sweat prickle on his neck. A muscle jumped in his jaw.

  When the COS took a breath, Harry said, “Where, again?”

  “Fort Collins.”

  “At the DVBID?”

  The Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases.

  “CDC was involved, yes. Under the auspices of the MRIID.”

  The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, that was. Did someone actually get paid to come up with these names?

  “But not at Fort Detrick?” Harry said.

  The main offices and labs of MRIID were housed in Fort Detrick, Maryland, a lot closer to Harry than Fort Collins, Colorado.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There were reasons.”

  Meaning, You don’t need to know the reasons.

  Harry could feel his blood pulsing in his throat. This was no DUI to be kept out of the newspapers.

  “How many are there?” he asked.

  A pause. Then, “Six.”

  Shit, Harry thought. “What happened?”

  Silence.

  “Listen,” Harry said. “I’m not going into something fucked up by the MRIID without knowing what I’m stepping into. I read The Hot Zone, yeah, and saw 28 Days Later. You want to expose a crew to Ebola or the rage virus, find somebody else.”

  Even then, a couple of extra seconds of silence over the line. Then the COS said, “No virus. No pathogens. These men were . . . stung.”

  Harry couldn’t believe it. “Stung?” he said. “Bit? You mean, like bees? I think I saw a movie once about that, too.”

  The old guy wasn’t laughing. When Harry was finished, he just said, “Yes. Stung. And you’re going to clean it up. Tonight.”

  Then he explained how.

  As he did, Harry felt his unease return. Whatever it was, it sounded like an emergency. An F5. A 9.1.

  Harry didn’t ask why. Didn’t ask what it was about. Those weren’t the kinds of questions he could ask, especially not in an election year.

  They weren’t even the kinds of questions he was supposed to wonder about. But by the end of the conversation—the COS’s monologue, really—he felt, for the first time in a long while, a little shaken. He’d never show it, of course, but there you were.

  He had only one question left. Only one he could ask.

  “Whatever stung those six men,” he said, “is it still there?”

  “Of course not.”

  Meaning: We hope not.

  Okay, one more question. “You killed it?”

  Silence.

  Meaning: No.

  Fort Collins, Colorado

  IT WAS THE damnedest government laboratory Harry had ever seen.

  He’d been in others, and they were all basically the same. Squat buildings on university campuses or in office parks. Concrete or brick on the outside. On the inside, linoleum, fluorescent and halogen lights, glass and steel. Disposal boxes for sharps and other hazardous materials in every room. Plenty of bottles of Purell.

  People in white coats and eyeglasses hurrying around clutching pads and clipboards and cell phones and little handheld computers.

  But the building where Harry and his team were sent late that night was none of these things. It was a two-story shingled house way out toward Horsetooth Mountain, in the shadow of Roosevelt National Forest. On the outside, just a house, out of sight of any neighbors, hidden away in the forest. The kind of thing a family might use for ski weekends in another season.

  The nodding leaves of the aspens caught the panel truck’s headlights when they pulled to a stop at the end of the long dirt driveway. Beyond the dark house, the surface of a stream glinted silver, reflecting a high, cold three-quarter moon.

  Harry felt uneasy out here. He wasn’t used to being spooked. It pissed him off.

  The man in the seat beside him, Trent, craned around. “Too bad I forgot my fly rod,” he said.

  Harry didn’t bother to reply. He swung the door open and climbed down. The breeze was cool—it felt like fall here already—and he could hear the stream trickling over pebbles and, farther off, an owl hooting.

  No people talking, no cars, no dogs barking. The officials who’d chosen this location had wanted solitude, isolation, and they’d gotten it. Harry didn’t like how dark it was.

  Why at night? he’d asked.

  There were advantages to working at night, he knew. Fewer eyes watching, for one. But also disadvantages: If some eyes happened to be open, they’d be more likely to notice you, to notice the truck labeled Central Moving & Storage rumbling past.

  And also, when you got to the site, no matter how isolated it was, at night you had to bring lights. Lights where people didn’t expect to see them often meant local police where you didn’t want to see them.

  Why at night?

  Getting back the usual bullshit.

  Why else?

  A last long pause, and then the chief of staff had spoken. One more sentence.

  We think they mostly come out during the day, he’d said.

  That hadn’t made Harry feel any better.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TWO were lying in the front hallway.

  “Holy fuck,” Trent said.

  The dead men were wearing the same white lab coats government scientists always wore. But their lab coats were no longer white. They were red. Red shading to black in the beams of the men’s flashlights.

  Their coats and the floor around them, too. The smell of blood was very strong, and so was another, less familiar odor.

  “What the fuck is this?” Trent said.

  Harry hadn’t told them, any of them, what they were going to see here. That was how it worked: No one knew any more than they had to.

  Not that knowing in advance made the sight much easier to take. Harry had heard stung and had looked up the after-effects of bee stings on the computer. People who died of shock, w
ho gasped and clutched their throats, who died, eyes popped out, when they swelled up and choked to death.

  That would have been bad enough, but this was worse. Much worse. These men’s eyes weren’t still, protruding, staring, as Harry had expected. They were gone. Torn out of the sockets. Nothing left but white flecks and globules across their cheeks.

  The other four, scattered across the floor of the lab itself, were the same. Eyeless, with every exposed portion of skin—faces, necks, hands, shins above their socks—covered in red, swollen speckles and slashes. And some deeper gouges where, Harry thought, something had fed.

  The crew’s flashlight beams kept returning to the eyes. “What the hell did this?” someone asked.

  “Some kind of bee,” Harry said.

  Knowing he shouldn’t have said anything, but feeling shook up. His tongue a whole lot looser than it should have been.

  “A bee?”

  “A shitload of them, I guess.”

  The beams went this way and that, crisscrossing, intersecting, as everyone looked in every corner of the room. Harry saw that, regardless of the building’s modest, deceptive exterior, the laboratory was well equipped with scanners, scopes, centrifuges, who knew what else. Important research had been going on here, until the bees came.

  “Get to work,” Harry said, “and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  He didn’t have to say it twice.

  * * *

  HE AND TRENT put the dead men into body bags, carried them out to the truck, hoisted them into the coffin-shaped coolers that ran half the length of the truck. When they were done, they’d drive to the rendezvous point halfway to Denver. There they’d find a car waiting for them, and the truck and its contents would no longer be their responsibility.

  While he and Trent lugged the bodies, the other two were focusing on their area of expertise. This involved a lot of careful carrying of liquids, some precise wiring, and plenty of quiet cursing.

  Harry often dismissed what they did as no harder than splashing lighter fluid on charcoal, but he knew the two men earned their pay. A few hours from now, when they were all safely far away, this isolated little house would erupt. By the time it was done burning, there would be nothing identifiable left.

  Nothing to make the story blow up, costing Harry his job.

  Or worse than just his job. He was under no illusions.

  Not in an election year.

  * * *

  IT WAS TIME to clear out.

  First, though, and as he always did, he took one last walk through the premises. One time there’d been a body in a closet that he hadn’t found till that last moment. He would’ve had a lot of bad days if he hadn’t thought to open that closet door.

  But he also had another goal for walking through the scene one last time, alone. He was always on the lookout for something, anything, that he might find useful later.

  Did anything here qualify? He wasn’t sure. But he did find something: an index card, on the floor near where one of the workers had fallen.

  Harry picked it up. There was blood on it, but it was still readable. Four short lines, half typed, half handwritten in black ink.

  Beside the typed word Family, a handwritten Philanthidae?

  Beside the word Genus: Philanthus???

  Beside Species: ????

  And beside Type Specimen: Patagonia, AZ.

  Harry said, “Huh,” tucked the card into his pants pocket, and went out to join the rest of his crew.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Manhattan

  “WE’VE LOOKED AT this video, like, twenty-seven times since your brother sent it,” Jack said. Slumped in the chair at his desk, he was scowling. “And it pisses me off just as much this time as the first.”

  He wasn’t happy that the camera had mostly been aimed at the sky.

  “The people who shot it had other things on their minds,” Sheila said.

  “Yeah? Well, next time, hire a cinematographer. I heard there’s quite a crowd of them in PNG.”

  Sheila looked at him. “You of all people should know that we make do with what we’ve got.”

  “Yeah.” He glowered. “Doesn’t mean I can’t piss and moan about it.”

  Sheila had returned from Florida the day before. Trey had come straight from the airport to the office after his flight back from Australia, not even stopping at home to drop off his bag and change clothes. Now here they were, the three of them: Jack at his computer, Trey in a chair beside him, Sheila looking over their shoulders at the screen.

  Together again, as if that made a difference.

  Trey thought about his visit with his brother. At the airport in Cairns, Christopher had smiled and said, “Things go the way I think they will, you won’t be able to spin around the globe so easily anymore.”

  Trey had shrugged off the words, but now he was seeing the truth in them and wondering how he’d react. How would he handle waking up every day in the same place?

  Sheila was looking at him. “You okay?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Why?”

  “You seem tired.”

  Jack laughed. “The mighty Trey Gilliard with jet lag? After just eighty hours on airplanes over five days? You must be getting old.”

  He looked up at the clusters of pins on the map. “I’m getting pisssed off. Those things are everywhere, and we still know damn-all about them.”

  He grasped the arms of his chair. “We fucking need to get some fucking specimens of this fucking species, and fucking soon.”

  “Yeah,” Sheila said. “But until then, what have we learned?”

  Trey, who had been slumped in his seat, straightened. “Agiru says that the people of the Southern Highlands weren’t the first in PNG to fight off the stilmen.”

  “Makes sense,” Jack said. “Look at the map. The first arrivals to PNG most likely came by boat to the islands and ports, or via airplane to Port Moresby, which is also on the coast.” He shrugged. “Those are the places the thieves would colonize first, before moving up into the mountain valleys.”

  “Plus the lowlands are hot and humid, friendlier turf for them,” Sheila said. “It must get cold in the highlands.”

  “Though they seem able to withstand the cold pretty damn well.” Jack waved a hand. “Look at the fucking map. They can survive almost everywhere.”

  Trey had only been half listening. Now he said, “My point is, how could those islands and villages have been battling the thieves, and no one has noticed?”

  Jack went still for a second. Then he was bending over his keyboard. A moment later he said, “Here’s how.”

  It was a little article on CNN.com dated about a month earlier. Just two paragraphs under the headline, “Papua New Guinea Violence Flares Anew.”

  Trey bent closer to look at the tiny type. The story was datelined Kambaramba, East Sepik Province. “‘This long-restive region was riven again by battles among different factions of the Kambot people,’” he read out loud. “‘Twenty-two were reported dead, local authorities said. The outbreak of violence follows others in Madang, Karkar Island, and elsewhere. Authorities blame the violence on heightened tensions following disputed parliamentary elections.’”

  Jack looked impressed. “That’s actually kinda brilliant,” he said. “If PNG is famous for anything, it’s for tribal violence. Nobody would think twice about a report like this, and nobody would double-check.”

  Sheila was nodding. “Another government wanting to hush up bad news.”

  “Until the chief sent around this half-assed video and spilled the beans.”

  “If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been someone else.” She shrugged. “Governments always think they can hide things, and they’re always wrong.”

  “I have an idea,” Jack said. “They could pull their heads out of their asses and fight back, like the villages di
d.”

  “Not all people are as fearless as the Huli, and governments are cowardly by nature. Most would prefer to ignore a problem and hope it becomes someone else’s.”

  Trey took a deep breath and said, “My brother believes that, in Australia at least, humans have already lost that war.”

  Or at least he thought he said this. He saw both Jack and Sheila staring at him, and then Sheila was taking his arm and pulling him to his feet.

  “I’m bringing you home,” she said.

  He tried to shake her off. “I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are.” Jack was standing there, too. “You look like one of the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, and not one of the handsome, debonair ones, either. And that last thing you said? It made zombie sense.”

  He looked at Sheila. “Malaria?”

  She shook her head. “He’s cold, not feverish.”

  “Home or hospital?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Home first. Then we’ll see.”

  “Go.”

  They went.

  By taxi, or at least that was what Sheila told him later. But Trey couldn’t have said one way or another, since as far as he could tell, he wasn’t there.

  * * *

  HE ROUSED A little when they went through the front door of his apartment. He was aware, at least. Aware of lying down, really more like falling. Of someone—Sheila—taking off his shoes and pulling a sheet up over him as he shivered and shook.

  Then he lost some more time, with no idea whether it was minutes or hours. When he awoke, he was a little more alert and realized where he was. His bed.

  But not his. It was Sheila’s bed now. Its contours didn’t match his body’s anymore.

  He was supposed to sleep on the sofa.

  He saw that she was sitting on a chair beside the bed. He caught the expression on her face. Concern. Worry, rearranging itself into a smile when she saw he was awake.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She seemed to understand that. “Hey.”

  He saw her stretch, as if her muscles were stiff and cramped. “I’m going to get myself a cup of tea. I’ll get you one, too. You’ll be okay for a minute without me?”