Invasive Species (33 page)

“Five days till the election,” Mariama said.

Sheila wrapped her coat closer. “What will happen?”

Trey said, “Harrison's going to win.”

Mariama said, “And then—”

And then.

“Mary and Kait and I are seeing Jeremy Axelson and the Harrison campaign team tomorrow,” Trey said.

“Will they listen?” Sheila asked.

“I doubt it.”

Sheila said, “Is it worth it? Mary's worn out. I don't know how much help she'll be.”

Trey said, “I don't think the greatest orator on earth could change their minds. And I'm no orator.”

The wind gusted, blowing some old papers down the street and up into a brief messy whirlwind.

“But I have to try,” he said.

TWO CONVERSATIONS.

The first took place in a hotel on Fifty-fourth Street between Madison and Fifth. Trey had never noticed it before: the Gaumont, a redbrick, five-story town house surrounded by restaurants and boutiques, with only a single modest sign hanging in front to announce its presence.

Inside, it was opulent but tasteful, all burnished oak and brocaded walls and oil paintings of handsome ladies and gentlemen in ornate gilt frames. As Trey and Mary and Kait waited outside the conference room door on the top floor, a man wearing livery pushed a wooden cart carrying silver-topped dishes down the hall.

Trey watched him go past and thought about the
Titanic
. Its maiden voyage had lasted—what?—four days and ended in two hours. Who was to say that the voyage of the human race couldn't last for millennia and end just as suddenly?

Kait said, “I didn't think Mr. Axelson would like a place like this.”

Mary, who had been paging through a glossy magazine she'd found on a side table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, looked up. “I doubt he picked it.”

“Then why is he here?”

“To celebrate,” Trey said.

“But—”

“To celebrate quietly,” he said, “since he has to pretend he doesn't know what will happen on Election Day.”

He looked at Kait. She was wearing Uggs, purple tights, a red skirt, and a white sweater, all obviously new.

“You look nice,” Trey said. Then, surprising himself, “Actually, make that
beautiful
.”

She stared down into her lap and blushed.

Mary managed a smile. “A Fifth Avenue shopping spree,” she said and shrugged. “Heck, it's only money.”

Trey nodded.

“Meaningless slips of paper,” she said.

*   *   *

THE HEAVY DOOR
to the conference room swung open, reflecting the shaded light cast by sconces set along the walls. A young woman in a business suit stood there. Her expression revealed a certain measure of curiosity, carefully masked.

“Please come in,” she said.

She led them through the door into a lush, dim, red-carpeted room scattered with small desks, sideboards, gleaming tables, and soft-cushioned chairs. Two Secret Service men stood in the center of the room. At the far end, close to where the curtained windows let in some light from outside, sat Jeremy Axelson and a scowling man Trey recognized as Ron Stanhouse, Anthony Harrison's campaign manager. Two younger men wearing identical impatient expressions sat a little farther off.

Axelson stood, shook Mary's hand, and then bent over to get closer to Kait's level. “How are you doing, sweetie?” he said.

She looked into his face. “I'm fine.” Then, “Are you going to listen to what Trey tells you?”

He blinked, then laughed as he straightened. “Of course we will.”

“I mean it.
Listen.
”

Some of the humor drained from his expression, and he raised his eyes to look at Trey. “I guess we'll have to see what Mr. Gilliard says, won't we?”

Whatever Mr. Gilliard was going to say, he had no intention of addressing it to Jeremy Axelson. Stepping past, he walked over and stood above Ron Stanhouse, who had not gotten to his feet or even rearranged his slouch.

Stanhouse leaned his head against the back of his shiny, brown-leather-and-gold-button chair. There was amusement tinged with malice in his expression.

“Behold,” he said. “The man who won us an election.”

Trey was silent.

“Without all your work—and that of your friends—we would never have connected the dots,” Stanhouse went on, his lips twitching behind his beard. “You couldn't have helped us more if you'd been on the payroll.”

“Well, that's what I live for, helping you.” Trey kept his voice calm, but there was something in his expression that made Stanhouse's eyes widen. Trey felt the brief, light touch of Kait's hand on his arm.

“What I live for,” he said again. “Yeah. I get it. It's victory lap time—or it will be in a few days. Well, go ahead, pat yourselves on the back and keep all the credit. I don't want it.”

He took a step closer. Stanhouse, looking uncomfortable, stiffened a little in his chair.

“The question is,” Trey went on, “what happens then?”

Stanhouse's lips twitched again. “Well, he'll work with Congress on a jobs package, and—”

Trey just looked at him, and after a moment Stanhouse wriggled his shoulders. “Why are you here, Gilliard?”

“To tell you: Back your guy off.”

Stanhouse knew exactly what he was saying. The malice in his eyes rose to the surface. “Now? Why should we do that? Pre- or postelection, it's a winning issue.”

“And a losing battle,” Trey said.

Stanhouse looked disgusted. “Come on, Gilliard. Stop being such a pansy. They're just
bugs
.”

Beside Trey, Kait made a small sound.

Trey felt his hands form fists. He thought of Agiru, the old Huli warrior, who'd said the same thing. But Agiru had understood the
binatang
. These men didn't.

“And how many lives,” Trey said, “will you be willing to sacrifice to these bugs?”

Before Stanhouse could answer, Jeremy Axelson stepped between them. “Look, Trey,” he said, “Governor Harrison has run on a platform of strength, of determination, and he won't back away from that now, no matter what your fears may be.”

“He has a choice,” Trey said.

Stanhouse said, in a tone of complete disgust, “Like what? What Chapman tried? Stashing a bunch of scientists in a lab somewhere, then waiting around for them to come up with a solution? Sure.”

Again, it was Axelson who played the good cop. “You must understand that showing weakness now—or early in the first term—would send just the wrong message to the American people, to our allies, and to our enemies themselves.”

“You saw what happened in Florida,” Mary said to him.

“The president's mistake in Florida was in thinking too small,” Stanhouse said. “I can promise you, we won't make the same mistake.”

But Trey was barely listening to him. He'd heard this boilerplate before.

Instead, he was thinking about what Axelson had said.

Our allies
.

With a growing sense of horror, he said, “You're coordinating an attack on the thieves with other countries.”

Stanhouse smiled at him. “You know only the president is allowed to do that . . . and our man isn't president. Yet.”

Trey ignored this. “When is it going to happen, then? The attack. On Inauguration Day?”

Stanhouse didn't answer directly, but he didn't need to. Inauguration Day or soon thereafter, it didn't matter.

“Listen to me,” Trey said. “
Listen.
It won't work. You'll lose.”

We'll lose.

But Stanhouse was flapping a hand in dismissal. “Those creatures,” he said, “will not be allowed to rule our lives.”

The meeting was over.

*   *   *

THE SECOND CONVERSATION,
via telephone, was much shorter.

“Mr. Gilliard,” Nathan Holland, the president's chief of staff, said. “What can I do for you?”

His voice, as gravelly as ever, echoed with exhaustion. He sounded a hundred years old.

Trey took a breath. “You need to tell President Chapman—”

“I have a better idea,” Holland said. “Tell him yourself.”

Trey said, “What?”

“Please hold,” Holland said, bitter amusement in his voice, “for the president of the United States.”

Waiting, Trey was struck by a vivid memory: sitting in various hotel rooms on his journeys into and out of the wilderness and watching repeats of
The West Wing
on television. How strange it always felt when the president talked to regular people.

There was a crackling over the receiver, and then a new voice, deeper than Holland's and more polished. Familiar.

“This is Sam Chapman,” the voice said.

Trey plunged ahead. “Mr. President, you were on the right track. Your approach was on target, and it has to go on even if you lose. Somehow you need to convince Harrison of this.”

“My approach?” There was an edge of amusement in the president's tone. “Which one?”

“The smart one. Calling together a team of scientists. Jack Parker from the American Museum, Clare Shapiro from Rockefeller—”

“I shut that effort down,” the president said.

“Yes, I know, but you shouldn't have.”

There was a pause, and then the president said, “You're right. It was a terrible mistake.”

Trey was silent.

Chapman's voice was quiet. “You're far from the first to tell me this, of course. I should have had the will to see that effort through and not worried so much about losing the election.”

His laugh was quieter than Holland's, but just as mirthless. “The election! I couldn't have done more to guarantee my defeat if I'd been working for the Harrison campaign myself.”

Still Trey didn't speak.

“Be honest with me, though, Mr. Gilliard,” Chapman went on. “Would it have made a difference, leaving that initiative in place? Would all my experts have figured out a way to defeat these creatures?”

“Defeat them?” Trey said. “No. Live with them? Coexist?” He took in a breath. “Maybe not. But it was the best of a bad set of options.”

Now it was Chapman's turn to be silent for a few moments. When he finally spoke again, his voice was very quiet. “As you may have noticed, we're not much for ‘living with' in this country. We don't do coexistence well. I'm also afraid—”

He fell silent.

Trey finished the sentence. “That the next administration won't do ‘coexistence' at all.”

Chapman sighed. “Nor will they listen to a word I—or anyone in my administration—says. Reinventing the wheel is a longtime tradition in our political system.”

“I know,” Trey said. “But I had to call.”

To try.

The president cleared his throat. “I told Nathan I wanted to speak with you,” he said. “To thank you for everything you've done since this all started.”

Trey said, “Done?”

“You and Dr. Connelly. Going on television, talking to magazines. Providing real information. Trying to help people stay calm.”

Trey said, “For all the good it did.”

“Trying to do good counts.”

“Thank you.” Trey took a breath. “Mr. President?”

“Yes?”

“That secure location where you went after . . . Florida.”

“You mean where they bundled me off to after the disaster. What about it?”

“Just . . . keep it handy.”

Again the president laughed. “Thank you, Mr. Gilliard. But I'm not going to hide behind locked doors while my countrymen die around me. Not this time. Not again.”

Trey was silent.

“I'm still the captain. Win or lose, that's how I'll always think of myself. If the ship goes down, I'm going down with it.”

ELECTION DAY.

Trey woke up pouring with sweat. Sheila, beside him in the bed, held him as he fought. “Trey—” she said. Then, when he focused on her, still half trapped by his dreams, she said, “What's it . . . saying?”

It.

Trey heard nothing but silence. It didn't matter. He was filled with cold certainty.

“It happens today,” he said. “Not Inauguration Day. Today.”

Her hand covered her mouth. “How can you be sure?”

Trey was quiet. How to explain the voice inside?

There was no explaining it. To understand you'd have to be like him. Not completely human anymore.

Sheila, watching, believing, took a deep breath and let her hand drop back to the sheets. Her chin lifted.

“If we have time,” she said, “I still want to vote.”

*   *   *

THE SILENCE ECHOING
inside him, Trey made a series of telephone calls.

Everyone was ready. They'd all been ready for days.

Except one. The one who mattered most.

“Still waiting on that part,” Malcolm Granger said, his voice over the phone as cheerful and easygoing as always. “You told me we had days. Weeks.”

“I was wrong. Can you get it today?”

Malcolm laughed. “Okay. Gonna take some hours, though. We got hours?”

The hive mind was as quiet as if it had fled forever, though he knew it hadn't. Trey knew it was there, though. Hiding.

No, not hiding. Waiting.

“I don't know,” he said.

“No worries.” Malcolm's tone was light. “Doesn't matter.”

Trey didn't say anything.

“Listen,” Malcolm said. “Whatever it's like when the time comes, we've flown through worse, you and me.”

*   *   *

SHEILA WANTED TO
watch the news. The reporters said that voting was light across the country. This was especially true in rural areas, places that required long drives, long walks, visibility, in order to cast your vote. But in cities, too.

During these last few days, the thieves had nearly disappeared. Only a scattering of reports of new attacks had come in, and many of those were late accounts of incidents that had taken place days earlier.

An unusual number of absentee ballots had been requested and filled out, yet overall voting numbers were way down. Only a small fraction of the typical turnout for a presidential election was making it to the polls.

“Low turnout favors the challenger,” Sheila said. “It's the people who want change who go to the polling place no matter what.”

“America, you have a choice to make,” Anthony Harrison had said in his speech on Election Eve. “A life lived in fear . . . or one filled with hope?”

Words. They were just words.

There was no longer any choice at all.

*   *   *

“LET'S GO.”

Trey looked at her. She returned his gaze, and color rose to her pale cheeks. Without speaking, she got to her feet and picked up her fleece jacket from the back of a chair.

“No matter where I've been living, I've stayed a citizen of this country, and I've always voted,” she said, slipping her arms into it. “I even changed my registration to be able to vote here. I'm not going to miss this one.”

Trey didn't argue, just walked to the door and waited as she found her shoulder bag.

Don't be caught too far apart when the end comes,
Elena Stavros had said.

He wasn't going to convince her to stay in the apartment.

And he wasn't going to let her out of his sight.

*   *   *

A BUS WENT
by down on Seventh Avenue, a flash of blue-white light, a squeal of brakes that sounded like a distress call. Trey could see a couple of dark figures inside. A few cars, windows rolled tightly up against the chill—or in a hopeless gesture at safety—followed. Other than that, the avenue was empty.

Nearly empty.

Sheila said,
“Damn.”

The man walked past without seeing them. He was wearing suit pants, black socks but no shoes. No jacket or dress shirt, just a sleeveless undershirt.

His eyes gleamed silver in the streetlight.

As he passed, they could see the thief on the back of his neck, its stinger buried deep. A summoning, out in the open.

Trey caught a glimpse of the nightmare that had woken him that morning: Hundreds, thousands of people with their thief riders. Filling the streets. Filling the city.

The doomed man walked into a trash-strewn alley between a closed flower shop and an empty storefront that had once housed a pet store. Trey began to follow.

“Forget it,” Sheila said. “Let's go.”

Then, uncharacteristically, she added, “Trey, I've seen enough.”

But he hadn't. He took a few steps into the mouth of the alley. “Come here,” he said.

Still she hung back.

“Sheila
.
”

She came up beside him. The man they'd followed had slumped back against the flower shop's crumbling brick wall. A few feet farther down the alley lay a second man, and at their feet a woman was flat on her back. She looked as if she were staring up through the gap between the buildings, trying to see the stars.

“Three . . .” Sheila's voice was just a breath. “Together.”

But this was only part of it. “Look,” Trey said.

Sheila saw. These were no homeless people, no pierside prostitutes, no runaways. Not the ones so easily sacrificed while the rest stayed safe.

The second man's coat was open, revealing a dark suit, white shirt, a tie that might have been red but looked black in the faint light. The skirt of the woman's expensive suit was hiked up, revealing sheer hose that had run and legs bluish from the cold.

Trey raised his gaze, peering into the shadows. He knew what he was looking for, and in a few moments he found it. Two pairs of eyes. No, three, faceted gleams like green diamonds reflecting moonlight.

Darker than the shadows, the thieves moved forward to the mouth of the alley. Then stopped there, a half dozen feet from where Trey and Sheila stood. Staying far enough away to be safe from Sheila, but still sending a message as comprehensible as if they'd used words.

Don't come any closer. We'll sacrifice ourselves to save our young, but we'll kill you first.

“Let's go,” Trey said. Sheila nodded.

But then a sobbing woman pushed past them.

*   *   *

SHE WAS BEYOND
reach and down the alley before Trey or Sheila could do a thing to stop her. He took a step to follow, but Sheila grabbed his arm, hard, and yanked him back.

“No!” she said. Then, more quietly, “Trey, it's too late.”

She was right. He took a breath and steeled himself to watch what happened next. The inevitable.

Only it wasn't what he expected.

He'd been sure that the thieves would make short work of the woman, but that was not what took place. Although they all rose high on their legs in the alarm posture, the wasps stayed where they were. Eyes on Trey, on Sheila, on the street beyond, as if expecting—guarding against—a further attack.

Leaving the woman down the alley . . . to what?

Half lost in the shadows, she knelt over the man Trey and Sheila had seen entering. Pulling on his arms, trying to get him to his feet, calling out to him, her voice almost drowned by her tears.

He lay there, dead weight, unresponsive. Lost to her, and even she must have known it.

But as Trey and Sheila watched, the other two hosts stirred. Stirred as if awakening, rose to their knees, and reached for the woman.

She screamed.

Even with his sharp vision, Trey could make out only a shifting in the darkness, a tangle of limbs. The blur of her face as she fell back, the white of her stretched-wide eyes. Her hands reaching up, grasping at air.

He heard a loud, dull impact, the crack of something—her skull—breaking. The woman's second scream turned into deep-throated moans, and then silence. Yet still the two hosts worked at her body.

Trey thought about the ravening prisoner Thomas Nyramba had taken him to see in Uganda. About what that man, his brain controlled as these ones were, would have done if he'd been able to break his bonds.

“Let's go,” Sheila said. Her voice was harsh in the silence.

Trey looked at her, and though he didn't speak, she understood his question.

“Home,” she said.

Still he didn't move.

She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Voting!” she said. “Now? What a ridiculous dream.”

*   *   *

TREY'S CELL PHONE
sounded just as they walked through the apartment door. “Granger,” the caller ID read.

“We'll be ready in an hour,” Malcolm said. “Get your butts over here.”

Trey opened his mouth to say okay, they were on their way, but he never spoke the words. At that instant, his brain filled, overflowed, burst with white light, and then the phone had fallen from his hand and he was lying on his back on the floor.

Sheila knelt over him, her eyes full of panic, but he could barely see her. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn't hear anything but the sound of wings.

Information poured into him. Messages from the hive mind, a torrent of them, like frames spliced together from a thousand, a million, different movies. Overwhelming him, drowning him, even as he understood what he was seeing, what was happening right now, at this moment, all over the world.

There was just enough of his mind left to understand that he and Sheila had waited too long.