Kait didn’t sleep well at night. She picked at her food at breakfast and dinner and gave away most of her sack lunch at school. Her parents looked at her, and frowned at each other, and suggested movies, dinner out, a trip across the state to see Harry Potter at Universal Studios.
But they didn’t push. They knew Kait had to see this through.
* * *
EARLY ONE MORNING the baby dolphin wasn’t floating anymore. It was half pulled up on the flat wooden platform that bobbed off the end of the dock. Da had built this platform when Kait was littler so she could step from it straight into their canoe to go paddling with him.
The baby looked as if it had been on the platform for hours. Its skin was all dry except for its tail, which hung unmoving in the water. The one eye she could see was a strange silver-white color.
At first Kait thought it was already dead. Then it gave a long, slow breath through its blowhole.
Kait looked down at the swelling on its back and saw movement beneath the baby dolphin’s skin.
She ran to get Da.
* * *
SOMETHING WAS COMING out of the black hole in the swelling.
Da said, “What the hell?”
He scrambled down the wooden steps to the floating platform. Kait followed.
The baby dolphin flinched a little at their footsteps, but made no effort to push off, swim away. Right then, Kait realized that its mother was gone. She’d abandoned her baby.
The thing was about halfway out of the hole now. Kait saw red wings, a head that looked to be too big for the black, wormlike body. Everything about it was droopy, wet. Drops of some liquid ran off it and speckled the baby dolphin’s back.
Kait’s hands covered her eyes, but then she spread her fingers. She had to look.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The damnedest thing.” Da squatted down. “Some kind of bee? No, a wasp. One heck of a big wasp.”
Kait had watched plenty of yellow jackets and cicada killers, even caught some in her butterfly net. She knew what a wasp looked like. This wasn’t a wasp. Or . . . it wasn’t only a wasp. It was also something else, some other kind of thing.
She could see its mouth parts moving. A whitish drop formed; with a twitch of its big head, it flung the drop away.
“Shit,” Da said, forgetting that Kait was there, speaking to the wasp-thing instead. “Where the hell did you come from?”
The baby dolphin breathed. The wasp-thing dragged itself farther out of the hole. With one last pull, it was free.
The baby dolphin’s body quivered, all the way up and down. Its blowhole gaped open, and its sad little droopy beak twitched. Then it was still, and Kait knew it was dead.
The wasp-thing raised its heavy body high on its skinny black legs. It stood still for a moment, and then a stream of the whitish liquid began to pump out of its rear end. It turned its big triangle head and looked at them, at Kait and Da.
It’s deciding what it wants to do to us, Kait thought.
Da made a funny gulping sound. His hand whipped out, faster than Kait could follow, and the next thing she knew the wasp-thing was flying through the air. It landed on its back in the water beside the dock.
Kait watched it struggle, its legs waving around, its wet wings twitching. A mackerel came to look at it, but swam away again.
Just a few seconds later it was dead, bumping against the pilings alongside some seaweed and a bit of newspaper.
Kait looked back at the baby dolphin. Already its eyes were glazed over, like the dead fish you saw at the market.
Everything was dead.
Da put his hand on top of Kait’s head for a second, just like he’d done when she was little. “I’m sorry, Bunny,” he said. “I wish we hadn’t seen that.”
Kait didn’t say anything.
* * *
GRANDMA MARY WAS at the house. Ma must have called her while Da and Kait were down at the slip.
Da went upstairs to take a shower.
“You and me, we’re going out for breakfast,” Grandma told Kait.
“I have school,” Kait pointed out. The first words she’d spoken in a while.
“Hang school!” Grandma talked like that. She wasn’t that much bigger than Kait, but she could be a lot louder.
Ma said, “I already called to tell them you’d be late.”
“I’m not hungry,” Kait said.
Grandma gave a big shrug. “Okay, fine, you can watch me eat, and after that we can do a little shopping.”
Grandma Mary loved shopping.
“Go,” Ma said.
So Kait went. They ate at Breakfast Plus (Kait ended up getting French toast, and even eating some of it), then went off to Marco Walk, where they visited every store. At Richard’s Reef, Grandma insisted she buy some earrings. Kait was quiet, but Grandma didn’t make her talk.
By the time they got back home, it was almost noon. “We’ll make sandwiches,” Grandma said. “And then, if you feel up to it, I’ll take you to school.”
Kait didn’t say anything, but she thought she might be able to manage school.
While Grandma went in the front door, Kait squatted down beside the front step to watch a small lizard that was sunning itself. An anole. When it saw her looking, it puffed out a pretty red pouch under its throat.
“You don’t scare me,” Kait said.
That was when she heard it. At first she thought it was the sound of a bird, a gull or maybe even an eagle. But then she realized it was coming from inside the house, a high sound unlike any she’d heard before.
And then she figured out what it was: someone screaming. A kind of scream she’d never heard before.
Grandma Mary.
* * *
MEN. DOZENS OF men. Maybe hundreds. A couple of women, too, big women with fake smiles, at least one of them sitting with her at all times.
Grandma Mary was in the hospital, they told her. But she would be fine. Fine.
They promised.
It took them a long time to say anything about Ma and Da. But Kait knew. She’d known from the moment she’d heard Grandma start to scream. That sound she’d never heard before, but which still echoed in her ears.
The men asked her a thousand questions, or maybe it was the same question in different words a thousand times. Kait didn’t say anything. She didn’t feel like talking.
But she knew.
TWENTY-ONE
IN THE TWO days Trey was gone, some kind of floodgate seemed to have opened. Or perhaps there was an algorithm for how long it took people to notice Jack’s alert on the Internet, go out looking for thieves, and report back on what they’d seen.
Or maybe, Trey thought, the algorithm was a darker one. Maybe the first people to go out looking for thieves didn’t make it back to their computers. Maybe there was some magic number of searchers that overwhelmed the wasps’ ability to stay hidden or to kill, and what the three of them were seeing was the overflow.
Whatever the equation, he returned to Jack’s office to find pins sprouting from the map on the wall. Each pin marked a spot where a sighting had been reported, and the pins steadily clustered more thickly and spread more widely.
Some of the reports were sketchy, others likely hoaxes. But enough were certain—a scrap of video taken from Ivory Coast, a photo from Thailand, a detailed description from an entomologist in southern Italy, a series of images from somewhere in South America, showing a thief standing astride what looked like the still form of a capybara—to make the overall picture clear. To make the conclusion inescapable.
The thieves had spread across the world. More than that: Their spread was explosive. They were moving like the Spanish influenza had in 1918, like malaria-carrying mosquitoes before that, like countless other pests and epidemic diseases throughout human history.
But even more easily than those of the past. “They’re fucking turbocharged,” Jack said. “There’s, what, tens of thousands of airplane flights taking off and landing every day? How many have these beasts on board, hitching a ride?”
Trey stayed silent. Sheila, sitting at Jack’s computer, didn’t appear to be listening.
“And not just planes,” Jack went on. “Planes, trains, and automobiles. All we’re missing is Steve Martin and John Candy.”
“No reports from the United States yet?” Trey asked. “That’s strange.”
“Must be that border wall they’ve been building in Texas.” Jack rolled his eyes. “The president should give a speech touting its success. It might help him win reelection.”
He gave a dismissive shake of the head. “Nah. It’s just a blip. Nobody’s reported it to us yet, but they will. Soon.”
He looked at the map, at the scattering of pins in South and Central America. “Put it in the books. The thieves are already here.”
Sheila merely raised her gaze from the computer screen.
“You’re right,” she said. “Look at this.”
* * *
SHE HAD A series of windows open on the screen. Most showed variations on the same headline: “Bee Attack Leaves Florida Couple Dead.”
“Already saw that,” Jack said. “‘Africanized Honeybees Claim Another Victim.’ ‘Killer Bees on the Prowl.’ ‘Young Couple Stung to Death.’ ‘Family Dogs Victims, Too.’”
He scowled, as if not proud of his tone, then shrugged. “Killer bees have been spreading throughout Florida and Texas for decades. These aren’t the first deaths.”
Trey was reading the first paragraphs of the different stories. “They all say the same thing.”
“Not this one,” Sheila said.
She clicked the mouse and brought a new page to the front.
The Marco Island Sunrise, a local online newspaper filled with stories about shopping deals and fishing charters and a new real-estate development. And the deaths of two island residents.
Trey read the sad details. The attack on the parents. The daughter surviving due to being out shopping with her grandmother. The grandmother being kept overnight in the hospital after discovering the bodies of her son and daughter-in-law.
“Look here,” Sheila said.
It was a link to a video, a black rectangle in the middle of the page. The heading was, “Orphaned Daughter Speaks.”
“Yuck,” Jack said.
Sheila clicked on it, and after a few moments the video began. It showed a reporter, a slim young woman, standing in front of a Florida scene: white houses with red roofs, palm trees, blue water shimmering in the distance. She was holding a black microphone.
“In a Sunrise exclusive, we were able to talk with Kaitlin Finneran, daughter of the couple whose tragic death is the talk of Marco Island,” the reporter was saying. Under her suitably solemn expression, she looked thrilled. “Kaitlin’s story will shock you.”
“Double fucking yuck,” Jack said.
The camera focused on two figures sitting on a bench: an exhausted-looking seventyish woman with white hair and a ten-year-old girl with fair skin dusted with freckles, black hair pulled back into a long ponytail, and big dark eyes. She had a hollow, thousand-yard expression in her eyes that Trey had seen too often before.
And too recently. He glanced at Sheila, who was leaning forward as if she wanted to climb through the screen.
“It’s too soon,” she said. “The grandmother should never have allowed this.”
“She’s in shock herself,” Trey said. “I doubt she knows what’s right.”
Sheila grunted.
“So, Kait,” the reporter was saying, “you’ve said that you don’t believe killer bees killed your parents.”
Kait shook her head.
“Then what did?”
Kait stared into the camera. As Trey watched, some banked flame lit behind her eyes, and suddenly she seemed completely focused and aware.
“The wasp-thing,” she said.
The reporter said, “The what?”
Kait didn’t blink. “I watched it hatch out of the baby dolphin,” she said. “Da killed it.” She bit her lip, and when she spoke again, her voice was choked. “That’s why they killed him and Ma.”
“So you’re saying—”
But Kait’s grandmother had had enough. She stirred and put her hand on the girl’s arm. “We’re tired,” she said. “Do you think you can leave us alone now?”
The scene went back to the reporter in front of the island scenery. “We talked to Derek Franks of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office about Kait’s extraordinary claims. Should the residents of Marco Island be afraid of wasps, as well as killer bees? His response: ‘Residents should not be afraid of either.’”
Sheila clicked the mouse, freezing the reporter with her mouth open. They were silent for a few moments, and then Jack said, “The little girl must not have understood what she was seeing.”
Trey said, “Why?”
“Because wasps don’t parasitize dolphins.”
Neither Sheila nor Trey spoke. Jack’s face turned red. “Okay,” he said. “Fucking sue me for being scientific, okay? Wasps are not such generalists.”
“They are in their diet, aren’t they?” Sheila said. “I mean, some are.”
“But not in their breeding methods.”
Sheila shrugged. “Yeah, and viral diseases couldn’t jump from species to species. It was a natural law . . . until this one virus took the leap from African chimpanzees to humans a few decades back. You know, the one transmitted during sex. That rule breaker has managed to spread pretty well through the population. What was it called again?”
Jack’s beard bristled. “I love it when you condescend to me,” he said. “Makes me feel all tingly inside. Still . . . a dolphin?”
“It’s not impossible,” Trey said. “A newborn dolphin stays at the surface. It’s not strong enough to dive yet. A larva needing only an occasional breath of air could grow inside one, hatching out before it would be in danger of drowning.”
“So these things can parasitize any mammal,” Jack said.
Neither Trey nor Sheila answered.
Jack was looking at the map. “We’re going to need more pins.”
* * *
“ONE THING I don’t understand,” Trey said a while later.
Jack said, “Only one?”
“Kaitlin says her father killed a thief. If there had been any others around, wouldn’t they have attacked right away? Why wait?”
Jack turned his palms up. But Sheila said, “No. You’re looking at this the wrong way.”
They waited for her to explain.
“If there’d been any other thieves in the area when Kaitlin’s father killed the hatchling, he and Kaitlin would have been dead at once,” she went on. “The ones that attacked—they came later.”
“Later?” Jack asked. “Like, for tea?”
“Jack—”
“No, tell me. Why?”
“That’s obvious,” Sheila said. “For retribution.”
“Retribution?”
“Revenge,” Sheila said.
* * *
TREY TOOK A breath and watched Jack carefully. He knew what was going to come next.
Jack’s eyes narrowed and red spots rose to his cheeks. He raised both hands and rubbed his face. The air whistled through his nose as he gave an explosive breath out, like a whale clearing its lungs through its blowhole.
All as expected.
Less expected was the wiry, snarling tone in his voice as he said, “Sheila, shut the hell up.”
Sheila blinked. “What?”
Jack’s face was dark. “Listen to you. ‘Revenge.’ Don’t be an idiot.”
She stared at him.
“You know where revenge comes from?” he went on. “Conscious thought. Calculation. Human attributes.”
“Okay,” Sheila said, her voice flat. “I misspoke.”
“No,” Jack said. “You didn’t misspeak. You’re ignorant. And you still don’t understand.”
Trey said, “Jack, you’ve made your point—”
“No,” Jack said again. “Both of you. Listen. It’s simple. Wasps, like all insects and most living things, are motivated by two things: the instinct to survive and the need to procreate. That’s all. Nothing else.”
“I know that,” Sheila said.
“No, you don’t.” Jack’s voice was quiet now, but no less fierce. “No . . . you . . . don’t. You’re watching me freak out, and you want me to stop, but inside you haven’t learned a thing.”
He ran his hands again over his face. “You know what intelligence is? Let me tell you: It’s the ability to ponder, to think things through, to see both sides of an issue. To change one’s mind.”
He paused for a moment, but when Trey began to speak he raised a hand in warning. “Shut up, Trey,” he said. “I’m not done. You still don’t get it. Neither of you. ‘Intelligence’ is the greatest weakness afflicting the human species. We insult the thieves when we attribute it to them.”
He took a breath, and when he went on, his voice was calmer. “Worse than that, we underestimate them. Because lacking intelligence sets them free. They don’t ponder, equivocate, mull things over. They act. They survive. They procreate. That’s all. But it’s enough.”
He looked back and forth from Sheila to Trey. Neither spoke.
“Wasps evolved more than a hundred million years ago, and they’re still going strong. They haven’t much missed being ‘intelligent,’ have they?”
* * *
TREY THOUGHT THAT would be the end of the discussion, but apparently Sheila didn’t. She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “So tell me: How did they do it?”
Jack blinked. “How did who do what?”
Sheila didn’t answer his question directly. Instead, she stood very still, and when she spoke again there was a wondering tone in her voice. “And I’ll bet it was the same thing at my parents’ place, too.”
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