Invasive Species (18 page)

Trey turned away. Nyramba was watching him closely, something in his expression that might have been amusement.

“You asked a question,” the police chief said. “After the final sting, the convicted grow worse and worse, but they only become like this at the very end. This man's punishment will likely end tonight, and then he will have peace.”

Trey didn't speak, just walked past him and back along the trail. Behind them, the prisoner howled at the sky.

*   *   *

“SO . . . FOURTEEN.”

Thomas Nyramba smiled. “Fifteen now.”

They were back in his office, drinking Nile Specials.

“And the thieves, they stay away from the people of the village?” Trey said.

A nod. “We have made a treaty, and both of us respect it.”

Trey listened to the language, the choice of words, and thought of what Jack's response would have been. It was all about survival and procreation.

He said, “But what happens when you run out of . . . offerings?”

Nyramba laughed. “What? Run out? People are bringing us”—he paused, searching for the word—“
troublemakers
from every town that the thieves have left alone so far. Four more will come tomorrow from Fort Portal.”

He sat back in his chair, still smiling. “We will never run out.”

“Is the same thing being done in other towns?”

“Of course. Where it is needed.” He gave a shrug. “But none of us will ever lack for people who, like Ndele, deserve what they get.”

Trey was silent.

“And you in the United States?” Nyramba said. “In New York? What is your response?”

Trey shook his head. “There've been very few reports so far anywhere yet, and none in New York.”

“There will be.”

“I know.”

“And when there are, when the
majizi
come,” Nyramba said, “you Americans will do the same things.”

Trey was silent.

Or worse,
he thought.

“Or worse,” Nyramba said.

Jabiru Wetland Preserve, Queensland, Australia

“YOU LOOK OLDER,”
Christopher Gilliard said.

Trey looked at him. He'd been thinking the same thing: Some last spark of youth in his brother had been extinguished since they'd last seen each other. He'd always been more solid, more settled, than Trey, but now time had thinned his sun-bleached hair, broadened his paunch, and lent his face the solidity of encroaching middle age.

He was thirty-nine. Trey was thirty-six. Neither of them were kids anymore.

Only one of them had chosen a life that allowed him to pretend he was.

Christopher said, “When were you last here?”

Trey thought back. With all the traveling he'd done, all the countries he'd visited, he'd made it to this corner of northern Australia just a handful of times, most recently three years ago. Actually, closer to four.

“Too long,” he said.

“And it took all this to bring you back here.”

“Yeah.”

Christopher turned his head to look over the wetlands he'd been hired to preserve, to protect. He breathed in through his nose, and though there was no smell other than that of damp earth and waterweed and, from farther away, dust carried by the wind from the Outback, Trey guessed what odor his brother was searching for. He'd been searching for it himself.

“You can't stay here,” he said. “You and Margie and the girls.”

Christopher didn't reply at once. Trey saw the corner of his mouth twitch upward and caught a glimpse of the boy he'd adventured with in a dozen different countries while their parents were otherwise occupied.

Still without looking at Trey, he said, “Yeah? How about you? You don't stay anywhere. You spend your whole life running. Do
you
feel safe?”

Trey was silent. After a few moments, Christopher did turn his head. There was affection in his expression, and amusement, too. Even after all this time, he was still the big brother, Trey the child. And they both knew it.

“The world's too small,” Trey said at last.

“For you. For most of us, it's just right.” Christopher smiled. “And anyway, I think you're missing something: I'm safer from those bugs than you are, no matter how far or fast you run.”

Trey blinked. “You are? Why?”

“Because they need me.”

*   *   *

THEY WERE STANDING
on a grassy bank, the freshwater marsh at their feet stretching toward a row of forested hills in the distance. The calm surface was green with algae, silvery where the sun caught it. Black swans and Australian teal and magpie geese paddled across the water and dabbled in the weeds, while lily-trotters ventured across giant lily pads on long-toed feet.

Not just swans and geese relied on the marsh for water and food. Driving in, Trey and Christopher had passed a big gang of gray kangaroos near the preserve entrance. Honeyeaters and other small birds flitted in the underbrush, and a flock of cockatoos clad in graveyard black circled overhead, letting loose with mournful honking cries.

The wetlands were a human creation, kind of. They had been here for thousands of years until the Europeans colonized the area during the nineteenth century. In an eyeblink, the flow of water was diverted, put to other uses, and the wildlife died out or went elsewhere.

On Trey's last visit, Christopher had explained the system of damming and water diversion that had restored the original marshes. Now he said, “These days, we need to keep pumping or the wetlands will dry out again.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

He gestured again, this time taking in not only the green hills that bordered the marsh, but what Trey knew lay beyond. The vast Outback, hundreds of thousands of square miles of searing heat and spiny grassland and red-rock desert, where wildlife was scarce and water almost nonexistent.

“These bugs of yours, they value the wetlands,” he said. “Like every living thing, they need water. Also food and hosts for their young, both of which congregate here. This is an oasis for them, too.”

Trey saw where he was going.

“If it weren't for me and my team,” Christopher said, “the oasis would vanish. The bugs don't want that.”

Trey thought about Thomas Nyramba, so certain that he and the
majizi
understood each other. That, like two warring societies, they'd reached a deal.

Trey had seen nothing to prove Nyramba wrong, or Christopher, either. Not exactly. What neither of them seemed to understand, though, was that the deal wasn't between two equal partners. It wasn't a treaty, signed and witnessed and understood, that happened to exist between two different species.

No. It was the same deal as the one enslaved ants made with their captors: We'll do what you command. In return, you'll let us live.

For now.

“How do you know this?” he said to Christopher. “How can you be sure?”

For a long time his brother didn't answer. He stood without moving, and when he finally spoke his eyes stayed fixed on the glimmering surface of the marsh.

“Brian Pearce,” he said. “He managed the preserve along with me. They killed him—or, I guess you'd say, used him. When he died, I sent the rest of the staff home and shut this place. Two days later, the pumps broke down.”

He watched a heron stalk along the shallows, hunting for fish. “I couldn't stand it, to let it all go to hell. So I came back, just me, and fixed what was broken.”

His expression bleak, he waited long enough that Trey said, “And?”

“And they watched me, the whole time I was here working. Six of them, maybe, or eight, when I was outside, at least two whenever I went in.”

Trey made a sound in his throat.

“Yeah.” Christopher managed a grin. “I'd prefer not to live through another day like that one, ta very much.”

He shook his arms and shoulders. “Anyway, they figured out what I was doing, or at least that I was necessary to this place, and since then they've left us alone. All of us. I can tell they've taken a few of the kangaroos, and who knows how many smaller mammals, but they're hands-off the humans for now.”

He tilted his head and laughed. “I guess I owe my life to these waters, just as much as the lily-trotters, ducks, and herons do.”

Then he turned his back on the wetland. “Let's go,” he said. “There's something I want to show you at home.”

Trey said, “Okay.”

Christopher paused and added, “And also, Margie and the girls would love to see you.”

Trey smiled and nodded, but Christopher looked a little embarrassed.

He was embroidering the truth, and they both knew it.

*   *   *

MARGIE GILLIARD WAS
tall and willowy and blond, with a firm jaw, blue eyes, and a no-nonsense manner. She greeted Trey with wariness, her behavior reminding him why: She'd always worried that whatever wanderlust infected him would spread to his brother. But she seemed pleased enough to bring him a beer and insist that he stay for dinner and the night.

He accepted the offers. “Thank you.”

Her eyes betrayed a glimmer of amusement. “Well, we could hardly make you stay in a hotel, could we? You're Kit's brother.”

“I hear unspoken words,” Trey said, smiling. “‘Even if not much of one.'”

She laughed. “You'll do,” she said, “until someone better comes along.”

In the living room the seven-year-old twins, Jaida and Nicole, long limbed and tan in shorts and T-shirts, stopped playing a video game to look him over. They claimed to remember him and proved it by recalling the time he'd dropped a pitcher of water that had shattered all over the deck outside.

Despite the years, they seemed comfortable with him in about thirty seconds. Trey found himself remembering—with the same surprise he always felt—that he enjoyed being around children. He often found it easier to talk to them than to adults.

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.