Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  With that, he turned and walked steadily away from the microphones.

  When the scene returned to the studio, one of the anchors said, “The White House has just released a statement.” She gave the camera a strange look, a kind of half smile. “The statement says, in full, ‘The White House will have no statement at this time.’”

  “Uh-oh,” Becca Shaw said, her voice little louder than a breath. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out her smartphone and glanced at the screen. By the time she lifted her gaze, she was already far away.

  “Thanks for all your help,” she said. “You’ll hear from us with any follow-ups, and we’ll let you know when the story will run.” Her eyes flicked up to the screen. “I’m guessing sooner rather than later.”

  Then she was gone, out the door, moving fast.

  Mary and Kait headed back to their booth. Sheila, though, was still looking up at the television. The guy behind the counter had switched back to ESPN. A golf ball, shining white against deep green grass, rolled toward a hole. It teetered and then fell in. A golfer pointed his club at the sky.

  “‘The president’s reckless actions have led to American deaths,’” Sheila said, then turned her eyes toward Trey. “What on earth do they know now,” she said, “that they didn’t before?”

  Trey didn’t answer. Somewhere deep in his brain, in his gut, in the tips of his nerve endings, something was shifting. Rousing. Coming closer to consciousness than it ever had before.

  Flooding him with . . . anger? Fear?

  No.

  Anticipation.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “I’M SORRY,” SAID the gatekeeper at Rockefeller University’s security desk, “but Dr. Shapiro is on leave.”

  The man didn’t sound sorry. Trey was silent for a moment. Then he said, “When is she expected back?”

  A trace of impatience in the return look. “Dr. Shapiro’s leave is indefinite.”

  “Do you know where she’s gone?”

  The gatekeeper’s mouth tightened. His body language caught the attention of a guard standing near the front door, who fixed his gaze on Trey.

  “Never mind,” Trey said. He began to turn away, then stopped. “How about Elena Stavros? Is she gone, too?”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  Trey shook his head. “Just tell her Trey Gilliard is here to see her.”

  With a frown, the gatekeeper punched a few numbers into the phone. After a moment, a squawk came across the line.

  “Security,” he said in a precise tone. “There’s a man named Trey Gilliard here to see you, but he’s not in the system.”

  The squawk got louder, so that Trey could make out the words. “Gilliard? Arrest him at once!”

  The gatekeeper said, “What?”

  “No, no. Send him up.”

  A loud crunching sound as the phone clattered into its cradle.

  The gatekeeper looked at Trey, then bent to print out his security pass. He muttered something with his head down.

  Trey thought it was “I hate this goddamn job.”

  * * *

  TREY AND ELENA Stavros had first met on the Rio Roosevelt, the River of Doubt, in Brazil nearly ten years earlier. He’d been doing his usual thing: walking into the wilderness, then emerging weeks later twenty pounds lighter, engraved with dirt, festooned with bug bites, and brimming with an encyclopedic knowledge of the area’s fauna.

  Meanwhile, she’d been heading downriver, the microbiologist on an interdisciplinary team studying a new form of leishmaniasis. They’d met, taken measure of each other, and grabbed the chance to share a tent for the nights before their paths diverged.

  You took your opportunities where you found them, and you didn’t waste time with preliminaries.

  In the year that followed, they’d spent two weekends together—one in Bangkok, one in Rio. Both had been memorable, filled with laughter and cigarette smoke (hers) and various other kinds of pleasure and release. Neither Trey nor Elena had asked for or expected anything more.

  And then, one day, Stavros had stepped off the carousel. The grapevine said that she’d gotten married. True or not, Trey hadn’t seen her again, though he’d heard she’d taken what was basically a desk job here at Rock U. The wheel had spun them to different places.

  This, too, was how it worked, most of the time.

  * * *

  WHEN HE WALKED into her office, she was standing behind her desk. She looked him over, the same frank assessment she’d given him a decade earlier.

  He did likewise. She was almost as he remembered: short, a little stocky, with olive skin and dark eyebrows and all that irrepressible black hair. And eyes that had the amazing ability to actually sparkle. She was the only person Trey had ever met whose eyes did that, and they were doing it now.

  It was she who broke the silence, as usual. “Bastard,” she said. “You’ve stayed thin while I’ve gotten fat.”

  Her voice exactly the same: deep, a little scratchy from years of cigarettes and retsina. And talk.

  Before he could reply, she came around the desk and across the room and hugged him. That was familiar, too, her soft, compact body belying her arms’ stranglehold.

  Then she pulled away from him and looked up into his face. Up close, he could see that the years had added some lines around her mouth and across her forehead. The hair might now be getting some help staying black. On the other hand, she didn’t smell like cigarette smoke anymore.

  “You look great to me,” Trey said, and he wasn’t lying.

  “For an old married lady,” he added.

  He’d noticed the photo on her desk, an eight-by-ten showing Elena with a tall, dark-haired man and two young girls.

  “Can you imagine?” she said. “Boring old homebody me, making cheese sandwiches for school lunch every morning.”

  Trey smiled. He’d seen this so often. The population of itinerant scientists, doctors, and field researchers was always being thinned by those who tired of the constant motion, who sought a more settled life.

  Or who thought they did. Plenty then discovered that they couldn’t tolerate the lack of stimulation, new sounds and smells, changing colors of light. Who missed the geography of unfamiliar bodies, another kind of terra incognita, as well.

  Trey wondered whether Elena ever yearned for her old life.

  She went back to her desk and sat down. “You came to see Clare,” she said. “To talk about all this foolishness.”

  Trey sat down in a chair opposite her. “Foolishness?”

  “This . . . hoopla.” She glanced down at her desk, and Trey knew that she was searching for a cigarette. With a grimace, she raised her eyes to his. “Making it into a political football. Making it about who wins an election.”

  Trey said, “Because the thing itself, the thieves, that’s not foolishness. Regardless of the hoopla, it’s real.”

  She stared at him. He recognized the expression. It meant: Do you remember who you’re talking to here?

  “Real?” she said. “Christ, Trey, it’s more than real. It’s the end of everything.”

  * * *

  TREY SAID, “WELL . . .”

  Elena sat up straight in her chair. “Oh, come on. You know more about these beasts than anyone. Don’t you see it?”

  She ticked the evidence off on her fingers. “A new threat we don’t understand. A clever, resourceful enemy. An attack we have no comprehensive defense against—and no time to develop one.”

  She shook her head. “That empty suit Harrison is right. It’s an invasion, a war. What he doesn’t understand is that we’ve already lost.”

  The same words Trey’s brother had used.

  “Come on,” Elena said. “I’ve seen you on TV. You’ve been out front on this. You’ve seen what those creatures are capable of. You know I’m right.”


  It was true, he thought. He had known, almost from the start, but hadn’t allowed himself to face it. Too busy taking one step at a time, just as he’d always done, and not looking at the whole picture.

  “Look,” Elena went on, impatient as always with a slow pupil. “Let me give you a hypothetical.”

  Her words awakening a powerful memory in him. Elena had always said, “Let me give you a hypothetical.”

  Sometimes her hypotheticals were devastatingly true. Other times they were ridiculous. But they always got her point across.

  “Listen,” she was saying now. “Hurricane Sandy.”

  Trey said, “What about it? I wasn’t here.”

  “But you remember what it did.”

  Trey said, “Sure. It knocked out power to millions of people, overloaded satellite circuits, flooded the subways, destroyed entire towns. Hundreds of people died.”

  Elena nodded.

  “That’s not quite the end of the world.”

  She drew in a breath through her nose. “Trey,” she said. “All that destruction was caused by a single Category Two hurricane. Now tell me—”

  The hypothetical.

  “Tell me what would happen to the region if there’d been another hurricane a week later, only this one a Category Five, and another one the next week, and one the week after that? And what if, at the same time, a storm of the same size hit Florida and one hit California, followed by another, and another. And not just in the United States . . . Europe. Japan. China. Everywhere, one blow after another, for weeks. What would happen?”

  Trey said, “That couldn’t—”

  “Imagine,” Elena said.

  Trey took a long time before answering. In the silence, he heard—felt, really—an electric hum, a vibration through his bones. It was Rockefeller University’s power supply, the whale song of hundreds of powerful computers and the rest of the hungry machinery the university’s brilliant scientists needed to do their work.

  Trey wondered if the university had generators to provide emergency power in case of a blackout. Most likely. But how long would the fuel for these emergency generators last?

  And how brilliant would Rock U’s scientists be without their machines?

  “It would take months—years—to get back to where we’d been,” he said.

  She made a dismissive gesture with her hands. “And if those months, years, were characterized by repeated hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis? Destroying crops, making huge areas uninhabitable, tearing apart our power grid?”

  Trey was quiet.

  “The five-hundred-year drought,” she said.

  This was also Elena. Announce what she was talking about, and leave it to you to catch up.

  “I have a friend who’s a paleobotanist,” she said. “He was studying ancient pollens in Nevada—remnants found along old trade routes—and he uncovered evidence of a drought that lasted half a millennium.”

  “Droughts don’t last that long,” Trey said.

  “That’s what I told him, and he said, ‘Why not?’” Elena widened her eyes. “He said just because we haven’t seen one during the pitifully short time we’ve been recording history doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”

  Trey was quiet.

  “That drought did some serious damage, as you might imagine. Entire civilizations disappeared into the dust. So tell me: In a world that now holds seven billion people, what havoc would a five-hundred-year-long drought wreak?”

  Now there was no sparkle in her eyes. “And weather? Drought? They’re just blunt instruments. Bad luck helped along by climate change. The threat posed by these thieves of yours is a whole lot more . . .” She searched for the words. “Direct. Clever. Real.”

  Still Trey didn’t speak.

  “Think about it,” she said. “What happens when there’s no one willing—or left—to oversee our communications satellites? Man our hydropower plants? Open the locks in the Panama Canal? What happens when there are no firefighters willing to quell a fire before it goes out of control, or ambulances and tow trucks to tend to car crashes on the highway?”

  The words hung in the air for a few moments.

  “All you have to do to end our world,” she said, “is make people terrified to go to work.”

  Her expression was bleak.

  “And it will take about five days, not five hundred years.”

  * * *

  THEY SAT. TREY could hear a machine grinding away somewhere down the hall, a phone ringing, cars honking on York Avenue below.

  He said, “Where is Clare?”

  “Oh, I imagine you’ve guessed. The government thing.” A waggle of her hands to signify meaningless hysteria. “They’re working to shut the barn door.”

  She saw his expression and sighed. “Okay. They enlisted her in some ultra-high-security effort that required her to drop contact with everyone she ever knew. Thereby solving two problems at once: confronting the threat and keeping her from blabbing to the public, which she certainly would have done.”

  “They did the same with Jack Parker up at the museum,” Trey said.

  “Yeah?” She flicked a glance at him. “Can’t really understand why you and your girlfriend—” Her eyes gleamed. “Why you and your skinny, gorgeous new girlfriend are still being allowed to make noise in public. I guess because all you’re doing is talking about public health.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Whatever.” Her expression turned serious. “Speaking of which, where is she?”

  “Sheila? She’s heading down to the Chesapeake Bay to see some friends.”

  A frown. “Trey,” she said, “from now on . . . keep her close.”

  He looked at her. She was staring at the photograph on her desk.

  “Don’t be caught too far apart when the end comes,” she said.

  * * *

  THERE DIDN’T SEEM like much else to say. Trey stood.

  Getting to her feet as well, Elena said, “By the way, what did Mariama want?”

  Trey wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “Who?”

  “Mariama. Honso? She said you’d met when you were in Senegal.”

  “Yes,” Trey said. Then, “Elena, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  His tone got her attention. She looked into his face, and her eyes went round.

  “Mariama called me looking for you,” she said. “This was at least two months ago—over the summer. She called from—from Panama, I think it was. Said she’d be arriving in the States in a couple of days and needed to find you. I told her where to look.”

  She took note of his expression and lifted her hands, an uncharacteristically defensive gesture. “Trey, she asked me not to say she’d called. She wanted to find you herself, show you something in person.”

  Trey said, “I never heard from her.”

  Elena’s hand went to her mouth. “Shit.”

  He thought about the last time he’d seen Mariama, standing beside the colony of thieves. Saving him. “Did she say anything else? Give any clue at all?”

  “No. Nothing.” Her mouth twisted. “I’m sorry, Trey.”

  After a moment, he shook his head. “No. Not your fault. How could you have known back then?”

  Still, Elena looked angry at herself. “Damn. I wonder what happened to her.”

  Trey drew in a deep breath.

  “I can guess,” he said.

  * * *

  AT THE DOOR to her office, she put her arm around his waist. She’d always liked physical contact.

  “Listen to what I’m telling you,” she said.

  “I will.” He hesitated. “But I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve been wrong. Why so few attacks? Everyone’s running around, hysterical, but where’s the evidence?”

  She released him, looked up into
his face. “Slave-making ants.”

  “What?”

  “You know, ant species that raid other ants’ colonies, bringing back eggs and pupae and making the newly hatched adults into slaves.”

  Trey said, “I know what they are.”

  Remembering the raid he’d watched in the Casamance forest, just before that first encounter with the thieves.

  “I used to watch them back in Greece when I was a child, and I saw how their strategies worked,” Elena went on. “They always attacked the biggest, strongest nearby ant colony, but they never began until they were ready. Until they had enough fighters. Until they knew they would win.”

  Trey nodded.

  “Before then?” she said. “When they were preparing? They didn’t even allow themselves to cross paths with their chosen victims. They left no sign, no scent, no nothing, until the moment they attacked.

  “And by then, the battle was as good as over.”

  There were sudden tears in her eyes. Trey hugged her, allowing his gaze to stray back to her desk, to the photo with the tall man and the two little girls.

  “When it happens,” he said, “you can’t be here.”

  Still holding on to him, she laughed. It was a joyless sound.

  “Oh! Sweetie,” she said. “If I knew of anyplace to go, we’d be long gone already.”

  * * *

  IF I KNEW of any place to go.

  When Trey got back to his apartment, he did something he knew he should have done long ago. He made a series of phone calls.

  Getting through in some cases, leaving messages in others.

  Starting the process.

  The last call was to Kenya. He hadn’t even bothered to figure out what time it was there. It didn’t matter.

  A click on the second ring. “Granger.”

  Malcolm Granger. They hadn’t seen each other since that day in the Casamance when Malcolm had landed the Piper in the field. The day they’d first spotted the thieves’ dying forest.

  “It’s Trey.”

  “Gilliard!” Malcolm’s voice was loud over the line.

  “Malcolm,” Trey began. “I need—”

  “I know exactly what you need,” his friend said. “Christ, I’ve been expecting this call for weeks.”