Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  Sheila grimaced. He could see the tendons standing out in her neck, along her jaw, but she didn’t waver.

  “The park,” she said.

  Prospect Park. A block and a half away.

  “Long Meadow.”

  Even farther. He shook his head. It was impossible.

  Another siren blared in the distance and was cut off. He heard shouts, a loud rushing noise, what sounded like gunshots, and, farther off, an explosion. The apartment was filled with smoke.

  Trey swayed on his feet, the images racing through his head joining with his own visions, his own memories. Every place he’d ever visited spun in the kaleidoscope. He could feel them being sucked out of his shattered brain and into the vast processor that was the hive mind.

  The campsite where he’d lived for four months in the thorn forests of Peru, undiscovered temples rising out of jungles in Cambodia, the lion that had stood nose to nose with him at the mouth of a tent in Botswana. The grizzly bear in Montana.

  His mother. His father. Christopher when he was a child. Past, present, real, or imagined, all part of the maelstrom.

  It was as if time had no meaning, as if there was no place—no living thing—beyond the thieves’ grasp.

  Trey finally saw exactly how the hive functioned. The kaleidoscope shaking his mind free from its moorings functioned perfectly for them. They didn’t need to ponder, to remember, to analyze. The wasps just saw everything at the same instant, saw and processed and acted.

  It was his weakness, his humanity, that was driving him mad.

  Sheila shook him. Coming back, he heard more crashes, three distant explosions in quick succession, and—most of all—the sound of wings. Not inside his head. Out there.

  “We’re going,” she said. “Now.”

  They went, his legs maddeningly weak beneath him. Inside his head he was flying, but here he could barely walk. Yet somehow they made it across the floor to the front door and out onto the stoop.

  The outside world was wreathed with black smoke billowing from the brownstone across the street. Red flames licked the sky, while white ones ate the building’s heart. Already the inferno had spread to the buildings on either side.

  Three fire engines, two pump trucks and one hook-and-ladder, blocked the street, engines on and lights spinning. Trey could see the bodies of three firefighters sprawled on the asphalt and one slumped behind the wheel of the hook-and-ladder. No one was left alive to hold the hoses, which writhed and danced like giant worms, vomiting streams of water first toward the sky and then in racing rivers down the street.

  As they watched, the brownstone collapsed in on itself. A column of flame rose in the air. A landslide of rubble slid forward and, with a sound that shook the street, entombed everything beneath it: bodies, trucks, spewing hoses.

  A blast of hot air blew past them. Thieves died in the collapse and in the burst of flames that followed. Trey saw them, felt them, was them. Again and again he died, but still he stood there, still he lived.

  Trey saw how foolish, how weak, it was to be human. To care about something so inconsequential as a single life, when all that mattered was the whole.

  Sheila pulled him forward, got him moving again. Together they made it down the steps to the street. Then half ran, half stumbled toward the row of leafless trees that marked the edge of the park. Thieves flew freely all around them, buzzing in for the kill, peeling away when they sensed what Trey—and especially Sheila—carried.

  Traffic was stopped at every corner, cars entangled like sculptures, like works of kinetic art. Stopped forever. The arteries of a city could be so easily blocked. A vast infarction, a heart attack New York could not survive.

  Malcolm was just thirty miles away, but it might as well have been a thousand.

  The contents of breached gas tanks spread across the streets. New fires were already erupting here and there, spreading, licking at the bases of the nearby buildings. Smoke came billowing upward from a subway entrance, carrying with it hopeless cries of terror and agony.

  Trey knew that no one would be coming to fight any of these fires. By morning much of the city would be aflame.

  How many other cities around the world as well?

  Bodies lay here and there, but not as many as he had expected. The electricity was still on, and he could see faces in many of the windows. The horror-struck expressions of people who were terrified to stay where they were, but more terrified to go out.

  He thought of the great tsunami that had struck Japan in 2011. Some people tried to flee and were swept away. Others chose to hunker down . . . and were swept away. Condemned to death, no matter which choice they made.

  It went against the human belief system. There was always supposed to be an alternative. Survival was always assumed to be an option.

  It was the same here. Some humans—the ones who fought back, who seemed like a threat—were being killed now, while others would be left alive to carry the thieves’ young within them. Left alive for days, even weeks. But doomed nonetheless.

  It was simple: Slave-makers never let anyone go free. One way or another, the only purpose in a slave’s life was to serve.

  FIFTY-TWO

  THEY MADE IT to the park. The branches above their heads stretched like skeletal white fingers into a reddish sky filled with flowing flags of smoke. In the darkness ahead, footsteps thudded, people screamed and wailed, a dog barked hysterically, and ten thousand wings whirred.

  Behind them, the staccato thud of explosions and the roar of another falling building.

  A half dozen steps down the path, Trey broke away from Sheila, stopped, and bent over. The crescendo inside his head raged, a battle, a war between the dictates of the hive and his desperate attempts to keep himself from being conquered.

  Sheila squatted beside him.

  “Why are we here?” he said.

  She didn’t answer. Just reached for him, helped him straighten. Through the onslaught, he could see the mix of emotions in her expression. Compassion. Understanding. Love.

  “Not much farther,” she said.

  They moved on down the trail, but Trey knew it was hopeless. Wherever they were going, whatever Sheila’s plan, it was too late. He was losing the battle, becoming unmoored. Only Sheila, her strong body holding him up, kept him standing on the earth.

  “You can do this,” she said into his ear.

  He thought, Maybe this form can. This . . . shell.

  But not me.

  * * *

  BODIES LAY SPRAWLED across the path, cut down as they ran. Eyeless faces turned toward the sky.

  The living cowered in the shadows, their gazes following Trey and Sheila’s progress.

  Others were here, too. Neither dead nor alive. As Trey and Sheila stepped onto the expanse of Long Meadow, they saw a dozen shadowy forms moving across the grass. Hosts in their final rabid stage.

  Roused by the frenzy of the thieves’ final assault, the hosts moved among the living. Killing those who fought back, holding down those who did not resist. Thieves arched their backs and plunged their ovipositors into the flesh of people who lay on the ground, unprotesting, paralyzed with fear.

  Moving fast, three of the late-stage hosts came across the night-gray grass. A middle-aged man, a young woman, and a girl in a bloodstained white dress. Trey, barely able to move, merely watched as their hands reached toward him. But Sheila stepped forward, put herself between them.

  Then a nearby thief relayed a warning to the hive mind, which immediately assessed it and sent it back out again. Beware! It was like a shout inside Trey’s head, and he knew that the jumbled remnants of the human hosts’ dying minds heard it, too. The three of them hesitated, staring at Trey and Sheila through silvery eyes before turning away.

  Sheila was scanning the sky. Then, making a sound in her throat, she pulled out her cell phone. Glanced at
the screen, shook her head, and dropped the phone to the ground. Turned her eyes to the sky again.

  And put her hands over her ears.

  At first Trey didn’t understand why. Then he did.

  The sound, unrecognizable, penetrated his shattered brain. A horrendous clattering roar growing louder and louder, causing even the hive mind to give off a signal of distress. Something was coming, a light and commotion in the sky above the trees to the north.

  It came into view: a huge passenger jet passing overhead, perhaps fifty feet above the ground. Upside down, its windows lit, figures glimpsed in the light. Flames spat from the engine in its tail.

  Trey was inside the cockpit, looking through the eyes of the single wasp within. The pilots were dead, he could see that, lying facedown over the cockpit controls.

  The screaming hulk disappeared from view. An instant later, there was a tremendous blast that turned the sky a brilliant white. The trees at the far end of Long Meadow ignited, casting dancing black shadows that stretched across the grass.

  The hive-mind fragment aboard the plane died and was instantly sloughed off, as meaningless as a flake of skin.

  Trey lay sprawled on the ground, Sheila beside him. He rolled onto his back, staring upward.

  At first he didn’t see the lights above him in the flickering sky. Lights that moved, seemed to stand still, and grew brighter again.

  Sheila got to her feet. She pulled off her sweater and waved it in the air.

  * * *

  “TREY,” SHE SAID to him, “get up.” A catch in her voice. “Please.”

  Amid the rushing of wings, the shocks that made the ground beneath him twitch and spasm, the smoke that carried the smells of burning rubber, plastic, wood, flesh, Trey saw a small two-passenger helicopter land on the meadow just twenty feet from where he lay.

  Malcolm sat behind the stick inside the plastic bubble.

  “If we don’t get over there,” Sheila said, “they’ll kill him.”

  Trey knew she was right. The thieves would soon investigate this new arrival, judge it a threat, eliminate it.

  Even now, he was with the half dozen closest ones, all turning their attention to the helicopter and the enemy within.

  Sheila was running across the meadow, but Trey knew that she was going to be too late. Feet could never compete with wings. Already the wasps were finding their way through the air vents and the gap beneath the rotor and roof. Only a few seconds remained before they fulfilled their assignment: to end one more human life.

  Malcolm’s life.

  Trey never knew how he had the thought, or whether it was a thought at all. Maybe it was just another step in being absorbed by the hive mind. Maybe it was just part of the process of abandoning who he was, who he’d been.

  But somehow at that instant, Trey understood something. Something he had only guessed at when his mind blurred, split in two as he watched the attack in Florida.

  He was not just a witness to the hive mind. He was a participant. He, too, was part of the whole, adding his own shard of information to the vast data trove that forged a single organism from an entire species.

  He didn’t have to just watch as his friend died.

  Lying on the ground, unmoving, he cast his own consciousness free. He was no longer trapped in the husk of his body. He was there, in the helicopter, alongside the wasps who had come to kill Malcolm.

  He was there, sounding an alarm.

  Danger.

  Infection.

  Death.

  Adding his voice to the constant stream of warnings that ruled the organism’s actions. The same warnings that sent a flock of pigeons hurtling away from the falcon’s talons, a school of fish flashing away from the marlin’s sword. A burst of information designed to be instantly processed and obeyed, not questioned.

  You need intelligence to question.

  The thieves inside the bubble hesitated for an instant. Then, as one, they pulled back, turned their entry points into exits, and were gone. Leaving Malcolm alone, still alive.

  Trey saw Sheila reach the helicopter, saw Malcolm open the hatch, saw—and heard—her shout something. But he couldn’t understand what she said. Human language no longer made sense.

  A moment later Sheila and Malcolm were both running across the grass toward him. Toward his body. Then Malcolm had him in an embrace, a fireman’s carry, and they were heading back toward the helicopter.

  When they reached it, Sheila climbed through the hatch and then reached back for Trey as Malcolm clambered over them and sat behind the controls. As she hoisted him up, and he struggled to help, the helicopter lifted from the ground.

  His legs were still dangling from the open hatch. He could hear Sheila’s tortured breaths as he began to slip from her grasp. But then, with one last convulsive effort, she pulled him to her. Trey’s head banged against the edge of the passenger seat, something whacked him in the stomach, stealing his breath, but he was on board, the hatch door slamming shut behind him.

  On their knees, they clung to each other as the helicopter rose through skeins of smoke, wallowing in the heavy, wet autumn air. Malcolm, grim faced, fought with the controls, swinging the wavering craft around to face north. The engine groaned and complained, the rotors stuttered, but their tiny lifeboat stayed aloft.

  Through a thousand eyes, Trey looked out over New York. Below, the city was going dark. One block, another, and then more, more, a cascade of failures of the grid that would never be reversed.

  Going dark, but for the flames.

  As they flew up the East River, the hive mind’s ultimate triumph rose in a wave, a climax, inside him once again. The scene overlain with a hundred others, the effortless worldwide destruction of the most powerful species on earth. Its hugest metal and stone towers crumbling like a termite mound under an anteater’s claws, leaving the people hiding within as soft and vulnerable as the white ants.

  Seemingly impregnable species with no defense against such an attack.

  The images spewing through Trey’s brain were so horrific he would have done anything to avoid seeing them. But he had no choice. They were inside him. They were him.

  As the helicopter flew past an Empire State Building lit only by fire, he gave up at last, let the remnants of his consciousness go. Surrendered and was at peace.

  FIFTY-THREE

  HE AWOKE TO a quiet, steady humming noise.

  Not wings, neither inside nor outside his head. And not the frantic chop of a helicopter fighting its way through treacherous air. A steady, even sound, felt as much as heard.

  He opened his eyes, tried to orient himself. First understanding nothing, but eventually attaining some kind of awareness. This strange shape was a body. His body, lying on its back.

  His conscious mind still somewhere else. It was a tapestry so tattered you could see the light gleaming through it. A frayed flag hanging from a pole, pieces of it missing, gone forever.

  He stared upward as his consciousness gathered itself. Above him was a curved surface, rows of yellow-green lights. He watched them for a while and then suddenly understood what he was looking at: the ceiling of an airplane. He was lying in the center aisle of a small jet. The hum was the sound of engines cruising through still, thin air.

  His awareness sharpened. The shapes around him were faces. Sheila’s face, upside down because his head was resting on her lap.

  Then Kait’s. Kait was squatting next to him, half in the aisle, half between two rows of seats. She had a white towel in her hand, an ice bucket at her feet, and as he shifted his eyes to look at her, she placed the cool, wet cloth against his forehead.

  She saw him looking at her. Her expression was calm, only her bloodshot eyes showing any signs of emotion. “Hey,” she said.

  He moved his mouth, but no sound came out. Even that effort made her face blur, and he closed his eye
s again.

  Lying there in the dark, he thought: At least the hive mind is quiet.

  He had that thought and realized at the same instant that he was capable of thought. That brought him part of the way back.

  Listening inside, he heard only the most distant sound of wings, of screams. The thieves were still at work, but not here, and not with the intensity he’d witnessed—participated in—before unconsciousness had taken him.

  For now, at least, he had been released.

  He opened his eyes. Focused and tried again and managed to say, “Hey, you.”

  The corners of Kait’s mouth turned upward. Before she could speak, though, Sheila tilted Trey’s head and held a plastic cup before his mouth.

  “Drink,” she said.

  He drank the cool water and felt his mind knit together a little more. Taking a deep breath, he struggled to get up. At first, Sheila protested and tried to keep him where he was, but eventually she sighed and helped him sit.

  He’d been lying near the back of the Citation X corporate jet that Malcolm had spent weeks refitting for long-distance travel. In preparation for this one-way journey that Trey and Sheila had almost missed.

  Among the passengers, about a dozen in total, he recognized a handful. But he knew who—and what—they all were: Doctors. Scientists. Architects. Carpenters. Brilliant researchers and people who knew how to fix anything that broke.

  More empty seats than had been intended, though. Trey and Sheila clearly hadn’t been the only ones trapped by the thieves’ sudden attack. They were just the only ones who’d been rescued.

  He looked at Sheila. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on in Brooklyn. She hadn’t even washed her face, which was smudged with soot and streaked with old tears.

  “That’s twice now,” he said, and he took in a long, ragged breath. “That you’ve saved me.”

  She tilted her head and looked into his eyes. “Just give me a chance to take a breath before you make me do it again.”

  Then she leaned forward and hugged him.