Fragment

August 23

6:29 A.M.

She sat in the blue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.

An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet–Saturday morning cartoon clichés in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless detail.

Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky. Just as it always did.

Nell screamed, soundlessly–the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…

Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.

Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.

She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.

So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.

Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.

Today, on Henders Island, she would find a new flower–and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.

And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too–by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.

12:01 P.M.

A sliver of shimmering light appeared on the horizon, and then the guano-crowned cliff began to rise from the ocean like a snow-capped ridge.

Nell and the others gathered on the mezzanine deck to watch the island as it was raised.

‘What a wall!’ exclaimed Dante De Santos. The muscular twenty-three-year-old cook’s assistant had Maori-style tattoos on his tanned arms, and jet-black hair combed back from a pugnacious face and tiger-opal eyes.

Nell remembered that he was an amateur rock climber who had been itching to pull out his gear and give it some use.

‘I could make that ascent, no problem, if we can’t find a way to land, man!’ he bragged. ‘Remember to tell the captain for me if we can’t get ashore, OK, Nell?’

She smiled. ‘OK, Dante.’

Nell watched the wide wall of Henders Island rise more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty from the horizon. It seemed so lonely out here in the middle of nowhere. She was reminded, with a pang of uneasiness, how very far away they were from everything.

5:48 P.M.

Revving boat engines echoed off the rock face of a cove as four Zodiacs raced toward a crescent beach.

Two 150-horsepower Evinrude outboards powered the large Zodiac that took the lead with Jesse at the rudder. Jesse’s passengers feared for their lives: Nell and Glyn clung to the edge rail as the inflatable jumped the breakers, its dual engines whining as they launched from each crest.

The cliff around the cove rose seven hundred feet straight up, swirled with faded bands of color like pigments in an overturned bucket of paint. Centered in the cliff, a dark crack had spewed broken rock over the beach down to the water. Judging from the fresh red and green color of the rubble, the crevasse had opened fairly recently.

Washed aground on this outpouring of jagged rock, the hull of a thirty-foot sailboat lay on her side like a swollen whale carcass.

‘That crack looks new,’ Glyn shouted.

Nell nodded, grinning. ‘It may give us a way inland.’

The Trident rolled on swells in the cove, anchored to one of the few submarine ledges their sonar had picked up around the island. They had nearly circumnavigated the entire island before locating this inlet, which they could have found in a few minutes had they circled in the other direction.

Now they had no time for setup. They had to dive into the boats and go live.

Peach got the camera feeds up as he counted down to the satellite uplink in the control room.

The three cameramen marked Peach’s countdown in their headsets aboard the speeding rafts. They carried waterproof videocams and backpack transmitters with a thousand-meter range.

Cynthea looked from the stern of the Trident and fired off orders to her camera crew. ‘OK, this goddamn island has a beach after all, and we’re in at 5:49, Fred! We’re going hot right now! Peach, tell me you’re on top of the uplink!’

‘TWO–ONE–ZERO. I’m there, we’re live,’ Peach said, cuing Zero’s feed first.

Cynthea ran down a passageway belowdeck, toward the control room in the starboard pontoon. ‘Glyn! Glyn? Can you hear me, Glyn?’

5:49 P.M.

Glyn wore a wireless earmuff transmitter on his right ear and carried the SeaLife flag at the prow of the Zodiac. The British biologist sported an orange SeaLife T-shirt, shorts, and Nikes, the last thing Nell thought she’d ever see on him. ‘Yes, Cynthea,’ Glyn said. ‘I hear you!’

Nell could hear Cynthea shouting through Glyn’s earphone: ‘Plant the flag on the beach!’

Nell grinned with excitement as she gripped the edge rail of the speeding boat and scanned the beach. The adrenaline pumping through her veins made her want to leap out of the boat and fly to the shore.

5:50 P.M.

Cynthea crashed through the door into the control room, where three camera shots zoomed toward the shore in the bank of monitors above Peach’s head.

The small Zodiac landed first. Zero and Copepod jumped out into the surf. Copepod barked excitedly and darted up the beach. Zero sidestepped out of the water to cover the other Zodiacs landing.

The rest of the crew watched intently from the decks of the Trident.

Andy ran to the ship’s rail in striped pajamas. ‘I can’t believe they didn’t WAKE ME UP!’ he yelled. ‘They give me the night watch and then they don’t wake me up? God damn it, I’m tired of getting SCREWED all the time!’

Andy turned to see a camera recording the moment and noticed some of the uniformed crew laughing nearby. ‘Screw you!’ he screamed.

Cynthea cut back to Glyn planting the SeaLife flag in the sand.

‘I claim this island for SeaLife!’ Glyn cried.

Fans cheered in their living rooms and dorm rooms across the globe; Glyn had just become an instant star.

The network chiefs smiled, and for the first time in a month leaned back in relief as they watched their screens.

Millions went ‘Ooo!’ as Cynthea caught Dawn flashing a look at Glyn and Nell squinting at Dawn.

Cynthea winked at Peach.

He nodded. ‘Drama.’

5:51 P.M.

‘Right! Let’s have a look at the boat!’ Glyn said.

The landing party scrambled over the avalanche of rock.

Zero and the other cameramen were shooting through Voyager Lite wireless television cameras with transmission backpacks feeding signals to the Trident. Peach switched the shots and beamed the signal to satellites that bounced it to relay stations that fed hundreds of cable networks and millions of television screens downstream.

They neared the boat’s battered hull that was encrusted with a thick layer of barnacles. As they drew closer they saw its name painted on the transom in faded green letters:

Balboa Bilbo

‘That’s our girl!’ Jesse shouted, banging his hand on the stern.

They circled the boat and saw the upper deck, which was tilted toward them at a thirty-degree angle. The boat had been de-masted and her rig wrenched overboard. She had obviously been at sea a long time before coming aground.

‘OK, let’s check it out,’ Glyn said, doing a little impromptu narrating and looking at Zero, who waved him off.

Jesse climbed onto the deck.

Glyn climbed aboard behind Jesse, and Zero followed.

Jesse crawled into the cabin. The glass was missing from its hatches and windows. Much of the cabin’s interior seemed to have been stripped: cabinet doors were gone, hinges and all; the glass from the windows seemed to have been pried out. Jesse spotted the beacon in the pilot’s seat and picked it up.

‘Yep, here’s the EPIRB all right. It’s still in the “on” position.’

He aimed the antenna of the cylindrical yellow device at Glyn like a gun, laughing.

‘What does that mean?’ Glyn said, looking at the camera. Zero quickly cut him out of the shot.

Jesse looked around the wreckage-strewn cabin. ‘Well, something had to turn this EPIRB on, Professor.’

Copepod barked frantically in the distance.

‘Maybe a bird flew through the window and pecked on it or something.’ Glyn pointed out the window. ‘The glass is missing, see?’

Jesse looked right at the camera and shook his head. ‘It’d take three birds working as a team to turn on an EPIRB, dude.’ He made the cuckoo sign against his head.

‘Oh.’ Glyn nodded. ‘Right!’

Nell stood on the rocks above the prone body of the sailboat.

Holding the bill of her baseball cap, she searched the base of the cliff. A purple patch of vegetation caught her eye some distance to the left of the crevasse. Everything else around her seemed to disappear as she focused on the vividly colored growth.

‘Hey, where’s Copepod?’ Dawn shouted.

The cameramen panned. The frantic barking had stopped abruptly. The bull terrier was nowhere to be seen.

Nell jumped across the rocks until she reached the coarse reddish sand of the beach. She jogged up toward the cliff. The afternoon sun lit up the wall of rock and the bright purple plants at its base. Nell saw flecks of gold in the sand. Fool’s gold, she thought–there must be a lot of iron sulfide in the cliffs.

She was relieved that no cameraman had followed her. The commotion of the landing party receded behind her as adrenaline quickened her steps.

Nell dug her knees into the sand before the patch of purple spears at the base of the cliff, catching her breath.

The stalks looked like a jade plant’s, she thought, except the straight shafts had no branches like jade plants, and the color was a vivid lavender. She noticed that the core of each stalk was purplish-blue, while its artichoke-like leaves were tinged green at their fuzzy points. They resembled fat asparagus spears, but she couldn’t identify the family they belonged to–let alone their genus or species, as there was no recognizable growth pattern.

She tried to calm her heartbeat as she rifled through the botanical taxonomy in her mind, telling herself that she must be overexcited and overlooking something obvious.

She reached out to the largest of the specimens and pulled a spiked leaf from the plant. It ripped like old felt and melted into juice that stung her fingertips.

She flicked her fingers, startled, and wiped away the blue juice on her white shirt. Opening her Evian bottle she splashed water over her left hand and shirt.

To her astonishment, the plant reacted like an air fern to her touch, folding all its leaflike appendages against its stalk. Then it retracted underground, an action that required internal muscles–mechanisms that plants did not have.

Surprised, she was about to call the others when she saw what looked like a trail of white ants moving along the base of the cliff.

She leaned forward and watched the large, evenly spaced creatures hurl down a groove in the sand, toward a crab carcass. They moved faster than any bug she had ever seen.

5:52 P.M.

‘Copey must have gone up into the canyon,’ Jesse yelled.

‘Copey!’ Dawn called.

‘Maybe that’s where the survivors went,’ Glyn suggested. ‘I mean, if there are any.’

‘Someone stripped this vessel, dude,’ Jesse shouted, shaking his head and banging his fist against the hull. ‘And somebody turned that beacon on.’

Cynthea seized the moment, switching to Glyn’s channel. ‘Go, Glyn, go! We have seven minutes left on the satellite feed!’

‘Let’s go!’ Glyn said.

Cynthea tapped camera two’s screen with her pencil.

‘Yeah!’ Jesse howled, and he raised his fist to lead the charge.

The three cameramen covered the four scientists and five crew members as they climbed the natural ramp of broken rock up into the crevasse.

5:53 P.M.

Nell picked up a sun-bleached Budweiser can that had somehow made it to the shore, and she used it to block the path of the speeding bugs.

One of the creatures fell on its side.

An inch-wide waxy white disk lay motionless on the sand.

She threw the Bud can aside and looked closer. Centipede-like legs emerged from the edge of the white disk. The legs flailed and the bug spun like a Frisbee over the sand in an evasive maneuver.

More of the white bugs arrived, massing in front of her. They were rolling on their edges, like unicycle motocrossers, down the groove. Within seconds, dozens had gathered. Suddenly, they tilted in different directions–preparing to attack?

Astonished, Nell stood up and took a few quick steps back. Such animals could not exist, she thought.

She looked around for the others in the landing party; they were gone.

She ran toward the crevasse, yelling, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

5:54 P.M.

From the control room Cynthea watched the search party as they entered the canyon, whose curving walls were obscured by mists above. The late-afternoon sun etched beams and shadows through the heights of the crack as water streamed and dripped over them.

Struggling over large boulders and climbing natural stairways of smaller rocks, Glyn boosted Dawn over a ledge, admiring the tattoo peeking from the back of her low-slung jeans.

‘Hey, look, everybody!’ shouted Jesse. ‘The crack of Dawn!’

Peach switched cameras at Cynthea’s pointing pencil. ‘This is great stuff, boss!’

‘We just saved SeaLife, Peach,’ she told him.

8:55 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

On his wafer-thin wall-mounted 55-inch Hitachi screen in his Midtown Manhattan office, Jack Nevins watched Glyn give Dawn a two-handed tush-push over a boulder.

‘This is great, Fred,’ Jack said into his cell phone.

Fred Huxley watched his own drop-down TV in the adjacent office, his own cell phone to his ear as he lit up a Cohiba: ‘This is GOLD, Jack!’

‘I think that magnificent bitch just saved our asses, pal.’

‘I could kiss her!’

‘I could fuck her.’

‘The old gal’s got a hell of a survival instinct.’

‘Next week’s numbers are gonna rocket, Baby Fred!’

‘Next week’s numbers are going to KILL, Brother Jack.’

5:57 P.M.

The search party fanned out on a ledge where the crevasse widened. Lush vegetation clung to the walls: a strange mat of purple growth squished underfoot.

The vegetation along the walls arched and wove together to form a cornucopia-like tunnel that stretched up into the twilit distance, speared with beams from the setting sun.

‘Nell, you hit the mother lode!’ Glyn muttered.

Some of the tall, glistening plants resembled cacti; others, coral. The canopy trembled with fluttering, brightly colored foliage above them. The air smelled sweet and pungent–like flowers and mildew, with a sulfurous hint of cesspool.

Glyn squinted skeptically at the canopy. Sweat trickled into his eyes and the salt burned as he rubbed them. He was still breathing hard from the climb. What should have been leaves, the biologist thought, looked more like ears of multicolored fungus sprouting from the branches overhead. ‘Wait a minute,’ he cautioned, winking his left eye repeatedly to clear it.

‘Yeah, hold on,’ Zero said.

The ‘plants’ and ‘trees’ grew in radial shapes like century plants, yuccas, and palms, but with multiple branches. They swayed as if there were a breeze. But the thick air was utterly still.

A buzzing, chittering sound rose like a chorus of baritones humming through police whistles. The green tunnel turned slightly purple. It rippled as if a strong wind was passing over it.

‘Hey!’ Jesse yelled, making everyone jump. ‘This plant’s MOVING, man!’

Jesse’s shout echoed through the stony heights, and the insect noise stopped abruptly. Except for the distant hiss of the surf below, the canyon was silent.

Zero’s camera barely caught a blurry shape streaking through the branches overhead.

The insect noise resumed, louder now.

Dawn screamed. Dartlike thorns, attached to a tree by thin cables, had impaled her bare midriff. As the party watched, the tree fired two more thorns like blow darts into her neck.

The translucent cables turned red, siphoning Dawn’s blood. With a desperate lunge she broke the cables and shrieked, bleeding from the siphoning tubes as she ran frantically toward the others.

Glyn noticed the branches above reaching down–then something caught the corner of his eye: a wave of dark shapes rushing toward them down the tunnel.

He felt a sharp bite on his calf and yelped. ‘Crikey!’ Glyn looked down at his bone-white legs, exposed for the first time on this trip by the damned L.L. Bean chino shorts he agreed to wear for the landing. He almost couldn’t spot the offender against his pale skin. Then he located it by a second sharp pain: a white disk-shaped spider clung to his left calf.

He raised his hand to swat it and hundreds of miniatures rolled off the spider’s back. A red gash melted open on his calf as, in the space of two seconds, the yellow edge of his tibia was exposed and more white disks fired into the gaping gash.

Before Glyn could scream, a whistling shriek flew straight at him.

He looked up as an animal the size of a water buffalo hurtled through the opening of the tunnel.

Zero turned the camera as Glyn yelled and caught the beast closing its hippo-sized vertical jaws over the biologist’s head and chest. With a sharp crunch, the attacker sank translucent teeth into Glyn’s ribs and bit off the top of the Englishman’s body at the solar plexus. Bright arterial blood from Glyn’s beating heart shot thirty feet between the beast’s teeth, dousing Zero’s shirt and camera lens.

Zero lowered the camera and saw a cyclone of animals shrieking and clicking as they swirled around the rest of Glyn’s body.

The others screamed as they were bombarded by flying bugs and more shadows pouring out of the tunnel.

Zero threw the camera toward the onslaught, and a few animals streaking toward him pivoted and chased it instead.

As fast as he could, he slipped from the ledge and zigzagged down the rocks in the crevasse.

5:58 P.M.

Cynthea, Peach, and the world watched in astonishment as all three camera shots panned wildly.

‘Crikey!’ someone shouted–and there was an awful cracking sound.

A chaos of shrieks overloaded the microphones, and the cameras jerked and spun.

One camera tumbled onto its side. Red and blue liquid spattered its lens.

Another camera fell, and blood-drenched clothing blocked its view.

The audience across the nation heard screams from their suddenly blackened TV screens.

Cynthea cut to the remaining camera just in time to see something fly toward the lens. Then the camera fell and was instantly blackened by swarming silhouettes.

‘We just lost the uplink, boss,’ Peach reported.

One hundred and ten million people across the continent had tuned in before the live feed had died.

Cynthea stared at the screens. ‘Oh. My. God!’

8:59 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

‘We’re fucked,’ Jack Nevins said.

‘It’s been nice, buddy,’ Fred Huxley said, stamping out his Cohiba.

6:01 P.M.

Nell leaped over the rocks toward the crevasse as Zero came running out. His gray T-shirt was drenched with bright red and blue liquid. He didn’t have his camera or his transmission backpack.

Nell called to him but he sprinted past her, lunging down the boulders with a ten-mile stare, heading straight for the water. She followed him instinctively, but halfway down the rocks she swung around and looked back into the mouth of the twilit crack.

What looked like a dog emerged from the shadow of the fissure.

The creature seemed to be sniffing along Zero’s trail. When it leaped onto a rock in the sun she saw that its fur was bright red. It was not a dog. It was at least twice the size of a Bengal tiger.

Its head swung toward her.

Nell backed away, turned, stumbled over the rocks around the derelict sailboat.

She spotted the small Zodiac on the beach and raced for it.

She saw Zero dive into the sea and start swimming for the Trident.

Finally, she hit the hard, wet sand and ran. Without looking back, she reached the Zodiac. She shoved it into the water and flopped in backwards, planting her feet on the transom.

She yanked the pull-start and shot a look up the beach.

Three of the creatures lunged from the rocks to the sand.

Apart from their striped fur, they were nothing like mammals–more like six-legged tigers crossed with jumping spiders. With each kick off their back legs, they leaped fifteen yards over the sand.

Nell yanked the pull-start again, and the motor turned over and coughed to life.

The Zodiac pushed over a breaker, and the three animals recoiled before a crashing wave. Driving spiked arms deep into the wet sand, they pushed themselves backwards in thrusts ten yards long to avoid the hissing water.