Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  “I don’t think there was ever a chance.” Sheila sighed. “People were going to find out, and things were going to start spiraling anyway.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s what people do,” Sheila said. “They ruin everything.”

  “‘People ruin everything.’” Jack’s voice was approving. “I think I’ll make a T-shirt with that.”

  “Tell me something,” she said to him. “Could someone weaponize wasp venom?”

  “I told you,” Jack said. “No. It’s bullshit.”

  He took a gulp of coffee. “Listen,” he went on. “Sure, you could make the venom more potent, more deadly—at least, someone like Clare Shapiro could. I’m sure those busy bees at the Defense Department are ‘efforting’ that as we speak.”

  He turned his palms up. “But when it’s still inside the wasp? Creating a new breed of superwasps? Come on. Crapola.”

  “But thief venom is so powerful,” Sheila insisted. “Powerful enough to kill a human—and much more than would be needed for smaller hosts. Why would it evolve that way?”

  Jack grinned at her. “Black widow spiders,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sheila,” he said, “what do black widow spiders eat?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Crickets? Beetles?”

  “Yeah. Stuff like that. Yet their venom can kill a human. Hell, it can kill a horse or a cow. Why?”

  Sheila opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again.

  Jack was enjoying himself. “The widow’s venom is thousands of times more powerful than it ‘needs’ to be. In fact, if anything, its potency is an evolutionary disadvantage.”

  Sheila thought this over, then nodded. “Because people who see a black widow are likely to kill her, where they might ignore a less venomous spider.”

  “Exactly. And not only people—other animals will go out of their way to kill widows as well.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “We all fall into the trap of seeing nature as infallible, of seeing every evolutionary step as an improvement, an aid to species survival.”

  “But it’s not true?” Sheila said.

  Jack shook his head. “Of course not. Evolution isn’t a straight path. It’s filled with dead ends, wrong turns, mistakes.”

  His shrug was eloquent. “Sometimes Mother Nature just deals a wild card.”

  “And the rest of us pay the price,” Sheila said.

  * * *

  SOON AFTER, JACK started yawning so widely that they could see where his wisdom teeth had been yanked fifteen years earlier. Eventually he started eyeing Trey’s sofa. “At night, I think better prone,” he said.

  “I certainly hope so,” Sheila said.

  Groaning a little, he lay back on the sofa. Three minutes later his eyes were closed and his mouth was open, though he wasn’t quite snoring.

  “Down for the count,” Trey said.

  Sheila, who’d come over to sit opposite Trey at the table, regarded Jack’s sleeping form with something like affection. “How come I feel like we’ve acquired a teenage son?” she asked.

  Trey said, “He’ll still be a teenager when he’s sixty.”

  “That’s true for most of you research types, isn’t it?” Her voice was light. “Heading off into the field, leaving your lives behind, staying forever young?”

  “Right now,” Trey said before he could stop himself, “‘forever young’ is about a million miles from how I feel.”

  Sheila looked at him. There was something new in her expression.

  “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me what’s happened to you.”

  Meaning: Since you were infected. Since I cut that thing out of you.

  Trey took a deep breath. He’d been waiting for her to ask. He’d known she suspected something.

  What he hadn’t figured out was how he was going to answer. Whether he was going to lie to her—say, “I’m fine,” and change the subject—or trust her to understand. Open himself up.

  Looking at her pale, beautiful face, the intensity and intelligence of her gaze, he knew he couldn’t lie. Subterfuge wasn’t in her makeup, and tonight he couldn’t summon it, either.

  “When you took out the larva,” he said, “something got left behind.”

  Her gaze strayed to where she’d performed the surgery, then back up to his face. “The site was clean,” she said.

  He smiled. “Yes, you did a beautiful job for someone who expected her patient to die. It’s almost healed already—but I didn’t mean there.”

  “Then where?”

  Slowly Trey reached up and pointed to his head. “Here,” he said.

  Then he hesitated and spread his hands over his chest for a moment. “Or here.” He shook his head. “I don’t know exactly. Just somewhere inside.”

  Sheila’s eyes were narrowed. “Left . . . what?” she asked.

  “The hive mind,” he said.

  She kept her eyes on his, steady, unblinking. But the faintest flush rose to her cheeks.

  “I asked Clare Shapiro at Rockefeller about it,” he went on. “She agrees with Jack that such a thing exists—that the minds of bees and wasps stay connected somehow. That they can communicate over great distances in ways we don’t understand.”

  Trey paused, remembering Shapiro’s unrestrained impatience at having to explain something so simple to a neophyte. “Listen,” she’d said. “Of course apocritids are capable of communication between members of the colony—that’s because each bee or wasp isn’t really an individual. Each is a separate part of one superorganism that incorporates data from thousands—or millions—of different viewpoints and makes a decision based on that data.

  “A million units,” she’d said, “but one controlling mind.”

  Now Sheila said, “Tell me.”

  He struggled to answer, as he’d known he would. “I feel like it’s watching me, and also looking out through my eyes,” he said finally. “Though not always. Not every minute. Sometimes it’s quiet.” He paused. “Like now.”

  “It’s looking elsewhere?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe that’s it. But even then, I can sense it. A heaviness. An awareness.” He raised his hands from the table in frustration. “It kind of . . . moves inside me.”

  She was silent.

  “And when it’s fully present,” he said, staring down at his coffee mug, “it does more than watch. I feel like it’s taking.”

  “Oh, Trey,” she said. He looked up to see that her expression was full of sorrow. She reached across the table and took his sweaty hands in her cool ones. Over on the sofa, Jack stirred but didn’t awaken. Somewhere in the distance, a car downshifted, its engine roaring, falling silent, then roaring again, much farther off.

  Still holding his hands, Sheila broke the silence with a single word. “Taking,” she said, her gaze sharpening. The scientist reasserting herself. “That makes me wonder.”

  “Yes. Me, too.”

  “We got the larva out early.”

  He nodded.

  “So what does the hive mind take from the rest of its victims?” she asked. “The ones where it stays until the end?”

  Trey stayed silent.

  “What is it learning about us?” she said.

  Still he didn’t speak.

  “And what will it do with what it learns?”

  * * *

  AT AROUND FOUR Sheila started rubbing her eyes, a childlike gesture. “I can stay up with you,” she said.

  Trey smiled and shook his head. “No. You’ll be of more use to all of us if you get a little rest.”

  She stood, then leaned across the table and kissed him. Just a quick kiss, her lips warm on his, before she pulled away.

  Something in her expression made him say, “What?”

  “I kiss . . . multitudes,” s
he said and headed off to bed.

  * * *

  TREY WAS DEEP in his own thoughts when the phone jangled. It was just past six. After two rings he got to his feet and walked over to the kitchen counter. Jack hadn’t moved on the sofa, but his eyes were open.

  The call was coming from a blocked number. With a sigh, Trey picked up the receiver and said, “Yeah?”

  “Gilliard?” said the voice on the other end. “George Summers.” Then, after a brief pause, “Department of Agriculture.”

  Trey said, “Yeah. I remember you.”

  “Is Parker there?” Summers’s voice sounded stretched, tense, and Trey wondered if he, too, had spent a sleepless night.

  “Guy should check his cell phone every once in a while,” Summers added.

  Trey said, “Yes, he’s here.” He glanced at Jack, who was sitting up, alert now. A movement at the periphery of Trey’s vision showed that Sheila had come to the bedroom doorway and was listening as well.

  Trey held the phone out to Jack. “It’s Summers.”

  Jack took it, then pointed and mouthed, “Speaker.”

  Once Trey had pushed the button, Jack leaned back on the sofa and said, “You knew. All that time bullshitting us in your office, and you knew.”

  “Jack, I don’t have time for this,” Summers said.

  But Jack did. “And know what else? Trey and me, we saw it right away. But you had to pretend that we were idiot conspiracy theorists, but now that your boss is being hit with a pile of—”

  “Fuck you, Parker.” Summers’s tone was venomous. “First of all, he’s not my boss—I’m career here, you know that. Second, fuck you anyway.”

  Jack was grinning. “Very nice. I’ll do anything you ask now.”

  “We need you to come in. Right away.”

  “Oh, now you want me? Well, fuck you, too.”

  “Could you put a lid on it for, like, two seconds, and just listen?”

  Jack grinned, but kept quiet. When Summers spoke again, his tone had changed. “You know this is a shitstorm,” he said, “and we need your help.”

  Some of the pleasure drained from Jack’s expression. “I don’t know, George. I saw the Bourne movies. ‘Coming in’ isn’t always such a hot idea.”

  “We need to know what you know. You’re doing nobody any good sitting in your little office in that big stone building filled with rocks and old bones.”

  Again, a pause and a change in tone. “I mean it. We want to hear what you have to tell us.”

  Jack moved his mouth around, as if testing arguments, but in the end he just sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Say I say yes, what do I do?”

  “How fast can you get out to LaGuardia? We have a plane waiting for you.”

  “Wow.” Jack’s eyes widened. “You sure know how to woo a boy. Let me just go back to my place for my clothes—”

  “We’ll buy you some when you get here.”

  “And I have to tell the museum.”

  “We already did that.”

  Jack scowled. “Let me just check with—”

  “No,” Summers said.

  “What?”

  “Not your friends. Just you. You’re the expert.”

  Jack said, “You’re wrong about that. They know things I—”

  “Just you,” Summers said again. “Those are my orders, and that’s the way it has to be.”

  Jack looked at Trey. Now he just looked weary.

  “You know that part of the movie where someone says, ‘You’re making a big mistake’?” he said. “Well, we’ve reached that point. You’re making a big mistake.”

  They heard Summers make a sound. It was probably a laugh.

  “I wouldn’t bet against it,” he said.

  * * *

  FRESHLY SHOWERED BUT his hair still a mess, Jack watched the TV as he got dressed.

  “Call when you can,” Trey told him.

  “Sure, if they don’t bump me off as soon as they pump me for everything I know.”

  It came out sounding like a joke, but Trey didn’t think he was kidding. Those Bourne movies must have made a strong impression.

  Jack ran his hands through his hair, then said, “Look, it’s that guy again.”

  “That guy” being Anthony Harrison’s communications director, Jeremy Axelson, whom they’d seen on every network the night before. Somehow he still looked awake, alert, ready to face the new day.

  As they watched, he looked straight into the camera and pointed. Jack got the remote and raised the sound.

  “One piece of advice for the president and his staff,” Axelson was saying. “You’re in deep already. Don’t dig yourself any deeper. Don’t obfuscate, don’t hide, don’t destroy. It’s not the crime—or not only the crime—it’s the cover-up. Whatever you try, it won’t work. We’ll find out. It’s a guarantee. We’ll find out.”

  The doorbell rang. “Your taxi’s here,” Trey said.

  Jack was still staring at the TV. Then he turned his head and gave them a wide-eyed look.

  “Summers is an asshole,” he said, “but he’s right about one thing.”

  “There’s a storm coming,” Sheila said.

  For once Jack looked completely serious.

  “I don’t believe,” he said, “that any of them—on either side—has the slightest clue how bad this is going to be.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Springfield, Vermont

  IT WAS THE same crew as the other time, Harry Solomon realized. Fort Collins. Trent and the two young guys, the ones who knew how to make things burn.

  Harry wondered what here in Vermont needed burning.

  He wasn’t sure he’d gotten over Fort Collins yet. It had left a bad taste in his mouth, and in his brain, too.

  At least this time they weren’t going to have to carry away any corpses. The chief of staff had assured him of this. Harry doubted the COS’s word, but the car left for them in this gravel parking lot beside a long-closed factory was a late-model Subaru Forester. Not big enough for the four of them and a stiff, much less multiple stiffs.

  Harry didn’t know exactly what their job would be. That was new. Ever since Anthony Harrison had made his first speech about those bugs, the COS—the whole White House—had been in full-on panic mode. Harry, and who knew how many others, had been working double-time, calling in favors—and offering money or threats when favors didn’t work—from newspaper reporters, police departments, and the general public, all to keep the story from boiling over.

  The panic had led to increased security, which meant Harry now got his orders in stages. Today, for instance, he and the rest of the crew had been told to meet here in Springfield, and then drive the Forester to some house a couple of towns away. There they would learn their ultimate destination and what they were expected to do.

  It was a pain in the ass, not knowing in advance, but Harry could see why the COS was crapping bricks. Just a few weeks left till Election Day, and their guy’s best chance was to convince the voters that the story was being overhyped by the Harrison campaign.

  Harry wasn’t so sure he believed it. That the story was being overhyped. He’d seen the dead guys in that house, and now he knew what had killed them. A few more attacks, someone filming the wasps chewing the eyeballs out of somebody, and all the bribes and threats in the world weren’t going to win Sam Chapman the election.

  Harry’s phone buzzed. He peered down at the screen: the coordinates of their first stop. Pain in the ass.

  He looked back up at his waiting crew. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  HARRY DROVE. THE GPS guided them west on a small highway, northwest on a smaller one, and then onto a dirt road heading due north. They passed dairy farms with black-and-white cows. A pond with people rowing on it. Cabins set back from the road, surrounded by maples and oaks that
were already losing their leaves, and some pines and firs, too.

  Then three more turns—east, north, east—and onto a small dirt road marked with No Thru Traffic signs. At the end of this road, in a small clearing at the end of a winding driveway, lay their initial destination.

  It was a wooden cabin, hand-built a half century or more ago, now weathered to gray. Harry stopped the car and they got out. Other than the pinging of the cooling engine and the whisper of a breeze through the trees, there was no sound. No human voices, no birdcalls, not even the chirp of crickets.

  Later, Harry knew he should have understood what this silence meant, but he didn’t. He wasn’t paying the right kind of attention.

  Instead, he was looking around. He guessed this was someone’s hunting or fishing cabin. Not a telephone pole or power line in sight. The kind of place you’d come to because there was no phone service.

  “I could like it here,” he said.

  Beside him, Trent opened his mouth to say something. Whatever it was, it went forever unspoken, because instead of talking he went flying backward. Flung through the air like some huge hand had flicked him away.

  His arms spread out as he flew. He had a surprised expression on his face.

  As Harry threw himself to the ground, he heard the muffled snap of a silenced .457, sound traveling more slowly than death, as always. Rolling, twisting, getting back to his feet, he hurled himself toward the edge of the clearing, as far as he could from where the bullet had come from.

  Knowing exactly what was happening.

  More muffled shots. The other two men dead in five seconds: a cutoff cry and the thump of a body hitting the ground, followed by one last crack of a gunshot, another thump. A wet, hopeless moaning.

  Just as Harry made it to the edge of the clearing and dove into the brambles that surrounded it, he felt something riffle through his hair. A moment later, he heard the shot that had barely missed him.

  He scrambled forward, feeling the thorns scratch his face and pull at his clothes. It was more like swimming than running. With every passing second—and there were too many of them, far too many—he imagined the gunmen approaching to finish their task. He knew, knew, they were drawing near, standing there, aiming.