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  CONTROL

  A Novel by Ed Kurtz

  Control

  Copyright © 2012 by Ed Kurtz

  First published in hardcover by Thunderstorm Books

  This edition of Control

  Copyright © 2013 by Nightscape Press, LLP

  Cover illustration and design by George Cotronis

  Interior layout and design by Robert S. Wilson

  All rights reserved.

  First Electronic Edition

  Nightscape Press, LLP

  http://www.nightscapepress.com

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to extend very sincere and gracious appreciation to Pat Bonanni, Colum McKnight, Frank A. Cornacchia, and Joshua Hansen for pre-reading Control and offering their invaluable comments and corrections. For their efforts, this is a much better book than it could otherwise have been.

  Thanks also to Robert Shane Wilson and Jennifer Wilson at Nightscape Press for bringing this book to a wider audience. Ya’ll rock.

  No white nor red was ever seen

  So am’rous as this lovely green.

  —Andrew Marvell,

  “The Garden”

  A newly discovered species of fungus—Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani—was observed growing out of the head of a carpenter ant deep in the Brazilian rainforest.

  Ophiocordyceps unilateralis was previously understood to be just one species, but recent scientific study suggests that the fungus is in fact divided into four separate species, which include Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani. All of them have been observed to infect—and control—the rainforest ants.

  The fungus infects the insect and seizes control of its brain before compelling the host to journey to the location best suited for the development and proliferation of the fungus and its spores.

  Once this is achieved, the parasitic fungus kills the host ant.

  Researchers say that this could be the brink of a much broader discovery of countless species of similar fungi in rainforests all over the world.

  —North American Journal of Natural Science and Discovery, March 2011

  The jungle is scorching, humid. The rain comes in bursts—then unrelenting heat. Above the dense, green canopy is stark white sky that goes on forever, but down below is a shaded ecosphere teeming with a billion diverse forms of life, each of them vying for survival on pain of death for its competitors. The carpenter ant clinging to a leaf of a shame plant knew this intuitively once, but now it only digs its tarsal claws into the soft flesh of the leaf and waits. The ant is waiting to die, though it does not understand this. Its tiny neural node has no function for self-awareness, and an ant on its own, apart from the colony, is effectively useless. A day ago, this ant complied with the will of the colony, marched tirelessly across the thick, rotten vegetation that carpets the jungle’s floor in search of sustenance and, if necessary, war. A towering mound gravid with termites might come into view, whereby both goals could be reached. The outcome did not matter. Each soldier did its job, entirely innocent of the future. Separated, it might wander forever. Or it might poke its funiculi into some damp, decaying hole in search of tiny prey, or flora, or a suitable fungus to eat. The carpenter ant on the shame plant leaf did just that. And now it clings frozen, disoriented and stunned. The firm outer shell of its occiput beginning to crack and fracture.

  Now the fungus is eating it.

  In a wink the carapace splits and the ant is dead. The fungus in its head, conversely, thrives. As the sweltering afternoon gradually acquiesces to a milder evening, and the hoatzins screech and the vipers commence their hunt, the dead ant’s head splits down the center from occiput to mandible and the fungus blooms out. Lush and verdurous, the growth spreads over the course of the night, enveloping the entirety of the insect’s head with each fresh blossom. When the fuzzy florets expand enough, they pop open and release a mist of spores that sprinkle down from the shame plant leaf, down to the well trodden jungle floor.

  And in the morning, when a division of the colony promenades back through, not a few of the dead ant’s comrades take notice of the sumptuous-looking spores amongst the abundant luxuriance their world has to offer.

  Whereby the cycle continues unabated.

  Ad infinitum.

  PART ONE

  1

  “I’m telling you, that girl is a goddamn freak.”

  Leon anxiously shuffled some of the papers on his desk—not even the ones on which he was presently working—and did his best to ignore Trey’s noxious comments.

  “You didn’t see her on Tuesday, man. You missed that shit.”

  “My father was ill,” Leon meekly defended himself.

  “Fucking tights, Leo. And do I mean tight. And no panties, neither! I dunno, man—why would a chick do something like that? I mean, at work. Work, Leo!”

  Leon’s thin, chapped lips parted to let a response come out, to inform Trey once and for all that for Christ’s sake his name was Leon, not Leo, but he made no sound apart from an inaudible puff of air.

  “Talk about an invitation. Here’s my ass, boys, and lookie here, what’s this?” Trey hunkered down on slightly bent knees and directed both hands toward his crotch. “Why, ain’t that my honeypot? Wouldja look at that!”

  Leon pinched his eyebrows together in a crumpled knit and focused more intently on the papers, an obsolete draft of a departmental earnings report he’d revised five times since and handed in over a month ago. He did not know why he continually failed to shred all these old documents. They just piled up on his desk and he tended to get so accustomed to them that he failed to even notice them.

  “Jesus, you missed out, Leo.”

  “My father was ill.”

  “Your father was ill,” Trey mimicked. “Ain’t he a grown man?”

  “He’s seventy-two. He needs me.”

  Trey spread his thick lips into a toothy, lupine grin.

  “Well, that’s just fine. You get the humanitarian of the year award, and I’ll get an eyeful of that broad’s ample assets. Goddamn, Leo…”

  Leon loudly cleared his throat and shot a stern look at the hulking security guard. Trey had his thumbs hooked into his gun belt, his massive belly lunging over it.

  “I’ve got an awful lot of work to do, Trey.”

  “You know she ain’t even married? A girl like that?”

  “And it’s already past noon.”

  “Jesus Christ…”

  “Busy day, Trey.”

  Trey’s grin gradually diminished, his shaggy brow lurking over his dark eyes like a shelf of rock.

  “Well,” he said. “I got rounds to do.”

  Trey twisted out of Leon’s cramped cubicle, his sundry leather trappings creaking with the movement.

  “Kicking ass and fighting crime, baby,” he said.

  “Sure, Trey.”

  The guard sauntered off down the hall, his creaks and squeaks ebbing as he made his way toward the bank of elevators. Leon sighed deeply and glanced at the document in his hand. In bold print at the top right corner was the date—six weeks ago. He wondered if Trey noticed and, if so, whether he’d put it together that Leon was snowing him. He dearly hoped not. The giant guard intimidated Leon, though he’d never been anything but friendly. It was just the man’s demeanor, so aggressive and nonchalant. Always the lewd comments about the women in the office, always the nausea-inducing stories of Trey’s violent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the most part Leon could put up with it—he did not typically assume there was much choice in the matter—and occasionally the lumbering guard would offer up something mildly amusing, if not wildly inappropriate. But the way Trey leered at Ami Akinjide, his nasty commentary and rude descriptions, was too much for Leon to bear. That the pretty young accountant had a tendency to dress somewhat provocativ
ely was hardly controversial, but Ami was a nice girl who, in Leon’s judgment, deserved better. Yet whenever he observed some boorish jackass like Trey flirting with her, inciting her infectious laughter, Leon’s blood boiled. Even her laughter had that mild, barely detectable Nigerian lilt to it. He hated to think someone like Trey could possibly induce it.

  So what if she wore tights that showed every curve and crease and dimple to the willing eyes of wolves like Trey? Was that an open invitation to gawk and drool and make vulgar comments?

  Leon sneered, wondering if Ami knew, and if she did, what were her thoughts on the subject? Perhaps she reveled in the attention—God knew some women did. But Leon could not bring himself to believe it, not about her. Ami was a nice girl from a conservative background and had a gentle, polite way about her. Even Leon’s cantankerous father would be proud for him to bring such a nice girl home for supper, if only she wasn’t both black and technically a foreigner. That was the deal breaker, what kept Leon silent. His father would go through the roof. It would be worse than the old man calling him faggot all the time. Leon could manage that, he was used to it, but not the indignity Ami would suffer due to his father’s deep-seated, Old South mindset. Besides, he was his father, and she was just some woman at the office he hardly even knew. Blood won out. It always did.

  Leon made a thin, colorless line of his mouth and fed the old report into the paper shredder affixed to the wastebasket under his desk. It whirred and munched, its high-pitched whine unpleasant to Leon’s ears. He gritted his teeth and shredded the rest of the report, one page at a time. The analog clock on his desk clicked over to 12:31. He narrowed his eyes at it. What he’d said to Trey was a blatant lie—he wasn’t busy at all. He hadn’t done a single useful thing all day. Accordingly, he was almost excited when the desk phone lit up and chirped the soft ringtone he’d set it to. Probably his supervisor Cheryl, or one of the dozen or so middle-managers who depended on Leon for a hundred piddling administrative duties. At that point in what was a painfully long and boring workday, he was ready to accept nearly any duty they handed him.

  “Thompson and Associates, this is Leon.”

  “Weissmann—this is Sam.”

  Leon’s eyes brightened at the sound of the voice on the line. It wasn’t work, after all. This was better.

  “Hi, Sam. What have you got for me?”

  “How does a Brazilian Wandering Spider sound to you, pal?”

  “Holy Moses,” Leon whispered. “Are you kidding?”

  “Collector I know knows a guy who knows a guy, that sort of thing. Probably a poacher, I don’t know. Smuggled some specimens out, and this little fella was one of them.”

  “Adult?”

  “Yeah, he’s got about a four inch leg span. He’s pretty aggressive, too, so watch out for that.”

  “Oh, man,” Leon cooed. “What a catch.”

  “I’m saving him for you, Weissmann,” Sam said. “Just don’t tell anyone where you got it. This kind of shit isn’t exactly on the up and up, you know.”

  Leon anxiously tugged at an earlobe.

  “How about that Goliath Pink Toe?” he asked.

  “Now that’s perfectly legal.”

  “Have you got one?”

  “Not yet. Just this little bugger.”

  “How much?”

  “For you? Let’s say seventy-five. That’s a friend price, Weissmann. Anyone else, it’d be a hundred, easy.”

  “That’s no problem.”

  “It’s pretty hot, though,” Sam warned. “I’d rather not keep him at the store much longer.”

  “Will you be there after five?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Then I’ll see you around half past.”

  “See you then, pal.”

  With that, Sam hung up and the line went dead. Leon placed the receiver back on the cradle and smiled. A Brazilian Wandering Spider. Member of the genus Phoneutria—Greek for murderess, which was apt. After all, it was the planet’s most venomous spider. And now it was part of Leon’s private collection. He clasped his hands together and beamed. Trey and his atrocious lechery were now all but forgotten. All Leon had left to worry about was the crawling time, because come five p.m. he was going to be like a rocket out of there and en route to Huntsman’s Exotic Pets across town.

  The desk phone chirped again, and this time Leon checked the caller ID readout. It was Cheryl, his supervisor. He let it go to voicemail.

  2

  On either side of the entrance were enormous Plexiglas enclosures into which any passerby could stop and stare. On the right side was a five foot komodo dragon sprawled out on a heated rock. On the left, hanging amidst a tangled network of thick plastic branches, was a two-toed sloth. Signs posted on each window firmly stated that these animals were not for sale. The sloth’s name was Mary. The reptile was nameless. Leon admired them from the sidewalk as he always did, and then he went inside.

  Sam’s sole employee, a stocky girl named Kristen with a short spiky hairdo, sat on a rickety stool behind the register with a shiny black emperor scorpion crawling on her hand. Behind her, three large plastic tubs filled with crickets made a noisome racket with chirps and the sound of five thousand tiny legs scraping against the walls. Leon acknowledged the girl with a nod as usual. And as usual, she ignored him completely. He glided past the front counter to the back of the store.

  Sam stood in front of a wall of terrariums, each of which housed several writhing snakes of varied sizes and species. A long, thick boa was draped over his shoulders like a scaly shawl, its huge, angular head poking back and forth. Sam was performing the hard sell on a pair of college boys, both of whom were enamored with the reptile but clearly apprehensive. Sam intermittently stroked the boa’s flat head as though it were a housecat. The snake flicked its narrow tongue out every time he did it.

  “Hey, Weissmann,” Sam said, breaking off from the college boys for a moment. “Let me finish up with these guys and we’ll do business.”

  Leon nodded and as Sam went back to his pitch, he perused the latest stock in the invertebrates’ corner. The preponderance of the specimens was the typical curly-hair tarantulas and emperor scorpions, giant African millipedes and Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Beginner’s stuff, Leon thought. Amateur hour. He knew the good ones were all in the back. That was where the serious collector might get his hands on a pair of Iraqi camel spiders, or an Australian funnel web spider if Sam trusted him enough. That was where Leon’s wandering spider was kept, unwittingly awaiting its new home in the heated garage where Leon kept the rest of his arthropod menagerie.

  For the most part, Leon kept his collection quiet, almost secret. He had learned the hard way that most people found it quite peculiar that a thirty-six year old man should keep a “bug collection,” that it was juvenile, eerie or just plain sad. His father thought it was utterly disgusting and beyond comprehension, but so long as Leon kept them in the garage and out of the house he did not make too much of a fuss over it. Thus far the twenty-eight specimens presently living in there had thrived, the only death—an Asian forest scorpion named Zhao—presumably the result of old age. He was quite good at raising and keeping the various invertebrates in his charge, and he was proud of it, despite the attendant secrecy. Everybody, in Leon’s opinion, needed something to keep them going. For him, his spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes and beetles were that thing.

  He watched a Venezuelan Redstripe creep up on a fat brown cricket, then pounce for the kill. The cricket rapidly worked its meaty back legs, desperate to escape, but to no avail—the tarantula already had its fangs sunk into the insect’s abdomen, pumping venom into its body to dissolve the prey into a drinkable liquid. Even as the poison worked its way through the cricket’s organs, it twitched and convulsed. Only when the neural core in the insect’s head was liquefied would it be completely dead. Until then, it died a slow and tortuous death, melted from the inside out as if by acid while the spider ate it alive.

  And though i
t was a gruesome scene that Leon had witnessed a thousand times over, he could not help but smile at the grim tableau.

  “Nature’s a mean old bitch, ain’t she?”

  Leon turned to face Sam, who continued petting the massive boa dangling from his shoulders.

  “No sale?” Leon asked him.

  “From those little girls? Naw. Frat boys—they’re all the same. All machismo and bluster, but no balls. This little darling wouldn’t harm a fine, well-conditioned hair on their pretty little trust fund heads, but they were nervous as hell. You could tell. Waste of my time.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Sam shrugged, lifting the expansive length of the boa’s body into a capital M.

  “The hell with them. Let’s go have a look at your new best friend.”

  * * *

  It was a gorgeous animal. Long, brownish-gray legs, jointed and spindly, jutted out and up from its taut, perfect abdomen. Its thick chelicerae, from which the fangs protruded, were coated in fine red hairs. Just above these, the spider’s glossy black eyes watched from behind the transparent plastic wall of its terrarium, mysterious and unknowable in their total vacancy. And when Leon leaned in close to examine the creature, it lifted it foremost pair of legs as high as it could, displayed its fangs and began to sway from side to side.

  A small, handwritten label on the terrarium read phoneutria spp.

  Leon decided he would name it Pablo.

  “Isn’t he a beaut?” Sam said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Definitely,” Leon agreed. “Breathtaking.”

  “That’s his defense stance. Aggressive as hell, like I said.”

  “I’ll be careful.”