Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  “More Henders rats?” Pound asked as they flew past.

  “I don’t think so. They’re something else. Here come some rats.”

  “Those are rats?” Pound smirked. “They don’t look anything like rats!”

  “They’re not rats. They’re not even vertebrates,” Andy told him. “They’re more like mongoose crossed with praying mantises. We just call them rats. They use those spike arms like kung fu masters and spear animals so fast you can’t even see it happen.”

  “Look how they move, man!” Quentin said, breaking into a giggle. “When they jump they launch themselves through the air off their tails! Check it out! Nell, you were right!” he shouted at Zero’s camera.

  12:18 P.M.

  “Yeah, baby!” Otto cheered, staring at the screen.

  Briggs looked at the image, slack-jawed.

  “Don’t stay too long, guys,” Nell whispered. “Can we get radio contact, Otto?”

  12:19 P.M.

  Andy and Quentin looked at each other with wide congratulatory grins on their faces.

  They all flinched as a badger-sized creature landed on top of the right-side bubble window with a rat in its jaws.

  The driver grabbed the gearshift. “What the hell is that?”

  “Rats get pretty big, I guess,” Quentin said.

  “Or it may be a different species,” Andy said. “Its coloring is different.”

  “Maybe the coloring changes as they get older…”

  The coconut-sized head of the animal, which looked like an overgrown Henders rat, peered at them from the end of its telescoping neck.

  It had the Bruegel nightmare face of a deep-sea fish, with large eyes on stems and lips that seemed to open in a smile around rows of dark fangs. Iridescent stripes of fur on its face pulsed waves of color away from its mouth.

  Its spiked front arms tapped the window as its eyes panned in quick motions. Quentin, Andy, Pound, Zero, and the driver all thought the three “pupils” in each eye were staring directly at them—and in fact the compound eyes actually were focused on each of them simultaneously, though the pupils were an optical illusion. Its body moved around, continuously adjusting its position on the window, but its head remained almost stationary on its flexible neck as it looked through the window at them.

  “We know mantis shrimp have at least eight classes of color receptors,” Quentin said worshipfully. “Humans only have three!”

  “Christ,” Pound said. “Shrimps see better than us?”

  “Not shrimp, really,” Andy said. “Somebody just called them shrimp when they were discovered, but they’re a totally different family.”

  “This guy here could be related to mantis shrimp—we think.”

  The overgrown Henders rat scrambled across the upper hemisphere of the window suddenly. Then it stopped over Andy, both eyes pointing down and converging on him.

  “Mantids have a special eye movement for tracking prey,” Quentin said. “Each eye can move independently seventy degrees in a microsecond while staying in focus.”

  “Why is it staring at me?” Andy said.

  “I think it likes you.” Quentin chuckled.

  “It likes your shirt,” the driver said.

  Andy rubbed his tie-dyed Jamaican T-shirt with three big diagonal stripes of saturated green, red, and yellow—the Rasta tri colors. He remembered that someone at a recent party had told him with absolute certainty that it was bad mojo for him to wear this shirt.

  “We should keep moving,” Zero said.

  As the creature repositioned the rasplike bottom of its wide tail to balance on the curve of the window, three juveniles popped out of an orifice in its side and sprang away in different directions. Two of the juveniles were instantly tackled in midair by wasps; they fell, taking the deadly fight to the ground. Zero followed one of them with his camera. To his surprise, it actually won the battle: it devoured the wasp fifteen seconds out of the womb.

  “Whoa!” Quentin laughed as he drummed the back of the driver’s chair. “Did you guys see that?”

  Each had seen something else. “Yeah!”

  A big wasp splatted on the window and the Henders badger extended its head and grabbed it with the two blue crab-like claws on its lower jaw, stuffing it into its gnashing teeth. Then it smacked its lips in an unsettling Mick Jagger sort of way.

  “Those jaw-claws are hard as your molars, but they molt, like the cranium-plates all over the jungle floor, which we thought were cockroaches at first.”

  “Un-fucking-real,” the driver muttered.

  “If this thing has a strike like a mantis shrimp…”

  “Oh shit,” Quentin said. “Remember what that juvenile rat did to Otto?”

  “And that thing that went after Nell—”

  “What?” Pound demanded.

  “Mantis shrimp have been known to bust out of aquariums made with double-paned safety glass,” Andy told him. “Their front claw strike has the force of a small-caliber bullet.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” the driver said.

  “We should move,” Zero said.

  The driver shifted into first gear with his foot on the brake. The rover lurched forward.

  The badger lost its footing on the slick window and tried to jump off as three Henders rats latched onto its back.

  A shimmering creature descended on a springlike tail. It engulfed the badger and its attackers in furry, cuttlefish-like arms, then sprang back up into the canopy.

  “Whoa, whoa! Did you see it?” Quentin yelled.

  “A ‘shrimpanzee’!” Andy shouted.

  “Huh?” Pound dabbed his forehead with his soaked handkerchief.

  “We don’t know much about that one yet. It’s only been seen a few times, very briefly.”

  “All right, just keep talking.” Pound shook his head, putting a hand on Zero’s shoulder. “You’re getting all this, right?”

  The cameraman looked up at him with one eye as he videoed through the other: “Yup.”

  “Good.” Pound nodded.

  “Some of the animals we first thought were different species could be the same species at different stages.”

  “But what’s cool is that they might still reproduce miniatures of whatever stage they’ve reached and might not start reproducing sexually until the final stage, like Chinese liver fluke worms.”

  Pound coughed and swallowed. “Fuck. OK—go on!”

  “So it’s possible that any one of them may be able to build an entire ecosystem of interconnected creatures around itself.”

  “Which may explain how this ecosystem protected itself from global extinction events. It’s just a theory.”

  In a motion stretching across all three windows, six animals devoured each other, one after another, in a balletic food chain that ended when a leaf slapped the last one and rolled it up like a cartoon tongue. The plant’s fruit or eggs ripened red like salmon roe on a branch above, which drew swarms of wasps, mice, and rats that raided the fresh food supply, some getting caught in other extending tongues while others carried off sticky eggs attached to their legs.

  “My God.” Pound gripped the back of Zero’s chair, sweating profusely now. “Is it…springtime?”

  “Well, we’re near the subtropics,” Andy said. “So the seasons are all pretty much the same.”

  “We found no seasonal detritus layers in the one core sample we managed to collect from the forest floor,” Quentin said.

  “It took nine robot-armed ROVs to bring it back from only six feet inside the jungle.”

  “It was a core-dart dropped by a helicopter.”

  “OK, OK.” Pound squeezed his eyes shut. “So why is this place like the Texas chainsaw massacre? What the hell is going on? And please speak English to me.”

  “Here’s what we think: the copper-based blood pigment in these animals is superefficient,” Quentin told him. “It exhibits a Bohr and Root effect more dramatic than that of any organism I’ve studied.”

  �
��Huh?”

  Andy stepped in. “Bohr and Root effects are what keep marathon runners like Zero here going.”

  “Under stress,” Quentin explained, “blood chemistry changes to deliver more oxygen to muscles so you can run faster, longer.”

  “And?” the bewildered presidential envoy demanded.

  “The copper blood in these things delivers more oxygen in a single heartbeat than any pigment I’ve ever tested, from bumblebees to cheetahs,” Quentin said.

  “Terrific,” Pound muttered. “I still don’t get it.”

  “Everything here kicks major ass,” Zero translated.

  “Yeah,” Quentin said. “These animals move farther faster than bugs, lizards, birds, or mammals. Some probably even have amino acid superchargers.”

  “Hey! That’s a bird!” Pound was relieved to finally see something he recognized. He pointed at a white seabird that fluttered down through the canopy. “Right?”

  From a branch over the rover’s middle window a thorn fired, trailing a translucent tendril.

  The harpoon struck the bird. It instantly fell, limp, swinging toward the window. Two more thorns launched from other branches. They pierced the fluttering frigate, and it dangled in front of them suspended by three harpoon strings that turned red as they siphoned off the bird’s blood.

  More thorns fired as wasps and drill-worms swarmed, producing a flurry of spiraling feathers.

  “Yes,” Quentin said. “That was a bird.”

  “Oh dear,” Andy sighed, watching its last few feathers seesaw to the forest floor.

  “Did you get that?” Pound asked Zero.

  Videoing with his right eye, the cameraman opened his left eye wide at Pound.

  “All right.” Pound nodded. “Could you turn the air-conditioning up in here?”

  “Sure thing, boss.” The driver flicked a switch.

  The right bubble window looked like a trucker’s windshield after the eighth plague of Egypt. Rats and larger animals leaped onto the surface to gobble up the splattered bugs, and everything attacked anything that stayed too long. This wasn’t predator versus prey; it was everything versus everything.

  A two-legged creature the size of a turkey landed on the front window and promptly knocked its anvillike nose against its surface like a jackhammer.

  “What the hell is that?” Pound had gone pale.

  Andy peered at the featherless biped. “That’s definitely a new one.”

  “I think it sees its reflection,” Quentin said.

  “It sees a rival, Quentin,” Andy corrected.

  “Yeah, a big one on a convex mirror. These things don’t back down, man!”

  Zero raised the camera from his eye. “Um—can we go now, guys?”

  The driver lifted his foot from the brakes just as a white-and-yellow jellyfish-like thing splattered on the middle bubble, clawing it with spiderlike arms and a rodent-toothed maw.

  As the rover jolted forward, the creature was torn off, leaving a meringue ring behind.

  The driver hit the throttle: a hail of thuds drummed against the starboard hull as they crossed the corridor.

  The five men clung to the safety straps as the rover bulldozed deeper into the jungle. Parting trees splattered it with juices and eggs as they broke apart, and though their fanlike fronds brushed off some of the debris, when the rover finally emerged from the forest onto a green slope its roof was snarled with foliage and yellow clover was spreading over its fenders.

  “OK,” Quentin said. “That slope across this meadow goes up to the desert area in the center of the island. It’s the lake on the other side of the core that we really want to take a look at!”

  They plowed down the green meadow, relieved to be in open country.

  To their left they could see a spill-basin where water seemed to have flowed in from a narrow crack in the outer wall. A white rind of crystals surrounded the oval pool at the end of the narrow stream, resembling a sperm cell that had impregnated the crack in the island cliff.

  Zero pointed to the south, panning his camera. “What’s that?”

  “It looks like saltwater,” the driver answered.

  A dead zone of white salt crystals, barren of life, surrounded the pool at the end of the stream. As the rover moved down the slope they caught a glimpse of daylight and ocean through the fissure in the cliff from which the pool must have been fed.

  “Seawater must get in at high tide or during storms,” Zero said.

  “That crack looks pretty recent,” Andy pointed out.

  “Based on the salt buildup on the rocks, that pool must be at least a few decades old,” Quentin corrected.

  “I meant recent by geological standards.”

  “Everything’s recent by geological standards.”

  The rover climbed the other side of the meadow. The landscape dried out as they passed from the clover to the barren core of weather-carved rock formations at the island’s center.

  The driver searched for a passable route through the core to give them a shortcut across the island.

  12:33 P.M.

  The rumble of the rover vibrated the rock and sand, waking the hives.

  The low-frequency vibrations triggered pheromone signals inside the purple honeycombed towers that lined the flat bottom of the ravine.

  The pheromones stimulated hundreds of drones.

  Budlike panels under the drones’ heads popped open. Three translucent wings expanded like blue flowers.

  The fanged lamprey-mouths flexed on their abdomens, ready to latch onto passing prey to suck its blood and feed their colonies.

  The towering hives were the nurseries of drill-worms. These half-worms were their juvenile form. When they matured, the vampire drones would double in size by growing a new segment shaped like a drill bit with three legs and a second brain and mouth. Then they would leave the hive to hunt in the jungle, drilling through the hard sheaths of the trees.

  A mature drill-worm bitten in half could regenerate its other half. Either segment could mate and give birth to polyplike eggs— eggs that multiplied into new hives that budded vampire drones.

  The XATV-9 throttled forward across the canyon’s flat bottom, which cut directly across the island’s arid core.

  The men observed a gallery of urchinlike cacti, yuccalike trees, and bloated purple towers lining the canyon walls to either side of the rover. The towers reminded Zero of termite mounds or pillar coral.

  The driver turned on the outboard mikes again and as the rover passed the men inside heard the sibilant buzz of the purple hives coming to life. Blue swarms emerged, attacking the rover’s windows then retreating to their hives.

  The silent men gazed through the rover’s windows down the lush green slope on the far side of the island’s core. The lake in the distance lay still and dark inside the outer ring of the jungle.

  “There it is.” Quentin pointed over the driver’s shoulder as they roared down to the green plain at sixty miles an hour, headed straight for the lake.

  12:35 P.M.

  The rover braked abruptly and stopped at the water’s edge.

  A hundred yards to their left rose the outer ring of the jungle, rimming the far side of the lake.

  Only thirty feet to their right, an isolated cluster of three tall trees rose on the shore. Two of the three trunks split into three branches, each of which bore crowns of long fronds covered with green clover. Like a broken umbrella, the tallest tree pointed five splaying fronds up into the air. Chains of red berries dangled under the fronds of all three trees, twitching and coiling as they caught bugs lured by the fruit.

  “We should not stop,” said Zero.

  “We’re safe, don’t worry,” said the driver.

  Radio static burst from the speakers, and they heard Briggs’s voice: “We’re evacuating StatLab. Repeat, we are evacuating StatLab! Return—base—”

  Then they could hear Nell’s voice over the breaking signal. “We’re los—transmission signal. The com—array—choked—
tation— over?”

  “Oh great,” Quentin groaned.

  “The clover must be eating StatLab’s dish.” Andy turned pale.

  Pound frowned. “Are we in danger here, if we can’t go back to the lab?”

  The driver shook his head. “We’ll just radio Enterprise. She’ll send a transport. They’ll hook on and take us home.”

  “How can they take this thing back to a ship?” Zero asked. “Who knows what’s stuck to it now?”

  “They’ll take us to the Philippine Sea,”the driver said.

  “They’ll sterilize and quarantine it there,” Quentin said.

  “Don’t worry,” the driver said. “They’ll hose this thing down with chlorine dioxide, formaldehyde—hell, the Navy’ll probably scuttle the whole damn ship when this is over, just to be on the safe side. They’re plenty paranoid.”

  Pound grabbed the radio mike. “StatLab, proceed with evacuation. We’ll catch our own ride home.”

  They heard Briggs’s voice over the radio: “Can’t—Over?”

  Pound shouted into the radio. “We’ll get our own ride home, StatLab. Copy?”

  12:44 P.M.

  Nell and the technicians stared over Otto’s shoulder as the video feed broke up.

  “Damn, we lost them!”

  “Keep trying,” Nell urged.

  “Their com array must be damaged.” Otto checked the camera overlooking one of StatLab’s microwave dishes. “It’s definitely not on our end.”

  “OK,” Briggs said. “That’s it! I want all hard drives packed and ready to go when the Sea Dragon gets here, people. All euthanized specimens need to be sealed in sterilized specimen cases. No live specimens are to leave the island under absolutely any circumstances. No pets! And no souvenirs!”

  12:45 P.M.

  The men inside the rover heard nothing but a blizzard of white noise on the radio.

  “Yeah, their com array’s definitely down,” Quentin said.

  Andy nodded. “Lichenovores must have gotten to it.”