Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  “Clovores, you mean.”

  “Oh right.”

  “How’d you guys like to get a look inside the lake?” asked the driver, who still seemed reassuringly gung ho, despite being cut off from the lab.

  Quentin glanced at Andy, arching his eyebrows. “You can actually do that?”

  “Sure can!” the driver said.

  “Bitchin’!”

  “We should call the Enterprise now,” Zero said.

  “Right after this, we will,” Pound agreed. “Let’s make sure to tape this for the President, OK?”

  Bugs were starting to swarm around the rover as an ROV deployed from the end of one of the robot arms, maneuvering down into the lake on a thin, Day-Glo orange tether.

  The driver used what looked like Xbox controls to steer it and flick on its headlight, illuminating the black water. The crew watched the ROV’s camera view on a screen above the forward window.

  The small vehicle buzzed down into the depths.

  “How deep can it go?” Andy was giddy.

  “About three hundred feet,” the driver said.

  “Awesome.” Quentin grinned at Andy.

  A huge animal, like an overgrown fairy shrimp, appeared on the screen, paddling in the inky darkness, and suddenly a wondrous world of Cambrianesque creatures materialized on the screen around it.

  Segmented creatures of fantastic designs crossed the camera’s view like apparitions: spiked saucers, horned boomerangs, finned champagne glasses, a Christmas tree with kicking legs.

  “Omigod,” Quentin breathed. “Stephen Jay Gould, eat your HEART OUT, baby!”

  “It’s the Burgess Shale come to life.” Andy sounded shell-shocked.

  “We were right!” Quentin said.

  “Wow, OK, guys, keep talking. Are you getting all this?” Pound asked Zero.

  Zero looked up from his videocam. “We should move. We shouldn’t stay—”

  Even as he spoke, he was cut off by a huge BOOM!

  The rover lurched, and then they heard another BOOM!

  The rover pitched forward and a third of the front window plunged into the water.

  “What the hell just happened?” Pound yelled.

  “Oh shit,” the driver said.

  “We can still drive, right?” Pound said.

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” the driver said.

  “We can still drive, though… right?” Zero asked.

  The half-tracks bore into the wet bank of the lake as they backtracked, but the front axles of the blown tires gripped the steep bank like anchors and the vehicle sank lower as it dug in. Then they suddenly stopped functioning. Red lights flashed on the control panel.

  The driver looked at them. “Uh… that would be a negative.”

  “We’ve got half-tracks, for Christ’s sake—why can’t we just power out of here, man?” Zero asked.

  “This is a prototype—it was designed to terminate functionality in the event of any malfunction that might cause damage to equipment worth millions of dollars.”

  “Inflatable rubber tires?” Andy screeched. “I thought this thing was a Mars rover!”

  The driver shook his head. “It’s experimental. And those tires are ten-inch-thick steel radials, for Christ’s sake! I don’t understand how both of them could blow like this.”

  Quentin looked out the side window and saw the shredded rubber above water. “Oh shit, it’s smoking!”

  Zero videoed out the right window. “Same on this side.”

  “We may have run over some clovores.”

  “What?”

  “Animals that eat clover and probably use sulfuric acid to dissolve it,” Quentin told Pound. “The acid inside them may have eaten away our tires, I guess.”

  “Shit!” the envoy snapped. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “You were the one in such a huge frickin’ hurry!” Quentin shouted.

  Andy jabbed a finger at the driver. “He said we can radio for a transport!”

  “Radio the ship for a transport now,” Zero said.

  The driver nodded and flicked on the radio. “Kirk to Enterprise, Kirk to Enterprise.”

  He glanced up at the others, who were glaring at him. “It’s my NAME, OK?” He clicked the radio again. “This is XATV-9, do you read, Enterprise?”

  White noise.

  “Do you read, Enterprise? This is XATV-9…Kirk to Enterprise?”

  Kirk looked up at the rest of them, shrugged.

  “Keep trying!” Pound urged.

  “But don’t say ‘Kirk to Enterprise,’” Andy said.

  Zero put the camera in his lap, popped out the memory stick, slid it into his pocket, snapped the flap, and hung his head down over his lap. Laughter gently rocked his body. “Why did I trust you idiots?” he moaned.

  “Don’t worry,” Kirk told them. “We can just sit tight. Sooner or later they’ll send a transport.”

  A shrieking alarm sounded; blue lights flashed at the rear of the rover.

  “Now what?” Andy yelped.

  Kirk looked puzzled. “The smoke alarm!”

  He squeezed between them and rushed to the rear of the rover to disable the blaring siren. Looking up at the ceiling, he shook his head grimly.

  “What?” Pound demanded. He squeegeed the sweat off his forehead with the side of his hand, like a windshield wiper.

  “Hey that’s funny,” Kirk said.

  “What’s funny?” Zero said. “I need a laugh.”

  Kirk pointed at the roof. “Something seems to be burning through the hull here…”

  “Ha ha.”

  “What’s the hull made of?” Quentin asked.

  “Superhardened plastic, so there’s no way any impact could—”

  “Oh shit.” Quentin looked at Andy.

  “You guys better take a look at this.” Zero pointed at the ROV monitor.

  Large shadowy creatures stirred on the screen just beyond the range of the ROV’s headlights.

  “Jeez, we were right!” Quentin crowed.

  “Right about what?” Pound’s voice cracked.

  “Giant mantis shrimp—that eye must be attached to an animal as big as a saltwater crocodile!”

  The ROV appeared to shine its spotlight on the football-sized compound eye of a slumbering leviathan.

  “Call off the ROV now!” Zero said.

  Kirk killed the light. He reversed the winch on the ROV’s cable, zipping it up at top speed.

  Andy and Quentin cringed as the camera pulled away from the creature. Pound sagged in relief.

  “Good man,” Zero said softly.

  Through the partially submerged window of the rover they had an above-and-below view of the black lake as a chevron of ripples headed toward them across its surface.

  More ridges appeared on the water, moving parallel to the first.

  12:51 P.M.

  The scientists and technicians quickly donned blue cleansuits as they prepared to evacuate StatLab.

  Nell watched through the window as the first wave of scientists boarded the first two Sea Dragon helicopters. All carried sleek titanium hard-drive containers and stacks of aluminum specimen cases onto the loading ramps, which slowly rose like drawbridges as the helos took off.

  “Damn it, Briggs,” she said, “these suits are a waste of time. Any microbes here must have evolved to attack a totally different biology from ours. Zero and I breathed the air on this island and nothing happened to us!”

  Briggs rolled his eyes. “Interesting theory, Nell. Better start suiting up!”

  She looked over Otto’s shoulder at the static-filled screen. “You go ahead, Briggs. Come on, Otto! Keep trying to make contact with them!”

  Briggs frowned as Otto typed rapidly, the aluminum splint on his thumb clicking the computer keys.

  12:52 P.M.

  “Can’t you reel that thing in any faster?” Pound complained. The arrows of ripples on the lake’s surface all pointed straight at the mired rover.

  “Stop reel
ing it in,” Zero said.

  “OK. I’m cutting it loose!” Kirk said.

  “Good thinking!” Zero agreed.

  Kirk flicked a button and a cable-shear on the end of the robot arm chopped the tether. The monitor went black.

  “I’ve got a satellite phone,” Pound suggested.

  Kirk shook his head. “Good luck using a satphone inside this thing. You need to be out in the open.”

  “Do you think we can step outside for a minute?” the presidential envoy asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Zero laughed.

  “We don’t have cleansuits on this rig,” Kirk said.

  “Zero’s been out there and lived,” Pound reminded them, stubbornly. His face was slick with sweat.

  “Germs aren’t the problem.”

  Two giant animals with iridescent green-and-red plates rippling down their bodies exploded from the water in front of the windows. They flew up into the air in a jet of white spray that drenched the rover.

  When the “mega-mantises” landed on the roof they jolted the rover forward, nosing it deeper into the black lake.

  The five men heard the creatures’ legs scrambling mightily overhead as one of them fell off to the left side, hitting the mud and surging backward into the lake.

  An explosive BANG stunned their ears. The cabin’s roof cracked with tendrils of sunlight as a shock wave shattered the overhead fluorescent light fixtures.

  “That was a claw strike,” Quentin shouted, holding his head.

  “We gotta get out of here!” Andy yelled.

  “That thing’ll open this up like a walnut!”

  Kirk climbed out of the cockpit and squeezed past the others to the rear of the rover.

  He yanked open a cabinet door on the wall. Inside were four sinister long-barreled guns attached to backpacks with tubes and straps.

  “We should be able to hold a circle long enough to get off a call, I think,” he told them, passing one of the weapons to Quentin.

  “Flamethrowers?” Quentin said, impressed, as he passed one along to Andy, who quickly handed it off to Pound.

  Kirk nodded, handing him another. “Strap the fuel tank on your back. Tighten it with the belly strap.”

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Quentin said.

  “Careful now,” Kirk said.

  “Zero, will you join us?” Pound asked the cameraman. “We could use a little advice if something comes at us. You’re the only one who’s been out there.”

  Zero saw the mega-mantis’s arms ratcheting for another strike on the domed window behind Pound. “Get down!” He ducked to the floor, putting his hands over the back of his head and ears.

  The shock wave knocked all of the other men over. It also spread three fine cracks through the forward bubble window.

  “Give me one of those, God damn it!” Zero snarled.

  “Plus one of these!” Pound’s ears rang as he thrust a very NASA-looking plastic headband at Zero. “It’s a head-cam— hands free!”

  Zero stared at Pound as if he’d suddenly burst into song.

  “Tap the side to send video back to the lab on Channel One,” Pound told the cameraman. “We’re out of range now, but it will reach them if you can get within a mile of the lab. It holds twenty-five hours on each memory stick. That’s a viewfinder on that arm there.”

  “Will it give me brain cancer?”

  “Of course not!” Pound scoffed.

  Zero couldn’t resist placing it around his head and swinging the viewfinder into place. He squinted into the small transparent screen that hung about two inches in front of his left eye. “OK.”

  Another bone-rattling blast seemed to crack the roof. A shard of knife-edged plastic grazed Andy’s arm. He screamed as the mega-mantis on the roof tightened tendons like trebuchets inside its massive forelimbs to let loose another strike across the middle window.

  The five men reeled at the shock wave. Kirk staggered to the hatch, unsealed it, and kicked it open.

  The arm of a mega-mantis reached down over the hatchway, followed by a giant multicolored compound eye.

  “Hit it!” Kirk screamed.

  He and Zero shot thirty-foot streams of fire out the hatch, frying the eyeball that was the size of a Weber barbecue grill.

  Through the forward window they could see the wounded mega-mantis lurch from the roof back into the lake, pushing the rover even deeper into the muddy bank. The middle window was now half-covered with water that churned as other creatures surfaced from the deep to tear into the injured giant.

  Kirk and Zero cut the flames, and all five men jumped out onto the green shore of the boiling lake.

  They smelled the treacle stench of death and sulfur in the air, and the humidity slapped a sheen of sweat on their skin immediately. The creatures wrestling in the water clacked and squeaked as they shredded the fallen mega-mantis in a feeding frenzy, turning the surface pale blue.

  A shrill insect noise from the distant jungle choked the air.

  The men ran in a group from the water’s edge and quickly formed a circle around Pound.

  Andy was the only one without a flamethrower.

  Pound fussed nervously with his satellite phone, his flame thrower slung over his shoulder by the strap.

  The buttons on the phone looked like a chaos of symbols as Pound tried to sort out what he had to push and in what order. Blood trickled from one of his ears. The shellshock of the mantis strikes had fogged his brain, along with lack of sleep and a voracious fever.

  The others blasted the flamethrowers to defend their circle, as more swarms emerged from the crowns of the trio of nearby trees.

  Quentin dropped his flamethrower. “Cover me!” he yelled to Andy.

  “Huh?”

  Without replying, Quentin ran to the tallest tree on the edge of the lake and extended a stethoscope to its trunk. The roiling water turned milky blue beside him as the battle under the surface spread.

  Mega-Mantis

  Magnisquilla manningi

  (after Echevarria et al, Proceedings of the

  Woods Hole Scientific Meetings, vol. 92: 61)

  “What’s he doing, giving it a checkup?” Kirk yelled, stunned.

  “Yeah… yeah… yeah! This thing has hearts,” Quentin shouted. “It’s an animal! I knew it had to have a vascular distribution system—”

  The tree suddenly retracted into the ground. It clamped its fronds down over Quentin like an umbrella closing.

  The ground quaked violently under their feet, causing Pound to punch the wrong last digit on the satphone. “God damn it!” he screeched. The rocking earth pitched him backwards. As he hit the ground, the butt of the flamethrower broke his fall and he accidentally fired a stream out its muzzle behind him—which torched the rover’s still-open hatchway.

  Frothing waves splashed the lake shore near the trees, where they could still hear Quentin screaming under the tightly closed fronds.

  “Quentin!” Andy shouted frantically, running toward the tree.

  “Andy! Don’t!” Zero yelled.

  Fronds of the other two trees leaned forward over Andy and a shimmering creature that seemed to be a larger version of a shrimpanzee descended on a bungeelike tail and snatched Andy, who screamed as it yanked him off the ground, all in a second.

  The earthquake finally settled and stopped.

  A wave of creatures came out of the wall of jungle a hundred yards away, and headed straight for the men.

  Zero turned and ran.

  Pound and Kirk ran, too.

  1:00 P.M.

  Zero looked behind him and fired his flamethrower at a swarm of flying bugs diving down at him. “Goddamned flying piranhas,” he muttered, fending them off. As he ran ahead of the others, who followed him, gasping in panic, Zero remembered the NASA camera. He tapped the button over his right temple and flipped the band over to see behind him. He swiveled the arm of the viewfinder forward—he had a rearview mirror.

  With one eye on the viewfinder, he r
an for his life, more or less following the tracks of the rover up the hillside as he faked left and right like a running back on the longest sudden death touchdown run of all time.

  1:01 P.M.

  Otto picked up the video feed from Zero. “I got something!” On the monitor they could see Zero’s pursuers and the two other men running desperately behind him.

  “Oh NO!” Nell crumpled into a chair behind Otto, staring at the screen.

  1:02 P.M.

  Zero sprinted uphill along the tracks of the rover, toward the island’s core.

  Wasps dive-bombed around him as he constantly zigzagged like Red Grange. As creatures leaped through the air at him, he dodged or slowed or sped up to avoid them.

  Kirk and Pound ran behind him up the hillside. Pound was winded and staggering when five wasps hit him simultaneously. He screamed.

  As their abdominal maws pierced his neck, back, and arms, the wasps injected capsules of embryos. These hatched instantly and bored their way through his flesh.

  Pound dropped the flamethrower and fell writhing in agony to the ground. The twisting larvae devoured nerve after nerve. The explosions of pain sent his body into deep shock. His glasses fell off, and the world became a blur. He tried to yell for help but could not. Two drill-worms landed on his forehead, and he screamed involuntarily as they bored their abdomens through his eyelids.

  1:02 P.M.

  In the headcam’s viewfinder, Zero saw a cloud of bugs cover Pound as the President’s envoy flailed on the slope behind him. It seemed to Zero that Pound screamed for a long time.

  Kirk pumped his feet over the squishy field of green vegetation, running behind Zero, who was headed for the canyon they had originally traversed in the safety of the rover. Halfway up the clover fields, Zero continued to gain ground, but suddenly Kirk doubled over, exhausted. His head was swimming and sweat stung his eyes, as he struggled to catch his breath. The sole of his right shoe seemed to be melting.

  Kirk pivoted and blasted his flamethrower blindly at the train of creatures racing up the slope behind him. Undaunted by the tongue of flame, they swirled around him in tight circles and, singed and smoking, struck into him with ravenous spikes and jaws.