Minutes to Burn (2001)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The forest alone held secrets. Treetops dusted with mist. Strange calls from unseen birds. Large rocks that rumbled and walked away on tor-toise legs.

  A vermilion flycatcher swooped between the leaves, a bright red dart in the shady understory, and Tucker grinned, pointing and looking over at Savage. But Savage wasn't there. Tucker spun to his right, where he'd last seen him. Savage let out a high-pitched whistle and Tucker turned again. His reddish beard shaped in a smile, Savage stood five yards off behind him. A tiny star spider scurried across a leaf inches from his face.

  Tucker ran his tongue along the inside of his lip. "Didn't see you walk over there."

  "I didn't. I floated." Savage shot him a quick wink. "Why don't I take point for a while?" Tucker nodded his consent, but Savage had already turned and headed off into the foliage. Tucker followed him into the shadows.

  Not a trace remained of their casual, off-duty attitudes. They moved like two legs of a single animal--always maintaining space and close-ness, forging ahead with a consistency of pace and movement. Savage's shirt was soaked through with sweat, the sleeves clinging to his biceps when he swung his arms. He fell into a trance of sorts, letting his eyes blur so they took in the plants and birds and dappled shadows.

  The parts of the creature's mouth bristled eagerly in anticipation. She sensed the presence of something living with her antennae and from the subtle vibrations of the ground. She rotated her head so that she could view her surroundings directly through the center of her compound eye, where her vision was sharpest. Her binocular vision enabled her acute depth of field perception.

  The approaching prey triggered special receptors in her head, and she sent out nerve impulses, expertly gauging the distance and angle of her impending strike.

  Underfoot, the clay gave way to mud, Savage's boots making a wet sucking noise when he pulled them free. He slowed, the span of his shoul-ders a green stroke against the cooler green of the forest. His hand flickered out to his side. It moved just three inches in the dim light, but Tucker halted immediately. Lowering his foot, Tucker eased his weight down gradually, even after his boot struck the mud.

  They stood in perfect stillness for a long time before even daring to turn their heads and look around. Savage gazed at the line of trees, his eyes fighting to adjust to the shadows and small patches of intense sun-light. He backed up to Tucker, his blade out and hanging loose at his side. He moved slowly, making no sound save the brush of his cammies. He halted next to Tucker. They waited, listening in the breeze.

  "There's something there," Savage said softly. His face was slick with the humidity, dark with sweat at the sides of his head along the edge of the bandanna.

  He and Tucker stood side by side, breathing in unison. They stared ahead at the shadows, the trunks of the trees, the waving leaves. Some-thing wasn't right up ahead, but Savage couldn't put his finger on it.

  The sky cracked with lightning, followed quickly by thunder. They heard the rain before they saw it, pattering atop the leaves of the canopy. It filtered down to them slowly, trickling through the network of tree-tops and branches. The air around them split in several narrow falls of water. "What do you think?" Tucker whispered.

  Savage looked ahead again, but the surroundings were losing focus. "The rain's gonna cut visibility and the ground'll go to shit. Even more."

  "Any bears or anything like that?"

  Savage shook his head. "No predators. Just a hawk or two, a harmless snake. Nothing dangerous in here."

  Tucker shook off a chill. "Guess we just spooked."

  Savage reached out a hand, letting a stream splash onto his palm. "Been known to happen," he said. He glanced back into the forest, the air gray and heavy with rain. "Let's see if those slippers made it back to base yet."

  He kept the lead on the way back.

  Chapter 32

  Base camp was set by the time Cameron, Derek, and Rex returned, the five tents spotting the pasture. The sky over the forest was clear now; the rainfall had stopped as quickly as it had begun, never straying beyond the high altitude side of the transition zone. The grass around the base camp and the canvas tents were wet.

  Since they were short on white fuel for the hurricane lamps, Tucker, Diego, and Justin cleared a fire pit. There was plenty of wood to burn, and in addition to providing light, a fire would make a good gathering site. Finding a few trees that had fallen in the recent earthquake, they'd rolled over the broken segments of trunk to serve as benches. Then, they'd torn up the grass within the ring of logs to ensure the fire wouldn't spread, leaving only a circle of dirt.

  Tank had fallen asleep sitting on the tortoise, which was now walking slowly toward a mud wallow. His boots dragged along the ground, his head lolling with each of the tortoise's tedious steps. He'd accidentally left an empty cruise box open beside his tent during the rainfall; it had caught the water running off the tent roof in its waterproof liner, filling with water.

  Szabla shadowboxed behind her tent. Savage whittled something into the bark of a nearby quinine tree. He didn't bother to look over as Cameron, Rex, and Derek approached. Though she'd been looking for-ward to seeing him, Cameron shot Justin a stern glance as he approached, to stop him from greeting her warmly.

  The team circled up around the fire pit, pulling out their meals, ready to eat. Sealed in thick brown plastic bags, the MREs were high-energy, high-protein, and easy to prepare. Savage sliced the top of the tough plastic with his Death Wind and slid the contents out onto the ground-- a plastic spoon, a vacuum-sealed cookie bar, a tiny Tabasco bottle, apple jelly in a tube, cocoa beverage powder, vacuum-sealed crackers and tube cheese, cardboard boxes holding pouches of potatoes au gratin and ham omelet, and a packet containing gum, coffee grounds, matches, sugar, salt, and a few pieces of toilet paper for when the need arose, as Justin often put it, to "take a squeeze."

  A long, thin plastic heat bag warmed up when exposed to water. Sav-age filled it from his canteen, slid the omelet pouch inside, stuffed the whole thing back into the cardboard casing, and set it at a tilt against a nearby rock.

  Tank lay flat to rest his intercostals, his hands laced across the back of his neck. Justin was already digging into his meal, spooning mushy bar-becue pork into his mouth. Rex watched him with disgust until Szabla tossed him a heated MRE pouch.

  Rex glanced at the carton. "Tuna with noodles? You expect me to eat this?"

  "Sorry, princess," Szabla said, squeezing a tube of cheese onto a cracker. "We're outta lobster."

  "What chemicals are used to heat this crap?" Rex asked angrily, reaching for Szabla's heater bag. Szabla slapped his hand, and he withdrew it, surprised.

  "Doubt they're biodegradable, Doc, if that's your concern," Savage said through a mouthful of cookie bar.

  "Heaters and processed food." Rex shook his head. "So much waste. Did you know geothermal energy sources could provide the world's energy twenty times over?"

  "Fascinating," Szabla said.

  "But what do we have instead? What legacy do we leave? Ozone depletion, acid rain, anthropogenic emissions, industrial pollution, nuclear waste, urban smog, high-altitude cooling, increasing global mean surface temperature, fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, defor-estation. We're like children. Stupid, vicious children." Rex paused, exas-perated. "What's next?"

  "The Red Sox'll win the World Series." Szabla leaned forward, forked a hunk of tuna noodles from Rex's pouch, and ate it. Tank grabbed the pouch from Rex and tilted it back over his open mouth, emptying it.

  Derek stuck his spoon into his apple jelly tube and turned it upside down like a Popsicle before throwing it aside. Cameron eyed the tube in the grass. "Diet?" she asked.

  Derek ran a hand over his stubble, and Cameron noticed how gaunt he looked. "Yeah," he said. "Need to slim down for swimsuit season."

  Diego stood quietly and picked up the discarded tube, setting it in a trash bag. Cameron watched him, but the others didn't seem to notice. Rex picked up another MRE and turned it upside down,
searching for the opening.

  Pale yellow tinged faintly with green, a sulfur butterfly flew a lurching figure eight overhead. It lit on Rex's shoulder, but he did not notice it. Diego reached over, trapping the butterfly's wings between the lengths of two fingers. Ever so delicately, he grasped the butterfly's fragile body with his other hand, then blew gently on the wings so they parted, revealing their full span. With a graceful flick of his wrist, he released the butterfly to the air, and it fluttered off. He glanced over at Cameron and smiled.

  "Justin," Derek said, "After lunch, I want you to swim out and retrieve your trauma bag and the other gear we discussed. See if you can figure some way to anchor closer to shore for when we take off in four days. Get back here by 1500. That give you enough time?" Justin snapped his head down in a nod. He was the best swimmer on the squad, and he prided himself on his specialty.

  "The rest of us'll break into buddy pairs and sweep the island. Once we find the other five sites, then we can focus on setting those last GPS units, getting the water samples Rex needs, and clearing out."

  Grabbing the thin cardboard box, Savage slid out the contents, then pulled the warm omelet pouch from the heater. He sliced the top open and dumped in the cocoa powder, then the Tabasco, stirring the whole concoction together. He raised a spoonful of the mush, white shot through with red and chocolate swirls, to his mouth. "We gonna make it back for New Year's?" he asked. "I got a stripper name of Mary Anne, said she'd get me firing both pistons if I can swing through Boseman."

  Justin caught Cameron's eye and made a jacking-off gesture with his fist.

  Rex stood, picking up another antenna. "You can consider that your incentive."

  Rex took Savage and Tucker to sweep the northwest quadrant of the island. Between the dark lava beach, the 103-meter rift, and the wide lava plain, he hoped to locate at least two sites. The hike from the Scalesia zone down the western coast was a gradual one. The transition zone slowly faded into the parched browns and grays of the arid zone--the stout plugs of Candelabra cacti, the dry, chalky ground underfoot.

  At one turn, a land iguana lay across the trail. Rex stepped carefully over it, but as Savage passed, he flipped it over with the toe of his boot. It landed on its back and squirmed over to find its feet before beating a sluggish retreat. Tucker laughed, and Rex turned and looked at Savage angrily.

  Rex signaled Savage forward, and Savage came, tossing the Death Wind at a cactus. It stuck with a thunk, and he pried it out, twisting it and sending a chunk of spines flying.

  "What the hell was that?"

  Savage lifted the bandanna off his head and used it to mop his brow. "Survival of the fittest," he said. He flexed, curling an arm up Popeye-style.

  Rex could feel anger flushing his face, and he fought to keep his voice steady. "That animal is the most magnificently adapted creature on this island."

  Savage cleaned beneath his thumbnail with the end of the blade, tracing it gently along the darkened line. "Not anymore," he said.

  Rex shifted the bag on his shoulder. "Maybe it took two, three hun-dred thousand years for a land iguana to be born with longer claws. A random mutation. The thing is, with longer claws, the land iguana can pull the spines out of cactus pads. That meant it could eat the pads, so it had access to a wider range of food. This mutation was passed along to its offspring, which also enjoyed the benefits of these claws. Soon, they outcompeted the normal iguanas for the limited food resources on the island. They thrived, the older iguanas died out, and land iguanas with more substantial claws became the norm for the species." His cheek quivered with anger. "That, my friend, is survival of the fittest. Kicking a defenseless animal to show how big your dick is, is not."

  Savage kept his eyes on the tip of the knife beneath his fingernail. "Been thinking about how big my dick is, have you?"

  "Yes. Of course. Since I'm a homosexual, I want to copulate with every male in the vicinity. I have nothing better to do on this survey but devote my thoughts exclusively to you and your penis."

  Tucker took a step back, his foot sliding on the gravelly slope. "Whoa," he said. "You're a butt stabber?"

  Rex raised his hands. "Where the hell have you been?"

  "But you didn't...No one said anything." Tucker rubbed his hands together, squeezing his fingers.

  Rex turned around, heading down the slope toward the steaming rift. "Don't ask, don't tell," he called over his shoulder.

  The curved scar of the rift followed the island's contour, spewing sul-furous gases. The ground itself consisted of an ashy sand, which gave way here and there to sheets of newly hardened lava. The only vegetation that had taken hold were Tiquilia plants--small gray herbs growing in humps like tiny mounds of cobwebs.

  Rex stopped a good distance from the rift, studying the ornate inlay of hardened lava. Some regions were ropy and fluid, indicating a more recent flow, but others had been smoothed by thousands of years of wind and erosion. He could feel the heat rising off the lava even through his shoes. Tapping the ground with the rock hammer, he assessed its consistency.

  Savage shifted from foot to foot. Tucker squirted a dollop of sun-block into his palm and smoothed it across his face, then tied his T-shirt around his head to cut the sun.

  "I'm getting mighty tired of this shit," Savage said.

  Rex raised the Brunton compass and glanced at the reading. "That's not really my concern."

  "'Not my concern,'" Savage grumbled. "It should be your fucking concern. You got Navy SEALs here. If we wanted to lug gear and fold underwear, we would've been swabbies on USS Fuckstain. If someone's gonna pull my ass out of a nice comfortable jail cell, it could at least be for some goddamn action."

  Rex tapped the rock with his hammer, gauging the vibration. "You think you're so forceful, all of you," he said. "With your guns and your combat training. As if that does any good in a time like this. The earth is rearranging itself in Biblical proportions, and you're standing by with a handful of bullets. Correction: with no bullets." He laughed, low in his throat, and looked up. "I'm a doctor, Savage. You're a fucking Band-Aid."

  Savage stepped forward, but Tucker blocked him, laying an arm across his chest. Rex stood quickly, his arms raised defensively, glowering at Savage.

  "Don't take the bait, buddy," Tucker whispered to Savage. He patted him on the chest, and Savage took a step back.

  Savage's upper lip quivered, itching to curl up into a snarl. "Fuck this," he said. He turned, storming off down the slope past the rift.

  "FREEZE!" Rex yelled.

  Savage halted. He turned slowly, facing Rex. "What now?"

  Rex crouched and picked up a baseball-sized lump of basalt. He tossed the rock once and caught it, then threw it in a high arc toward Savage. It struck the ground about five feet past Savage in the direction he'd been heading. Breaking the thin crust of the lava and leaving a black outline in the ground, it continued down into the earth, falling through the deep cavity left where the underlying rock had dissolved and retreated. Savage waited to hear a thud when the rock struck bottom. There wasn't one. He stared at the small black hole in the ground, a pin-point opening to a massive underground cavern.

  Rex began to walk off in the opposite direction. "This way," he said.

  Chapter 33

  Cameron gasped when they crested the hill and the lagoon came into view, a disk of water nestled within a craterous swoop on the south-west margin of the island. Inlaid a mere fifty yards from the ocean, the deep green waters struck a sharp contrast to the blue beyond the narrow barrier beach. She rested her hands on her head, taking in both the breadth of the lagoon and the endless sheet of the ocean in a single glance.

  Diego paused beside her, amused, and Derek brought up the rear, lugging two canteens and wearing a kit bag like a backpack.

  "I thought Navy SEALs were not supposed to gasp," Diego said.

  The lagoon had been formed six and a half years ago, the result of a tsunami caused by the Initial Event. Its eighty-five-percent salinity was doub
le that of the ocean, caused by the continuous evaporation of the trapped waters. Due to the high salt content, only algae and shrimp sur-vived there.

  Striped with layer upon layer of compressed volcanic ash and dark black lava, the walls of the lagoon had eroded in twists and divots, leaving them dappled with smooth, rippling formations. A few pink flamin-gos stood in the shallow reaches, heads dipped upside down in the bright green water, inverted jaws sifting for food as their tough, bristled tongues suctioned water.

  The mud around the lagoon had hardened and cracked, giving it a shattered appearance--myriad pieces of a puzzle fitted but slightly spread. Between the venous cracks, the mud was smooth and white.

  A flamingo lumbered over to its young, opened its mouth, and regurgitated milk from its stomach. Cameron opened her mouth, then closed it.

  "It is difficult to get to Galapagos," Diego said. "But once you're here, it is easy to want to stay." Removing a sample jar from his pack, he hiked slowly down to the lagoon, leaving Derek and Cameron with the view.

  Cameron watched him skillfully navigate the incline before turning back to Derek. From the mats of brush to their right, a farolete rose, a four-foot orange cone of prefabricated modular rings. A navigation aid that functioned like an unmanned lighthouse, it had the seal of the Insti-tuto Oceanografico painted on its side, along with the precise geo-graphic bearings of the unit--Latitude: -0.397643, Longitude: -91.961411.

  Derek rested a boot against the farolete, and stopped dead. He was ashen, his face frozen in an expression of disbelief, amazement, and fear. Cameron stepped back quickly, following his gaze to the edge of the brush near her feet.

  Inching slowly toward her was a plump, segmented larva, its head eight inches long and rounded. Almost three feet in length, it elevated its torso off the ground, its head cocking slightly to one side. Its mandibles curved into the slit of its mouth. Gills quivered behind its head. Cameron could see her terrified expression in the glassy sheen of the larva's round eyes. She felt her heart double-beat in her chest, and her hands went slick with sweat. The larva emitted a soft, gentle coo, and Derek stumbled back, tripping over his feet and falling down.