Invasive Species (6 page)

“Almost done,” Sheila said, trying but failing for the same light tone she used with her young patients. “Just sit still.”

Megan said, “No. Please.
Sheila.
”

Sheila wanted to put her hands over her ears. Without responding, she squirted the second dose of lidocaine through the airhole to calm down the larva. It was a lot easier to pull out a sleeping worm than a wriggling one.

As the anesthetic sluiced into the burrow beneath the skin, she saw a flash of writhing white come to the surface of the airhole, then something black, and then white again.

Her mother spoke no more. Nor did she make a sound when Sheila reached in with her sterilized thumb forceps, got hold of the larva, and slowly pulled it out of the hole.

She could see at once that this grub came from no tumbu fly. Those were oblong, resembling white kidney beans.

This larva, however, was two inches long, with an opalescent white body; big eyes like pearls made of onyx; soft, half-formed legs; and curved black mandibles. Even as she stared, it twisted its body into a U shape and, seemingly unaffected by the lidocaine, bit viciously at the end of the forceps.

Sheila felt her heart thud against her ribs. Over the years, she'd evicted her share of scorpions from various bedrooms, bathrooms, and tents, often using forceps much like this one to transport them safely. She'd always marveled at the tensile strength of the armored creatures, an inherent will to survive that she both admired and feared.

But she'd never felt anything like the strength that seemed to course through this writhing larva. It mashed away at the forceps with its powerful mandibles, creating a vibration that Sheila could feel through her fingers and all the way up into her forearm. Without thinking, she tightened her grip on the handle.

And then, just like that, the larva died. Some grayish goo came out of its jaws, and suddenly it was just a limp wormy thing hanging from the forceps' metal tips. A bitter smell filled the room.

“Christ,” Sheila said. “Mom, what the hell
is
this?”

But Megan didn't respond with words, only with a low, guttural groan.

Alarmed, Sheila looked up, but even as she did Megan's eyes rolled up so only the silvery whites were showing. Her mouth stretched wide.

Sheila had barely dropped the forceps and begun to reach out when her mother toppled sideways and fell to the floor.

Manhattan

THERE WAS A
big cockroach in Trey's subway car, a water bug like the ones you see scattering from the light in the bathrooms of third-rate hotels all over the world. Not a native New Yorker—an invader of a species from the forests of Asia—but it didn't seem to care. To a roach, one warm, dirty, food-rich environment is as good as another.

Trey watched it scuttle over to investigate some sticky yellowish stuff, maybe spilled soda, on the orange plastic seat across the car from his. Tan in color, flat as something that had been stepped on, it looked alert, energetic, fully alive.

And alien.

Somewhere in our nervous system is an inherent belief that all other creatures are in some way like us, that we can relate to them, understand their thinking, get inside their heads. We make cats, dogs, parrots, even lizards human in our eyes, ascribing our emotions to our pets to justify the food, housing, and love we offer.

But the truth is, if you got inside a cockroach's head, you'd find plenty of nothing. No brain, no control tower for the central nervous system. In fact, if you decapitate a roach, it doesn't die. It doesn't even take a break from running around. True, it can't see, but the only severe damage you've done is to deprive it of the ability to eat. A headless roach will live on until it starves to death.

This is not a creature we can relate to, no matter how hard we try.

The train pulled into the 81st Street station. As it jerked to a halt, the cockroach hustled across the seat and inserted itself into a crack that Trey doubted he could have slid a dime into. He got to his feet and saw, as he stepped out of the car, a young woman sit down right in front of where the roach was hiding.

Most likely the bug was now going to hitch a ride home in the woman's Coach bag or in a pocket of her North Face jacket or snuggled in the fleece lining of her Uggs.

It was perfectly adapted to life in this big city.

Certainly better adapted than
he
was.

*   *   *

“HEY, HAMLET,” JACK
Parker said. “What are you pondering?”

“Cockroaches,” Trey said.

Jack stared at him for a moment. “Well,” he said, “you're in the right building, the right floor, but the wrong office. Cockroaches are down the hall.”

He laughed. “Cockroaches
and
the men who love them.”

Jack was a senior scientific assistant in the Department of Entomology at the American Museum of Natural History. Short, squat, bearded, with a bald head and a barrel chest, he looked like a battering ram and had a personality to match.

The two of them were sitting in Jack's office on the fifth floor, where most of the museum's staff scientists worked. Its anthropologists and paleontologists and ichthyologists and experts in biodiversity and extinction, all laboring away here, mostly hidden from the public.

And entomologists, too. The people who studied insects, bugs, and spiders.

There were more entomologists at the museum than scientists in any other field. This made sense, since at two million species (give or take thirty million), there were more insects, bugs, and spiders than all other creatures in the animal kingdom combined.

“They should make a permanent exhibition about cockroaches,” Trey said.

Jack growled. This was a sore subject for him.

No visitor to the museum would realize the abundance—or importance—of entomology at a glance, since there wasn't a single permanent exhibit anywhere in the public areas dedicated to bugs. Dinosaurs, of course. African mammals, sure. Meteors and gems and ancient peoples and even New York trees. But no cockroaches or butterflies or walking sticks or rhinoceros beetles. When it came to arthropods—insects and spiders, basically—no nothing.

Jack had a simple theory about why this was: People were idiots.

“They fear what they don't understand,” he said. “And you don't go to museums to see things that terrify you. You make horror movies about them.”

Jack would know. He could recite the dialogue from just about every grade-Z movie ever made.

The people who were terrified of bugs would have fled screaming from Jack's office. It had originally been a nondescript room like so many others in the building: four peeling walls, linoleum floor, grime-streaked windows overlooking Central Park West and the park across the way. Just another chamber in the hive, until Jack had decorated it with mementos of his own area of expertise: the order Hymenoptera. Bees, wasps, and ants.

Specifically: wasps.

On his big oak desk were trays of specimens borrowed from the collections room, each containing rows of little yellow-and-black hornets whose black-eyed gazes seemed filled with rage even in death. The bookcases were filled with everything from reference books to penny dreadfuls (“Attack of the Wasp Woman!”), and every other surface was covered with sculptures, postcards, beer cans, and other knickknacks, all variations on the theme.

“What have arthropods ever done to deserve their evil reputation?” Jack asked.

“I'm about to tell you,” Trey said.

*   *   *

THE TWO OF
them had met more than a decade earlier. Trey, emerging from four weeks assessing a vast, empty stretch of foothill thorn scrub in northern Peru, had encountered a multidisciplinary museum expedition that included Jack. No one there ever forgot the contrast between Trey's dirty, ragged, half-starved condition and the opulently equipped expedition.

Unexpectedly, the chance meeting had also marked the beginning of a friendship. Just about the only lasting friendship Trey could claim, and one that most people didn't understand. How could the explosively, unstoppably enthusiastic and talkative Jack have anything in common with Trey, who spent so much time observing and analyzing the world around him that sometimes you forgot he was there?

Trey had wondered about that himself.

Jack's thick arms were crossed over his chest. “What are you talking about?”

Trey didn't answer.

After a moment, Jack said, “People are whispering about you, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They're saying you had your butt kicked out of Senegal and got fired by ICT.”

Trey was quiet.

“They basically disappeared you, except you ended up here instead of Guantánamo.”

This was true enough. A short flight on a military airplane and Trey had been in Dakar, three hours after that he'd left Senghor Airport on a Senegal Airlines 747, and less than seven hours later he'd disembarked at JFK.

Feeling disoriented. More disoriented than he'd ever felt before, and he'd been traveling his whole life.

And also curious. When he'd gotten into trouble before, he'd always known why. But not this time.

He brought himself back and looked at Jack. “ICT can't fire me, since I don't work for them.”

“They can stop giving you assignments.”

This was true as well.

Jack blinked. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Trey, you're, like, famous. You're the guy who always does whatever the hell you want, and always gets away with it.”

Trey closed his eyes. He saw the wet gleam of the ivory white stinger. The agonized monkey. The wasp hovering just in front of his face, deciding whether he should live or die.

He opened his eyes again to find Jack staring at him. “Shit, Gilliard,” he said, “what the hell happened out there?”

Trey said, “Get your pencils.”

*   *   *

JACK WAS A
brilliant draftsman. Two centuries earlier, he might have been an itinerant artist-scientist, traveling the world with paints and collecting jars. Producing works like those that now hung on the office walls. A John James Audubon of the insect world.

But those times had passed. In the modern era, his artwork was known only to those who read his journal articles. And to his friends, who were often faced with the challenge of finding the perfect place in a small apartment to hang a portrait of, say, a tarantula-hawk wasp attacking its prey.

Over the years, Trey had often seen—but not captured—insects that didn't yet exist in the scientific literature. Jack's crystal-clear reproductions based on his descriptions had existed long before actual specimens were collected, when they were at all.

Knowing the drill, Jack sat down behind his desk, rummaged, pulled out his case of artists' pencils and a sketch pad. Then looked up and said, “Okay. A bee?”

“Wasp.”

A gleam in Jack's eye. He loved wasps. “How big was it?”

Trey held his thumb and forefinger three inches apart.

Jack's mouth turned down at the corners. “Come on, Trey.”

Trey's fingers didn't move.

“You sound like a civilian, the kind who mistakes a housecat for a mountain lion.”

Trey said, “But I'm not, am I?”

“Not what?”

“A civilian.”

Jack stared at him, and now there was a kind of desperation in his expression. “Trey, the largest known wasp on earth,
Scolia procer
, isn't that big!”

He made a gesture over his shoulder at one of the old prints hanging on the wall. It showed a fat black-and-yellow wasp whose wings extended from its back like an airplane's.

“That's not what I saw,” Trey said.

“I know! But—”

“The ones I saw were bigger,” Trey said. “Can we get started?”

Jack drew in a breath. His face was a little red. After a moment, though, he lifted a hand and held it over the pencils. “Okay,” he said. “Color and shape of the body?”

“Black,” Trey said. “Skinny like a mud dauber. Arched abdomen.”

Sitting in an old armchair across from the desk, he spoke. For twenty minutes, the only sounds other than his voice were the distant hum of traffic down on the street, the scratch of the pencils, and Jack's questions making sure he was getting the details right. The color of the wings. The angle of the head. The size of the mandibles.

When he was done he held up the picture, a nearly perfect representation of the wasps Trey had seen. All that it was lacking was the sense of menace, of calculation, of intelligence that came to Trey whenever he closed his eyes.

The soul.

“You
saw
one of these,” Jack said, as if he still couldn't quite believe it.

“I saw a colony of them.” Trey sat back a little in the chair. “In a forest that was dying.”

Jack stared down at the drawing, and when he raised his head his eyes had a different look. Trey had seen it many times before. It meant his friend's mind was engaged. It meant he was ready for the hunt.

“The whole story, please,” Jack said.

*   *   *

AGAIN TREY TALKED.
It was a requirement of his occupation, talking—if someone was paying you to go look, they expected you to tell them what you'd seen—but one he hated. Usually when he was done being debriefed, done talking to fund-raisers and scientists and whatever press was interested in his explorations, he'd disappear into the wilderness again. Making up for a few days of noise with weeks of silence.

Jack was quiet, looking down at his desk, at the drawing. For someone who loved the sound of his own voice, he knew how to listen, too.

Only when Trey was done did he look up. “That smell,” he said. “Was it formic acid?”

The characteristic odor of ant colonies, the acid found in their stings . . . and wasps', too.

Trey frowned. “No. Not quite. It was . . . stronger.”

He was much better describing what he'd seen than what he'd smelled.

“And the dead man you saw had the same odor.”

“The room did, at least.”

“And you think the wasps were going to kill you.”

“I think they were considering it.”

Jack frowned. Opened his mouth as if there was something he wanted to say, then shook his head as if he'd changed his mind. What he finally said was, “But the sting didn't kill the monkey. You said being stung made it . . . more alert. Aggressive.”

Trey said nothing, just turned his palms up.

“Do you think they attacked that woman after she rescued you?”

Trey shook his head. “I tried calling the village to ask about her,” he said, “and no one there will speak to me. But—”

“But she didn't seem afraid?” Jack widened his eyes. “Suicidal?”

“No. Determined.” He struggled to find the right word. “Powerful.”

Jack grimaced. “I hate this shit.”

“What?”

“Having a few pieces of the puzzle, but not enough. And not having access to the rest of the pieces.”

“I know.” Trey felt weary. “But I'm not getting back into Senegal anytime soon, and I don't know how else to get the other pieces.”

Jack stared at him for a few seconds. Then he gave a sudden grin. “You're so clueless, you make me seem like Stephen Hawking. I admire that in you. You really don't know what to do next?”

Trey shook his head.

Jack's eyes flicked over to the laptop computer that sat open on his desk. The screen saver showed not wasps but, unexpectedly, a litter of golden retriever puppies.

“Well, I do,” he said.