He nodded, watched her leave the room.
His room. Hers.
Why was he in here?
He’d ask when she came back.
* * *
BUT BY THE time she did reenter the room a few minutes later, carrying two mugs and a steaming teapot on a tray, he’d forgotten what he’d been thinking about.
Her eyes were on him as she came through the door. He saw her stop so suddenly that the mugs clattered against each other, nearly toppling.
“What are you doing?” she said, in a tone of voice he hadn’t heard before, hoarse, twisting upward in pitch at the end.
“Doing?” he said. His mouth felt fuzzy, his words indistinct in his ears. “I’m not doing anything.”
She put the tray down on the floor—another clatter—and was sitting on the bed beside him before he could move. He felt her grab his right hand, and only then did he realize that he’d been scratching his stomach under his shirt.
Sheila’s face was a mask of horrified realization as she pushed the shirt up. He lifted his head off the pillow and looked down at his body.
They both saw it. The small swelling. The tiny black airhole.
Something moving beneath his skin.
“Oh, God,” Sheila said, her voice a gasp. “Oh, no. Trey.”
TWENTY-NINE
Albuquerque, New Mexico
JEREMY AXELSON SIGHED.
Here they were again. How many nights had been spent this way since the campaign started? A thousand? Ten thousand?
It felt like a million.
Axelson could probably have figured it, the real number, or close, if he’d wanted to. But why bother? It would just depress him, and right now his brain was fried extra crispy anyway. The last thing it needed was a math problem to solve.
A million nights. A million hotels. Not that it made a difference. Wherever they stayed, it always felt like the same room. You could only tell where you were by the subjects of the paintings hanging on the walls.
In Iowa the paintings showed towheaded kids among ripening fields of corn. Vineyards or the Golden Gate Bridge in northern California. Leaping dolphins in Miami. Here in Albuquerque? Mountains and canyons.
Of course, you didn’t ever get the chance to see the actual scenery. Just the paintings.
The three of them were watching four televisions. Or not watching. The speech was over, and now it was time for the political consultants to offer their opinions, the spinners to spin, and the panelists in the studios to sit in middle-aged rows and pontificate.
The TVs were muted. Not that it mattered: Each of them, two men who’d pushed past fifty and a woman a decade younger, could have recited the words being spoken on-screen. No need to hear them.
“Guy puts me to sleep,” the rumpled, bearlike man sitting across from Axelson complained.
He wasn’t talking about the anchors, the consultants, the spinners, or the panelists.
He was talking about the man who’d just given the speech. Sam Chapman.
The president of the United States.
“You say that every time,” Axelson pointed out.
“He does it every time.”
The woman—tiny, sharp-eyed—stirred in her chair. “If he does it another ninety times between now and November,” she said, “he’s going to win.”
The three of them stared at the silent screens, and for a while nobody said anything.
Ron Stanhouse, the campaign manager. Chief pollster Melanie Hoff. And Axelson himself, tall, angular, with a narrow face and a beaklike nose and a general air of geniality belied by the glitter of intelligence and calculation in his eyes.
Axelson was the communications director. Which meant it was his job to make the world think that the smell arising from their campaign was imminent victory, not flop sweat.
Not their campaign. Tony’s.
Senator Anthony Harrison, the man who, in two weeks, would be nominated to run for president against Sam Chapman.
And who, eight weeks later, was going to lose.
“Give me today’s numbers,” Stanhouse said.
Hoff sighed. “Nationwide, likely voters, we’re behind 49–43–8. Make them choose, it’s 53–47. Likeliest screen, a little closer: maybe 52.2 to 47.8. Not good enough.” She grimaced. “You know all this. The numbers haven’t budged in weeks.”
“Think they’ll budge a little after tonight,” Axelson said.
Tonight the president had delivered what amounted to an out-of-season State of the Union speech from his desk in the White House. The supposed excuse was to reassure America over instability in the Mideast. The truth was that Sam Chapman knew that whenever he demonstrated the trappings of the presidency, his numbers went up.
The results of the first instant poll appeared on one of the screens.
More likely to vote for: 31%.
Less likely: 13%.
No difference or no opinion: 56%.
“Tomorrow’s numbers will be worse,” Hoff said.
At the beginning of the cycle, Chapman had seemed vulnerable. The unemployment rate had risen in his first year and had stayed stubbornly high, gas prices had been spiking, the housing market continued in its endless stay in the doldrums.
And though he was still seen as likable—it was one of the things that had gotten him elected in the first place—nobody had ever claimed that the earth shook when he spoke. Support for him had been broad, but only an inch deep.
Almost by definition, Chapman was the kind of incumbent who might fall to a strong challenge. And among the usual gaggle of senators, ex-governors, and hopeless gadflies, Anthony Harrison, former governor of Colorado, had an excellent shot at the nomination.
That was why Stanhouse, Hoff, and Axelson had signed on with him.
Almost immediately, though, the breaks had started going the incumbent’s way. None of the potential challengers, including Harrison, had emerged unscathed from a long, tedious, and expensive primary season. The recent laws allowing for nearly unlimited anonymous corporate donations had given even the fringiest wannabes life and staying power.
Another ex-governor had, as was her wont, gobbled up far more than her share of media oxygen before declining to run.
Now, at the end of the circus, as Harrison was finally emerging with the nomination, a skeleton or two had been unearthed from his closet. Nothing the campaign hadn’t known about, and nothing they couldn’t deal with, but still, the news had occupied too many cycles.
The point was: To defeat a sitting president, you had to get all the breaks. Or just one, if it was big enough.
But neither was happening for Harrison. For them.
“Swing states?” Stanhouse said.
Hoff shrugged. “Today we’d win Florida, Georgia, North Carolina. Colorado, of course. But we’d lose most of the others: Pennsylvania, Virginia, the industrial Midwest—maybe even Missouri.”
She switched her gaze to Axelson. “Your guys better write him one hell of a convention speech.”
When he didn’t reply, she drained her drink, mostly just ice and water now, and got to her feet. Stretched, yawned, and walked to the door.
“Figure out a way to change the game,” she said, “and I’ll give you better news.”
* * *
A KNOCK ON the door.
Axelson didn’t move. It was late, dark-night-of-the-soul late, but he was still up. He hadn’t moved since Hoff and Stanhouse left, except once to freshen his drink and turn off three of the TVs. The television that was still on, tuned to TCM, was showing an old Bob Hope–Bing Crosby movie, the one where they went to the North Pole.
The Road to Utopia. Axelson laughed and drank. Could he go along? Utopia was sounding pretty good right about now.
The knock came again. For a moment Axelson considered ignoring it. But he knew he wouldn’t
be able to hide from whatever news lay on the other side of the door. Not forever.
With a groan, he got to his feet, walked over, and swung the door open.
A young man stood in the hall. He was wearing a pinstriped gray suit, a crisply pressed sky blue poplin shirt, and a patriotic red tie. With his fair skin, open expression, and studious black-framed eyeglasses, he lacked only an American flag pin to be ready to appear on camera.
No, wait. He was wearing a flag pin, on the lapel of his suit jacket.
Perfect.
“Do you sleep in that getup?” Axelson asked him.
The young man smiled. “Gary Kuster, sir,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”
Axelson knew who he was. A member of the field staff, an advance man whose job it was to lay the groundwork for campaign appearances.
He was good at it, too. A rising star, keen minded, and not nearly as guileless as his fair-haired-boy looks would have you believe.
Axelson didn’t move. “What about?”
He was tired. He didn’t want to hear any more complaints. Nothing that this irritatingly bright-eyed boy had to say could possibly be of any interest, not tonight.
“Sir,” Kuster said, “I need to show you something.” He looked Axelson straight in the eyes. “Something that will win us the election.”
Axelson sighed. He’d outgrown dramatic pronouncements from underlings twenty-five years ago. They always thought they’d found the faux pas that would sink the opposition, the angle that no one else had seen. And they were always wrong.
He swirled the Scotch in his glass. It needed more ice. “Do I have to go somewhere to see this ‘something’?”
Kuster lifted his left hand. He was carrying an iPad. “No. Here’s fine.”
Finally Axelson moved out of the doorway. As he fished the last shards of ice from the bucket, he watched Kuster push a button. The iPad lit up, revealing a YouTube page.
“What are you going to do,” Axelson asked, “show me rock videos?”
* * *
HE COULDN’T BELIEVE it.
The guy was showing him videos. And not stuff of any interest, either. Not even old Allman Brothers performances, Bugs Bunny cartoons, or trailers for the movies that Axelson would miss this fall, when every minute would be spent staving off electoral humiliation.
Not even the cute amateur shit that he’d watched during the endless down hours every campaign had to endure. Cats running on treadmills, monkeys pulling dogs’ tails, the guy who traveled all around the world dancing. (Axelson would have traded jobs with that guy in a heartbeat.) That old one, with the little kid biting the finger of the other little kid.
No. None of that. Videos of wasps.
Big wasps. Axelson had grown up in Texas, not that far from the Rio Grande, and the wasps down there, the cicada killers, they could be huge. But these ones looked different, skinny and black, with legs that made them look like they were half spider. These ones were spooky.
One of them crawled over a branch and stared at the camera. Axelson felt like it was looking right into him.
Damn spooky.
“What’s the point?” he said.
Kuster didn’t reply. The camera zoomed in so that the wasp’s face filled the screen. Watching, Axelson could have sworn that he could see intelligence in its gaze. The way its mouth moved, it looked like it was licking its chops.
When the video ended, he said, “Okay, you’ve put me off my feed. Now tell me why the hell I should be interested.”
Kuster smiled at him. “I told you. These bugs are going to win us the election.”
Then he began to explain. His voice staying calm, but with an edge of excitement, of triumph, behind it. Euphoria.
Sometimes he paused to show Axelson evidence. Proof. Another video, a newspaper article, notes he’d made on a legal pad.
At first Axelson remained skeptical, out of sorts. Then his attention sharpened. He found himself leaning over Kuster’s shoulder, peering in at the screen or down at the neat handwriting on the pad. His heart thumped, and again.
And then, finally understanding, seeing exactly where this was going, Axelson felt his legs get weak. He sat down, his drink forgotten. But he still didn’t say anything. He just listened. Listened for more than an hour, until Kuster was finally done.
At last the young man said, “That’s it. What do you think?”
Axelson cleared his throat. He wondered what his face looked like.
“Who else knows?” he asked. His voice was scratchy. “Who else knows the whole story?”
“No one,” Kuster said. “No one else has put it together yet, much less figured out the White House’s role. Just you and me.”
Axelson was already reaching for his phone. “Let’s fix that,” he said.
He knew what he’d just heard. He understood what it meant.
He punched a button and said, “Ron? Wake up and get back in here. Melanie, too. Everybody. The whole senior staff. Roust ’em.”
Normally Stanhouse would have bitched about it. It was late, it’d been a bad day, and why the hell was it his job to track everyone down? But he merely said, “Okay,” and disconnected.
He recognized that tone in Axelson’s voice.
Soon enough, no more than fifteen minutes later, everyone was there. In rumpled clothes, some of them still rubbing their eyes, but ready. Eager. It was amazing how fast a staff’s morale could turn around, if they sniffed a change in the wind.
Axelson surveyed the room. A dozen faces. His team.
Then he looked back at Kuster, who was still sitting in the same chair, and said, “Go over it again.”
Kuster smiled and began.
THIRTY
“TAKE IT OUT,” Trey said.
His heart was hammering, as if he’d just climbed a mountain and was standing at twenty-seven thousand feet. But he hadn’t moved. Couldn’t move.
Understanding at last what had happened to him. His mind clearing for an instant, just an instant, then clouding over again. Like a tide sweeping in, obliterating everything in its path, before being sucked back out, leaving only ruins behind.
A battle. A war.
His heart was his enemy. With every beat, every liquid leap inside his chest, every surge of blood in his veins, his consciousness dwindled.
Sheila stood beside the bed. Frozen. Stunned. He could see that. As if through a smeared window, he could see the anguish on her face.
His heart thudded. He was disappearing inside his poisoned blood.
“Take it out,” he said, or thought he said. “Now.”
Only knowing he’d actually said the words, and not just dreamed them, when Sheila, her bloodless face half obscured by the hand over her mouth, shook her head. Hard. In terror.
“I can’t,” she said.
Trey reached out and grabbed her arm. He could still feel it. It was cold.
“Sheila,” he said, “there’s no time. It’s . . . taking me.”
His blood rushed. Something was chewing at the edges of his consciousness, dropping crimson veils over his vision. Winning the battle. Winning the war.
“Trey.” She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his hand in both of hers. “You’ll die.”
Her voice tiny through the roaring in his head, the rattling of his heart.
“No.” His tongue felt swollen in his mouth.
In some remote, untouched corner, he thought, It’s trying to stop me. It knows that if we wait just a little longer we’ll be too late.
It.
With an effort almost beyond his imagining, he wrenched his shattered thoughts back into an approximation of something whole. His vision cleared. A little.
“Sheila, no,” he said. His voice wasn’t his own.
“You don’t die,” he said. “Not—yet.”
Save me.
Her face was a mask of grief and indecision. Tears streaked her cheeks and dripped from her chin. “My mom—”
“Sheila,” he said, “I don’t know—when this happened. I don’t remember. But not long. Look—”
He couldn’t breathe. His lungs were filling.
“Look.” He was speaking underwater. “It’s so small.”
Still she did not move.
“Agiru—” he said. His words tumbling out in gasps. “The old man. He said they weren’t in time—”
Was she listening? Would she understand?
“Do you see—” Despairing. “That’s why you don’t remember you were infected. Not at first. Because you won’t die . . .”
It was hopeless. She would not go. She would not try.
It was already too late.
He felt something flutter inside him. A tiny wriggle within his flesh.
For one last instant, everything was silent, calm. He sat in the eye. The center of the vortex.
He could see. He could hear.
He could breathe. He inhaled and said, his own voice, his own words, “Sheila. Kill it.”
The creature wriggled again, more strongly. Diving deeper. Releasing its poison.
Saving itself.
Sacrificing him.
Trey’s mind burst apart. His mouth moved, he could feel it moving, but the roaring of his heart kept him from knowing if he spoke words or if the words made any sense.
With his bloodred gaze, he saw Sheila put her hands over her face. Then she took them away, and, when she did, her expression had changed.
She got up from the bed. He saw her, could still see her, as she ran for the bedroom door and out of view.
The creature dug.
The veil fell, and he was blind. No: blind on the outside. Inside, he could still see.
Seeing, he glimpsed . . . something.
Huge. Monstrous. Shapeless.
At that last instant, Trey knew what it was.
And what it wanted.
* * *
FAR IN THE distance, he felt . . . something new.
Pain.
Invasive Species Page 21
