Minutes to Burn (2001) (25 page)

The ground was extraordinarily soft underfoot. Though the sun had dried the dew quickly, a few beads of water still clung to the little spider-webs threading the lush grass. Nearby, several giant tortoises lay retracted into their shells, their high-domed backs rising from the grass like boul-ders.

The loose canvas flap on the tent snapped in the breeze, its rope swaying as they approached. Cameron fisted the cord, pulling it tight. The noise ceased immediately, leaving a sudden silence. She looped the loose end through a hole in the canvas, knotting it. The wind kicked up again, filling the fresh silence with a low whistle as it carried through the shack atop the watchtower down the dirt road.

The sun bounced off the specimen freezer so strongly it made them squint. Derek raised an arm against the glare as Rex strode to it and examined the thick lock that jutted out from the door just beneath the handle. The size of a shoe box, the lock had a jagged mouth of a key slot. Around back, there was a vent for the humidor, which cleared the moisture from the freezer so as to preserve the specimens. The vent's grate caught on steel teeth if it was forced inward, locking it into place to prevent scavengers from getting in and devouring the specimens.

Rex tapped the lock with his fingers, swearing under his breath. "We'll search for the keys, but I'd bet Frank kept them on his person."

Derek checked the freezer door, testing it with his fingers. Pressing his ear to the door, he knocked twice with his fist, gauging its thickness.

"Tucker packing any C4?" Cameron asked. Derek backed up, shaking his head.

"Even if we did have some, there'd be no way to reseal the freezer," Rex said. "The heat would turn the specimens to Jell-O in about five minutes." He groaned, banging his forehead lightly against the alu-minum. It sent a tinny echo through the interior. "And there's no way we can haul this whole thing back to civilization."

"What do you think's inside?" Cameron asked.

"I don't know," Rex said. "But it must be for multiple specimens--it's certainly larger than any land form on the islands. It's also locked, which means Frank collected something before he disappeared." He tapped the door with his fingernails, making a hollow ping. "Ain't curiosity a bitch?"

Rex returned Cameron's smile, then ducked into the larger tent, sur-veying the dim interior. A rotting, fecund smell permeated the space. A mat and a single sleeping bag lay on the ground, along with a hurricane lamp that had broken in a recent tremor, a wooden chest, and a toiletries bag. He lifted the lid of the chest, and a swarm of tiny wasps rose up, clouding around his head. He cried out and stumbled backward, tripping over the chest. Swatting at the wasps, he shoved through the tent flap. The swarm lifted from around him in the breeze, flying in several tight swoops before disappearing.

Cameron and Derek looked at Rex, startled, then amused by his disheveled hair and red face. "Any stings?" Cameron asked.

"No. Podagrionids. Torymid family. Predators of mantid larvae." Rex dusted off his pants. "They use their sharp ovipositors to pierce the spongy egg cases before they've hardened, and lay eggs inside. Their off-spring hatch and feed on the developing larvae." He clapped his hands together and sank them in his khaki pockets. "They don't sting."

Cameron's lips pressed together in a hint of a smile. "The expression on your face, you could've fooled me."

Rex ducked back inside and approached the chest, raising the lid more cautiously. Sure enough, inside lay a segment of an ootheca about the size of a playing card, dotted with holes. He shooed the few remaining wasps and held it out before Cameron and Derek. "Case in point," he said. He turned the segment over, his fingers sinking into it. "Looks like it sustained some UV damage," he said. "That would have made it easier for the wasps to penetrate it." He held it closer to his face. Frank had written the estimated hatching date on a piece of tape stuck to the ootheca--11/25/07. "So Frank was alive through the end of Novem-ber," Rex said. "But this is odd. Mantids usually don't hatch until April. This is out of season."

He pulled one of Frank's T-shirts from the bed, wrapped the ootheca segment, and stuck it in his bag before heading into the other tent, which Frank had apparently used as a biostation. Cameron followed him in, and Derek waited outside. A folding card table remained stubbornly on its legs in one corner, though all the equipment it had held had slid to the ground in a quake--a cassette-tape case filled with glassine envelopes, a 160-watt mercury vapor lamp, a 10x loupe, a UV lamp, a Nikon with seven rolls of film, a dissecting microscope. Three killing jars sat in a cluster on the ground, the layers visible through the glass--crystalline cyanide, sawdust, plaster of Paris on top.

A sketch pad caught Rex's eye. He picked it up and set it on the card table, pulling an equipment chest over for a seat. When he flipped to the first page, an overscale sketch of a mantid stared back at him. Below it was taped a ripped segment of text that Rex recognized as belonging to an unpublished insect listing, one of several sheaves of reference notes about island fauna that Frank brought with him on surveys.

The paper was titled MANTIDS, and it read: Galapagia obstinatus: endemic species found on Baltra, Floreana, Isabela, San Cristobal, Santa Cruz, Sangre de Dios. Conventional collection methods--beating vegetation, malaise trap, or at lights. Arid to humid zones, though heavily prefers humid. Closely related to Musonia and Brunneria.

The "author," or discoverer of the species, was listed as "Scudder, S.H." in an 1893 article titled, "Reports on the dredging operations off the west coast of Central America to the Galapagos to the West Coast of Mexico and in the Gulf of California, incharge of Alexander Agassiz, carried on by the U.S. Fish Commission Steamer Albatross during 1891, Lieut. Commander Z. L. Tanner, U.S.N., Commanding."

Derek ducked into the tent, his hair damp with sweat. "Jesus, the sun," he said.

Rex waved a hand to silence him, focused on the next page in the sketch pad--another sketch, this time of a praying mantis ootheca. It was ensconced along a branch on a tree that had fallen over, making a clearing in the forest and leaving the ootheca exposed to the sun. Rex tapped the bulge of the ootheca segment in his bag. "Frank must have pulled this from the ootheca he drew," he said. "The picture explains the sun damage."

To caption the sketch, Frank had scrawled the mathematical symbol for "approximately" and then 250 offspring. Beside that, he'd written Ten viable.

Cameron pointed at Frank's note. "What's that mean?"

"Mantids usually lay oothecas from which two hundred to two hun-dred fifty nymphs are spawned. I don't know what 'ten viable' means. 'Viable,' as an evolutionary term, means that a mutated organism can develop and survive given favorable circumstances, but I don't see how that would be relevant here." Rex shook his head. "That's Frank for you. Typically vague."

He flipped the page, but the next sheet in the sketchbook was blank, save nine tallies, ticked off like a billiards score on a chalkboard. Rex tapped the sheet, frustrated. "Frank usually took copious notes," he said.

Outside, the flap came loose on the other tent, snapping in the wind, and they all started at the sudden sound.

Derek shrugged. "That was before the tree monster got him."

Chapter
29

S
amantha had finally drifted off when she heard Tom Straussman yelling at her through the glass. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, rubbing her eyes and feeling like a zoo animal.

"Get over here!" Tom shouted. "Take a look at this!" He slamm-ed a micrograph against the glass and Samantha hazily rose to her feet and shuffled across the slammer, muttering something about ticktacktoe.

When she saw the micrograph, her eyes widened. The virus that Dr. Denton had sent over, stored in the dinoflagellates of the water samples, had been blown up to enormous magnification. The micrograph showed several pairings of slender strands connected by horizontal bars, like tiny ladders. The pairings were all twisted and bore a remarkable resemblance to DNA, which was odd since the magnification was only high enough to capture gross viral particles.

Samantha stared at the print, her mind racing. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen.

"I've sent it to diagnostics to run genetic sequencing on it," Tom said. "Reverse transcriptase, polymerase chain reaction, nucleic acid probe test--the whole nine yards. I'd like to see if we can find a match in the gene bank."

Samantha tried to swallow, but her throat clicked dryly. She felt the movement of her heart in her chest. "You won't find a match in the gene bank."

"Well, we'll see after diagnostics--"

"You can run diagnostics all year, it's still not gonna show us how the virus acts." She blinked hard, trying to focus. "That shipment of rabbits for the Crimean Congo tests. Did it arrive?"

Tom nodded.

"I want them in here," Samantha said. "In the operating room." She pointed through the crash door. "And I want a pellet of the virus." Tom started to object, but Samantha closed her eyes, feeling her heartbeat pounding in her temples. "Now!"

Fifteen minutes later, she stood in the operating room, the rabbit cages at her feet. A syringe full of the virus poised in one hand, she bent over and opened the top of the cage, pulling up a rabbit by the scruff of its neck. Tom and several other colleagues watched her from the obser-vation post. Samantha injected the first rabbit, setting it back in its cage, then followed with the remaining five. The other scientists looked on silently.

She finished and crossed to the window, looking at Tom. Behind her, the rabbits thumped softly in their cages.

"The first rule of virology," she said. "Let the disease be your teacher."

Chapter
30

S
zabla pulled her shirt off and tossed Tucker a bottle of sunblock, pointing to her back and straddling the cruise box. Justin was working Tank's hamstring and from the expression on Tank's face doing a pretty good job.

A wave rolled in, hitting the lava plain to the west and sending up steam-whistle bursts through the blowholes. Just above the water's edge, a ruddy turnstone picked at sea lion afterbirth. Szabla turned and faced the island, admiring how the low shrubs of the beach gave way to dry, rocky terrain and tree-spotted slopes. Above the slopes the green-hazed mountaintops presided over the island, imperious and remote, lurking behind fingers of garua. "What a fuckin' place," she said. "From desert to forest in a stone's throw."

Tucker smeared a handful of sunblock across her shoulders, rubbing it high on her neck and along the rims of her ears. Justin eyed the sun-block across Szabla's back. "I don't see what you need that shit for, given you're a native people."

Szabla turned to face him with a half-smile. "You'd better watch your mouth, boy, or I'll tell your wife to bitch-slap your shit in line like she normally does."

"Please don't," Justin said. "She's been doing a lot of curls lately."

"Where the hell did Savage go?" Szabla asked, looking around.

Tucker pointed down across the face of the cliffs. "He wandered off that way while you were pulling your shirt off."

"He makes no causal argument," Justin said.

Szabla rose and pulled her tank top on, adjusting her bra. "I'll go grab him."

She took off at a jog along the beach, kicking the sand behind her in white sprays. She slowed when she stepped up onto the lava plain that spread like an apron out from the base of the Punta Berlanga cliffs. The lava was slick with sea spray, and the tide pools were clogged with brown floating algae and dotted with black-shelled snails.

She put her foot down on something live and it twisted and squirmed out from under her. Leaping back, she stumbled and went down hard on her ass, breaking her fall with the heels of her hands. A shape moved on the rock, black against black, and she realized she'd almost crushed a marine iguana.

A fat lizard about two feet long with tough folds of black skin and a row of spikes running from its neck to the base of its substantial tail, it had a prehistoric appearance. Two beady black eyes peered out from the lumpy white scales encrusting its face.

Szabla stayed still for a moment, suddenly aware that all around her, the lava was covered with marine iguanas, some longer than two feet. Their gray-dusted black scales blended perfectly with the dark rock. Sev-eral were pushed up on their front legs in a position of elevated basking, allowing the breeze to cool them off. They all lazily rotated their heads toward her.

One of the marine iguanas made a sharp sneezing sound, spitting through its nose to clear the brine, and a few others followed suit. Though Szabla knew they were harmless herbivores, they looked fierce, almost ferocious, and she rose quickly to her feet.

A promontory abruptly interrupted the curve of the cliffs to the west, angling out into the sea with a spill of rocks. Szabla headed for the point, carefully avoiding tide pools and iguana colonies. She waded out around the cliff, navigating her way through patches of green sea urchins. The water surged in, forcing her toward the wall, but she held her ground, planting her boots underwater against a flat lava ledge as the undertow spent itself.

A large spray of white mangrove sprouted from the outermost point of the promontory like a strange tumor. A fallen beetle floated on its back below the leaves, paddling in little circles with the bicycling move-ments of its legs. Szabla pulled back the mangrove, revealing a small crescent of black sand nestled just beyond the promontory, cliffs towering protectively above and around it. She inhaled sharply.