Invasive (29 page)

Sandy. Jesus, Sandy. He tries not to cry again, but the gulping sob comes out of his throat as he remembers her writhing on the floor of their hotel room, bitten up by those little motherfuckers. He ran away from her. He didn't try to help.

He's a bad person. He knows that now. A coward. This was supposed to be a nice vacation. He was going to propose to Sandy. The ring is still in his pocket. Hanging heavy there in its little box.

The ants came in just after noon. Nobody thought much of it at first other than how disgusting it was—an invasion of little buggies in a pricey Kauai hotel, well, you can be sure everyone was right away rushing to their phones and tablets to start leaving nasty one-star Yelp reviews. But the ants kept coming, and they didn't want crumbs.

In the moonlight, Gabe sees a body on a nearby pool chair. Facedown, ass up. Sometimes it looks like the body is moving, like it's breathing, but it isn't. It's
them
.

A little line of them marches near the edge of the pool, skin bits held aloft in their jaws.

Gabe thinks,
Maybe it'll be over soon
. Surely someone will come. He hears sirens sometimes. Yelling and screaming. Gunshots, too. Maybe people are killing themselves. Guns in mouths, triggers pulled. Leaving this world instead of watching it go like this.

He has things to live for, he tells himself. Friends, family. A dog named Beans. A nice car—okay, not
nice
-nice, but it's a four-door Hyundai and it's new and fuck you if you can't appreciate the power of a new car.

Gabe pisses clumsily into the pool.
I'm sanitizing it,
he thinks madly.

Of course, you can drink your own pee, can't you? He doesn't remember. Not that it matters much because he doesn't
want
to drink his own pee and again he reiterates:
It'll be over soon.
Someone will come. Cops. FEMA. The military. Christ, isn't there a big military base on the far side of the island? Got to be people there gearing up to help.

Once in a while, the ants come closer. He can see them there, lining up at the edge of the pool. In the quieter times, he can hear the faint clicking of their feet. Sounds almost like someone typing on a keyboard in another room.

Once in a while, they drop into the water. Whenever that happens, he thinks:
Drown, you little assholes. Drown.
Then he laughs so he doesn't cry.

Now, though, they're not just dropping into the water. He can see them climbing down the inside of the pool. Right to the top of the water but no farther.

“Get away!” he yells, and he takes the flat of his hand and makes a splashing wave. It hits the gathering ants. Some of them wash into the pool. Most, though, stay right where they are.

He blinks. Then he sees it: their tiny legs connecting to one another. New ants come to replace those washed away, and they climb over the others and begin to move into the water.

Where, he figures, they drown.

But even drowning, they stay floating. And as the dead ants accumulate, the others begin to use them to stand on so that
they
aren't in the water.

Gabe splashes at them again, and once more some go under while just as many stay buoyant. They're building a raft—which in turn is becoming a bridge. Right toward him. All the alarm bells go off in his head.

He starts formulating a plan: Go to the opposite end of the pool. Climb out. There's a fence, a tall bamboo fence so gawkers can't peer in at the pool. Beyond it is the parking lot. He can climb the fence, land in the lot. Then he can run, full speed, to the beach, which is only 200, maybe 250 yards the other way . . .

Gabe drops off the raft, the water up to his chin. He starts swimming toward the opposite end of the pool.

The ants are at that end, too.

He swims right—

Ants.

He swims left—

They're coming from all sides now. Creeping in over the edge. Dropping into the water and using their drowning comrades as rafts.

Gabe does all he can do. He goes the one direction they cannot. He dives down into the dark water. The chlorine burns his eyes. Bubbles flutter up from his nostrils.
I can hold my breath a long time,
he thinks, or he used to be able to when he was a kid. But the more he thinks about it, the more his lungs feel like they're on fire, the more his ribs hurt, the more his mind feels the way his dog acts during a thunderstorm—scrabbling at the door, clawing at the counters, shaking like a leaf . . .

He can't hold it anymore.

Gabe thrusts up out of the water. At first he thinks he's fine, they've gone. But as he draws in a deep, gasping breath—something's in his mouth. A clot of crawling things, working their way down his throat. He begins to choke. And thrash. They're on his face. His ears.

He tries to vomit—

A pinch. A sting.

His body stiffens.

I love you, Sandy. I'm sorry I ran.

As Gabe's body begins to spasm and he takes water into his lungs with a sudden hitching gulp, one last thought swims up out of the dark to meet him on his way down:

Sandy
,
will you marry me?

1:30
A.M.

The CBRN suit is ill-fitting. Hollis feels like he's wrapped in butcher paper and bagged like meat. He steps out of the back of the Jeep, and the two sailors, Hurwitch and Hornshaw, get on either side of him.

It's quiet here. Ahead, the masts of boats stand like sentinels, lit by the watery glow of old streetlights. They walk down past the Waikaea Canal toward the docks and the little ramshackle hut. Hollis sees no ants, but that's because he doesn't see any
people
. The little monsters are as single-minded as they come. Ez told him they have antennae that can pick up human frequencies like a shark sniffing blood from a mile off. He hopes like hell he's not radiating
the stink of sweat or cologne or bad breath just because the suit doesn't fit right.

“Agent,” Hurwitch—or maybe it's Hornshaw—says. “This way.”

Hollis nods (the suit squeaks and rasps), and they walk along past the fishing boats parked here. Ahead, the hut is old wood with a roof made to look like thatch, but underneath all the grassy bits are wood shingles. A customer service window has been cut out of the front. A body lies slumped there. Half across the counter. Arms dangling out over the edge. Glistening red in the moonlight.

Hollis steps over. Most of the hair is gone. White bone shines. Flies take flight as he gets closer, but they don't stay away for long; they will not be dissuaded from a perfectly good meal.
The age of the insect,
he thinks.
The meek truly shall inherit the earth.

“Sir,” Hornshaw—or is it Hurwitch?—says. “Here's the camera.”

It's on a pole adjacent to the hut. All the docks have security cameras. Part of Homeland Security law. And this one, like all the others, is old, decrepit, an antique rimed with salt.

And with a bullet hole in the dead center of the glass. Just like at the last three fishing harbors.

“Someone took this one out, too,” Hollis says.

“Sorry,” Hurwitch says, and he knows it's Hurwitch because Hurwitch is the nicer of the two and apologizes for everything like it's his fault.

Hollis goes back to the hut and leans over the customer service window. Looks again at the body. The last three joints didn't have anybody there. They were closed for business. The dead they found were on boats moored to the dock, not behind the counter. Here a rust-pocked sign says they're open twenty-four hours. Makes sense. Fishing boats want to go out early.

Hollis reaches over, puts the flat of his fingers under the dead man's forehead, and lifts. The man's face pulls away from the counter with the sound of ripping wallpaper. Ants spill out of the man's mouth, nose—

And from a hole in the center of his forehead.

Hollis barks a wordless alarm and launches himself backward. The man's head thuds forward again, shaking more ants free. They patter against the ground. Some aren't black. They're white.
No,
Hollis thinks, the ants are carrying something white.

“Eggs,” Hornshaw/Hurwitch says. “They're carrying little eggs.”

“They were making a nest in the man's head?” Hollis asks.

“Looks like.”

Hollis has to try very hard not to throw up in his suit. When he's composed himself, he again lifts the dead man's head. Sure enough, he saw what he thought he saw. A bullet hole right in the middle of the man's skull. Never came out the back of the head. Low-caliber pistol. Maybe a .22. Though he's seen times when a .25 or .32 didn't make an exit wound, either—smaller caliber means a softer punch.

And there, over the man's shoulder—in the shack behind—Hollis spies a winking green light. He heads around to the door next to the customer service window. Finding it locked, one of the two sailors pulls a pistol and—
bang, bang
—barks two shots against the knob.
That's one way to do it.
The door drifts open.

Hornshaw (Hollis is pretty sure) says to Hurwitch, “You didn't have to fire your damn gun. We could've kicked it down. Shoot. My ears are ringing.”

“Whatever, man.”

“Warn me next time.”

“I said whatever.”

Hollis steps inside, and there, on a bench full of fishing supplies, he finds a laptop computer. At the top of the screen is the winking green light. And it's right next to a camera.

Bingo.

Back at the Roc, they pull up the video archive. Looks like the camera is pretty much always on. Then the man who owned it, a man
named Jed Freeman (also the name on the business lease), diced those videos up into their own feeds. Looks like he was capturing videos of pretty girls going out on booze cruises—girls in bikinis, thongs, and the like. All the videos are like that.

All the videos but the one from last night. That one plays thusly:

Just before sunrise. 6:15
A.M.
time stamp. No sound.

Boat pulls up in the distance.

In view is, presumably, Jed Freeman. Just past him is another man, unidentified—tall, maybe Chinese. Wispy goatee. Trucker hat turned around.

Suddenly, the two of them startle. They look around. Not quite panicked, but definitely confused. The man in the trucker hat points up toward the camera on the pole next to the hut.

They look at each other, talking—but there's no sound, so no way to hear what they're saying. (Hollis wonders if it's worth getting a lip-reading expert. The video is grainy, though. Lots of visual artifacts.)

Jed and Trucker Hat are still talking to each other, looking up at the camera. They don't see, in the distance, the boat sidling up to the dock. There's the blur of a rope lashing around a post. Someone in all black steps off.

A gangplank down. The person goes back on the boat.

Then the person is back again. Walking backward and pulling a hand truck with a barrel resting against it.

Barrel down. The stranger begins to walk down the dock. Toward Jed and Trucker Hat.

The stranger is a woman. Long hair. White skin. Too grainy to make out much else yet. One arm looks funny, Hollis realizes—but wait, no, that's not her arm. It's something looped over her shoulder, next to her arm. A rifle.

She doesn't need it, though, because in her hand she's got a pistol.

Trucker Hat turns, sees what's coming. He pivots, tries to run—A red puff near his head and he goes down.

Jed has his arms up, waving them like,
No, no, no
—The gun
muzzle flashes again. His head shimmies left and right, the motion of the bullet entering the head and bopping around inside without coming out. Then his head drops forward.

The shooter brings the barrel forward, then cracks it open down the middle. And then she leaves.

For a while, nothing.

Hollis asks Yeoman Stroop to fast-forward. She does. “Stop,” he says.

He sees something spilling out of the bottom. Like it's leaking oil or ink. But it's not liquid. It's the ants.