Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  Regardless of anything else, the fact that he lived in New York City part-time made him golden to the two girls. They asked him endless questions about shopping on Fifth Avenue, celebrity sightings, and other subjects he knew nothing about, and thankfully forgave him his cluelessness.

  When they’d relinquished him, Christopher jerked his head toward a door off the living room. Trey followed, and they entered a small, dim study containing a desk, a bookshelf, and a computer.

  “‘Kit’?” Trey said.

  Christopher smiled. “Got a problem with that, Thomas the Third?”

  Then his expression darkened. “You need to see this,” he said, sitting down at his computer. “An old friend of mine in the Southern Highlands sent it to me.”

  The Southern Highlands were on New Guinea, the enormous island that lay just a short flight north of Port Douglas. Before settling in Australia, Christopher had worked on water projects in that area.

  Trey had visited him there only once. He retained vivid memories of the Huli Wigmen, with their painted faces and elaborate wigs of human hair twined with flowers and the feathers of birds of paradise. A proud, warlike people, they’d been more than willing to show off their ceremonial dress to outsiders, but had kept their age-old ceremonies a secret.

  “The video was raw when I got it,” Christopher was saying. “I’ve done a little editing, but it’s still pretty rough.”

  It began with a close-up on a man’s face. An old man with dark skin and fierce eyes, staring straight into the camera. “I am Isaac Agiru,” he said. “Listen to what I am about to tell you.”

  “Agiru. I’ve known him for years.” Christopher gave a snort of amusement. “He was a rebel until the government changed. Now he’s a member of the National Parliament. Tough old bugger.”

  “He’s speaking English,” Trey asked. “Not New Guinea Pidgin.”

  “Agiru wants this to be seen and understood.”

  “Two months ago,” the old man went on, “the stilmen came to the highlands.”

  “Stilmen is the Pidgin word for thieves,” Christopher said.

  Trey knew.

  “We did not understand how to fight them, and at first many died throughout the district.” Agiru’s expression turned fierce. “But soon we learned.”

  “Look at him!” Christopher’s voice was admiring. “Don’t cross the Huli. Don’t even steal a pig from them.”

  “Today we will go to war,” Agiru said.

  For a moment the screen went black. “How does he know?” Trey asked.

  “Watch.”

  The screen lit. It showed two men lying on their backs on a grass mat on the floor of a hut. When the camera came in close, Trey could see that their eyes were half open. Light from offscreen caught a silvery sheen.

  He took a breath. Beside him, Christopher said, “Seen this before, too, have you?”

  Trey nodded. “Too often.”

  “Today we will take out the worms that live inside these men,” Isaac Agiru was saying, though the camera remained focused on the dreaming men. “Later, the stilmen will come. They will want revenge, as they always do, but we will defeat them.”

  Trey thought about Sheila, about the little girl Kait and her parents, and about revenge.

  The video’s view shifted to a dusty village square ringed by wooden huts and an elaborately ornamented longhouse, the building where all the important—and secret—Huli rituals took place. A steady stream of men was emerging from the front door. Sixty, or perhaps even more.

  They were dressed for battle, with painted faces beneath their large, triangular wigs. They looked powerful, unafraid.

  Trey could see a pile of wooden and metal objects in the corner of the screen. He leaned in closer to inspect the image.

  “I’ve studied that,” Christopher said. “They had guns, clubs, nets, and canisters and sprayers of what I imagine is DDT.”

  DDT, the pesticide banned for forty years in the United States but still available in other countries.

  “You can’t see when the battle starts, but I think they rigged mist nets to arrows, and shot them over the first wave of stilmen.”

  Trey nodded. It was a clever strategy. Still . . . “How many attack?” he asked.

  Christopher shrugged. “A lot.”

  The screen showed the closed door of the hut where the two infected men lay. After a moment, the door opened, and a young man came out. He walked up to the camera and showed what he held in his hands: the limp white bodies of two thief larvae.

  Agiru’s voice. “And Jonathan and Tiken?”

  The young man shook his head. His face was grim. “It has been too long,” he said.

  The camera returned to the old man’s face. “Now we will wait,” he said. “They will come.”

  “How do the thieves know?” Christopher asked. “I’m guessing they have a sentry that goes and warns the colony. Something like the ones who were watching me.”

  Trey said, “Maybe.”

  There was a jump in the video. When it focused again, Trey could see that hours had passed. Dusk was approaching. The longhouse cast black shadows across the ground.

  Whoever was carrying the camera put it down on a wall or other structure, aimed at the plaza and the waiting men.

  Most of the warriors had been sprawled on the ground, but now they got to their feet and went to the pile of weapons. A moment later they had moved out of sight of the lens, some heading to the front of the plaza, some to the sides.

  “They come,” Isaac Agiru’s voice said.

  Trey leaned forward, his ears straining to hear the hum of wings, his nose prickling as if somehow he could smell the thieves’ odor.

  A moment later, someone screamed, a sound of agony. There was a flurry of movement on the right side of the screen—a man staggering, his hands clutching at his face as he fell to the ground. This was followed by disordered shouts, the twang of unseen bows, the sound of gunfire, the sharp crack made by birdshot shells.

  And then someone knocked into the camera. The view jolted and spun, coming to rest aimed upward at a patch of treetops.

  Trey said, “Don’t tell me—”

  Christopher sighed. “Sorry, yes.”

  More shots, more cries, another scream. The hum of wings close to the camera’s microphone. A glimpse of a thin black body. Nothing else. No one reset the camera’s aim.

  All Trey could make out were the trees against a darkening sky. He wanted to climb inside the screen. He needed to see.

  The scene leaped forward again. Hours had clearly passed, and now it was nighttime. It seemed the battle was over.

  “That’s it?” Trey said.

  Christopher nodded.

  The camera was again focused on Agiru’s face, just as it had been at the beginning. Illuminated by the harsh light of an offscreen lantern, the old man was still wearing his full Huli regalia. His face was painted yellow, with red slashes under each eye and beneath his mouth; a white line ran down his forehead and nose. His beard was blue, his wig ornamented with brilliant red-and-yellow bird-of-paradise feathers.

  “It is done,” he said. “Mipela I paitin ol stilmen na killim olgeta.”

  We fought the thieves and killed them.

  His eyes glinted. “Seventeen of our warriors are dead. But the stilmen will not return.”

  “How can he say that?” Trey said.

  “Listen.”

  “We are not the first to fight them. The first to defeat them. The stilmen attacked the people of the lowlands and islands, Kambaramba and Karkar and Imbonggu and Margarima, first. The warriors of those places fought back. They drove the attackers away, although many men died.

  “The lowland peoples warned us, the men of the Southern Highlands, the Huli and the Duna. They told us to watch the forest, to watch the skies. And we did. So wh
en the stilmen came here, we were ready. We knew what we must do.

  “And, like them, we are victorious. The stilmen will be gone from here. This was the last big battle, and we defeated them.

  “Together, the people of Papua New Guinea have discovered: The stilmen, they like to kill, but they do not like to die.”

  He leaned toward the camera, his face a totem of strength and certainty. “If you are watching this,” he said, “this is what we have taught you.”

  He sat back and made a dismissive gesture, a flick of one hand.

  “Remember,” he said, “they are still just binatang.”

  Bugs.

  “And they do not like to die.”

  * * *

  THE VIDEO CAME to an end. Christopher stood, stepped away from the computer. “Plenty to ponder in that,” he said.

  Trey said, “Yeah.”

  “Mostly, it makes me think that in New Guinea, on the islands and in the mountain valleys, victory is possible,” he said. “But here in Oz, we don’t have a chance.”

  Trey looked at him.

  “Think about it. We’re a huge, empty country. Not very many people, most of us clustered in a few areas, and hundreds of millions of rabbits and other potential hosts.We couldn’t be more outnumbered.”

  He shook his arms and shoulders, the same gesture he’d made when overlooking the wetlands. Trey recognized it as a sign of acceptance.

  “No, this war is over,” Christopher said again, “and we’ve already lost.”

  “Then leave,” Trey said, the words emerging almost before he’d thought them. “Take your family and go to the Southern Highlands.”

  Christopher smiled. “I’ve been in touch with Agiru. He said they will welcome us when the time comes.”

  He looked into Trey’s face. “Come with us.”

  Trey was quiet.

  Christopher took a breath to calm himself, a familiar habit Trey had forgotten. When he spoke again, his tone was lighter.

  “I know. What was I thinking? You’ll race around, trying to save the world, until the last possible minute. Beyond.”

  His gaze burned into Trey’s. “But then what?”

  Trey was silent.

  “We’ll be safe in New Guinea. Where will you go?’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dry Tortugas, United States

  WHEN THE MEN from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security met her at Kennedy Airport, Mariama assumed her counterfeit passport had tripped her up. Perhaps the fat man back in Panama City had alerted the authorities. Maybe this was his revenge.

  Or maybe her number had just come up. She had, in fact, entered the United States illegally. No matter how porous the borders were, sometimes you just got caught.

  As she sat across the table from the three men who would question her, her mind was racing. She had to be able to keep going. They had to allow her to go on. What could she say that would make them unlock the door and set her free?

  But then it turned out not to matter. As soon as the questioning began, she realized she had it all wrong. They didn’t give a damn about her passport.

  The leader, a man with a strong jaw and unblinking gray eyes, said, “You are from Mpack, in the Casamance region of Senegal.”

  Not a question.

  Mariama recalculated. “I am.”

  He reached into a briefcase and pulled out a single sheet of paper. Laid it down on the table between them. “And you are familiar with these.”

  She looked down at the paper and saw a drawing of a thief.

  Mariama laughed. All three men, their careers built on unflappability, showed their surprise in subtle ways: a blink, a slight clenching of the jaw, the fingers of a hand flexing for an instant.

  “Yes,” Mariama said. “Quite familiar.”

  “Do you know how to stop them?”

  Getting to the point more quickly than she expected.

  They must be very afraid, she thought.

  Yet she was unsure how to respond.

  She could say yes, she knew. But what would happen then? She’d get absorbed. Become merely a cog.

  Disappear into the machine.

  Or she could say no and . . . perhaps complete the task she’d traveled across the world to accomplish.

  The three men’s eyes were fixed on her. Even with the lag she demanded due to a (feigned) difficulty with English, she had barely a second left before her hesitation became obvious, before their suspicions were raised. And once that happened, there would be no turning back. They’d break her to find out what she knew.

  Decide.

  “Of course not,” she said. “I came here to escape them.”

  She saw the disappointment on their faces. And, for a moment, she almost weakened, told the truth.

  But she’d never been much for playing on a team. Her philosophy: A team was only as strong as its weakest player. And in Mariama’s opinion, almost every player was weaker than she was.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE wrong decision. Catastrophically wrong.

  She’d thought at worst they’d send her home. Then she could start trying again.

  But they didn’t. After two days in New York they flew her here, to this rock in what had to be the Caribbean Sea, with its old fort and manicured lawns and boatloads of tourists coming to see the ruins and watch the seabirds circling above, white against the blue sky.

  None of them knowing there was a small prison on the island, too, a featureless building a stone’s throw from where the crowds wandered, and a world away.

  For the first few days, Mariama expected to be interrogated. To be tortured. Why else would they bring her to a prison off the mainland?

  But as the days passed, Mariama realized that she was here just so they didn’t have to worry about her. But why? She was no threat, was she? Why had they neither sent her home nor questioned her further?

  She was treated well enough. A cell to herself, with a cot, a small table, and a barred window overlooking a patch of scrubby salt grass, a stretch of sky, a single palm tree, and one end of the small paved runway used by the airplane that had brought her here. The window admitted, along with sunlight in the late afternoon, the sounds of the wind and birds calling, and even sometimes the crash of waves.

  Between the window and the overhead electric bulb, the light in her cell was always strong enough to read by. That was most important of all. As Mariama had long known, the greatest punishment a jailer could inflict was to take words away from her.

  They wouldn’t let her read newspapers or magazines, or listen to the radio or watch television. Instead, they brought her books. Novels, books about ancient history, mystery stories.

  But nothing that would give her a clue about what was going on in the real world.

  She asked. Of course she did. She asked the people who brought her meals. She asked those who accompanied her during her two hours outside every day, the walks she took within the courtyard, under the brilliant blue sky and circling white birds. She asked the guards who stood outside her cell day and night.

  No one would tell her a thing, so eventually she stopped asking them. And there was no one else to ask. If she wasn’t alone in this jail, they kept her separate from any of the other prisoners.

  Whenever she was outside, the trade winds would be blowing. Every day, she’d take in a deep breath, searching for the familiar smell but detecting nothing.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  SHE STOPPED ASKING, but not wondering.

  Why am I here?

  It wasn’t the foundation for a philosophical disquisition. She wasn’t questioning her place in the universe. No. It was:

  Why am I here?

  Why am I here?

  That led to another question: Who had condemned her? In the darkness of her solitude, Mar
iama even allowed herself to believe it might be the thieves themselves. That somehow they’d infiltrated the highest reaches of the United States government and commanded that Mariama Honso must be neutralized.

  Even in the darkest moments, her essential sanity made Mariama laugh. Even at her maddest, she would never believe herself to exist at the center of the world.

  No, not the thieves.

  Who, then?

  There was only one answer that made sense.

  * * *

  THE WEEKS PASSED. She told the guards she’d changed her mind, that she wanted to talk, that she had important things to reveal. But it didn’t help. No one ever responded.

  The guards, young men and women in uniforms she didn’t recognize, brought her food. Maids cleaned her cell while she was outside.

  Summer turned to fall. Even here, the air had a chill to it in the late afternoon.

  One day she had a revelation: She’d been forgotten. She’d slipped into the system, but now no one remembered she was here, why she’d been sent, why requisition slips were still being signed and manpower still being allocated to guard her and keep her alive.

  Late at night, sleepless, she thought: I will know when the world comes to an end. On one sunny day the tourists will stop coming to visit the fort. Then the guards and those who keep me fed will disappear.

  And then it will be only me, me alone, the last person left on earth.

  The last untainted human. Until the thieves find me, too, as they someday will, and pollute me, and finish the job they’ve already begun.

  * * *

  THAT WAS THE worst day.

  The beginning of the worst days.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Washington, D.C.

  “THIS CAN’T GET out,” the chief of staff said. “Not a whisper, not a breath.”

  Harry Solomon didn’t bother to stifle his laugh. How often had the old guy called with something desperate that needed fixing? How many assignments had he prefaced with this same tired demand?

  It was dumb on so many levels. If Harry or his people had ever let a story leak, even a whisper, even a breath, then the COS wouldn’t ever have called again.