Invasive Read Online Free PDF

Ezzy?” His voice is hoarse. An esophagus abraded with the sandpaper of a hard life.
    Ez grunts as she leans across Hannah and hands out a crumpled wad of money. Hannah spies a few one-dollar bills, a few fives. “It’s me, Carl. Here’s some cash.” But before he takes it, she jerks the money back. “Ah, ah, ah. You know the drill with this.”
    He chuckles—a raspy, wheezing sound, like air whistling through an old rusty pipe. “Don’t buy liquor.”
    â€œAre you going to buy liquor with it, Carl?”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œAre you lying?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œNo liquor!” she barks, then hands over the money. “Go on, get out of here, you old scamp.” She shoos him away and he kisses his calloused fingers and blows her a kiss. Hannah smells his breath: it smells, contrary to her expectations, herbaceous. Like basil or oregano. His laugh can be heard trailing away as he shuffles across the parking lot.
    â€œThat’s Carl,” Ez explains. “He’s local homeless. Nice guy. Drunk, but not a creeper. We gotta watch out for him on really hot days. Try to get him into shelters with AC.”
    Hannah releases a stuck breath. “You were saying something about a . . . a harvester ant?”
    â€œRight! The Maricopa harvester. The venom in a harvester ant is the most toxic in the insect world. Its LD50 value—the median lethal dose—is through the floor: 0.12. The lower that number, the less of the venom it takes to actually kill somebody. And 0.12 is freaking low, Hannah.”
    â€œDeadliest ant in the world and it’s right here in your backyard?”
    Ez snaps her fingers. “See, that’s the thing. It’s not the most lethal because it kills the most people. It’s aggressive, like the fire ant, but it’s rare—you don’t see many around. Which means people don’t get stung all that often. Fire ants are all over the damn place and,so, technically super deadly. A hand grenade is more lethal than a single bullet, but most people don’t have hand grenades.”
    With fingers like forceps, Hannah pinches the bridge of her nose. She runs through this in her head and asks, “Why are you telling me all this?”
    â€œLook,” Ez says, grabbing the folder and thumbing through the pages. She finds what she’s looking for—a close-up image of a skin fragment. It’s so close-up it almost looks topographical. Ez stabs down with a finger and says, “I scraped away the fungus—which, by the way, is Candida, just old-fashioned, old-timey yeast—and underneath I found marks. Lines and dots, lines and dots.” Sure enough, on the skin sample: a small horizontal red line and a red raised dot beneath it. “Like with fire ants, you have the line from where they get a good mandibular grip— chomp! —and then they do some insect yoga and curl their bodies inward to jam their little stinger into the flesh. Injecting venom.”
    â€œThese ants stung the man. They didn’t just bite his skin.”
    â€œThey definitely stung him. And the venom of these weird little monsters is as bad as the harvester ants’. It’s almost the same venom: amino acids, peptides, polysaccharides. Plus the toxic, allergenic proteins and the alkaloids that both poison the victim and send up a chemical signal to the rest of the nearby ants.”
    â€œSo, somehow, harvester ants made their way to New York State, to a remote cabin by an even more remote lake, and—”
    Ez laughs: an unhinged, wild sound. “No, you don’t get it, Stander. It looks like a leaf-cutter ant and has the venom of a Maricopa harvester. This is what I’m saying: no ant like that exists.”
    â€œGuess you got your wish?” Hannah says. The smile across her face is not meant to demonstrate happiness, but rather to temper the shock of the absurd. “Maybe you can name it