Warren Fahy - Fragment

“It’s OK, Andy,” Nell soothed. “The President also asked us to see if any life on this island could be saved.”

Geoffrey stared at her in surprise. “Change of heart, Nell?”

She looked at him as tears welled in her eyes. “This is different…”

“Come on,” Zero yelled. “We gotta check this out! This is fricking amazing! Go where he says, man! Go! Go!”

“We need to find out what we have here and then report to the President as soon as possible, Sergeant,” Nell said. “Everything depends on it. OK?”

Cane gritted his teeth. The creature’s hands ceaselessly tested everything around it, including Cane’s helmet. He closed his eyes, breathing hard. “All right. But I’m under strict orders about not allowing anything unauthorized off this island alive!”

“Does that include us?” Andy wanted to know, seething. “Are you going to nuke us, too, Commander BUTTHOLE?”

“Don’t push me, sir.”

“Yes, don’t push him, Andy,” Nell agreed.

Geoffrey nodded. “Let’s all just get along, now.”

Cane backed the Hummer out slowly and then he gunned it up the slope.

“Wheeeeeee!” the creature fluted.

The Hummer’s Mattracks rolled to a stop beside a towering baobab-like tree at the north rim of the island. About a dozen of these gargantuan trees clung to the edge of the island. From a distance they’d looked like toadstools, with vast umbrellas of dense green foliage.

“It lives here?” Cane was staring.

“Wait till you see his hobbit hole,” Andy said. “Oh, hey, if we’re going to transport them off the island before all the nukes go off we better take something to pack their things in!”

“Them? Pack their things?” the soldier said.

Andy nodded.

“We can use the specimen cases in the back here.” Nell glanced at Geoffrey; he nodded and reached for them.

Copey barked enthusiastically and jumped out first. Up here, near the island’s rim, the air was considerably fresher. The sound of the jungle below was a buzzing high-pitched white-noise.

The scientists each carried one of the aluminum specimen cases from the back of the Hummer.

Now that he was outside the vehicle, Cane carried his M-1 assault rifle, glancing warily at the branches overhead. They were far away from the teeming jungle at the island’s heart-but what lurked in the giant tree above them was anyone’s guess.

“Are you sure we’re all right, Andy, next to this thing?” Zero pointed his video camera up into the tangled canopy.

“Yeah, we’re fine if we stay close to the tree.”

A perimeter of salt seemed to have been excreted into the soil around the tree’s trunk. This seemed to hold back the Henders clover from attacking the creamy gray surface of its trunk, which was as wide as a house. Stepping stones led over the salt perimeter like a Japanese rock garden.

Though it had originally appeared to them like a spider with six legs radiating four meters, the creature now seemed compact. Two legs folded up in back like a spider’s. Its middle arms apparently acted as forelegs, and its upper arms tucked up against its long neck so that the first joints or “elbows” resembled pointy shoulders from which surprisingly human arms hung down. The hands on all six of its limbs had three fingers and two opposable thumbs. The scientists and the cameraman drank in the details of its anatomy and its elaborate and effortless motion with speechless wonder.

The long elastic tail from which the creature had dangled over the cave was now coiled inside a potbelly. A sheen of color played over its thick fur like the Aurora Borealis. Its head was onion-shaped, with an understated sagittal horn on top. It had a high-browed forehead over a wide and graceful mouth, and no sign of a nose. As it looked at them, its large oval eyes had a sly, feline look, moving independently in different directions. The eyes blinked with furry eyelids whenever their stalks retracted. Slanted triangular lobes projected to either side of the creature’s sagittal horn like brow-ridges over its eyes.

The shape of its wide mouth and lips had a duck-like friendliness, with smiling corners and an eager peak on its wide upper lip. Its expression had an elegant confidence that the humans found disconcerting. Reaching out one of its upper hands, the creature touched the barrel of Cane’s assault rifle with delicate curiosity.

Cane jerked the barrel back and aimed the weapon at its head.

“No!” Nell shouted.

Copepod barked frantically.

“Chill, dude!” Zero said, lowering his camera.

“You can trust him, Hender,” Andy told the creature.

“It has a name?” Thatcher sounded bemused.

“It’s cool, Cane.” Geoffrey spoke with more confidence than he felt. “This thing just saved our lives, remember?”

“It’s cool, Cane!” the creature sang, freaking the soldier out. Cane felt cornered. He darted a glance at Thatcher, who nodded at him discreetly, signaling patience. Cane backed down, and nodded back at Thatcher.

All watched in astonishment as the shimmering creature stepped delicately onto the stones, then turned toward them and gestured for them to follow. It opened a round door that was nearly imperceptible in the bulging trunk of the ancient tree.

Inside, engulfed by the flesh of the vast tree, they stepped into another surprise.

“It’s the fuselage of a World War II bomber,” Zero murmured.

Andy nodded. “Yep!”

Only the nose of the plane poked out of the massive trunk, hanging over the cliff at the far end. Through the twisted frame of the cockpit window, which seemed to have been covered by a stitched patchwork of clear plastic, they saw the sun setting over the sea.

“The house that Hender built,” Andy announced.

“‘Hender’?” Nell said.

“That’s what I call him. Or her. Or both.”

“Hender didn’t build this B-29,” Zero said. He canvassed the scene in broad pans.

With four hands, “Hender” pantomimed a plane trying to pull out of a steep nose dive and failing. It made a noise that was an uncanny approximation of an explosion.

“Do you suppose he saw it crash?” Geoffrey asked the others.

“That had to have been at least sixty years ago.”

“I think Hender’s old,” Andy told them. “Really old.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Geoffrey agreed. “Is he a solitary animal? Does he live by himself?”

“Yeah,” Andy said.

“What’s that got to do with how old he might be?” asked Nell, intrigued, as she glanced at Geoffrey.

“I’ll explain later,” Geoffrey said.

“Good.”

“It’s a radical theory.”

“Good.”

“Way outside the box.”

She gave him an appreciative glance, then smiled.

None of the humans could take their eyes off the remarkable creature for more than a moment as it moved gracefully toward the nose of the plane in which it had made its home. The fur on its body emitted soft fireworks of color as it pointed at the control panel in the cockpit. Like a weird recording, it spoke:

“This concludes the Pacific Ocean Network broadcast, May 7, 1945. Once again, it’s VEEE-EEE-DAAAY! Victory in Europe!”

Geoffrey and Nell glanced at each other in speechless astonishment.

“He must have heard that on the plane’s radio,” Zero whispered.

“Yeah,” Andy told them. “And I’ve heard him do Bob Hope, too.”

“I thought you said it didn’t speak English,” Cane snapped.

“He doesn’t. I’ve taught him a few words. And he repeats things he heard on the radio back then, but he doesn’t understand them.”

It was pleasantly cool inside Hender’s lair, and the air had a faintly sweet and spicy smell, somewhat like Japanese incense, Nell thought. She could see that Hender had collected a variety of wine bottles, bell-jars, fishing floats, a peanut butter jar, a mayonnaise jar-precious glass vessels had somehow miraculously survived their journey from civilization to Henders Island in cargo containers, steamer trunks, crates, and wrecks across great gulfs of time and distance.