(I)
When Slydes awoke, he felt akin to a reanimated corpse rising from a lime pit. Mooooooooother- FUCKER! he thought. Had someone hit him in the head last night? Had he fallen down? But when he awoke, he remained in the captain's chair behind the wheel, where he usually took his downtime on the boat.
Ruth's tousled head emerged from belowdecks. She looked cross-eyed and dehydrated-about the same way Slydes felt just now. "When are we leaving?" her shrill voice inquired. "Isn't it high tide yet?"
Bonehead, Slydes thought. "We missed it by ten hours," he gruffed. His watch told him it was seven in the morning. We fucked up again… "What the fuck is wrong with us!"
"I don't feel good, Slydes!"
Them bugs, he remembered. They MUST have bit me. "We all must have got some jungle fever or some thing. We keep passin' out." He tried to roust himself. "I'm gonna try to get us out of here in low tide. Shag Jonas's ass and get him up here."
"Jonas ain't down there!" she railed. "You said he went looking for me last night!"
Ruth's whining voice was killing him. "He never came back? That goddamn pain in the ass!"
"Where do you think he went?"
"You know damn well where he went! Probably went back for more dope, the shithead! We never should have come out here in the first place. This is his fault." The solution was simple; they needed to bring him back so they could leave. But he was still out in the woods, and the woods were where they'd picked up those gross-ass yellow bugs.
Slydes eyed up Ruth. "Go to the head shack and bring him back."
Ruth's face screwed up at the suggestion. "Fuuuuuu- uuck you, motherfucker! I ain't going back in those woods by myself! I told you! There's a zombie out there that pulled my pants off and tried to rape me! And he tried to feed me to those giant pink snakes!"
Here she goes with the zombie again. There's nothing like a drug burnout to make a fucked-up situation MORE fucked up. He took the keys out of the boat's ignition. Did he trust Ruth?
Hell no.
"I'll go find him, you stay here," he ordered.
"I don't want to stay on this creepy boat by myself!"
"Quit whining! You sound like a fuckin' dog toy. Nighttime's one thing, but this is broad daylight. You and I both can't be thrashing around in the woods, not with them photographers up and about."
Ruth crossed her arms. 'If you go, I go."
"Yeah?"
'Yeah."
Slydes punched her right in the forehead. She fell to the bottom of the short steps, out cold. Best way to win an argument with a gal, he thought.
Slydes stepped off the deck ladder into the water, and waded toward the island.
(II)
Nora thought back to her old lit classes as she meandered through the woods at just past dawn, Henry David Thoreau and all that. Being alone amid this plush wilderness-just as the new day began to arrive-put one in a sedate frame of mind. The beauty shimmered around her; it seemed to invite her to venture deeper, that and her curious solitude.
It feels damn good to be away from everyone else for a little while, she admitted, and she knew it was more than just escaping the envious angst that Annabelle incited. It let her free her mind, and now, for these cherished moments, she delighted in the luxury of thinking about nothing at all.
She roved deeper, down trails she hadn't been aware of. The pink light of the sunrise shot bolts down through dense branches. All that spiced the silence were chirping birds.
She wasn't sure why she'd risen early. She'd woken to obscure dreams and a headache. The other tents remained zipped up, so she sprayed herself down with some repellent and quietly wandered off, if only to take a look at more of the island.
I better be careful I don't get lost, she considered. The tropical forest grew more dense as the next trail continued. She supposed she was looking for more signs of the worms and ova she and Loren had stumbled on last night. Soon the dilemma ruptured her mood.
I'm getting paranoid, she realized. Everything she knew about worms that produced motile ova insisted that they were harmless to humans-so what was she afraid of? But-
A bienvironmental species? A worm as well as its ova that can function on land? And the worm itself did resemble certain worms from the Trichina and Trichinella families, and some of those could definitely infect humans…
Be realistic! she finally commanded herself. I'm an expert, and my professional inclinations are that these things are no more dangerous to humans than ladybugs.
The determination made sense, yet the back of her mind wouldn't let go of the creepiness.
Her next step was snagged-something on the ground. Vine, she thought at first. She looked down to see what had caught the front of her flip-flop.
Not a vine, a cable.
She detached her foot and knelt. A black cable-an inch thick-stretched across the overgrown trail. What's this doing in the middle of the woods? she thought. It's a power cable.
Nora followed the cable back toward the camp and head shack areas, and didn't go more than a hundred or so yards before it terminated and split. One end branched to a conical voltage regulator that provided the lights and electricity to the head shacks. The other end veered directly into a tin shed that contained two bulky machines. Stenciled spray-paint letters identified one: FIELD PURIFICATION UNIT, WATER, PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. A series of hoses ringed through the second machine, and most of the joints and connections on the hoses were streaked with white crust. Salt, she knew at once. This must be the desalinator Trent was talking about.
Then she turned around and followed the black power cable back, where it would undoubtedly termi nate at the portable generator that Trent had also mentioned on the day they'd arrived.
She followed several hundred yards farther, expecting at any moment to hear the chugging sound of the generator.
She walked on and on… and didn't hear a sound.
Finally the cable ended at a fat metal connection ring set into a square of concrete. The generator's underground? she thought. But she knew better. That can't be…
Something white could be seen behind some leafy branches. She pushed back a bough and found a metal sign on a post. The sign was white with red borders, and it read KEEP AWAY! RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN USE!
Nora ran back to the campsite. She didn't hesitate to open Trent's tent and stick her head in. "Hey! Lieutenant!"
Trent's head rose groggily in the lightweight sleeping bag. "Huh?"
"Is there a hot radioactive source on this island?"
The question slapped him out of sleep. "What the-" Then his face drooped. "You found the…"
"Yeah! Is it live?"
"Wait for me while I get dressed."
He knows all about it, Nora felt sure. And he lied. He specifically told us that the generator ran on diesel fuel. A minute later, Trent came out, dressed in crumpled fatigues.
"There's no diesel generator on this island, is there?" Nora demanded.
"Well, uh, no."
"Then how come you told us there was? You've got an RTG in the ground out there, don't you?"
"Keep your voice down," he said, glancing at the other tents. "Over here."
He took her out of the campsite and down the trail to the field shower area. "Now I can talk," he said. "I'm not supposed to let any civilians know about it. You know what an RTG is?"
"Yeah," Nora said testily. "Radioisotope thermal generator. I have a lot of friends who've seen them on Arctic specimen expeditions, and the government puts them up in the mountains, too, to provide power to remote observation posts. It's a nuclear battery."
"Exactly, and you're right, the government uses them all the time, in places where there's no practical way to deliver fuel to run gas and diesel generators. A small radioactive pellet produces heat that's changed into electricity through a thermocoupler. Same sort of thing NASA puts on satellites, Mars probes, things like that. It's a battery that lasts a hundred years." Trent sat down on one of the old picnic tables, rubbed sleep out of his face. He looked worn out. "Since I had to escort civilians to the island, my orders were to lie about the power source. No one knows about the RTG and there was no reason to think it might be discovered-it's all the way on the other side of the island." He looked right at her. "What the hell were you doing that far into the woods?"
"I was going for a nature walk," Nora said, and she didn't feel the need to apologize.
"Great. Now you'll have to be debriefed when we leave-big-pain in the ass."
"Debriefed?"
"The location of the RTG is classified. You'll have to be interviewed in Jacksonville by the Army Security Agency and sign a National Secrets Act nondisclosure form."
Nora felt outraged. "'That's ridiculous!"
"Hey, you're the one who had to go on a nature walk."
My God, she thought, frowning. "So that thing was installed for the missile site?"
"Right. It provided all the needed electricity for the control station and the launch circuitry."
"How come it wasn't removed when the missiles were dismantled?"
Trent smiled and shook his head. "The RTG itself is only the size of a lunch box… but it's seated in a thousand-pound shielding box, and then they embedded the box in fifteen tons of steel-reinforced concrete."
"Too big to move."
"Yeah, but if no one knows it's there, it's not a security risk." He rubbed his eyes again, aggravated. "Now someone does know where it is. You."
"Well, I'm certainly not going to tell anyone about it."
"Good, because if you do, you can get five years in jail and a quarter-million-dollar fine. In this day and age, can you imagine the uproar if the public found out there was an RTG on an island two miles off the coast of Florida? Every nut job and wannabe terrorist would come out here trying to dig it up. You know, the psychological element. Theoretically, if you took the uranium out of that RTG core-someone could make a dirty nuke. So mum's the word here. If Annabelle mentions in her bristleworm article that there's a friggin' nuclear battery on Pritchard's Key, I turn into a buck private real fast. My whole career will be in the toilet."
Now Nora got the gist. RTGs were safe alternate power sources whose fuel was inaccessible, but in today's climate of terrorism, dirty bombs, and overall radiological paranoia, public knowledge of their whereabouts provided a huge security breech.
"All right, now I get it," she said. "And of course I won't tell anyone. So we can skip the debriefing part, okay?"
"Not okay. I'd lose my job."
Nora grimaced. "You really are by the book, aren't you?"
"Pretty much. That's the way it's got to be. Next time you go on a nature walk-don't go. Most of this island's unexcavated. There's quicksand, sinkholes, all kinds of trouble. Please. Stick to the safe areas. And I couldn't repeat it enough: Don't tell Annabelle or Loren about the RTG. And once you're back on the mainland, don't tell anyone else. Ever. The military's really paranoid about this stuff. You'll have your phones tapped, your mail swiped, all your data sucked out of your computers, oh, and the IRS. And all because you know about a little piece of radioactive material that's smaller than a BB."
Nora looked bug-eyed at him. "Lieutenant, trust me, I'll sew my mouth shut."
"Good, 'cause this is no joke."
Damn. The riot act, Nora thought. Can I help it I decided to go for a friggin' walk? There were better ways to start a day.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Trent said next, the sour topic finally closed. "Remember when you mentioned you found something like a tiny camera in the woods?"
"Yeah, it was stuck into a tree, almost like a nail."
"I found one too, last night. I'll show it to you later. It's in my tent somewhere."
.You said it might be an electric eye, right?"
"Yeah, and I still think that's what the things are."
Old electric eyes from an old missile installation, she thought. What could be duller? But the RTG? That and last night's surprise discovery: the tiny pink worms and ova that seemed to grow at an extraordinary rate. She'd love to get a look at one of the worms under a lab-grade microscope. The ones we found in the lobster were too small for these little field scopes.
At least it would give her something to do while Annabelle and Loren continued to search for more scarlet bristleworms.
She was just then reminded of something that had slipped her mind. "Damn, I forgot. You left the lights on in the last two head shacks."
He looked at her funny. "You mean the one you and Loren are using?"
"No, the buildings on the other end. I saw light leaking out from the roofs the other night." She chuckled to herself when she realized how little it mattered now. "On the other hand, I guess the army's not worried about wasting electricity. The power from the RTG is unlimited and free."
"That's true, but there still shouldn't be any lights on. In fact, no one could have turned them on. I only have the key for the head shack you're using. The other head shacks are locked up and I couldn't get in them if I wanted to. The rest of the keys are back at my post's property room. I better check it out anyway. I can't see the army sending anyone else out here, not without me knowing. I'm the only one who ever checks this island."
"The only one that you know of,' Nora posed.
"Well, yeah, but it wouldn't make sense. As far as the army's concerned, this is dead property."
Not quite, Nora elected not to say. Not with a nuclear battery buried in the ground.
In an instant, Trent's eyes lit up as he looked past Nora. "There she is," he announced. "You're up early."
"So are you," Annabelle replied. Wrapped only in a towel, she frowned at Nora. "What are you two doing sitting there?"
Discussing the mini nuclear reactor that's hidden in the woods, Nora thought. Why don't you go sit on it for a few days?
"Nora was just telling me about scarlet bristleworms," Trent lied. "They're remarkable creatures."
"Um-hmm. Remarkable." Annabelle strode for the field shower. "If you're that interested, you could snorkel with Loren and me later, when Igo out to do the rest of the shoot."
"I just might do that," Trent said.
Annabelle was clearly perturbed by Nora's presence with Trent. Nora loved it. What a drama queen. "I'll be on my way," she said and rose from the table. – - – - – - – - – - – -
Annabelle pulled back the shower curtain, brazenly hung up her towel so that both could see, then stepped in.
Another deliberate move. That self-absorbed bitch just can't stop showing everyone that her body's better than mine. By now, Nora couldn't care in the least.
"Oh, shit!" Annabelle bellowed. "Not again!" And then she leaped back out of the shower and flung the towel back on. "What is wrong with this freak-show gross-out island? I'm sick of it!"
What's she shrieking about now? Nora followed Trent over and looked in the shower.
"Looks like a piece of pink yarn," Trent said.
"Last night I had those disgusting worms in my lobster," Annabelle railed, "and now there's a snake in the shower."
That's no snake, Nora knew at once. The thing was a foot and a half long, glistening, and pink as bubblegum. I can't be this lucky, she thought. She dropped to one knee. The ground that served as the shower's basin was wet from the water that had accumulated; there was a half inch of muddy water topped by floating bits of leaves.
Nora leaned closer.
"Don't touch it!" Annabelle exclaimed. "It'll bite."
"It's just kind of floating there," Trent said. "Looks dead to me."
"It is dead," Nora affirmed. She looked up at Trent. "The insecticide you sprayed in here the other day saturated the ground." Then she looked at Annabelle, explaining, "And this isn't a snake. It's the same species of worm that infected the lobster, just older and more mature."
"Great, a worm. That's even more disgusting.'
But Nora wasn't disgusted at all; she was intrigued. The bands of the coelum matched those they'd examined last night with the microscopes.
Again, her observations were verified: This was not a species of annelid that she recognized.
Nora got her wish: a bigger specimen to examine.
"What's that stuff coming out of its mouth?" Trent asked. From the tip of the worm's eyeless head floated a plume of something nearly granulated and yellow.
"Ova," Nora said. "Motile ova. They're underdeveloped versions of those yellow things that were in here two days ago."
.You mean the worm's eggs?" Annabelle asked.
"Carriers of the worm's eggs," Nora corrected. "Once mature, they can move about independently. Some invertebrates don't lay eggs that hatch from a stationary nest, they disperse the eggs. Moving hairs called cilia or rings of muscle called parapods enable the ova to find its own hatching place. In the case of a parasitic ovum, the hatching place is another living thing, like a lobster, for example."
"Or a human?" Trent asked.
"With this type of worm, I don't think so," Nora felt confident in saying. "Not mammals of any kind. Once a worm or an ovum like this entered the bloodstream of a mammal, the macrophages in our immune system would kill it immediately. I don't think we have to worry about infections ourselves. The main thing I'm worrying about is getting in a thorough examination of this before it decomposes."
Nora looped the dead worm over her pen and lifted it up. Now I have something to do today!