Slither (22 page)

"Can't believe you're not married," Trent muttered.

"That's so proverbial," she teased. "You can't do better than that?"

"Yeah," he admitted, "but I'm too tired right nowthanks to you."

"My pleasure."

"No serious boyfriend back in New York?"

"Nope," she lied through her teeth. She'd been
stringing along the same fiance for a year. A successful
stockbroker, whose family owned one of Wall Street's
biggest brokerages. He was great for jewelry and the
Porsche, of course, and she supposed she really would
marry him someday. It would be worth her while. And
he was so busy with his job, he didn't have time to
monitor her. She cheated on him with impunity, any
time the magazine sent her on a shoot. As long as she kept her infidelity out of the city, she could have the
best of both worlds.

She caressed her breasts when she knew he wasn't
looking.

"Yeah, well, I think I'll be visiting you in the Big Apple sometime soon," he asserted.

In your dreams! Now he was annoying her, the way
he wielded his personality the same way he had sex:
with assertiveness. I'm the one doing YOU a favor, she
wished she could say aloud, and it's only because
Loren is LESS my type than you. "We'll see," she said
instead. She wanted to keep his fire fanned. Then she
added, if you're a good boy."

"Oh yeah?"

She stretched her toes out as far as she could, flexed
her long legs. She let her mind wander.

She imagined herself being taken right here on the
beach, not by Trent nor her fiance but by a coterie of
men from her past. Her nerve-charged body, her
spread-open legs and narrowed eyes summoned them,
and then they were lying atop her, thrusting into her fast
and rough, one after another. The fantasy titillated her
as the sea breeze slipped up and over her bare skin....

"Be right back, gotta take a leak," Trent said and
got up.

Charming, she thought, but now that he'd left, she
could focus on the greedy invention of her mind. Hot,
muscled bodies squashed her, callused hands mauled
her breasts. Raving sensations pinpointed at her nipples, which were either torqued by fingertips or sucked
out by fervid mouths. Stout penises delved into her
most private places, spending themselves in a feverpitch only to be replaced by more. Back in reality her
own hands succored herself ...

Mmmm ...

"Hey, Annabelle! You got a flashlight?"

Trent's voice shattered her pleasures. That asshole,
she thought, disgusted. Can't even have a minute of
fun with myself. She leaned up with a frown. A flashlight? What's he want that for? He needs to SEE where
he's pissing? "I think so!" she griped back.

"Bring it here, will you? I need to see what this is."

Probably means his cock ... She pulled the light out
of the bag and got up, followed the annoying voice to
the edge of the woods.

There he was.

The moonlight painted his naked body. He was leaning over, looking at a tree. Annabelle's smirk couldn't
have been more severe, her senses still buzzing from
her self-stimulation. "Here," she said testily.

He pointed the beam on a tree trunk, lighting it up.
"There. See?" His finger indicated a nub of some kind.
"Definitely not part of the tree. I scratched my damn
leg on it."

Poor you ... Annabelle looked closer. "It's a nail. So
what?"

"I don't think it's a nail ..." It looked more like a
black stud. "It's coming loose," he said, yanking on it
with his fingers. "It's working free."
- - -- - - - - - - - - - -

Annabelle shook her head, hands on bare hips. "Is
therea reason I'm supposed to care about this?"

"It's
got-"
He
squinted
harder,
the
image
ridiculous
now: a hairy-backed man fiddling with a tree in the
middle of the night, buck-naked. "Remember what
Nora was saying earlier?"

"That skinny wuss?"

"She said she found something that reminded her of
a camera lens attached to a tree." Finally he prized it
loose. "It's almost like it was nailed into the tree."

"A camera that small?" Annabelle objected. "That's
ridiculous."

He held it right up to the flashlight, the splayed beam
throwing wedges of dark and light against Annabelle's
bosom, belly ... and frown. "She was right. It's got a
tiny piece of polished glass inserted in the top, like a
lens."

"Read my lips. Who cares?"

He seemed amazed by the find. "I guess I was right.
It's an electric eye sensor from the old missile site probably. They left these things in the perimeter because it
was easier than removing them all. They're probably all
over the place."

`Read my lips. I'm bored."

"Oh, sorry." He caught himself. "It's just kind of interesting, isn't it?"

"How about ... no?"

"I'll have to show it to Nora, see if it's the same thing
she was talking about."

The comment made her fume. As far as Trent went,
she could take him or leave him. The man was just a
sideline distraction because there was nothing better
around. But he was still part of her sexual turf and
there was no way she'd allow him to be in proximity to
that bitch.

"We can show it to her tomorrow," she said, emphasizing the pronoun "we."

They moved through moonlight back to the beach;
Trent placed the object in his bag. "Well, you're bored,
so I guess that means you want to get back to the
camp," he presumed, and reached for his pants.

"Not that bored."

"Oh, okay. Let's lie out here a while longer," he said.
He got back down on his towel.

What a moron. "I'm not done yet," she said bluntly.

"Not done with what?"

She stepped over him, looking down. "With you,"
she said, and sat on his face.

When Slydes awoke, he felt akin to a reanimated
corpse rising from a lime pit. Mooooooooother-
FUCKER! he thought. Had someone hit him in the
head last night? Had he fallen down? But when he
awoke, he remained in the captain's chair behind the
wheel, where he usually took his downtime on the boat.

Ruth's tousled head emerged from belowdecks. She
looked cross-eyed and dehydrated-about the same
way Slydes felt just now. "When are we leaving?" her
shrill voice inquired. "Isn't it high tide yet?"

Bonehead, Slydes thought. "We missed it by ten
hours," he gruffed. His watch told him it was seven in
the morning. We fucked up again . . . "What the fuck
is wrong with us!"

"I don't feel good, Slydes!"

Them bugs, he remembered. They MUST have bit
me. "We all must have got some jungle fever or some thing. We keep passin' out." He tried to roust himself.
"I'm gonna try to get us out of here in low tide. Shag
Jonas's ass and get him up here."

"Jonas ain't down there!" she railed. "You said he
went looking for me last night!"

Ruth's whining voice was killing him. "He never
came back? That goddamn pain in the ass!"

"Where do you think he went?"

"You know damn well where he went! Probably
went back for more dope, the shithead! We never
should have come out here in the first place. This is his
fault." The solution was simple; they needed to bring
him back so they could leave. But he was still out in the
woods, and the woods were where they'd picked up
those gross-ass yellow bugs.

Slydes eyed up Ruth. "Go to the head shack and
bring him back."

Ruth's face screwed up at the suggestion. "Fuuuuuu-
uuck you, motherfucker! I ain't going back in those
woods by myself! I told you! There's a zombie out
there that pulled my pants off and tried to rape me!
And he tried to feed me to those giant pink snakes!"

Here she goes with the zombie again. There's nothing like a drug burnout to make a fucked-up situation
MORE fucked up. He took the keys out of the boat's ignition. Did he trust Ruth?

Hell no.

"I'll go find him, you stay here," he ordered.

"I don't want to stay on this creepy boat by myself!"

"Quit whining! You sound like a fuckin' dog toy.
Nighttime's one thing, but this is broad daylight. You
and I both can't be thrashing around in the woods, not
with them photographers up and about."

Ruth crossed her arms. 'If you go, I go."

"Yeah?"

'Yeah."

Slydes punched her right in the forehead. She fell to
the bottom of the short steps, out cold. Best way to win
an argument with a gal, he thought.

Slydes stepped off the deck ladder into the water,
and waded toward the island.

Nora thought back to her old lit classes as she meandered through the woods at just past dawn, Henry
David Thoreau and all that. Being alone amid this
plush wilderness-just as the new day began to
arrive-put one in a sedate frame of mind. The beauty
shimmered around her; it seemed to invite her to venture deeper, that and her curious solitude.

It feels damn good to be away from everyone else for
a little while, she admitted, and she knew it was more
than just escaping the envious angst that Annabelle incited. It let her free her mind, and now, for these cherished moments, she delighted in the luxury of thinking
about nothing at all.

She roved deeper, down trails she hadn't been aware
of. The pink light of the sunrise shot bolts down through
dense branches. All that spiced the silence were chirping
birds.

She wasn't sure why she'd risen early. She'd woken
to obscure dreams and a headache. The other tents remained zipped up, so she sprayed herself down with
some repellent and quietly wandered off, if only to take
a look at more of the island.

I better be careful I don't get lost, she considered. The
tropical forest grew more dense as the next trail continued. She supposed she was looking for more signs of
the worms and ova she and Loren had stumbled on last
night. Soon the dilemma ruptured her mood.

I'm getting paranoid, she realized. Everything she knew about worms that produced motile ova insisted
that they were harmless to humans-so what was she
afraid of? But-

A bienvironmental species? A worm as well as its
ova that can function on land? And the worm itself
did resemble certain worms from the Trichina and
Trichinella families, and some of those could definitely
infect humans ...

Be realistic! she finally commanded herself. I'm an
expert, and my professional inclinations are that these
things are no more dangerous to humans than ladybugs.

The determination made sense, yet the back of her
mind wouldn't let go of the creepiness.

Her next step was snagged--something on the
ground. Vine, she thought at first. She looked down to
see what had caught the front of her flip-flop.

Not a vine, a cable.

She detached her foot and knelt. A black cable-an
inch thick-stretched across the overgrown trail. What's
this doing in the middle of the woods? she thought. It's
a power cable.

Nora followed the cable back toward the camp and
head shack areas, and didn't go more than a hundred
or so yards before it terminated and split. One end
branched to a conical voltage regulator that provided
the lights and electricity to the head shacks. The other
end veered directly into a tin shed that contained two
bulky machines. Stenciled spray-paint letters identified
one: FIELD PURIFICATION UNIT, WATER, PROPERTY OF U.S.
ARMY. A series of hoses ringed through the second machine, and most of the joints and connections on the
hoses were streaked with white crust. Salt, she knew at
once. This must be the desalinator Trent was talking
about.

Then she turned around and followed the black
power cable back, where it would undoubtedly termi nate at the portable generator that Trent had also mentioned on the day they'd arrived.

She followed several hundred yards farther, expecting at any moment to hear the chugging sound of the
generator.

She walked on and on ... and didn't hear a sound.

Finally the cable ended at a fat metal connection ring
set into a square of concrete. The generator's underground? she thought. But she knew better. That can't
be...

Something white could be seen behind some leafy
branches. She pushed back a bough and found a metal
sign on a post. The sign was white with red borders,
and it read KEEP AWAY! RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN USE!

Nora ran back to the campsite. She didn't hesitate to
open Trent's tent and stick her head in. "Hey! Lieutenant!"

Trent's head rose groggily in the lightweight sleeping
bag. "Huh?"

"Is there a hot radioactive source on this island?"

The question slapped him out of sleep. "What the-"
Then his face drooped. "You found the ..."

"Yeah! Is it live?"

"Wait for me while I get dressed."

He knows all about it, Nora felt sure. And he lied.
He specifically told us that the generator ran on diesel
fuel. A minute later, Trent came out, dressed in crumpled fatigues.

"There's no diesel generator on this island, is there?"
Nora demanded.

"Well, uh, no."

"Then how come you told us there was? You've got
an RTG in the ground out there, don't you?"

"Keep your voice down," he said, glancing at the
other tents. "Over here."

He took her out of the campsite and down the trail to the field shower area. "Now I can talk," he said. "I'm
not supposed to let any civilians know about it. You
know what an RTG is?"

"Yeah," Nora said testily. "Radioisotope thermal generator. I have a lot of friends who've seen them on Arctic specimen expeditions, and the government puts
them up in the mountains, too, to provide power to remote observation posts. It's a nuclear battery."

"Exactly, and you're right, the government uses them
all the time, in places where there's no practical way to
deliver fuel to run gas and diesel generators. A small
radioactive pellet produces heat that's changed into
electricity through a thermocoupler. Same sort of thing
NASA puts on satellites, Mars probes, things like that.
It's a battery that lasts a hundred years." Trent sat
down on one of the old picnic tables, rubbed sleep out
of his face. He looked worn out. "Since I had to escort
civilians to the island, my orders were to lie about the
power source. No one knows about the RTG and there
was no reason to think it might be discovered-it's all
the way on the other side of the island." He looked
right at her. "What the hell were you doing that far into
the woods?"