Minutes to Burn

Chapter 46

They were at the aluminum specimen freezer in minutes. The breeze was moist against their faces, mixing with their sweat. The freezer stood before them, unchanged and unyielding against the wind-fanned grass.

They circled it as if it were a shrine, Derek pressing the larva to his side.

Savage tossed the thermite grenade to Cameron, who pulled the pin and rested it atop the thick shoe box-sized lock that protruded just beneath the handle. She was angry with herself for not remembering Tucker's grenade earlier-he always brought it with him on missions, nestled in the cargo pocket of his pants. His good-luck charm.

It took a while for the chemicals to mix, then the grenade emitted an intense white flame, like a welder's arc. They looked away as it melted down into the lock. There was no need to guide it through the metal, and the entire lock fell to the ground with the still-burning thermite.

The heavy door creaked open a crack, then sucked shut again.

The grenade kept melting right through the grass, and Derek kicked aside what was left of the lock and covered the grenade with dirt. Diego shook his head but said nothing. Derek reached for the thin metal han-dle and the door swung open to meet his hand. He turned and looked at the others for a moment before pulling it open.

"Lantern," he said.

Szabla stepped forward, the hurricane lamp dangling from her hand. As it swayed, it threw Derek's shadow across the door, oversize and dis-torted against the silver surface.

He pulled the door open, and they were greeted with the familiar smell of unliving flesh. Eight gnarled little bodies swung on specimen hooks, underlit by the hurricane lamp so they threw sinister patterns through the freezer. They were all close to three feet long, green, and contorted as if they'd been in great pain when they were slaughtered. Aside from that, none of them looked anything like the others.

A button on the compressor in the back cast a wan glow, pale like moonlight. The breeze shook and twirled the bodies like wind chimes.

The soldiers and scientists moved among them, looking up in revul-sion. One creature had a massive jaw shaped like a shovel and a scattering of eyes across its forehead; another had the vulgar hunch and primitive brow of a chimpanzee. The body farthest away had eight furry legs protruding from its midsection, and its shadow was framed per-fectly on the back wall of the freezer. Its body was that of an enormous spider, its head something between a canine and primate.

"Jesus H," Rex whispered. "It's like a Lariam nightmare."

The larva cooed, squirming in Derek's arms. In the far corner, a tan-gle of hooks lay on the floor.

The wind pivoted one of the bodies and its leg struck Szabla in the back of the head. She grabbed it without flinching and turned the body to examine its front side. It had the smooth slender belly of a lizard, curling back into a tail that, due to rigor mortis, ran parallel up its scaled back. The face had the broad snout and yellow teeth of a crocodile, and an iguana's pouchlike cheeks.

Behind Szabla, Justin shuddered.

The inside of the door had a heavy bolt that allowed collectors to lock themselves in in case predators were drawn to the scent while they loaded specimens. With slight maneuvering, the bolt could be disen-gaged and removed.

Tank pulled the bolt free from the door and held it by his side. It was thicker and heavier than the spikes; it would make a better weapon.

The hurricane lamp continued to cast lunatic shadows all across the constrictive walls and ceiling-dangling limbs, paws split in fingers, heads enlarged and misshapen. The soldiers' faces were drawn and bloodless among the beasts, which dangled among them like repulsive mobiles.

"If these manifestations are due to a virus, it's unlike anything I've…" Rex's voice trailed off. Diego's jaw had literally dropped; he gazed at the new creatures around him with a wonder bordering on disbelief.

Of the hung hooks, one was empty. Thick and barbed like a meat hook, it scraped against the far side of the freezer, metal on metal. The sound resonated within the bare freezer walls until Cameron grabbed it, holding it above her head like a subway strap.

She turned to face the others beneath the small dangling bodies, her neck flushed all the way down to the line of her breasts. She could only remember being this stunned once before-when she'd opened her rifle case and found the engagement ring Justin had hidden there for her.

"There were close to two hundred fifty chambers in the ootheca Frank found," Rex said, his voice hushed from fear or reverence. "Every one filled with a mutant-a new prototype. Of those two hundred fifty, only ten stood a legitimate shot at hatching." His breath caught in his throat. "'Ten viable.' That's what Frank wrote. Here are eight of them."

Diego laughed, a choke deep in his throat. "Look at the variation- it's incredible. Something caused the parents to breed all different off-spring. Adaptive radiation in a single generation, of a single brood. It's like a genetic brainstorm."

"Or a genetic nervous breakdown," Szabla added.

"What's that accomplish?" Justin asked. "Aside from scaring the shit out of me?"

"If they all mutated the same way, it would be a case of the genes put-ting all their chips on one number," Diego said. "Having different off-spring raises the odds considerably that one of them will take to the environment, or find a way to survive."

"Or two," Szabla said, counting the eight bodies again.

"Or two of the offspring. Exactly."

"How could they mate if they were so different?" Derek asked skepti-cally, looking at the bodies in the air all around him.

"I'd guess that those with the capacity to metamorphose do so into adult mantids like the one Savage killed," Rex said. "They only look dif-ferent in the early stages."

"I still don't get it," Cameron said, noticing that Derek was cradling the larva to his chest protectively. "The larvae are so much smaller than that thing that killed Tucker."

"Insects do have the capacity to increase over a hundredfold in size from birth."

Diego shot Rex a sideways look. "It's not an insect," he said. "Even if we are referring to it as a mantid."

"So given that you people are all such tree huggers," Szabla said, "why do you think Frank hunted these eight down and killed them?"

"I can't imagine," Rex said.

"He must have realized they were a threat to him, a threat to the peo-ple on this island," Justin said.

Something dripped from one of the corpse's legs. Cameron ran a hand lightly over her head to make sure nothing had landed in her hair.

Rex snapped his fingers. "In Frank's notebook, he tallied a nine count, meaning, I think, that he'd located nine of the ten offspring that had hatched and made it into the wilderness." His eyes clouded. "He must have kept one alive to observe, and it mated with the tenth one that he didn't find."

"So, the million-dollar question is: What did the one he kept look like?" Szabla asked, eyeing the empty hook over by Cameron. "Why did he keep it alive?"

The freezer door banged loudly behind them with the wind and they all jumped, the air thick with bodies. The larva cooed and squirmed in Derek's arms. When the door swung open again, they could see Savage's silhouette crouching just outside on the grass. They watched him through the corpses. Steam rose off his body in the mist.

"Why did God make puppies cute?" his outline grumbled.

They watched him expectantly.

He spit once to the side and wiped his mouth. "So we don't kill 'em."