Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  Still puffed up from his starring debut, Glyn had seated himself across from Dawn. He seemed terribly interested in what she was saying.

  Nell stifled a giggle at the almost inconceivable coupling. Dawn looked like she would eat Glyn alive.

  Zero sat down across from Nell at her table and commandeered an unclaimed plate of food. Gouging a bite out of a filet of orange roughy, the lead cameraman looked at her. “So what made a gal like you want to be a botanist?” He broke off a chunk of fish and fed it to Copepod.

  Nell sipped her ice water as she mulled over his question. “Well, when my mom was killed by a jellyfish in Indonesia, I decided to study plants.”

  Zero lifted a forkful of fish to his mouth, surprised. “For real?”

  “Of course, for real!” said Andy, who was sitting next to Nell protectively, as always, though it was usually she who protected him.

  Nell had persuaded Andy to leave his cabin after his earlier tantrum, and he had changed into a more subdued blue plaid flannel shirt open over a yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on the chest. The vintage shirt said, “Have a Nice Day!” with no ironic bullethole in its head or anything out of the ordinary—just a smiley face waiting for the world to deface it.

  Nell squeezed Andy’s wrist and patted Zero’s hand, instantly charming both men with her brief touch.

  “My mother was an oceanographer,” she explained to Zero. “She died when I was a kid. I never saw her much, except on television. She was abroad most of the time, making nature documentaries in places that were way too dangerous for children.”

  “You’re not the daughter of Janet Planet, are you?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “‘Doctor Janet explores the wild planet!’” he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. “Right?” A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.

  Nell nodded. “Yeah. You remember the show?”

  “Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?”

  Nell laughed. “Our last name didn’t play well on television.”

  “So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.”

  “Except that I chose botany,” Nell protested, parrying with her fork. “Plants never eat people.”

  “Right on.” Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. “Conquer your fears, right?”

  Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. “Something like that.”

  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 sprawl.

  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. The monolithic palisade seemed so lonely out here in the middle of nowhere, where so few had ever set eyes upon it. 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 purple mat of growth squished underfoot.