Ho chuckled and nodded in agreement.
Riggs took a few seconds to gather himself. “Yeah, I think I remember you. I’m sorry.” He shook his head and gazed at a photo on his wall of him arm-and-arm with fellow divers beside a map of the underwater caves that they completed. “It’s just that what I saw yesterday, it garbled up everything in my head. I’ve been diving these springs for four decades, since I was a little boy. I’ve been down there with giant gators. I saw up close tiger sharks when I dove in the gulf. But this…” He wiped his hand over his mouth. “It doesn’t belong here.”
Trainer exchanged glances with Pierre. The TERU member nodded in appreciation. Trainer had recommended that they come all the way up here to check out Riggs’ story. They hadn’t found any leads on the mutant since the sinkhole attack.
“Florida is full of things that don’t belong, invasive species like Burmese pythons and Australian pines,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “Have you noticed any changes in water quality? Any fish kills or unusual carcasses?”
“No, it wasn’t that.” Riggs paused for a deep breath. Blue eyes that were always cool and confident turned mortified. “I saw this thing, I can’t describe it.” He stopped cold. Riggs ran his hand over his eyes and mouth before continuing. “They were Russian tourists, a young married couple. Lev and Nadya were their names. Told me they went diving in the Black Sea before.”
“The Black Sea? With all the sludge in there from the pollution, I wouldn’t recommend it,” Trainer said.
“Not to say that I’ve been there, but it’s not exactly the Caribbean.” Pierre the Navy SEAL smiled at the mention of the waters where he grew up.
“Which is exactly why this couple wanted to explore our crystal-clear fresh waters,” Riggs said. “I rented them equipment, instructed them for nearly a full day, and then yesterday I let them dive on their own. I made them promise not to enter the expert areas. The signs would tell them not to go any further. I waited for them on the boardwalk on the edge of the spring. They only had two hours of air in their tanks, tops. When they had five minutes left and I didn’t see their flashlights, I knew something was wrong, and I started suiting up. By the time I had my gear on they were well past two hours down there. I should have reacted faster.”
He grabbed a longneck and threw back some beer, chugging it a little too hard like a nervous smoker inhaling. Riggs finished it and stared at the bottle like he hated the thing. He nudged it toward the center of the table.
“I got this feeling, like I shouldn’t go down there. It made no sense, you know, because I’ve done it thousands of times. Nerves are for rookies, right?” Riggs glanced at Trainer.
“Or for veterans who sense something’s wrong,” he replied.
“I felt something wrong, alright, and I could feel it the moment I entered the water. I started through the lip of the cave and quickly found their dive reel. When I tugged on it, it felt too light. No one pulled back. I reeled the line in. That brought me the dive belt it’d been clipped to, nothing else. I swam deeper into the cave. First I saw a flipper. That worried me. Then I saw a mask and regulator still attached to the air hose. At that point, I knew this was a mission to recover their bodies.” He paused, clasping his hands together before his mouth and staring into nothingness. “I should have turned back at the first sign. A torn piece of wet suit, smeared with blood. Then the second mask, bashed in, twisted. The air tanks bubbling, leaking oxygen into the water. I kept going until I found them, and it. The thing had both of them in its arms, all four arms. The way it gorged made a gator feeding frenzy look civilized. It ate not just out of hunger, but out of hate.”
Riggs drew a deep breath and bowed his head.
Ho, that insensitive dolt, showed him his tablet with a rendering of the mutant. “Did it look anything like this?”
Trainer elbowed some sense into his ribs, but it was too late.
“Holy shit! That’s it!” Riggs instinctively backed his chair away. “Was it an alien?”
“Show some sensitivity and put that away.” Trainer shoved Ho’s tablet against his chest. He should have tossed it out the window. He turned to Riggs. “It’s not an alien. Let’s say it’s their butt-ugly cousin. How’d you make it out of there?”
“It was so consumed with feeding that it didn’t notice me,” he replied. “Trust me, I didn’t linger long.”
“Too bad you couldn’t recover the bodies.” Ho said. “We could examine them as—”
“There’s nothing to examine. The time’s for action,” the Lagoon Watcher said. “This aquifer supplies drinking water to most of Florida, not to mention parts of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. It nurtures the animals in those freshwater ecosystems. If this mutant contaminates the aquifer, it would be a catastrophe, even worse than the loss of the Indian River Lagoon. Our state would become a tropical desert.”
Pierre, whose other homeland, Haiti, already had its water supply and forests ruined, shot forward in his chair. “I’ll give Brigadier General Colon the news right away. I suspect we’ll be strapping on flippers soon.” He turned to Riggs. “Can you show me where you last saw the thing?”
“On a map only,” Riggs replied. “No way in hell I’m going back down there.”
Damn, the man just gave up his lifetime of work, Trainer thought. That made the thing he was about to volunteer for really stupid.
“I’m coming with your team,” Trainer told Pierre.
“Listen, Mr., uh, Lagoon Watcher, I know you want to save the habitat, but this isn’t clean up the shoreline day.” The SEAL glared at the frazzle-haired scientist like a naïve hipster. “This is war. You’ve seen how this thing treats peoples’ bodies. Leave this one to us.”
“I don’t doubt that you can fight it,” said Trainer, although he questioned whether these soldiers, no matter how elite, could succeed where a whole Air Force base failed. “But are you prepared for the other threat? Take a look around you. This is the perfect place for the aliens to unleash their bacteria. A massive underwater cave system that’s extremely difficult to access, there’s no more secure hiding spot. The ability to follow the current of underwater rivers for miles beneath our feet and tap virtually every source of ground water in Florida, what better way to spread the infection?”
“There’s no evidence the bacteria is here,” Ho said.
“No there isn’t, and that’s why I want to go down there with them and run some tests to make sure it’s not here,” Trainer said. “Because if it is, we’ve got ourselves a larger crisis.”
An ill-looking Riggs slouched in his chair. Pierre told Trainer that he’d request Colon’s permission to bring him along for the dive.
Trainer flashed a bittersweet smile. While held captive in jail, he’d become a Lagoon Watcher without a lagoon. This time he’d be on the front lines. Nothing down there could stop him.
Riggs probably had similar feelings about diving every day into the waters that he knew as well as his living room. Now Riggs knew better than to pursue a predator into its lair. The difference between bravery and bravado is mighty thin.
35
Moni normally loved cooking. It brought back some of her fondest memories, even now as she roared across the desert on her ATV hurling dust and rocks through the air behind her as she went in search of ingredients of a sort. Her mother had cut the chicken and passed it to her as she stood on a chair so she could reach the counter. She’d dipped it in egg and then a plate of flour. One time Moni had scratched an itch on her face and her mama started cracking up. She didn’t get why until her mom held up a reflective spoon and showed Moni her white powdery beard. They laughed together until father came home, slamming the door so hard it shook the picture frames on the wall.
At the dinner table her dad took one look at the chicken and remarked, “What the fuck were you smoking when you made this? I asked for breaded chicken, not ugly-ass, half-breaded bird.”
The magic happened when they could get away from her father, like when her m
other took her shopping the day before Thanksgiving. Moni got so excited when her mom let her pick out a nice, fat turkey. Her mama would roll the cart down the aisles and have Moni grab the fixings she called for; corn, collard greens and sweet potatoes for a wicked pie.
Moni wondered what her mother thought of her now looking down from heaven as she gathered an entirely different type of ingredients for this meal.
Heading north from the Potrillo Mountains, she crossed Interstate 10 and stuck to the open terrain, with her ATV launching her up hills. She caught major air, like a roller coaster propelling off the tracks. Remembering how her mother would jerk the shopping cart around and make motor sounds, Moni smiled and imagined her mama telling her to hold on tight. As she approached Leasburg Dam State Park and the Rio Grande, vegetation sprang out of the land. The knee-high bushes and puffy trees were nothing like Florida’s overgrown forests, but they were a jungle compared to the barren land where she spent the morning. Some of the bushes bloomed yellow flowers. The greenery clung to the river, the lifeline that allowed mammals such as deer and prairie dogs to cluster here.
Moni crossed a winding two-lane road and parked the ATV near an incline along the bank of the Rio Grande. She surveyed the waters as they flowed south to the city of Las Cruces.
Don’t fall in or they’re all dead.
She bounced off her heels and got a running start. Just before the edge of the river, Moni leapt with everything she had. At first it seemed like she’d keep ascending forever, then the water started coming closer underneath her as she neared the east bank of the river. Moni stretched out her legs. They hit solid ground. Not breaking stride, Moni sprinted towards the mountains, big piles of sand dotted with scrubs. Up she went, her thighs pumping. About a mile from the road, she found it, a huge gash in the earth. The massive pit had been dug into the mountainside in search of iron ore, and they had found plenty, according to the information she looked up on her satellite phone. Now, how to extract iron deposits with her bare hands?
“Give us! Give us! Give us! It’s right under your feet. Don’t you smell it?”
A metallic aroma filled her nostrils, enticing her almost as much as her mother’s red velvet cupcakes. Her mouth salivated uncontrollably as she approached the source. It was more than mouth watering, it was mouth flooding. Her glands gushed until she had to close her trap to avoid spilling infected saliva upon the ground. With no option besides breathing through her nose, she descended into the hole following the scent of iron. She reached a place where the hillside had been cleft away. Her nose led her to a chunk of metallic rock, but it was lodged in there tight with a whole mound atop it. Even with a pickax, it would take backbreaking work to mine out.
Her swollen saliva glands squirted more fluid into her mouth. Moni’s lips parted and some dripped out. She slurped the saliva back in and covered her mouth with her hand.
“Stop it! Do you want to feed or not?” she asked them.
“Let us go and we will.”
“Only if you immediately return to my body, every single cell of you.”
“Of course we will. It’s so dry out here, there’s nothing to keep us alive outside of your body.”
Nothing that they would admit to.
What Moni did next couldn’t be described as very ladylike. It certainly wasn’t good table manners. The acid saliva she sprayed on the rock ate into the sediments around it at the direction of the microscopic alien cyborgs. Within minutes, the iron ore came loose with edges as smooth as a laser cut. The same precision the aliens had used to sever heads.
Moni held out her finger. The liquid oozed from the rock to her skin, coloring it purple. She sucked her digit clean, depositing the aliens and their bacteria back into her body. Closing her eyes, she listened for their mental signature in the rocks. She didn’t move until she was sure they all had returned.
Now she knew how to keep them on their best behavior. Feed them. If she did that, perhaps she’d get strong enough to fight whoever else they possessed. They were playing coy, not answering her questions about it, but she knew something or someone out there had become their host. The fact that it hadn’t directly confronted her yet meant it was gathering strength, feasting on the resources of the land until it could overwhelm her. She better cut it down before it reaches its peak. Otherwise there’d been no one to protect these towns, especially the one life the aliens knew she valued most of all.
After jumping the river with the iron ore in her backpack and strapping it to her ATV, Moni headed south for the East Potrillo Mountains. She kept her mental senses acute. Soon after crossing the malpais of black, ancient lava she felt it. Those weren’t animals. They had coherent thoughts, in Spanish. She didn’t sense the presence of the aliens in them, but she couldn’t be sure from so far away. Only migrants or drug runners would braze this dusty oven on a blazing day like this.
Moni parked her ATV on the far side of a mountain and hiked to the top with her binoculars. Gazing down into the valley, she spotted a pickup truck. It bounded over the rough terrain, the eight Hispanic immigrants in the back clutching the sides so they didn’t catapult out. They knew the smugglers wouldn’t stop for any of them, even the children. The little ones were thirsty. The driver and his smuggler partner in the cab had seized their water for themselves. Moni could help them. She had some water in her cave.
“You would give them our water? You forget that we’re in this body together and we need this. Either you evolve with us, or we die together.”
She hoped they were bluffing, but she couldn’t gamble anymore. Moni headed back to her ATV. She had a way of harming those she wished to help, yet she bit her lip as she felt a young girl’s thirst and heard her inner cries.
Moni scaled the mountain and reached her cave, the same one she killed the infected coyote in not long ago. Offering her a hideout from the occasional border patrol drone, the cave had plenty of room for her supplies, her sleeping bag and her defacto kitchen – a bath tub. Aaron had bought as much as they could fit on her ATV. They’d plugged up the drain so it had no leaks. The white porcelain wasn’t glamorous, but she didn’t plan on any company, not human company anyway.
She started her stew by emptying a jug of water and then several gallons of gasoline into the tub. As she dropped in the iron ore, she recalled how her mom once stopped her from pouring chocolate syrup in the pot roast to sweeten it. Mom promised she’d take Moni out for a sundae later, as long as she didn’t tell dad. He hated his house-captive wife spending his money on junk that “rotted the teeth.”
Stripping naked in the cool air of the dark cave, Moni wished she could talk to her mom now. Would she understand why she was doing this to her body? She raised her to become a strong woman, not a half-breed dependent on the tyrants in her bloodstream. Mama had told Moni she needed a man who respected her and would stand by her. Moni understood, without her mother spelling it out, that she meant the opposite of her father. She only wished her mother could meet Aaron. Then she’d know her daughter found the right one. By taking this step, she’d become less human, less compatible with Aaron, physically at least. Whatever the alien nanotech would do with her body here couldn’t be undone by Aaron, or anyone.
“The choice has already been made. You stepped into our waters in Florida. You swallowed our pill. It’s already too late to return to humankind. Take the next step with us. Grow stronger.”
“I’m not doing this for you. I’ll do whatever it takes to survive out here, and make sure I’m the only host. You can transform my body, but you can’t steal my soul.”
Moni dipped her toe into the water. Immediately, it sizzled. She settled into the tub. Her head submerged. She counted to five, and opened her mouth, pretending the liquid was air. It felt better than air, more natural and soothing for her lungs. Soon, the buzzing started in her stomach. It swept down her arms to the tips of her fingers. They gathered, squishing against the underside her skin, soaking it until it practically liquefied. Her skin felt like a wra
pping of tar between the bubbling water and her raw muscles. Through bioleaching, the bacteria extracted the iron from the rocks and oxidized it with the sulfur of the gasoline. The process contaminated the water with hydrochloric acid strong enough to melt human flesh, but not hers.
The acid soothed her skin like bath oil. It emboldened her, stimulating her muscles and forging her tendons into pistons. The weak keratin of her fingernails dissolved. New nails grew in their place, ones gray with solid iron. She pressed them against her palm and, with minimal pressure, drew purple blood. Even though her skin was still malleable, Moni had the feeling her new nails could claw through solid rock with ease.
Her gums grew sore. Moni pushed her tongue against her teeth. They wiggled, then swayed, all of them. One by one, her teeth popped out of her gums, from her incisors to her molars. Her gummy mouth held several dozen teeth. She slipped her finger into her mouth and tried pressing one back into place. Fruitless. Moni spit them out like olive seeds and let them settle on the bottom of the tub. No sooner had she done that then her gum line hardened. New teeth emerged. They were sharper than her previous set, and firm as brass knuckles. Iron.
At least I won’t need a knife to cut my steak.
She had a feeling they wanted her biting something else besides cooked food.
Deciding they’ve made enough changes to her body for one day, Moni arose and hacked the acidic water out of her lungs. She stepped onto a thick rug. As the acid dripped from her body, it singed the rug, but not all the way through. Rubbing her bare arms, Moni shivered as she eyed the tub. The bathwater appeared so tranquil, inviting. Yet it contained not just deadly acid but the little soldiers who would rip her planet apart. Any critter wandering into this cave might mistake it for drinking water and get infected. She couldn’t very well pour the toxic mix into the dirt and let it seep into the groundwater.
Moni grabbed a blue tarp and wrapped it around the tub. Using ropes, she sealed it tight, preserving the mix for later in case she needed more rejuvenation. A sudden pounding rocked her head, knocking her to her knees.
Silence the Living (Mute Book 2) Page 18
