Warren Fahy - Fragment

“My mother was an oceanographer,” she explained to Zero. “She died when I was a kid. I never saw her much, except on television. She was abroad most of the time, making nature documentaries in places that were way too dangerous for children.”

“You’re not the daughter of Janet Planet, are you?”

“Um, yeah.”

“‘Doctor Janet explores the wild planet!’” he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. “Right?” A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.

Nell nodded. “Yeah. You remember the show?”

“Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?”

Nell laughed. “Our last name didn’t play well on television.”

“So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.”

“Except that I chose botany,” Nell protested, parrying with her fork. “Plants never eat people.”

“Right on.” Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. “Conquer your fears, right?”

Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. “Something like that.”

She sat in theblue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.

An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet-Saturday morning cartoon cliches in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless sprawl.

Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky. Just as it always did.

Nell screamed, soundlessly-the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…

Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.

Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.

She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.

So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.

Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.

Today, on Henders Island, she would find a new flower-and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.

And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too- by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.

A sliver of shimmering light appeared on the horizon, and then the guano-crowned cliff began to rise from the ocean like a snow-capped ridge.

Nell and the others gathered on the mezzanine deck to watch the island as it was raised.

“What a wall!” exclaimed Dante De Santos. The muscular twenty-three-year-old cook’s assistant had Maori-style tattoos on his tanned arms, and jet-black hair combed back from a pugnacious face and tiger-opal eyes.

Nell remembered that he was an amateur rock climber who had been itching to pull out his gear and give it some use.

“I could make that ascent, no problem, if we can’t find a way to land, man!” he bragged. “Remember to tell the captain for me if we can’t get ashore, OK, Nell?”

She smiled. “OK, Dante.”

Nell watched the wide wall of Henders Island rise more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty from the horizon. The monolithic palisade seemed so lonely out here in the middle of nowhere, where so few had ever set eyes upon it. She was reminded, with a pang of uneasiness, how very far away they were from everything.

Revving boat engines echoed off the rock face of a cove as four Zodiacs raced toward a crescent beach.

Two 150-horsepower Evinrude outboards powered the large Zodiac that took the lead with Jesse at the rudder. Jesse’s passengers feared for their lives: Nell and Glyn clung to the edge rail as the inflatable jumped the breakers, its dual engines whining as they launched from each crest.

The cliff around the cove rose seven hundred feet straight up, swirled with faded bands of color like pigments in an overturned bucket of paint. Centered in the cliff, a dark crack had spewed broken rock over the beach down to the water. Judging from the fresh red and green color of the rubble, the crevasse had opened fairly recently.

Washed aground on this outpouring of jagged rock, the hull of a thirty-foot sailboat lay on her side like a swollen whale carcass.

“That crack looks new,” Glyn shouted.

Nell nodded, grinning. “It may give us a way inland.”

The Trident rolled on swells in the cove, anchored to one of the few submarine ledges their sonar had picked up around the island. They had nearly circumnavigated the entire island before locating this inlet, which they could have found in a few minutes had they circled in the other direction.

Now they had no time for setup. They had to dive into the boats and go live.

Peach got the camera feeds up as he counted down to the satellite uplink in the control room.

The three cameramen marked Peach’s countdown in their headsets aboard the speeding rafts. They carried waterproof videocams and backpack transmitters with a thousand-meter range.

Cynthea looked from the stern of the Trident and fired off orders to her camera crew. “OK, this goddamn island has a beach after all, and we’re in at 5:49, Fred! We’re going hot right now! Peach, tell me you’re on top of the uplink!”

“TWO-ONE-ZERO. I’m there, we’re live,” Peach said, cuing Zero’s feed first.

Cynthea ran down a passageway belowdeck, toward the control room in the starboard pontoon. “Glyn! Glyn? Can you hear me, Glyn?”

Glyn wore a wireless earmuff transmitter on his right ear and carried the SeaLife flag at the prow of the Zodiac. The British biologist sported an orange SeaLife T-shirt, shorts, and Nikes, the last thing Nell thought she’d ever see on him. “Yes, Cynthea,” Glyn said. “I hear you!”

Nell could hear Cynthea shouting through Glyn’s earphone: “Plant the flag on the beach!”

Nell grinned with excitement as she gripped the edge rail of the speeding boat and scanned the beach. The adrenaline pumping through her veins made her want to leap out of the boat and fly to the shore.

Cynthea crashed through the door into the control room, where three camera shots zoomed toward the shore in the bank of monitors above Peach’s head.

The small Zodiac landed first. Zero and Copepod jumped out into the surf. Copepod barked excitedly and darted up the beach. Zero sidestepped out of the water to cover the other Zodiacs landing.

The rest of the crew watched intently from the decks of the Trident.

Andy ran to the ship’s rail in striped pajamas. “I can’t believe they didn’t WAKE ME UP!” he yelled. “They give me the night watch and then they don’t wake me up? God damn it, I’m tired of getting SCREWED all the time!”