Gregg Hurwitz - Minutes to Burn

Cameron had thought she'd feel nothing, so she was completely unprepared for the wave of emotion that swept through her. Her mind danced across a landscape of memories, spinning with images. She thought of the larva, bucking and squealing and dying. She thought of the gnarled little creature on the floor of the Estradas' house. She thought of Derek and Jacqueline and their baby girl. She thought of all the frightful things she had seen-so many reasons to be afraid, so many reasons to pull back into herself where everything was neat and safe.

"Baby?" Justin was asking. "Do you want to? Do you think you're ready?" His eyes were as soft as they'd ever been-brave yet intensely vulnerable.

She could barely hear him because she was so far down in herself, swimming in fear and excitement and sheer elation. The answer was there like a bright beam of light, and with it came tears, hard and unremitting. She was pressing her face against his chest, weeping with joy, and from somewhere far away she heard herself saying yes over and over like a prayer.

The island's last remaining feral dog nosed through the ash and debris of the base camp, looking for food. Her paws were ragged, one of her nails torn off from a fight with another bitch. She'd caught a masked booby chick the previous day, which she'd eaten right in front of its squawking mother, sliding down to her belly and savoring the meal. But the hunger had returned again quickly, greeting her in the morning with the rising sun.

Maybe it was because she was pregnant.

She tugged on a scorched edge of canvas, searching for something edible beneath, but there was nothing, just a warped cruise box and a dented canteen. Finally giving up, she trotted toward the road, her head barely protruding from the high grass.

Leaping gracefully among the fallen balsas, she nosed her way through the cracks of the trunks, but again there was nothing. She was just about ready to head to the forest when she caught a whiff of some-thing faint, lining the southern wind.

She jogged up the road toward the source of the smell, her nose ele-vated and twitching. Stopping at the base of the watchtower, she sat, peering up its length.

In the shed at the top, the desiccated body of the larva lay beneath the dangling hook, protected by the shade of the shed. The abdomen and thorax had long rotted away in the sweltering heat, but the sclerotized head had just begun to crack. Green hemolymph oozed out, working its way slowly down the side rail of the dilapidated ladder, its pungent odor thick in the air. The bitch sat, head cocked, watching the ripe fluid slowly descend.

In the distance, the dot of a boat appeared on the horizon, Diego on the deck, Ramoncito laughing and swinging from the boom. It was still a good few hours away from shore.

The hemolymph pooled momentarily above a crooked 2 x 4 that served as one of the ladder's steps before spilling over and snaking the rest of the way down the side rail.

The dog stepped forward and began lapping.