The Colony: A Novel (4 page)

Kendra flipped off the gyrator and the rumbling tank fell silent. It would take at least fifteen minutes for the insects to calm down. Kendra switched on a computer and prepared the collected secretions for analysis by a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer, a device used to identify unknown compounds by separating and breaking them down into characteristic fragment ion patterns, just like fingerprints.

This particular unit was fitted with an extension designed by the university’s engineering department specifically for Kendra’s unique method of ant study. The structure, made of metal castings and plastic tubes, looked like a homemade distillery. Kendra checked the slow drip from the day before. In the collection flask was about four ounces of yellow liquid, a synthesized version of the queens’ pheromones, and she poured the liquid into a brown glass vial that was nearly filled to the top. She was pleased to discover that there was enough chemical to finish off the bottle, so she capped it and placed it in her backpack.

Kendra hit the stereo and Bob Marley blasted through the steel hut louder than most morning ears could tolerate, but Kendra liked her reggae loud. She found the soothing vocals and steady rhythm of the snare drum hypnotic. She stripped off her nightgown, grabbed a towel and kicked open the battered aluminum door.

Music poured like liquid across the silent desert plains and dissolved into the vastness. The sun was a fiery dome of orange just above the horizon and it bathed the sand in the same brilliant hues. In the outdoor shower, Kendra tugged a metal chain and cold water washed the dust and sweat from her skin, revealing a bronze tone across her face and graceful neck, her lithe arms and legs, while the rest of her body was ice cream white. Under the loud spray of water, Kendra was completely unaware of the young college student driving up to the shower stall.

Marshall swiveled his motorcycle up to the hut, never taking his eyes off the shapely calves below the shower door. He slowly dismounted, nervously biting the corner of his student union card.

With a last tug and rinse, Kendra draped herself in a loose towel, tiptoed hastily across the scorched sand and found the boy standing gape-jawed by her door, his hair sticking up flat on one side and T-shirt half untucked.

“Marshall.”

“Professor H-Hart.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The d-d-dean sent me. He wants to t-t-talk to you right away.”

Kendra breezed by the stuttering boy with a flick of her hand and opened the door. “Tell him the check’s in the mail.”

The music was deafening. Marshall pressed his fingers to his ears and followed her inside, leaping to avoid the swinging door. “He said you haven’t answered your phone in weeks.” He squinted, trying to adjust to the darkness of the room. “Do you want a ride to campus?” he shouted over a bass guitar.

“No. I don’t have time for his whine festival. I have field work to do.” Behind a thin screen, Kendra dropped her towel and put on a robe.

Marshall spun around, cheeks flushed, eyes shut and shouted, “What should I tell the dean?”

Kendra snapped off Bob Marley and the room fell silent. “I’ll call the university tomorrow.”

“I don’t think he’ll be happy about that!” The young man’s eyes were still pinched tight.

“Marshall?”

He looked at her.

“Don’t you have a class or something?”

Marshall walked out the door, dazed. His ears were still ringing from the music and he was worried about the dean, but he had to smile at the blissful image of his teacher’s lovely silhouette forever embedded in his brain.

Kendra poured breakfast into a bowl, a handful of M&Ms mixed with Cocoa Puffs and granola. Chocolate was the only weakness she indulged and her eyes half closed as she munched the concoction down with warm bottled water.

She rolled up the sleeve of her robe and gave herself an injection of antivenom. It was common for entomologists in the field to treat themselves with venom immunotherapy, especially if they had insect allergies, and Kendra was allergic to fire ants. It stung for just a moment, and she quickly dressed for the worksite.

She couldn’t wait to get started. There was a time she remembered all the complexities of a past life, a mosaic of people and places and belongings. A frustrating marriage to an arrogant scientist. A stifling career in the corporate world. The hectic lifestyle in a bustling metropolis. That was years ago and now all the faces, connections and minutiae had begun to fade into the sand.

There was only her research, the desert and the ants.

CHAPTER 6

KENDRA
’
S OLD YELLOW JEEP
Wrangler blasted down the dusty road to the pulsating rhythms of Bunny Wailer. On the back of the vehicle, two bright red bumper stickers proclaimed to the world,
WOMEN WHO SEEK EQUALITY TO MEN LACK AMBITION,
and,
I GOT THIS CAR FOR MY HUSBAND—IT WAS A GOOD TRADE.

The morning drive was Kendra’s favorite time of the day. Hot wind licked her face and blew her untamed hair. Tall mountains rose off the horizon, purple and majestic, and the white sand seemed as vast and uninhabitable as the surface of Mars, billions of life-forms silently camouflaged. It took less than a half hour to reach the university’s student housing complex, a cluster of shabby trailers roasting in the desert heat and jokingly referred to by its young residents as Death Valley.

Kendra beeped her horn and a student emerged from a boxy building. Kate, a perky redhead with too many freckles, sprinted to the Jeep under a cloudless blue sky.

“Hurry up, we’re late,” Kendra said.

“Sorry. I was trying to get through to civilization,” she said, vaulting into the seat.

“Civilization?” Kendra smirked and threw the Jeep into gear. “Who needs civilization?” She took off down the road, turned a sharp left and headed straight up a sand dune, blasting the music and belting out the tune in the wind. The women laughed and sang and headed straight into nowhere, leaving a contrail of dust in their wake.

The study site was nine hundred acres of parkland; endless flat terrain dotted with yuccas and lilac and flaming red blooms of ocotillo. Kendra drove up to a small metal trunk baking in the sun and took a rough count of the white flags scattered like those of a miniature golf course, marking each anthill.

She spied two other students, Jane and Derek, under the shade of a Joshua tree playing hacky sack with the meticulously rolled excrement of a dung beetle.

“Was I right?” Kendra quipped. “Fooling around like usual.”

“Well, this
is
their spring break.”

“Uh-huh.” Kendra was all too familiar with goofball interns. Most students willing to spend their last big vacation counting ants in the desert were stoners and partyers, desperate for extra credit by the end of the school term.

Kendra leaped out of the Jeep and geared up. She wiped globs of sunscreen on her face and arms. Fire ants had a fierce sting so she wore billowy coveralls with a high collar and stuffed her pant legs into thick socks. To complete the look, she slipped on a black Oilers baseball cap and dark shades that were large enough to fit over her prescription glasses.

Jane and Derek ambled over to the worksite.

Derek stood six feet tall with a long blond ponytail, scuba pants, no shirt and a flawless tan that smelled of coconut; a surfer dude even in the desert. “Hey, Professor Hart,” he said with a sleepy drawl, squinting at her enlarged sunglasses. “You’re starting to look like a bug.”

“Ha-ha,” replied Kendra. “Did you get a corpse count?”

“Bloody well did,” quipped Jane, an exchange student from England. “Fifty-seven queens.” She held out a Styrofoam cup full of ants.

For Kendra, the exhilaration of finding so many dead queens was overshadowed by the insects piled inside a cheap coffin that appeared to have orange juice stains.

“You dumped them in a cup?” Kendra asked.

Jane shrugged. “Sorry. Should we say a few words then?”

“Back to business,” Kendra said brusquely.

Ants were already busy at work. It was well past five-thirty reveille when the first workers emerged from holes like children at recess. They were called foragers, small reddish ants that were marking trails and heading back to the nest with news of crackers that Derek had sprinkled before sunrise.

“Man, I don’t get it.” Derek scratched his head. “Why are they so hard to kill?”

“Ants have been around for a hundred million years,” replied Kendra. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“Hundred million years?” Derek asked. “That’s like—almost as long as people.”

Kendra frowned at her student’s paltry knowledge of basic evolution.

“So what’s the secret to their success?” Kate asked.

“No males,” Kendra answered.

“Huh?” Derek scratched his head again.

“Ant colonies. They’re all female,” she told him. “The male lives a couple weeks, does his thing … dead.”

Derek squinted for a moment and then chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

Jane slapped sand from her hands. “I still say we poison them all. Throw some god-awful pesticide on the whole bloody lot.”

Kendra seized a black spray can. “You mean like this stuff?”

“Perfect.”

A white mist erupted as Kendra sprayed a cloud of ant repellant toward her students and they scattered like bugs.

“Unless you directly target every queen, they’ll react the same as you. A million fleeing ants, carrying their eggs and larvae through a hundred miles of tunnel.” She threw them each a bottle of water and grinned, like a mother teaching her children the hard way not to stick fingers into electrical sockets. “Either that or they’ll split into multiple colonies.”

“You could have just said that,” Jane said, spitting bitter particles from her lips.

“Haven’t you been paying attention? Pesticides don’t work. The entire world has been hypnotized by a handful of billion-dollar companies that have made nature one big science experiment and human beings their guinea pigs.” Kendra’s voice rose like a Baptist preacher’s. “The same people selling the world’s precious seed supply are conveniently selling all the pesticides as well and genetically mutating our plants into toxic, allergenic pseudo-food in an attempt to make them bug resistant. We’re busting our asses out here trying to break the cycle of a chemical dependency.”

“Is that gonna be on the test?” Derek asked.

Kendra sighed heavily. “I’ve spent years trying to wipe these suckers out. Best team of entomologists ever assembled. Guess how many colonies we killed?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “
Zero.
”

“We’ve wiped out eleven in four months,” beamed Kate.

“Exactly. We might have finally found the answer to a hundred-year-old problem.” She threw Kate a bottle of yellow liquid. “So let’s move it.”

Kendra watched her students get back to business with little enthusiasm and she sighed. They could never understand the magnitude of what had been accomplished. There had never been a chemical to stop the spread of fire ants or any other ant species. Theoretically, if her formula succeeded in wiping out ants, it could potentially control other insect populations as well. Over time that could mean millions of dollars to her company, Invicta, as well as the university that supported her studies. Not that the money mattered to Kendra. Each year fire ants damaged millions of crops and caused thousands of injuries and even deaths to people and farm animals. Since the 1940s, fire ants had spread across the United States as far north as Virginia and, due to their rapid adaptation and global warming, it was estimated they would reach as high as New England by 2020. Wiping out their population was her only motivation. Early tests were positive but not definitive. There were too many variables, but still, Kendra felt more optimistic than at any other time in her life.

She sat down in the sand and observed her students. Kate stood over the fire ant mound and removed the stopper from the pheromone solution. Derek handed her two long cotton swabs and she dipped them into the bottle. Together they began dabbing the liquid onto the thoraxes of ants headed back to the nest. Then Kate used the top of a dropper bottle to suck up six grams of solution, squirt the contents into an ant hole and set off to treat the other mounds.

Kendra threw a nod to Jane. “I see you left the shorts home. How many bites total?”

“Eighteen. All the way up to me bum.”

She stirred up a newly erupted anthill. “You have to admit, aside from being a nuisance they’re utterly amazing.”

“I guess.”

“Their social networking system makes Twitter and Facebook look like a joke.”

Jane chuckled.

“The perfect society, really.” Kendra picked up a single ant with a pencil tip and watched it crawl across the wood. “They work for the good of the colony, never for themselves. So affable and serene—at the same time, dogged and terrifying.”

“Terrifying?”

“Formica sanguinea?” Kendra blurted, as if it were obvious.

“Oh, yes,” Jane nodded. “I do so love the really nasty ones.”

Kendra tried to impress upon her students that ants were not the helpless creatures they appeared underfoot. They acted purely on instinct to secure the survival of the colony—and often in heinous ways. Formica Sanguinea, the slave maker ant, was a favorite example. After the queen mates, she plays dead and is dragged to another colony by her own soldiers. She kills the enemy queen and rolls around in her scent to confuse the colony. After this deadly act of assassination and impersonation, she takes the workers as slaves and begins laying her eggs. As her own brood matures, they emerge to attack other colonies, tearing their enemies apart limb by limb and scurrying off with thousands of eggs to be made into new slaves.

“That’s why we’re so fortunate,” said Kendra, holding the pencil at eye level as the ant crawled across the horizon. “We can study them up close. Understand their uniqueness. Most people
think
an ant is an ant.”

Jane raised a brow. “I
think
you need to get out more, Professor.”

The two women laughed together.

“Hey!” Kate shouted to the others. “Take a look.”