The Colony: A Novel (3 page)

Paul’s studies were based on the social aspect of ants. Their ability to survive since 50 million years before the dinosaurs was due to congenital cooperation, not the pursuit of individual needs. Ants performed tasks solely for the benefit of the colony, never for themselves. They possessed an incredible sense of duty; all worker ants had two stomachs, one for themselves and one to feed the rest of the colony. Certain worker ants might be in charge of cleaning out the tunnels, but if they noticed food stacking up at the entrance of an anthill, they would switch tasks and begin food storage. It was called collective decision making.

Paul compared the sociology of ants to certain altruistic human societies, like the Aborigines in Australia, the Siberian Inuit, the bushmen of Africa, monks of Tibet and Buddhists in Malaysia. Based on his study of Hymenoptera, Paul had developed a theory: societies that act in cooperation survive, whereas those motivated by personal gain will eventually become extinct.

There wasn’t a scientist on earth who possessed his knowledge or experience in the taxonomy of ants. But Paul had to admit, for the first time in his life, he was stumped. He flung the contaminated specimen and dissecting tools into a utility sink, went back to his desk and collapsed in the leather chair. He leaned forward and rubbed his bloodshot eyes, then gazed around the room. On the walls were photos of Paul with Jane Goodall in Africa, David Attenborough in Madagascar and Edward O. Wilson back at Harvard. Without a doubt, Paul had reached the pinnacle of his career.

That was before the mutant ants.

Paul cringed at his arrogance. Hadn’t he promised the mayor he could single-handedly contain the colony? Hadn’t he done everything possible to keep out his rivals? Now he was locked in a deadly race against time, anxiously awaiting DNA reports from universities like Cornell, Texas A&M, North Carolina State and Purdue as well as entomology institutes in England, Kenya, Japan, Germany, Australia and every other ant shop he knew. He walked back to the lab, heavy in thought.

Jason, a spirited young assistant, entered the office. He was tall, boyishly handsome, with intelligent eyes and a biting smirk on his face; a younger version of Paul. He carried a thick stack of folders in one hand and held out a cell phone with the other.

“Mayor’s office is calling
me
now.” He raised an accusing brow at Paul. “Turned yours off, didn’t you?”

Paul didn’t answer, but grabbed the stack from his assistant.

“Latest batch,” Jason said. “They all say the same thing.”

Paul slammed the reports on the counter.

Enough paperwork.
Falling back on his early training, when all the answers could be found in the physical world, he plucked up a fresh ant specimen from a slide, held it between his fingers and sliced the thorax down the middle with a diamond-blade scalpel.

A clear bubble of liquid oozed from the exoskeleton and leaked onto Paul’s thumb. The venom set off a fierce sting and Paul reflexively dropped the ant, snapping his wrist back with a gasp of pain. He shook his hand and frantically scanned the room.

“Looking for this?” Jason nonchalantly picked up a coffee can of sodium bicarbonate.

Paul plunged his fingers into the can.

Jason laughed.

“Thanks a lot.” Paul rolled out a length of paper towel, tearing off a piece to wrap around his thumb.

“Geez, you’re bleeding.” Jason clicked his tongue several times with mock empathy. “That was truly the act of a desperate man. This won’t go over well with the Nobel folks, no sireee.”

“Perhaps you’d like to go back to assembling Eskimo dioramas.”

“I’m just saying…” The sarcasm in the room evaporated. “So what the hell are you waiting for? Go to the press.”

Paul shook his head. “Not until we figure the damn things out.”

“Is that you talking, or city hall?”

Paul felt flushed. He wasn’t sure if it was from the toxic hit he’d taken from the ant or from his assistant. A Blackberry lying on the counter rang out Beethoven’s Fifth and Paul stiffened. His thumb was still bleeding through the paper towel. He added another layer and answered the phone.

“O’Keefe.” A wave of nausea swept over Paul as he listened to the mayor’s voice on the other end. It was worse than he expected.

Jason handed him a medical bag as Paul headed out. “Another body?”

Paul shook his head. “Two.”

CHAPTER 4

NEON LIGHTS SWIRLED FROM
the tops of a dozen police cars, blocking off a chunk of Broadway, where the bodies of the sanitation workers lay under white sheets in the same position they were found. NYPD officers stood stoically over the crime scene while commuters pressed against the yellow tape, straining their necks to get a look.

Police Chief Scotty Harris walked away from the bodies in disgust. The medical examiner, handpicked by the mayor himself, still hadn’t arrived and Harris cursed him through gritted teeth. He yelled out to one of his men, “Sergeant! Where the hell is Wang? I got two dozen detectives, FBI, CIA and no fucking medical examiner. I want these bodies gone.”

“He’s up in Harlem,” the sergeant scowled. “Got another one. That makes what—seven?”

“Who’s counting?”

A white van topped with a satellite dish screeched up to the scene,
FOX FIVE NEWS
emblazoned on the side in red, white and blue. The door blew open and a willowy blonde sprang out with a cameraman in tow, ready to roll. She elbowed through the crowd to the first cop that didn’t flee from her like the plague, thrust a microphone in his face and fired off questions just as
NBC News
pulled up to the scene.

The rookie cop, caught in the spotlight, raised a helpless brow to the chief.

“Go tell Debrowski to keep his mouth shut,” Harris told the sergeant. “Anyone asks, it’s a regular, run-of-the-mill New York City double homicide.”

“Right.”

The chief backhanded the sergeant’s shoulder. “Who’s that?”

Poking around the bodies was a man in a lab coat and latex gloves. The sergeant shrugged. “Some ant guy the mayor sent over. Probably another one of his cronies who won’t give us a goddamn thing.”

The chief sighed and stepped off the curb. The stranger squatted over the bodies with a pair of tweezers. He raised a dead ant to the sun and dropped it into a bag, just as the cop reached the corpses’ shoes.

“Chief Scotty Harris. Can I help you?”

Paul peered up with affable brown eyes and offered a business card. “Paul O’Keefe.”

“Mayor sent you?”

“Just getting some samples.”

The chief glanced at the card and read,
American Museum of Natural History.
“You gonna put these things in a display case?”

“I’m purely research.”

He stooped down next to Paul. “So what, are these some kind of fire ant? That’s what the last guy told us, when they killed that couple in the park.”

Paul didn’t answer. “Mind if I open the guy’s mouth?”

“Forensics hasn’t arrived.” Harris motioned to a cop standing guard over the bodies and asked, “They take photos yet?”

“Half hour ago,” the cop replied.

“What the hell,” Harris said, disgusted. “Mayor’s running this show.”

He pulled the sheet back slightly from the victim’s head and Paul winced. The skin of the dead man was shiny white and swollen to the point of resembling whale blubber, the features hardly discernible as human. Thickened blood protruded from orifices and deep cracks in his flesh. The eye sockets were empty and the one remaining eyeball hung like a wet strawberry from fibrous membranes.

Paul opened the mouth with a tongue depressor. The cavity was crammed with ants, mostly dead, but three crawled across the lips.

Harris stumbled back, nearly losing his balance. “Damn. They’re alive.”

Paul ripped off a glove with a snapping sound and scooped the ants with the tongue depressor, then sprinkled them onto his naked palm.

Harris was startled by the risky move but had a feeling this had become routine for Paul. The ants were unperturbed and seemed to be cleaning their antennas with nimble legs. The cop strained to get a look. “Huh. Not a bite. Guess they must be stuffed from eating this guy.”

“Maybe.”

From his breast pocket, Paul retrieved a Genetic Barcode Reader; a shiny silver device with a touch screen and small square hole at the base. It worked on the same principal as a barcode scanner at the supermarket but instead of recognizing line patterns on vegetable cans and packs of poultry, the scanner sequenced strands of DNA and could identify any plant or animal on earth from a database of 10 million species.

Paul retracted a stylus from the side and used it to crush one of the ants into the hole. The screen lit up and numbers and letters streamed by like ticker tape. When it stopped, he peered down at the screen and frowned.
SPECIES: NEGATIVE.

“Thank you.” He stood up, a head taller than the chief, and extended his hand.

Harris shook it, but then held on firmly, his expression pleading for mercy. “C’mon, guy. You gotta give me something.”

Paul could hear the heavy weight of desperation in the cop’s voice. His ruddy face was pinched with lines of worry that stretched from his receding hairline to the bridge of his bulbous nose. Paul looked past the police badge to the early dawn creeping over the skyscrapers and wondered what new horror the day would bring.

“I’m sorry.” His eyes showed he truly was. Paul headed toward the uptown subway.

The chief eyed the cadaverous mass on the sidewalk and watched a few ants crawl out from beneath the sheet. A couple stragglers drifted toward his shoe and he backed off, kicking up gravel.

“Hey!” he called out. “Just tell me one thing. Is there anyone out there who can kill these sons of bitches?”

Paul was already gone.

CHAPTER 5

Las Cruces, New Mexico

THE CHIHUAHUAN DESERT WAS
alive with early morning sounds of coyotes, ravens and warblers. It was already hot—maybe 82 degrees—but a slight wind blew west off the Rio Grande.

A Quonset hut stood in the sand, lonesome in the middle of nowhere, its oblong solar panels reaching up to the sky. Inside it was still quiet and dark, but a sleek gecko, camouflaged with brown and yellow blotches, scampered lightning quick across the gray cement floor like a paratrooper in fatigues. It raced up the side of a bed to a pillow, across a sweaty cheek, and came to rest on a full, sensual pair of lips.

“Feh! Feh! Oh, guck!” Professor Kendra Hart sat up spitting, with sharp blue eyes focused and alert. She wiped the feeling of slime from her mouth and lifted the lizard to eye level. “That was a dirty trick, Darwin.”

Kendra glanced at a retro Atom Ant alarm clock on a side table.

It was five-fifteen. Late again.

“Okay, pal, you’re off the hook this time. But if that’s your way of coming on to me, I’ve got to tell you, I’m partial to the warm-blooded type.”

She threw off the linen sheet and froze. Slithering across the floor was a six-foot king snake; a sleek pattern of gold diamonds glowed as bright as its milk-white eyes. Kendra kept utterly still as the serpent side-winded out of the shadows toward the bed.

She narrowed her eyes. There was something odd about this snake. A lump the size of a baseball swelled above its midsection. Kendra whipped around to a stack of metal cages. Through the bars she could see the plodding movements of a fat Sonoran toad, the silhouettes of a screech owl, iguana and chuckwalla. The smallest cage—home to a desert rat—was upside down on the floor, open and empty.

“Chomps!” she yelled, flashing back to the snake. “You ate Socrates!”

The unperturbed reptile slithered past her, as the suspicious lump moved farther down its gut.

Kendra sighed, letting her bare feet touch the cool floor. She would have to consider finding a better circle of friends. And it wasn’t just the eating-each-other thing. Lately, she’d been talking to herself, having casual conversations and even arguments. Perhaps the solitary life of the desert was becoming a little
too
solitary.

“That’s insane,” she said aloud. “You’ve never been happier.”

Kendra lifted her body with a yoga stretch, expecting long cascades of hair to fall down her back as they did each morning, but her head felt light and bare. The night before, she’d chopped off her blond locks in a declaration of independence or, more accurately, liberation from her past. She picked up a mirror on her nightstand and stared at her short mop of hair, which was wispy and uneven.

Punky, she thought, pleased with her new look. Although there was nothing punk about her. The plaid nightgown she wore could easily be categorized as granny-style and it was a perfect match for her round metal glasses. She slid them onto the bridge of her nose, which was always slightly runny in the morning, and took a double hit of nasal spray, as she was allergic to dust, pollen, mold, peanuts and a variety of other allergens.

Still, no amount of frumpiness or sniffles could hide her natural beauty. Kendra had been an exceedingly pretty child who grew into a striking young woman, but she cringed when anyone commented on her looks. She attributed one’s appearance to simple genetics. Her perfectly shaped face, creamy complexion and sapphire eyes were merely genes passed down from her mother. Her toned, athletic body was the result of having a physically strenuous job.

Slipping into a pair of fuzzy slippers, Kendra stepped across the Quonset hut. Like a faithful dog, Darwin followed her to the lab, flicking his tongue to catch the crickets she tossed from a box before they could hop under the computer equipment resting on the floor. Kendra sprinkled flakes into a small tank that held a dozen crawling insects.

Queen fire ants.

“Hey there, girlfriends,” she said, tapping on the glass. Startled, the large red ants paused for a moment and then darted side to side with frantic feelers, tracking each morsel.

“Ready for your morning workout?” she asked. The tank was resting on a metal plate and when Kendra flipped a switch, the plate began to vibrate. The ants, sensing a sudden earthquake, reacted with extreme agitation. The first queen rose on her hind legs, mandibles wide open and antennae working like a couple of whips. Kendra placed a thin syringe into the tank, which contained an absorbent fiber inside the barrel. She aligned the tip of the needle just below the queen’s head, catching precious airborne chemicals known as pheromones, secreted by the queen. She did the same with eleven other queens.