The Invasive Read online

  “Beautiful night,” Bishop said.

  Angela nodded, unable to speak thanks to the gourmet burger.

  “Good. I’m glad you’re enjoying this.”

  Angela stared at the skyline, the wind blowing her hair across her face. She brushed it away and took another bite.

  “When I was younger, my father used to tell me a lot of things,” Bishop said. “Some of them stuck, others did not. Well, this one stuck. We were out fishing a stream in the Apex Valley, and I was tired. I mean, I could barely cast my fly rod. It had been a long day, and I was sunburned and dehydrated. My father realized I was beat and told me to call it an evening, that my best shot was to try the next day after rest and hydration. So I did, and he was right. That was my best shot. You’ve got to know when you’re ready to do something, so you can do it right.”

  Angela met his eyes, and Bishop knew she was wondering what he was going on about. Good, he thought.

  “And Angela, you’re my best shot, and I hope I’m yours. I love you so much, and I want to do this right.” Bishop reached into his pants pocket and took out a small felt box. He opened it, revealing a diamond engagement ring.

  Angela gazed at him with watering eyes. All was silent except for the wind in the mainsail.

  “Will you marry me?” Bishop asked.

  The Search for Safety

  The thick metal truck frame provided a sense of security. At least for now.

  Bishop sat next to Angela and examined the backpacks and coolers. They were filled with aluminum pouches that hikers used as self-contained meals. Bishop unzipped a backpack as Colbrick watched him in the rearview mirror.

  “What are you doing?” Colbrick asked.

  “Uh…just looking at your gear. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Would you mind if I poked around your stuff?” Colbrick asked.

  “In this situation, I wouldn’t care at all,” Bishop said.

  Colbrick grimaced. “Go ahead and take a look. I got nothing to hide.”

  “Thanks,” Bishop said. “You know where Spargus Hospital is, right?”

  “Of course I do. I live in these parts. Where do you think I’m going right now?”

  “Sorry,” Bishop said, squeezing Angela’s hand. He caressed her with a single finger and she whispered to him.

  “Water,” she said.

  Bishop held the water bottle to her lips, then took a drink for himself.

  “There’s plenty more,” Colbrick said, watching them through dark sunglasses in the rearview mirror. “And these ain’t no wimpy Evian bottles. I got full gallon jugs in the coolers.”

  Bishop opened one of the plastic coolers, lifted a hefty jug, ripped the cap off and gulped the water.

  “Hey Colbrick, you got a shirt I can borrow?” Bishop asked.

  Colbrick nodded. “The blue backpack.”

  Bishop took a red-checkered flannel from the impressive pack.

  “Good,” Colbrick said. “I was getting tired of looking at your sweaty ass crack.”

  And I’m getting tired of your fake cowboy attitude, Bishop thought. Even so, Bishop thanked him with a forced smile. He wasn’t sure what to think of Colbrick. He felt a sense of protection with another pair of eyes, but at the same time, the guy seemed like a classic prick. Since protection was the priority, any dislike would have to be jettisoned if they were to survive.

  “So Colbrick, how long have you been in this area?”

  “Much longer than you.”

  “That’s not really specific.”

  “There was no call to be, so there you go.”

  Bishop clenched his teeth and squeezed Angela’s hand a little too hard.

  “Any reason why you’re being so difficult?”

  “Any reason why you ask so many God damned questions, city boy?”

  “I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. Please don’t classify me as some touron.”

  “What city you from?” Colbrick asked.

  “Now who’s asking questions?” Bishop said.

  “Has to be somewhere out east. You sure as hell ain’t from the west.”

  “That makes me less of a person, doesn’t it?” Bishop said. “And thanks. I like being insulted while my wife lays here injured.”

  Colbrick didn’t respond, and they drove on in silence. Bishop checked his phone again—no bars. Not unusual for the Apex Valley. He tried to call 911 anyway, but the phone only produced beeps, crackling static, and a sweeping frequency.

  “Have you checked the radio?” Bishop asked.

  “Yup. We get two stations out here, and neither are coming in.”

  Verdant cedar and spruce blurred by, and no other cars were seen. Pine-covered mountains surrounded the highway as it cut through the valley, stretching on for ninety miles. This area was one of the most remote in the lower forty-eight—the main reason Bishop’s father became attracted to it many years ago.

  Spargus Memorial was still a good fifty miles away. Bishop stared out the window at familiar and well-loved sites. He kicked a backpack when he thought of what was happening to his favorite place in the world, a place with snowy peaks, rare grizzly bears, and tumbling rivers with trout and the diving water ouzel. What are those things doing to this place? His stomach heaved, but he managed to stop the acidic soup from rising.

  Colbrick mumbled and jerked the steering wheel, causing the truck to swerve.

  “What are you doing?” Bishop asked.

  “Something ain’t right,” Colbrick said, slowing down.

  Bishop looked through the windshield and saw what one would expect to see—more asphalt with a lane marker, rows of spruce and pine, and a narrow embankment. But far ahead of the familiar scene, Bishop noticed haze across the road.

  Tons of it.

  Colbrick slowed the truck as they peered through the windshield. Mangled trees emerged from the top of the haze, some with upended roots dangling in the air.

  “Looks like downed trees,” Colbrick said. “And I don’t have my chainsaw.”

  Bishop concentrated on the hazy obstruction as it grew larger. What Colbrick said was correct. They were trees. The problem was it was a pile of them, or at least had to be as the silty air obscured the bottom two-thirds.

  “What the—?” Colbrick asked, inching the truck forward for a better look.

  “Maybe we should turn around,” Bishop said, although the thought of delaying treatment for Angela made him clench his fists.

  “Hold on a damn second, we could learn something here,” Colbrick said, craning forward.

  Below the hazy, massive obstruction water pooled, and their truck made a small wake as they entered the flood periphery.

  Bishop and Colbrick stared ahead, mouths agape. The imposing presence loomed thirty feet above the highway. Worse than that, a combination of gnarled vegetation and haze seemed to stretch into the forest on either side of the road as if whatever freak of nature had built the thing had done so deep into the wilderness. The air boiled with thick dust, and Bishop swore it was getting darker by the second.

  From deep in the trees came frenetic buzzing and clattering.

  “What is this?” Bishop asked, eyes wide.

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Colbrick said.

  “I thought you knew everything since you lived here,” Bishop said.

  “Punk.”

  “Did you drive us into a dead end, Colbrick?” Bishop said, grinning. He thought he may have even heard a weak chuckle from Angela.

  Colbrick coughed as bits of dust blew into the interior. The scent of moist wood and vegetation permeated the cab.

  “I’m going closer,” Colbrick said. “Maybe there’s a way around.”

  “Are we seeing the same thing?” Bishop asked.

  Colbrick tapped the gas pedal and shot into the standing water. Spray flew up around the truck and splattered on the windows.

  “Do you want to get to the hospital or not, slick?” he said. “There might be a way through it, and this
water ain’t deep.”

  Colbrick shifted the truck into four wheel drive. The sky darkened as they drew closer. Bits of sawdust and pungent soil clouded their vision. Colbrick flicked a switch and the headlights cut through the haze, reflecting off the roiling water that surged away from the truck.

  At the base of the vegetation wall, Colbrick put the truck in park and let the engine idle.

  They remained in the truck, the headlights illuminating the back end of a Honda and a tangle of aspen and spruce. The Honda’s plates were personalized, reading: 2fast4u. The glow of the instrument panel turned Colbrick’s serious face a tint of green.

  The truck began to shake.

  “Damn engine’s dying,” Colbrick said. “Water must have flooded the intake.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Bishop said.

  Bishop felt the truck shake again, and when he looked at the RPM gauge, the needle lay still. Colbrick tried to start the engine but it wouldn’t turn, so he hammered his fist onto the dashboard. A faint trickling of fluid whispered in the haze, and a raspy breeze entered the cracks in the windows.

  Dim buzzing came from deep within the forest.

  Bishop sighed when he realized the water they were stuck in was Cooke’s Creek, a place he and his father had fished for cutthroat trout many times. As depressing as that was, it wasn’t as bad as Angela’s condition.

  “You OK?” Bishop asked her, placing his fingers on her forehead, checking for fever. She moaned. Bishop’s stomach churned when he realized they wouldn’t be getting to the hospital as fast as he thought.

  Colbrick pocketed his shades, reached into the glove box, and pulled out a headband. He placed it on his head and pressed a switch, and a bright beam of light shone on the dashboard. It was one of those newfangled headlamps Bishop’s father was always telling him to get. It sure beats the hell out of sticking a flashlight in your mouth while you work, his father had told him.

  “There’s more of these in the front pockets of the backpacks,” Colbrick said, his voice swallowed by a cloud of dust.

  Bishop fumbled around, unzipped a pocket, and grasped one of the elastic headbands. He stretched it around his head and felt for the plastic switch. Bishop adjusted the headband so it centered on his forehead and pressed the convex switch, illuminating the cargo area of the truck. He turned to Angela, and she winced from the bright light.

  “Sorry, honey,” he said.

  The buzzing grew louder from both sides of the road.

  Bishop peered into the haze.

  “I’m getting out of here,” Colbrick said. He opened the door, then disappeared as he slipped and fell on his ass.

  “Colbrick, you OK?”

  “Yeah…I’m OK,” Colbrick grunted. “But I got some kind of God damn slime all over me. It stinks like shit too.”

  A few seconds later, Colbrick opened the rear door and Bishop got out.

  “Careful here, this is slick as can be,” Colbrick said.

  Bishop planted his feet, and cold water numbed his ankles. He examined the giant wall of vegetation and noticed water seeping from it, not unlike the tiny, cliff-bordering spring creeks he and his father used to fish in certain sections of the Apex Mountains.

  Bishop turned, and his headlamp beam caught something that raised the hair on his neck. He returned the beam across the eastern portion of the vegetation wall, revealing the object once more.

  “Holy hell,” Bishop said.

  Colbrick followed his lead, and they shone their dual beams upon the distant object.

  “It’s a tail light to another car,” Colbrick said.

  A spike of adrenaline tweaked Bishop’s heart, and a little voice in his head told him to run.

  “Fuck this, Colbrick. We need to leave.”

  “Hold up there, city slicker,” Colbrick said. “We ain’t gonna abandon all the gear I’ve got.” Colbrick took a backpack from the hatch and leaned into it, then secured the heavy-duty hip and chest straps. “This is good quality shit here. These packs are full of food, clothes, and ammunition.”

  “Ammunition for what?” Bishop asked.

  “For Justine and the .357 in the other pack,” Colbrick said.

  Bishop grinned. He’d never been a gun person, but he was born again. He took a backpack, grunting as he hoisted it onto his frame. Once set, they reached into the cargo area and carefully lifted Angela—Bishop taking her arms and Colbrick her legs.

  “Where’d you get all this stuff?” Bishop asked.

  “Here and there. I like to be prepared,” Colbrick said.

  “I’d say so,” Bishop said. Although Colbrick was an asshole, at least he was on their side, and sometimes you need an asshole on your team.

  They carried Angela towards the reflecting tail light, each step bringing a bigger piece of the car. Much of the vehicle was covered with dripping vegetation. Their headlamps shone into the broken windows, revealing plush seatbacks with map pockets.

  With the next sweep of beam, Bishop’s worst fears were realized; in the front seats slumped two motionless humans.

  A shiny, black stain streaked down the shattered passenger side window, reminding Bishop of oil.

  They inched closer, their headlamps shifting the once murky details into high-definition. It was surreal to be fixated on the trashed interior of the Honda and the unkempt, front-lit hair of the dead passengers. Bishop was glad he couldn’t see their eyes.

  “I’m not going any closer,” he said.

  “Nah. We might learn something here,” Colbrick said. “If they’re dead, I want to see how they got it so I can make sure that don’t happen to me.”

  “OK…you have a point,” Bishop said. “But please mind Angela.”

  “I’ve been minding her since we met. I ain’t going to stop now.”

  Bishop’s shoulders eased. Despite the abrasive nature of the man, he was glad to have found him.

  They stopped a foot from the passenger side and peered in. An obese woman slumped pale-faced in the driver’s seat with her mouth agape. To her right slouched a younger, slender woman—perhaps her daughter. She was hunched over, her dirty brown hair obscuring portions of her defined cheekbones. Both women’s jaws thrust outward in a peculiar fashion. From each mouth corner hung icicles a good eight inches long. The tips of these odd structures dripped fluid—not as clear as pure water but more translucent than oil. Bishop flashed his lamp onto the right ear of the driver, noticing more crystals hanging from the lobe. His eyes followed them down six to eight inches to their tips, and he froze.

  At first, Bishop wondered if he’d lost his mind, if he’d taken a bad fall at their anniversary cabin and the hospital had pumped him full of meds. He waited a moment for a sign, for some kind of clue, but it never came so he shook it off.

  At the bottom of the icicle, a tiny primate-like creature suckled on the tip as if a colt to a mare. Its thin lips quivered, its abnormal crimson eyes with Revlon lashes blinking as it received fluid from the icicle. Each eyeball contained three silver pupils, and it alternately grasped the icicle with six hairy limbs. Bishop exhaled, his breath glazing the shattered glass and disrupting the feeding organism. He watched with morbid curiosity as the tiny creature fluttered and shrieked. Its cries rose in a steady, fevered pitch.

  What the hell? Bishop thought.

  The creature’s jagged cries lost their peaks and troughs and became alarm-like, consistent in tone and tenor.

  “What in God’s creation?” Colbrick asked.

  “I don’t think this has anything to do with God, if he/she even exits,” Bishop said. He glanced to the dashboard again, this time noticing the broken heater vents…the thin plastic slats pushed outward.

  Something had come into the vehicle from the ventilation system as well as the windows.

  Whoever was inside this poor Honda had decided to wait things out. Bad idea, Bishop thought.

  The creature’s shrieks grew louder and more annoying.

  “OK, lesson learned,” Bishop said. �
��Let’s get out of here.”

  The primate-like creature wailed as it trembled and thumped the seatback. Bishop wondered if its eyeballs would pop from the pressure.

  From either side of the road came manic buzzing and shuffling. Bishop didn’t care for the inconsistent tone which implied multiple sources.

  “Where to, all-knowing cowboy?” Bishop asked.

  “The hell out of here,” Colbrick said. “But unlike the city, you can’t just step on a subway to cart your lazy ass around.”

  “The subway beats your driving,” Bishop said.

  “I had no problems driving before I found you two,” Colbrick said.

  “Shut…up,” Angela moaned. “Get…get us out of here.”

  Bishop looked down at her and she winced, the headlamp blinding her again.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” Bishop said.

  They left the death Honda behind and waded through the shallow water that had been Cooke’s Creek. The cries of the primate creature faded, replaced with the hyper-buzzing that came from both sides of the highway.

  “Let’s move a little faster, eh?” Colbrick asked.

  “I’m trying man, I’m trying. This pack is heavy.”

  “These packs will save our lives, city boy. You need to get stronger.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bishop said, rolling his eyes.

  They trudged through the floodwater away from the vegetation wall, their lamps illuminating the dark pavement underneath. Behind them in the haze something scraped against one of the vehicles, and the distinct tone of ripping flesh carried towards them. The buzzing grew louder, and Bishop thought he could discern shrieks of derision and the clicking of small, bony parts.

  “Colbrick—”

  “Shhh. Not wise to make noise,” Colbrick whispered.

  A shriek erupted from behind them.

  Creatures were honing in on their voices and footfalls. Dozens of limbs pattered and splashed behind them in the murk.

  Splish splash.

  The light changed ahead of them, as if they were in a dark movie theater with a malfunctioning projector and a dim screen. Colbrick increased his pace, almost yanking Angela out of Bishop’s hands. Bishop’s legs throbbed and he gasped for air. So much for cardio, he thought. I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re carrying your wife and a fifty-pound pack.