Slither, page 16
He drank gratefully, and sputtered a satisfaction. "This busywork assignment has turned out to be a great time."
"Yeah, and we're both getting paid."
"But I don't think I'll be writing this part down in the report to my CO. Drinking rum on a moonlit beach at midnight, with a foxy blonde. No, that wouldn't wash."
Just foxy? She took exception. I'm a hell of a lot more than that and you know it. Don't get cocky. She stretched out. A couple of hits of rum right after sex was an ideal tranquilizer. Trent lay angled away from her; she could see him gazing out at the surf, his middle-aged desires clearly sated. A younger, more acceptable man would be on top of her again. She had that way with men-to make them want more than they could handle. She reveled in the impression of herself.
"Can't believe you're not married," Trent muttered.
"That's so proverbial," she teased. "You can't do better than that?"
"Yeah," he admitted, "but I'm too tired right nowthanks to you."
"My pleasure."
"No serious boyfriend back in New York?"
"Nope," she lied through her teeth. She'd been stringing along the same fiance for a year. A successful stockbroker, whose family owned one of Wall Street's biggest brokerages. He was great for jewelry and the Porsche, of course, and she supposed she really would marry him someday. It would be worth her while. And he was so busy with his job, he didn't have time to monitor her. She cheated on him with impunity, any time the magazine sent her on a shoot. As long as she kept her infidelity out of the city, she could have the best of both worlds.
She caressed her breasts when she knew he wasn't looking.
"Yeah, well, I think I'll be visiting you in the Big Apple sometime soon," he asserted.
In your dreams! Now he was annoying her, the way he wielded his personality the same way he had sex: with assertiveness. I'm the one doing YOU a favor, she wished she could say aloud, and it's only because Loren is LESS my type than you. "We'll see," she said instead. She wanted to keep his fire fanned. Then she added, if you're a good boy."
"Oh yeah?"
She stretched her toes out as far as she could, flexed her long legs. She let her mind wander.
She imagined herself being taken right here on the beach, not by Trent nor her fiance but by a coterie of men from her past. Her nerve-charged body, her spread-open legs and narrowed eyes summoned them, and then they were lying atop her, thrusting into her fast and rough, one after another. The fantasy titillated her as the sea breeze slipped up and over her bare skin....
"Be right back, gotta take a leak," Trent said and got up.
Charming, she thought, but now that he'd left, she could focus on the greedy invention of her mind. Hot, muscled bodies squashed her, callused hands mauled her breasts. Raving sensations pinpointed at her nipples, which were either torqued by fingertips or sucked out by fervid mouths. Stout penises delved into her most private places, spending themselves in a feverpitch only to be replaced by more. Back in reality her own hands succored herself ...
Mmmm ...
"Hey, Annabelle! You got a flashlight?"
Trent's voice shattered her pleasures. That asshole, she thought, disgusted. Can't even have a minute of fun with myself. She leaned up with a frown. A flashlight? What's he want that for? He needs to SEE where he's pissing? "I think so!" she griped back.
"Bring it here, will you? I need to see what this is."
Probably means his cock ... She pulled the light out of the bag and got up, followed the annoying voice to the edge of the woods.
There he was.
The moonlight painted his naked body. He was leaning over, looking at a tree. Annabelle's smirk couldn't have been more severe, her senses still buzzing from her self-stimulation. "Here," she said testily.
He pointed the beam on a tree trunk, lighting it up. "There. See?" His finger indicated a nub of some kind. "Definitely not part of the tree. I scratched my damn leg on it."
Poor you ... Annabelle looked closer. "It's a nail. So what?"
"I don't think it's a nail ..." It looked more like a black stud. "It's coming loose," he said, yanking on it with his fingers. "It's working free." - - -- - - - - - - - - - -
Annabelle shook her head, hands on bare hips. "Is therea reason I'm supposed to care about this?"
"It's got-" He squinted harder, the image ridiculous now: a hairy-backed man fiddling with a tree in the middle of the night, buck-naked. "Remember what Nora was saying earlier?"
"That skinny wuss?"
"She said she found something that reminded her of a camera lens attached to a tree." Finally he prized it loose. "It's almost like it was nailed into the tree."
"A camera that small?" Annabelle objected. "That's ridiculous."
He held it right up to the flashlight, the splayed beam throwing wedges of dark and light against Annabelle's bosom, belly ... and frown. "She was right. It's got a tiny piece of polished glass inserted in the top, like a lens."
"Read my lips. Who cares?"
He seemed amazed by the find. "I guess I was right. It's an electric eye sensor from the old missile site probably. They left these things in the perimeter because it was easier than removing them all. They're probably all over the place."
`Read my lips. I'm bored."
"Oh, sorry." He caught himself. "It's just kind of interesting, isn't it?"
"How about ... no?"
"I'll have to show it to Nora, see if it's the same thing she was talking about."
The comment made her fume. As far as Trent went, she could take him or leave him. The man was just a sideline distraction because there was nothing better around. But he was still part of her sexual turf and there was no way she'd allow him to be in proximity to that bitch.
"We can show it to her tomorrow," she said, emphasizing the pronoun "we."
They moved through moonlight back to the beach; Trent placed the object in his bag. "Well, you're bored, so I guess that means you want to get back to the camp," he presumed, and reached for his pants.
"Not that bored."
"Oh, okay. Let's lie out here a while longer," he said. He got back down on his towel.
What a moron. "I'm not done yet," she said bluntly.
"Not done with what?"
She stepped over him, looking down. "With you," she said, and sat on his face.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
(I)
When Slydes awoke, he felt akin to a reanimated corpse rising from a lime pit. Mooooooooother- FUCKER! he thought. Had someone hit him in the head last night? Had he fallen down? But when he awoke, he remained in the captain's chair behind the wheel, where he usually took his downtime on the boat.
Ruth's tousled head emerged from belowdecks. She looked cross-eyed and dehydrated-about the same way Slydes felt just now. "When are we leaving?" her shrill voice inquired. "Isn't it high tide yet?"
Bonehead, Slydes thought. "We missed it by ten hours," he gruffed. His watch told him it was seven in the morning. We fucked up again . . . "What the fuck is wrong with us!"
"I don't feel good, Slydes!"
Them bugs, he remembered. They MUST have bit me. "We all must have got some jungle fever or some thing. We keep passin' out." He tried to roust himself. "I'm gonna try to get us out of here in low tide. Shag Jonas's ass and get him up here."
"Jonas ain't down there!" she railed. "You said he went looking for me last night!"
Ruth's whining voice was killing him. "He never came back? That goddamn pain in the ass!"
"Where do you think he went?"
"You know damn well where he went! Probably went back for more dope, the shithead! We never should have come out here in the first place. This is his fault." The solution was simple; they needed to bring him back so they could leave. But he was still out in the woods, and the woods were where they'd picked up those gross-ass yellow bugs.
Slydes eyed up Ruth. "Go to the head shack and bring him back."
Ruth's face screwed up at the suggestion. "Fuuuuuu- uuck you, motherfucker! I ain't going back in those woods by myself! I told you! There's a zombie out there that pulled my pants off and tried to rape me! And he tried to feed me to those giant pink snakes!"
Here she goes with the zombie again. There's nothing like a drug burnout to make a fucked-up situation MORE fucked up. He took the keys out of the boat's ignition. Did he trust Ruth?
Hell no.
"I'll go find him, you stay here," he ordered.
"I don't want to stay on this creepy boat by myself!"
"Quit whining! You sound like a fuckin' dog toy. Nighttime's one thing, but this is broad daylight. You and I both can't be thrashing around in the woods, not with them photographers up and about."
Ruth crossed her arms. 'If you go, I go."
"Yeah?"
'Yeah."
Slydes punched her right in the forehead. She fell to the bottom of the short steps, out cold. Best way to win an argument with a gal, he thought.
Slydes stepped off the deck ladder into the water, and waded toward the island.
(II)
Nora thought back to her old lit classes as she meandered through the woods at just past dawn, Henry David Thoreau and all that. Being alone amid this plush wilderness-just as the new day began to arrive-put one in a sedate frame of mind. The beauty shimmered around her; it seemed to invite her to venture deeper, that and her curious solitude.
It feels damn good to be away from everyone else for a little while, she admitted, and she knew it was more than just escaping the envious angst that Annabelle incited. It let her free her mind, and now, for these cherished moments, she delighted in the luxury of thinking about nothing at all.
She roved deeper, down trails she hadn't been aware of. The pink light of the sunrise shot bolts down through dense branches. All that spiced the silence were chirping birds.
She wasn't sure why she'd risen early. She'd woken to obscure dreams and a headache. The other tents remained zipped up, so she sprayed herself down with some repellent and quietly wandered off, if only to take a look at more of the island.
I better be careful I don't get lost, she considered. The tropical forest grew more dense as the next trail continued. She supposed she was looking for more signs of the worms and ova she and Loren had stumbled on last night. Soon the dilemma ruptured her mood.
I'm getting paranoid, she realized. Everything she knew about worms that produced motile ova insisted that they were harmless to humans-so what was she afraid of? But-
A bienvironmental species? A worm as well as its ova that can function on land? And the worm itself did resemble certain worms from the Trichina and Trichinella families, and some of those could definitely infect humans ...
Be realistic! she finally commanded herself. I'm an expert, and my professional inclinations are that these things are no more dangerous to humans than ladybugs.
The determination made sense, yet the back of her mind wouldn't let go of the creepiness.
Her next step was snagged--something on the ground. Vine, she thought at first. She looked down to see what had caught the front of her flip-flop.
Not a vine, a cable.
She detached her foot and knelt. A black cable-an inch thick-stretched across the overgrown trail. What's this doing in the middle of the woods? she thought. It's a power cable.
Nora followed the cable back toward the camp and head shack areas, and didn't go more than a hundred or so yards before it terminated and split. One end branched to a conical voltage regulator that provided the lights and electricity to the head shacks. The other end veered directly into a tin shed that contained two bulky machines. Stenciled spray-paint letters identified one: FIELD PURIFICATION UNIT, WATER, PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. A series of hoses ringed through the second machine, and most of the joints and connections on the hoses were streaked with white crust. Salt, she knew at once. This must be the desalinator Trent was talking about.
Then she turned around and followed the black power cable back, where it would undoubtedly termi nate at the portable generator that Trent had also mentioned on the day they'd arrived.
She followed several hundred yards farther, expecting at any moment to hear the chugging sound of the generator.
She walked on and on ... and didn't hear a sound.
Finally the cable ended at a fat metal connection ring set into a square of concrete. The generator's underground? she thought. But she knew better. That can't be...
Something white could be seen behind some leafy branches. She pushed back a bough and found a metal sign on a post. The sign was white with red borders, and it read KEEP AWAY! RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL IN USE!
Nora ran back to the campsite. She didn't hesitate to open Trent's tent and stick her head in. "Hey! Lieutenant!"
Trent's head rose groggily in the lightweight sleeping bag. "Huh?"
"Is there a hot radioactive source on this island?"
The question slapped him out of sleep. "What the-" Then his face drooped. "You found the ..."
"Yeah! Is it live?"
"Wait for me while I get dressed."
He knows all about it, Nora felt sure. And he lied. He specifically told us that the generator ran on diesel fuel. A minute later, Trent came out, dressed in crumpled fatigues.
"There's no diesel generator on this island, is there?" Nora demanded.
"Well, uh, no."
"Then how come you told us there was? You've got an RTG in the ground out there, don't you?"
"Keep your voice down," he said, glancing at the other tents. "Over here."
He took her out of the campsite and down the trail to the field shower area. "Now I can talk," he said. "I'm not supposed to let any civilians know about it. You know what an RTG is?"
"Yeah," Nora said testily. "Radioisotope thermal generator. I have a lot of friends who've seen them on Arctic specimen expeditions, and the government puts them up in the mountains, too, to provide power to remote observation posts. It's a nuclear battery."
"Exactly, and you're right, the government uses them all the time, in places where there's no practical way to deliver fuel to run gas and diesel generators. A small radioactive pellet produces heat that's changed into electricity through a thermocoupler. Same sort of thing NASA puts on satellites, Mars probes, things like that. It's a battery that lasts a hundred years." Trent sat down on one of the old picnic tables, rubbed sleep out of his face. He looked worn out. "Since I had to escort civilians to the island, my orders were to lie about the power source. No one knows about the RTG and there was no reason to think it might be discovered-it's all the way on the other side of the island." He looked right at her. "What the hell were you doing that far into the woods?"
"I was going for a nature walk," Nora said, and she didn't feel the need to apologize.
"Great. Now you'll have to be debriefed when we leave-big-pain in the ass."
"Debriefed?"
"The location of the RTG is classified. You'll have to be interviewed in Jacksonville by the Army Security Agency and sign a National Secrets Act nondisclosure form."
Nora felt outraged. "'That's ridiculous!"
"Hey, you're the one who had to go on a nature walk."
My God, she thought, frowning. "So that thing was installed for the missile site?"
"Right. It provided all the needed electricity for the control station and the launch circuitry."
"How come it wasn't removed when the missiles were dismantled?"
Trent smiled and shook his head. "The RTG itself is only the size of a lunch box ... but it's seated in a thousand-pound shielding box, and then they embedded the box in fifteen tons of steel-reinforced concrete."
"Too big to move."
"Yeah, but if no one knows it's there, it's not a security risk." He rubbed his eyes again, aggravated. "Now someone does know where it is. You."
"Well, I'm certainly not going to tell anyone about it."
"Good, because if you do, you can get five years in jail and a quarter-million-dollar fine. In this day and age, can you imagine the uproar if the public found out there was an RTG on an island two miles off the coast of Florida? Every nut job and wannabe terrorist would come out here trying to dig it up. You know, the psychological element. Theoretically, if you took the uranium out of that RTG core--someone could make a dirty nuke. So mum's the word here. If Annabelle mentions in her bristleworm article that there's a friggin' nuclear battery on Pritchard's Key, I turn into a buck private real fast. My whole career will be in the toilet."
Now Nora got the gist. RTGs were safe alternate power sources whose fuel was inaccessible, but in today's climate of terrorism, dirty bombs, and overall radiological paranoia, public knowledge of their whereabouts provided a huge security breech.
"All right, now I get it," she said. "And of course I won't tell anyone. So we can skip the debriefing part, okay?"
"Not okay. I'd lose my job."
Nora grimaced. "You really are by the book, aren't you?"
"Pretty much. That's the way it's got to be. Next time you go on a nature walk-don't go. Most of this island's unexcavated. There's quicksand, sinkholes, all kinds of trouble. Please. Stick to the safe areas. And I couldn't repeat it enough: Don't tell Annabelle or Loren about the RTG. And once you're back on the mainland, don't tell anyone else. Ever. The military's really paranoid about this stuff. You'll have your phones tapped, your mail swiped, all your data sucked out of your computers, oh, and the IRS. And all because you know about a little piece of radioactive material that's smaller than a BB."
Nora looked bug-eyed at him. "Lieutenant, trust me, I'll sew my mouth shut."
"Good, 'cause this is no joke."
Damn. The riot act, Nora thought. Can I help it I decided to go for a friggin' walk? There were better ways to start a day.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Trent said next, the sour topic finally closed. "Remember when you mentioned you found something like a tiny camera in the woods?"
