Minutes to Burn (2001)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Pulling back the top lip of her pants pocket, Cameron glanced at the small digital clock face. A couple minutes past eleven. For now, the man-tid was trapped in the forest, needing shade. Dusk would hit at about six o'clock, which gave Cameron seven hours. In seven hours, the creature could travel wherever she wanted.

  Cameron couldn't swim out to the tuff cones for the night because the mantid might discover Justin's hiding place or fly off in search of food, taking the virus with her. And if Cameron couldn't find the remaining larva, which seemed quite likely, there was a good chance she'd have two of the things on her hands at nightfall.

  Given Justin's vulnerability and the creature's advantage at night, Cameron would have to take the offensive. The speargun was lost, but she still had three flares, and two crates of TNT. She tried to think of different traps that she could rig, but her mind came up blank. She'd never realized how much they'd counted on Tucker for demo.

  Virtually alone on an island, no gun, tracked by one of nature's most advanced predators in its own habitat. Her husband's and the island's life dependent not just on her surviving, but triumphing over the creature. Things looked bad.

  Covered with blood, hemolymph, and sweat, Cameron rose and stood on unsteady legs. She needed to eat. If she had food in her stom-ach, she'd be able to think more clearly.

  She staggered toward her old tent, her arms sore, cramps setting in through her legs. The insides of her thighs brushed with each step, sending waves of pain through her lower body. Her head felt close to exploding, her shoulder throbbed incessantly, and the cut on her calf from the freezer vent was deeper than she'd thought.

  In all likelihood, she had seven hours to live.

  She drank from the canteen until she vomited, the water tasting pure and fresh on the way back up. After that, she regulated how much she hydrated, even though the pork and rice from the MRE felt as dry as sand in her mouth. If she threw up again, she'd lose the nutrients from the meal.

  Ravenously devouring the oatmeal cookie bar, she glanced out along the edge of the forest. It took her a long time to pick out the mantid from her hiding place among the foliage. With her motionless, alert stance, she protruded just barely from the last line of trees like a gar-goyle, her head swiveling ever so slightly, keeping Cameron in view.

  Cameron lay back on the grass, propping her head up on the log so that she could keep an eye on the mantid. It was not long before she began to doze off, and when she snapped awake, she saw that the mantid had broken from cover, taking a few steps toward her.

  With a choking gasp, Cameron jumped up, waving her arms and yelling, and the mantid scrambled back to the trees. Evidently, the man-tid would risk going out in the direct sunlight only if she was assured an easy kill. Cameron's display of liveliness had saved her--the mantid couldn't afford a chase, since her energy would drain quickly in the hot sun. She knew she could just wait until dark.

  The incident reinforced Cameron's relief that Justin was buried, hid-den safely from view. It would not have taken long for the mantid to work up the courage to go after wounded prey. The adrenaline from the scare kept Cameron wired for a while, but physical exhaustion, coupled with emotional fatigue, made it hard for her not to think of napping. Sleep called her like a siren's song. She chomped down on her cheek until it bled; she bit her fingers as hard as she could across the nails; she even forced herself to stand, but still, she drifted off.

  A jolt of images thrashed through her mind--deformed babies choked and burnt and flaming, piled up in pyres and slaughterhouse mounds, twisted eyes and mouths spread in wordless, thoughtless terror. A mutated baby pulled itself from the melting mound of infant flesh, crawling on distorted limbs though it sank to the wrists. The baby's mouth stretched wide, a clown's screaming frown.

  Listing to her left so she had to stumble to recover her balance, Cameron realized that the scream was her own. Her hands struck at her face, trying to wrench the images from her eyes. Remembering where she was, she turned frantically to locate the mantid in the forest. She was gone.

  With alarm, Cameron glanced down along the forest's edge. Instinctively, she stepped back toward base camp, then she finally saw her, blending in among the balsas along the side of the road, swaying slightly in the breeze, her one good eye staring at Cameron.

  Cameron waved her arms and screamed, "I'm not asleep, you bitch. I'm awake. I'm fucking awake!"

  Cameron's wild movements again made it clear that she was not slug-gish prey. The mantid scurried back to the forest, using the trees for cover, moving with surprising speed. Cameron plucked a rock from the ground and hurled it at the mantid, but it careened harmlessly off a tree trunk several yards behind her.

  "Fuck you!" Cameron screamed. "Fuck..." She fell to her knees.

  When she closed her eyes, the deformed babies crowded her, soft-fleshed and innocent and screaming all the screams of hell. She shook her head, trying to clear the haze from her mind, then watched the man-tid fade back into the forest, the razor spikes flashing in the sunlight.

  She was going to die a slow, painful death and no one would ever know about it. She felt tears filling her eyes beneath the lids, and her chest closed in a mix of panic, frustration, and grief. She pulled Savage's knife from the back of her pants and hurled it at the log. It stuck with a thunk. She broke down sobbing for a few minutes, rocking and pressing her hands to her eyes.

  She sat for a long time before the fear started to fade, and then she started muttering to herself, running her fingers through the grass. The fear burned away, leaving only hard, hot embers of rage. Her fist snapped shut around a handful of grass.

  When the babies flashed through her mind again, she greeted them, refusing to flinch from the image. She stared at them shrieking and whining until she felt nothing, just a numb tingling across her face.

  A part of her had died. She could feel it hanging, loose weight around her heart.

  Even though Cameron remembered right where the mantid was, it took her a few moments to distinguish her from the trees. The creature came slowly into view--the angled head, the greenish-tan good eye, the smashed hull of the other. Cameron stared at the mouth that was always slightly open, a collection of protruding parts, and felt the closest thing to pure enmity she had ever felt--not a hatred fueled by emotion, but a cold, dispassionate antipathy.

  She rose to her feet and walked to her discarded MRE envelope, dig-ging out the coffee package. Ripping the top open, she poured the grounds into her mouth and chewed, taking a sip from the canteen when they started to gum up. She opened two more MREs and ate the coffee grounds from them as well.

  By the time she finished, the thin skin over her temple was pulsing with her heartbeat. She was badly burned across her shoulders and cheeks, and the insides of her ears were so sun-raw they throbbed even in the absence of touch. Through the soreness, she tested her muscles one by one. They still worked, all of them, without enough pain to debil-itate her, though her thighs were pretty badly ripped up from her slide down the trunk.

  She laced her fingers together and brought the backs of her hands across her forehead, pushing until her knuckles cracked. Ducking, she practiced two hard jabs and a right, grunting with the movement. She pulled her shoulders forward, flexing them, then settled them back. They were broad, as powerful as they'd ever been.

  The creature met her glare from the forest.

  Cameron was wide awake, so alert her leg was hammering up and down at the knee. Right now, she felt as if she could take the mantid with her bare hands and a blade, as Savage had before. Her eyes halted on the fallen balsa tree near the road. It was propped up off the ground by the boulder on which it had landed. The force of the massive trunk smashing down had been enough to send a crack through the rock.

  It had been there all along, right in front of them. The earthquake had practically shown them how to do it, how to take care of the creature.

  Cameron charged over to the explosives crates. She threw open a lid and saw the dull red
tissue paper of the TNT wrap staring back at her. She picked up one of the two-pound blocks, turning it over before her eyes. The three blocks from the air vesicle were outside near the fire pit, taped together and not yet detonated.

  The Death Wind protruded from the top of a log like an arrow, glinting in the sunlight. Slowly, she walked over and pulled it out, holding it up for a moment to see her wavering, silver reflection. She sheathed it, ramming it into the back of her pants again like a gun. With the sheath pressed against her skin and the sorrow in her heart turning to a leaden frost, she understood a part of Savage now that she had not before. She felt hard, ruthless. The mantel had been passed.

  She pulled Tucker's kit bag from his tent, digging through it and tossing his clothing and supplies over her shoulder as she searched for the manual she needed. She couldn't find it.

  The mantid watched her work.

  The other manuals were flapping along the grass and Cameron ran them down frantically, fearful she had overlooked the one she needed. She stepped on one just before it blew across the field, and when she glanced down at it, her face lightened with relief. In large stenciled letters across the front cover, it said: Tactical Demolitions Training Manual.

  Cameron ran her finger down the table of contents, flipping to the page labeled Abatis. A rough sketch showed two rows of trees felled in a crisscross pattern, blasted but still clinging to their stumps.

  The wind picked up, howling through the watchtower.

  She was ready to get down to business.

  Chapter 71

  Cameron had five hours until dark and a lot of work to get done.

  As she unwound the tape from the TNT blocks she'd retrieved from the hole, she prayed that the other larva had died somehow or that it would not emerge from metamorphosis until tomorrow. She stood a chance, however small, of surviving until 2200 with only one mantid on the island, but with two, there was no way she'd make it.

  And two could mate.

  Cameron had rigged an Abatis tree trap only once, in Iran in '03, but between her memory and the demo manual, she'd be fine. She retrieved the previously rigged TNT blocks from where she'd set them beside the fire pit and threw them in one of the explosives crates. The crates left furrows in the grass as she dragged them across the field toward the road, ignoring the pain spreading through her body like a fever.

  The mantid watched her with interest, then pulled back into the for-est, disappearing. As Cameron struggled with the heavy crates, the man-tid appeared at regular intervals, craning her neck out from different spots in the foliage along the forest's edge. She wouldn't dare come down here in the heat, not now with the sun near its peak.

  Cameron would have to hurry to get all the trees wired before dusk. She still carried the scent of the body from the freezer, carried it on the bottom of her pants and in the hardened smear on the back of her tank top. After she finished setting the Abatis, she'd have to wash all the virus-laden secretions off herself.

  She finally reached the middle of the road and dropped the end of the cruise box. It thunked to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  Carrying the blocks of TNT two at a time, she laid them beside some of the balsas lining the road. She selected ten of the taller trees on each side, including the slender quinine toward the middle of the row, spacing them out so that they were roughly five yards apart. Diego would approve of the fact that she was only blasting introduced species, she realized with mild amusement.

  Despite her aching arms and back, she went to work immediately on the twenty trees she'd chosen, aware all the time of the creature leering at her from the cover of the forest at the road's end. Whenever Cameron looked up, it took her several minutes to actually see the creature, but she could sense her immediately and instinctively.

  If she used too much TNT on a tree, she was liable to blow it straight off the stump, and she'd have much less control over which direction it fell. If the charge was too small, then the tree might not go over at all, in which case she'd be a sitting duck. In the manual, she'd found the conversion chart that calculated the size of the charge to use. The trees she'd chosen were old and sturdy, with diameters that she estimated at three feet; according to the equation, she'd need roughly twenty-four pounds of TNT per tree.

  She fit the TNT blocks with nonelectric blasting caps, smearing the puttylike booster around their bases. Technically, TNT didn't require booster, but she used it on each charge anyway. She wasn't going to fuck around and have something not blow at the last minute.

  There were no tools to make bore holes in the trees, but the blocks of TNT could be easily fastened to the trunks and used as untamped con-centrated external charges. The manual, she recalled, had said to set the charges five feet above the ground to ensure the trees would remain attached to the stumps when they fell. But Cameron wanted them low to the ground all the way across, so she primed the timber at three and a half feet, notching the bark with the peen of the hammer Szabla had brought back from one of the farmhouses.

  The work was hard and tiresome, and it took her even longer because she kept glancing nervously at the forest. Now, the creature was nowhere in sight.

  Using the thick tape that was stored in the underside of the explosives box lid, she adhered the TNT blocks to the trees--two rows of six blocks for each trunk. The tape stood out in shiny bands. She used one strand of det cord, with small extensions, for the charges on each side of the road, carefully crimping the aluminum ends of the blasting caps around it. It looked pretty when she was done; Tucker would've been proud.

  The TNT would blow out a chunk of tree beneath it when it deto-nated. Because of the placement of the blocks, the trees of each side would fall parallel at a forty-five-degree angle to the road, crashing down on the dirt in the middle. Cameron would have to set two trip wires so that one side would detonate before the other, or the trees would deflect each other on the way down. She dug through the explosives box for eyelets, then started to run wire off the spool. She decided to set the trip wires about ten yards apart, each of them four feet off the ground so that the mantid wouldn't unwittingly step over them.

  The sun had already peaked and begun its descent. Cameron checked the watch face and saw that it was already three o'clock. Only three hours remained until dusk.

  The air was already starting to cool across her shoulders.

  Diego placed the dino DNA segments from the seventeen water sam-ples into separate wells of the ethidium-bromide-soaked agar and plugged in the gel box, a voltage machine that would draw the negatively charged DNA downward. The DNA's progress through the viscous agar would form distinct banding patterns visible under UV light, which he and Rex could compare to the control dinoflagellates' banding pattern to determine if the samples were infected.

  Rex drummed his fingers on the countertop, checking his watch. "How long will this take?" he asked.

  Diego settled back on the high metal stool, fished for a joint in his shirt pocket, and lit it. Ramoncito watched him, shaking his head.

  "An hour," Diego said.

  Rex tapped the gel box. "Can't we speed it up?" he asked. "It's only at one hundred fifty volts."

  Diego shook his head; his chest expanded with a toke. Smoke wafted from his mouth when he spoke. "It'll melt the gel. Fuck up the resolution."

  He pointed to Rex's knee, which was vibrating up and down in a nerv-ous tick, then held out the joint. Rex stared at the joint, at Diego.

  "There's nothing more we can do now," Diego said.

  Rex reached out and took the joint.

  The mantid's legs moved her back into the forest, the cuticle scraping loosely around her body as she walked.

  She crawled up the trunk of a tree and secured herself upside down, her slightest movements causing her to swing. Dangling like a bat, she began to push through her old exoskeleton. It split first along the seam of the thorax, and she wriggled her head and raptorial legs from the gash, squirming. The spear stock was deeply embedded in her head; the old
cuticle had disintegrated around it. Her abdomen remained encased in the old cuticle and she flailed back and forth, screeching, until it popped free. Then, she hung from the exuvia for the better part of an hour, which gave her new cuticle a chance to begin hardening. When she finally dropped to the ground, she landed in a heap, her new cuticle still moist and tender. She rose quickly; the dirt could crumple up her new wings and dry out her exoskeleton. Her anomalous post-metamorphosis molt was complete.

  Her protective tegmina were a deep brown, attached to her body at the second link of her thorax and overlaying her light-green speckled underwings. Sprouting from the third section of her thorax, the under-wings stuck out a bit, forming green stripes along her sides.

  The mantid crawled back up the tree, past the branch to which her old cuticle still clung, past the other branches that spread like balconies from the core of the trunk, and when she reached the top of the canopy, where the foliage of all the Scalesias wove itself together, she pushed through and stood on top of it, her four back legs taking hold of the uppermost branches and leafy boughs.

  She was standing atop the forest.

  The water circling the island was visible all around, the sky stretching clear and blue for as far as the eye could see.

  Unfurling her wings from her sides like massive capes, she spread them wide. Their span was enormous, and as they dried, they would con-tinue to stretch and grow; only this benefit had driven her to brave the sun. Already, the new cuticle stiffened around her, a living suit of armor. Her body unfolded to the air, the mantid rested, growing stronger and harder in the sun.

  Soon, it would be nightfall.

  Chapter 72

  As Cameron finished setting the trip wire, a shriek echoed up the road. She wasn't sure whether it was the mantid or a wounded animal, but it sent a chill from the depths of her bowels all the way up her spine.