Gregg Hurwitz - Minutes to Burn

Diego shook his head, his face drained of color. "How?" he asked.

Rex reached into his bag and pulled out the segment of the sun-damaged mantid ootheca that Frank had kept in his tent. It was pep-pered with parasite wasp holes. Holding it up, Rex closed one eye and peered through one of the holes, telescope-style. "UV damage kept the ootheca from hardening enough to prevent parasitic wasps from drilling through the shell. The virus probably invaded the ootheca later through the wasp holes, acting on the developing mantid nymphs that weren't eaten by wasp offspring, and altering their genetic composition before they hatched."

Diego picked up a jar, turning it in his hand. "How do you know these dinos are infected?"

Rex pursed his lips. "We don't. They look normal under a standard lens, but we can't definitively determine whether they're infected without running a gel, and we don't have the equipment here. But we do know that they were infected two months ago when Frank pulled the samples and had them shipped to us."

Diego handed him back the jar. "But we don't even know what the virus does to begin with. It could merely be a plant virus. You're com-pletely hypothesizing."

"A new virus appears on the same island we discover a massive living aberration… I just can't help thinking they've got to be linked, either through direct or shared causation."

Diego shook his head. "This animal could be an ordinary mutation."

Cameron looked at the jagged moons of the mantid's mandibles, flickering darkly in the firelight.

"I don't know about that," Rex said.

"Why not?" Diego looked up, his eyes alight. "Evolution doesn't progress slowly and evenly-it progresses in sudden and giant leaps. The Cambrian Explosion, the Permian and Cretaceous Extinctions-all blinks of the eye." He paused, pulling his hair back to band his ponytail more tightly. "Think of the reptiles dying out during the Mesozoic Period, the graptolite's rapid decline after the Ordovician Period, the sudden evolution of complex Metazoa. The fossil record has always shown punctuated equilibrium-mass extinction and abrupt origination." He pointed to the mantid corpse. "Speciation like this can take place in a geological instant."

Cameron looked over at Rex, unsure of what to make of Diego's sud-den tirade. Rex cleared his throat before speaking. "A geological instant is hundreds of thousands of years."

Diego looked down at his pants, stained with mud and torn at one knee. "Well, it just got shorter."

A piece of charred wood collapsed in the fire, startling them both. Diego crouched over the dead, slumped mantid. He reached out and stroked the waxy cuticle covering the abdomen. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

Rex nodded. "Beautiful, yes. And fearful."

A whistle from the darkness indicated Szabla and Justin's return. A few seconds later, Justin stepped into the light, carrying a shovel. A length of rope looped over one shoulder, Szabla appeared next. A ham-mer protruded from her back pocket.

"That's it?" Tank asked.

"The farmers took most of their shit with them when they left, espe-cially their tools," Szabla said. "There's no gasoline anywhere, or oil, and the machines seem to be on empty."

"The supply ship," Diego said. "It stopped coming months ago."

"Well, what do we have?" Cameron asked.

Justin cleared his throat ceremoniously. "Four chainsaws, one with a snapped guide bar, a tiller with a burned-out motor, what looks like a broken-down ribbing plow from 1902-"

"Equipment the Norwegians left years ago," Diego said. "Useless."

"— six empty gasoline cans, plenty of rope, one enormous purse seine with a three-foot tear, loose concrete blocks from the houses, four wheelbarrows, a hammer, two Phillips-head screwdrivers, a burnt frying pan, a case of fishing hooks, a flat-edged hoe snapped in half, a length of hose, a trowel, and Ramon has an ax that he wisely elected to keep." He shook his head. "The generator is out-appears to be totally useless."

"Is there gas in the tiller we could siphon for the chainsaws?" Cameron asked.

"Not a drop."

"Insecticides?" Tank asked.

Szabla snickered. "Yeah, there was an eight-foot bottle of Raid, but we left that behind." She looked down at the jars, still arrayed in a line. "What's up with that?"

"Rex thinks there's some kind of virus on the island," Cameron said. "Maybe affected the animal life."

"Well, I'd say we're not in great shape," Szabla said. "Mostly useless shit left behind. Right now, the GPS spikes are our best bet for weapons. Can't see troweling one of these motherfuckers to death." She tilted her head, cracking her neck. "I say we take cautionary steps."

They all slowly turned their eyes to the larva. Its abdominal segments contracted, pushing it upward in the middle. It squirmed forward, fleshy prolegs pulsing, true legs rasping against the grass. It stopped when it touched Derek, wedging itself against his leg and the ground, and stilling.

Szabla stood up and walked over, twirling the spike around her hand. She threw it at the soft ground a few feet from the larva and it stuck like a javelin. She looked from the larva to Derek, her implication clear.

Derek's face was wan in the firelight. "You heard our orders."

"We're gonna take those orders to the grave," Szabla said.

"That's one of the responsibilities of being a soldier, Szabla," Cameron said. "If you don't like it, you can go home and bake cookies."

"Soldiers have no obligation to die pointlessly. They have an obligation to follow mission-relevant orders."

"You have an obligation to follow all orders," Derek said.

Szabla tilted her head back, her nostrils flaring as she tried to calm herself.

Rex stood up, the usual expression of arrogance missing from his face. "I just wish we could get into Frank's specimen freezer. It might give us some answers."

Savage stood from his seat on the log and stepped over the edge of the fire toward the scientists, the flames licking at the back of his pants. He rocked the Death Wind back and forth along his palm with his thumb. Rex rose defensively.

Savage reached into one of his pockets and pulled out Tucker's ther-mite grenade, the one the mantid had regurgitated.

"Well, gents," he said, "today might be your lucky day."

They were at the aluminum specimen freezer in minutes. The breeze was moist against their faces, mixing with their sweat. The freezer stood before them, unchanged and unyielding against the wind-fanned grass.

They circled it as if it were a shrine, Derek pressing the larva to his side.

Savage tossed the thermite grenade to Cameron, who pulled the pin and rested it atop the thick shoe box-sized lock that protruded just beneath the handle. She was angry with herself for not remembering Tucker's grenade earlier-he always brought it with him on missions, nestled in the cargo pocket of his pants. His good-luck charm.

It took a while for the chemicals to mix, then the grenade emitted an intense white flame, like a welder's arc. They looked away as it melted down into the lock. There was no need to guide it through the metal, and the entire lock fell to the ground with the still-burning thermite.

The heavy door creaked open a crack, then sucked shut again.

The grenade kept melting right through the grass, and Derek kicked aside what was left of the lock and covered the grenade with dirt. Diego shook his head but said nothing. Derek reached for the thin metal han-dle and the door swung open to meet his hand. He turned and looked at the others for a moment before pulling it open.

"Lantern," he said.

Szabla stepped forward, the hurricane lamp dangling from her hand. As it swayed, it threw Derek's shadow across the door, oversize and dis-torted against the silver surface.