Fragment (26 page)

Skidding down the slope on the greasy ground-cover, he saw that it had turned purple as the mid-afternoon sun cast it in shadow. A strong stench of rotten eggs wafted up the hillside. He almost stepped on a sprouting clovore, and slipped, landing painfully on his butt. He scrambled back onto his feet without losing a beat and continued pounding downhill.

In the viewfinder he saw the wasps, vampire drones, and rats that had made it through the gauntlet of vampire bees. They were emerging from the canyon, on his trail.

Then, charging around the slope of the island’s core, he saw two large red beasts.

Two marauding spigers had picked up his scent and were lunging down the slope to cut him off.

Otto sobbed. “Come on, man!” he pleaded.

Nell wept with fear and frustration as she watched the red spigers soar through the air toward the viewscreen.

An alarm sounded.

At the other end of the lab, Todd Taylor jumped from his chair and peered through the hatch window of Section Four. “Guys, I think something breached the vestibule down here!”

Zero was fading. His head was spinning, and his eyes burned with sweat. Running in zigzags was exhausting, and there had been no opportunity to pace himself. He let gravity pull him forward now and gave up trying to vary his course—with all his remaining strength, he pumped his legs hard and headed straight for the pool.

A fresh wave of seawater spilled into the pool from the fissure in the island’s outer wall—maybe an aftereffect of the quake, Zero thought vaguely as he ran, gasping for breath.

In the viewfinder, he saw the spigers soaring through the air behind him, and he dove into the pool.

As he splashed into the salty water, the creatures pursuing him stopped cold, veered away, or pulled back like common bees.

One rat with too much momentum hit the pool beside Zero. It squealed frantically as it tried to paddle its eight legs, which soon slowed as it sank beneath the water.

Zero crouched in the water, his feet touching bottom and his head barely gasping above the surface, before he noticed that nothing was attacking him.

None of the creatures were even
flying
over the pool. It was as though some kind of force field was repelling them.

The spigers had driven their spiked arms into the ground, stopping on a dime. Now they sprang back from the water’s edge, examining him crossly.

Nell stared at the screen in awe. “Saltwater?” she breathed in astonishment.

“What?” Briggs said, looking up at the screen.

“They don’t like saltwater!” She turned to Briggs in elation, slapping his big biceps.

“How can you tell it’s saltwater?”

“How can
they
tell is the question,” Nell challenged, looking intently at the images on the screen. “Come on, Zero, figure it out!” she yelled.

Zero laughed deliriously and splashed more water over his Long Beach Marathon T-shirt, wheezing as he struggled to catch his breath. He whacked big splashes at the wall of waiting, hovering creatures, which immediately pulled back.

The bugs that he downed flailed wildly on the pool’s surface, exuding a chemical slick. On the bottom of the pool he could see the carcasses of animals that had recently drowned.

After catching his wind, and before his muscles started to seize up, Zero submerged himself one more time and rose from the pool, sopping wet.

Then he leaped out of the water and made his final run up the far sunlit bank.

The air was fresher and the field green in the sunlight as he headed toward the blackened tracks of the XATV-9, which could still be seen on the field leading from a hole blasted into the forest edge.

He drove his body forward as the animals rushed around the edge of the pool.

He used up his lead to reach the jungle opening ten feet ahead of the frontrunners.

He plunged into the thick jungle, following the rover’s tracks.

Nightmarish shrieks and howls filled the fetid air as Zero wove around and over the tangled growth, ducking and dodging stinging darts from the trees.

He nearly ran into the trunk of a tree covered with vertical sharklike jaws spiraling up its surface. At the last moment, he
dodged around it; two pursuing Henders rats struck the trunk and disappeared into snapping mouths.

He tried to stay focused and not allow himself to fall into any rhythm.

The rubber soles of his running shoes were losing their treads, dissolving off his feet. He kept moving. Somehow, as sweat evaporated from his body, it seemed like a bubble had formed around him, repelling the creatures with an invisible wall. He dodged across the shooting galleries of jungle corridors unscathed. He had no time to wonder why or how this was happening.

In the dense jungle between the corridors he veered randomly while trying to stay near the plowed tracks of the rover, until he came to an unexpected dip and lost his footing on slick mud. “Oh shit!” he muttered as he slid down a giant lavender leaf, avoiding the hooks on its surface as the leaf folded closed behind him in sections.

“Oh shit!” someone said in the trees ahead.

Zero felt a spurt of adrenaline and lunged instinctively toward the human voice.

“Oh shit, oh shit!” the voice said, and Zero realized it was his own voice. He looked up and saw a shrimpanzee hurtling out of the canopy toward him. “Oh shit, oh shit!” it said, spreading six legs wide above him.

Zero rolled under a fallen tree and then leaped up, running and dodging a fusillade of disk-ants shooting through the air like discuses toward his legs. He pole-vaulted on a yuccalike stalk that split open and tried to curl down over his hands before he let go and somersaulted under a clover-covered dead trunk that absorbed a hail of darts fired from nearby trees—except for two, which stabbed Zero’s right calf through his pants.

He ripped out the darts immediately but he could feel the leg going numb as he pulled himself to his feet and pushed on.

He had lost the rover tracks and despaired, fearing he was lost. His hands and arms were scratched and bleeding, his whole body dripping with sweat. His right leg was dragging, but he swung it forward with his right hand, crashing through the undergrowth.

He ducked and snaked awkwardly around branches and trunks. The air grew hot and more putrid. At last, he spotted the sunlit opening above where, an eternity ago, the rover had penetrated the jungle.

With a gasp, he emerged onto the slope. To his right, he saw StatLab staggered like a derailed train up the hillside.

His lungs burned, his throat wheezed, his head pounded and his eyes stung as he limped up the hill. The muscles of his right calf were seizing, barely functional. The soles were peeling from his shoes and leaking blue gel.

Heaving himself forward, he banged on the encrusted bottom of Section One.

Scientists and technicians inside Section Four continued to pull on their cleansuits to exit the lab.

Todd Taylor, suited up except for his helmet, looked nervously at a hairy woodpecker-like creature that had landed on the hatch window overlooking Section Three. The pseudo-bird smashed its pick-ax head against the window rhythmically. “What the hell is it doing that for?” Todd shouted, waving his arms to scare it away, which only seemed to make it strike faster.

In the video feed on the monitor, Nell sat frozen, watching the edge of the jungle recede behind Zero. Then she could see the lower sections of StatLab through his camera! She turned quickly to the window and saw Zero staggering up the hill.

“It’s Zero! Let him in!”

“He’s outside the seal!” Todd yelled. “We can’t—”

“Bullshit!” Nell snarled and ran to the upper docking hatch.

With a crash, the “woodpecker” smashed the window inches over Todd’s head, and Henders wasps and drill-worms poured in, followed by Henders mice and rats, all moving so swiftly that they ricocheted off the ceiling and walls.

Two rats squeezed down the neck of Todd’s cleansuit; he screamed as they thrashed inside the belly, ripping into his gut.

His cries drew other predators, which circled back to converge on him, and several squeezed into his mouth before he could close it.

Zero limped to the closed upper hatch. Nell waved him off, motioning him toward the Sea Dragon helicopter that was landing on the slope above.

Zero turned and clambered up the slope on his hands and feet like a wounded ape.

The scientists in Section Four, seeing the invading horde now vomiting through the shattered hatch window, panicked. They stampeded toward the upper hatch. The animals attacked, taking chunk after chunk from the exposed necks and faces of those at the back of the pack and homing in on those who screamed.

Nell punched the code into the keypad and bashed the “PURGE” button with her fist. The hatch’s bolts exploded and the door shot off like a bullet into the side of the hill.

Suitless in the Henders air, Nell yanked on Briggs’s elbow, and he kicked off the one pant-leg of his half-donned cleansuit.

“Come on!” she urged the hesitant scientists behind her, and she and Briggs jumped from the hatch and ran up the scorched field.

Zero was first onto the Dragon’s loading ramp, and he turned to help Nell on board. Then he collapsed, groaning, against her side. She propped him up as Briggs, Otto, and a handful of scientists and technicians jumped onto the ramp.

The rest lumbered in the awkward cleansuits as animals poured from the hatch of StatLab at their backs: the long segmented lab had become a pipeline straight out of the jungle.

Wearing a helmet offered them no protection: teeth and claws easily slashed the flimsy cleansuits. The tears admitted hordes of Henders beasts that turned the suits into gruesome feedbags within seconds.

Even those closest to the Sea Dragon fell, screaming, as it lifted off.

Nell saw a huge red spiger leap up the hill in two bounds and launch itself at the helo, but the wind from the rotors battered it
down and the beast barely missed hooking the edge of the ramp with its spiked arms.

“Jeezus!” One of the helicopter crewmen hissed, the cool expression shocked from his face as he glanced out the window at the carnage. “Guess we need a new lab…”

Zero hung on Nell’s shoulders, and she hugged him tight against her.

“We may need a new planet,” she said.

Andy woke up in the dark and saw a glowing Henders wasp inches from his face.

He jumped back.

The movement startled other bugs all around him, also trapped in jars and bottles, which illuminated a strange chamber with cans, bottles, and other garbage piled against the walls.

A human skull in a niche wore a U.S. Air Force pilot’s hat.

The room, Andy realized, was an old airplane fuselage.

Suddenly there were snorts and scratches at a round door cut into the wall across from him. Fear immobilized him—all he could move were his eyes. He knew he was going to die and only hoped it would be quick.

The door in the wall opened inward and Copepod ran into the room.

The bull terrier licked Andy’s astonished face.

Andy stared as the creature he had only glimpsed earlier appeared behind the dog like an apparition in the room.

He hugged Copey in horror, but the burly dog barked and wriggled away, then ran right at the creature.

The Muddy Charles Pub
, overlooking the river that bore its name, buzzed with MIT professors and students consuming pizza and beer.

Among those gathered to hear the much-anticipated
SeaLife
announcement was noted zoologist Thatcher Redmond, who nibbled his trademark roasted pumpkin seeds and sipped a plastic cup of Widmer Brothers hefeweizen.

Though he professed to be a strict vegetarian, Thatcher cheated in private. He disguised his paunch under the camouflage of his Banana Republic cargo vest, which he wore over a pale denim shirt with each sleeve folded twice.

Today, as usual, students thronged Thatcher’s table, and this time his colleague Frank Stapleton had decided to join them to watch the breaking news about Henders Island.

Frank Stapleton was an academic bear with black-framed glasses and frazzled gray hair. An old-school man, he made an enjoyably stodgy sparring partner to Thatcher’s crowd-pleasing
sensationalism: students loved to hear their public exchanges just for the entertainment value.

This time, however, something else had stolen their attention.

“Wait, wait! Here it is,” shouted the student wielding the remote control.

A mutual
shushing
quelled the pub chatter as everyone trained eyes and ears on the large television screen mounted over the bar.

The CNN anchorwoman finally reached the story that had been teased all day:

Groans and curses filled the pub.

A video clip ran showing the
SeaLife
cast smiling and waving from the stern of the
Trident
and sailing off into the sunset.

“That’s
the hoax!” someone shouted, triggering another avalanche of
shushes.
The newscaster continued: