Fragment. Warren Fahy
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tubes as she ran frantically toward the others.
Glyn noticed the branches above reaching down–then something caught the corner of his eye: a wave of dark shapes rushing toward them down the tunnel.
He felt a sharp bite on his calf and yelped. ‘Crikey!’ Glyn looked down at his bone-white legs, exposed for the first time on this trip by the damned L.L. Bean chino shorts he agreed to wear for the landing. He almost couldn’t spot the offender against his pale skin. Then he located it by a second sharp pain: a white disk-shaped spider clung to his left calf.
He raised his hand to swat it and hundreds of miniatures rolled off the spider’s back. A red gash melted open on his calf as, in the space of two seconds, the yellow edge of his tibia was exposed and more white disks fired into the gaping gash.
Before Glyn could scream, a whistling shriek flew straight at him.
He looked up as an animal the size of a water buffalo hurtled through the opening of the tunnel.
Zero turned the camera as Glyn yelled and caught the beast closing its hippo-sized vertical jaws over the biologist’s head and chest. With a sharp crunch, the attacker sank translucent teeth into Glyn’s ribs and bit off the top of the Englishman’s body at the solar plexus. Bright arterial blood from Glyn’s beating heart shot thirty feet between the beast’s teeth, dousing Zero’s shirt and camera lens.
Zero lowered the camera and saw a cyclone of animals shrieking and clicking as they swirled around the rest of Glyn’s body.
The others screamed as they were bombarded by flying bugs and more shadows pouring out of the tunnel.
Zero threw the camera toward the onslaught, and a few animals streaking toward him pivoted and chased it instead.
As fast as he could, he slipped from the ledge and zigzagged down the rocks in the crevasse.
5:58 P.M.
Cynthea, Peach, and the world watched in astonishment as all three camera shots panned wildly.
‘Crikey!’ someone shouted–and there was an awful cracking sound.
A chaos of shrieks overloaded the microphones, and the cameras jerked and spun.
One camera tumbled onto its side. Red and blue liquid spattered its lens.
Another camera fell, and blood-drenched clothing blocked its view.
The audience across the nation heard screams from their suddenly blackened TV screens.
Cynthea cut to the remaining camera just in time to see something fly toward the lens. Then the camera fell and was instantly blackened by swarming silhouettes.
‘We just lost the uplink, boss,’ Peach reported.
One hundred and ten million people across the continent had tuned in before the live feed had died.
Cynthea stared at the screens. ‘Oh. My. God!’
8:59 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
‘We’re fucked,’ Jack Nevins said.
‘It’s been nice, buddy,’ Fred Huxley said, stamping out his Cohiba.
6:01 P.M.
Nell leaped over the rocks toward the crevasse as Zero came running out. His gray T-shirt was drenched with bright red and blue liquid. He didn’t have his camera or his transmission backpack.
Nell called to him but he sprinted past her, lunging down the boulders with a ten-mile stare, heading straight for the water. She followed him instinctively, but halfway down the rocks she swung around and looked back into the mouth of the twilit crack.
What looked like a dog emerged from the shadow of the fissure.
The creature seemed to be sniffing along Zero’s trail. When it leaped onto a rock in the sun she saw that its fur was bright red. It was not a dog. It was at least twice the size of a Bengal tiger.
Its head swung toward her.
Nell backed away, turned, stumbled over the rocks around the derelict sailboat.
She spotted the small Zodiac on the beach and raced for it.
She saw Zero dive into the sea and start swimming for the Trident.
Finally, she hit the hard, wet sand and ran. Without looking back, she reached the Zodiac. She shoved it into the water and flopped in backwards, planting her feet on the transom.
She yanked the pull-start and shot a look up the beach.
Three of the creatures lunged from the rocks to the sand.
Apart from their striped fur, they were nothing like mammals–more like six-legged tigers crossed with jumping spiders. With each kick off their back legs, they leaped fifteen yards over the sand.
Nell yanked the pull-start again, and the motor turned over and coughed to life.
The Zodiac pushed over a breaker, and the three animals recoiled before a crashing wave. Driving spiked arms deep into the wet sand, they pushed themselves backwards in thrusts ten yards long to avoid the hissing water.
Then they reared up and opened their vertical jaws wide, letting out piercing howls like car alarms that bounced and shattered in echoes over the cliffs around them.
Nell stared as the beasts leaped back up the beach and over the rocks toward the crack in the wall.
She stared at the twisted cliff leaning over her in the sky, and froze, breathless. She felt as if she were a child again, paralyzed as her nemesis burst into the light of the day. The face of her monster appeared in the rock, as though it had been waiting in the middle of nowhere for her.
Her head spun and her stomach convulsed. She bent abruptly and vomited overboard, clinging to the tiller with one hand.
Gasping, she splashed her face and rinsed her mouth with saltwater. There was no making peace with it–no way to replace it with a pretty face or flower, she knew. She had to fight it. She had to fight. Angry tears streaked her face as she steered the Zodiac toward Zero.
She called to him. The cameraman reached out and she hooked his arm, pulling him into the safety of the boat.
August 24
12:43 P.M.
The surgical mask muffled Geoffrey Binswanger’s amazed laughter. His eyes twinkled with childlike delight.
A lab technician bent the tail of a large horseshoe crab and stuck a needle through an exposed fold directly into the cardiac chamber of the living fossil. The clear liquid that squirted through the needle blushed pale blue as it filled a beaker. The color reminded Geoffrey of ‘Frost’-flavored Gatorade.
The director of the Associates of Cape Cod Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, had invited Geoffrey to see how horseshoe crab blood was extracted each spring and summer. Since the blood was copper-based instead of iron-based, it turned blue instead of red when exposed to oxygen.
Geoffrey had spent several summers as a visiting researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or the ‘WHOI’ (pronounced ‘hooey’ by the locals), but he had never visited the Cape Cod Associates facility. So today he had taken his metallic-lime Q-Pro road bike up Route 28 a couple miles to the lab, which lay tucked inside a forest of white pine, white oak, and beech, to take a look.
Geoffrey wore maroon surgical scrubs over his biking clothes, a sterile hair cap over his dreadlocks, plastic booties over his shoes, and latex gloves. Similarly clad lab technicians removed the writhing arthropods from blue plastic drums, folded their tails forward, and placed them upright in crab-holders on four double-sided lab counters.
‘This procedure doesn’t hurt, I hope?’ Geoffrey said.
‘No,’ said the technician who had been assigned to show him around. ‘We only draw one-third of their blood, then we drop them back in the ocean. They regenerate it in a few days.