Minutes to Burn (2001) (50 page)

"All the shit going down on this island," Savage said, "and the fucker died taking a header into a goddamn hole." He shook his head again.

It took them the better part of an hour in the baking sun to find an air vesicle appropriately sized for the trap. About ten feet deep, six wide, and twelve long, it was originally a spherical gap in the lava. Decades of erosion had worn away the top, creating sheer walls. Since the vesicle collected shade and moisture, and slowed evaporation, it contained an entirely different ecosystem: ferns flourished in shafts of light; stubby miniature trees sprouted up between the mounds of rubble.

Szabla and Savage stood facing each other across the length of the hole. Szabla's undershirt was pasted to her body and drenched through all around. She tried to spit, but it dangled from her bottom lip, a thick pasty cord. She spit again and it spun to the ground.

Base camp was about a hundred yards west, and the forest several hundred yards upslope. "This is good," Szabla said. "Nice and open. Nothing can sneak up on us here, and it's close enough to the forest that the motherfucker could see it and come if it had cover of night."

Savage nodded, his fingers rasping in his beard.

"Let's get some of that rock cleared from the base of the walls," Szabla said. "Make sure nothing can crawl out."

They headed back to base camp to retrieve shovels and some rope, steering clear of the hole in which Frank Friedman's body lay rotting.

They trudged through the forest, Cameron hacking with the spike as if it were a machete when the foliage grew thick. Tank and Justin followed her silently.

When she heard the cooing, her legs went slack with the memory of the thing she'd beaten along the floor of the cave. She slowed down, Tank and Justin immediately halting to see what was wrong.

The sound was coming from behind a plant with thin elongated leaves cascading to the sides. The leaves' serrated edges cut her hand as she pulled them aside, expecting to be greeted with the engaging face of another larva.

When she saw the dark-rumpled petrel's white face and black bill, her eyes welled with relief. The petrel had scraped a burrow in the soft soil and was guarding over her full nest of eggs. She squawked at Cameron indignantly, her wedge-shaped tail fluttering, and Cameron withdrew.

She stood up right into Justin, who had moved close behind her with the spike, ready to take care of the kill to spare her having to go through it again. A perversely sweet gesture. She leaned back into him just to feel his body against hers for a moment. His hands around the circle of her waist calmed her, and she winked at him before turning and cutting back into the trees.

The fact that she'd been certain of her obligation--that she had to kill the larva last night--had not made the task easier for her. She'd had to fight every instinct in her to swing the spike, to batter the thing to death.

She had not been trained to kill animals. Only other men, men with weapons and harsh accents. Combatants. Maybe she found killing the larva difficult because they were not political or malevolent, because they did not wish her harm or know how to wish at all. Or maybe it was because she was participating in the elimination of a life form--a task so vast, momentous, and irrevocable that she seemed to lose herself in the scope of its ramifications. At the very least, she found it simultaneously ironic and natural that it should give her greater pause than ending a human life.

The larvae were extraordinary, and literally unique. But the price they would exact were they to continue to exist was immense. The distorted thing Floreana had birthed refused to leave Cameron's mind even for a second; she carried it in every moment, a second, vicarious pregnancy on top of her unsettled own.

To the east, Cameron saw where a sheet of land had fallen away in the most recent earthquake, the forest ending suddenly in a cliff. She sat down on the edge, letting the spike clatter on the rocks beside her. Banging her heels against the precipice like a little girl, she kicked loose some pebbles, which spiraled down several hundred yards. She lost sight of them before she could see them splash in the water. The blood rushed into her legs in pins and needles. They'd been walking since sunrise, and the nonstop activity of the past few days was taking its toll.

The thought of the squad's rebellion filled her with shame and self-revulsion. Though she knew she'd been right in opposing Derek, she hadn't yet forgiven herself for it. The emotions playing through his face as he'd looked at them. Loss, confusion, fear tinged red with anger.

Justin sat behind her, his stomach against her back, his legs outside hers. Tank plopped down next to her and rested one of his paws on her shoulder.

"I'm gonna kick both your asses if you keep babying me like this," she said. "I'm fine, you know. Quit touching me."

Tank withdrew his hand, and Justin made to strangle her from behind, but she caught a pressure point under his elbow, and he released his grip quickly.

"Ouch!"

"Yeah, ouch. There's more where that came from, too." A breeze brought them the scents of the forest. "I'm feeling a little hopeless looking for these things," she conceded. "Needles in haystacks."

"We should head back," Justin said. "Help them with the hole."

Despite her earlier complaints, Cameron leaned back slightly into her husband.

Before them, the water stretched clear and endless to the horizon. It whispered against the base of the cliff beneath Cameron's feet, stirring in swirls of white, frothy bubbles. Fronds dipped in the breeze next to them, bowing politely.

"You're pregnant," Tank said. "Aren't you?"

Cameron sucked her bottom lip. It was salty from the air. "When did you know?"

He shrugged. "When I picked you up at your house."

They sat quietly for a few moments.

"I won't let anything happen to you," Tank said.

His voice was low and steady as ever, but something in it made Cameron bite her lip to keep back the emotion. After a moment, she reached for his hand, but Tank hesitated and looked at Justin, as though he'd been caught doing something wrong.

Justin nodded at him, as if to say, go ahead.

Tank's hand was large and warm--it enveloped hers easily. Cameron leaned between the two men, letting herself feel calm and safe, if only for a moment.

Tank pulled his hand back and the three sat again in silence. The blue-footed boobies plunge-dived to the waters and popped to the surface. American oystercatchers hopped along the rocky coast, their bright-red bills and yellow eyes standing out against the dark lava.

"In another life," Tank said, "this would be a beautiful place." He leaned back on his hands, the red skin of his scalp visible through his thin, bristling hair.

Cameron looked from the stunning view to the spike lying beside her, the end still stained with the larva's fluids.

"Yeah," she said. "It would."

Chapter
61

The
sky drained quickly of color. Derek murmured and dozed in fits, the leaves soft against the side of his head. He was back outside his house The Night Of, his legs weak and fluid beneath him, knowing something was dreadfully wrong. The house had looked like a church, a demonic church.

Panic had seized his guts, gripping him like a cramp, but he'd fought it off, refusing to run, refusing to lose his head. The front door hadn't been hot to his touch, not hot as he'd imagined it would be. It had swung open slowly, uncreaking, a coffin standing on end. He'd managed to choke out his wife's name once, and then again. When she'd answered, her voice had been light and airy, like silk afloat on wind. "In here," she'd called. Her voice had seemed to issue from the dining room.

He'd staggered through the kitchen, knocking over a chair, leaning on the countertop to gain his balance. The knife block had been on its side, a black slit where the largest blade should have been.

He'd paused just short of the doorway to the dining room before shuffling weakly forward, sucking air, his chest heaving, his face blotched crimson.

He'd seen Jacqueline standing at the head of the table like a high priestess over an altar, a ghost in the blurry movement of her night-gown. He'd seen the curtains fluffed behind her with the night breeze. He'd seen the smudge of blood across Jacqueline's cheek. He'd seen the small flaccid limb, the arch of the tiny dough-soft fingers on the lac-quered rosewood, four slivers of crescent moon. He'd felt his heart beating in his temples, his hands, his eyes. He'd looked at her, transfixed, unperceiving. He'd known what she was going to say before her mouth moved, before he'd heard the words.

"No bugs," she'd murmured.

Suddenly he was yelling and shuffling backward on the forest floor on all fours, slapping at his face, swiping at the cobwebs of the memory. He slammed into a tree before realizing where he was, within a small ring of Scalesias in the highlands of Sangre de Dios.

His breath caught in his chest when he saw the thing woven between the two trees across from him. A pupation chamber. About five feet tall, cylindrical, and horizontally striated, the cocoon was a dull beige. A sticky substance ran up along the trunk on each side, securing the cocoon to the tree. It bulged near the center, like a body bag.

It was pulsing.

Derek tried to crawl backward, again hitting the tree trunk behind him. He stood, gazing at the cocoon in horror and amazement. His lips trembled, trying to form sounds.

The cocoon seemed to float in the shadows, framed by the dark trees stretching up around it. It looked almost holy, the circle of moss, like the apse of a cathedral. Derek felt as he had as a boy when he'd stepped forth from his confirmation, surrounded by a group of relatives. Their eyes had all been on him, and for a fleeting moment, he'd felt he must have been something holy for so many adults to be staring at him in his too-tight suit.

Derek's knees jarred the ground when he fell, bringing him back to the forest. He felt wetness on his cheeks and realized he was crying, though he wasn't sure why.

A grumbling creak came from within the cocoon.

Though the sun had already slipped beyond the horizon, the sky was still lit with its distant glow--a light shade of purple. A heap of cumulus clouds drifted, barely visible through the treetops. Derek was crying so hard the world seemed to streak before his eyes--the trees, the purple sky, the light sheen of the cocoon.

He turned to his shoulder and it took him three tries to say the name so his transmitter could read it. "Cameron," he finally sputtered. "Pri-mary channel."

Cameron was in the vesicle when Derek's voice clicked through. Tank had been shoveling like a back-hoe, clearing out the excess rock at the bottom. They were all working now, using the light of the hastily made torches that Justin had stuck in the ground at the edges of the hole. "Yeah?" she said. "Derek? Derek?"

"Are you private? Get private."

Cameron threw her shovel aside and scrambled out of the hole, using a knotted rope they had tied to a spike up top. She was careful not to bring more rock tumbling down beneath her feet. She felt Szabla's angry eyes on her as she ran toward the camp, and she knew her secrecy prob-ably upset Justin as well, but she owed Derek at least that. She ran until she was clear of the others, leaning over with her hands on her knees. For a moment, she thought the transmitter had cut out, but then she realized that the wavering noise was Derek sobbing. "Derek," she said. "What's up?"

Derek wiped his eyes and stared at the cocoon. It was wiggling now, and he could see something moving beneath the surface. It was creaking as it stretched.

Cameron tried to be patient, but her voice wouldn't allow it. She heard a noise in the background, like the supports of a bridge groaning. "Derek, what's going on there?"

An image moved through him--four tiny, lifeless fingers curved on lacquered rosewood. "It was my fault, Cam," he said. "I should've known it was going to happen."

"What's there, Derek? What's going on?"

"I don't know. I think ...I think she's changing."

"Is there a cocoon?" He didn't respond, so she forged ahead. "Derek, listen to me very carefully. Find a branch, a rock, anything. You have to protect yourself. You saw that thing Savage dragged back here."

Weighted with grief and exhaustion, Derek searched the area for a suitable branch. He finally found one. It was a bit thicker than he had hoped for, but he could still get his hands around it well enough to swing it with some force.

Shoving himself up to his feet, he clutched the branch tightly, searching for rage. He stepped forward, raising the tree limb above his head, but became nauseously weak. He crouched, his head bowed as if in sup-plication, his shoulders heaving with sobs.

"She's just a baby, Cam," he said. "She's just a baby."

Cameron looked frantically at the forest. Somewhere in the dark patch of trees this was all taking place, and she was unable to do any-thing about it. "Derek, listen to me. If you don't pull your head out of your ass ASAP, we're all gonna be in a fuckload of trouble. Now toughen up! Do it!"

Derek stumbled to his feet, moving toward the cocoon. It swayed and convulsed, something pumping beneath its surface. He drew back the branch like a baseball bat, flexing his arms and his shoulders and throwing his full force into the swing. He struck the side of the cocoon, rocking it between the trees. It was hard, and much denser than he'd expected. He was just drawing back the branch again when a massive splitting sound filled the air. A seam had opened straight down the pupa
tion
chamber.