Slither (35 page)

And Loren was correct: Here was proof of what
she'd come here to find out. A military test in the field.
A worm that's obviously a cross-species, the product of
either a mutation process or a genetic splice ...

And humans are what they're testing it on.

Loren put the case back, then squeezed her arm.
"How can I put it more eloquently, Nora? We have to
get the fuck out of here."

"All right, all right ..."

He practically dragged her out of the room. The door
remained opened at the end of the hall, light pouring
in. Nora peeked in the first room as they brushed by;
then she tugged back at him.

"Wait a second-"

"Damn it, Nora!" he whispered. "We're going to get
caught in here!"

"I don't think anyone's here right now," she said.

"Then where are they?"

"Outside. Look at that ..."

She was pointing to the security monitors in the first
room. Loren edged in behind her, seeing what she
meant. "That's one of them," he said.

On one of the higher screens, a man was kneelinga man in a gas mask and decon suit. He was kneeling at
a large slab of concrete.

'fhat's the RTG, isn't it?" Loren noticed.

"It sure is." A chill went up her back. "We were just
there a few minutes ago."

"And look, there's two more of them-"

Yet another screen briefly showed two more masked
and hooded men moving down a trail.

"Three of them total," Nora counted.

"Plus the one I shot ..."

Both of them looked back at the RTG screen, and
the mysterious figure kneeling before it. A gloved hand
produced a small black box and rested it on the slab.
Then he opened the box and withdrew a black disk
that looked like a hockey puck.

"What the hell is he doing?" Loren asked.

"That disk," Nora said. "What's that rod he just
pulled out of it?"

They both stared. The man extracted a short rod
from the disk; from the end of the disk, he seemed to
remove a cap.

Then he pushed the rod against the slab's cement
face. A moment later, the disk had been mounted onto
the concrete.

"The rod must be some kind of stand," Nora said.
"And ... shit. I've got a bad vibe about this."

Loren looked right at her. "Me too. Nora, why do I
have a funny feeling that black thing is a bomb?"

"I ... don't know ..." She was thinking the exact
same thing. "It's not big enough to be a bomb is it?"

"A piece of C-4 the size of a hockey puck? It could
probably break that concrete slab in half."

"And then the pressure from the explosion might
split the fuel-source casing."

"Instant dirty nuke. Shit, Nora. If that really is what
he's doing..-..."

"It would look like a terrorist operation," she realized. "The radioactive dust from an explosion like that
would contaminate the entire island."

"And anyone or anything on it would die from radiation sickness in a matter of days."

This is madness, she thought, still staring at the
screen.

Then the man in the gas mask got up and walked
away, leaving the disk propped up on the slab.

"We're out of here,' Loren insisted, but just when
they would turn to leave, a security monitor in the corner began to blink.

"What's happening now!" Nora exclaimed.

It was the screen showing the north beach. The panel's
frame was suddenly bordered by a blinking red line.

The camera showed the water beyond the beach ...

"That's where the trench is," Loren murmured.

"And where their sub is ...'

They stared fixedly at the screen.

Nora supposed she could guess what was about to
happen even before it did. In a few moments the water
beyond the beach began to stir.

"Holy shit," Nora muttered.

"Uh, yeah," Loren agreed with her, because they
both saw it very clearly.

The sub was surfacing.

There he is, Trent thought.

The clearing.

Then another thought: What if he's not dead?

The man whom Loren had shot lay utterly still, gloved
hands outstretched, legs and booted feet sprawled. The
visor of his gas mask was tinted; Trent couldn't see
through it.

Probably the latest generation decon gear, he
thought of the flat-black finish. He knelt and touched
it-the material felt like sheer polyester. Trent tried to
pull off a glove but then saw that it was fastened somehow, perhaps snaps on the inside.

He was about to pull off the mask but something
dark caught his eye.

A dark gray patch over the left breast. In the U.S.
Army, that's where a troop's name tag would be
sewn.

But this tag bore no name, only this, in black marks
against the gray:

That shit again .. .

Trent fished around in the man's pockets, eventually
pulled out a plasticized card.

The card read:

He felt creeped out. How could that stuff be a code?
he wondered.

Next, he tried to pull down the hood. He needed to
get inside the suit, for the ID tags that would, by regulation, have to be around his neck.

Damn it!

The hood wouldn't detach from the mask. Was the
entire suit integrated, a step-in?

Trent stood up, grabbed the lip under the mask's
chin, then yanked upward.

The mask pulled off after several tugs.

Trent stared.

He doubted what his eyes were showing him at first.
Was it a disease? Something from the worm?

The open-eyed face stared up at him.

Trent could see red arteries and blue veins webbed
across the man's face. And he could see the skull beneath the flesh, because ...

The flesh was transparent as glass.

Hands shaking-and his mentality breaking upTrent yanked open the jumpsuit's front, popping unseen snaps down the middle.

More clear, jellylike flesh, embedded with blood vessels, nerves, and the rib cage.

A lower glance to the abdomen showed more transparent flesh encasing obvious digestive organs.

Trent simply stood there looking down, a reasonable response. He tried to conceive the inconceivable,
and eventually he acknowledged what lay before his
eyes:

This guy's not in the navy. He's a fucking alien-

A final squint showed him what he'd been looking
for all along. A small, rectangular plate on a cord
around the figure's neck.

Trent leaned over and looked.

-:, the plate read.

His mind churned as he continued to stare. Then the
next thing he knew, an impulse caused him to dash out
of the clearing and hide.

Why?

He'd heard footsteps thrashing through the woods.

Trent prayed it was Nora and Loren ... but he knew
that would not be the case.

Two more figures in the same black gear entered the
clearing and stopped at the corpse.

Trent held his breath, gun in sweaty hand.

The figures seemed to be communicating, yet no
words could be heard. Radio gear inside their hoods? It
didn't matter. They looked back and forth at each
other, glancing alternately at the body of their comrade.

Then one of them produced something that looked
like a pen. When he aimed it at the corpse, something
issued from the "pen's" tip. Trent absurdly thought of
Silly String, but this stuff was black.

The man sprayed the pen back and forth, eventually
covering the corpse in a bizarre black web.

Then the two figures walked away.

Trent kept his eyes on the webbed corpse. He heard a
definite hissing sound, then saw bluish, sooty smoke
rising.

By the time a full minute had ticked by, the web had
completely disintegrated the corpse, and itself.

Trent walked back out to look more closely.

The area where the corpse had lain was clear. It was
as though the corpse had never been there at all.

Nora's and Loren's mouths hung open as they kept
their eyes nailed to the monitor.

The hundred-foot-long submarine had fully surfaced
now, and sat there in the frame, floating on the calm water. It shone black in the sun. Modest fins could be seen
forward and aft of the perfectly cylindrical hull, yet the
ends weren't rounded or pointed like typical subs.
There was no conning tower. There were no windows.

And there was no propeller.

"I've never seen a submersible like that," Loren said.
"No prop? Must be impeller-driven but ... I don't see
any intakes for the impellers."

"Loren, I don't see any anything on that. It looks like
a giant black Pringles can sitting in the water."

The monitor frame continued to flash.

Then the vessel began to rise.

More slack-jawed silence as Nora and Loren tried to
comprehend what their eyes were seeing on the screen.

The vessel was levitating ten feet above the water
now, and a moment later it began to move forward, toward the island. As it did so it began to change color, the
stark black giving over to the green blue of the water.
Eventually it moved out of the confines of the frames.

Nora finally broke the silence. "You're thinking what
I'm thinking, right?"

Loren's Adam's apple bobbed when he gulped.
"Yeah. It's not a submarine or submersible-it's a
spaceship. And it ain't one of NASA's."

"I don't believe in that kind of stuff."

"Neither do I, so what are we seeing?"

"Hallucination," Nora suggested. "Side effects of
sunstroke, maybe. Maybe we have been infected by
these worms, and one component of the infection is
psychosis. There are many roundworms as well as ova
of roundworms that can corrupt a host's DNA with a
mutagenic virus. Maybe that virus is now in our brains
and we don't even know it."

Loren smirked at her. "Do you believe that? That
we've been having shared hallucinations because of a
roundworm infection?"

Nora shook her head. She knew that she had no confidence in a single word that had just issued from her
mouth.

"Aliens, then," she said.

"What else could it be?" Loren stalked around the
room. "We know that the box full of worms in the
other room and the ones that have overrun this island
can only be the result of a gene-splicing and DNAmanipulating process that is beyond the technological
capabilities of the modern scientific community." He
reached up and took down one of the strange round
lights on the wall. "How do you like that? A light that
doesn't give off heat, doesn't have batteries, and isn't
connected to a power source."

"Just like the cameras in the woods, too," Nora said.

"Sure. No power source, no electrical connections of
any kind, not even an antenna, but-" He pointed to
the bank of monitors. "They work better than any surveillance cameras we've ever seen." Loren was starting
to get a little giddy with his acknowledgments. "Not to
mention these monitors, which aren't connected to a
power source either." He fiddled with the corner of one
of the monitors ... and eventually peeled it away from
the others.

Nora brought a hand to her mouth in shock.

The monitor was nothing but a clear sheet-like a
plastic cover sheet for a term paper, and just as thin.
Loren held it up, flapped it around, then rolled it into
a tight tube. When he unrolled it again, it still held the
perfect image of the sea where the vessel had just lifted
off.

"How do you like that?" Loren said cockily. "Boy,
that's a really cool monitor, isn't it? I'm sure you could
go to Circuit City right now and buy one just like it."

Next, he pointed to the screen rolling the strange
markings: