Warren Fahy - Fragment

Even those closest to the Sea Dragon fell, screaming, as it lifted off.

Nell saw a huge red spiger leap up the hill in two bounds and launch itself at the helo, but the wind from the rotors battered it down and the beast barely missed hooking the edge of the ramp with its spiked arms.

“Jeezus!” One of the helicopter crewmen hissed, the cool expression shocked from his face as he glanced out the window at the carnage. “Guess we need a new lab…”

Zero hung on Nell’s shoulders, and she hugged him tight against her.

“We may need a new planet,” she said.

Andy woke up in the dark and saw a glowing Henders wasp inches from his face.

He jumped back.

The movement startled other bugs all around him, also trapped in jars and bottles, which illuminated a strange chamber with cans, bottles, and other garbage piled against the walls.

A human skull in a niche wore a U.S. Air Force pilot’s hat.

The room, Andy realized, was an old airplane fuselage.

Suddenly there were snorts and scratches at a round door cut into the wall across from him. Fear immobilized him-all he could move were his eyes. He knew he was going to die and only hoped it would be quick.

The door in the wall opened inward and Copepod ran into the room.

The bull terrier licked Andy’s astonished face.

Andy stared as the creature he had only glimpsed earlier appeared behind the dog like an apparition in the room.

He hugged Copey in horror, but the burly dog barked and wriggled away, then ran right at the creature.

The Muddy Charles Pub, overlooking the river that bore its name, buzzed with MIT professors and students consuming pizza and beer.

Among those gathered to hear the much-anticipated SeaLife announcement was noted zoologist Thatcher Redmond, who nibbled his trademark roasted pumpkin seeds and sipped a plastic cup of Widmer Brothers hefeweizen.

Though he professed to be a strict vegetarian, Thatcher cheated in private. He disguised his paunch under the camouflage of his Banana Republic cargo vest, which he wore over a pale denim shirt with each sleeve folded twice.

Today, as usual, students thronged Thatcher’s table, and this time his colleague Frank Stapleton had decided to join them to watch the breaking news about Henders Island.

Frank Stapleton was an academic bear with black-framed glasses and frazzled gray hair. An old-school man, he made an enjoyably stodgy sparring partner to Thatcher’s crowd-pleasing sensationalism: students loved to hear their public exchanges just for the entertainment value.

This time, however, something else had stolen their attention.

“Wait, wait! Here it is,” shouted the student wielding the remote control.

A mutual shushing quelled the pub chatter as everyone trained eyes and ears on the large television screen mounted over the bar.

The CNN anchorwoman finally reached the story that had been teased all day:

“After the apparently disastrous final episode of the reality show SeaLife, a network spokesman has now admitted that the much-discussed cliffhangers were in fact hoaxes created for no other purpose but to generate ratings.”

Groans and curses filled the pub.

“Issuing an apology and an announcement that the show is going into an indefinite ‘retooling’ break, the show’s producers released the following clip.”

A video clip ran showing the SeaLife cast smiling and waving from the stern of the Trident and sailing off into the sunset.

“That’s the hoax!” someone shouted, triggering another avalanche of shushes. The newscaster continued:

“However, relatives have been unable to contact their loved ones on the show since the last episode aired twenty-three days ago. Two crewmember families will make a public statement on Live Current later tonight. And while official complaints against the United States and Great Britain by other members of the U.N. Security Council were formally filed today, Defense Department officials are continuing to deny a firestorm of Internet rumors of a naval blockade around Henders Island and a media blackout. Our own requests for satellite images of the area, whose coordinates have been closely followed by millions of viewers on the show’s website, have been denied. According to all satellite services, the Pentagon purchased exclusive rights to all satellite photos of Henders Island within hours of the final airing of SeaLife .”

The anchorwoman blithely moved on, over a chorus of angry groans, to a story about a man who murdered his entire family and then committed suicide.

“Why don’t they just kill themselves first?” Stapleton grumbled.

“Courage, I think,” Thatcher replied. “It takes far less courage to commit suicide when you’ve done something so bad everybody will want to kill you anyway.”

“That’s about the sickest goddamned thing I’ve ever heard,” Stapleton snapped, looking at Thatcher. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

Thatcher shrugged.

A student in a black King Kong T-shirt chimed in. “SeaLife beat out sex for the most looked-up word on the Internet last week. How sick is that?”

“That’s it? After three weeks of waiting we’re supposed to believe it was just a huge scam for ratings?” Thatcher Redmond’s attractive blond research assistant, Sharon, glowered at the television screen.

“Face it,” the T-shirted student snorted, “it was a brilliant piece of marketing, Sharon. They sucked you in.”

“It’s not a hoax,” Sharon insisted. “What they just showed was CGI, and not even good CGI.”

“That wasn’t CGI,” someone said.

“It was an old clip!” another shouted from across the pub.

“They doctored an old clip with CGI,” another said.

“What the hell is CGI?” Stapleton grumbled.

“Computer Graphic Imaging!” everyone in earshot shouted.

“We could probably prove that’s CGI in less than an hour,” Sharon insisted. “The other governments of the world can definitely tell. So why are they trying to get away with it?”

“Coca-Cola and Nike sales?” offered the guy in the black T-shirt.

Thatcher Redmond grinned and drummed his fingers on the table. He enjoyed any form of chaos. He was immediately attracted to anything that roiled the thin film of “order” that human beings tried so vainly to impose over reality. “I almost wish it weren’t a hoax.”

Frank Stapleton looked up. “You can’t be serious, Thatcher.”

“Wouldn’t it be delightfully ironic, Professor Stapleton, if in our rush to shine light in every corner to dispel our primal fear of the dark, we opened up a Pandora’s box that finally wiped us off the planet?”

“Yes, it would be ironic, but I don’t see what would be so damned delightful about it.”

“At least something might have a chance to survive on this planet, Professor Stapleton, if humans were eradicated. I realize, of course, that this whole thing is almost assuredly a fraud of some sort. The chances that anything remotely as dangerous as our species could be found on so small and isolated an island are slim to none. But if such a thing actually did happen, I believe it might be cause for celebration.”

Sharon stared at her mentor with the mixture of angst and awe characteristic of all his research assistants. “Why, Dr. Redmond?”

Stapleton shuddered. “Please, for the love of God, don’t encourage him.”

“Intelligent life is an environmental cancer, Sharon,” Thatcher replied. “By rearranging nature, the human race has created new viruses, diseases, drug-resistant bacteria. We are alone responsible for all manner of mayhem that could never have occurred in nature. After centuries of domesticating plants and animals, genetic engineering is now directly corrupting the code of life. We’re crossing wires of evolutionary circuitry billions of years in the making and precipitating a genetic breakdown that could soon rage through our environment like a molecular plague.”