by Jon Land
“Is there any scientific precedent for them becoming carnivorous?”
“Over time, beetles can adapt to practically any kind of diet. Some break down animal and plant debris; some feed on particular kinds of carrion, such as flesh or hide; some feed on wastes, fungi, or plants. Some beetles are fruit eaters.” Something changed in Whatley’s expression, wariness replacing the childlike gleam. “And some are predatory. Ranger. I watched a video of a ground beetle attacking an earthworm that would freeze your insides.”
Caitlin looked back at the picture. “And you’re saying an army of these is what dropped those cattle in their tracks and chewed them up.”
“Not exactly chewed,” Whatley corrected. “Beetles don’t have teeth; they have pincerlike mandibles that help them crush and eat food. But that’s the idea, yes. And they’re also a nearly perfect organism, one of the most survivable on the planet, even more adaptable than cockroaches—and far more formidable.”
“What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Well, bombardier beetles secrete a compound they can actually shoot, potentially injuring small mammals and killing invertebrate predators outright. And the Anthiinae family of beetles, meanwhile, can hit their targets with similar secretions from as much as ten feet away.”
“How much of this did the two of you know a couple days back?”
“Not a whole lot,” Whatley shrugged.
“I don’t like sleeping much anyway,” Young Roger added.
“At all, more like, in this case,” Caitlin corrected. “One thing, though, Doc: cattle aren’t small mammals.”
“No, Ranger, they’re not. But a million of these things would be enough to cover a half-acre of land in a black blanket.” His face paled a bit. “I can’t even picture what a swarm of them feeding on a herd would look and sound like.”
“What do you mean ‘sound’?”
“The bess beetle is able to produce a recorded fourteen acoustic signals, more than many vertebrates. Adults produce the sounds by rubbing the upper surface of the abdomen against the hind wings.”
“But they can’t fly, right?”
“Not that we know of, no.”
“That’s a strange way of putting it, Doc.”
Whatley’s expression turned dour. Young Roger took a single step forward to place himself between the older man and Caitlin.
“Now comes the fun part,” said Young Roger. “A picture out of the old encyclopedia is all well and good, except for the fact what we’re facing here is as advanced beyond that thing as we are from cavemen.”
“The boy can’t prove what he’s about to say, Ranger,” Doc Whatley cautioned.
“But you agree with me on most of it.”
“Some, son. Some.”
Caitlin planted her hands on her hips, stopped just short of stamping her foot and firing her gun into the ceiling. “Will one of you get to the point?”
Whatley nodded. “We agree on the fact that exposure to something in the soil, air, or groundwater—maybe a combination of all three—led to a drastic mutation. We’re guessing the mutation would’ve occurred over several life cycles. Since beetles ordinarily live around a year, whatever stimulus caused the mutation would date back three or four years, probably.”
“This didn’t happen overnight, in other words,” an antsy Young Roger added.
“I’m talking here,” Whatley groused at him.
“My turn now,” Young Roger said, no longer able to contain himself. “These things aren’t just mutations—at least I don’t believe they are.”
“Then what are they?” Caitlin asked him.
“Advanced on the evolutionary scale, Ranger. I think we’re looking at what beetles would have evolved into after, well, maybe another ten thousand years or so.”
* * *
“Just a theory,” reminded Doc Whatley, “with no proof or data to back it up.”
“The proof and data is in the cattle and crops they’ve been eating.”
“They don’t actually eat the crops,” Whatley corrected. “They eat the refuse and, especially, the seeds.”
“Same effect.”
“Not really.”
“So,” Caitlin advanced, before the two men could start arguing again, “these crop infestations weren’t really infestations or blights at all.”
“No, ma’am,” said Young Roger. “The crops didn’t grow at all, or grew poorly, because the seeds had been damaged or destroyed.”
“You can see where we’re going with this,” said Whatley. “Traditionally, beetles aren’t migratory by nature. But these will go anywhere there’s a food supply for them, in the form of crops or cattle—anything green or flesh and blood, really.”
“The whole Midwest, in other words.”
“Maybe just for starters. I’ve been doing some figuring, Ranger. Care to hazard a guess as to how many of these things there’ll be in a year’s time if this continues unchecked?”
“Not really.”
“Neither can I, because the figures keep climbing. A trillion at last count, or three thousand for every American, according to the last census.”
“Jesus Christ.…”
“Yeah,” echoed Young Roger, “do the math.”
“That’s only part of the picture,” said Whatley. “That analysis of the recovered frass I did also found plenty of crop waste, too, almost like, well…”
“Almost like what, Doc?” Caitlin pushed.
“Like these sons of bitches are eating everything in their path, Ranger.”
76
MANHATTAN, KANSAS
“Cheer up, cowboy. How bad can it be?” Jones said, his voice a bit slurred by the third whiskey he was working his way through. Jack Daniel’s poured neat, in an actual glass, since they were flying private.
Their jet had finally been cleared for takeoff, and Cort Wesley found himself unable to stop picturing the hordes of beetles, making up the growing number of colonies, overrunning the entire state of Texas before spreading out in all directions.
“This is the happiest I’ve ever seen you, Jones. If I wasn’t the only one here, I’d suspect someone had slipped something into your drink.”
“It’s called purpose. I’ve got people taking my calls again. I’m back in the game. Fuck persona non grata.”
Cort Wesley had his cell phone out. “I’m calling my boys.”
“It’s been, what, a whole two hours since you spoke with them last?”
“What part of my youngest maybe still being a target don’t you understand?”
* * *
Cort Wesley turned away from Jones to hit “Dylan” on his Contacts list, remembering how his oldest son had lost his patience teaching him how to program all the numbers and e-mail. How long ago had that been? Maybe before the boy had gone off to college—an Ivy League school, no less. What were the odds?
“Everything’s fine, Dad,” the boy said by way of greeting, picking up after the first ring. “Just like the last time you called.”
“Nothing suspicious?”
“Nope, other than those black helicopters circling overhead.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not going back to school until it’s over.”
“Put your brother on.”
“Can’t you call him back on his own phone?”
“I’m paying for both of them. Now get him on yours.”
It took maybe half a minute before Luke came on.
“I’m on my way home,” Cort Wesley told him.
“You don’t have to keep calling. I’m fine.” But then a pause followed, heavy enough for Cort Wesley to feel the air over the line between them. “Any word on the kids from my school?”
“Not that I’ve heard. But you don’t have to worry. Caitlin’s gonna find them and bring them home.”
Cort Wesley could hear Luke snickering on the other end of the line. “You talk to me like I’m ten. It’s on TV twenty-four/seven. FBI’s in charge now. Rangers aren’
t even involved anymore.”
“This is Caitlin Strong we’re talking about. Think that’s gonna stop her?”
“The big guy was here,” Luke told him.
“I know. His men still are.”
“I can’t see them.”
“You’re not supposed to. Neither will anybody stupid enough to come anywhere near the house.”
“That’s good.” Luke paused, tension crossing over the line as Cort Wesley listened to him breathe. “Zach’s parents picked him up.”
“Okay,” was all Cort Wesley could think to say, as opposed to something wrong.
“They didn’t look too happy. I don’t think they like me.”
“Screw them.”
“Yeah,” Luke followed. “Screw them.”
“I want to give them a call, tell them they’ve got a good kid.”
“This all really sucks.”
“You can’t be blaming yourself.”
“I wish I was bigger, I was stronger. What I’d like to do to whoever’s behind this…”
“I know how you feel, son.”
“Last year, when the big guy drowned those two men in my fish tank at school, it didn’t bother me. I didn’t feel anything, because I knew they were going to hurt me, and I was glad he did it. Is that okay?”
Cort Wesley almost said, wanted to say, a whole lot of things, but only a single word emerged ahead of his thoughts. “Yes.”
* * *
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked Jones, once the call was done.
“Since when do you need to ask permission?”
“Last year, when you knew Luke was in trouble, you sent Paz to his school.”
“Right,” Jones smirked. “You’re welcome.”
“So you were watching him. You were watching Luke.”
Jones ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, said nothing.
“Anything you’d like to tell me?” Cort Wesley continued.
Jones looked a bit befuddled, even suspicious. “I told the Ranger he was in danger. I sent Paz to pick him up. What else are you looking for?”
“Never mind,” Cort Wesley said, looking away.
77
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“I’m no entomologist,” Doc Whatley continued. “And, even if I was, I’d need living samples of these beetles to do a detailed study. But I can say, even absent of that, that this isn’t remotely part of the natural order, leaving something unnatural to blame for their behavior.”
“As in…”
“Like I said before, genetic mutation would be the most obvious and likely, caused by exposure to something entered into their ecosystem that altered their DNA. Something that also accelerated their reproductive capacity and turned them into insatiable eating machines.”
“Any idea what that could be?”
Whatley shrugged. “Right now, your guess is as good as mine. But if you’re looking for a scientific precedent for what we’re facing, check out army ants. When a colony exhausts its available food supply, it enters a nomadic phase where the ants set off to forage and consume any living thing in their path. I’ve read that a single colony can consume a hundred thousand animals per day.”
“Hold on, did you say a hundred thousand?”
“I did indeed, Ranger.”
“So how is it we’ve got something like that going on right under our noses and no one’s seen these things?”
Whatley nodded, clearly having pondered that himself already. “Well, army ants march by night and rest during the day. I’d say the same could be true with these beetles, burrowing underground to nest during the daylight hours and emerging to feed on anything in their path at night.”
“Sounds like they could be averse to sun or heat, maybe both. So they avoid the strong light of day.”
“I guess. It could also be that these feeding phases are more sporadic than regular. And, under any scenario, the colony wouldn’t have started at the level it’s grown to now, remember. So any early incidents—compared to the more recent destruction of large swatches of crops, and now these livestock deaths—wouldn’t have made anybody’s radar.”
Caitlin thought of the various areas throughout Texas where blights and animal kills were known to have taken place, including Armand Bayou, where Luke’s classmates had disappeared. “One more thing, Doc. What would determine which direction these things followed?”
“Again, you’re as much an entomologist here as I am. I think we’d be looking at environmental factors like soil condition—soft instead of rocky, for burrowing. And they would gravitate toward the largest sources of food supply. Remember, beetles rely primarily on their sense of smell, so it wouldn’t be hard for them to move from one source to another based on which way the wind took them.”
“Is there some food source that might attract them more than others?” she raised to both Doc Whatley and Young Roger.
“That’s the rub, Ranger,” Whatley said, jumping in first. “We don’t know enough to even hazard a guess about that.”
“In other words,” picked up Roger, “everything we’re postulating here is based on what we know about beetles, their habits and patterns. The problem is these aren’t your daddy’s bugs. They’re mutations, genetically altered, thanks to some stimulus that disrupted their life cycle and created the superstrain we’re facing now.”
“Could you be a little more specific, Rog?”
“It’s difficult, Ranger; all supposition at this point. But the common denominator is the farms and ranches known to suffer pest infestations, though obviously on a much smaller level.”
“Pesticides,” Caitlin advanced, nodding.
“Indeed,” Whatley said, jumping in. “But most pesticides are essentially neurotoxins that kill everything they come into contact with. More modern methods, some of which are untested and experimental, rely on homing in on a genetic sequence that’s unique to one species, thereby sparing others that are exposed.”
“It’s called RNA interference,” Young Roger added, “and some say it’s the key to eradicating all pests in the future, and perhaps hunger and famine along with them.”
“What do the others say?” Caitlin asked him.
But it was Doc Whatley who answered. “That using it now, as a little paper called The New York Times reported, is the equivalent of using DDT as a pesticide in the 1950s—and look how that worked out.” He looked toward Young Roger. “Why don’t you tell her about the case that’s most similar to what we may be facing with these beetles here?”
“Experiments were done with corn, incorporating a toxin into the crops that was supposed to kill rootworms. Worked like charm, for a while, until the rootworms developed a resistance to that toxin and everything else technology could throw at them. They’d become impervious to all efforts at eradicating them or even moderating their behavior. A superstrain, you might call it, that was eventually killed off by frost, if you can believe that.”
“You think that describes what happened to our super-beetles.”
“Not exactly, no,” Young Roger told her. “Beetles aren’t considered dangerous to crops, especially compared to other pests. I think the first generation of these beetles was exposed to one of these RNA compounds meant to alter the genetics of a different insect. I think it got inside them and, by the time it spread geometrically through the reproductive process, they weren’t the same insects anymore. They’re what you see now—an entirely different species, for all intents and purposes, and exceedingly dangerous.”
“Cavemen and us,” Whatley advanced, restating the metaphor. “That’s the level of variance we’re looking at and, unfortunately, we don’t know any more about these beetles than we actually know about those cavemen.”
“How much could the Soviets have known in 1983?” Caitlin asked them both, thinking of the case worked by her father, for which he’d enlisted the help of Boone Masters.
“Well, the technology wasn’t there to pull this off on the level and scale we�
�re discussing,” Young Roger told her. “But they could have come up with something very close and very, very dangerous.”
“Where you going with this, Ranger?” Whatley asked her.
“You don’t want to know, Doc, believe me. But given what we do know, what exactly are we looking at if these things keep spreading?”
Doc Whatley swallowed hard, looking toward Young Roger, who was more than happy to respond. “The loss of a vast percentage of our crops and livestock throughout the Midwest and, before very long, California and Florida too.”
“Okay,” she said, “so these things are out there, and now we know it. So how do we go about stopping them?”
“How many bullets does your pistol hold?” Young Roger asked her.
“Fourteen in the mag, one in the chamber.”
“Since that’s a bit short of the trillion you’d need, Ranger, I’d consider calling nine-one-one.”
Caitlin tried to smile but couldn’t. “Normally, I’m the one who answers,” she told him.
78
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Caitlin sat in Captain Tepper’s truck for a few minutes with the windows rolled down and the sun burning her face through the windshield. He never used air-conditioning, probably didn’t even know his truck’s was broken.
She’d parked in the sun outside the University of Texas Health Science Center, in which the medical examiner’s office was located. Even with twilight closing in now, the cab was still warm, which helped to erase the layer of cool clamminess that seemed to have enveloped her skin during the course of her meeting with Doc Whatley and Young Roger. The minutes had literally melted into hours, but she’d still left with the anxiety of not knowing nearly enough. She couldn’t recall a time when she’d been more frightened by what she was facing.
I think the first generation of these beetles was exposed to one of these RNA compounds meant to alter the genetics of a different insect. I think it got inside them and, by the time it spread geometrically through the reproductive process, they weren’t the same insects anymore. They’re what you see now—an entirely different species.…
Caitlin couldn’t remember whether it was Doc Whatley or Young Roger who’d said that. Recalling it now triggered thoughts of something else, a missing piece just out of her grasp, which she couldn’t quite get a handle on. Her mind flashed back to her earlier meeting with Calum Dane. He was the key to all this, somehow, starting a couple years before with the burning of his petrochemical plant—for which Dane, in Caitlin’s mind, was no doubt responsible—to destroy all trace of the pesticides being produced there. And, just a few minutes before, Young Roger had suggested exposure to just such a pesticide had caused a genetic mutation that had unleashed a new breed of insects into the world, with the potential to destroy the entire heartland, with the devastating economic ramifications that presaged.