The Colony: A Novel
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Authors: A. J. Colucci
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To Al, Rachel and Julia
CONTENTS
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise! Having no commander, overseer or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer and gathereth her food in the harvest.
—Proverbs 6: 6–8
PROLOGUE
New York City
PIONEER GENETICIST DR. PHILLIP LAREDO
leaned into an early morning breeze that skidded off the choppy whitecaps of the Hudson River. It was spring and sunny, but the biting wind cut creases around his eyes, blew long strands of his thinning gray hair and gave the doctor a chill. He was dressed only in a nightshirt. The rest of his clothes were stuffed inside a garbage can on 125th Street, along with his wallet, three gold fillings and a few other personal items.
Laredo knelt in a sandy patch of grass and looked down at the busy anthill. Specks of black scurried around, clutching tiny white crumbs sprinkled from his pocket. It was the beginning of the end. Panic caught the doctor off guard and his body went rigid. Tremendous heat flushed his face. He fought off a surge of adrenaline by breathing deep into the cold and exhaling warm vapor until his heart rate became steady.
You know what must be done, now do it.
Laredo’s murky blue eyes scanned the park for spectators. The field was deserted. The only sounds came from an occasional passing car on the Henry Hudson Parkway. On hands and knees he reached into a cloth sack lying in the dirt and retrieved a brown metal canister, a revolutionary marvel of storage technology that appeared old and worn like an ancient artifact, engraved with curls of English ivy. The lid retracted with a suction of air.
Laredo dropped a single ant from the canister into the colony. Just one; but he knew it would be enough.
The enormous ant named Cleopatra was brown and slender and about the length of a mouse. She darted skillfully over the anthill, pressing abdomen to earth and depositing a heady scent in calculated patterns along the soil. She stirred up quite a commotion among the others, but as expected, they didn’t attack.
The doctor observed the last ant in his possession with pride and remorse, as he rubbed the tips of his fingers together and felt the sting of having just removed his own fingerprints with Drano and an X-Acto knife. Unexpectedly, Laredo’s thumb drew the sign of the cross above his brow, a gesture he had long ago renounced. There was simply no other way; of this he was certain. He considered the chain of events just released on the world by his own hands and lamented that while God might forgive him, the human race most surely would not.
When Cleopatra disappeared down the hole and the doctor was satisfied that the process had begun, he pulled a revolver from his satchel and blew his brains across the grassy lawn of Riverside Park.
* * *
Cleopatra pushed through the outer passageway, touching antennae with wary workers. Instinctually she knew from the heavily marked path that she was headed for a nesting site. The others knew from her scent that she was prepared to give birth. On a steady spiral downward, through tunnels that barely fit her body mass, she marked her trail with a sense of urgency.
She reached the pupae nursery, where thousands of translucent yellow eggs had been carried that morning to higher, warmer ground.
Cleopatra knew her first task. Her huge jaws opened sideways, digging into the membrane of the egg and pinching closed with stalwart force. Behind the outer jaws, a second mouth chewed apart the soft innards of the egg.
The clarity and intensity of her pheromones were unlike any the colony had ever detected, and their response was swift and unconditional. Conforming to the signals of the strongest chemical secretions was their most fundamental tenet to one hundred million years of evolutionary survival. Immediately the ants began to eat their young. As directives spread from tunnels to chambers to adjoining colonies, the last of the common black field ants fed on their final generation.
It was now time for Cleopatra to take her place. She moved quickly to the site.
The queen’s chamber was bustling with nurser ants, small young workers tending to the field ant queen. They scattered as Cleopatra entered. In the center, the swollen monarch lay in a soft bed of silt continuously pumping out eggs in a rhythmic motion. Dim-witted and feeble, she turned her obtuse head slightly towards Cleopatra, barely regarding her more potent, intelligent cousin.
With thick pincers, Cleopatra decapitated the queen.
TWO YEARS LATER …
CHAPTER 1
New York City
WINTER, KISS MY ASS,
Jerrol Thomas cheerfully mused as he strolled out of the Harlem bodega and the late afternoon sun hit his face. It had been a frigid March and now the air was balmy and sweet. He smiled and counted his lottery tickets. April was his lucky month, so he was surprised to find a boy banging a rock against the lock of his new racing bike, denting the derailleur and chipping the paint.
“Shiiee, Malcolm! Who taught you how to gank a bike?” Jerrol was tall and broad-shouldered with a goatee and striking black eyes, and he towered over the twelve-year-old. “Ever hear of a hacksaw, you stupid ass? Get the hell away from my wheels!”
“I didn’t know it was yours, sir,” Malcolm said, and quickly sprinted down the sidewalk.
“It’s no wonder you’re failing my math class,” Jerrol yelled after him, but then walked away smiling. He crossed Amsterdam Avenue and opened the garden gate to the back of his building. His apartment was small but surrounded by the community garden. No one messed with the garden. The white picket fence was like a fortress in the neighborhood, which had its share of gangsters and social misfits who went around shoplifting, mugging and shooting each other, but no one would even think about picking a tomato. Jerrol liked that his front door faced the hydrangea, which were still standing brown and dry since the fall.
He strolled over to the patio and fiddled with his keys. There was a noise behind him and, without turning around, Jerrol knew it was a rat. Lately there had been a lot of rats, and they seemed to be acting strangely. Not lazily eating the foliage as they normally did, but zipping in frantic circles and rolling in the weeds. This rat seemed to be dancing on its hind legs. Its tiny arms waved as it swayed from side to side. Then it fell to the ground beneath the fence. Jerrol strained his neck to see that part of the animal’s back was gone. In place of fur were patches of bloody flesh, as if it had been skinned.
“Coming in?” a voice said from inside.
Jerrol looked at his wife standing in the doorway.
“Postpartum checkup, remember?”
Jerrol didn’t want her to see the bloody creature so he kissed her hard on the lips and pushed his way inside. “You be sure to ask the doctor when we can get back to business.”
“Now you’re talking.” She grabbed her purse and headed out. “I’ll be home late. Check on the baby. It’s almost suppertime.” As soon as the door shut, there was a shrill cry from the nursery. Jerrol went to the kitchenette, heated up a bottle in the microwave and headed down the hallway.
* * *
A few hours later, Jerrol was reading a book on the sofa in cut-off shorts and a Lakers T-shirt when he remembered the rat. He laid the book on the coffee table and went to the front door, flicked on the outside light and stepped into the chilly night air.
The patio light cast a shimmer on the concrete terrace and metal chairs. A few yards away, the garden was still visible under a three-quarter moon that shone down on rows of freshly tilled soil. Poppy plants swayed in a gentle breeze. There was nothing between the stakes of dried tomato vines, where the rat had expired. It was gone.
An orange-striped cat sprang to the top of the fence and Jerrol flinched, but then he smiled as the feral beast dropped to the other side with a dead thing in its mouth.
“Good going, Garfield,” he said.
Hanging from a leafless elm tree was a string of bamboo chimes that made a clattering sound. They fell silent as the wind died down. Jerrol noticed that the poppy plants continued to move. Dried stalks rustled and quivered in a peculiar way. Then, out of their shadows, a wide puddle emerged. It seeped across the ground like an oil leak, into the whiteness of moonlight. Immediately it was clear that this was not one entity but countless tiny forms.
Ants.
Jerrol had seen a cluster of them scurrying through the garden last spring, moving as a unit just like these but in a much smaller group. The dense pool spread out and broke off into ravines, forming perfect rows twelve inches across. These ants were the biggest he’d ever seen, nearly an inch long. Jerrol observed their pageantry, curiously amused, but at the same time his nerve wrenched at the way they marched in formation like platoons of soldiers. It was a hauntingly familiar image.
Driver ants.
They had been featured on a Discovery Channel special in one of the school classrooms—
Killer Ants of the Congo
, it was called. They were known to hunt in groups, attacking anything that breathed. But this was Harlem; you had to keep out the drugs, not the bugs.
The yard suddenly grew darker and Jerrol turned around, squinting at the patio fixture. Black splotches encased the glass ball, moving and blending together until the lamp disappeared and only the moon was left shining. In the shadows, millions of tiny agile bodies were forming bridges and ropes ten feet long, connecting bushes, flowerpots and lawn chairs.
Ants don’t do this, he thought and a shiver of impending doom ran up his spine. He blinked hard and refocused on the garden. Threads of black were linked like chains between gutters and trellises. They blanketed the ground and spilled over rocks and brush and newly sprouted greenery. They covered the barbecue grill, the lawnmower, a soccer ball, a wooden bench, the toolshed and every other surface on the property.
* * *
One exceedingly large ant lay motionless on a tree limb, watching Jerrol from the back of the yard. Her compound eyes lacked the sharp focus of human vision, but with thousands of tiny lenses she perceived movement and the slightest change in light more acutely, which allowed her to observe the man below whose form, shape and erratic movements all signaled prey. His scent, drifting in the wind, was detected between her antennae and made a clear confirmation.
