Diego stood quietly and picked up the discarded tube, setting it in a trash bag. Cameron watched him, but the others didn't seem to notice. Rex picked up another MRE and turned it upside down, searching for the opening.

Pale yellow tinged faintly with green, a sulfur b.u.t.terfly flew a lurching figure eight overhead. It lit on Rex's shoulder, but he did not notice it. Diego reached over, trapping the b.u.t.terfly's wings between the lengths of two fingers. Ever so delicately, he grasped the b.u.t.terfly's fragile body with his other hand, then blew gently on the wings so they parted, revealing their full span. With a graceful flick of his wrist, he released the b.u.t.terfly to the air, and it fluttered off. He glanced over at Cameron and smiled.

"Justin," Derek said, "After lunch, I want you to swim out and retrieve your trauma bag and the other gear we discussed. See if you can figure some way to anchor closer to sh.o.r.e for when we take off in four days. Get back here by 1500. That give you enough time?" Justin snapped his head down in a nod. He was the best swimmer on the squad, and he prided himself on his specialty.

"The rest of us'll break into buddy pairs and sweep the island. Once we find the other five sites, then we can focus on setting those last GPS units, getting the water samples Rex needs, and clearing out."

Grabbing the thin cardboard box, Savage slid out the contents, then pulled the warm omelet pouch from the heater. He sliced the top open and dumped in the cocoa powder, then the Tabasco, stirring the whole concoction together. He raised a spoonful of the mush, white shot through with red and chocolate swirls, to his mouth. "We gonna make it back for New Year's?" he asked. "I got a stripper name of Mary Anne, said she'd get me firing both pistons if I can swing through Boseman."

Justin caught Cameron's eye and made a jacking-off gesture with his fist.

Rex stood, picking up another antenna. "You can consider that your incentive."

Rex took Savage and Tucker to sweep the northwest quadrant of the island. Between the dark lava beach, the 103-meter rift, and the wide lava plain, he hoped to locate at least two sites. The hike from the Scalesia zone down the western coast was a gradual one. The transition zone slowly faded into the parched browns and grays of the arid zone-the stout plugs of Candelabra cacti, the dry, chalky ground underfoot.

At one turn, a land iguana lay across the trail. Rex stepped carefully over it, but as Savage pa.s.sed, he flipped it over with the toe of his boot. It landed on its back and squirmed over to find its feet before beating a sluggish retreat. Tucker laughed, and Rex turned and looked at Savage angrily.

Rex signaled Savage forward, and Savage came, tossing the Death Wind at a cactus. It stuck with a thunk, and he pried it out, twisting it and sending a chunk of spines flying.

"What the h.e.l.l was that?"

Savage lifted the bandanna off his head and used it to mop his brow. "Survival of the fittest," he said. He flexed, curling an arm up Popeye-style.

Rex could feel anger flushing his face, and he fought to keep his voice steady. "That animal is the most magnificently adapted creature on this island."

Savage cleaned beneath his thumbnail with the end of the blade, trac-ing it gently along the darkened line. "Not anymore," he said.

Rex shifted the bag on his shoulder. "Maybe it took two, three hun-dred thousand years for a land iguana to be born with longer claws. A random mutation. The thing is, with longer claws, the land iguana can pull the spines out of cactus pads. That meant it could eat the pads, so it had access to a wider range of food. This mutation was pa.s.sed along to its offspring, which also enjoyed the benefits of these claws. Soon, they outcompeted the normal iguanas for the limited food resources on the island. They thrived, the older iguanas died out, and land iguanas with more substantial claws became the norm for the species." His cheek quivered with anger. "That, my friend, is survival of the fittest. Kicking a defenseless animal to show how big your d.i.c.k is, is not."

Savage kept his eyes on the tip of the knife beneath his fingernail. "Been thinking about how big my d.i.c.k is, have you?"

"Yes. Of course. Since I'm a h.o.m.os.e.xual, I want to copulate with every male in the vicinity. I have nothing better to do on this survey but devote my thoughts exclusively to you and your p.e.n.i.s."

Tucker took a step back, his foot sliding on the gravelly slope. "Whoa," he said. "You're a b.u.t.t stabber?"

Rex raised his hands. "Where the h.e.l.l have you been?"

"But you didn't...No one said anything." Tucker rubbed his hands together, squeezing his fingers.

Rex turned around, heading down the slope toward the steaming rift. "Don't ask, don't tell," he called over his shoulder.

The curved scar of the rift followed the island's contour, spewing sul-furous gases. The ground itself consisted of an ashy sand, which gave way here and there to sheets of newly hardened lava. The only vegeta-tion that had taken hold were Tiquilia plants-small gray herbs growing in humps like tiny mounds of cobwebs.

Rex stopped a good distance from the rift, studying the ornate inlay of hardened lava. Some regions were ropy and fluid, indicating a more recent flow, but others had been smoothed by thousands of years of wind and erosion. He could feel the heat rising off the lava even through his shoes. Tapping the ground with the rock hammer, he a.s.sessed its consistency.

Savage shifted from foot to foot. Tucker squirted a dollop of sun-block into his palm and smoothed it across his face, then tied his T-shirt around his head to cut the sun.

"I'm getting mighty tired of this s.h.i.t," Savage said.

Rex raised the Brunton compa.s.s and glanced at the reading. "That's not really my concern."

"'Not my concern,'" Savage grumbled. "It should be your f.u.c.king concern. You got Navy SEALs here. If we wanted to lug gear and fold underwear, we would've been swabbies on USS f.u.c.kstain. If someone's gonna pull my a.s.s out of a nice comfortable jail cell, it could at least be for some G.o.dd.a.m.n action."

Rex tapped the rock with his hammer, gauging the vibration. "You think you're so forceful, all of you," he said. "With your guns and your combat training. As if that does any good in a time like this. The earth is rearranging itself in Biblical proportions, and you're standing by with a handful of bullets. Correction: with no bullets." He laughed, low in his throat, and looked up. "I'm a doctor, Savage. You're a f.u.c.king Band-Aid."

Savage stepped forward, but Tucker blocked him, laying an arm across his chest. Rex stood quickly, his arms raised defensively, glower-ing at Savage.

"Don't take the bait, buddy," Tucker whispered to Savage. He patted him on the chest, and Savage took a step back.

Savage's upper lip quivered, itching to curl up into a snarl. "f.u.c.k this," he said. He turned, storming off down the slope past the rift.

"FREEZE!" Rex yelled.

Savage halted. He turned slowly, facing Rex. "What now?"

Rex crouched and picked up a baseball-sized lump of basalt. He tossed the rock once and caught it, then threw it in a high arc toward Savage. It struck the ground about five feet past Savage in the direction he'd been heading. Breaking the thin crust of the lava and leaving a black outline in the ground, it continued down into the earth, falling through the deep cavity left where the underlying rock had dissolved and retreated. Savage waited to hear a thud when the rock struck bottom. There wasn't one. He stared at the small black hole in the ground, a pin-point opening to a ma.s.sive underground cavern.

Rex began to walk off in the opposite direction. "This way," he said.

CHAPTER 33.

--------------------- ameron gasped when they crested the hill and the lagoon came into view, a disk of water nestled within a craterous swoop on the south-west margin of the island. Inlaid a mere fifty yards from the ocean, the deep green waters struck a sharp contrast to the blue beyond the narrow barrier beach. She rested her hands on her head, taking in both the breadth of the lagoon and the endless sheet of the ocean in a single glance.

Diego paused beside her, amused, and Derek brought up the rear, lugging two canteens and wearing a kit bag like a backpack.

"I thought Navy SEALs were not supposed to gasp," Diego said.

The lagoon had been formed six and a half years ago, the result of a tsunami caused by the Initial Event. Its eighty-five-percent salinity was double that of the ocean, caused by the continuous evaporation of the trapped waters. Due to the high salt content, only algae and shrimp sur-vived there.

Striped with layer upon layer of compressed volcanic ash and dark black lava, the walls of the lagoon had eroded in twists and divots, leav-ing them dappled with smooth, rippling formations. A few pink flamin-gos stood in the shallow reaches, heads dipped upside down in the bright green water, inverted jaws sifting for food as their tough, bristled tongues suctioned water.

The mud around the lagoon had hardened and cracked, giving it a shattered appearance-myriad pieces of a puzzle fitted but slightly spread. Between the venous cracks, the mud was smooth and white.

A flamingo lumbered over to its young, opened its mouth, and regurgitated milk from its stomach. Cameron opened her mouth, then closed it.

"It is difficult to get to Galpagos," Diego said. "But once you're here, it is easy to want to stay." Removing a sample jar from his pack, he hiked slowly down to the lagoon, leaving Derek and Cameron with the view.

Cameron watched him skillfully navigate the incline before turning back to Derek. From the mats of brush to their right, a farolete rose, a four-foot orange cone of prefabricated modular rings. A navigation aid that functioned like an unmanned lighthouse, it had the seal of the Insti-tuto Oceanogrfico painted on its side, along with the precise geo-graphic bearings of the unit-Lat.i.tude: 0.397643, Longitude: 91.961411.

Derek rested a boot against the farolete, and stopped dead. He was ashen, his face frozen in an expression of disbelief, amazement, and fear. Cameron stepped back quickly, following his gaze to the edge of the brush near her feet.

Inching slowly toward her was a plump, segmented larva, its head eight inches long and rounded. Almost three feet in length, it elevated its torso off the ground, its head c.o.c.king slightly to one side. Its mandibles curved into the slit of its mouth. Gills quivered behind its head. Cameron could see her terrified expression in the gla.s.sy sheen of the larva's round eyes. She felt her heart double-beat in her chest, and her hands went slick with sweat. The larva emitted a soft, gentle coo, and Derek stumbled back, tripping over his feet and falling down.

His yell echoed back to them from the walls of the lagoon. Cameron pulled him to her side speechlessly as the larva lowered itself flat to the ground again. It inched forward and Cameron and Derek stepped back.

Diego was scrambling up the slope of the lagoon, calling out, but they were transfixed by the strange creature before them and couldn't respond. Cameron wiped the sweat from her face with a sleeve, her cheeks raw, sunburnt, and trembling.

Panting, Diego reached Derek's side and leaned over, hands resting on his knees. When he saw the larva, he inhaled sharply. He stepped back, tears rising to his eyes. The larva inched forward again, prolegs squirming to find holds in the ground, and Diego stepped forward cau-tiously, leaning over it but ready to spring back at the slightest indication of danger.

Cameron grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back. "Let's just take this slow," she said through clenched teeth. Her chest was heaving beneath her top. "Let's just take this slow," she repeated, more for her benefit than for Diego and Derek's.

Diego stepped around the larva, pointing at the bushes. A thin path had been cleared; the larva had literally eaten its way through the dense underbrush. "Hay Maria Santisima," Diego said. "Its consumption is extraordinary."

"What the f.u.c.k is it?" Derek asked, his voice wavering. He rocked a little on his feet.

Diego leaned forward again, mumbling as if to himself. "An arthro-pod of some sort, probably an insect. Eruciform larva, a caterpillar, maybe. Distinct head, aristate antennae, three pairs of true legs off the thorax, multi-segmented abdomen." He reached out a hand but drew it back quickly when the larva's head turned to track its motion. "Cono la puta madre!"

Cameron could not tear her eyes from the thing's head. The wide saucers of the eyes connoted an innocence and gentleness she had seen before only in mammals. The cooing sound issued from the larva again, a soft click moving beneath the surface of the sound.

"Impossible," Diego said. "Insects have no lungs, no vocal cords. They only make stridulating noises, from rubbing their legs or wings together. It must be pushing air through its cuticle, or sc.r.a.ping its seg-ments together. It must be... " He stared at the larva's open mouth, the st.u.r.dy stocks of the mandibles.

"It's soothing," Derek said. "The noise."

"It has holes in its sides," Cameron said, pointing to the oblong spiracle openings, one on each side of each abdominal segment. "Maybe the air's coming through those."

She yanked a thorn tree up by its roots, protecting her hand with her shirt. Holding the bottom toward the larva, she shook it before its face. The larva's head moved slightly side to side as it eyed the dangling roots. Its segments seemed to contract and then spring, launching its head toward the thorn tree. It got its mouth around the base of the thin trunk and began munching. Cameron watched in amazement, the larva pulling its front segments up off the ground as it ate its way up the stalk toward her hands. She released the tree before the larva got too close. It finished the trunk on the ground, then looked at her again.

"Is it dangerous?" Cameron asked. "It looks kind of ...I don't know..."

"Personable?" Diego offered.

"Something like that."

Diego reached out a hand and touched its terminal segment. "I don't know. I've never seen anything like it. But it doesn't have stingers, claws, or spines, and there's no warning coloration. Its mandibles are strong, but that's common in larvae. It has glands posterior to its l.a.b.i.al mouth-parts, probably to expel silk for a pupation chamber. It appears to be herbivorous, but it might be an opportunistic carnivore. The size is alarming, but I'd guess it's not danger-"

The larva turned its head in response to his hand, and he pulled his arm quickly back out of reach.

"Convincing, Doc," Derek said. "Real convincing."

"Will it metamorphose?" Cameron asked.

"I would guess so," Diego replied. "It is distinctly larval. Maybe a large b.u.t.terfly, or..."

"A tree monster?" Cameron finished. They all watched the larva for a few moments. "Do you think there are others?" she asked.

Diego shrugged, nodded, shook his head. "I have no idea. I've just never...I've never. I suppose there could be just this one, but I have to believe that it's a species of sorts, that it has a . . . that there are others. But we can't take a chance...if we never see it again, it could be...could be tragic...an opportunity like this..." He slid his lip to one side, chewing it.

"What are we going to do with it?" Cameron asked.

Diego rose from his crouch and scratched his head, his elbow pointing out like a flag. "I don't want to move it, but if we leave it, we could easily lose track of it. And even though we haven't seen any, there could still be feral dogs roaming the island. It could get killed. We need to make sure we at least have an opportunity to examine it. We could return it afterward, right where we found it." He looked at them sheepishly, as if waiting to be contradicted.

Finally, Cameron glanced over at Derek. "Do you think it'll fit in your bag?"

The others' faces reflected Cameron's thoughts. Tank, Rex, Tucker, Sav-age, and Szabla sat on the logs near the fire pit, flabbergasted. The larva crawled on the soft gra.s.s to the side of Derek's tent, and Diego stood over it, guiding it back toward the circle of logs. Derek stood, ghost-white and gaunt, staring into the dark stretch of the forest to the north.

"You gotta be s.h.i.ttin' me," Savage said.

Tucker cleared his throat loudly, bringing up a mouthful of phlegm. "There's no way."

Tank stood up, then sat back down. "f.u.c.k," he said.

"What the...I don't...What is...I'm a..." Szabla stopped, evidently realizing she wasn't making any headway. She was deeply flushed.

"Kinda cute, ain't it?" Cameron asked.

Placing his hands on the larva's back safely behind the head, Diego elevated it slightly. Its prolegs wiggled in the air, searching for a hold. Cameron laughed and Tank couldn't help smiling. He walked over to the cruise box that had filled with rain and splashed some water over his face.

"We found it at the fringe of the arid zone," Diego said. "It's partial to shade, so it's probably disposed to the forest. The cuticle seems more papery and fragile at the back of the thorax-probably UV damage. My guess would be it worked its way down from the forest under cover of the palo santos."

"If its straying so far from the forest is anomalous," Rex said. "What was it doing?"

Diego didn't have an answer. The larva stopped squirming momen-tarily, regarding Derek's boot with an almost human curiosity.

"Should we name it?" Cameron asked, only half joking.

"Why all this ha-ha-look-how-cute-s.h.i.t?" Szabla said, regaining her composure. "That thing could be dangerous. It could be whatever all this s.h.i.t is about-all these superst.i.tions. Could be what took out that scientist friend of Rex's."

"He wasn't my friend," Rex said slowly, still spellbound by the larva. It rippled forward over the gra.s.s, using the stumps of its prolegs for trac-tion. It gazed up with its oversize eyes, its mouth working as if it were chewing something.

"I hardly think this thing is capable of killing a human being," Derek said. "We don't even have evidence that anything's actually happened here. No proof. Only stories. Even that guy with the ax-"

"Ramn," Cameron said.

"Yeah, Ramn. Even he couldn't show us anything concrete."

"So it's just a coincidence that weird s.h.i.t is going on here, people are disappearing, and we discover this Caterpillar-That-Ate-New-York-City motherf.u.c.ker?" Szabla said.

Diego cleared his throat and started to speak. "I don't think-"

"Plus it'll metamorphose," Szabla continued. "Could hatch G.o.d-f.u.c.kin'-zilla all we know."

"And we have an obligation to see that it does metamorphose," Diego said.

"Maybe it's an alien," Tucker said. "Or from the inner earth or some-thing. Up through the earthquake cracks."

"Or maybe there was a radioactive spill somewhere," Szabla said, rais-ing her hands and wiggling her fingers. She snorted. "This isn't Them."

Rex pressed his lips together, suppressing a smile. "I'd guess it's a mutation or an entirely new species."

"Big f.u.c.kin' mutation," Savage said.

Rex shrugged. "With the state of the ozone layer, who knows? Life on this planet has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to func-tion successfully within specific parameters of solar radiation. When those parameters are drastically altered, it's a DNA free-for-all." He coughed once into a fist. "The larva's size indicates some kind of hydro-static skeleton. Without one, it would collapse into a formless puddle."