Invasive Species (21 page)

“TAKE IT OUT,”
Trey said.

His heart was hammering, as if he'd just climbed a mountain and was standing at twenty-seven thousand feet. But he hadn't moved. Couldn't move.

Understanding at last what had happened to him. His mind clearing for an instant, just an instant, then clouding over again. Like a tide sweeping in, obliterating everything in its path, before being sucked back out, leaving only ruins behind.

A battle. A war.

His heart was his enemy. With every beat, every liquid leap inside his chest, every surge of blood in his veins, his consciousness dwindled.

Sheila stood beside the bed. Frozen. Stunned. He could see that. As if through a smeared window, he could see the anguish on her face.

His heart thudded. He was disappearing inside his poisoned blood.

“Take it out,” he said, or thought he said.
“Now.”

Only knowing he'd actually said the words, and not just dreamed them, when Sheila, her bloodless face half obscured by the hand over her mouth, shook her head. Hard. In terror.

“I can't,” she said.

Trey reached out and grabbed her arm. He could still feel it. It was cold.

“Sheila,” he said, “there's no time. It's . . . taking me.”

His blood rushed. Something was chewing at the edges of his consciousness, dropping crimson veils over his vision. Winning the battle. Winning the war.

“Trey.” She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his hand in both of hers. “You'll die.”

Her voice tiny through the roaring in his head, the rattling of his heart.

“No.” His tongue felt swollen in his mouth.

In some remote, untouched corner, he thought,
It's trying to stop me. It knows that if we wait just a little longer we'll be too late.

It.

With an effort almost beyond his imagining, he wrenched his shattered thoughts back into an approximation of something whole. His vision cleared. A little.

“Sheila, no,” he said. His voice wasn't his own.

“You don't die,” he said. “Not—yet.”

He squeezed her hand.
Listen to me.

Save me.

Her face was a mask of grief and indecision. Tears streaked her cheeks and dripped from her chin. “My mom—”

“Sheila,” he said, “I don't know—when this happened.
I don't remember
. But not long. Look—”

He couldn't breathe. His lungs were filling.

“Look.” He was speaking underwater. “It's so small.”

Still she did not move.

“Agiru—” he said. His words tumbling out in gasps. “The old man. He said they weren't in time—”

Was she listening? Would she
understand
?

“Do you see—” Despairing. “That's why you don't remember you were infected. Not at first. Because you won't die . . .”

It was hopeless. She would not go. She would not try.

It was already too late.

He felt something flutter inside him. A tiny wriggle within his flesh.

For one last instant, everything was silent, calm. He sat in the eye. The center of the vortex.

He could see. He could hear.

He could breathe. He inhaled and said, his own voice, his own words, “Sheila.
Kill it.
”

The creature wriggled again, more strongly. Diving deeper. Releasing its poison.

Saving itself.

Sacrificing him.

Trey's mind burst apart. His mouth moved, he could feel it moving, but the roaring of his heart kept him from knowing if he spoke words or if the words made any sense.

With his bloodred gaze, he saw Sheila put her hands over her face. Then she took them away, and, when she did, her expression had changed.

She got up from the bed. He saw her, could still see her, as she ran for the bedroom door and out of view.

The creature dug.

The veil fell, and he was blind. No: blind on the outside. Inside, he could still see.

Seeing, he glimpsed . . . something.

Huge. Monstrous. Shapeless.

At that last instant, Trey knew what it was.

And what it wanted.

*   *   *

FAR IN THE
distance, he felt . . . something new.

Pain.

A dart of pain as clear as crystal.

Light danced before his eyes. The aurora borealis. The height of a migraine's aura. Twisting, whirling fragments of light, but through them he could again glimpse the real world. The world outside, the one that the monster deep in his brain could not yet control.

The tide pulling back.

He looked down at his body. It lay on the bed. Still. Waxen. Someone else's body.

Sheila sat on a chair, leaning over it. Leaning over the body. She was wearing latex gloves from the first-aid kit he kept in his bathroom.

Trey could see the side of her face, see that she was calm now. A doctor. Doing what she had to do.

She held a small knife in her right hand. A paring knife from the kitchen. In her left hand, rubbing alcohol in a brown bottle.

The bottle spilled. The liquid was cold on the body's pierced skin.

Somewhere in the center of his brain, Trey felt something new rise. Something jagged.

Fear. Rage.

Not his own.

Trey watched as Sheila swabbed first the knife blade with the alcohol, then the body's bare belly. Her face intent, she bent over him. The blade caught the light as it sank into his swollen flesh.

In the moment before the two warring worlds inside his brain collided, merged, burst apart again, Trey saw the larva wriggle in the parted lips of the cut. He glimpsed its black head, saw its mandibles reaching in vain for something to attack.

Sheila lifted it from the body. It twisted on the points of a gleaming pair of forceps.

Trey felt terror erupt inside him. Something shrieked inside his head.

Who was it?

What was he?

The world inside flew. Shattered.

He was gone.

ONE MOMENT WAS
a dreamless blank, and the next Trey was lying in his bed, aware of the sheets against the bare skin of his back and arms, the pillow against his head. The body he'd been watching from a distance was once again his own.

He lay there, unmoving. His eyes were closed, but the shadows projected on them came from the yellowish light illuminating the bedroom.

He could feel himself breathing, his lungs pushing the bellows of his chest up and out, down and in. He could feel his heart beating, but more gently now, set free from its adrenaline frenzy.

He could feel the pain in his stomach. In the skin of his stomach.

Still he didn't move. These sensations were all reassuring. He was alive. He'd been right. Sheila had gotten the larva out in time. Whatever poison it had released to stop his heart, it had not yet possessed in sufficient quantities to succeed.

It had tried. It had done its best, and he still lived.

But . . .

Somewhere deep inside his brain, something had changed.

Something was different.

He explored, like you search for a missing tooth with your tongue. He probed, and found . . .

Something gone?

Something new?

He didn't know.

Maybe both.

*   *   *

TIME PASSED. THEN
he awoke again and, this time, opened his eyes.

Sheila was sitting in a chair beside the bed, elbows on knees, head propped on her hands. The latex gloves were gone, her hands scrubbed clean. But she'd neglected to wash her face. Tearstains had left tiny streaks on her cheeks, like the paths the first raindrops leave down a dusty windshield.

No tears now, though. Just an echo of terror in her eyes. Trey could see it. It was still there. He wondered if it would ever leave.

Her gaze found his face. “There you are,” she said, and it sounded casual until her breath caught on the last word.

She reached out and took his hand. Just as she had done before, when he was falling. Before she pulled him back.

Her hand still felt cold in his, and she didn't want to meet his eyes. He could only imagine the horror she must have gone through as she made that first incision, as she removed the writhing larva from his flesh. She must have been sure, certain, that he would die.

That she would kill him, as she believed she'd killed her mother.

But she'd gone ahead anyway. She'd done what he'd asked, what he'd pleaded for.

Trey moved his mouth. Making words seemed strange, as if he didn't quite know the language anymore.

“Thank you,” he said.

Now she was looking directly at him. “If you ever make me do that again,” she said, “
I'll
die.”

He shifted his gaze to the window and saw that night had fallen. The light he'd seen through his closed eyelids had come from the bedside lamp, not the sun.

He realized he didn't even know when—or how— they'd come back to the apartment. The entire day seemed obscured, covered in fog.

Was that what every victim felt? Every host? Was that the preamble to the dreaming days, and death?

“I was asleep,” he asked, “for how long?”

Sheila looked at her watch. “About four hours.”

“God,” he said, remembering his dreams. No. They hadn't been dreams.

He'd have to tell them about what he'd seen, what he'd felt. Sheila and Jack. Even though he didn't want to. Even though something inside him, inside the part of him that had changed, fought against the telling.

Sheila raised her eyes to his. “Once you'd survived the initial procedure,” she said, only the slightest quaver in her voice betraying her resolve, “I wondered if you'd live, but never awake.” Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Whether all I'd done was turn your dreaming days into dreaming years.”

She rolled her shoulders, winced. “I thought about calling an ambulance, taking you to the hospital.” Both her voice and gaze sharpened. “But Jack's right. We don't understand
anything
about this. Maybe moving you would have killed you. I didn't know.”

Her mouth twisted, a grimace, not a smile. “So I kept you here and stayed beside you.” A pause. “And . . .
prayed
.”

Trey drew in a breath, remembering the maelstrom inside his head. His fear. All the pain. Dimming now in the memory, becoming surreal, as pain always did.

“I'm . . . glad you stayed with me,” he said.

Her hand tightened in his. “After about two hours, you began to give the signs of someone emerging from deep sedation. That's when I thought you might be all right. But still . . . it took so long.”

Trey tried to push himself up into a sitting position. He couldn't stop himself from making a sound in his throat.

Sheila frowned. “Stay where you are. I rigged up a butterfly bandage for the incision, but you really need a couple of stitches.”

He shook his head and kept trying. Finally, with her help, he propped himself against the headboard. He was sweating, light-headed.

Sheila said, “Oh, so you're
that
kind of patient.”

He reached for the water bottle that stood on the bedside table and took a drink.

His belly hurt. He looked down and saw a large white sterile pad—a little stained with yellowish red—covering where the swelling had been and, underneath it, the edges of the butterfly bandage.

Seeing it made the bile rise in his throat. That was where it had been. The invader. The parasite.

Sheila said, “I'm sorry if it's a mess.” For a moment her gaze turned inward again. “You're not exactly equipped for surgery here.”

Trey nodded. He felt cold.

“But if we keep it clean, I don't think there'll be much risk of infection. Since the larva was”—she struggled for the word—“comparatively undeveloped, it hadn't gotten in very deep.”

Deep enough. Trey could remember the sensation as it dove beneath the surface. It had felt like it was digging into his center, his core.

He made to swing his legs over the edge of the bed, to get to his feet. Sheila put a hand on his shoulder and, without effort, kept him where he was.

“Overruled,” she said. Then, more gently, “Give yourself a little time. You're still clearing all that junk out of your system.”

She frowned. “I wish I had some way of measuring your kidney function. Don't be surprised if your pee comes out some strange colors the next few days. Your blood is likely full of debris.”

“I'm fine,” Trey said.

She kept her hand on his shoulder. “Then why are you shivering?”

After a moment, he lay back down.

“Better,” she said.

For a moment he thought he might drift off again. Then, almost before it became a conscious thought, the question was out of his mouth. “Where's the larva?”

Sheila's mouth turned downward. “In a jar, in the bathroom.” She gave a little grin. “I didn't want to be in the same room with it.”

“Is it—”

She nodded. “As a doornail, about thirty seconds after I pulled it out. And I didn't squeeze it.” She widened her eyes. “I don't think those things can live long away from their hosts. Not until they're ready to hatch.”

She got to her feet and walked out of the room. Trey watched her go, that strong stride on long, slender legs causing her knee-length skirt to swish back and forth as she moved.

Her skirt. Had she been wearing a skirt earlier? Trey didn't think so, though his dreaming hours made him unsure of what he knew and what he didn't.

She came back in carrying a little jam jar. Trey noticed that she was wearing a white sleeveless blouse with a network of small flowers around the neck and down the sides. She'd washed the tearstains off her face.

“You look beautiful,” he said, surprising them both.

Sheila's face colored. Then she gave him an askance look. “Calm down, cowboy. I'm still telling you to stay in bed till tomorrow.”

She sat down in the chair and showed him the jar. At its bottom lay the dead larva, a limp white tube with oversized head, staring black eyes, and those familiar, vicious mandibles.

Trey had seen two of them before, alive and then dead, in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. Bigger, those had been, and more deadly. But seeing this one made his heart pound again, as if it were still inside him, still spreading its poison.

The top of the jar was screwed on tight. Sheila saw him looking. “Can't hurt to be sure.” She gave a little laugh, shaky around the edges. “I would have glued it shut if I'd found where you keep the glue.”

“Jack will be happy,” he said.

She frowned. “I've been trying him, but for once he's not at the office, and his cell phone's off.”

Trey leaned closer, but the larva had nothing else to tell him.

Or maybe it did. Finally his head was clear enough for something else to occur to him. Something he should have thought of as soon as he awoke.

His gaze shifted to the window, which was closed, the shades drawn. To the door of the room, closed as well. To the shadows cast across the ceiling by the lamp at his bedside. To the dark closet and shelves in the corner.

Sheila, watching him, nodded. “I wondered when you'd think of that.”

“But—”

“Nothing.” There was something blurred in her expression. “Let me tell you, Trey, I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom, the minute I was done.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then turned her gaze on him once again. “But I couldn't. Not with you here.”

Trey didn't say anything. “Thank you” was not enough for everything he owed her.

She leaned over, reaching down out of his line of vision. When she straightened, she was holding a kitchen knife, a claw hammer, and a big hardcover book.

“The place needs more weapons,” she said. “And better ones.”

Trey looked at her armaments and said, “Yeah. Pretty pathetic.”

Sheila's gaze shifted to the door. “Still,” she said, “sometimes they don't come for hours for . . . revenge.”

Trey nodded but didn't speak.

“It could still happen at any moment,” she said. “Couldn't it?”

Trey raised his eyes to look at her. “Yes. It could. But I don't think it will.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's a lot easier for a thief to plant a larva in me than to hitch a ride here.”

“I don't know,” Sheila said. “They seem like pretty caring parents to me.”

Trey shook his head. He was missing something, some revelation that lay just beyond his conscious mind.

Something he'd learned from the creature, the
presence
, inside him.

He was reaching for this knowledge when he heard Sheila gasp. He focused on her and saw that her face was bloodless.

“What?” he said, alarmed. “What's wrong?”

“Trey,” she said, “where's your suitcase?”

He looked around, as if he expected to see it on the floor. Even as he did, though, he felt a tide of horror rise inside him.

“I went straight to the museum,” he said, his voice a whisper. “It's still there.”

But Sheila was already standing, half turned toward the door. Reaching into her bag, pulling out her cell phone, dialing.

Saying, even before Jack's phone began to ring, “Answer me this time, you idiot.
Answer
.”