Invasive Species (32 page)

BRAZEN.

That was the word Mariama had used, and that was what the thieves had become. Brave. Fearless. Brazen.

It had begun immediately after the failed helicopter assault in Florida. (“A disastrously ill-conceived October Surprise whose only lasting impact may be the end of a presidency,” as one prestigious newspaper put it.)

Now, less than two weeks later, it seemed like they were everywhere. Spreading through nature preserves and city parks. Occupying rent-controlled apartment blocks and expensive suburban developments. Establishing colonies in beachside dunes and golf resort sand traps.

Far more visible than ever before. And why not? Why should they worry about being seen? People were terrified of them. No one would go near an adult thief, much less try to kill it. Everyone knew you couldn't fight them without risking an overwhelming attack in response.

The media, as always, stoked terror in the guise of providing information. You couldn't watch the cable news networks without seeing endless replays of the Florida catastrophe, along with footage of several other large attacks in different parts of the world.

Trey had seen one filmed in Russia. The screams had echoed in his head all day. After that, he stayed away from the coverage. It had nothing to teach him.

He did see one newspaper chart that was updated each day. With colorful graphics, it tracked the thieves' progress across the world.

“Just like our old map,” Sheila said.

She was right. The chart showed how the wasps had followed trade and travel routes, radiating outward from Africa to ports, canals, and big cities around the world. From there, blessed with abundant food supplies and hosts for their offspring, they'd undergone an enormous population explosion, colonizing new territory in all directions and at breakneck speed.

By now, they'd established themselves on six continents. Only Antarctica had remained untouched, though one thief, dead of some unknown cause, had been found aboard a supply ship heading to McMurdo Station.

Mariama had shrugged at this news. “I do not think they'll try to populate Antarctica.”

“Too cold?” Trey had asked.

She'd sighed. “I used to dream of living in a cold climate, because it would make me free of them at last. Now I think no place is safe. The thieves are opportunistic and hardy. If they have to live inside in the coldest regions, in corners, in attics and storerooms, they will.”

“Then why is Antarctica exempt?”

“I didn't say it was.” Mariama had looked directly into his eyes. “The thieves won't bother with it because it is doomed. Those few humans at McMurdo pose no threat, and they will die off on their own soon enough after the end comes.”

That was what conversations with Mariama were always like. Not if. Not even when.

After.

*   *   *

AFTERNOON SHADING INTO
dusk in Central Park. Some late-season softball players were trying to get a game together on the Great Lawn, but there weren't enough of them to make two teams. The thieves had been staying away from the park's big open expanses, so far, but so were most people. Coming out here, as these young men and women were doing, was itself an act of defiance.

“This feels strange,” Sheila said.

Trey said, “Well, yeah.”

She gave him a sideways look. They were sitting on a splintery bench under the cold autumn sun, side by side, facing the empty gray grass.

“I mean,” Sheila said, “where's Jack?”

“I knew what you meant.” Trey sighed. They were here in the park because they'd gone to the museum to clear out what they'd left in Jack's office. Books, mostly. And memories.

Sheila slid down on the bench a little, leaning her head against the back, stretching her long legs out in the dirt. Her eyes were closed.

Trey thought she looked like she was made of some pure, icy substance: porcelain, maybe. Or unforged silver. Incomparably beautiful but untouchable as well.

“My mother's mother was one of twelve children,” she said. “Nine of them died before they reached their sixth birthday.”

She opened her eyes and stared down at her hands. “Can you imagine losing a brother or sister every year or two? Or burying your own children?”

Trey said, “We're the first generation to think we have the right to live forever.”

The small group of softball players left the empty field and trailed past them.

“We were,” Sheila said. “But that's finished.”

Trey looked at her. After a moment, she sensed it and turned her head. Then, in an instant, her arms were around his neck and she was kissing him. Her lips were warm and soft, not porcelain, but there was something hungry, even desperate, about her grasp.

She broke away, loosened her grip, but kept her face close to his. “You,” she said.

“What about me?”

“What Kait said:
Don't die
.”

*   *   *

THEY WALKED PAST
Turtle Pond, its fringing brown cattails rattling in the breeze, to the area called the Ramble.

This hilly, densely wooded expanse had once been popular with two groups: gay men seeking rendezvous out of the public eye and birders seeking rarities. Today, though, it was the sort of place where only the insane would willingly venture.

The insane or the protected. Sheila had nothing to fear from the thieves. And Trey, though his safety was more equivocal, had decided not to hide, especially when he was in the company of one of the immunes.

They left the quiet park road, ghostly without its usual myriad of cyclists and joggers, and headed into the woods. Neither of them spoke, but they both knew what they were looking for.

It took only a few minutes. As always, the smell alerted them, at first just a harsh whiff carried away by the chilly breeze. Then stronger. A smell so omnipresent now, so familiar, that if they weren't searching they sometimes didn't even notice it.

The man lay on his back at the bottom of a small gully overgrown with bittersweet, mile-a-minute, and other invasive vines. He was wearing black pants, the right leg ripped to the knee, a Hannah Montana T-shirt, and an unzipped down jacket that had once been cream colored but was now caked with dirt.

He looked like he'd been homeless long before the thieves summoned him.

It took Trey a minute to find the wasp guarding its larva. The creature gave itself away with movement among the vines, a quick, agitated back-and-forth. As thieves always were, it was disturbed to be close to the poison and, perhaps, to Trey as well. To the corrupt, half-finished remnant of the hive mind he contained.

The wasp's head twisted as it kept them in view. There was likely another one or more somewhere in the vicinity. Staying hidden, watching, waiting to see if they presented a threat.

Sheila was looking at the man. No one would try to help him, they both knew. No one would go near.

And his death would make as little impact as the deaths of the homeless men who perished out in the streets whenever the city was gripped by a deep freeze.

Beside Trey, Sheila shuddered. They'd made it a practice to stop, pause, wherever they found a human host, to seek them out in parks and vacant lots and beneath underpasses and abandoned piers.

It had been Sheila's idea, her insistence, to seek out the infected. “Someone has to acknowledge them,” she'd said. “Someone has to remember that they were once human.”

Though each time she saw one, each time she witnessed the inevitable, she seemed sadder, more haunted.

“Let's go,” Trey said and took her arm.

But at that moment they heard a rustling in the brush beside the trail. A man emerged, another host. Walking with purpose, his head turning this way and that. Trey wondered what he was seeing through that silvery gaze.

“Trey,” Sheila said in a sudden, tortured whisper.
“Look.”

Trey had already seen it: a thief clinging to the back of the man's neck. Its slender abdomen was arched, and as the man passed they could see that it had plunged its needlelike stinger deep into his flesh, just between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Its head turned to watch Trey and Sheila, twisting to stay on them as the man moved down the trail.

Trey and Sheila both understood what they were seeing. The summoning.

He should have guessed. He'd seen wasps do this before, riding their victims, guiding them to their doom with chemicals administered directly to their brains. Only their victims had been cockroaches and spiders and other wasps, not primates. Not human beings.

That colobus monkey he'd seen in the Casamance, staggering into the thief colony's clearing, it must have had a rider as well. Trey had missed it. He hadn't known what to look for.

The man followed a curve in the path and moved out of sight. Again Trey said, “Let's go,” and this time Sheila didn't resist.

*   *   *

THEY WALKED EAST
and then up to Eighty-sixth Street and met Mariama at a Starbucks. She was staying with some old acquaintances in a Senegalese neighborhood in Brooklyn, but every day she and Trey talked, made plans, prepared.

Got ready for
after
.

The Starbucks was reasonably crowded. Logically or not, people felt more secure indoors, especially in crowds. Anyway, no matter what, they still needed their coffee. The last human force in the final battle would be fueled by Starbucks.

Sheila's mind was still on the latest victims she and Trey had seen. “Nobody was looking for them,” she said. “They had no one.”

Mariama shrugged. “That's how predators hunt. You know that. They choose the weak. The vulnerable.”

“They cull the herd,” Sheila said.

Trey breathed in. Someone had left a newspaper on their table, the
Times
. The headlines were all about the ongoing plunge in the stock market, factories closing because not enough workers were showing up, oil prices skyrocketing.

The president counseled patience. But Anthony Harrison promised that, when
he
was elected, things would change, and fast.

“This herd won't put up with being culled,” Trey said.

Mariama gave another shrug. “Then they'll be overwhelmed.”

*   *   *

“WHY DO I
have it inside me?” Trey asked. “The . . . mind?”

Mariama had hinted around, but until now he'd refused to talk about it. Suddenly, sitting here, he knew he was being ridiculous. After, there would be no room for anything but complete honesty.

She gave him a considering look, as if debating with herself how to answer.

“You saw,” he went on. “You knew right away.”

She nodded.

“That means you've seen it before.”

After another moment, another nod. “Of course I have. There is nothing about the thieves that we haven't seen.” She widened her eyes. “Except for their poison, they're not very complex.”

“Complex enough to bring down a civilization,” Sheila said.

Mariama shrugged. “A one-celled organism could do that.”

She turned back to Trey. “How long had you been infected when Sheila removed the larva?”

“Two days, I think.” He hesitated. “More. Closer to three.”

She raised her hand and touched the side of his head. “And how did you feel . . . in here? Before the worm was removed?”

“Like my mind was being eaten from the inside.”

“Yes.” She dropped her hand. “Yes. Others have used similar words.”

Sheila moved in her chair. “How much longer before he would have died from the surgery?”

“A few hours. Perhaps less. It is . . . not predictable.”

“So that's what happens even if you live?” Trey found this hard to say. “Some of it gets left behind?”

“Or it causes some kind of permanent changes in the chemistry of the brain.” Mariama frowned. “We do not know. In the Casamance, our scientists have not had the tools to study such things.”

Sheila's gaze had turned inward. “I should have noticed sooner,” she said. “And when I did, I shouldn't have hesitated.”

“No.” Mariama reached across the table and touched her gently on the arm. “You were brave. Even in the Casamance, many would not have been as brave as you.”

Sheila didn't reply, but Trey thought she looked a little calmer within herself.

“And by waiting, we've gained something, too,” Mariama went on.

Trey thought of the white light that had filled his brain as the Florida assault had begun, as the helicopters had burst into flames.

“Awareness,” he said. “Knowledge.”

Mariama nodded.

“But what has Trey lost?” Sheila said.

Mariama didn't reply at once. Trey glanced over at the table next to theirs. A woman was huddled over her laptop with the news on the screen. She was watching a clip of Anthony Harrison giving a speech in front of a huge crowd. He was gesturing as he talked, pointing, his face alight with anger.

Trey looked back at Mariama. “What's inside me . . . it's never going away, is it?”

She tilted her head as she looked at him, her silence an answer.

“This—illness.” He struggled to find the right word. “This condition. Does it get worse over time?”

After a moment, she said, “Yes. Most often . . . quite slowly. But, yes, it's progressive.”

Sheila made an impatient movement. “Progressive,” she said, spitting out the word. “I guess that leaves me only one option.”

Trey said, “Which is?”

“To be the doctor who develops the cure.”

*   *   *

THEY STOOD OUTSIDE
the subway station. Eighty-sixth Street had always been a little shabby, but now it was virtually abandoned. Small groups of people, in threes and fours, headed into one or another of the electronics stores or fast-food restaurants, but the street had none of the market-day bustle it had once possessed.