by Edward Lee
His voice sounded diffuse through Clare’s astonishment. The insect was impossibly large; she’d never heard of cockroaches getting that big.
“And look,” Joyce said, holding up her boot. “Before it died, it was eating through the boot leather.”
More astonishment, when Clare squinted at the boot. Its tip looked like it had been gouged at with a sharp knife. “If it can do that to leather, think what it can do to human skin.”
“Yeah, and I put my foot on that thing.”
“You’re lucky you still got all your toes,” Rick said.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Joyce added. “I need a new pair of boots ’cos there’s no way in hell I’m ever putting this one back on.” She dropped the boot in the garbage can with a thunk.
It didn’t occur to Clare to ask how the repugnant insect had come to find its way into Joyce’s boot; she was too busy just looking at it and wondering if she could believe what her own eyes were showing her.
“That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen,” Clare spoke up. Then— “Correction, the second grossest thing.”
Joyce and Rick both looked at her. “What could be grosser than a cockroach that big?”
“Try a ten-pound frog,” Clare said, “Eviscerated. With teeth like a dog.” Then she went to explain the details of what Adam had found at the lake that afternoon.
“Well that’s pretty bizarre, isn’t it?” Joyce posed. “I’m no zoologist but I can tell you roaches and frogs don’t get that big. It’s got to be some kind of mutation.”
“That’s what Adam said. He even said it’s not that uncommon around here. Some toxic compound gets into an isolated ecosystem and causes defects and mutations.”
“Adam’s the biggest asshole on the island,” Joyce offered, “but he does know his field. And he’s right, there has been a fair share of toxin-based mutations in the state—”
Rick cut in, “Yeah, I remember that bit on the news awhile back, alligators with two tails.”
“Right, ’cos someone was dumping industrial waste water into a bunch of lakes in Polk county.” Joyce looked quizzically down at the crushed insect. “And all of a sudden we’ve got two different kinds of mutations right here at Fort Alachua Park. What did Adam do with the frog?”
“He took it, said he had to report it. Evidently there’s some authority in the U.S. Park Service that he has to turn things like this in to.” Clare looked at the mammoth insect, then smiled at Rick. “Rick, be a trooper and wrap that thing up in foil and put it in the fridge, will you?”
Rick thought nothing of it, and as he was wrapping the thing up, he said, “I wonder what the hell Ranger Jingles was doing out at the lake in the first place. He never goes out there unless we report something to him.”
Clare caught the reference. “Ranger…Jingles? Why do you call him that?”
Joyce shot a repressed glare at Rick.
“What, he walks around with a lot of change in his pocket?” Clare prodded.
“He walks around with a lot of something in his—” Rick began—
—but Joyce cut him off: “Rick, just put the thing in the foil!” And to Clare, “It’s nothing, it’s a long story.”
“And a pretty funny one, too,” Rick goaded, placing the package in the refrigerator. “Want to know why he’s more afraid of lightning than anyone else?”
Joyce grinned through grit teeth. “Thank you, Rick. You really should be leaving now, right? ’Bye!” She turned him around by the shoulders and pushed him out the door.
When he was gone, Clare said, “I won’t even ask.”
“Thanks. Now, are you sure you’re feeling all right? If you’re not, I’ll still work your shift for you.”
“No, I’m fine. But thanks.” But Clare couldn’t help being aware of the giant roach in the fridge. “Adam doesn’t work at night, does he? I want him to take that bug away ASAP.”
“No, he just works day shifts. Call him in the morning, he’ll probably be around, and believe me, he’ll be happy for any excuse to come over here.”
Clare thought of the mishap at the shallow quicksand. “I got to know him a little better today, and you’re right. He’s a dick.”
“That’s putting it mildly. I’m telling you, don’t trust that guy as far as you can throw him.” Joyce signed out on her logsheet. “Thank God for the weekend. You’ll just be on call, right?”
“Saturday and Sunday? Yeah. But I’ll probably make some rounds anyway,” Clare said.
“Give me a call if you want to do anything tomorrow. See ya!”
“’Bye. And thanks for helping me out tonight. Sorry about the screw-up.”
“No problem.”
Joyce left, and Clare smiled after her. Yeah, she’s cool, and so is Rick. And they’re good sports too. Clare still couldn’t believe that’d she’d overslept and missed shiftchange. I have to make sure that DOESN’T happen again. She felt confident that it wouldn’t, and even more confident about the job in general now that she was getting to know the site and the people. Every workplace had its good points and bad points; identifying them quickly was the key to succeeding, and from there she could adjust to the bad points and use the good points to her advantage.
So far the only real bad point was Adam Corey.
I can handle him, she knew. But what of this roach, and the frog?
All I can do is report it to the proper channels, and Adam just happens to be that channel. From there, she supposed, it would be the job of some arm of the Department of the Natural Resources to investigate the possibility of pollutants in the area.
She couldn’t help but wonder, though…
I think I’ll drive out to Lake Stephanie. See if there’s anything else out there that’s bigger than it should be…
She checked the alarm system, locked up the office, and made for the exit. But on her way, she noticed a door open a few inches, in the treatment wing.
The door marked IRMT.
She remembered Dellin telling her about the system—Intensified Radiation Modulation Therapy—something about cross-hairs of low-dose radioactive beams killing tiny tumors with exceptional precision. But he’d also said that the half-million-dollar system wasn’t needed for the stromatic carcinomas that were treated here. Whatever, Clare thought. But that door shouldn’t be unlocked.
She remembered when she’d looked in the other day: the room contained an elaborate bank of computers and viewing screens, plus the large nozzle-like discharge heads hanging off the ceiling. Someone could easily come in here and steal a monitor or a CPU.
When Clare looked in the room, it was empty.
(III)
KEEP OFF!
THIS REGISTERED SEA TURTLE NEST
IS PROTECTED BY THE U.S. ENDANGERED SPECIES
ACT OF 1973
DO NOT TAKE SEA TURTLES OR THEIR EGGS!
VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED AND IMPRISONED!
With a bleak chuckle, Bill-Boy noted the last line of the yellow sign; it didn’t say that violators may be fined and imprisoned, it said they will be. Down here, they took that shit serious. One time Bill-Boy himself had been fined $1500 for possessing one female stone crab. Just one. And they took his boat too! It was any poacher’s risk, especially in Florida. You could bust your wife’s jaw with a two-by-four and you wouldn’t do as much time as you’d get for digging up sea turtle eggs. Florida police hardly gave a flying shit if you drove drunk, but don’t you dare mess with those palm trees and sea oats. He remembered once reading in the paper about how the DNR cops opened fire on some yahoos for taking shots at a dolphin.
That’s fuckin’ Florida for ya, Bill-Boy thought. You get a suspended sentence for dick-spankin’ your daughter, but if I get caught pinchin’ a few sea turtle eggs, I go to the joint for a year.
Just a day in the life of someone in Bill-Boy’s profession.
Bill-Boy wasn’t a meth-head or synthetic smack addict like most of the low-scale area rednecks. He was just a good old fashioned chronic
alcoholic. He had the look: bone-skinny, MOTHER tattoos, long hair and a Fu-Manchu. Didn’t want a job—not that he could keep one if he did—it was easier to poach gator, stone crab out of season, and the ultimate prize: Chelonia mydas a.k.a the Green Sea Turtle. Bill-Boy had the gig where others in his trade simply didn’t. Unless you had a line on a middleman for private collectors, selling Green Sea Turtles was like selling the Hope Diamond. But Bill-Boy knew this dealer in Tampa Chinatown—the fuckin’ guy paid a c-note for every egg that hatched. Paid twice that too, if you had anything a week before Chinese New Year. Was Bill-Boy game for that kind of action?
Bill-Boy was game.
One good nest could keep him in Milwaukee’s Best Ice for a year.
You had to be careful digging was all, as careful as he was being right this very minute: on his knees on the east beach of Fort Aluachua Park at two in the morning. The nests were cordoned off by yellow tape and stakes—he could hardly fuckin’ believe that. Thanks for TELLING ME where the eggs are! You’d see the cordons all over the place, even on the tourist beaches—way too risky to hit. But Fort Alachua Park, at this hour? The endangered eggs were begging to be pinched.
He teased his fingers into the damp sand; it was a delicate process. Break the egg and the turtle inside croaked—and there goes a hundred bucks out the window. Of course, Bill-Boy wasn’t too keen on what the Chinamen did with the baby turtles once they hatched—they cut the shells off the little critters and deep-friend them alive. It was some Oriental delicacy or some shit. Sounded kind of cruel to Bill-Boy—frying baby turtles on an endangered species list—but—
Fuck, it man. Business is business. If I don’t get ’em the eggs, they’ll find some other guy who will.
Bill-Boy was what you’d call a “functional” alcoholic, in that he still was able to pay the rent and strive to be happy, cirrhotic liver and all. A couple poaching jobs per month paid for his dump motel room and he could even hang out at the Beach Saloon where they had dollar drafts and all the drunk tramps you could look at. These days, Bill-Boy just teased the gals; they were all nuts for him on account of he had the look. But he never picked them up any more—it was best to keep them wanting, it preserved his mystery. Fact of the matter, though, there was no reason for him to pick up a woman. Thirty years of chronic alcoholism will have a tendency to take the lead out of the sexual pencil, so to speak.
Aw, the motherlode! he thought. One by one, his fingers gingerly lifted out the eggs. An older turtle would sometimes lay seventy-five, and the hatch rate was close to one hundred percent if you transported them carefully. Bill-Boy transferred each egg into the padded bucket he’d brought, using such care you would’ve thought they were pellets of nitroglycerin.
Half hour later he had sixty-six eggs in the bucket.
God is a’smilin’ down on me tonight, yessir!
It was time to book; he’d made his haul. He could be greedy, of course, and look around for more nests, but in his business the longer you hung around, the more risk you exposed yourself to. There was a ranger who patrolled the park sometimes, and there was always a chance that the marine police might see his boat. He’d even heard there was security around here too. Why take the chance?
That’s why, he thought.
Not a hundred feet away was another cordoned nest.
This is too easy.
He was back to digging right away. Wouldn’t take too long to top off the bucket. But—
Man, it’s hotter than a pizza oven out here.
That it was, even this late. And the mosquitoes were hitting on him too, drawn by his sweat. I need to cool off for a sec…
And he knew that just fifty yards or so inland there was a place he could do that. Lake Stephanie.
Bill-Boy stood up, brow dripping. The thought, in this heat, was tantalizing. Yeah, I think I’ll take me a quick dip, and then a few minutes later he was wading right into the water. Man, that’s good! When he was hip deep, he squatted down on his knees, cut-off jeans and HIGHWAY TO HELL t-shirt right along with the rest of him. The cool water caressed him. Shit, alls I need now is a cold beer and I’m in heaven!
Perhaps.
But heaven probably didn’t have what swam up his shorts a moment later. Alcoholic or not, his reflexes were still hair-trigger quick. What the motherfuckin’ HELL? and he was standing back upright in a flash.
Bill-Boy froze.
Had it just been a weird current?
He wasn’t sure at first. But it had sure as hell felt like something long and thin had swum up his pants, through the leghole. He didn’t want to move too abruptly, in case…
Well, in case it was a snake.
But whatever it was, it hadn’t felt big enough to be a snake. It had felt extremely thin, no fatter than a pen, and he wasn’t sure if he felt it at all now.
Had it swum right back out?
Or maybe it was just a weird subsurface current.
Bill-Boy wasn’t quite sure what to do; it was merely some instinct that induced him to keep still. The moonlight was bright here, bright in his face and on the water, and when he looked down—
Holy lord God of all, what is THAT?
—he could see what at first appeared to be a yard-long length of yarn floating on the water but when he squinted he could see that it wasn’t floating, it was swimming.
Very slowly, Bill-Boy reached down and, without moving the rest of his body, he snatched the thing out of the water.
Gotcha…
Then he started to feel real sick.
It was no yard-long length of yarn, it was a yard-long millipede, some kind of bizarre aquatic millipede that he didn’t even know existed. He held it close at one end, the end the head was on, while the rest of it quickly curled around his arm. He could feel the thousands of tiny hairlike legs moving, but they didn’t hurt, and then that sudden nausea began to subside when he remembered that millipedes were essentially harmless.
Owww! MotherFUCKer!
That’s when the essentially harmless millipede began to bite him.
He flailed his arm, trying to shake it off—to no avail. Soon it wasn’t just biting him, it was boring into his skin, on his forearm. He grabbed the body again, pulled, and was aghast when he saw that in only those few seconds it had bored six inches under his skin. When he was able to pull it out, he howled—it felt like a hot iron poker being drawn out of his flesh. When he retracted it all, he grabbed the thing just under its head this time, and he pinched it hard as he could between his thumb and the side of his index finger.
The nausea returned like a gut-punch.
The millipede’s mouth, if you could call it that, existed as an expanding and contracting hole rimmed with the tiniest hook-like teeth.
He pinched down hard, harder, pressing, until the long repulsive thing fell limp. He flung it away as far as he could.
Good godDAMN that hurt like a son of a—
Sheer dread lopped off the rest of the thought. In his constant alcohol buzz, he’d momentarily forgotten one crucial possibility.
The thing that had swum up his pants…
Had that been it? The thing that he’d just killed and flung away?
Or—
Is there another one just like it…IN MY FUCKIN’ SHORTS RIGHT THIS MOTHERFUCKIN’ SECOND?
The latter, regrettably, proved to be the case. Suddenly his crotch came alive with an explosive tickling sensation, those thousands of tiny legs coiling around his scrotum and penis. The most primal intuition of horror gave him a solid idea as to exactly where the millipede intended to go, so Bill-Boy was just going to have to get the thing OUT OF THERE before it was able to succeed.
He yanked his shorts right off, grabbed his terror-shriveled genitals, began to uncoil the millipede, and—
—screamed high and loud as a truck horn when an eel with a head the size of a Doberman shot out of the water and took out most of his right bicep with one bite. A second later a similar-sized chunk of flesh was bitten out of his buttocks.
>
The pain, of course, could be described as cataclysmic. Bill-Boy’s mental sentience took a quick exit, to be replaced by a sole impulse of self-preservation. Another millipede was now boring quicky into his sinus cavity via a nostril; another was boring into his ear, while his other ear was bitten off whole by a spectacularly striped fish whose head was mostly teeth.
The water around him seemed to percolate with activity, as a feeding frenzy commenced.
Hideous fish and more eels used him as a biting post; the millipedes were already laying eggs deep in his body. Yet with all that, Bill-Boy deserved at least some credit for his resiliency. In spite of losing roughly a chunk of flesh per second, his now mostly mindless instincts allowed him to eventually thrash himself out of the water, where he collapsed on the narrow shore. The beastly eels and fish were gone—along with thirty percent of his muscle mass.
And his heart was still beating.
I-I-I’m…still…alive..
But as some modicum of the mental process returned so did that reactivity of the central nervous system known as pain.
And Bill-Boy began to flop on the shore like a flounder on a hotplate.
That first millipede? The one that had swum up his shorts?
It was eating its way quite nicely up into Bill-Boy’s lower gut, via the urethra.
— | — | —
Chapter Ten
(I)
Clare’s shift had passed dully. At one point, while on patrol, she’d thought she heard someone shouting, or even screaming, but then it occurred to her that the sound must be vaulting across the inlet, from the trailer parks on the other side. The partying over there regularly carried over to the island.
As for the distressingly large cockroach in the refrigerator, she was actually miffed that Adam Corey wasn’t at his office phone when she’d called at nine a.m. It wasn’t that she wanted to see him—not by any means—she simply didn’t want that dead, foil-wrapped thing in the fridge any longer than it had to be. Unfortunately its removal relied on Adam. Damn it, she thought. Looks like it’ll be sitting in there all weekend. All she could do was leave a message on the ranger’s answering machine. A morbid curiosity had pestered her all shift; at least once an hour she’d fearfully peeked into the refrigerator, half-expecting the silver package to be broken open, the cockroach gone.
