by Warren Fahy
They waved them in the window of the cockpit.
Thatcher glanced over his shoulder at the others as he slipped out the door.
He checked his Timex Indiglo watch, pressing the crown to light up its face, and peered down the hillside. He heard the engine of the Humvee and saw headlights beaming from behind the B-29’s rotting wing farther down the slope. He sighed as a wave of relief washed over him. Then he ran toward the lights.
9:00 P.M.
In the control room aboard the Trident the video started to fizzle and fade.
“We’re losing you, Zero,” Peach said.
They heard the cameraman’s voice as the transmission died: “Look up … for us!”
9:01 P.M.
Moments later, they saw the Trident’s deck lights flick on and off twice. “They spotted us,” Geoffrey said.
“Come on, Andy,” Nell said. “Let’s pack their stuff in those specimen cases.”
Nell and Andy ran to the other end of the fuselage to start packing the hendropods’ possessions into the aluminum cases. The other hendros ran past them and climbed into the hole to the spiral stairs that led to Hender’s elevator. But Hender paused beside Nell, watching her place his things inside one of the cases.
“Go now, Hender. Exit,” Geoffrey said, behind him. “Nell will come with us.”
Hender twisted his head around and looked at Geoffrey. “Nell will come with us,” Hender repeated, nodding. He turned to Nell and both his eyes bent down and looked into hers. Suddenly, without warning, he embraced her, wrapping four arms around her.
Nell was alarmed as his four hands pressed against her back— but his touch was surprisingly gentle, and as her fingertips reluctantly touched the smooth fur on his belly colors expanded like petals blossoming. Pink and orange blooms of light opened all over his silvery body, along with shifting stripes and dots of green, and without warning she was laughing. Tears spilled over her eyelids as she realized that she had found her flower, after all.
“Thank you, Nell.” She felt his voice hum through her like an oboe.
She ran her fingers gently over the thick, glossy coat. “Hender go now,” she said. “OK?” “OK, Nell. Hender go now.”
9:01 P.M.
As Thatcher ran down the slope, he dodged weird transparent fern-like growths that sprouted over the clover fields in the gloom. Down the slope about a hundred feet, the headlights went dark. Thatcher could hear the idling engine cut off as he finally reached the Hummer.
9:02 P.M.
The alpha spiger launched its two-ton body off its rear legs and catapulting tail, lunging up the hillside in a thirty-foot leap, as it followed the tracks of the Humvee up the slope in the moonlight.
Behind the red beast two smaller spigers the size of polar bears, the two members of its pack, pounced up the hill.
Drool lubricated their vertical jaws and their eyes darted rapidly on stalks, canvassing the hillside around them in vibrant, vivid detail. An army of parasites, from scavenging disk-ants to centipede-like worms, coursed through the giants’ fur like sea monsters battling all attacking bugs to a standstill and protecting its wounds so they could heal.
The alpha spiger bore a deep scar on one side of its face where a wolf-sized rival had slashed its head before it had bit the youngster in two. The others in its pack had devoured the spiger’s other half.
The alpha spiger spotted the Humvee rolling to a stop on the slope above. It doubled its speed.
9:04 P.M.
Nell and Andy packed the cases to the brim with the haversacks of each hendropod and started stuffing as many fossils as they could squeeze into the rest, even slipping some inside their pockets, reluctant to leave anything behind.
“Nell,” Andy said. “Thank you.”
“What for?”
“Coming back to get me.”
“Oh! No problem, sweetie.” She laughed and gave him one of her signature hugs.
“I thought I was dead,” he said, tearfully. “I couldn’t believe they saved me. But the hendros really took me in, Nell, they really did. Considering what they’re going to do to the island…” He paused, eyes closed tight. Finally he sighed, and opened his eyes to meet hers. “Anyway,” he said, “thanks.”
“Thanks for finding them, Andy.” Nell let him go and squeezed his shoulder. “Your name will go down in scientific history as the one who saved the hendropods from extinction. Come on—we don’t have much time. We need to go.” They each carried two stuffed cases up the stairs, leaving the fifth case for a second trip.
9:04 P.M.
The cataract of the Milky Way filtered through the screen of the tree’s dome-like canopy. A heavy branch reached out over the cliff from which a row of branches protruded like monkey bars.
They watched as the hendropods turned headstands on the wide branch and, with their four long legs, reached out and grabbed the side branches. The creatures swung across, rotating with one limb after another.
When the hendropods reached a pulley that hung from the bottom of the branch, they jumped down the thick cable into the big basket.
“Mmm. I don’t know…” Andy quavered, assessing their precarious escape route. “Hey! Where’s Thatcher?”
The others shot quick glances around.
“I’m not waiting for Thatcher,” Zero announced. He jumped out to catch the first rung of the “monkey bars” and then swung over the seven-hundred-foot plunge hand-over-hand on the side branches.
Geoffrey went after him. They both made it look fairly easy.
“Lookin’ good, guys,” Nell called as they slid down the cable into the basket.
“Uh, how are we going to get these over there?” Andy pointed at the cases.
“Uh-oh,” Nell said. “Hend—”
As Nell started to call them, the hendropods sprang back up the cable and swiftly spread out along the “monkey bars,” forming a chain back to the main branch. As she handed them off they tossed the cases along the chain to Zero and Geoffrey, who caught them in the basket.
“Your turn, Andy,” said Nell.
“I can’t do this.”
“Come on, Andy!” shouted Zero. “Just don’t look down!”
“I didn’t know you were afraid of heights,” Nell said.
“Who isn’t afraid of heights?”
“It’s not that far, just go!” she said.
Andy jumped with a terrified yell and caught the first branch.
“Hand over hand!” shouted Zero.
Andy glanced down the sheer cliff face and began thrashing his legs wildly.
Hender stood by Nell on the main branch. The four other hendropods hung from the monkey bars, watching Andy.
“Go Andy!” Hender said.
Andy reached for the next monkey bar and grabbed it, but when he swung for the rung after that his hand missed and he fell.
She heard Andy’s scream. Hender jumped from beside Nell and plunged down the cliff as she looked down.
Hender grabbed Andy’s ankle with an outstretched hand as two hendropods leaped from the rungs in sequence.
Like the pieces from a Barrel of Monkeys game, one hendro stretched a hand out to grab Hender’s tail while hooking tails with the one behind it, who held the tail of a fourth, who clung to the ladder with all six hands.
As Andy plummeted down the face of the cliff, the hendropods’ tails stretched to the limit and then sprang back and jerked him upward like a bungee cable.
At the top of the recoil, Hender handed Andy off to the fourth hendropod at the top of the chain, who quickly passed him to a fifth hendro hanging from the pulley.
The fifth hendro dropped Andy, who had been screaming throughout, into the basket.
Zero and Geoffrey patted his back with amazed congratulations as Andy popped his head up, speechless.
9:05 P.M.
Thatcher slid into the shotgun seat of the waiting Hummer, breathing hard from his run. “They have no way to contact the base,” he said, slamming the door.
“You sure they don’t have one of these?”
“What’s that?” Thatcher wheezed.
“A satphone.”
“No, no. They would have used it.”
“The scientists think the island is sinking,” Cane whispered. “They’re going to nuke it ahead of schedule, twelve hours from now, they say, if there’s anything left to nuke. They’re evacuating the lab and deep-freezing the last specimens for transport. We could just leave now, no problem, sir.”
“We’ve got a problem. Those scientists are trying to escape with four more of those wretched creatures, Sergeant. They’re planning to use that elevator they built. They’re getting the ship from that TV show to pick them up.”
Cane solemnly reached under the seat and pulled out his rifle and some ammo clips. “You know my orders, sir. My orders are clear.”
“You’re not…” The scientist’s eyes widened, “going to shoot them?”
Sergeant Cane released the safety on his weapon. “With extreme prejudice, sir.”
“I mean—you’re not going to shoot the humans?”
“The humans were warned of the consequences. They’re no better than terrorists smuggling WMDs.”
“But—” The gears were jamming in Thatcher’s mind. He noticed specimen cases in the back of the Humvee. “What are those, Sergeant?”
“When I was driving around down there I ran into a bunch of panicky eggheads, no offense, sir, who asked me to take some specimens back to the base. They fumigated the canopy and knocked out a bunch of rats.”
Thatcher saw the taped labels on the cases that said HENDERS RATS. “So those are live specimens…”
“Not for long,” the soldier replied darkly. “They’ll whack ’em back at base camp. Deep freeze.”
“How will we explain that? I mean, if the others don’t come with us, how will we explain how we got those specimens?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, sir. We’ll just say we caught the others trying to smuggle specimens off the island: in other words, we tell the truth. My orders are clear, regardless of what you may want to do. This mission is now official, and not hypothetical, sir.”
“Right…” Thatcher said softly. He looked at the cases of live specimens, thinking fast as he reeled forward different scenarios in his mind and, seeing three bars come up down one path, decided to gamble. “Give me a gun, Sergeant. I don’t intend to sit out here unarmed.”
Cane paused, studying the scientist for a moment. Then he reached down to his holster, unsnapped it, and handed Thatcher his Beretta.
Cane reached for the door. Thatcher’s fingers tightened on the weapon as soon as the soldier turned away, but his arm froze when Cane turned back to him. Then, in the window behind Cane, Thatcher saw a giant shape rising like the neon marquee of the Flamingo Hotel.
Thatcher forced himself to remain calm and lowered the gun to his lap. “You’re sure you don’t want me to come with you? It could be dangerous,” he said.
“I’ll be fine,” replied Cane. “I’ll be right back.”
When the young soldier opened the door to step out, a black spike ripped the door from its hinges. A second spike pierced Cane from his neck to his pelvis, and lifted him out of the vehicle like a gruesome marionette, dead.
Thatcher reached over from the passenger seat and switched on the ignition. When the Hummer started, he shifted it into gear. It rolled forward as the spiger, joined by another, and then a third, ripped into the soldier’s body.
Thatcher scrambled into the driver’s seat of the rolling Hummer and gripped the steering wheel. In the rearview mirror he was certain he saw two of the spigers follow him.
He pointed the vehicle down the slope, grabbed the satphone from the seat and one of the specimen cases from the back, then he shifted the Hummer into neutral and jumped out, getting lucky as he hit a relatively bare patch of ground and sprawled flat.
Thatcher raised his head inches from a bloom of fetid purple clover to watch the empty Hummer pick up speed on the darkened slope, chased by the two smaller spigers. The big one, having finished with Cane, lunged down the field to join the hunt.
Thatcher stood up and ran. The creature’s bizarre tree house was fifty yards away, and he could barely hug the bulky specimen case under one arm. He had dropped Cane’s pistol somewhere, but he wasn’t about to stop and look for it.
The alpha spiger’s rear eyes and hindbrain spotted the zoologist running behind them up the field. It abandoned the chase of the Hummer, spun instantly on a spike, and launched after Thatcher. The other spigers followed.
Thatcher shifted the case from arm to arm, gasping for air as putrid gases wafted over the purple field.
The spigers ran at full speed, pushing off their powerful middle legs and digging in their cleated tails and hind legs to propel them forward. In mid-leap they curled their spiked tails back under them to take the blow of their landing and drove their spiked front arms into the ground to pull them forward as their middle legs pushed off and their tail and hind legs launched them again.
Thatcher huffed and puffed as he jumped over glistening clovores blooming on the starlit slope. He stuffed Cane’s sat-phone in the inner pocket of his vest and didn’t look back. He barely registered the distant concussion of the Hummer plunging over a cliff into the jungle below. As it exploded, distracting the spigers for a precious beat, he put his head down, and ran for his life.
9:08 P.M.
On their monitors inside the Trigon’s control center, three Army Radio Telephone Operators noticed Blue One on the move in the theater of operations.
“Blue One just took a nosedive!” one RTO reported, turning to his CO in the communications room.
The Commanding Officer on duty opened a radio channel. “Blue One, what’s your status, damn it!”
“I don’t think they’ll be answering, sir,” the RTO said, staring at the screen. “They must have fallen about fifty feet off a cliff before they hit jungle.”
“When did they last check in?”
“About twenty-three minutes ago, sir. They were collecting specimens.”
The icon indicating the Hummer’s transponder vanished from the map on their screens.
“Fuck it!” the CO snarled. “Send a search-and-rescue chopper, but don’t drop anyone in. I’m not leaving one more soldier on this goddamned island, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir! But there were some VIPs on board Blue One, sir. Um…Dr. Cato, Dr. Redmond, and Dr. Binswanger… and Nell Duckworth. Plus that survivor they picked up.”
“Oh, Christ. I’ll call General Harris—Jesus Christ!—the shit’s going to spray on this one, guys. Fuck! My order still stands, Lieutenant. Do not drop anyone in there, under any circumstances.”
“Yes, sir, Colonel! That’s affirmative.”
9:09 P.M.
Thatcher stumbled the last ten feet to the door as the spigers closed the gap behind him, coming within one leap of their quarry. He shoved the door open as the alpha spiger landed on the doorstep.
Thatcher heard the whistle of its arms slash the air behind his head as he slammed the door to Hender’s house, wheezing and gasping for breath. He tore the taped label from the specimen case, and then he pushed himself up the spiral stairs. Reeling and dizzy, Thatcher thought his blood pressure was going to pop his eyes like corks.
9:09 P.M.
The alpha spiger’s warning signals triggered as it sensed the tree’s pheromones and the warning pheromones of other creatures that had approached it. But the spiger was disoriented; the electromagnetic flux generated by the island’s seismic activity interfered with the predator’s instincts as a static of confusing impulses fired in its brains.
The spiger drew its tail forward underneath it and dug it into the ground, cocking its giant rear legs as it lowered its head at the front of Hender’s house.
Then it slung its mass forward, clawing out with its spiked arms, and smashed the door to pieces with the top of its head.
A
s it thrust its body into the fuselage, the nostrils on the alpha’s forehead sampled the scents in the air and found a strand of Thatcher winding up the stairway.
9:10 P.M.
Nell watched Hender carry Copepod with four hands as he swung to the creaking basket.
“Where’s Thatcher?” Andy called from the basket, his voice echoing off the cliff.
“I don’t know,” Nell said, looking around.
“I’d like to know what that explosion was.” Geoffrey stood beside Andy in the basket.
“Screw Thatcher, let’s go!” Andy urged.
“I’ll go get the last case and see where he is,” Nell said.
She turned—and there was Thatcher, flushed and panting for breath, and hugging an aluminum case. She looked him up and down. “Good timing, Thatcher. Come on!”
She grabbed the case out of his hands, and saw his look of surprise.
Without a second thought she handed the case to Hender, who swung across the monkey bars and tossed it to the others in the basket before returning to Nell.
“Our turn,” Nell told Thatcher.
Thatcher stood at the edge of the cliff looking at the rungs reaching out over the cliff. “Good God!” he said. “There is no way I can do this.”
“Hender!” Nell called.
9:10 P.M.
The spiger extended its spiked front legs two yards in front of it and shimmied rapidly up the spiraling tunnel of stairs.
Since it did not have vertebrae, it stretched forward as the legs attached to its three bony rings grabbed hold and hauled it forward up the stairs like a muscular Slinky.
The other two spigers caterpillared their way furiously through the corkscrewing tunnel behind it.
9:11 P.M.
