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They neared the boat’s battered hull that was encrusted with a thick layer of barnacles. As they drew closer they saw its name painted on the transom in faded green letters:
Balboa Bilbo
‘That’s our girl!’ Jesse shouted, banging his hand on the stern.
They circled the boat and saw the upper deck, which was tilted toward them at a thirty-degree angle. The boat had been de-masted and her rig wrenched overboard. She had obviously been at sea a long time before coming aground.
‘OK, let’s check it out,’ Glyn said, doing a little impromptu narrating and looking at Zero, who waved him off.
Jesse climbed onto the deck.
Glyn climbed aboard behind Jesse, and Zero followed.
Jesse crawled into the cabin. The glass was missing from its hatches and windows. Much of the cabin’s interior seemed to have been stripped: cabinet doors were gone, hinges and all; the glass from the windows seemed to have been pried out. Jesse spotted the beacon in the pilot’s seat and picked it up.
‘Yep, here’s the EPIRB all right. It’s still in the “on” position.’
He aimed the antenna of the cylindrical yellow device at Glyn like a gun, laughing.
‘What does that mean?’ Glyn said, looking at the camera. Zero quickly cut him out of the shot.
Jesse looked around the wreckage-strewn cabin. ‘Well, something had to turn this EPIRB on, Professor.’
Copepod barked frantically in the distance.
‘Maybe a bird flew through the window and pecked on it or something.’ Glyn pointed out the window. ‘The glass is missing, see?’
Jesse looked right at the camera and shook his head. ‘It’d take three birds working as a team to turn on an EPIRB, dude.’ He made the cuckoo sign against his head.
‘Oh.’ Glyn nodded. ‘Right!’
Nell stood on the rocks above the prone body of the sailboat.
Holding the bill of her baseball cap, she searched the base of the cliff. A purple patch of vegetation caught her eye some distance to the left of the crevasse. Everything else around her seemed to disappear as she focused on the vividly colored growth.
‘Hey, where’s Copepod?’ Dawn shouted.
The cameramen panned. The frantic barking had stopped abruptly. The bull terrier was nowhere to be seen.
Nell jumped across the rocks until she reached the coarse reddish sand of the beach. She jogged up toward the cliff. The afternoon sun lit up the wall of rock and the bright purple plants at its base. Nell saw flecks of gold in the sand. Fool’s gold, she thought–there must be a lot of iron sulfide in the cliffs.
She was relieved that no cameraman had followed her. The commotion of the landing party receded behind her as adrenaline quickened her steps.
Nell dug her knees into the sand before the patch of purple spears at the base of the cliff, catching her breath.
The stalks looked like a jade plant’s, she thought, except the straight shafts had no branches like jade plants, and the color was a vivid lavender. She noticed that the core of each stalk was purplish-blue, while its artichoke-like leaves were tinged green at their fuzzy points. They resembled fat asparagus spears, but she couldn’t identify the family they belonged to–let alone their genus or species, as there was no recognizable growth pattern.
She tried to calm her heartbeat as she rifled through the botanical taxonomy in her mind, telling herself that she must be overexcited and overlooking something obvious.
She reached out to the largest of the specimens and pulled a spiked leaf from the plant. It ripped like old felt and melted into juice that stung her fingertips.
She flicked her fingers, startled, and wiped away the blue juice on her white shirt. Opening her Evian bottle she splashed water over her left hand and shirt.
To her astonishment, the plant reacted like an air fern to her touch, folding all its leaflike appendages against its stalk. Then it retracted underground, an action that required internal muscles–mechanisms that plants did not have.
Surprised, she was about to call the others when she saw what looked like a trail of white ants moving along the base of the cliff.
She leaned forward and watched the large, evenly spaced creatures hurl down a groove in the sand, toward a crab carcass. They moved faster than any bug she had ever seen.
5:52 P.M.
‘Copey must have gone up into the canyon,’ Jesse yelled.
‘Copey!’ Dawn called.
‘Maybe that’s where the survivors went,’ Glyn suggested. ‘I mean, if there are any.’
‘Someone stripped this vessel, dude,’ Jesse shouted, shaking his head and banging his fist against the hull. ‘And somebody turned that beacon on.’
Cynthea seized the moment, switching to Glyn’s channel. ‘Go, Glyn, go! We have seven minutes left on the satellite feed!’
‘Let’s go!’ Glyn said.
Cynthea tapped camera two’s screen with her pencil.
‘Yeah!’ Jesse howled, and he raised his fist to lead the charge.
The three cameramen covered the four scientists and five crew members as they climbed the natural ramp of broken rock up into the crevasse.
5:53 P.M.
Nell picked up a sun-bleached Budweiser can that had somehow made it to the shore, and she used it to block the path of the speeding bugs.
One of the creatures fell on its side.
An inch-wide waxy white disk lay motionless on the sand.
She threw the Bud can aside and looked closer. Centipede-like legs emerged from the edge of the white disk. The legs flailed and the bug spun like a Frisbee over the sand in an evasive maneuver.
More of the white bugs arrived, massing in front of her. They were rolling on their edges, like unicycle motocrossers, down the groove. Within seconds, dozens had gathered. Suddenly, they tilted in different directions–preparing to attack?
Astonished, Nell stood up and took a few quick steps back. Such animals could not exist, she thought.
She looked around for the others in the landing party; they were gone.
She ran toward the crevasse, yelling, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’
5:54 P.M.
From the control room Cynthea watched the search party as they entered the canyon, whose curving walls were obscured by mists above. The late-afternoon sun etched beams and shadows through the heights of the crack as water streamed and dripped over them.
Struggling over large boulders and climbing natural stairways of smaller rocks, Glyn boosted Dawn over a ledge, admiring the tattoo peeking from the back of her low-slung jeans.
‘Hey, look, everybody!’ shouted Jesse. ‘The crack of Dawn!’
Peach switched cameras at Cynthea’s pointing pencil. ‘This is great stuff, boss!’
‘We just saved SeaLife, Peach,’ she told him.
8:55 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
On his wafer-thin wall-mounted 55-inch Hitachi screen in his Midtown Manhattan office, Jack Nevins watched Glyn give Dawn a two-handed tush-push over a boulder.
‘This is great, Fred,’ Jack said into his cell phone.
Fred Huxley watched his own drop-down TV in the adjacent office, his own cell phone to his ear as he lit up a Cohiba: ‘This is GOLD, Jack!’
‘I think that magnificent bitch just saved our asses, pal.’
‘I could kiss her!’
‘I could fuck her.’
‘The old gal’s got a hell of a survival instinct.’
‘Next week’s numbers are gonna rocket, Baby Fred!’
‘Next week’s numbers are going to KILL, Brother Jack.’
5:57 P.M.
The search party fanned out on a ledge where the crevasse widened. Lush vegetation clung to the walls: a strange mat of purple growth squished underfoot.
The vegetation along the walls arched and wove together to form a cornucopia-like tunnel that stretched up into the twilit distance, speared with beams from the setting sun.
‘Nell, you hit the mother lode!’ Glyn muttered.
Some of the tall, glistening plants resembled cacti; others, coral. The canopy trembled with fluttering, brightly colored foliage above them. The air smelled sweet and pungent–like flowers and mildew, with a sulfurous hint of cesspool.
Glyn squinted skeptically at the canopy. Sweat trickled into his eyes and the salt burned as he rubbed them. He was still breathing hard from the climb. What should have been leaves, the biologist thought, looked more like ears of multicolored fungus sprouting from the branches overhead. ‘Wait a minute,’ he cautioned, winking his left eye repeatedly to clear it.
‘Yeah, hold on,’ Zero said.
The ‘plants’ and ‘trees’ grew in radial shapes like century plants, yuccas, and palms, but with multiple branches. They swayed as if there were a breeze. But the thick air was utterly still.
A buzzing, chittering sound rose like a chorus of baritones humming through police whistles. The green tunnel turned slightly purple. It rippled as if a strong wind was passing over it.
‘Hey!’ Jesse yelled, making everyone jump. ‘This plant’s MOVING, man!’
Jesse’s shout echoed through the stony heights, and the insect noise stopped abruptly. Except for the distant hiss of the surf below, the canyon was silent.
Zero’s camera barely caught a blurry shape streaking through the branches overhead.
The insect noise resumed, louder now.
Dawn screamed. Dartlike thorns, attached to a tree by thin cables, had impaled her bare midriff. As the party watched, the tree fired two more thorns like blow darts into her neck.
The translucent cables turned red, siphoning Dawn’s blood. With a desperate lunge she broke the cables and shrieked, bleeding from the siphoning tubes as she ran frantically toward the others.
Glyn noticed the branches above reaching down–then something caught the corner of his eye: a wave of dark shapes rushing toward them down the tunnel.
He felt a sharp bite on his calf and yelped. ‘Crikey!’ Glyn looked down at his bone-white legs, exposed for the first time on this trip by the damned L.L. Bean chino shorts he agreed to wear for the landing. He almost couldn’t spot the offender against his pale skin. Then he located it by a second sharp pain: a white disk-shaped spider clung to his left calf.
He raised his hand to swat it and hundreds of miniatures rolled off the spider’s back. A red gash melted open on his calf as, in the space of two seconds, the yellow edge of his tibia was exposed and more white disks fired into the gaping gash.
Before Glyn could scream, a whistling shriek flew straight at him.
He looked up as an animal the size of a water buffalo hurtled through the opening of the tunnel.
Zero turned the camera as Glyn yelled and caught the beast closing its hippo-sized vertical jaws over the biologist’s head and chest. With a sharp crunch, the attacker sank translucent teeth into Glyn’s ribs and bit off the top of the Englishman’s body at the solar plexus. Bright arterial blood from Glyn’s beating heart shot thirty feet between the beast’s teeth, dousing Zero’s shirt and camera lens.
Zero lowered the camera and saw a cyclone of animals shrieking and clicking as they swirled around the rest of Glyn’s body.
The others screamed as they were bombarded by flying bugs and more shadows pouring out of the tunnel.
Zero threw the camera toward the onslaught, and a few animals streaking toward him pivoted and chased it instead.
As fast as he could, he slipped from the ledge and zigzagged down the rocks in the crevasse.
5:58 P.M.
Cynthea, Peach, and the world watched in astonishment as all three camera shots panned wildly.
‘Crikey!’ someone shouted–and there was an awful cracking sound.
A chaos of shrieks overloaded the microphones, and the cameras jerked and spun.
One camera tumbled onto its side. Red and blue liquid spattered its lens.
Another camera fell, and blood-drenched clothing blocked its view.
The audience across the nation heard screams from their suddenly blackened TV screens.
Cynthea cut to the remaining camera just in time to see something fly toward the lens. Then the camera fell and was instantly blackened by swarming silhouettes.
‘We just lost the uplink, boss,’ Peach reported.
One hundred and ten million people across the continent had tuned in before the live feed had died.
