Slither - Edward Lee [108]
"What the hell is he doing?" Loren asked.
"That disk," Nora said. "What's that rod he just pulled out of it?"
They both stared. The man extracted a short rod from the disk; from the end of the disk, he seemed to remove a cap.
Then he pushed the rod against the slab's cement face. A moment later, the disk had been mounted onto the concrete.
"The rod must be some kind of stand," Nora said. "And ... shit. I've got a bad vibe about this."
Loren looked right at her. "Me too. Nora, why do I have a funny feeling that black thing is a bomb?"
"I ... don't know ..." She was thinking the exact same thing. "It's not big enough to be a bomb is it?"
"A piece of C-4 the size of a hockey puck? It could probably break that concrete slab in half."
"And then the pressure from the explosion might split the fuel-source casing."
"Instant dirty nuke. Shit, Nora. If that really is what he's doing..-..."
"It would look like a terrorist operation," she realized. "The radioactive dust from an explosion like that would contaminate the entire island."
"And anyone or anything on it would die from radiation sickness in a matter of days."
This is madness, she thought, still staring at the screen.
Then the man in the gas mask got up and walked away, leaving the disk propped up on the slab.
"We're out of here,' Loren insisted, but just when they would turn to leave, a security monitor in the corner began to blink.
"What's happening now!" Nora exclaimed.
It was the screen showing the north beach. The panel's frame was suddenly bordered by a blinking red line.
The camera showed the water beyond the beach ...
"That's where the trench is," Loren murmured.
"And where their sub is ...'
They stared fixedly at the screen.
Nora supposed she could guess what was about to happen even before it did. In a few moments the water beyond the beach began to stir.
"Holy shit," Nora muttered.
"Uh, yeah," Loren agreed with her, because they both saw it very clearly.
The sub was surfacing.
CHAPTER WENTYTWO
(I)
There he is, Trent thought.
The clearing.
Then another thought: What if he's not dead?
The man whom Loren had shot lay utterly still, gloved hands outstretched, legs and booted feet sprawled. The visor of his gas mask was tinted; Trent couldn't see through it.
Probably the latest generation decon gear, he thought of the flat-black finish. He knelt and touched it-the material felt like sheer polyester. Trent tried to pull off a glove but then saw that it was fastened somehow, perhaps snaps on the inside.
He was about to pull off the mask but something dark caught his eye.
A dark gray patch over the left breast. In the U.S. Army, that's where a troop's name tag would be sewn.
But this tag bore no name, only this, in black marks against the gray:
That shit again .. .
Trent fished around in the man's pockets, eventually pulled out a plasticized card.
The card read:
He felt creeped out. How could that stuff be a code? he wondered.
Next, he tried to pull down the hood. He needed to get inside the suit, for the ID tags that would, by regulation, have to be around his neck.
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