The Newcomers: a novel of global invasion , human resilience, and the wild places of the planet

by Pamela Jekel

  “Kind of like ‘capture the flag’ but with food?” Skylar asked. “And your team won a prize?”

  “Yeah! It was really cool! We got a red prize. That means we get to pick the movie next time.”

  Jack glanced at Skylar. She smiled at Miranda, but the happiness didn’t meet her eyes. “That’s cool beans, honey.”

  “What’s wrong, Mama?”

  “I’m just really tired, honey. It was hot today, and we worked hard.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Miranda was indignant. “The bad guys don’t got any air condition. I sweated so much, and everything is so stinky. But tomorrow, they said we go on the scavenger hunt right after breakfast, and we go to class when it’s hot, so that’ll be better.”

  “Yes, that’ll be better,” Skylar said faintly.

  After dinner, they walked Miranda to her evening assembly and went back to the dorm where they found Jim and Judy’s room vacant. Even Jack was asleep before curfew. That night, the explosions seemed closer and louder, lasting more than an hour. Jack counted eleven different explosions, some of them so fast, he wasn’t sure whether it was one or two strikes. There can’t be that many cars left in the city, he thought, but then he fell back asleep, grateful for cool dark.

  For four days, they worked in the same field, digging and picking and wheeling debris, working in the soil until it was a more uniform color, more like the red clay of Georgia. All of them were browner now, all of them more properly garbed for their labor, with makeshift hats, scarves, home-made gloves, and what felt like permanently stooped backs. Their new roommates were a young black couple from Athens, with kids just a little older than Miranda. They had been transferred over from Spelman College.

  Each night, the explosions continued, some sounding very close, others clearly at a distance. They were learning to sleep through them, or at least to fall back asleep the moment they ceased. But on the fifth night since their arrival, the explosions were unusually close, and Jack leaped out of bed full of anger. “Goddamn,” he said, “what can they possibly be blowing up now?”

  As he went to the window, Skylar cried out, “Don’t look at it, Jack!”

  He pulled aside the blinds, shading his eyes cautiously, and he could see a pillar of glowing, molten metal, shining like the sun, so bright that he winced and pulled away. Something very tall was burning, melting, with a light more intense than any normal fire would provide. The light went up into the sky, and as he craned his neck to see, a laser shaft of white brilliance hit another darkened building farther away, rocking his head back with the shock of light and sound. As he watched, the distant skyscraper glowed, melted, and turned white with heat. The explosions matched the strikes from the laser, and the thunder was the sound of the buildings being fused and shrinking into shortened, melted spires. More distant buildings were yellow or orange, as they cooled.

  “They’re not exploding cars,” he said with horror. “They’re melting the tallest buildings in the city.” He turned to look at her, one hand gesturing to the window helplessly. “My God. I think that one was the Marriott Marquis.”

  * * *

  On the seventeenth floor of an Atlanta high-rise, behind a kitchenette wall stud, Peri was resting in a space no taller than two stacked nickels. She rested nearly seventy-five percent of every twenty-four hours, mostly in the daytime. Her shiny reddish-brown body was broad and flat, nearly one and a half inches long, with a yellow figure-eight in front. Her six segmented legs had spines to help her climb, turn, and run nearly three miles per hour. She had two pairs of wings, one tough and protective, the other full of veins and cross-veins, and she had two highly-sensitive antennae longer than her body which helped her find food and others of her kind. Peri preferred being with many, rather than few, and given a choice, she would choose to live, nest, and feed collectively. She had been mated when she was four months old, and she would be pregnant the rest of her life. Peri was a mature Periplaneta Americana, an American cockroach.

  Though Peri could not know it, she was a queen among insects, from an order more than three-hundred million years old with five-thousand species, inhabiting most everyplace on the earth. She, like most of her cousins, preferred warm climates and tropical regions. Because she had evolved to live in close association with man and now man was making the earth warmer with each season, she and her kind were thriving. They likely always would.

  Peri could exist on very little, would eat anything, and could survive without food for three months or water for more than a month. She could go without oxygen for almost an hour. If her heart stopped, her veins would still move her blood backwards and forwards in her body. If for some reason, her head was cut off, she could still survive for several weeks, because her body did not depend on her head to breathe. If the sun should send out a sudden flare as it had many times since the Cretaceous period when cockroaches began, Peri could take more than fifteen times the radioactivity that any man could and survive. Over her two-year life span, Peri would hatch more than fourteen-hundred nymphs from egg cases she would lay and hide in spaces smaller than the width of a dime.

  Peri had a few enemies, but she feared only one. It was not man, with his baits and traps and poisons, for those were easy to evade. It was not his domesticated animals, like the one that used to live in this apartment. Peri was as fast as a cat and could hide in the smallest places. There was one creature that shared this place, however, which Peri feared indeed. And it was because of this creature that Peri chose to rest many of the daylight hours, for she needed to be swift each night to survive.

  As the day went away, however, Peri began to stir. The humans and cat who had lived in this place had left it long ago, but the cupboards and drawers were still full of sufficient forage for Peri and swarms of her cousins. Lights still came on in the night at times, but they had learned that the lights did not mean humans were near. Peri no longer feared the lights, but she knew instinctively that the dark was safer, with or without man. She stretched her legs, ran her front segments over her antennae, and felt with her sensitive claws the movement of cockroaches around her. Following the scent markers they left for each other, she traveled quickly to a cupboard where several open boxes of food had been discovered by her cousins.

  Peri wasted no time with the males, who were posturing and rubbing their wings together to attract her. She had recently inserted her egg-case into a protective crevice near her nest, and she did not need to be mated to produce more. Other females, however, did find their courtship rituals intriguing, and more than one pair mated among the food debris, facing away from each other with their genitalia in contact. Peri ignored those pairs as well.

  What she sought was the open box of sweetened cereal where she had fed two nights before. She crawled up the box easily, her claws finding sure grip on the plastic and paper, slipped inside the open seal at the top of the box, and followed the scent trail she had left down to where the food was waiting.

  Peri’s mouth parts were on the underside of her head, and her chewing mandibles were very effective at separating food and moving nutrients into her body. As she ate, another cockroach joined her, and then another, and then another. Their presence calmed her, even facilitated her digestion, and she willingly moved aside to allow others to feed where she fed. As they fed, they communicated with each other by clicking their wings, soft chirping, and brushing their bodies together, sharing pheromones of pleasure and safety. Sensing that she needed more than this sugary treat, she again climbed out of the box, touching antennae with many as she passed, went down the side of the box, and foraged along the scent markers for other food.

  An opened bag of rice was her next stop, and she fed contentedly with many others, leaving traces of pheromones and feces as she went. After she felt satisfied, she knew she would need water, and she knew where to find it. Following the markers of others, she climbed down from the cupboard, down the wall, across the counter, and down the face of the drawers to the floor. Keeping to the corners and the sides o
f the walls for safety, she scurried quickly out of the kitchen, and into the heavy carpet of another room. Here, she could not move as quickly, for the fibers of the carpet caught in her claws and the spines on her legs. Still, she was used to this journey, and she made her way to another surface, sensing the presence of her kind around her, following the trails they had made.

  Once in the bathroom, she went to the shower, where water made a slow drip from the faucet onto the stone floor. As she scuttled across the tile, anticipating the pleasure of the cool water, she felt sharp claws grip her surely, and she chirped in terror and rolled, trying to evade what she feared was coming next. Two needle pincers pierced her underbelly, and Peri felt the toxin pump into her body. This was her mortal enemy. In seconds, she was unable to move, as the centipede curled around her. Nocturnal, agile, and resilient, the silverfish centipede had been with man and on earth just as long as her kind, but this enemy had one weapon she did not: poison that paralyzed, poison that dissolved her soft digestive organs, poison that killed.

  As Peri died, she could not know that the silverfish would finally be entombed with all of her cousins in a flash of blinding, scorching heat which even they could not survive.

  Chapter Five

  Jomo and Asha Maathai

  Nyeri, Kenya

  2025

  “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

  King James Bible, Genesis 1: 26.

  Asha lay in the bed next to Jomo, listening to the sounds of the morning in the dim light. She was amazed he could sleep through it, but his soft snores continued, despite the explosion of noise that always signaled a new African day. The lot of day birds, with their mad scrabble for food, females, and their bit of tree or branch to defend, their ceaseless crashing of wings and constant noise, were as familiar to her as the muted clatter of dishes and skillet from the kitchen, the nicker and stamp of the horses in the far pasture, and the soft pad of Desta getting up to be first in the loo.

  Rain-birds were pouring forth their song, green bee-eaters would be darting around from the cedars to the river, and the soft double call of the anvil-bird was like the voice of the trees themselves. Asha knew without seeing, simply by the sudden burst of intensity or an abrupt hush of bird noise, if a snake crawled nearby or a hawk flew overhead. In the same way, she could sense her daughter’s mood by her footstep. Saturday, garden day. They should be out early this morning, before the heat rose.

  It was the end of April, one of the good months, when the terrible heat and humidity that grew through January and worsened in February was finally abated. In the summer months, the night temperatures stayed high, sleep was difficult, and everyone grew tired and fractious. The smallest cut turned septic with the air was so thick and moist, and bacteria thrived. The insects swarmed, the snakes sought out the coolness of the veranda and the water pipes, and the elephants were bad-tempered, tortured by flies under their armor of caked mud, stomping what was left of her garden just for meanness. Lions were louder, complaining right through the heat of the day and the night. But now in April, the days and nights were cooler, the snakes and insects disappeared, and sleep, blessed sleep relaxed even the elephants. By June, it would be cold enough for a blanket, but April….April was her favorite month, a true gift from God.

  She was tempted to spend just a moment longer next to Jomo, but then she heard Desta padding back again, a door opened and closed, and she knew her daughter was already out in the garden. Sacred time and space.

  She slid out of bed quietly, pulled the sheet over her husband’s shoulder, and slipped into the loo. In moments she was out in the hallway, closing the bedroom door gently behind her.

  Asha went through the kitchen to say good morning to Jata and Peter and gratefully accept the cup of tea Jata had ready for her on the table. She cradled it in her hand, savoring the warmth.

  “Did bwana kijana win his match?” Peter’s voice was eager. He always followed Baako’s football victories, mourning losses as though they were his personal failures.

  “He did, indeed,” Asha smiled. “His team moved to second place with this win. He will be impossible this morning, no doubt.”

  “And the young mister,” Jata asked. “He did well?”

  “Just fine,” Asha nodded. “We shall have to listen to them both crow like two roosters over their magnificence.”

  “Young mister gets on, then?”

  Asha nodded to Jata, touching her shoulder in thanks for asking. “Mind you, it worried me rather, just pushing the lad into the pond, as it were. I thought perhaps the other lads would peck him to pieces. But he placed well in his exams, he seems to be making a few friends of his own, and now their team has won, he’ll have more friends still. Our two lads will likely elbow each other for bragging rights, and we’ll have to listen to them huff and blow like two hippo overlords.” She chuckled. “But Baako is still the stronger player, yes? And so we shall have peace for a bit longer.”

  “It is good that young mister is the younger male,” Peter said.

  “It is good, indeed. No one need thrash the other soundly to make the point.” She glanced out the window. “Ah. I see my girl is already in the rows. Let’s have that lovely fish tonight,” she said to Jata. “With a nice parsley sauce and jacket potatoes?” She set her empty cup down and went out the door, pulling her old sun bonnet over her eyes against the sun.

  Desta smiled in welcome as Asha settled down on the row of herbs and began pulling weeds. “Beat you,” she said. “Baba still in bed?”

  “Oh, he’s probably up by now.” Asha rested her buttocks on her heels comfortably, relishing the smells of the earth, hot, sweet, smoky smells, the sharp odor of cut weeds, the wet verdure of young plants, and the muted musks of her own body all mixed together. “Now then, what’s this I hear about Akila’s betrothal? She’s your age, is she not?”

  “Six months younger!” Desta rolled her eyes.

  “Oh dear, what a pity.”

  “What is her father thinking of?”

  “Of his mbari, of course.” His clan. “Certainly not of his daughter. Mind you, with all these troubles, I can’t blame him for wanting to extend his holdings and strengthen his family, but I shouldn’t think Akila’s bride price will make up for the loss of his daughter. I hardly feel she’ll fare well. Is she in love?”

  “She thinks she is.” Desta yanked fiercely at a stubborn weed wrapped around the base of a tomato plant. “She says she is going to be married all in gold, with a fine house, a Cadillac to drive, and four children.”

  “I shall hold my breath.”

  Desta was quiet for a moment. They picked weeds companionably, shifting to relieve the pressure on their heels and thighs, moving in rhythm up the rows of vegetables. Once a week, they worked together for several hours, weeding, planting, mulching, hoeing, and gossiping, making sure that the family had the best the garden could offer. Of course, Peter and Jata could have tended it, but then Desta would not learn what she needed to about growing food, and Asha would have missed the feel of her hands in the dark, moist soil. She liked to believe that her daughter looked forward to this private time even more than she might enjoy the actual task they shared.

  “Mama, have you and Baba thought about my betrothal?”

  “We have done.” Asha kept her face solemn. “But we’re short what we’d need to pay someone to take you.”

  Desta pushed her mother so that she rolled off her haunches and had to right herself lest she fall into the pepper row. “Daft cow.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You should.” She waited until her mother had re-balanced herself. “Seriously. I know things are different now, with the beastly aliens all over the world. We talk of little else in between classes, it seems.”

  Asha sighed. “It is a terrible wo
rld, my darling. But it is also one of fierce beauty. We must pray that God’s plan for us includes survival. The papers say that many of the camps have opened and evicted the people because they can’t care for them. Paris is nothing more than a roaming pack of savages, now that they have no food and no power. Drinking out of the Seine. Can you imagine? They’ll all die of typhoid in a year. At least we are still all together. I cannot fathom what it must be like to send one’s children away. I mean, just think of it,” she sat back and gazed at her daughter. “Chase’s mother and father had to give him all the teaching and guidance they could give him in a short time….maybe only a week! Something they thought they’d have all their lives to give.”

  “He’s lucky to be here. Plenty of them have been taken in as servants or gardeners or nannies to a pack of cheeky brats.”

  “Or worse. Can you imagine what might happen to a pretty little white girl sent to Dubai or Thailand? Do you see Kayla, the American with the Maloris? Any of the others?”

  “She’s in my French class, but we’re not mates. She seems to be doing well enough, I guess. Some of the refugees from China are in my classes, too. They’re ruining our grade curve in math.”

  “How intolerable.”

  Desta fell silent again and shifted her position to a row of bush beans. “Are we going to be okay?”

  “Of course we will. Your father’s position is secure, and even if the market for our py is down, we can live on his salary. Come to that, the clans will always take care of each other.” She shook her head. “I will say, however, it was a bit of a wrench when Jata came to me to say she’d broken a needle and needed another. Something I’d not have given a thought to last year. Those are the things which will be difficult to replace. We’ve stocked up on salt, matches, fishhooks, toothbrushes, aspirin and antibiotics, loo paper, items we use every day and don’t make here in Kenya much, but I’m certain I’ve forgotten something essential that we’ll miss sooner or later. We’ll just have to do the best we can, share with those who have less, and have faith that these times won’t last forever.”