Slither - Edward Lee [110]
"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."
"Whatever," Loren said in haste. "But there's nothing more we can do except leave right now before all this shit happens and we get turned into dust."
Nora's mind raced. Her eyes were all over the room, along with her thoughts. "Trent wanted to inspect the dead body, but we already know what he found, so I want you to go back to the campsite, and-"
Loren's look of incredulity couldn't have been more glaring. "No, Nora, we go back to the campsite, get Trent, then go to that girl's boat, and get off this powderkeg island."
"You go," she said. "It'll only take a few extra minutes. Get Trent and come back here. Then we'll all go to the boat together."
"Bullshit!" Loren yelled.
"I want to look around here a few more