Water splashed; Nora was jerked by one hand out of the water. She flopped over on the deck, dripping.
"Can you believe that shit? We did it! We're clear!"
Nora leaned up and looked ahead. The current was sucking the boat out of the lagoon now, and sending it straight into the seemingly limitless Gulf of Mexico.
We made it, Nora thought, a tear in her eye.
"Looks like something's finally going our way," Loren said, flopping down on the deck. The current was taking them fast. "In ten minutes we'll be a mile or two out."
Safe from the bombs, she hoped.
The sun blazed overhead, welcome sea breezes drying their faces. Loren stood back up and grabbed the wheel at the console. They didn't have power, but he could rudder with the current to get them out faster. He held the wheel with one hand but was looking back.
"What are you looking for?" Nora asked. She helped herself to her feet by a gin-pole. "The ship?"
Loren squinted hard. "There it is. See it?"
Nora shielded her eyes to cut the glare. It looked like a slightly darker piece of the skyline but, yes, after a few moments she could make out its long cylindrical configuration. It was hovering about thirty feet up, near the beach at the far end of the island.
"Those guys," Loren said next, in a lower tone.
Nora could see them, too. Two of the men-or whatever they were-in the black suits and masks. They were both standing immediately below the almost invisible craft. Something bulky stood next to them-a cart full of boxes?
Then the cart levitated upward and disappeared into the ship.
"Jesus," Loren muttered. "Those guys really are aliens, aren't they?"
"What else could they be?" Then she thought, Oh my God, at what they saw next.
A hatch of some sort seemed to cant out of the bottom of the craft. One of the masked men had something in his gloved fist. When he raised his fist overhead… he, too, began to levitate up to the craft, as if he'd been hauled up on a winch.
But there was no winch.
Then the second crewman rose into the craft the same way.
"I've seen everything now," Loren said, eyes peeled.
As the boat coursed farther away, they stared another few minutes at the spectacle they were certain no one would believe: the otherworldly vehicle hovering in midair.
Then-
"This is it!" Loren said.
– the vehicle began to rise, very slowly at first, and then-
It seemed that in the course of two or three seconds, the craft launched straight into the air so quickly it didn't even blur in their eyes. It was gone in a blink.
There were no exhaust gasses, no shuttlelike roars of burning propellents, no expected blastoff.
The ship simply darted upward and was gone.
"At least we were right about one thing-they were getting ready to leave just about the same time we found out about them."
"Yeah, but you know what that means…"
Nora did indeed. "Now that they're gone, the bombs will go off. And we know there are at least two."
"TWO?"
"Yeah, after you left the station, one of them came back and activated one of the disks in the room with all the monitors. But-shit!" She'd forgotten to tell him. "I hit the guy in the head and knocked him out, and when I went looking for you, I passed the RTG. And guess what?"
"The bomb we saw the guy plant there was gone," Loren said smugly.
Nora's jaw dropped. "How did you know?"
"I'm the one who took it off the slab."
"How?"
Loren shrugged as though it were nothing. "I killed a thirty-foot worm and melted the connector with its digestive enzymes. The stuff turned the cement to butter, so all I had to do was pull the bomb out."
"Loren! That's fantastic! That bomb would've ruptured the RTG's core and blown radioactive fallout halfway across Florida!"
"Sure it would've. But I took care of it, no problem."
Nora gave him a giant hug. "Loren, you're the world's first polychaetologist hero!"
"It was nothing."
"So what did you do with the bomb?"
"I put it in my pocket, figured I'd try to find a safer place to ditch it."
Nora's eyes widened. "Loren. Tell me that bomb's not still in your pocket?"
Loren rolled his eyes. "Of course not. In fact-" He paused and snapped his gaze back toward the beach.
"Look! There's the third guy! His buddies left without him!"
Nora could see the frantic black-clad figure standing on the beach. He was looking to the sky.
"That must be the one I knocked out in the control station. When he didn't get back to the ship in time, the other two left."
Loren broke out into hysterical laughter. "Oh, shit! That guy's really screwed!"
"Loren, what are you talking about? There's a live alien on the island now! Who knows what kind of weapons and technology he has! Jesus Christ, if he gets to the mainland-"
Loren crossed his arms and shook his head. "Take my word for it. That asshole's not going anywhere."
"What do you mean!"
"After I got the bomb off the RTG slab, I stuck it in my pocket. Then I went to look for you. I went back to the control station, and that guy was lying on the floor, unconscious."
"So?" Nora shouted.
"Nora, I put the bomb in his pocket."
Nora stared. "You mean-"
"Then I ran back to the campsite."
Just as the words left Loren's lips, the detonation took place.
There was no sound, no cacophonic explosion as they might expect.
Instead, just the sensation of a sudden monumental shift in air pressure.
The entire island jolted, its trees swaying as if swept by a hurricane wind. The point on the beach where the figure had been standing was suddenly a throb of light that rose, then fell. A similar throb occurred deeper on the island, where the old control station had been.
That fast.
The light dispersed, forming a crude dome over the entire island, and a second after that-
Nora was fingering her cross. "God in heaven…"
The diffuse dome flattened all at once.
The concussion knocked Nora and Loren flat on their backs. No heat wave or scalding radioactive flash assailed them. No mushroom clouds emerged.
When they got back up, they looked back at the island…
It was on fire, from one end to the other.
They could feel the heat even this far out.
"Incineration," Loren observed. "How convenient."
"It'll kill everything on the island, every worm, every ovum."
"And the third guy? He doesn't even exist anymore. You can bet everything they left in the control station will be ashes too."
"No evidence," Nora whispered.
"Look at that shit. Unbelievable…"
The fire raged for only seconds. Then it went out as quickly as it had bloomed. Even the smoke dissipated in a matter of moments.
But the island was a blackened clot now. Every tree on it had been reduced to a charred stalk.
"No evidence is right," Loren said. "But it doesn't make sense."
"Maybe it does but we just don't get it."
Loren stroked his chin, contemplating. "Why did these people come here, from God knows where, to create a hybrid bienvironmental parasite that grows exponentially and infects humans faster than any known virus… only to destroy it all in one puff and leave?"
"Just a field research exercise, I guess," Nora muttered. "A scientific test on their equivalent of laboratory animals."
"Only in this case the rats were us."
"Has to be. We do the same thing sending probes to Mars, and mice in space, and setting up research stations on the North Pole."
Loren chuckled, wiping sweat off his brow. "No reason to even tell anyone what really happened."
"Not unless we want everyone to think we're crazy," Nora added. "Our authorities will think the RTG melted down, that's all. It'll get pushed to the last page of the newspaper."
Loren shrugged, eyes ahead to the sea. The boat bobbed as the current claimed it. They'd probably drift back to the mainland in an hour or so.