Damn it!
The hood wouldn't detach from the mask. Was the entire suit integrated, a step-in?
Trent stood up, grabbed the lip under the mask's chin, then yanked upward.
The mask pulled off after several tugs.
Trent stared.
He doubted what his eyes were showing him at first. Was it a disease? Something from the worm?
The open-eyed face stared up at him.
Trent could see red arteries and blue veins webbed across the man's face. And he could see the skull beneath the flesh, because…
The flesh was transparent as glass.
Hands shaking-and his mentality breaking upTrent yanked open the jumpsuit's front, popping unseen snaps down the middle.
More clear, jellylike flesh, embedded with blood vessels, nerves, and the rib cage.
A lower glance to the abdomen showed more transparent flesh encasing obvious digestive organs.
Trent simply stood there looking down, a reasonable response. He tried to conceive the inconceivable, and eventually he acknowledged what lay before his eyes:
This guy's not in the navy. He's a fucking alien-
A final squint showed him what he'd been looking for all along. A small, rectangular plate on a cord around the figure's neck.
Trent leaned over and looked.
– :, the plate read.
His mind churned as he continued to stare. Then the next thing he knew, an impulse caused him to dash out of the clearing and hide.
Why?
He'd heard footsteps thrashing through the woods.
Trent prayed it was Nora and Loren… but he knew that would not be the case.
Two more figures in the same black gear entered the clearing and stopped at the corpse.
Trent held his breath, gun in sweaty hand.
The figures seemed to be communicating, yet no words could be heard. Radio gear inside their hoods? It didn't matter. They looked back and forth at each other, glancing alternately at the body of their comrade.
Then one of them produced something that looked like a pen. When he aimed it at the corpse, something issued from the "pen's" tip. Trent absurdly thought of Silly String, but this stuff was black.
The man sprayed the pen back and forth, eventually covering the corpse in a bizarre black web.
Then the two figures walked away.
Trent kept his eyes on the webbed corpse. He heard a definite hissing sound, then saw bluish, sooty smoke rising.
By the time a full minute had ticked by, the web had completely disintegrated the corpse, and itself.
Trent walked back out to look more closely.
The area where the corpse had lain was clear. It was as though the corpse had never been there at all.
(II)
Nora's and Loren's mouths hung open as they kept their eyes nailed to the monitor.
The hundred-foot-long submarine had fully surfaced now, and sat there in the frame, floating on the calm water. It shone black in the sun. Modest fins could be seen forward and aft of the perfectly cylindrical hull, yet the ends weren't rounded or pointed like typical subs. There was no conning tower. There were no windows.
And there was no propeller.
"I've never seen a submersible like that," Loren said. "No prop? Must be impeller-driven but… I don't see any intakes for the impellers."
"Loren, I don't see any anything on that. It looks like a giant black Pringles can sitting in the water."
The monitor frame continued to flash.
Then the vessel began to rise.
More slack-jawed silence as Nora and Loren tried to comprehend what their eyes were seeing on the screen.
The vessel was levitating ten feet above the water now, and a moment later it began to move forward, toward the island. As it did so it began to change color, the stark black giving over to the green blue of the water. Eventually it moved out of the confines of the frames.
Nora finally broke the silence. "You're thinking what I'm thinking, right?"
Loren's Adam's apple bobbed when he gulped. "Yeah. It's not a submarine or submersible-it's a spaceship. And it ain't one of NASA's."
"I don't believe in that kind of stuff."
"Neither do I, so what are we seeing?"
"Hallucination," Nora suggested. "Side effects of sunstroke, maybe. Maybe we have been infected by these worms, and one component of the infection is psychosis. There are many roundworms as well as ova of roundworms that can corrupt a host's DNA with a mutagenic virus. Maybe that virus is now in our brains and we don't even know it."
Loren smirked at her. "Do you believe that? That we've been having shared hallucinations because of a roundworm infection?"
Nora shook her head. She knew that she had no confidence in a single word that had just issued from her mouth.
"Aliens, then," she said.
"What else could it be?" Loren stalked around the room. "We know that the box full of worms in the other room and the ones that have overrun this island can only be the result of a gene-splicing and DNAmanipulating process that is beyond the technological capabilities of the modern scientific community." He reached up and took down one of the strange round lights on the wall. "How do you like that? A light that doesn't give off heat, doesn't have batteries, and isn't connected to a power source."
"Just like the cameras in the woods, too," Nora said.
"Sure. No power source, no electrical connections of any kind, not even an antenna, but-" He pointed to the bank of monitors. "They work better than any surveillance cameras we've ever seen." Loren was starting to get a little giddy with his acknowledgments. "Not to mention these monitors, which aren't connected to a power source either." He fiddled with the corner of one of the monitors… and eventually peeled it away from the others.
Nora brought a hand to her mouth in shock.
The monitor was nothing but a clear sheet-like a plastic cover sheet for a term paper, and just as thin. Loren held it up, flapped it around, then rolled it into a tight tube. When he unrolled it again, it still held the perfect image of the sea where the vessel had just lifted off.
"How do you like that?" Loren said cockily. "Boy, that's a really cool monitor, isn't it? I'm sure you could go to Circuit City right now and buy one just like it."
Next, he pointed to the screen rolling the strange markings:
"That ain't no military code," Loren balked. "It's not an encryption. It's fucking Microsoft Word from another planet."
Nora felt tiny looking at the screen and all of its ramifications. An alien language, she thought.
"And to top it all off, we've got these guys in gas masks-who are obviously the crew to that thing we just saw levitate out of the fucking Gulf of Mexico, and they've been running around this island the whole time, instigating what can only be a field test of a genetically created parasite. And we just saw one of those guys put a fucking bomb on a live RTG. What's that tell you, Nora?"
"It tells me that their field test is over," she said with surprising calm, "and now they're getting ready to leave. They know enough about the modem human species to know that if they blow up an RTG, the radiological dispersion will contaminate the island so effectively that our own authorities won't be able to investigate the perimeter closely enough to ever realize that an advanced race from another planet was here doing tests on us in the first place."
"Exactly."
More silence. It was too much to contemplate, and too much to believe even after all they'd seen with their own eyes.
"There's got to be a way we can defuse that bomb," she finally said.
Loren laughed out loud, bug-eyed. "You're kidding me, right? We don't even know what it'll do. Just because it's only the size of a hockey puck doesn't mean much when you consider the technology base of the people who put it there. Nora, it could a millionmegaton bomb."
"Yeah, but it probably isn't," she reasoned. "It's not logical. What's logical is what we just said. They don't want our authorities to know they were even here. So they're going to rupture the RTG core with a small nonnuclear device because they know the U.S. military will simply quarantine the island and believe it was some terrorist cell trying to make a point. I guarantee you, our side will believe that a lot more readily that they'll believe an alien entity came here to do a genetic field test, and then left without a trace."