Invasive Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Gwen Pearson and the fine folks at the

  Purdue University Bug Barn

  EPIGRAPH

  The future is a door.

  Two forces—forces that we drive like horses and chariots, whips to their backs, wheels in ruts, great froth and furious vigor—race to that door.

  The first force is evolution. Humanity changing, growing, becoming better than it was.

  The second force is ruination. Humanity making its best effort to demonstrate its worst tendencies. A march toward self-destruction.

  The future is a door that can accommodate only one of those two competing forces.

  Will humanity evolve and become something better?

  Or will we cut our own throats with the knives we made?

  —Hannah Stander, in her lecture to students at Penn State University: “Apocalypse versus Apotheosis: What Does the Future Hold?”

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Formication Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II: Ant Colony Optimization Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part III: Invasion Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Interlude: Hollis Copper

  Chapter 19

  Interlude: Hollis Copper

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Interlude: Ez Choi

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part IV: Competitive Exclusion Interlude: Kauai

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Chuck Wendig

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  FORMICATION

  formication (n)

  1. the sensation that ants or other insects are crawling on one’s skin.

  1

  Terminal F at the Philadelphia International Airport is the end of the airport, but it feels like the end of the world. It’s a commuter terminal, mostly. Prop planes and jets hopping from hub to hub. The people here are well-worn and beaten down like the carpet underneath their feet.

  Hannah’s hungry. A nervous stomach from giving a public talk means she hasn’t eaten since lunch, but the options here late at night—her flight is at 10:30 P.M.—are apocalyptic in their own right. Soft pretzels that look like they’ve been here since the Reagan administration. Egg or chicken salad sandwich triangles wrapped up in plastic. Sodas, but she never drinks her calories.

  She’s pondering her choices—or lack thereof—when her phone rings.

  “Hello, Agent Copper,” she says.

  “Stander. Where are you?”

  “The airport. Philly.” Uh-oh. “Why?”

  “I need you to get here.”

  “Where is ‘here’?”

  He grunts. “Middle of nowhere, by my measure. Technically: Herkimer County, New York. Let me see.” Over his end comes the sound of uncrumpling papers. “Jerseyfield Lake. Not far from Little Hills. Wait. No! Little Falls.”

  “I’m on a plane in—” She pulls her phone away from her ear to check the time. “Less than an hour. I’m going home.”

  “How long’s it been?”

  Too long. “What’s up in Little Falls?”

  “That’s why I need you. Because I don’t know.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “It cannot.”

  “Can you give me a hint? Is this another hacker thing?”

  “No, not this time. This is something else. It may not even be something for you, but . . .” His voice trails off. “I’ll entice you: I’ve got a cabin on the lake with more than a thousand dead bodies in it.”

  “A thousand dead bodies? That’s not possible.”

  “Think of it like a riddle.”

  She winces. “Nearest airport?”

  “Syracuse.”

  “Hold on.” She sidles over to one of the departure boards. There’s a flight leaving for Syracuse fifteen minutes later than the one leaving for Dayton—the one she’s supposed to get on. “I can do it. You owe me.”

  “You’ll get paid. That’s the arrangement.”

  She hangs up and goes to talk to an airline attendant.

  Boarding. The phone’s at her ear once more, pinned there by her shoulder. It rings and rings. No reason to expect her to answer, but then—

  “Hannah?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Everyone moves ahead toward the door. Hannah pulls her carry-on forward, the wheels squeaking. She almost loses the phone, but doesn’t.

  “I wasn’t sure it was you.”

  “You would be if you turned on caller ID.”

  “It’s not my business who’s calling me.”

  “Mom, it is exactly your business who’s calling you.”

  “It’s fine, Hannah, I don’t need it.” Her mother sounds irritated. That’s her default state, so: situation normal. “Are you still coming in tonight?”

  Hannah hesitates, and her mother seizes on it.

  “Your father misses you. It’s been too long.”

  “It’s a work thing. It’s just one night. I’ve rebooked my flight. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “All right, Hannah.” In her voice, though: that unique signature of sheer dubiousness. Her mother doubts everything. As if anyone who doesn’t is a fawn: knock-kneed and wide-eyed and food for whatever larger thing comes creeping along. What’s upsetting is how often she’s proven right. Or how often she can change the narrative so that she’s proven right. “We will see you tomorrow.”

  “Tell Dad good night for me.”

  “He’s already asleep, Hannah.”

  In flight the plane bumps and dips like a toy in the hand of a nervous child. Hannah isn’t bothered. Pilots avoid turbulence not because it’s dangerous, but because passengers find it frightening.

  Her mind, instead, is focused on that singular conundrum: How can a cabin by the lake contain a thousand corpses?

  The average human body is five eight in length. Two hundred pounds. Two feet across at the widest point. Rough guess: a human standing up would take up a single square foot. How big would a lake cabin be? Three hundred square feet? Three hundred corpses standing shoulder to shoulder. Though cording them like firewood would fill more space because you could go higher. To the rafters, even. Maybe you could fit a thousand that way . . .

  She pulls out a notebook and paper, starts doodling some math.

  But then it hits her: Hollis Copper was dangling a riddle in front of her.

  Q: How do you fit a thousand dead bodies in a cabin by the lake?

  A: They’re not human bodies.

  2

  She rents a little four-door Kia sedan just as the place is closing. Smells of cigarette smoke smothered under a blanket of Febreze.

  It’s late April, and the drive to Little Falls is long and meandering, through thick pines and little hamlets. The GPS tries to send her down roads that are closed (BR
IDGE OUT) or that don’t seem to have ever existed. She’s tempted to turn it off. Not because of its inefficacy, but because she knows it’s tracking her. Passively, of course. But where she goes, it knows. And if it knows, anybody can know.

  She grinds her sharp spike of paranoia down to a dull knob. She is always cautioning her parents not to give in to that anxiety. (Let’s be honest, the horse is miles out of the barn on that one.) That is a deep, slick-walled pit. Once you fall into it, it’s very hard to climb back out.

  She leaves the GPS on and keeps driving.

  After another hour, she sees the turn for Jerseyfield Lake. It’s another hour to the cabin. The pines here are tall, like a garden of spear tips thrust up out of the dark earth. The road is muddy, and the sedan bounces and judders as it cuts a channel through the darkness.

  Then, in the distance, she sees the pulsing strobe of red and blue. As she approaches, a cop stands in her way, waving his arms. He’s mouthing something, so she rolls down the window to hear: “—back around, this is a crime scene. I said: turn back around, this is not a road, this is a private driveway and—”

  She leans out the window: “I’m Hannah Stander.” Her breath puffs in front of her like an exorcised spirit. It’s cold. The chill hits her hard.

  “I don’t care if you’re the Pope,” the cop says. He’s got a scruffy mustache and beard hanging off his jowls. “You need to turn around.”

  “She’s with me,” says a voice from behind the cop. And sure enough, here comes Hollis Copper. Tall and thin as a drinking straw. Hair cut tight to his head. Gone are his muttonchops; now there’s just a fuzzy, curly pelt on his face.

  The cop turns. “She law enforcement?”

  “Yeah,” Copper says.

  “No,” Hannah says at the same time.

  The cop gives an incredulous look. “You know what? I don’t give a shit. Park over there—” He flags her toward a puddled patch of gravel tucked tight against a copse of trees whose leaves are just starting to pop. She eases the sedan over there, cuts the engine, meets Hollis. She thanks the cop, still standing next to a cruiser and a couple of black SUVs. He just gives her an arched brow. “Sure, honey.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Hollis says, not quietly. “This way.”

  They head across the limestone gravel toward a pathway cutting through the trees. She can make out knife-slashes of moonlight on distant water and the shadow of a small black cabin. Its windows and doorway are lit up like the eyes and mouth of a Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

  “I’m not really law enforcement,” she says.

  “You’re a consultant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That makes you law enforcement to me.”

  “I don’t enforce the law.”

  “You investigate breaches of the law. That’s the first step of enforcement.”

  She knows better than to get into a semantic argument with him. “It’s not human bodies, is it?” she says.

  He cocks his head at her. “Nope.”

  The smell is what hits her first. It forces its way up her nose before she even crosses the threshold of the cabin. It’s not one odor, but a mélange of them competing for dominance: a rank and heady stink like mushrooms gone mushy; the smell of human waste and coppery blood; the stench of something else behind it, something pungent and piquant, vinegary, acidic, tart.

  It does nothing to prepare her for what she sees.

  The dead man on the floor has no skin.

  He still wears his clothes: a fashionable hoodie, a pair of slimcut jeans. But his face is a red, glistening mask—the eyes bulging white fruits against the muscles of his cheeks and forehead. The skin on his hands is gone. The upper arms, too. (Though curiously, the skin at the elbows remains.) Where the present flesh meets exposed muscle, the skin is ragged, as if cut by cuticle scissors. It looks like torn paper. Dried at the edges. Curling up.

  There’s one body, she thinks. Where are the rest?

  It takes her a second to realize she’s looking at them. The little black bits on the floor—hundreds of them, thousands—aren’t metal shavings or some kind of dirt.

  Insects, she realizes. Ants. Dead ants, everywhere.

  “What am I looking at?” she says, putting on a pair of latex gloves.

  The question goes unanswered. Hollis just gives her a look. He wants her to tell him what she sees. That’s why she’s here.

  “No tech,” she says. No laptop, no tablet. The cabin is a single room: cot in the corner with a pink sheet on it, galley kitchen at the far end, a cast-iron pellet stove against the far wall. No bathroom. Outhouse, probably. (She’s all too familiar with those. Her parents had one for a number of years because they didn’t trust any plumber coming into their house.)

  If there’s no tech, why is she here? She takes a gingerly step forward, trying not to step on the ants. They may contain vital forensic data.

  But it’s impossible not to step on the ants. They make little tiny crunches under her boot—like stepping on spilled Rice Krispies.

  She looks up. Oh God. What she thought was a pink bedsheet on the cot is no such thing. It was a white sheet. But now it’s stained pink. The color of human fluids.

  She looks over at Hollis. He gives a small nod. He’s got his hand pressed against the underside of his nose to stave off the stench. She doesn’t even notice it now. Curiosity’s got its claws in.

  The sheet on top, the one stained with fluids, is lumpy, bumpy, oddly contoured. She bends down, pinches the edges with her fingers, and pulls it back.

  Her gorge rises. This smell won’t be ignored. A wall of it hits her: something formerly human, but something fungal, too. A sour bile stink filled with the heady odor of a rotten log. Her arm flies to her nose and mouth and she chokes back the dry heave that tries to come up.

  Under the sheet, she finds a good bit of what remains of the victim’s skin. All of it clipped off the body in tiny swatches—none bigger than a quarter, most smaller than a penny. Tattered, triangular cuts. Half of it covered in striations of white mold—like fungus on the crust of bread. The white patches are wet, slick. The air coming up off it is humid.

  Amid the hundreds of little skin bits: More dead ants. Hundreds of them.

  Hannah pulls out her phone, flicks on the flashlight. The light shines on the glossy backs of the ants, each a few millimeters long. Many are covered with a fine carpet of little filaments: red hairs, like bits of copper wire. Some of those filaments are covered in the same white fungus.

  And in some of their jaws—their prodigious jaws, jaws like something a morgue attendant would use to cut through flesh and bone—are snippets of dried skin.

  Hannah’s head spins as she tries to imagine what happened here. A man dies. Natural causes? Falls forward. Ants come in—

  A memory passes over her like the shadow of a vulture:

  She’s young, not even eight, and she’s out at the mailbox (before Mom chopped the mailbox down with an ax), and she pops the lid and reaches in—suddenly her hand tickles all over. Hannah pulls her hand out and the tickling bits turn to pinpricks of pain. Her hand is covered in ants. Little black ones. Dozens of them pinching her skin in their tiny mandibles. She screams and shakes her hand and ants are flung into the grass as she bolts back to the house, forgetting to close the barbed-wire gate—Mom would give her no end of dressing down over that because you never leave the gate open, never-never, ever-ever, because then anybody can get in . . .

  She stands up. The smell recedes. She gently sets the sheet back over the battlefield of ants, fungus, and human skin, then turns to Copper. “Is this even a crime scene?”

  “That’s what I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

  She looks around. The pellet stove is cold—the air here almost the same temperature as outside—but she sees ash spilled on the floor in a little line.

  Hannah takes a knee next to the body. Most of the skin on the scalp is gone, as is most of the hair. The skull underneath is exposed: pinkish-brown, like the sheet on
the cot. But no sign of injury. No broken bone. “Any injury to the body?” she asks, taking a pen and poking around.

  Hollis tells her no, nothing.

  The dead man’s ears are gone, mostly. Holes leading into the side of the head. As she nudges the skull with her pen, more ants spill out of those canals. All dead. Were they eating the brain, too? Or just trying to nest in there?

  The dead body doesn’t bother her, but that thought does.

  Outside, the air is cold and crisp—like a hard slap against her cheek. She paces out front a little. After a few moments, Hollis joins her, thumbs a piece of hard gum through its foil backing, offers it to her. She takes it. Wintergreen.

  He pops a piece into his mouth and gives a hard crunch. “What am I looking at in there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re supposed to know.”

  “I don’t see any tech inside. I don’t see any . . . anything. There’s no there there. This isn’t my world.”

  “Just tell me what you saw.”

  Is he asking because he knows something she doesn’t? Or has Hollis Copper lost a step? She’s heard rumors. Last year’s fiasco with Flight 6757 was hell on him. Brought down by hackers, the story goes. Nobody brought her in to consult on that one—to her surprise.

  Whatever it was, Hollis had to take some time off before the NSA lobbed him back to the Bureau like a hot potato. When he came back, he seemed the same at first, but something lives behind his eyes now.

  “Again, I don’t see any tech. But who doesn’t have a phone? Everyone has a phone. You didn’t find one?”

  He shakes his head.

  “How’d you even find this? This is way off the beaten path.”

  “Cabin’s a rental. And nobody is renting it. The owner got a call from someone across the lake, said he saw lights here. Thought it might be squatters.”

  “But the dead man in there isn’t a squatter.”

  “Why do you say that?”