"The Uber Out of Time"

You slam the door on your way out.

Stupid, stupid. If you'd just kept your voice down, just tried to work things out, maybe she wouldn't have accused you of all that. Stupid. Doesn't she know what you're going through? You can't be expected to listen to this shit. It's not your fault--you were coerced! You can't be blamed.

You need some air; you need to get away. Soon the ride-share car rolls up the street, speckled by drizzle. It's a Saab, of all things, but well-kept. You haul on the door handle and throw yourself in.

The driver turns around. He's nondescript. The app says his name is Kameel. "How's it going?"

"Hey." You aren't interested in small-talk. Not right now. Rage burns under your skin, and you feel like punching the back of the passenger seat. You don't.

"So, when do you want to go?"

You stare at him. "Now. I thought that was implied."

"No, no..." He holds up his phone. The app there is unfamiliar. You look down and see the app you have open isn't familiar, either. It sure as hell isn't one you downloaded. "I mean, what year? What point in your life?" He checks his phone. "You are Chuck Wentworth, right? You didn't put in a timeline when you requested me."

You stare at him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm Chuck." You're not.

The app is asking for a year and a date. Outside, the rain is thickening, fat spots of drizzle sliding cold and viscous down the Saab's window. Some corner of you wants to slug the guy, or laugh. But then the other side, the shrewd self that's been hiding lipstick smudges, kicks in. Maybe you'll humor him. See if there's a scrap of truth in his bullshit.

"How far can I go?" Can't believe this crap.

"That's on you, man. Big surcharge on 2020, though. Surge pricing, y'know?" Oh, ha-ha, very funny. You roll your eyes, and the rain stops coming.

It doesn't just pass--it stops falling completely. In midair. Droplets hang suspended; wind-swept showers wait on the cold breeze, captured like a photograph. A photograph you're inside of. Nearby, a sparrow caught in the wetness dangles over a puddle, the spray of its takeoff surrounding it, a halo of dew under the soggy orange streetlight glow.

The driver fidgets. "What's it gonna be? If you wanna cancel, that's fine, but there's a fee..."

"No, I'm fine, How about...." You swallow, the walls of your belief cracking open. "Same timeline. But... six months from now."

An eyebrow is raised. "You sure? Same timeline?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, bro. You asked." He circles the block, gently easing around frozen cars. When he arrives back in the same spot, there's a blinding flash--the corona of two hundred suns flashing across the sky all at once. A wave of heat and cold in alternating stutters washes over you. You find your fingernails longer, your hair shaggy. Your stomach paunchier. Clearly these six months without her have been stressful. Good thing you didn't have to live through them.

"Well, there you go, man. Home sweet home. Thanks for riding."

"Thanks..." You climb out of the car. It's sunny, now, and beautiful. The early, crisp days of March. You check your phone and see that you were charged $10.56 for your ride, courtesy of Yog, a company you've never heard of.

Well, damn.

You swagger up the sidewalk towards your apartment--free, easy, no weight on your shoulders. Barely comprehending. Yet you're loose now: no more responsibility. You cheated, in more ways than one: you've escaped. Now you can live your life without interruption, without nagging. Thank God. You always wanted to be a bachelor, on the inside, but you hated the loneliness, the stigma. Now you can start over.

When you get inside, your girlfriend is on the couch. She looks due in about three months: puffy, tired, and enormous. Her things litter the walls, crowd your tiny living space. She looks miserable.

"Hey," she says, cradling a bowl of ice cream. "Did you get that second job?"

THE GUARDS ARE TALKING BACKWARDS

                Getting up there was easy. The UN had pooled resources to send a mission up to the vessel; we didn’t have a name it then, but a lot of folks in the Army were just calling it the Craft. Capital C—not ‘a’ craft, THE Craft. Real dramatic, those army boys.

                They came with me, Patterson and Trace—we were Contact Team Nine. Eight had gone inside, none had come out. Around this time, the UN -consul general finally admitted it was time to arm their “diplomats.” Took them too long, if you ask me. A twenty-mile-wide, alien craft hovering over New Jersey, and the welcome party didn’t bring any weapons? My brother is a hostage negotiator for the police, and he told me something: if you want something, manners are important, but a gun is easier—long as they don’t see it coming.

                We jumped up into orbit, on these sweet-ass space planes… retrofitted shuttle paneling, horizontal takeoff, the works. They were made for ferrying rich tourists to space. They were a little beat up from the first eight teams, but they were our only ride.

                Inside, time seemed to stretch… It’s still stretching. I’ve been experiencing events backward for some time now. You can’t see it, but that’s what I’m doing. Every moment and event begins with its own results, then folds backward into previous events… and that shape folds into itself, and on and on and on, without ever getting any smaller. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Who told me that?

                They told me.

                Not in so many words, of course. But I want you to understand it’s important for you to know I am experiencing all of this in rewind—did I say this already? My lips are flapping as they sound out a word that makes no logic to me, that my backwards mind cannot accept because every neuron is twisted inside out, retracing its own pathways. No, I wouldn’t call it strange.

                Together, we exited the space plane. It was damn dangerous: even though we were in low orbit next to the Craft, they didn’t give us an airlock to get into the thing. No. We were pushed from the opened hatch of the plane into a smooth, round hole in the rock of its side. We knew it was made of rock: that much was evident from the pits and crags on its surface. But how does a rock hover 20 miles over New Jersey, unmoving, for thirty days? Based on the imaging we’ve obtained from sonar, we knew the thing is hollow. It was understood prior to… prior to… God, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We are fifty-three days before the day I’m talking about, the day we went in, but in the wrong direction. It’s all folded to me, the memories bunched into a sleeve… gotta work my way through the creases. Fifty-three days ago we made a solemn vow not to hurt anything we found inside. They got me in on this pact, even though I didn’t agree. Even though I thought it was a pussy to do. The last eight teams hadn’t made it out for a reason, and here these goddamn fools were promising to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Well, I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

                We were heavily armed. We were supposed to defend ourselves, if push came to shove. They’re showing me my childhood, ever since that moment: Autumn leaves crunching dry-crisp beneath our feet. The backyard. The air is chilly and me, my sister and I, are jumping… in…

                The sun hung low-slung and deep-set, those days. In the days of apple cider and cinnamon shaved fresh all over glazed buns. The smell of molasses from the barn. It’s food I remember most, and I guess it makes sense. It’s the only thing I’m allowed to savor, from those days. Everyone is gone.

                The inside was smooth and curved up towards a green light. We approached it… we didn’t know what else to do. We were drawn to it, like deep-sea fish glimpsing an angler for the first time. We each wanted to be the big kahuna, the first one to talk to an alien species…

They aren’t better than us. They make mistakes. We went through, and to each of us the ecosystem inside was something different—superseded over our own perceptions and filters of reality. Our histories, laid out for us, woven from our own minds.

                You’ve been calling them “creatures,” the things that made the Craft. You would be wrong; they aren’t alive, not in the way we know. They are sentient light, beings made of frozen photons running through a certain type of ice, which naturally forms in cubist structures on their planet. Ha! I’m kidding. Just kidding. Sentient ice! Ha, the look on your face, you really believed me! I’m not telling you shit, you government goon. You put us in there. You did this to our minds!

                I’m sorry, have we met before?

                Alive… yes, they are alive. Alive and full of love. And rage. And confusion. They are the essence of thought, distilled and zipping around on air currents. They’re also astronomically large worms, each one as long as a solar system. They are anything that has ever evolved, in this galaxy: they have moved past us on a quantum level, they are entangled with everything. Everything! From the day you were born, they knew your name. “Even before I shaped you in the womb, I knew you.”

Dimensions lie in layers over them, baked into their tissue, their limbs. They are so far from us that we may as well be atoms under their microscopes. And yet, they love us.

                I knew we had to bomb the thing.

My wife? She had divorced me the month before I left the Revivalist movement in New York. The good brothers and sisters thought the Craft was Jesus, was His chariot come to deliver Him. Like a pizza! Ridiculous. We had a “disagreement,” and if I’m being honest, I knew it would come down like that. That damn cult split me from my wife. I needed to prove she was wrong about it… about the Craft being divine. You can’t kill God, right? He’s eternal. I wanted to test that theory. Why do you think I worked so hard—wormed my way into security detail? I killed one man—just one. He knew my secret, and I wasn’t having it.

No, Maria, the dishes are in the sink.

               

These things… see, they aren’t eternal. They aren’t immortal. They are the past, the instant flash-bang of a species’ final steps away from the one from before it, and before it, and before it. They are less than an instant of life. Their life-span ticks off in attoseconds.

                They showed me the technology that made them like this: they showed how to see inside a star, how to watch the sub-atomic dance unfold. They taught me that every single second happens at the same time, every moment of every world. They showed me things my mind could not have grasped if given a lifetime to contemplate the reaches of my irrelevance.

                Sir, I don’t reckon good human beings need to see things like that.

                Our power is in our brevity. Our short lives, our limited hands and limbs and eyes are what define us—what make us the clever, original, cunning and dangerous apes that we are. If we were handed this gift, this Pandora’s box, we would have lost ourselves. Any hope of identity would have disappeared—one human mind, one human spirit. One human moment spread across countless millennia, with no frame of reference for what is heroic, or evil, or the meaning of kindness. Kindness requires a physical shape.

                Kindness requires a soul.

                So yes, I killed it. A week inside the Craft, and then I blew it to pulp. You can blame me, call me a lunatic. You can say I sabotaged our only attempt at contact with another species.

                But I stand by what I did. Those idiots on my team stood around slack-jawed in the billowing infinity, consumed in the light of orgasmic comprehension. Transported by it. No different than the religious sheep my wife is following: the light made them blind. Stupid. We can’t worship these things; we simply can’t afford to. We didn’t evolve to interact with them: the human mind can’t survive it.

                I see. You want to know why they came? Why they taunt us with their presence, if we can’t talk to them in ways that don’t turn our minds to soup?

                I think it’s because one of us… one of our future versions… the Earth that could be, that Earth is ready for them, because it is so much like them, a brilliant mesh of infinite possibilities not held back by doubt or fear… And they are forever seeking Earths like this, and destroying the rest by contact with them. No, I can’t prove this. You can’t prove a feeling.

                You think you can contain the fragments… But they are loose now, no longer bound into one concept, one idea. And the human mind loves ideas: ideas are like candy, rotting your head to a husk if you have enough of them.

We are so lucky. Where am I? They will change us all for the better—no, be quiet, shut up!! They will change us all, each diaper-shitting child and crumbling adult, each schizophrenic and depressive and obsessive, they will mold us into the infinite forms beyond this single, dry, turd-reality. We are the chosen ones. We are nothing, we are everyone.

               

I stand by what’s done. Maybe, if I’d left them in the Craft… if I hadn’t scattered their ur-flesh all over the landscape. But I stand by what’s done. It’s all you can do, right? You have to stick to your guns, in time of crisis. God help us.

My mother says it’s time to get up. I never kissed that girl behind the quad—no, no way. Not her, Dad. It’s my fault, I burned the bread. Where’s my scar? I used to have a scar… The guards are talking backwards. You might want to hear what the guards have to say. The guards are talking backwards.

               

I bet you’ll find them quite illuminated.

The Bonus Episode

An excerpt from "Obligatory Road Trip Book," something I've been working on for a friend.


                Almost a year after the trip, I had a dream.

                We were going through the deserts of New Mexico again, this time in daylight. It’s odd my mind chose to fixate here, because we barely spent any time at all in that state—after passing the crux of weirdness that was Roswell, we passed out of the state pretty quick. But something about the dream—you know, that implicit and wordless transfer of information, the mental “elevator pitch” if you will—told me it was New Mexico. Scrubs, desert, a little badlands and some mountains in the distance. I could feel the heat and light of the place.

                In the dream we weren’t in our trusty Passat, but instead in some kind of red-leather-upholstery, Oldsmobile type of deal. Again, I don’t know why it’s just these details that were swapped out. Was it a kind of mimicry, with small screw-ups from my subconscious, or do the changes mean something? Who the fuck knows, man. I don’t take stock in dreams; as far as I’m concerned, they’re the unconscious equivalent of a fart. The only useful function they serve is creating pictures, concepts and scenarios your feeble waking imagination can’t attain. Stretches of the brain, scenes and worlds you would never have conceived of before, because you’re limited to the reaches of your perception. Dreams, luckily, are not very concerned with reality.

                Enter Mitch.

                I’m calling him Mitch because the dream wouldn’t give me a name for him, a real name—the dream only told me that his name was generic enough not to cause concern. Again, specificity was not the strong point here. We were getting into the car after making a pit stop at a tiny, sun-beaten restroom somewhere in the New Mexico flatness, and there was Mitch, sitting and grinning

                Supposedly, dreams can’t show you the face of anyone you haven’t seen somewhere in life. This makes sense—no matter the power of the human mind, it’s just not clever enough to conjure up a whole new person, right down to the follicles and pores. But I think this guy was the real deal. One hundred percent computer-generated, if you will, a flawless CGI insertion into our story. He sat in a mysterious middle seat that had somehow appeared in the front of the old car, along with himself. And he was grinning, as if he’d been waiting for us to come back.

                You can probably see where this was going.

                Mitch was Bad News. He was that creeper who shows up at the beginning of a horror movie, uninvited, to foreshadow the shitshow that’s about to start. He’s the shapeshifter whose head pops open at some point in the story. And he knew it: he was acting the buddy, the pal, sitting between Sergei and the Nymph and cracking jokes. None of us laughed. With that sort of instant narrative telepathy of dreams, we all knew something was up.

                We drove in silence for a very long time.

                Eventually Mitch asked us to pull over beside a seedy, abandoned motel. We did. He took Sergei aside and they had a brief conversation, Sergei smoking like a chimney and Mitch just smiling, and smiling. Finally Sergei comes over to us and says he’s going around the back with Mitch for a while. He doesn’t seem worried, or angry, just calm and lighting up another butt. Even in dreams, presented with a horror movie cliché in the flesh, Sergei was suicidally determined to be unruffled.

                The Nymph and I are scared shitless at this point, so we both agree to wait by the car. Sergei goes around back with the smiling guy, who by this time had teeth so big you couldn't stop looking at 'em even if you wanted to. This is all typical spooky story stuff, right? You’d expect Sergei to end up dead and the chase to begin: me and the Nymph on the run in the dying New Mexico light with a monster in tow.

                Nope. Nothing of the sort. We waited for hours, till the sun was getting low, nervous but afraid to leave. There were no sounds—maybe the dream’s audio department lost an MP3 or two. But eventually Sergei comes around the front, wiping his hands on his pants, and says “let’s go.” And we go.

                I don’t present this thinking it’s a super fascinating delve into my head. Woop de doo, you had a dream, good job buddy, do you want a Snickers? But I do present it thinking, despite how afraid we both are of Sergei sometimes, this is the kind of thing even your unconscious expects from him. It just fits. He defies expectations, whether he’s supposed to or not, in reality and in fantasy. And whether we like it or not, he’s miles tougher and more strange than the other two of us combined. Crude, he might be, but he damn sure is effective.

                And so we drove on, and the dream segued into someplace and sometime different, the cast shifting and changing with the random and unfathomable needs of the night’s visions. On to a remake of “John Dies at the End” with puppet animation, and something about my dead uncle Ward. All these things revolve, and all these things come back, playing over the mind’s eye. Things that might seem irrelevant or stupid rise again, from the muck of our brains.

                And some experiences never go away.

Shooting Sweeps

You never knew what Mr. Tracey was going to do next. Prajeet was his driver, and had been for four years, ever since Tracey struck it big with that movie of his, and had his name plastered in lights all over Los Angeles. He didn’t seem to like LA much; like many of his predecessors, he was eccentric to the brink of insanity, and the noise and glamor of the city undermined his sense of self-importance. He moved to a sprawling estate in Montana, and Prajeet followed him. Well, technically he’d been following the money, but unfortunately, the money was attached to Mr. Tracey and there was no way to separate the two. If there was, he thought often, he would have done so.

On the day he fired a grenade launcher for the first time, Prajeet was hung over. He was not a drinking man, but he had found out the day before that his girlfriend was not coming to the States. She had found someone else, and the unspoken truth was that this man was wealthier than Prajeet, was better than he was. A driver for one of the richest filmmakers in America, and he’d been upstaged by a tech company manager! An assistant manager, at that! The betrayal had cut him deeply. He’d spent the previous night in the bar, muttering darkly about dowries to his friend Nathan. Half-cooked schemes buzzed in his head: he would show up at her door, with a fistful of American dollars. He would throw the bundles of cash at her feet, and he would ask, is this enough? Is this what you wanted from me?

That morning, when he arrived bleary-eyed and aching, Mr. Tracey had a gun.

A big one, very modern. He was cleaning it on the back deck when Prajeet arrived, the deck overlooking the infinity pool he’d had installed “because my guests miss their Western excesses.” The gun was long, black and looked like something out of a movie. It had a long barrel, folding legs that tucked underneath like the limbs of some deadly wasp. A prop, perhaps, straight off the set of American Sniper--at least, he hoped it was a prop.

Prajeet approached, with a pretty valid case of the jitters. “Sir? Your car is outside.”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Tracey placed the gun in a case almost as tall as he was, and snapped it shut. “Very good.”

“I’ve been calling you…”

“Let’s not start, Praj. Punctuality is for people who’ve never won a Golden Globe. Come now, we’ve got work to do.” He hauled the case down the hall, resisting offers by Prajeet to help him. Very self-sufficient, was Mr. Tracey, even at sixty-two and with a mane of gray hair he combed back into a helmet-like shell. Prajeet thought he looked like Stan Lee, from the Marvel movies, but had never said so.

Into the limo they went. Its sleek black hulk looked so out of place in the shadow of Montana’s red-brown hills that Prajeet often felt they were out of their depth here. In winter, the limo needed snow chains to even get down the driveway, yet Mr. Tracey refused to buy an SUV with his piles of money. Americans, thought Prajeet, and hit the ignition button.

Mr. Tracey sat in the back, holding the gun case over his lap. “I’ve had all the arrangements made. Today’s going to be a good day, Praj, an excellent day.”

“Yes, sir?” Most of Prajeet’s responses to his employer consisted of various “yes sirs” arranged in different tones and inflections. If you offered any more, the gregarious old coot would suck you into a long conversation, and he was not in the mood for this today. Especially when his employer was carrying a gun with a magazine the size of a phonebook.

“Good day. Excellent day. Today,” and those silver brows arched, “I get my revenge.”

“Yes… sir?” Now Prajeet was starting to panic. It was one thing to be an accomplice in the man’s peculiar hobbies; it was quite another to assist in murder. He wondered if the man who’d shot John F. Kennedy had taken a cab that day, and how the driver might have felt once he’d learned of the shooting. A lot like this, he thought, the poor guy had probably felt a lot like this.

“Quite so.” Mr. Tracey’s phone rang, and the director fumbled it out of his back pocket, his fingers shaking strongly enough for Prajeet to see it in the rear-view mirror. “Yes! You’ve had it delivered? Yes?” He nodded. “Yes. Fantastic. Many people are called the man, but you are actually the man. Know what I mean?” Another nod. “Beautiful. I’ll have my people wire you the money. And the city didn’t make a fuss? Good.” He hung up. “Gorgeous fucking day, isn’t it?”

It was. The still blue skies of morning hung over a dry and scrabbly landscape spotted with pines, sagebrush and huge chunks of rock which looked to have been forgotten on the day of their creation. Prajeet felt his fear soothed by the sight; strange as this country was, much of it was very beautiful. “Yes, sir.”

They drove in silence for quite some time. Prajeet was afraid to ask what the gun was for, and his boss did not offer an explanation. He had finally worked up the courage to ask, but by then they’d arrived.

Mr. Tracey’s phone had spoken to the car, and sent it a set of GPS coordinates nowhere near Missoula, the filmmaker’s favorite destination for antagonizing everyone with ostentatious displays of wealth. He had guided them out into the badlands, an area that was half-Idaho in the composition of its heavy soil and all-Idaho in the bleakness of its hills and crags. Someone had set up a large table in the dirt nearby, and on the table were more guns. Lots more.

Prajeet kept close to the car as Mr. Tracey got out, lugging his case, and leaned it against the cornucopia of murderous tools. A swathe of hunting rifles, oversized pistols, stubby Russian machine guns, and even what looked like a grenade launcher sat patiently, each one awaiting a turn to do mischief. If Prajeet had been jumpy before, now he’d crossed the border into pure terror. He wondered how far he could run before he was out of range of those things. Pretty far, from the look of it.

“I’ll just, er, find a shady place to put the car,” he said. It was heating up, the height of June in a climate with few trees… and fewer places to hide if, say, one’s eccentric employer decided to go postal.

“Nonsense! Come along. Have you ever fired a gun before?” Mr. Tracey’s jovial attitude did not allay his driver’s fears, but against all his common sense, Prajeet walked over to the table with his boss. They surveyed the armory before them: it was, Prajeet had to admit, fascinating to see such an array of deadly force all in one place. “It’s quite thrilling. And today, we have the perfect target…”

“Me?” Prajeet blurted. He hadn’t meant to, but he was sweating into his white collar under his black suit-jacket, and sweating always made him nervous, made him blurt out things like “I love you” to a girl on the other side of the world. Both blurts were equally embarrassing.

Tracey looked at him for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “God, no! What do you think I am, some kind of sociopath?”

“Well,” said Prajeet, not sure how to answer that.

Tracey shook his head. “This isn’t a Leslie Banks movie, Praj. No, my revenge will be much more than personal. Today we strike a blow against an institution.”

He pointed. On a hill nearby, so small as to almost be mistaken for a distant boulder, there was a vehicle. Clunky and tall, it had a glass cockpit and enormous twin brooms on the underside. Prajeet squinted at it. “Is that a…”

“A street sweeper! Yes, of course.” Tracey rubbed his hands together, not unlike a praying mantis, and reached for a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at the end of the table. “Here, I saved one of these for you. I want a witness to my vengeance, now that it’s finally at hand.”

Prajeet, utterly perplexed but morbidly curious, put on a pair. The world faded into a muffled mime-show, a silent film. If Mr. Tracey was going to shoot him, he thought, he was certainly taking his time. He flinched as his boss plucked a Desert Eagle from the table, a gun so oblong and ridiculous as to almost resemble a marital aid, and emptied a full clip at the street-sweeper.

The noise was deafening, even through a shell of rubber and foam, Prajeet’s fight-or-flight instinct made him leap back. Shell casings flew and the Eagle spit fire; there was an echoing crack with every shot as the slide jumped and the force travelled up Mr. Tracey’s burly spray-tanned arms into the thickness of his neck. His eyes were dead-set, purposeful.

His aim had appeared steady, but no sounds of impact bounced back at them. He might be rich, thought Prajeet, but he was a pretty shitty marksman. “Hm,” Tracey said, grabbing a pair of miniature binoculars from his pocket. “Unharmed! Fate continues to mock me, after all these years. Prajeet, have you ever entertained thoughts of revenge?”

The driver’s mind immediately went to his girlfriend, who he had been excited to think of as his future wife. He’d built his life around the idea, and now it was all crumbling down. “Ah. Well.” He had to shout, to be heard through the earmuffs. “Sometimes, yes. I mean… doesn’t everybody?”

“Exactly! Spot on, my Indian friend. And when I was young…”

“Bangladeshi,” said Prajeet.

“What?”

“Never mind.” He’d said it many times, but some people you couldn’t educate. Especially rich ones.

Tracey leapt back into his story without skipping a beat. Thunder crashing between his words as he reloaded the gun, emptying another clip to no avail. “Right. When I was young, I lived in a city on the east coast. No need to name names, it’s all in the past. I don’t hold grudges.” But his thin mustache quivered, and as the sweat began to roll down their necks from the sun, he grabbed a revolver that would not have been out of place in a sixties western. The earsplitting pop of the shots going off was accompanied by sulphurous whiffs of gun-smoke. “I didn’t have much money, back then. I might seem richer than God now, and sometimes I think I am. And when that sequel’s finished, I’ll walk away even richer. But at one point I had nothing, a bank account full of mothballs and some petty cash. And a certain group of human beings took it upon themselves to persecute me.”

“Street sweepers?” guessed Prajeet.

The revolver was emptied in flashing spurts of force, but a glimpse through the binoculars showed no results this time, either. “Yes! Well, no, not the drivers. Those shiftless monkeys had no charge over the real scam. You see, Prajeet, I used to drive myself everywhere. Shocking, right? I had but one asset in the world: a Ford station wagon, old as the hills, and it was my only friend as I was writing scripts and struggling to feed myself. And these stupid weasels… These damned, filthy, spiteful animals… They towed my car every day.”

“I… see," said Prajeet, wondering if he was supposed to care.

Up came an AK of some kind—Prajeet recognized it from movies, but couldn’t place the name of it. A bayonet gleamed at its tips. A thunderous cacophony, and brass shells scattered as Mr. Tracy fired it from the shoulder. This time there was the tinkle of glass, and the clatter of metal being riddled with lead. “Ha! That’s more like it! Did you hear that? Did you hear that whoreson take a hit?”

“Yes,” said Prajeet, his teeth gritted at the echo. The noise was not doing wonders for his hangover.

“It’s wounded, I think… Yes, there’s motor oil trickling out.” The ritual of the binoculars was observed. “I know it seems silly, Prajeet. Even deluded. But every week, those bottom-feeding, purposeless vermin would go out, and they would steal my only earthly treasure. Didn’t matter the time, didn’t matter whether the street was actually being cleaned—they were very efficient, you see. Towing was big business, they all made a profit. And everyone got a slice! They called the police, the police called the towing rats, and off went my Bessie. It pulled them a hundred thousand in ticket money and impound costs every day. They were blue-collar scam artists, Prajeet, confidence men of the highest quality. Satan himself could not have pulled a better grift.”

“Ah.”

“It does things to a man, to have his happiness taken.” Mr. Tracey looked over his collection of destructive devices; his pompous boom had faded to a whisper, and he looked to be gradually deflating in the Montana sun. “Oh, how I burned to go out there and bludgeon one of them to death. Just show them how it was done: how easily a person could be pushed into homicide. But I held my tongue. I could have taken any one of those scum-suckers—maybe several. I could have mailed letter-bombs to their fat, crooked cop friends in the precinct. But I held back. I believe in civilization, Prajeet, even when it screws you. Even when you have nothing, and then that nothing is taken away.”

Prajeet said nothing. He was thinking of his woman. Not his, anymore—no, not at all. The bitterness in Tracey’s soul warmed something in his own, and he longed to gather around that fire of hate and frustration. But he didn’t want to overstep himself. Losing this job would be a final blow: best to let his mad employer do as he would, then go home. Sleep it off. Do nothing irrational.

The old man shrugged, to no one. He opened the big case, the latch-clicks coming from far away, as if they were underwater. “Well, no need to waste every bullet, eh? They’re just pea-shooters, after all.” That boisterous clangor was back in his voice, and Prajeet was almost glad to hear it. There was something too familiar in Tracey’s growling hints of murder; something he remembered from the pub last night. Words spoken in earnest, ugly things promised. Could you take a promise back, once you were sober? How much weight did your vows hold, when uttered in drunken fury?

“Feast your eyes,” his boss said. “I’ve loaded this beastie with depleted-uranium rounds strong enough to blow through concrete!” He bounced his silver-caterpillar eyebrows at the driver, gesturing at the gun, Vanna-White-style. “What do you say, Praj? Care to work out a little aggression? I promise you, it’s more rewarding than jail. Why, if I’d killed the entire precinct back then, I never would’ve made my money!” And he laughed like a child.

Prajeet looked at the gun, thought of his girl. That twenty-two-year-old waitress with dusky eyes from a Maharashta hillside, whom he hadn’t really known at all, in spite of late-night Skype sessions and whispers of a future together, of real, actual, lasting love. He thought of the things he’d like to do to the man who’d stolen her: public humiliations, vandalism, maybe the trick some local kids to throw a flaming bag of cow shit through his open window. This rabbit-hole of frustration went deeper, so much deeper than he’d expected, and suddenly he was very frightened.

These things—he was actually planning to do them. He’d already calculated the costs of the plane tickets, the odds of arrest. Suddenly he longed for an escape from his own evils, for a compulsive explosion focused through a tiny, reinforced metal tube and exerted on an enemy that wasn’t real, who couldn’t feel pain or the terror of revenge. After four years, he finally began to understand Mr. Tracey; behind madness and a vast, inflated ego, he saw a frustrated little boy trying his best to play safely with God-like financial powers. To exert his human furies, and harm no one—there was a certain nobility in that, a certain safety in tilting at windmills. He felt his eyes come to rest on the grenade launcher.

“She’s a beaut, that one. Got her from war surplus,” said Tracey, his eyes glinting with taboo delight. “Want to give ‘er a spin?”

“Yes, actually,” said Prajeet, smiling as he sized up his target. “I would love to.”

The Traitor

An excerpt from one of the books I'm working on, called "Plague of Steel."

            My name is Jamie Dhukkan, and I am about to become a terrorist.

            When the first refugees arrived, my husband and I campaigned to deport them. It was ironic: we were both second-gen immigrants, his parents from Kolkata and mine from Sri Lanka, and here we were petitioning to try and reject frightened, scared people from our shores. America is beautiful, yes… but as they say, you must pay the toll to get in, and the toll was far too high for these people, escapees of the first infestations in Ukriaine, in Sierra Leone, in Indonesia. My husband overheard the military discussing the plague; they thought might have been “delivered” to developing nations on purpose. “Developing”… Well, they developed under Silver’s influence. Very quickly. They developed into angry hives of furious, faceless half-machine monsters, their last sliver of humanity allowing them to understand the pain and betrayal of border closures, UN firing squads, the last resorts of a terrified Europe. Can anyone be blamed for trying to run from these things?

            If we had permitted a few more to make landfall, if we’d seen the face of the disease instead of sharpening bayonets and building higher fences, we might’ve managed a cure. We might have had enough time, enough human specimens to work on. Applied EMP bursts worked temporarily for pushing back the infected, but it was like using a sledgehammer against a swarm of gnats—by the time the FDA had approved the manufacture of EMP belts and necklaces, Florida was already neck-deep in nanites, and the first cases had surfaced in New York. We waited too long; we saw only in the short term, planning for today instead of thinking of tomorrow. Now we’ll pay for it.

            My husband has been gone for three weeks.

He was working on Project Kessen—a “breakthrough” he claimed would turn the tide of the plague. Two days ago the Army came and confiscated all his work, right down to the last sample. I was furious; I demanded they tell me where he was, what had happened. They served me a death certificate on the spot, like stone-faced magicians producing a rabbit. Reach into the black top hat and poof, Annie, your husband is gone. So sorry. An accident at the lab, casualty of the war, these things happen.

They stripped the lab and left me standing in the kitchen, hyperventilating like an idiot. I sucked life from my inhaler, struggled for air as they piled into an armored truck and pulled away. I wish I’d fought them on it, asked more questions, forced my hand… but would it have helped? We all know what happens when you ask too many questions about the nanites. About where they came from. The president has stopped issuing denials—Silver is a federal experiment gone wrong, and everyone knows it. My Farook wouldn’t say so—but I saw the guilt in him. The shame. The terrible knowledge that his adopted country had unleashed something on the world, something that was eating men and women and children alive. Changing them. That kind of guilt can’t be shaken off—you live with it all your life.

I should know; I’m a cellular biologist, like my mother before me. When I was five, she was working on malaria for the Sri Lankan government, trying to neuter infected mosquitoes. Somehow a single insect escaped from the lab—my mother would never say how, but she suspected that someone simply left a door open. One fault in a specimen cage, one door left ajar, and hundreds of people died from a completely preventable disease. The elderly, the weak, and the poor died in droves. Such are the wages of knowledge.

Sorry, I’m rambling. I’m getting bitter in my old age. Just forty, and I’ve lost my husband, my career, my government grants. No golden years for us, no peaceful retirement—it’s not like there’s a Florida or an Arizona for us to retire to, anyway. But I refuse to believe I lost him in some idiotic accident. Farook wasn’t like the other Army hire-outs, the ones who sucked the CDC’s teats and outsourced their work to agencies that didn’t even wash their petri dishes. Farook was smart. He could sense a change in the wind before anyone else—it’s how he survived the budget cuts, the havoc at DARPA when funding for his cellular automata disappeared. He never quit, naturally: he was patient, he was precise, and above all he was committed. He loved the whole concept of nanobots, I took to making fun of him for it. “Don’t make anything that can think,” I would warn him, and pinch his ear. Oh, how he hated that.

Guess the joke’s on me. Because if he didn’t have a hand in making Silver, who did? Some backwoods Iranian engineer? Those madmen in Pyongyang? I don’t think so. These machines are not logical; they do things to human cells that shouldn’t be possible, that defy the laws of physics. They move so quickly and evolve so fast it borders on—I hate to say it—magic. If human hands were behind this thing, I’ll eat my doctorate.

The Army is running out of doctors. Silver cases among the enlisted are through the roof, and of course the nanites can chew through a clean-suit now. They’ll do anything to get at a vulnerable human host. Which makes no sense; the wet, hot environment of human organs should be anathema to machines. We should be inhospitable to them. But the ‘why’ of the disease is no longer important. The plague’s hunger is my ticket into Farook’s Army base.

It’s been a long time since I left med school for epidemiology. I didn’t have the heart for being a medical doctor… Watching people sicken, watching them die. I wasn’t strong enough to watch for that, because I knew for every man or woman I saved, there would always be two more who died of leukemia, or bone marrow cancer. No, that life was not for me. Until now.

               

I found a man who will forge me credentials. He smells strange, like curry gone rotten, and doesn’t speak much. But he’s ex special-forces and he knows what they look for—the personality quirks they check you for. He thinks he can get me into the base, to “treat” their sick. As if anything can stop the machines, once they take root.

                There’s an on-site lab, very secure, hidden below fifty feet of bomb-proof elevator shaft. I have Farook’s codes. I took them, before the army came. I thought he might want them, if… if he ever came back.

                I’m packing now. I’m leaving this tape recorder because, well, once I get in there I can’t guarantee what will happen. If they disappear me, if they wipe me from the records and ship me to Guantanamo or some other blacksite, Chicago maybe, at least someone might find this. At least someone will know why I did what I did, why I turned traitor. It wasn’t for a big agenda, not for fundamentalism or money. It’s just love. I loved that ridiculous, eccentric, occasionally stupid husband of mine, and I am going to get him back or find his body. One way or the other.

                Project Kessel… They think they’re so clever. They think just because I’m a biologist by training, there’s no chance I could have understood his notes. They didn’t even take me in for questioning. But I know what they’re up to.

                They’re trying to tame it. Turn it to their side, or a piece of it, or a colony. And then… what? Weaponize it? This thing has already threatened us as a species. How many more will die when they try to turn it loose, a dog on a very brittle chain? Right now, the machines convert people at random. It’s all arbitrary. Some hosts merely get sick; others warp into monsters with gears for teeth and titanium fingernails. But if we make it angry, threaten it… It’s not stupid. It can respond to stimuli, evolve. If we declare war on this thing, turn nanite on nanite, how long can our species survive?

                I’m going. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I know this will be the last time I see the house. The photographs in the hall; the shrine near the coat-rack. All of it, I must hold in my memory. When they catch me, and waterboard me, and put battery clamps on my loins, it will be this house I think of. Our peace that we built, here, in spite of the plague. In spite of a lack of children. We made this house our child, and it breathes in and out with the essence of us. The essence of what we were.

                I’m coming, Farook. Wherever you are, please don’t give up.

                It’ll take more than a little plague, to stop me loving you.

The Getaway, Part 3

Part 3, "the final chapter" as they say. Sorry this took so long!! Thanks for reading.

In the rear of the bungalow there was a box containing a first aid kit; there was also a small fire axe, an extinguisher, and a faded map of the island. The map was comically undetailed, but it had the information Sandra needed: latitude and longitude. She had Googled the place before Josh brought them here (still thick-throated with grief, she still had to struggle not to be angry with him) and she knew the closest land was the Turks and Caicos islands; these were the less popular southern brothers of the Bahamas, the spits of land only placed on charts as a courtesy. She made the kids stay in the bedroom as she checked all the windows and the single door; nothing lurked outside in the bright sun. Nothing waited to leap up at them, eliciting a final scream.

It was so tempting to think she’d imagined what she saw, that she had snapped under the stress of dealing with her family, with her troubled self-image and the nagging suspicion that the kids would grow up maladjusted and leave her stranded in a nursing home with Josh. But that temptation was a slippery slope, and it led directly downhill to denial.

Sandra knew all about denial. One day, she’d come home to find Josh boxing something in the kitchen, taping up a battered Amazon box. Curious, she’d asked him if he’d brought his work home with him—half-joking, half wondering why he would bother when they worked him so hard already. He’d spun around, knocking the box off the table and into the stove. Nothing had spilled out, but she’d seen what it was.

Prescription bottles. Dozens of them, taped together like machine-gun magazines with an accuracy and skill that spoke of countless hours on the Amazon packing lines. Josh had leapt to close the box and hide his little secret, but she’d seen enough. They’d had a small, terse argument: he’d insisted it was a one-time “favor” for a “friend.” What kind of “friends” he had, she didn’t know; outside of his weed guy Damien and the toothless alkies at Sonny’s Corner, Josh had few friends to speak of. He’d lost most of them when the kids were born, drifted apart from them as often happened with old connections after a sudden change in lifestyle. Like, say, suddenly having to provide for two perpetually screeching kids. Okay, that was an exaggeration; they didn’t scream perpetually. But Charlie had been a noisy baby, and Tam a fussy one. Between them, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Sandra hadn’t believed him for a minute, of course. But she hadn’t called the cops, either. When you live with someone long enough, you begin to understand what makes them tick, what keeps them going. What she’d seen in Josh’s eyes wasn’t just shame: there was determination there, as well, and even a little pride. Whatever he was doing, he thought he was doing it for them, for their dysfunctional little family unit. So she left him to his work, and put it in the back of her mind. She certainly hadn’t caught him doing it again; likely, she thought, because he had begun doing it somewhere else.

She’d known they couldn’t afford this bungalow on their own, not on his salary. Despite the outhouse and the lack of entertainment, this was a rich man’s retreat: literally a private island. She hadn’t questioned that either, hadn’t demanded to see the receipt for the rental of the bungalow or what bank account he’d paid it out of. It certainly hadn’t been theirs. And so in a way, she was responsible or partially responsible for bringing them out here. She was just as guilty of trapping them on the island as he was.

All of this seemed to make his loss hit harder; if she’d just had someone to share the blame with, the creeping terror would’ve been easier to deal with. Hefting the fire axe—it was more of a crowbar-axe combo, gimmicky stainless-steel, barely the length of a kitchen cleaver—she found herself convinced his death was on her. She’d let him go out there. Hell, she’d been glad to be rid of him, for a few hours. In a roundabout way, it was almost as if she’d murdered him herself.

That’s not true. And you don’t know he’s gone—maybe he’s out there, still. Maybe it’s just the finger. No, she didn’t believe that for a second either. If he had survived his maiming, where was he? No, Josh had run afoul of… something. Something that had killed him quickly, quietly. That dark shape in the water…

“Mom, do we have glue?”

Charlie’s voice brought her back to reality as she stared out the window at the beach. Her little Charlie, her little man. He was being so strong. “I don’t think so, honey. Let me check.” But she didn’t check. She kept staring out at the shore; something was bothering her, something seemed odd about that beach but she didn’t know what it was—

There. That rock, that rock hadn’t been there when they’d arrived. It was the size of a beanbag chair and just as lumpy, and it had no place in the shallows where it lay. Which led to the obvious conclusion: that it wasn’t a rock.

It didn’t move, or jerk, or burst into life as she watched. But it did seem to move up and down, that dark pebbly hump, that dome of gray silence. It was breathing, she realized. Something out there was alive, and it was breathing, and she felt without a shadow of a doubt that it was watching them. As if waiting.

She pulled down the blinds.

There was no glue to be had—if ever a handyman had visited the island, he had taken his tools with him. Really, the whole place seemed slapped together with such disinterest that she wondered if drunks had built it. The toilet paper supply in the outhouse had been so limited that they’d had to ration it, the generator needed to be fed gasoline every morning or it farted exhaust and died, and the pantry was so shallow it could barely hold all their food. This wasn’t a home away from home; more of a doll’s house, a facsimile of a vacation house. And it was their fortress now, this lousy stoner’s palace.

Maybe even their tomb.

The book said to keep her chin up, though, so she kept her chin up. She helped Charlie fit some of the phone’s pieces together, held Tam when she cried, and didn’t tell them about the dark shape in the shallows, the fat lumpen thing that heaved ugly breath in and out of itself. And as the sun began to dip down towards the horizon, she didn’t think of what they would do at night, how they would get through. Not thinking seemed more sane than thinking, at this point.

Outside, the dusk was beautiful and stained with colors; the splash of vibrant light across the horizon filled the whole sky with blues, and purples, reds and scintillating oranges that crashed across the stratosphere and made the whole world into a postcard. Oblivious to the picturesque sunset, the thing in the water waited, still hungry. Biding its time. Waiting for the right moment.

All predators in nature, after all, are patient. They know when the time is right; instinct speaks to them, and they move in for the kill. As the sun melted down into the endless blue sea, the thing in the water began inching forward. Sandra did not see it; the kids were locked up safely in the bedroom, and they were in the opening stages of trauma, fear numbing their brains and making them stiff and jaded.

The thing heaved its liquid bulk up onto the shore, arms uncoiling like a flower opening at close of day. It unspooled its great limbs and began hauling itself over the dry sand, the particles sticking to its enormous body like tiny hitchhikers. Its rolling eyes with curious inhuman slit-pupils swept the beach, which was filling with the gathering dark. No prey here.

Yet it remembered; it had seen prey, and it remembered. More importantly, it had seen where the prey had gone.

Moving with effort, almost with pain, the great hunter dragged its starving mass up towards the house.

Inside, Tam had finally stopped crying. It seemed she had no more tears to cry. She was thinking of Daddy, of the man who had been so strange lately but still her father all the same. She was trying to wrap her head around the concept he was dead. She knew things died, of course; Tam was at times an eerily pragmatic child, unconcerned with the passing of insects and small animals. But this was different; her dad was not a bug. And her dad was gone.

As she sat struggling to digest this, Charlie pushed his glasses up his nose. He was sweating; they had turned on the ceiling light to help him work but it was slow going, especially without any glue. He’d been forced to use the price tags on his schoolbooks (good old Mom had insisted he bring them, and now he was glad) to meld together certain parts, the adhesive on the stickers binding loosely together the parts they had broken. Guilt filled every inch of him, but he managed to keep it in by focusing on the task at hand. He had stretched the dead phone out on his mother’s bed, the white sheets like a surgeon’s operating table. He screwed the receiver back into place, wedging it in with strips of saliva-wetted paper from his textbooks. He puzzled over how to reconnect a shredded wire, finally twining it back together with his fingers, meticulous. They didn’t need every part back in place—just enough to send a signal. Just enough to reach whatever private satellite whirled silently overhead, waiting for them to call for help.

“Charlie, I’m sorry.” He turned to see his sister peering over the edge of the bed. Her eyes were nearly crimson from crying; in the light of the single ceiling lamp, she looked like a pale little ghoul. “I’m sorry I called you those things.”

He blinked. Thrust suddenly into the role of phone-repair-boy, he had entirely forgotten about their argument. “It’s… fine. Don’t worry about it. We got other stuff to worry about, right?” She nodded. “Look, when we get out of here I’ll play as much Scrabble with you as you want. And I promise I won’t cheat, ever again. Kay?”

The edges of a smile tugged her lips. “Kay.”

Their mother appeared at the bedroom door, carrying a pair of plates. On the plates were a pair of bologna sandwiches. “Hey, you two. I know it’s not much—”

The lights went out.

In the mindless panic that descended, before their night vision arrived (Tam’s first; she had always had keener vision than the rest) the plates thumped to the floor, bologna slices flying. Tam shrieked. And Charlie put his hands protectively over the half-dead phone, terrified someone might nudge it in the dark and destroy his work. Later he would wonder why he didn’t go to his mother, or his sister, but the answer was simple: Josh wouldn’t have, either.

“It’s alright. It’s alright—everybody just calm down.” Sandra sounded like she needed some calming herself, but she fumbled through the moonlight from the window and pulled Tam close to her, reaching for Charlie. “It’s the generator. It’s just the generator. I’ll go out and fill it again. It just ran out of gas—that’s all.”

Charlie heard something, then, in the absence of the whirr of the ceiling fan and the ever-present, distant rumble of its power source. Something moving in the silence. “Mom, shush.”

“I’ll just be a couple minutes, I promise, I’ll get out and come right—”

“Mom, quiet!” The urgency in his voice sent both Tam and their mother into silence. For a moment, utter stillness descended on the beach house. In that stillness, they heard it.

Something moving against the walls. Heavy, wet, scraping and slithering, pushing and probing. Had it been there the entire time, or had it only just arrived? They couldn’t know, but Sandra felt an ugly stab of fear in her guts as the thing outside pressed its mass against the wall. There was a quiet, yet utterly repulsive squirting noise, like an enormous boil popping.

What is it? came the thought, to all their minds at once. What’s out there? Even Sandra, who had hoped against hope that Josh might come back, knew better than to go and open the blinds. The moonlight fell in sharp blades across the bed, across the wreckage of the phone, across her children’s frightened faces. Then something passed in front of the window, a heavy hump of shadow that rose and fell almost in the same instant. That window is almost six feet high.

Had someone stowed away on the boat, intent on stalking them? It couldn’t be—the area was too small. They would have noticed. Which meant it had to be something else. That lump in the water… The thing was on land now. Watching them. Waiting.

She gripped the axe tight. “Everyone stay here.”

“Mom?” Charlie’s eyes were moons in the dark, the reflection of his glasses flickering and gleaming. “Mom, where are you going?”

“We need that generator on.” She stared at the door, half-open, the pale circles of the fallen plates beside it.

“We don’t. We’re fine, Mom. Don’t go out there.” He was begging her, softly, with as much dignity as his fear allowed him.

“How are you going to fix that thing in the dark?” she asked him, a little more harshly than she’d meant to. “There was no flashlight with the first aid kit. How are you going to fix it in the dark, Charlie?”

He swallowed, the clicking of his throat audible. Outside, the hump-thing squeezed its body against the side of the bungalow. Sounds like the slapping of soggy ropes on tin sheeting rang and boomed throughout the small space.

It wants in, she thought.

“Get against the wall.” She ushered them, shepherd-like, away from the sounds. There was a small bureau beside the bed, an ugly faux-mahogany thing, but it wasn’t high enough to block the window. They stood, all together, a huddled little family unit being stalked as surely as any Neanderthal clan was harried by a sabertooth, and waited. Eventually, the sounds stopped.

That worried Sandra. Her palpitating heart would have found some relief if the thing outside had crashed through the window, or hammered on the walls in an attempt to break through. At least then they would have been able to see it. This pensive, squamous silence sounded too patient, too much like thinking for her. She did some quick math: forty feet to the generator. Forty feet back. How fast was this thing? It must’ve been strong, to take her husband so quickly, but from the sound of it, it moved slow. She thought she could outrun it: she had done four years of track in high school, after all, and lacrosse in college. The years since had done some damage to her fitness and waistline, sure, but the muscle memory might still be there. “I’m going to be out for a minute, okay? Just a minute. I just have refill the generator.”

“Mom…” Charlie clung to the hem of her dress, in a way he hadn’t since he was four or five, when his precocious demeanor told him he had to “outgrow” such things. “What about us?” Tam began to whimper. Worried she might cry, Charlie pulled her close and shushed her, but she shoved him away.

“You two will be okay.” She nodded at the door. “The bureau is small. Get it in front of the door, and don’t move it until I get back. Okay?”

“It’s a vampire,” said Tam in a strangled squeak. They both looked at her; the idea was so absurd that Sandra half-smiled. Then she realized her daughter was being serious; she had glimpsed a few scenes of Queen of the Damned when she and Josh had watched it last year. And who was she to laugh? They had no idea what was out there. “It’s gonna get you. Don’t go.”

“It’s not a vampire, sweetie.” She hefted the small axe. “And whatever it is, it’s not going to get me. I’m going to come back, and we’re going to get out of here, and then we’re going to go back to New Hampshire and never, ever, ever go on the beach again. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Charlie. He put a hand on his sister’s shoulder, and this time she didn’t push him.

“I’ll be back soon.” Her heart began ramping up its pace again as she opened the bedroom door. “Love you two.”

The last thing Charlie and Tam saw of her was the edge of her sundress, sweeping around the doorframe. That memory would lodge in his mind afterward, like a piece of broken glass in the soft tissue of his brain, able to call up pain whenever he brought it back.

Like a charm.

                Sandra pushed aside the mini-fridge and went out into the night, with nerves jangling and humming under her skin. Survival instincts—mostly bred out of the human race, by centuries of complacency—were telling her to get back inside, where it was safe, where her children were safe. She ignored the instincts, because they did not have the capacity for long-term thought, and in the long term, her children were going to die if they did not get the lights going.

                She’d tripped over things in the dark while leaving the bungalow, and her toes throbbed as she closed the door behind her and located the generator hut under the moonlight. The air was sickeningly warm, flowers hunched under swaying palms lending a false sense of security, all of it soaked in the salty breeze coming off the ocean. The night was still and quiet; strips of cloud hurried across the moon.

                From the back of the house, there was a scraping, like teeth on metal. Then a slow, steady shuffling, like a sack of wet cement being dragged over sand. The sound froze her on her feet for a second. Then she began to run.

                It’d been a long time since Sandra had sprinted anywhere, and she felt it as the blood pounded in her ears and her unused joints sent out pangs of complaint. Years ago she’d been spry enough to chase down the kids, but then had come iPads, wireless broadband, and all the gewgaws which helped keep them still and silent, the way Josh wanted everyone. She’d lost her reflexes, and she felt it keenly as she tripped over a protruding rock, bashed her knee, and then scrambled up like a sack-race participant who’d forgotten her sack.

                The shuffling grew closer. It was not fast, this thing, but it was persistent. She promised herself she would give it a chase, if nothing else. Sandra spared a glance over her shoulder as she closed the forty feet between the house and the hut.

She immediately wished she hadn’t. It was easily the size of car, a knotty pyramid of pale flesh oozing over the white sand. Rope-like arms spilled out in front of it, to carry its liquid bulk. It was like a giant stress ball, malleable and wriggling, covered in hook-tipped tentacles. In the dark, she couldn’t see if it had eyes or a mouth or what the hell it was, but it was big. And it wanted her.

                She felt her middle jiggling as she ran, and she burned with shame despite her fear. If they ever got out of this she would be back to the gym, you bet your ass, back to the gym every goddamn day and make no mistake about that. She’d be like every other up-and-coming woman on the block—a gym bunny, a cardio fiend, a Zumba queen. She would bust her ass like never before—if she survived, that was. The axe in her hand was slippery with sweat, and seemed inadequate now, a monkey’s Stone Age toy to fight a colossus.

Almost there! The generator hut rose up in front of her—she grabbed for the latch, hauled open the tin door and tried to ignore the stink of gas. She’s safe, ladies and gentlemen, she’s home free! Slamming the door shut, she fumbled for the light switch, which didn’t work—of course it didn’t work, stupid, the fucking genny was out. Idiot!

                She tried to think through her panic as the shuff-shuff-shuff of the tentacled thing drew closer. She had been out here with Josh, once, and then again when she went looking for him. There had been something on the wall—she searched blindly in the dark, her heart in her mouth; in her groping she dropped the axe, and it clanged loudly on the sand-strewn concrete. There: a small flashlight, on a hook. She flicked it on, and nearly blinded herself. Probably the only one on the island, she thought. Hell of a thing to skimp out on.  They wouldn’t need to turn the generator on, she realized, if she could just get it back to the house. If she could just stay away from that thing a little longer.

                Shards of moonlight broke through as a rattling crash shook the hut. It trembled like a shark cage as (whatever-it-was) smashed into the sides, with terrifying force. She bit back a shriek and held the door shut, white knuckles gripping the latch in darkness. There was silence for a moment, and then she felt shock run up her arm as the door handle wiggled up and down. That was no mindless assault—that was a test, like a chimpanzee slowly catching on to a Pavlovian test.

                It understands doors.

                How? How could—It didn’t matter. She had a light. There was a chance, a slim chance, she might be able to get back to the house before the horror outside pulled the door open, or bashed through the wall. But she couldn’t just dash out there. She couldn’t. If she got torn to bits, who would protect the kids? She felt sick, thinking of them as orphans. Without her, without the light, they would die.

Unable to dislodge her, the thing outside rammed against the frame, a vomitous slapping sound rolling through the genny-hut as its arms slapped and scraped on the thin barrier between Sandra and death. She flinched away; a crack of light appeared on the edge of the door, and a mass of pulsing meat filled it. The thing made no sound, no roars or growls or shrieks, but it stank—God, it reeked. It smelled of the ugly, black-blind depths of the ocean, of rot and blood and the grave. Sandra’s sweat fell in her eyes, but she didn’t dare take both hands off the handle of the door. She didn’t dare give it another inch—already, she could hear the serrated hooks on the ends of its arms scrabbling to get into the tiny gap. She wouldn’t give it an inch, or that would be the end.

The crawling beast mashed itself against the shack, and she caught a glimpse of one transparent, rheumy goat’s-iris in the glare of her flashlight, as it tried to press through the cleft of the doorframe. Then a booming crash, as it whipped its arms at the tin roof. Then silence, deep and broad, as it withdrew.

The hut, beaten and battered, creaked around her.

The stench of gasoline was making her vision. She could stay in here forever, she thought, if only that awful thing would leave her alone. But inside, that same strength that had directed the children during her panic took hold again. You’re just going to stay in here? Let it fuck with you, push you around, keep you in a box?

Just like Josh?

That sealed it. Her days of high-school glory, athletic and intellectual heights she could have reached had her husband not kept her down, set Sandra’s veins afire. Whether it was desperation, or arrogance, she decided she would take her chances with that thing. No big squid, or mutant or hybrid, was going to keep her from her babies.

She picked up the axe. Turned the door handle. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.

“Fuck you!” she screamed, hurtling out into the night. She swept the flashlight in a quick one-eighty, raising the axe. Where was it? It was huge, a bloated monstrosity, and it had just been here, where the hell did it go?

In the blue midnight, she saw sucker-marks trailing across the sand. Saw the glistening trail of slime up the side of the shack. And with the slow-motion terror-laughter of a dream, she smiled at her own idiocy. It understood doors; why had she assumed it didn’t understand traps?

Half  a ton of cephalopod came down on her from atop the shed. Her death was not slow, and did not come easy. Dozens of twisting suckers with razor-hooks dug into her, muscular folds of flesh filling up her mouth, her nostrils. Two suckers worked into her eye shot, and the hooks plunged in, twisting, searching.

Sandra Harrison died alone, in squamous silence, her flashlight rolling across the sand and arrowing its fragile beam up at the uncaring stars.

“Where’s Mom?”

Charlie wished his sister hadn’t asked this question. Mostly, it was because he didn’t know, but it was also because he had been wondering it himself. He didn’t like to admit that he was lost, but staring at the gleaming pieces of the phone under the starlight, he had to make this confession. It hurt, but he had to face the facts. Mom had been gone for half an hour; they’d heard smashing, then a shout. Then, nothing.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The vastness of the space around him, might not be apparent to Tam, but Charlie knew. He’d seen the charts in the boat they’d ridden here, the laughing Rasta-man whose dreads might’ve been a wig the way he’d been fussing over them—Charlie had seen that man’s charts, and this place was less than a dot, less than an inkblot on the map. It didn’t even have a name. In a stroke of originality, someone had scribbled “Gull Island” over the dot. Truly inspired.

Except they hadn’t seen any gulls in their time here. Not a single one. No wheeling seabirds had cried to wake them in the mornings, or crap on them while they played on the beach. And Dad hadn’t caught any fish—not a minnow, not even a single, undulating jellyfish. It was almost as if something had been keeping the wildlife away. Something that had moved in and dominated the foodchain, destroying the natural order. Something that had waited three days, to seek out fresh meat.

Josh wasn’t concerned with its species right now, or where it had come from, or what unholy urge made it crawl on land and eat the flesh of human beings. Two thoughts dominated brain. The first concerned how to get off the island. A pragmatic boy, he was not one to panic, or lose control of any situation he still had a snowball’s chance of hanging onto. The second was the concept of his mother’s death.

His father’s death, he could handle. He and Josh (he had thought of his father largely as Josh, for several months after discovering a second cell phone taped to the inside of the glovebox in the family car—all the numbers in there were foreign, and some quick Googling had revealed them to be for a Thai phone-sex company) had never been close. It was painful to lose his dad, of course; he was not so jaded, and there was a part of him that sincerely loved his father. Yet another part of him rejoiced: Dad was gone! Good riddance, this devil-Charlie jeered. Hope he enjoys his speed-ride all the way down to Heck.

But his mother… She had always been there to play good cop. Patch him up when the kids at school tried to shove his chess-club pieces down his pants, leaving ugly bruises. She had been there to hound and tongue-lash the school board into transferring him, over and over, whenever he was marked for cruelty—and he always was. You didn’t memorize radio repair manuals at his age, and not expect a few hard knocks. Now she was gone. The smell of her, her perfume, clung to him as a memory of sanity and patience.

Now that island was gone, and he had a very different island to deal with: one that wanted to kill him. Not impossible to handle, sure, not for someone who had beaten the reigning middle-school chess champion not one but three times in a row. Challenging, though, with grief clinging to him—and fear. He was very afraid. So he pushed that fear away, pushed it and pushed it, corralled it with simple math: Mom and Dad are gone. That leaves just us now. No room for collapse, Charles. No room for silly games and feelings, no space for breakdowns or panic. Only room for efficiency.

His sister was saying something. “What?” he snapped, irritated, and then sorry.

She was shaking his arm. “Please,” she whispered, sobbing. “Please come back.”

“What are you talking about?”

She wiped tears from her eyes. It was amazing, how many tears Tam could summon; sometimes he wondered if it was her only talent. “You’re back. Good. Good-good, you were gone for… your face went all dumb. For like, an hour.”

He blinked. “Oh.” Sometimes his mind did this. If there was a big problem to work on, it would send him away, put him in a safe quiet space where he could work undistracted, no matter the parental fights going on down the hall or the obnoxious Disney movies playing in his sister’s room. Sometimes, he was gone for a long time. Now he’d done it and left Tam alone in the bungalow, hunted by an insane, impossible creature. He needed information.

“Did it come back?” he asked, putting a hand on her arm. She was pale-faced, probably dehydrated and hungry. They would both have to deal with that at some point; it had to be late, past his bedtime and certainly past hers. “Is it still out there?”

She shook her heard. “I heard it. It wented… Went back out to the ocean.” Her syntax was falling apart. Her words didn’t always come out right, when she was upset. Both of them, he realized, were falling apart—detached logic or not. They had to pull together. There were no adults to help them here.

“Okay.” He took a breath, the first one consciously drawn that night. “Okay, that means we have some time.”

“Maybe it went away,” said Tam, the hope in her voice heartbreaking. “Maybe it’s gone, and Mom’s gonna come back?” She was seeking approval from him, backup, protection.

She wasn’t going to get it. “I don’t think so,” he said. She shrank against the wall, and pulled herself into a bundle on the cheap carpeting. He sat down beside his sister and put an arm around her. Even as he did, his brain was jerking into high gear.

A creature that size, big enough to claw at the window of the bedroom, must have an enormous calorie requirement. Common sense and biology alike dictated this. Therefore, there was no reason to think it would stop at Mom and Dad—it had emptied its environment, after all, and expanded outward to drive off gulls, local fish populations and probably pick off unsuspecting fishermen, for all he knew. It would be back, once it had finished its grisly meal, and they would be next.

Unless they stopped it.

How to fight such a thing? It clearly had no special vulnerability to blades; Mom hadn’t lasted more than ten minutes against it. Guns, perhaps? He knew his father had one; Josh had often gone to it in the middle of the night, checking the safe behind the hallway mirror like a different father would go to the refrigerator for a snack. What he’d been afraid of, Charlie didn’t know. But he never would have brought that ridiculously oversized Colt down here—his father had seemed like he had nothing to fear, from the moment they’d stepped off the boat. Nothing to worry about. That sure worked out for you, thought Charlie bitterly.

Why had the thing gone back to sea? To eat its meal in peace, perhaps. To stash it in some watery tomb where it kept a larder. Or—

“Because it has to,” he realized, astonished at his own thought.

Tam looked up at him. “Huh?”

“It only came out after dark,” he said, and found himself grinning: a mad, stupid grin that split his face. “Because the sun was too hot. It needs to stay wet, or it dries out, like a… an amphibian, or a mudfish, or something. It can’t take heat!” Tam nodded, as if following along, though her eyes were lost and distant—traumatized. In his excitement he decided her trauma could be dealt with later. They had a chance, now. They had a shot at survival!

Fire, perhaps? Yes, they would have to burn it. But what would they use for fuel? All the gasoline was in the generator shed, and he doubted his parents’ thin summer clothes would make satisfactory torches for long—they would need a light. And if they had fire, he realized, he could finish fixing the phone. The stove was electric, run off the generator, but his father had been a smoker, a chronic smoker. And forgetful.

Charlie moved to the bureau and began rifling through it, dimly aware how embarrassed he would normally be to touch his mother’s underthings, his father’s starchy boxer shorts. He found a hairbrush, an ounce of pot in a plastic baggie, an old-fashioned pipe… and there it was. His father’s lighter, forgotten in his excitement to go out and catch a big one.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Tam. “I’m need you to hold this for me. Okay?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice very small. “Charlie?”

“What?”

“Is the big thing gonna get us?”

He sighed. “Maybe. But not if we’re smart. Okay?” She looked doubtful. “Hey, come on. I know you can be smart. You knew how to deal with Mom and Dad, way better than I did.” He hated to talk about them in past tense—it scared him, made things real somehow. But it was the truth. “You use your brain whenever mine’s off like a mile away. You gotta be my backup. Please?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Alright. Now it’s gonna come back, and it’s gonna be looking for us. We have to fix the phone before that happens.” He instructed her on how to hold the lighter, and helped her steady it as it flared to life under her tiny fingers. “Fix the phone… and get ready.”

Alone in the dark, in miles of black ocean, the two children began their work.

The great hunter had returned to life-giving saltwater. The dry air of the island burned it, sapped its strength; it had taken its time picking over Sandra’s body and gnawing the softest parts off, and it was shriveled, papery. It had no concern about scavengers approaching ; it had already eaten them all. It had drained the seas of life for miles around, and now had only plankton for company.

It soaked in the sea, regained its strength, and emerged once again.

Lurching onto the beach, its malign intelligence guided it back to the place that had been the source of its best meals: the bungalow. It probed and prodded at the walls, tentacles coiling over the cheap doors and windows with their Tyvek HomeWrap poking from under fake bamboo exterior. Eventually it found an open window; it knew by now that doors could be locked, and every second of wasted energy meant it would have to go back to sea sooner. It heaved its enormous body up onto the wall, and began the laborious process of squeezing itself through the window.

Invertebrates, lacking skeletons, are able to pass themselves through spaces far too small for their size—given enough time. The hunter of Gull Island was no exception. Mashing itself against the tiny windowframe like a vast blob of putty, it heaved and shoved until it had applied enough pressure to ooze its form into the living room, great oozing piles of its reeking flesh pouring onto the slate inside. The arms followed, razor hooks whipping and grasping for a handhold in the cool dark space. Its arms latched on the couch, shredding it; its mass filled nearly half the room, its bulbous top half grazing the ceiling. Unconcerned with the lack of light, the creature began to explore.

Outside the water, its hunting capacities were limited. Without the ability to sense electrochemical signatures—the alert flags of prey—through water, it was reduced to using its eyes and arms alone. It dug beneath the couch, looking for soft meat to slice; it fumbled through the kitchen, crushing the stale bread and a half-finished sandwich Tam had started that morning and then forgotten. Arm after leathery arm filled the bungalow, each one seeking with a mind of its own, controlled independently. One of its legs knocked over the big-screen TV, and it recoiled as the machine crashed to the floor. Arms poked, scraped, confirmed there was no threat, and the hunt resumed. It popped open the mini-fridge to find bologna and alcohol, useless substances that were ignored completely. Where was the prey?

At length, it discovered the bedroom. The flickering light from beneath the door fascinated it; it had spent several minutes playing with Sandra’s flashlight earlier, and this illumination held it hypnotized. It worked a tentacle under the door, groping, grasping until it found the bolt on the inside. With a click, the door was unlocked, and the creature barreled into the room, doorframe cracking as it pressed its mass through.

No prey—but there was heat! Such terrible heat! Something had been done to an object in this room, something the animal had no understanding of. Tam and Charlie had set fire to the bed, a few minutes before escaping. They had left the window open, the heavy bureau knocked over to serve as a stepladder. Clothes were scattered over the floor, and several of the drawers were empty.

The hunter had no awareness of this. It was both horrified and obsessed with the hot, dancing light spreading across the bed. It stretched out one tentacle to touch the flames, and when the grasping claws at its tip met fire, its pigmentation changed to a disgusted gray color and it surged away in one bubbling, liquid motion. Bad! The light was bad, very bad, it hurt. Worse, it was dry, hot and dry and terrible. The thing from the water had discovered what it felt like to be burned.

It was not pleased.

Over a thousand pounds of cephalopod crashed out of the bedroom, not bothering with patience, simply ripping the doorframe apart on its way out. Its skin flashed and pulsed with bio-luminescent rage. On some dark, instinctual level, it understood that it had been tricked. Why? It had only wanted food. Why was this happening?

Seeing the front door open, it squirmed towards the welcoming moonlight. It would soak in the brine for a time, and then return. The night was long, and it was still hungry. But there was a curious pile by the door, something soft and lumpy, blocking the way.

And the door hadn’t been open before. It remembered that quite clearly. There was a shape standing over the lump. The horror paused, its curiosity mingled with frustration, which dashed in colorful patterns over its skin.

Charlie stood over a pile of clothes soaked in his father’s best bourbon, his every limb trembling. The thing was lit from the back by the blaze in the bedroom; to him, it seemed a thing from nightmare, as tall as the ceiling and covered in hook-tipped limbs. Twin eyes like bulging, transparent tomatoes rolled and bugged at him. He could almost sense its anger, and he had to laugh.

An octopus. For all its smarts, its deadly hunger and its subtlety, he could see it plain: the horror unmasked was only an octopus. Huge, of course, bigger than any he’d ever read about, and equipped with the kind of claws you’d expect on Freddy Krueger, but still an octopus. A dumb fish, he realized sadly, had killed half his family.

“This is for Mom,” he said, and flicked the lighter over the pile of clothing.

The bourbon wasn’t as high-proof as the salesman in Bermuda had claimed—the sticker was a lie, pressed on to entice thirsty tourists—but it burned just fine. Hawaiian shirts, bras, socks and a single piece of lacy lingerie Sandra had brought to entice her husband burst into flame, scarlet tongues leaping upward. The creature, which had been rippling towards him, pulled back. It was scared, he realized with a thrill of animal glee. It knew from the bedroom what fire was, and big or not, it was scared. “That’s right,” he said, backing away. “Burn.”

He fled into the night.

The animal in the living room turned and twisted, its clever murderer’s brain filling with panic. The door was blocked with more pain-light, and it had nowhere to run—it couldn’t squeeze back through the window, not in time to get away from the dehydrating smoke and the blooming heat. Much like the late Josh, it had never evolved to counter a strategy like this. Its ingenuity, its ruthless hunting, had run up against a threat it could not understand. And now it was trapped in a house aflame.

The fires had spread from the bed already, licking the bedroom ceiling, coiling over the stained rug beneath the bedframe. The single framed picture Sandra had brought of all of them together blackened and cracked on the nightstand, the faded print from a long-gone era of Polaroids crackling and crisping. The fire spread; smoke filled first one room, then the next. The bungalow was burning to the ground, just like Charlie had planned.

Outside, he sprinted across the sand to his sister, who had dutifully hidden among fallen palm leaves. They watched the ugly glow of fire spread, and heard the banging and thundering from within. Josh wished the thing would roar, or scream, or give some sound of surrender, but it did not. Only the helpless thrashing of its arms could be heard, booming through the night. “You okay?” he asked Tam.

She sighed. “My iPad’s in there,” she said, sounding very distant.

He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s okay.” In one hand, he held the repaired phone, and he flicked the lighter over it, squinting at the emergency number taped under the receiver. “We’ll get you another—”

The creature smashed through the wall of the bungalow, half its body afire, arms whipping and pounding the sand. Terror and fury had driven it mad, and it whirled and bubbled, its eye fixing on them. The other eye had popped from heat, and was running in filthy streams down its blackened shape. Charlie froze, his finger poised over the patched satellite phone.

He had seconds to react. Seeing the lighter, the thing was coming towards them, and not slowly, either; instinct was telling it to return to water, but now the hunter had learned a new sensation, one that burned sick and furious inside it: Hatred.

Charlie pressed the phone into his sister’s hands. “The rocks,” he stammered. The car-sized beast was hauling itself at them, whipping hooks thrown out in front of it. It wasn’t just going to kill them, he realized; it was going to tear them apart for what they had done to it. He wondered if it understood revenge. “The rocks we climbed the first day. Get on top of them, call the number.”

“No,” she said, and clung to him. “No, no—”

“Do what I tell you to, dammit!” he screamed at her, and sounded so much like his father that it disgusted him for a moment. He shoved her, and she staggered, betrayal in her eyes. “Go!” She nodded, and hugged him, quickly. He hugged her back. For all her brattiness, for all his jealousy, he did love her—and he would probably never see her again.

She dashed away, propelled by the kind of terror only a child can know. He stood his ground as the thing approached, holding up the lighter. The beast would have a choice to make; pursue the smaller, weaker prey, or come after the more dangerous target—the one that had nearly killed it. Any ordinary animal, one that was motivated only by hunger, would have followed Tam. But this thing was not ordinary, and he had done more than hurt it. He had made it angry.

Without even pausing, it closed the gap between them and swept its arms out to embrace him. He rolled away; it was big, but clumsy, its body unused to the heaviness it experienced on land. Hooks of bone smashed into the palm fronds around them. He leapt up and began to run; it followed.

The generator shed was close by, its walls dark and high, a stain of blood marring the earth in front of it. He stepped over his mother’s blood with a stomach-jerk of revulsion, and pulled himself inside. He would not have long before it got inside.

In Charlie’s mind, efficiency had again taken center stage. One way or another, the creature was going to get him. The island simply didn’t have a shelter big enough to keep it out. And once it ate him, it would move on to Tam, dehydration be damned. It would not stop until it had killed its tormentors. That was what monsters did: they kept coming. Like his dad, plowing forward through life, an idiot brute with no conception of how to escape the trap he’d set for himself. Charlie pulled the door shut to the generator shed, and held it for a moment, long enough to hear the claws scraping on the other side. It would expect him to hold the door; that would buy him a few seconds. Enough to do what had to be done. Enough time to take Option Two.

Gagging at the smell inside the shed, he hurried to the ladder, which stretched down into a hole—a sort of bunker. He realized only belatedly that the reason they’d put the generator underground was the same reason he was now feeling his way down greasy rungs into the dark: they needed it away from the house. Far away from visitors, in case anything happened.

And accidents happened, didn’t they? Tam was an accident, he knew that much. His parents had never meant to have her. And when they had, it seemed like everything had unraveled. His mom had found a new joy; for his dad, the children became a chore, something to be resented. This made his choice easier to make. He would not resent his sister. He would not choose himself over her.

He flicked the lighter as he reached the bottom; at the same time, the beast called his bluff and pushed open the door. Illumination spread, and Charlie saw things. Terrible things.

The wetness on the ladder hadn’t been grease. He shrank against the wall, horrified: his mother’s shredded body lay in the light of the small flame, her skin stripped from her, intestines devoured and eyes dug out like truffles removed by some rooting hog. It had dumped her down here, like a candy wrapper, discarded. She was a mess, and he turned away from her, his mouth filling with vomit, and tried to forget the sight. There was no time for grief, now.

Soon there wouldn’t be time for anything.

He found what he was looking for in the back of the generator basement: a tiny, cramped space, it only had enough room to house the generator itself—and dozens on dozens of plastic cans of gasoline. How often, in the movies, had he seen the hero kill a monster with gas? Countless times—but the hero always escaped, always lived another day. Always came back in the sequel to do it again, and again, and again.

Not this time.

The cracked, peeling tentacles of his pursuer were twining down the ladder, bone razors rasping on concrete. He poured a can of gas onto the floor, then another. The cold stinking oil slopped around his feet. The creature followed him down into the depths slowly; perhaps the fumes confused it, or perhaps it knew it had him cornered. Perhaps it was having fun, he thought.

He stood ankle-deep in gasoline by the time it reached the bottom. Its mass filled the ladder-shaft and plopped into the tiny room like so much excrement. And before he could lower the lighter into the gasoline or perhaps drop it in dramatic slow-motion, the creature reached out and tore his arm off.

Charlie didn’t have time to scream, only feel a vague sense of surprise. The next tentacle whipped across his throat, pulling out his voicebox and trachea with a pop and a spray of red, and he slumped over with a distant sense of failure in his fading brain. It hurt, yes, but it hurt more that he had failed his siter. His baby sister, who he had bullied so mercilessly.

I love you, Tam.

The monster feasted, among the gasoline and the filth. It turned Charlie’s severed, dripping arm around in its appendage like a toy. At last, it brought its attention to the curious object in Charlie’s drained, white fingers. Pried it loose. Toyed with it, brought one claw over the silver wheel that summoned flame from nowhere, as if by magic. By now, leaden gasoline fumes had filled the tiny cavern below the shed.

The creature’s inquisitive nature was insatiable. It had to know; how had the boy accomplished his trick? How had it been hurt? The claw stroked the wheel, then pressed, turned it. One try, two were not enough: it was a persistent devil, and it tried a third time. That was the charm.

The fumes, and the gasoline slopping noisily in the depths, went up in a plume of fiery rage that bellowed into the night sky, lighting up the air over the island like a Roman candle.

Curiosity, the oldest hunter in the world, had claimed a new victim.

The next morning when the rescue helicopter arrived, Tam was sitting on the rocks just as she had been ordered, playing with the phone. She was rocking back and forth slowly, deliberately. The paramedics and authorities swept the island, pulled her into the helicopter. Inquiries would be made, body parts examined. Months later, she would be told her brother was a hero, that an unexpected runoff of some-or-other chemical had caused an exponential growth in certain wildlife. That warmer seas and changing climate had encouraged the increase in size of blah-blah-blah.

Yet Tam never responded, never voiced a shrill cry of joy or a sob of terror. She had a notion in her survivor’s brain that if she had just been quieter, just been better behaved, they never would have come to the island. It would be over twenty years, before she spoke again.

Out in the blue empty of the tropics, the waves crashed over one another in raucous joy. Gulls floated on warm thermal wind, and the illusion of a paradise on earth, of infinite azure beauty, persisted.

And no one questioned this beautiful lie.