Trainer considered flipping the meathead a well-deserved bird and going home, whatever was left of it. Yet, the way the soldier balled his fists, Trainer didn’t have a choice. Anyway, the sooner he solved the military’s quandary, the sooner they’d remove their boots from the pristine lakebed.
He had already made up his mind to go, when NASA stooge Leonard Ho scurried up all red faced. Trainer hoped that his attire, a polo and khakis, meant he had the good sense to leave this muddy work to him. Of course not.
“Mr. Trainer, you are going, right?” Ho asked. “Please, this is very serious.”
Trainer turned toward the soldier. “Do you have a bug on you?” Then he faced Ho. “Or did you inject me with a listening device?” Trainer patted the pockets of his jeans and then pressed the skin on his forearm looking for an implant.
“I don’t need a listening device to know you’re more stubborn than a cat at bath time,” Ho said.
“Who says I’m stubborn? I’ll go along but I’m sitting up front to make sure Major Bulldozer over here doesn’t trample any animals on the way.”
The soldier rolled his eyes, all the more reason to keep watch of him. Five minutes into their drive through the wooded trail, an endangered gopher tortoise crawled into their path up ahead. The driver didn’t slow.
“Stop! Stop the jeep!” Trainer hollered. “It’s a gopher tortoise.”
“And what’s the problem?” the soldier asked.
Trainer opened the door. As the door brushed against bushes and branches, the soldier slowed the jeep. The vehicle skidded to a halt, mercifully before the endangered animal, and Trainer leapt out. The dirt it kicked up scared the tortoise into its shell. The Lagoon Watcher scooped the confused fellow out of the way and placed him safely in the bushes.
“What are you doing? Get back in here!” The soldier waved him back toward the jeep.
“What I’m doing is saving this endangered gopher tortoise that you were ready to slaughter.”
“Slaughter a turtle?” The soldier huffed. “We have hundreds of people dead and you’re worried about a turtle?”
“Welcome to my world,” Ho said.
Trainer hopped back into the jeep, reached into the back seat and wiped his dirty hands on Ho’s polo. The annoyed NASA man brushed it off. Without looking at the driver, Trainer remarked, “Now try reaching the lake without killing anything on the endangered species list.”
“Just so you know,” Ho told the soldier. “Turtle-hugging scientists aren’t an endangered species.”
When they arrived, Trainer was dismayed to find four military humvees and about twenty soldiers and federal research hacks. This secluded lake couldn’t handle the waste footprint of so many visitors. Plastic bags and food wrappers had been strewn about. The heavy tires of a humvee were suffocating a tree’s roots. They had a roaring generator going that powered a pump sucking out the soil of the lakebed and sifting through it. How could they drain a natural beauty like this?
“What the hell are you doing here?” The Lagoon Watcher commanded the attention of the whole group. “What about the fertile fish? The innocent amphibians? Did you do a survey of the species in the lake before you took this drastic action? You’d think that after the aliens trashed our lagoon we’d be more protective of our waters.”
A tall Hispanic soldier with a star on his collar approached him, not with anger, but diplomatically and with a hint of empathy in his eyes. He looked familiar.
“Mr. Trainer? I’m Brigadier General Alonso Colon. My team commandeered the scene of this double murder after we saw the report from the county sheriff. This might be connected to the invasion of our country, but we need your assistance to know for certain, sir. I know you’re concerned, rightly concerned, about the safety of the environment here, sir. We’ll be as careful as we can, but first we must understand what happened to this man and his son.”
“Your group is a mish-mash of uniforms, Army, Navy, Marines and you’re Air Force,” Trainer said. “What are you, the flunky misfits sent out to fight the little purple men?”
He didn’t blink at the insult. “We’re a special unit created under orders of the president to combat the aliens, sir.”
“Is that so? Then can you take this doofus off my hands? He’s really annoying.” He pointed at Ho.
Ho threw his hands over his head in a fit. “I accept that offer. I’m tired of babysitting you.”
“I don’t know,” Colon said. “I wouldn’t want to break up your budding friendship.”
Staring at his hard jaw line and the thin scar alongside his right eye, Trainer realized where he’d seen Colon before. He was the head of Patrick Air Force Base along the Indian River Lagoon. Trainer had sent Colon’s office dozens of letters pleading with him to refrain from jet takeoffs and landings during sea turtle nesting season. Never once did the scientist get a response. They’d neglected the lagoon’s health until the marine animals were empowered by the aliens to fight back. Trainer would have called it poetic justice if the invasion hadn’t killed the animals and poisoned the lagoon in the process.
As they neared the taped off area guarded by soldiers, Trainer asked, “The president chose you, the man who allowed the invasion on his doorstep, to prevent it from happening again?”
Colon clenched his lips for a few seconds and kept his eyes on the focused expressions of his soldiers. Then he turned to Trainer. “And I’d ask why they signed you up after you let the aliens take over a lagoon you studied more closely than anybody.”
“You think they caught me by surprise? I always knew something was wrong. The government didn’t listen. Heck, they arrested me!”
“You couldn’t find convincing evidence. Now we both have a second chance. Here’s yours.” Colon signaled for the field medics to remove the black tarps from the two bodies on the lake shore.
Trainer had seen plenty of animal attack victims, but nothing like this. The skeletons were an adult and a preteen. They had their flesh chewed to the bone like a turkey leg gnawed on by a dog. Their noses and ears were ripped off, showing an unusual craving for cartilage. The face of the young one, a boy of about 11, was mostly intact. However, the adult had his jaw bone missing, deep gashes all over his face and his eyes mashed into their sockets. The ribs were cracked, with a deep puncture wound in the younger one. The femurs were snapped. Most of the finger bones were missing.
“Oh God.” Ho crumbled to his knees.
The lightweight probably hadn’t seen a human corpse outside a movie or photograph. Trainer had seen plenty of weeks-old, chewed up animal carcasses, although never comparable to this.
“This isn’t the work of a human being,” Colon said. “Could an animal attack explain this?”
“Gators take big bites, not a bunch of small ones. And they like to crush bone and swallow large chunks, not carefully lick up every ounce of flesh off the bone,” Trainer said. “A pack of wild dogs or coyotes might do something like that, but they would scatter the bones all over the place. Where exactly did you find the bodies?”
“In the water,” Colon replied. “Their family reported them missing after they didn’t return from a fishing trip. The sheriff’s officers dove into the lake and found them, along with a fishing rod and a knife. We’ve only found fragments of their clothes. So far there are no signs of the flesh that was removed.”
“You won’t find any,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “This fella doesn’t leave any leftovers on his plate.”
Trainer slipped on gloves and examined the two halves of the adult femur. Only a few strands of flesh and tendon remained. The cutting instrument was near the sharpness of a knife. It hadn’t been sawed. The bone had been sliced through, and he saw why.
“This was about hunger. Ravenous hunger,” Trainer said. “Our killer sucked out the bone marrow like a caveman.”
He fretted what a monster like this would do to the many species of deer in Florida. He hadn’t seen reports of any animals getting attacked in this way, although suc
h incidents often went unreported when they occurred in remote areas.
“So if no known animal did this, then what did?” Colon asked.
Trainer saw by the trepidation on the soldier’s face that Colon dreaded the answer. Everybody wanted the invasion to be over. Denial might help you sleep at night, but it won’t keep you safe from what lurks in the darkness.
“Something formed in the lagoon during the invasion,” Trainer replied. “I found several mutants that survived. None of them have signs of alien infection. They seem to function under the brain power of the original animals.”
“Yeah, but the mutants we found were helpless, most of them anyway,” said Ho, tapping away on his tablet. “Their bodies weren’t meant to survive without the alien host supporting them.”
“But what if one figured out how to survive?” Trainer asked. “These lakes feed the whole Everglades. This could contaminate the water flow in half the state.”
“What makes you think it’s a free-willed mutant and not one under alien control?” asked Colon, who had winced at mention of the aliens.
“Ignoring your blatant disregard for Florida’s most precious environment, I’ll point out the obvious for you,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “There are no purple marks on their flesh – no telltale signs of alien bacteria. Now look at the patterns. When the aliens kill someone, they carefully remove the critical organs and always, always, take the head with the brain in it. That was the most valuable part. Here, they shredded the organs and left the brains. Frenzied force over precision.”
Colon drew his weary eyes away from the corpses and drew a deep breath. “You’ve got a point, sir. I’d like to you write up some notes so my team can recognize the difference.”
Trainer nodded. A mutant that devours people who stray too close to the fragile lakes underpinning Florida’s ecosystem, not a bad idea, Trainer thought. He’d petitioned the government for years to enact more protections for these lands and to prohibit vehicles and camping. Show photos of these corpses around and no government ban would be necessary.
Still, Trainer had a feeling the mutant wouldn’t stop with people. If it couldn’t find humans, such a beast would snare any creature it could catch. It would probably target larger animals first, upsetting the balance of the food chain. It had already traveled over 35 miles from the lagoon, probably heading west in the man-made canal near Sebastian. He shuddered to think where it went next.
“Do the right thing for Florida this time,” The Lagoon Watcher told Colon. “Don’t let this monster ravage our environment any further.”
“You were about to say not to let it butcher the state’s people either, right sir?” Colon asked.
“Yeah, something like that.”
Colon furrowed his brow. “I don’t care what your motivation is. We can both agree that we need to catch this mutant. Where would it go?”
“Where do you think? It’s off to the theme parks hoping to cut in line at the roller coasters.”
Colon snickered. Then he took another look at the bodies and his face turned sober. “You know what would happen if everyone learned that mutants survived and strayed from the lagoon. Half of Central Florida would up and leave. The tourists would disappear.”
“Sounds great, doesn’t it?” the Lagoon Watcher said. “Finally, the environment would return to its natural state. I have to ask myself who would do more damage, one mutant or millions of carbon-blasting, trash-dumping, toilet-pumping consumers.”
“Since a full-scale evacuation is not called for, we’re forming a two mile perimeter around this lake. We’re discretely going to suggest that civilians turn back, but no big announcement yet. I lived through one mass panic and I don’t want to trigger another unless I absolutely have to. I’d warn people to be on the lookout for our suspect, but I have no idea what it looks like.”
“I do have an idea, sir.” Ho looked ashen as he held up his tablet. “The biology team ran a projection of the growth patterns in the alien DNA they extracted from the infected animals. If their DNA could incubate and develop, they believe the aliens would look like this.”
The screen showed a diagram of a creature with four heavy limbs, each with rows of sharp tendrils of varying lengths. It had a long neck but nothing that resembled a mouth, at least what a mouth should look like.
“Zoom in on the tendrils,” Trainer said.
Ho spread his fingers across the screen to enlarge it. The tips of the tendrils hooked inward, like a spear meant to catch fish. Trainer reexamined the puncture wounds on the adult’s face, then the stab wounds in the boy’s ribs. They all hooked at an angle.
“Looks like we have a picture of the suspect after all,” Trainer said.
14
It started as a walk. Then it became a run. Moni broke into a sprint, racing over the rocky desert at a speed no human should reach for more than a matter of seconds. She channeled her pained regret into her legs as they propelled her away from the world she’d nearly destroyed. And away from the last person alive who made her feel human.
She headed into the wasteland, surrounded by windswept dirt, stones and prickly desert shrubs. A normal person would have fainted from the triple digit heat. It soothed her rough skin, as it had a similar temperature of the hot undersea vents of the aliens’ lost home world, minus the moisture of course.
Moni approached a long formation of chunky black rocks. The ancient lava flow had formed a permanent scab on the land’s surface. Lined with dried out scrubs, the malpais snaked through the terrain like an alien landscape deposited upon the brown earth. That’s what her existence had become. Everywhere she roamed she was the lava, scalding the land and burning all alive.
Shaking her head and ignoring her sore heels as they propelled off the rocks, she picked up the pace.
So many people she knew had died because of her. Her hand trembled from the muscle memory of the gun’s kick when she’d fired, murdering Detective Sneed in cold blood. Yes, she’d stopped him from killing the infected girl, but he was trying to halt the invasion. She’d made that decision in an instant, without hesitation, eagerly in fact. Moni couldn’t blame the aliens’ influence. Only her conscience could make that trigger finger move, and then fire again and again. She had to live with that, and the consequences.
When Aaron had slept during the trip, Moni tuned the radio to NPR and listened to interviews with survivors of the invasion. A woman had talked about her sister and her two children, a boy and a girl, who were driving over the causeway when it exploded. They had been headed back from a day at the beach to celebrate the boy’s ninth birthday. The whole family had been waiting for them at the house for a surprise party. They never arrived.
All so Moni could protect the refugees of a dead planet.
She came to a sudden stop at the edge of a massive crater. About 300 feet deep, the depression stretched over a mile wide. It had cliffs of crumbling basalt, the hardened remnants of lava. The bottom was scrubland with a small mound in the middle. Examining the ground as she trolled along, she found green shards of peridot and black nuggets of obsidian. Ages ago, the Earth had blown apart from volcanic pressure, creating a maar. What better signifier? The only way the aliens could survive on this planet is to obliterate a swath of our environment and remold it into their own.
“See how deep you can go underground, and still no water for you?” she taunted.
Her back muscles seized up in a spasm, making her hunch over. Her stomach shriveled in agony. The world started spinning. The hole, the expansive sky, the mountains looming in the distance, the rocks at her feet, all whirled by.
“Do not dare deny us! We didn’t travel this far to let our species die forever. You will find us a new sanctuary or we’ll make sure you never see Aaron’s face again.”
She tried screaming to shut them out of her head. Not a sound emerged from her parched throat. Moni brought the nozzle of the gas can to her lips. The fumes, once so repulsive, were as appetizing as fresh coffee. She chugged
the gasoline down. She waited for the crippling aftermath. There was none. Her body had adapted, becoming more like them.
“If you want to keep your species alive, you better treat my body better because I’m all you’ve got. Now let’s take a little hike. You could handle space. What’s a little desert?”
Moni circled around the maar and headed west toward a mountain range in the distance. It could be a few miles, or it could be 20, she had no idea. It looked bare and dark, certainly not populated. Coming from Florida, she was used to seeing grass and trees everywhere. The vegetation was so virulent back home it spouted between cracks in the sidewalk and climbed the sides of buildings. Here, the sickly scrubs were desperate for rare rainfall. The sight of a green-leafed tree was like a miracle. Prickly cacti were as good as it got. While in Florida it was hard to drive far without bumping into rows of houses or condos, here there was nothing. Even as she scaled the mountainside, weaving between black volcanic rocks, she couldn’t spot another living soul. This view looked much the same as it had 5,000 years ago. Only the higher content of CO2 in the air had changed.
Moni reached the top of the mountain and halted in her tracks. The western sky was awash in orange as the sun descended behind the next set of peaks. A purple hue crept into the clouds overhead. The brightest stars twinkled. A cool wind made Moni shudder, a warning of the chilly night coming. She sat atop a rock and folded her legs so her throbbing heels were finally free of the rocky ground. From there she watched the sun disappear and the moon emerge.
For the first time in her life she sat alone in the dark with only the faint light provided by nature, a sliver of a crescent moon and the stars. No flashlight or headlights or even a cell phone. The darkness smothered the landscape, allowing only shadowy outlines of the hills remaining. She was free to move, she just couldn’t see where. She could be on the edge of a steep cliff, or beside a stabbing cactus and have no idea. Moni sat still and let her thoughts drift. She imaged the sound of Aaron’s voice. He always said something to lighten the mood. She let his laughter fill her head, making her smile. How could she ever see him again? Aaron deserved a real woman, one who could touch him, who could kiss him. Moni deserved the cold, lonely night.
Silence the Living (Mute Book 2) Page 8
