Invasive: A Novel

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 (BRIDGE 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?

He’s got money. The boots are Lowas. Boots for rich-kid backpackers. Three hundred a pop, easy.

He snaps the gum. You got a photographic memory I don’t know about? Or are you just a boot fetishist?

I hike. Those are hiking boots. Overkill, really, and whoever that corpse was, he didn’t get much use out of them. And his jeans are fashionably ripped, not worn from use. The vest is nice, too—an Obermeyer. Also not cheap. I’d say the vic is a young man. Under thirty, at least. Probably not under twenty.

Agreed. Go on.

The owner found the body?

Uh-huh.

He see anybody else here?

Nope.

She hmms. He complain about an ant problem?

No. But he did puke.

I don’t blame him. She pauses, considers. It’s early for ants.

What?

Ants hibernate over the winter. Argentine ants, carpenter ants.

Hollis blows a bubble. It’s spring, though.

But spring in upstate New York. Snow belt. Something nags at her. When did the owner find the body?

This evening. He looks down at his watch. "Yesterday evening. It’s already past midnight. Jesus."

The man was dead when the owner found him. The ants were dead, too?

So he says.

A thought occurs to her. Hannah heads off the meager porch at the front of the cabin and stoops by a small bundle of early greens growing up out of the limestone gravel. Little yellow flowers sit on top, withered and cold. She rubs her thumb across a burgeoning, uncurling leaf. Wet. Cold. Not icy. Not yet.

Over her shoulder, she says, Was there a frost the night before? It would make sense. Last expected frost date around here is probably what? May 3?

Hollis says he doesn’t know, and calls over to one of the unis. The officer walks over, says there was a cold snap, so maybe. Copper comes up behind her, towering over her. Yellow rocket, she says, indicating the plant. One of the first blooming weeds of spring. You can eat it.

Your parents teach you all this stuff?

They did. She starts to stand—but then she sees it.

Look, she says, pointing to the ground. A footprint. In a patch of shining mud next to the driveway, away from the stones. Pointed toward the lake. Could match the Lowas on the victim’s feet. Hollis snaps his fingers, tells one of the cops to get pictures and a preserved mold.

The cop who comes over is the same one who tried to shove her off—the jowly, scruffy one. Is this even a crime scene?

Just get the damn print, Hollis says.

Yeah, yeah, sure, all right. Relax.

Together, Hannah and Copper head down a set of stairs—stairs that aren’t stairs so much as a collection of flagstones stuck haphazardly in the earth, leading down to a narrow dock jutting out over the lake.

Hollis pokes around while Hannah stands and takes it all in. The moon is just a scythe hook over the dark lake—a bitten fingernail left on a blanket of stars. She tries to piece together what happened while Hollis walks out over the dock, his boots clunking on the wood as the whole thing bobs and plops against the surface. Eventually he returns, empty-handed. Nothing.

She stares at a fixed point on the horizon as she tells the story: Our victim comes to the cabin. Doesn’t settle in for long, because he’s still got his vest on, his boots, everything. But he feeds the pellet stove, starts to get warm. A thought occurs to her. Did you check the outhouse? Did someone use it?

We checked it, but nobody used it.

So she continues: "Somehow he dies. I know, that’s a big somehow, but it’s all we have. A health issue, maybe. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Or something more sinister than that? He dies there on the floor. And the ants come in—this is a rainy area this time of the year, and ants tend to come indoors when the weather is cold or rainy. Like the mailbox from her memory: it had rained the night prior, hadn’t it? They have no food and choose him as their meal. But then, of course, nobody’s feeding the pellet stove. The stove goes out. The chill creeps in. Cold snap. Frost. The ants perish. And here we are."

Sensible. And still doesn’t give us the answer to the question.

Is this a crime scene? Or is it something else entirely?

The ants, she says. They might hold the key. Ants have two stomachs. Crops, they’re called. One for food for themselves, one for food for the colony.

So, the ants might have forensic value.

It’s something. Obviously you’re going to do further analysis—a tox screen and all that.

We will. I’ll contact someone in the Bureau who might be able to help on the forensic side. He flinches. It’s pretty nasty in there. Ants pulling all that skin off. At least he was dead when they did it.

She thinks but doesn’t say: We assume he was dead when they did it.

Maybe he had a heart attack or a pulmonary embolism. And along come the creepy crawlies. What’s that old song? The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah . . . The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah! . . . The ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to suck her thumb, and they all go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain . . .

Then they start to bite.

Even in the cold, she starts to sweat.

What she says to Hollis is I’d like to handle it.

You’re not in forensics, I’ll remind you.

No, but I have a friend who’s a forensic entomologist.

You sure? I thought I was interrupting a vacation.

Visiting my parents is about as far from a vacation as Pluto is from Earth. It’s fine. Put together a package ready for travel—ants, fungus, skin sample—I’ll book a flight to Tucson. Ez Choi teaches bug science at the state university.

That Arizona State?

No, it’s— She tries to draw it up from memory. The other one. University of Arizona.

We’ll have to ship the package separately, if that’s amenable.

It’s fine by me, thank you.

Then go forth and do the work of the law, Ms. Stander.

Will do, Agent Copper.

3

She sleeps in the rental car because it’s too late to get a room anywhere and her flight to Tucson is early. Her sleep is restless—she’s shaken by forces unseen, the threat of the future, the threat of the open door. The threat of anything and everything. A sword above everyone’s heads, held by a thread. A plane hacked by hackers, crashing. Terrorists using homemade drones as bombs. A world pinned by global warming, the lack of resources plunging the planet into another Cold War—or worse, an active global conflict.

Hannah moves her hips. She bangs one knee on the stick. She bangs her other knee on the underside of the steering wheel. It’s 4:00 A.M. This is my job, she thinks. To imagine the worst. To look far down the road to see what’s coming: What technology, what social system, what change to nature will humans face? Will it elevate and evolve us? Or will it destroy us?

Or worse—and here is the crux of her work—Will we use it to destroy ourselves? Her brain follows the yellow brick road all the way to Oz—except this Emerald City is shattered, with spires of broken glass, skyscrapers like jagged shards. She looks ahead to see what risks await: the threat of artificial intelligence, the danger of hackable cybernetic implants, the permutations of robots as part of daily life. Will they put us out of work, will we rely too much on them, will the laws be fast enough to catch up with what they can do, will artificial intelligence one day take control of them and decide that we are the greatest threat to robotic life? GMO crops that don’t feed us and brain modifications that allow us to read each other’s minds and mass extinctions—a drain-swirl of improbable but possible scenarios.

At some point, her mind quiets down long enough for her to sleep. But her dreams are thick with terror—in the darkness of slumber she smells that foul piss-vinegar odor. She smells the earthy, turned-soil stink of fungus on skin scraps. She reaches into a mailbox and returns an arm covered in ants. She tries to scream but the sound is caught in her throat. She tries to flail but her arm is stiff and her feet are rooted to the ground. Her family’s farmhouse sits in the distance. Somewhere a goat bleats, then screams. The ants begin biting. Ripping bits of skin off like pulling the wet label off a sweating beer bottle—bit by bit, in larger strips and curls, in worthless, gummy swatches. Until soon her arm is just bold vermilion—red and raw like a steak cut right from the cow. Lush, blood-slick meat braided with bruise-dark veins.

Finally she screams—

And screams herself awake. Here she is. In the airport rental lot. She sits up. Her hair is matted to her forehead with sweat. She looks at her arm. She’s got three scratches down the length. Nothing serious. No blood. Just raised red furrows where her nails must have done their work.

She looks at the time. She’s running late.

With a growl of frustration, Hannah gets out of the car and rescues her carry-on from the backseat. She’ll call the rental place, have them find the car parked in the adjacent lot. She rushes to catch a shuttle bus.

The shuttle is slow. The lines through security are long, too long, and because she’s only a consultant with the FBI and not actual FBI, she is afforded no privilege with the TSA. She has to go through the cattle chute like the rest of the traveling herd.

The plane leaves without her. They rebook her on an afternoon flight.

She calls her mother.

You’re not coming, are you.

It’s work, she says. Her stock answer.

Your father wants to see you.

I know.

He needs to see you.

I know.

No, you don’t know. A sigh on the other end. Mom’s voice softens a little: Is it important, what you’re doing?

I don’t know. Yes.

Do you need to warn us? Is something going on? Her work always leads to that question.

No. This is just standard. It’s a . . . Her mouth forms the word murder, but she has no evidence of that. It doesn’t even add up yet. She says, It’s an ongoing investigation.

You didn’t tell me about last year. The plane.

I didn’t know about the plane.

Terrorists can hack planes and crash them into the ground? What have we done to ourselves, Hannah? We’ve made it all too complex. Too complex to live.

I have to go, Mom. I’ll be in Tucson a day or two and then—

Don’t say it. Your mouth shouldn’t make promises the rest of you can’t keep. We will see you when we see you.

I love you guys.

A pause.

We love you, too, Hannah.

The flight is a roller-coaster ride. Bucking like a horse, then dropping like the horse got shot. (Here, a sudden, unexpected memory: The way to drop a whitetail deer is a lung shot. Take the air out of it and it’ll fall right where it stands.) The turbulence doesn’t bother her, even though her stomach takes every bounce and dip a half second later than the rest of her. But all along the way she ponders how you’d hack the plane in flight. She’s not a hacker, so she doesn’t have the skills, but if she did . . .

The systems are all bound together. That’s the