Slither - Edward Lee [127]
Nora's jaw dropped. "How did you know?"
"I'm the one who took it off the slab."
"How?"
Loren shrugged as though it were nothing. "I killed a thirty-foot worm and melted the connector with its digestive enzymes. The stuff turned the cement to butter, so all I had to do was pull the bomb out."
"Loren! That's fantastic! That bomb would've ruptured the RTG's core and blown radioactive fallout halfway across Florida!"
"Sure it would've. But I took care of it, no problem."
Nora gave him a giant hug. "Loren, you're the world's first polychaetologist hero!"
"It was nothing."
"So what did you do with the bomb?"
"I put it in my pocket, figured I'd try to find a safer place to ditch it."
Nora's eyes widened. "Loren. Tell me that bomb's not still in your pocket?"
Loren rolled his eyes. "Of course not. In fact-" He paused and snapped his gaze back toward the beach.
"Look! There's the third guy! His buddies left without him!"
Nora could see the frantic black-clad figure standing on the beach. He was looking to the sky.
"That must be the one I knocked out in the control station. When he didn't get back to the ship in time, the other two left."
Loren broke out into hysterical laughter. "Oh, shit! That guy's really screwed!"
"Loren, what are you talking about? There's a live alien on the island now! Who knows what kind of weapons and technology he has! Jesus Christ, if he gets to the mainland-"
Loren crossed his arms and shook his head. "Take my word for it. That asshole's not going anywhere."
"What do you mean!"
"After I got the bomb off the RTG slab, I stuck it in my pocket. Then I went to look for you. I went back to the control station, and that guy was lying on the floor, unconscious."
"So?" Nora shouted.
"Nora, I put the bomb in his pocket."
Nora stared. "You mean-"
"Then I ran back to the campsite."
Just as the words left Loren's lips, the detonation took place.
There was no sound, no cacophonic explosion as they might expect.
Instead, just the sensation of a sudden monumental shift in air pressure.
The entire island jolted, its trees swaying as if swept by a hurricane wind. The point on the beach where the figure had been standing was suddenly a throb of light that rose, then fell. A similar throb occurred deeper on the island, where the old control station had been.
That fast.
The light dispersed, forming a crude dome over the entire island, and a second after that-
Nora was fingering her cross. "God in heaven ..."
The diffuse dome flattened all at once.
The concussion knocked Nora and Loren flat on their backs. No heat wave or scalding radioactive flash assailed them. No mushroom clouds emerged.
When they got back up, they looked back at the island ...
It was on fire, from one end to the other.
They could feel the heat even this far out.
"Incineration," Loren observed. "How convenient."
"It'll kill everything on the island, every worm, every ovum."
"And the third guy? He doesn't even exist anymore. You can bet everything they left in the control station will be ashes too."
"No evidence," Nora whispered.
"Look at that shit. Unbelievable ..."
The fire raged for only seconds. Then it went out as quickly as it had bloomed. Even the smoke dissipated in a matter of moments.
But the island was a blackened clot now. Every tree on it had been reduced to a charred stalk.
"No evidence is right," Loren said. "But it doesn't make sense."
"Maybe it does but we just don't get it."
Loren stroked his chin, contemplating. "Why did these people come here, from God knows where, to create a hybrid bienvironmental parasite that grows exponentially and infects humans faster than any known virus ... only to destroy it all in one puff and leave?"
"Just a field research exercise, I guess," Nora muttered. "A scientific test on their equivalent of laboratory animals."
"Only in this case the rats were us."
"Has to be. We do the same thing sending probes to Mars, and mice in space, and setting up research stations on the North Pole."
Loren chuckled, wiping sweat