Slither - Edward Lee [109]
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