Read Online Invasive by Chuck Wendig - Free Book Online Page A

boat—”
    â€œBoat? I’m going by boat?” She feels her middle clench up. She doesn’t like boats. “I thought—a plane or helicopter . . .”
    â€œNo, no.” He waggles his finger like a metronome. “Where you go, only Mr. Geirsson goes by helicopter because he has a permit and his own pilot.” Of course he does. “Kolohe is a protected atoll. Only permitted so many flights in and out per month. So, boat ride.”
    â€œI don’t like boats.”
    He laughs and shrugs. “I’m sorry. There’s food in the fridge. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Sunrise!”
    â€œSunrise it is.”
    He drives away, leaving clouds of dust trailing behind him. Hannah is alone.

    Sunrise. Bleeding across the horizon like a slit throat. Pono picks her up, drives her to a nearby marina.
    Groggy, she heads down past men and women hauling fish off a boat, onto the dock and into coolers full of misting ice. At the end, a man in a pink aloha shirt and loose-fitting black pants stands straight as an arrow shot into the ground. Chin up, eyes down, dark features. On the boat, another man—older, white mustache—stows an extra life jacket. The captain, she guesses. He gives her a smile and a nod.
    The other one, the man in the pink shirt, takes off his sunglasses and offers a hand. “Ramon Espinosa,” he says. “Ray. You must be Agent Stander.”
    Hannah shakes his hand. He gives hers a good squeeze. Her knuckles grind together like they’re in a millstone. “Not an agent,” she says. “Just a consultant.”
    A wry smile. “Right. Of course. This is our ride. “Behind him, a luxury catamaran. Blue and orange. Name across it: The Damselfish . “That’s the captain up there. Captain Dan Sullivan.”
    â€œMs. Stander,” the captain says, and ducks belowdecks.
    â€œYou ready?” Ramon—Ray—asks.
    â€œI am.”
    â€œGood.” He gives her one last look like he’s sizing her up. “I assume you can get your own bag. Third-wave feminism and all that.” A stiff smile, and he precedes her up the ramp and onto the boat.
    This should be fun, she thinks.

    Hannah almost drowned when she was a little girl. Her mother insisted she learn to swim, and Hannah did not want to. The water terrified her. It seemed endless and unknowable. It contained multitudes.
    But her mother had other ideas, and one day threw Hannah into the reservoir. The dark water felt like it was trying to swallow her up. Hannah struggled. She felt hands reaching for her (fish, probably, or just tangles of weeds or even old fishing line), and she took in mouthfuls of water. Her mother said she didn’t almost drown, but to a little girl it sure felt like almost drowning. Eventually she learned to swim, when she got older, but not eagerly and not easily, and even now that old fear of the water rises inside her like a surfacing beast.
    The ocean beneath the boat unsettles her. She imagines what lurks down there. The sea is a poorly understood ecosystem. Every year someone pulls up some creature that nobody ever knew existed—hellish jellyfish, parasitic nematodes, alien crustaceans, pyrosomes. She once saw a documentary about the Humboldt squid—a massive thing, more than six feet long, aggressive enough to attack and maul an unsuspecting diver with tentacles lined with razored suckers.
    But her fear, she knows, is part of the problem. Man knows next to nothing about the ocean. And because of that, he doesn’t respect it, and he is ruining it with overfishing, pollution, global warming, toxic algal blooms.
    And so, as Hannah sits alone on the deck of The Damselfish, she fears both what the ocean is (a hungry mouth) and what it will become (a dead place). Even though the day is beautiful and the ocean is a blue like she’s never seen, Hannah feels herself teetering on the edge of full-blown panic. To the right of