An eight foot thresher shark launched itself up out of the blood-foamed surf, a tower of muscle driven by silent agony beyond measure, and for a stark, screaming second, Storch thought it was going to fly all the way up to him and get him in its snapping jaws. Black segmented tentacles snaked up out of the foam and snared the shark with millions of barbed teeth, dragged it down beneath the red waves. Gripping the toggles tighter, he focused on the island.
The concrete bunkers were low, rambling pillbox-shaped shells with palisades of glass-faced lead bricks to the south and crumbling flanges and buttresses sprawling in all directions, suggesting a complex of structures that had been torn or blown down in the years since the test. They were overgrown in broad-leafed vines that reminded Storch of the kudzu he'd seen growing around the bases he'd lived on in Georgia and Alabama. It looked like a fugitive from the jungle, not like the sort of amphibious pickleweed that grew in tidal zones, as he would have expected from a place periodically engulfed by the ocean. Rippling and rustling in the wind, the vines grew so fast you could hear them.
Satellite dishes sprouted on the roof, which was totally clear of vines, as if they'd only been pruned yesterday, or knew not to grow there. As he drifted closer, one of the dishes moved. The sound of its motors grated eerily over the wind and waves.
He had expected more. An army of him on the shore, or just one, waiting to receive him with open arms and sparkling gray eyes, unsurprised by his arrival, ready to fight and win or die, but tell him what it all meant. He deserved that much, at least. But there was only the freakish battle in the surf, and the vines strangling the lonely bunkers, and the satellite dishes, turning like flowers to hearken to the secret illumination of creeping satellites. The one they controlled from here was gone. That much, at least, had been no trick. Perhaps this island was only an empty relay station, after all. He almost thought he could hear Keogh laughing at him.
The earth rushed up under him all of a sudden. He landed on his feet, but the jarring brittleness of the ground shocked him to his knees. His chute dragged him across the island, full-bellied on the whipping surface wind. He shook the toggles off his hands and went for the quick-release button, but it was gone, torn away when his body tried to change in the air. The wind yanked him forwards again. The ground offered him no traction. The gray-white coral-rock was smooth as bone, with only a thin layer of sand on it, and shallow, elliptical pits everywhere like the holes in an Indian grinding stone, or the breathing-holes in an abalone shell.
His boots skidded impotently across the rock. His hands fought with the cinches around his legs, but they were numb from the strain of steering the parachute and his blood flow was all fucked up because his body tried to grow fucking wings—
His heels caught on the lip of a pit, and the wind died down. The chute settled to the ground. He reached for the cinches and undid the left one. He went momentarily limp as blood coursed into the starved limb. He flexed his hand, reached for the right cinch.
The chute was snatched up again, and jerked Storch off his feet. Rock hit his head. Through pinwheels of demented sunlight, he saw that the wind didn't have his chute. Tentacles rose up out of the lagoon and rended the chute to shreds, dragging him toward the madly churning water.
Storch scrabbled madly for a handhold with one hand and tore at the thick belt of nylon around his right thigh. His legs spasmed and kicked like a hanged man's death throes, and suddenly, his right leg flexed and grew, thickened so fast the blood drained out of Storch's head and he almost fainted. The pain was enormous, but in an instant, it was over. The leg strap popped and he fell out of the harness. The thrashing kelp-tentacles drew the empty parachute into the lagoon.
He lay on his back, chest heaving, each breath like a month in traction. His skin tingled. A billion microscopic plutonium beestings pricked him. A million subatomic bullets exploding through the busy little microcosms of his skin cells: hundreds of thousands of particles smashing the delicate superstructures of his DNA helices into strands of deranged acid debris. If he were a normal human being, he'd be dead in hours, disintegrating on this beach where only kudzu grew and the seaweed ate sharks, while Keogh laughed, somewhere else in the world and deep inside his head.
But he could feel his cells going to work, rebuilding, refining defenses against the onslaught. His skin thickened into scales and bony shell-plates under his jumpsuit. The half-formed hair-feathers sprouting down his arms burst through the sleeves as thick thorns of keratin. He felt the burn of the radiation damping down, as it changed him. He was becoming less human every moment he spent on this island.
He got up and patted himself down. He still carried thirty pounds of weapons, explosives and ordnance in bellows pockets all over the suit, and more inside. He drew an M9 Beretta 9mm from a hip pocket, and slid in a fifteen-round clip of green-tipped bullets. His finger was covered in thickening scales, and barely fit through the trigger-guard. Looking over his shoulder at the hungry lagoon, he walked towards the bunkers.
Kudzu stirred, though the wind had stopped. He circled around a bunker until he found a recess in the wall of vines that might be a door. He probed the vines over the door, recoiled. Under their shield-leaves, the vines must be hairy with thorns, which shredded his sleeve, though they couldn't break his skin. He took out his K-Bar knife and slashed at the vines. They wept green sap and parted to reveal a blind wall of lead bricks.
He knew only a little about the old island A-bomb tests, but he knew that they buried all the radioactive trash in the bunkers and sealed them up. In all likelihood, there was only more of the same inside. But there were satellite dishes on the roof, and this was the place where it all started. He had to be here. There had to be something inside—
He took out a brick of C4, sliced open the shrink-wrap and tore it into strips. He mashed these into the join where the bricks met the concrete, using the entire one-pound block, and jabbed a detonator into it. The detonator looked like the face of a cheap digital watch with wire leads snaking out of it, which, essentially, it was. You could shoot at plastique, or pour gasoline on it and burn it without making anything but smoke. It took an electrical charge to make it explode.
He walked away fifty feet and took shelter behind a projecting buttress. The wind shifted, bringing the bloody, voiceless battle in the surf to his ears. He took out the remote, checked the channel, and pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
He went back over to the doorway. The detonator was gone. He eyed the rustling vines suspiciously. How oddly easy it was, now, to just accept that the fucking vines stole it. They were too green to burn, and he only had four more detonators. He couldn't waste one.
He hacked the vines back with the knife and plugged in another detonator, backed away without blinking or looking away. Sure enough, the fuckers came creeping around the wall towards the detonator. He shot at them once, twice, tearing off a stalk so that the leaves fell away and he saw what else lay beneath. It was not kudzu. It bore only an incidental resemblance to any species of the plant kingdom, but it was not truly an animal, either.
Under their leaves, the vines were covered in silver-gray eyes like coins, and black, questing thorn-tongues, and other things that neither an animal nor a plant had any business with.
He pressed the detonator. It worked.
He threw himself prone on the coral ground. The concussion rolled over him and filled the air with ingots of lead. Over the supersonic crack of the explosion, the vines screamed. Smoke rolled in the cavity he'd made.
He got up and approached with the gun extended before him, disturbed but a little comforted to see how his hand was growing over it. He walked up to the hole, picked up a chunk of lead and tossed it through. It vanished through the smoke, but the dull clang of metal stopped it somewhere inside. Fanning the smoke out of his eyes, he stalked over the low mound of lead and into the hole.
His eyes adjusted to the gloom and the dust, but there was nothing to see. Stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall, rusting barrels leaked on the lead-lined floor. The black and yellow radiation symbols on them were barely legible through the layers of corrosion. The radiation here was almost a visible exhalation from the barrels. It cut through him, playing havoc with his cells, turning them against each other.
He backed away, stumbling outside and running away down the beach. He stopped at the surf when the black kelp sensed his approach and reared up out of the waves to embrace him. He shot into the surf on reflex. He backed away from the water, standing midway between the two threats and looking up into the hurtfully blue sky, but now he saw only Keogh's eye, staring down on him.
A hammerhead shark hurled itself out of the sea and flopped across the coral beach before the black tentacles took it back. Its gasping jaws snapped silently at the air. Its dull black eyes glinted dumb malice as it was eaten alive.
"I know you're here!" he roared at the island. "I know you, motherfucker, and I know you know me! I found you, didn't I? Found your home! This is where you live, isn't it? Where you came from?"
He walked up the beach to the lagoon. He pulled a grenade from his breast pocket and bit off the pin, chucked it into the thickest clump of Keogh-kudzu. It exploded, tossing whipping salad and shrill vegetable screams into the air.
"You were just a man once, and I bet you're still just a man! You're not a god, and if you can't come out and face me, you ain't even much of a man!"
He threw another grenade into the lagoon. The kelp made a whirlpool around where it hit the water. It blew a Volkswagen-sized bubble of ocean into the air, black kelp and red blood spraying the setting sun. The lagoon went insane. The kelp-tentacles thrashed and rose up, and clusters of eyes bloomed on their tips. Wise silver-gray eyes. Storch almost understood.
"Why don't you come out and face me, man to man, motherfucker? You talked a big line of shit in my head, but now that I'm here, I don't see much to back it up. What are you hiding from, Keogh?"
The ground stirred beneath his feet. The vines rattled their shield leaves and grew taller. The black kelp stood on end in the air like statically charged hair. Suckered tentacles and massive jointed crustacean claws knitted together into a single, towering form above the water.
Storch froze with his foot in mid-air before one of the shallow pits in the coral. The bottom disappeared, or rather, it opened, because the pit was really an eye socket. A great gray compound eye regarded him from the pit. All around him, eyes opened in the ground—eyes and mouths brimming with gnashing shark teeth and eager, darting tongues.
"I'm not hiding from you, Zane," said the island. "I've been waiting for you."
Storch pointed at the eye between his feet and shot it. The enormous lens puckered and sank like a soufflé, a spray of plasma turning to green suds as the bullet dissolved and went to work.
The island screamed. The kudzu grew furiously at him. The writhing tower in the lagoon flew apart and became a cyclone of black snakes. Storch fired at it, too, but the shots went wild. He was ducking whiplash tendrils and armored flails, but there was no single body to put a bullet into. He fired at the coral between his feet, at the field of eyes and fang-rimmed maws yawning and leering at him, at the formless, endless face stretching to the horizon.
There was nowhere to run. The island
was
Keogh.
The island laughed, and the sound ate away at him like the radiation, and the sun was low on the horizon, it would be full dark, soon—
He ran out of bullets. Tendrils like cobras made of iron rebar snared his right hand as it went for another clip. Thorns dug into his arm, grew through shell and skin and muscles and into his bones. They caught the other arm as he tried to free the right, and stretched him out prone on the coral. He looked up into the indigo sky and prayed,
let the plane come now, let Don not give a shit about me, let him come and blow this all away
—
"I am somewhat larger than you expected, yes?" Keogh's voice came from every pore in the rock. "But you didn't come to destroy me, did you, Zane? You always come to take from me. Take my cures, my lessons, my bodies, and this time, you want the whole truth. You want to know what you're fighting."
The tentacles grew thicker around him, bit deeper. He tried to tear himself free, but it was beyond pain. His bonds sank tiny rhizoid teeth into his bones. Tearing free meant tearing himself apart. He would do it now and die content, but for the truth of what the island said. He had come to
know
.
"I want to tell you, Zane. I've been waiting for someone to come here, so that I can make them understand. Even though you turned your back on us when we needed you most, I'm so glad it was you."
Storch was lifted off his feet and borne closer to the lagoon. His vision fogged with pain, but he could hear water rushing. Was He going to throw him into the surf? Storch strained to see.
The lagoon was below him. The forest of tentacles and armored limbs grew out of the inner walls of the lagoon, which was a ribbed orifice with no visible bottom, a titanic alimentary canal extending down to the ocean floor, almost a mile below. Colossal engines of valves and striated muscle, like a Panama Canal of dinosaur hearts, stirred the water into a roiling whirlpool. The smell of it engulfed him, choking him and invading his palate, a sickening submarine stench that was so familiar to him because he'd tasted it in his own sweat. Inexorably, unmoved by his frantic resistance, the tentacles dragged him into the water, giving him only a moment to suck in a breath and hold it. The briny seawater was warm as blood when it closed over his head.