“Are you telling me that an eight-year-old girl has been calling the shots on the worst attack on American soil since 9/11?” Carter asked.
“This is not some little girl,” Sneed said. “After we caught the Lagoon Watcher, he told us about these things he found in the infected animals. They were like miniature robots mixed with living cells. He called them borgs or cyborgs. Anyway, they are what possessed the animals. I reckon they did the same deal with Mariella. Lord knows why Officer Williams is protecting the foul creature.”
“If that’s the case, why don’t you have a warrant out of their arrests?” Sheriff Brandt asked. “And why didn’t I see anything about cyborgs in your report on Trainer?”
“This information would have been helpful yesterday-before they detonated our bombs,” Colon said. “Why did you withhold his statement?”
“Cause I thought he was insane! I didn’t believe it until I saw the footage…” Sneed gestured to the TV screen, which showed a pier that had been tossed ashore as easily as a box of matches. The car underneath it had an old woman’s head lodged in the front window. “Will you quit blaming me and not the woman who abetted the murderer? Just because it’s not politically correct to accuse a black woman, that ain’t my fault.”
The other people on the call were silent for nearly a minute before Colon chimed in. “I wouldn’t have believed the Watcher before today either.”
“Looking back won’t help us now. There will be plenty of time for internal reviews of conduct later,” Carter said. “What’s clear is that we have a new facet to our mission. We must apprehend your Officer Williams and the girl.”
“Leave that to me,” Sneed said. “I’ve got GPS tracking on her vehicle and on her phone every time she makes a call. Last I heard she was on the beachside. No coincidence there, I’m sure.”
“What about Professor Swartzman?” Sheriff Brandt asked. “Didn’t you assign him to investigate the Lagoon Watcher’s claims?”
“That was the first thing I did,” Sneed said in an irritated tone. “Let me get him on the line.”
Sneed opened a new line and dialed Swartman’s cell phone number. It went straight to voicemail without a ring.
Where is that cocksucker when I need him?
He checked his cell phone to look up the number for the professor’s lab. Sneed discovered that Swartzman had sent him six photos about 25 minutes ago. When he opened the first one, Sneed saw a postcard from hell.
Chapter 44
Aaron ducked inside a flimsy trailer along the foot of the bridge he had taken from Merritt Island to the beachside. Letting out a grateful breath as he saw the phone, he hurried over and started dialing Moni’s number. Before he finished, Aaron heard a thunderous explosion that shook the phone from his hand. When he gazed out the window, he saw a 30-foot yacht tumbling through the air like a football in mid-kickoff. The massive yellow bubble that sprang out of the lagoon had provided the boot. Several palm trees snapped when the yacht hurtled through them. It grinded to a stop in the marina’s parking lot as a heap of shattered fiberglass and bent steel.
Most other boats were swallowed inside the bubble. They deteriorated into leaky, bare-metal skeletons as if 10,000 years had passed before Aaron’s eyes in under a minute.
Putting off breaking the news to Moni for just a few minutes so he could save his life, Aaron called his father. His parents lived five minutes away. He figured his dad couldn’t have anything more exciting going on during a Saturday morning.
“Hi dad. The world’s going to hell. I need a lift.”
His dad grumbled about Aaron not using his damn car, until he saw the pillars of black smoke rising from the lagoon. He hung up and sped over. Aaron limped down from the trailer-treading gingerly on his burned heel-and climbed into his father’s Mercedes.
“Jesus, do you have to smear my leather seats with your stinky wetsuit?” his dad asked.
“Good to see you too, dad. Don’t worry about the acid burns on my foot or the ten near death experiences I’ve had today. I won’t stain your totally righteous car.”
“You were in the lagoon?” His eyebrows arched as he saw the overturned yacht. Having never seen anything so astonishing behind his desk in the corner office, he gunned his most cherished possession out of there. “Thank God you’re alive. Was anyone with you?”
Aaron lowered his head and turned away so his father couldn’t see the shame in his eyes, or his tears. “Professor Swartzman…” Those words, which had once rolled so casually off his tongue, stung him worse than the acid that had nearly consumed his foot. “He was with me. I… I couldn’t save him. I lost him.”
Instead of offering consoling words, Aaron’s father shot him a stern look. It drilled down his point that Aaron should have listened to him and picked a normal profession-one where he wouldn’t kill people with his ineptitude.
He offered no excuses this time. If Swartzman had taken another student with him, his professor might have made it out of the lagoon alive. Aaron could never change that, but he knew one person he could help.
“Let me borrow this for a sec,” Aaron said as he snatched his dad’s cell phone from his hip case and dialed up Moni.
Moni answered with a hollow, “Hello.” She sounded more distant than earlier that morning. But as long as she could talk, that meant the microscopic invaders hadn’t conquered her.
“Did you see what’s going on in the lagoon?” Aaron asked.
“I’m sorry,” Moni said. She paused. He dreaded the reason why she felt she owed him an apology over this. “I didn’t think it would happen this way. So many people got hurt. Even now they’re resisting instead of accepting it.”
Moni had known. Maybe she didn’t have the whole story, but Mariella must have told her they would take the lagoon. Moni would never allow that, even at Mariella’s request, Aaron thought. They must have brainwashed her.
“Is Mariella with you?”
“She’s right here. I won’t let them hurt my baby. I’m gonna make a break for it and take her home.”
If Moni went anywhere near the lagoon with the possessed girl, Aaron knew he would never see her again.
“Moni, that’s a totally bogus idea. We discovered what’s controlling the lagoon. They are these little creatures-part robot and part microorganism. They built this huge colony in the lagoon with their victims’ heads on it. That’s what Mariella has inside her. I’m sorry Moni, but she’s not human. Not anymore. You’ve gotta let her go and come with me.” He waited for her gasps of shock or outraged denials. It got so quiet that he checked the phone to make sure it hadn’t dropped the call. “Professor Swartzman died today for this information. They killed him! You gotta believe me.”
“I do,” Moni said way too calmly for having just learned that the child she loved wasn’t human. She must have already figured it out, but it hadn’t changed her feelings for Mariella. What is the destruction of bridges and the murder of hundreds in the face of love? “There are pieces of this story you wouldn’t understand. Mariella and her kind aren’t evil. They’re just lost.”
“Her kind? What kind are they?”
“They’re the ambassadors from an alien species that went extinct on their home world. The lagoon is being prepared for their rebirth. That’s all they want.”
“Uh, okay then.”
Aaron first considered shipping Moni off to the nearest mental hospital. Then he thought about everything he had seen. The technology, from the miniature cyborgs seizing control of animals to the gene splicing that created the mutants, was way beyond anything on earth. The environment in the lagoon wouldn’t support any native life besides the thiobacillus. Perhaps on another planet, organisms like these formed the base of the evolutionary tree that sprouted all other life, including the intelligent beings that planned on rising from extinction.