Slavemakers

Praise for

INVASIVE SPECIES

“Cost me a perfectly good night's sleep . . . I hope Wallace carries a screenplay of
Invasive Species
in his hip pocket; he's going to need it.”

—Bill Ransom, author of
Burn

“Wallace's unsettling, mind-bending apocalyptic novel chillingly dives into what happens when the balance of the world is disrupted and an invasive species grabs the reins. Terrifying and, yes, poetic, this is a novel that gets under your skin with an ‘it could happen here' kind of chilling grace.”

—Caroline Leavitt,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Is This Tomorrow

“A vivid detour into hell . . . Scary good.”

—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of
The Water Museum
and
Queen of America

“Unbelievably engrossing and mildly terrifying,
Invasive Species
is impossible to set down.”

—
San Francisco Book Review

“Wallace has crafted a truly believable tale of invasion in this book . . . This one is deserving of every bit of the hype it has received and then some.”

—Bookshelf Bombshells

“Wallace seems to have studied the best speculative action page-turners in history, such as those by Benchley and Crichton, and has outdone them all in one fell swoop.”

—g33k-e.com

Titles by Joseph Wallace

INVASIVE SPECIES

SLAVEMAKERS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

SLAVEMAKERS

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Wallace.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

For more information, visit
penguin.com
.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-17945-5

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Ace premium edition / December 2015

Cover art by Nekro.

Cover design by George Long and Adam Auerbach.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Sharon, Shana, and Jacob. Always.

And for Danielle, Emmalisa, Liana, Mike, Sophie Dora, Stephanie, and Violet, whose boundless enthusiasm meant everything to me as I was writing this book.

With this novel, as with all my books, I'm grateful to many people for their help . . . and their patience:

Sharon AvRutick, a superb editor and, as always, my first reader, who guided me through the process of making this complex story come clear.

Deborah Schneider, my brilliant literary agent and a marvelously insightful reader as well. This novel and I are both indebted to her.

Robin Barletta, Natalee Rosenstein, and the whole team at Berkley and Ace. I'm grateful for their faith in this book and the beautiful job they did turning it into a reality.

My brothers, Jonathan and Rich, who share my love of nature, not least the creepy-crawly parts.

Keith Bass, with memories of bug-filled tents with leopards snarling just outside; Danielle Tobias, who allowed me to distract her from work for lively conversations about parasitic wasps, zombie ants, and other cool creatures; and Carl Mehling and Fiona Brady, who provided timeless perspectives on the history of life on earth—as well as peerless company over delicious meals on Arthur Avenue.

And, crucially, Emmalisa Stangarone, my research assistant. During hours-long Skype sessions, Emma patiently and generously discussed her findings, experiences, and insights, helping me breathe life into some of the novel's most important characters and settings.

I'm also indebted to two books. Among the many (many!) postapocalyptic novels I've read, one that strikes deep is John Wyndham's haunting
The Day of the Triffids
(1951), with its indelible exploration of the concept of a “soft apocalypse.” And, for a fearless portrayal of black widow spiders, tarantula hawk wasps, rattlesnakes, and other ferocious hunters, Gordon Grice's 1998
The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators
can't be topped. My slavemakers—and the universe they inhabit—wouldn't exist without it.

To learn more about
Slavemakers
, my other books and stories, and me, check out josephwallace.com. (You can get in touch with me there as well.) The website links to my YouTube channel, where I've uploaded short films to accompany my novels. I'm also on Twitter @Joe_Wallace and at facebook.com/JoeWallaceWriter. Hope to hear from you.

THE HELICOPTER ROSE
from the black, blood-soaked grass, slewing sideways as its rotors spilled air. Malcolm Granger fought with the stick and the throttle, but even though he was the best pilot he'd ever met, he knew that his chances of wrestling this overloaded Schweizer S-333 over the trees were god-awful—and of getting himself and his passengers to safety, even worse.

Thirty seconds earlier, Malcolm had been sure he was about to die. He'd seen the instrument of his death approaching, coming at him from all directions, and had known there was nothing he could do to prevent it. He'd known he was helpless.

This pissed him off. He fucking hated being helpless. He'd done the best he could, gotten further already than anyone else would have, he was sure of that. And death had never scared him. Losing, failing, that gutted him, but dying itself? No worries.

But then, just like that, the threat had disappeared. In a blink. The thieves were coming, they were inside the helicopter with him, then they were . . . gone. The moment of his death passed, and he was still alive.

He couldn't understand it. But understanding didn't matter. The S-333 bucked in his hands, fell twenty feet, threatened to roll. He was still alive, and if the bugs hadn't killed him, this fucking machine wasn't going to be the thing that did.

Down on the ground, too close once again, he saw the pale smudges of faces in the darkness, flickering white in the light of the immense flames consuming the buildings to the south. That was where the jet had gone down, the passenger plane that, screaming upside down a hundred feet above them, had come close to turning the helicopter—and Malcolm—into a smear of metal and flesh.

Smudges of faces. Not human faces, though. The faces of whatever humans became in the last stage. The faces of monsters reaching for him as he regained control and hovered for an instant just above their grasp.

The humans who were still alive weren't looking up. They were running. Or rolling on the ground. Or clutching at their eyes. Or they were already lying still.

Soon enough, all of them would be dead. Dead or worse. There was no room for them on the Schweizer, nor time.

Once more, Malcolm regained control, and the helicopter roared upward to safety. Temporary safety. At his feet, Trey Gilliard writhed and spasmed. Malcolm had no idea what had possessed him, but you didn't have to be a devil-worshipper to see that he was possessed.

Or: Half of Trey writhed. The other half was hanging out of the hatch. The way the S-333 was slipping and sliding, he would have been long gone, plummeted to the blood-soaked ground into the grasp of the monsters, if not for Sheila.

Malcolm had barely met Sheila, and she hadn't made much of an impression on him. A serious young woman who rarely smiled and sometimes seemed overwhelmed by the speed with which things were falling apart.

But now, watching her hang on to Trey, risking her own life to save his, Malcolm was changing his opinion. As they skimmed just above the trees that lined the park—feeling the heat from the airplane crash and a dozen, a hundred, other fires already beginning to consume the city—he saw her pull Trey fully inside and to safety.

Well. Shit. Safety by its current definition.

In his life on the edges of civilization, Malcolm, clear-eyed and fearless, had been witness to war and famine and acts of terrorism, to human suffering and death in all its variety and abundance. But as he took the little helicopter higher and aimed it north, the sights that greeted him were almost unendurable.

He wanted to close his eyes. Yet he forced himself to look because already he knew that someone had to see it. Had to watch the destruction of the civilization, the world, they'd all thought could not be breached.

On the floor near Malcolm's feet, Trey was finally still. Sheila was huddled over him, her face close to his.

So Malcolm was the only witness. No, that wasn't true. There were others. Millions. Billions. But they were all dead already, even if they didn't realize it yet.
He would be the only one to see and live to remember. The only one left to tell the story.

If they reached their destination, the little airport where the others waited for them. If he survived this night.

He piloted the S-333 over and around countless burning buildings. Orange and red and pure blinding white, spreading, flooding like a tsunami's wake down avenues snarled with cars that would never move again. Buildings collapsing, sending plumes of sparks and fountains of smoke erupting skyward.

On the streets below, some headlights were still gleaming. Brighter, and more hopeless, were the spinning red-and-white beacons of the fire engines. But no one was left to operate the hoses, and anyway, it was far too late. The city was beyond saving.

The cars and trucks were abandoned, but not the buildings that were still standing. He saw people perched on windowsills, outlined by fire. People jumping, choosing one kind of death over another. Small groups and big crowds huddled on rooftops, black smoke billowing past them, faces turned toward the helicopter, toward Malcolm, as if he were a vision from a future where they might survive. A dream of life.

A hopeless dream. Because everywhere,
everywhere
, was the whirlwind. Thieves in such numbers that even Malcolm's head spun. Vast spiraling clouds of them, the maestros of the city's destruction.

No. Not them. Not the whirlwind. It was the mind that had done this. The thieves were just the instruments of its plan.

*   *   *

THEY FLEW NORTH.

Finally leaving the conflagration behind and passing over the darkened suburbs. Some fires here as well, just beginning to spread, but all else dark except for the headlights. The power grid gone, and gone for good.

The highways gone as well, blocked forever by crashed and wrecked cars. Yet not every route was closed off, and Malcolm glimpsed below them the weakly glowing firefly's trail of a car moving along some smaller road. A lone car cresting a hill, its headlights flashing like a lighthouse beacon.

No: like the ghostly lights on a ship, seen from the surface as it sinks into the depths.

Malcolm took one last look at the car, imagining its unseen driver hurtling from one certain death to another. Then he straightened. Ahead, through a scrim of bare trees, he could see the emergency lights illuminating the runway of Westchester County Airport. At the foot of the runway stood the Citation X private jet that he had retrofitted for this night. This night that had come too soon.

The little plane that held some of the few who would survive the destruction of the Last World.

*   *   *

IN ALL THE
years that followed, Malcolm told only a few people about what he had seen that night. Only those few who were closest to him, who never passed on the details to anyone else.

But others let their imaginations run wild, and in doing so assumed that Malcolm would never want to venture back into the world whose final torments he'd witnessed. They assumed he'd be happy spending the rest of his life in the haven that Refugia, the village that was their home, provided.

So everyone was shocked when, even in the early years, Malcolm was already making plans to leave once again. And when, as soon as he could, he started building the three-masted, square-rigged ship that years later would be christened the
Trey Gilliard
. A ship designed for nothing but exploration. Escape.

People guessed, they psychoanalyzed, they speculated. But they couldn't understand why Malcolm couldn't stop wandering.

Or what—or who—he was so desperate to find.