Good question, Nora realized. 'Because we've never seen a parasitic marine worm like these, which is disturbing because ..."

  Loren finished the statement for her. "Because we're America's leading authorities on the subject. We've never even seen a marine worm body configuration like this-not a chitin-penetrating species."

  "Chitin-penetrating?" Trent queried.

  "The ability to penetrate a chitinous exoskeleton--,an insect shell, or a lobster shell, in this case." Nora was transfixed. "Chitin penetrators that live in seawater are always segmented, yet these don't appear to be."

  Loren continued with the late-night worm lesson. "Certain types of marine worm parasites attack crustaceans by disgorging a corrosive digestive enzyme onto the host's shell. The enzyme burns a hole through which the worm can either consume the innards of the host or inject eggs, or-" He and Nora looked at each other with raised brows.

  "Or what?" Trent asked.

  "Or inject fertilized ovum," Nora said. Like the ova we found in the shower .. .

  "How can you even see them?" Annabelle asked next. "They're tiny."

  "You're right," Loren said. He stood up with the lobster, and Nora got up right next to him.

  "Which is why we're going to go look at these under the microscope." Transfixed now, she and Loren stalked away to their field lab.

  The fire crackled. Trent smiled and slipped his arm around Annabelle. "How do you like that? All of a sudden you and I have this cozy campfire to ourselves."

  The grotesquery of the parasites she'd nearly eaten vanished. She grabbed Trent's hand and urged him up. "I'm not interested in romance, Lieutenant. While those too nerds are looking at their worms, you and I are going to find a place to fuck."

  Trent followed Annabelle-and the rest of his good fortune-down another trail.

  The fire crackled some more, painting the trees and surrounding brush with lines of light that squirmed, almost like worms.

  (II)

  "They're resilient, that's for sure," Loren said, gunning up his microscope. "The cooking process didn't kill them all, and this lobster looks pretty well cooked."

  The fact didn't impress Nora much. "There are worms that live in underwater thermal vents that survive at hundreds of degrees. I just want to find out what these damn things are."

  Neither of them said anything at first. Nora adjusted the comparator microscope, while Loren sat at the table beside her, changing stages on a smaller scope. Each had placed several of the tiny pink worms under their lenses. "I'm seeing something else immersed in the fluidity between each worm."

  "Me too," Nora admitted. "Could it be mesenteric debris from the lobster?"

  "Lobsters don't have mesentery. They have semisolid blood-processing organs that are green. This carrier fluid's clear. And there are specks in the fluid. You got those on yours or am I seeing things?"

  "You're not seeing things," Nora said. "The specks are off-yellow."

  "Just like those ova we saw in the shower stall."

  It was difficult for Nora to frame words, but she knew Loren was thinking along the same lines. "The shower ova were the size of jelly beans and these are so small they're practically microscopic. You and I both know the size differentiation means that these specks came from a completely different species."

  "A worm ovum this small couldn't grow to the size of a jelly bean. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the shower ova have red spots on their sheaths?"

  "Yes," Nora grimly replied. "And I'm sure you just did the same thing I did, Loren, and upped your magnification."

  "There are red spots on these too."

  "Which means that these and the shower ovum did come from the same species of worm-"

  "A conclusion that's zoologically impossible," Loren finished.

  Nora sighed at the table. One thing at a time. We've gotsome chitin-penetrating worms that are fluxed with some accessory debris that looks like motile ova. "Let's focus on the worms," she ordered.

  The microscope's light stage showed Nora another world, a circular world of brilliant colors, vibrant details, and stunning light. She had several of the worms on her slide; each one, if extended, might stretch a quarter of the perimeter's border.

  The worms shimmered, squirming with vigor. Their fresh pink bodies glistened like squiggles of some bizarre molten metal.

  "No segmentation," Loren said.

  "And no striations on the skin, either. No plating, so we know it can't be a gastropod or anything from the molluska line. It almost looks like a shipworm-"

  "But shipworms are really clams in tubular casings, and this ... ain't that," Loren added to her observations.

  Nora sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. "Conclusions? Hypotheses?"

  "Either we're not as smart as we thought," Loren said, "or we've stumbled on an undiscovered species of parasite."

  "Um-hmm, and if this were a channel in Antarctica, that would be a reasonable deduction. But in the Gulf of Mexico, North America's nucleus of warm-water marine biology?"

  "The chances of this particular research community missing this is impossible."

  Finally they'd both given voice to the gravity of the dilemma. "I wish these worms were a little bigger. Then we could dissect one even with these small scopes," Nora said.

  "This will have to do." Loren cast his boss an odd look. "Both of us should be really jazzed about this. How come we're not?"

  "Because it's too fucked up," she didn't hesitate to profane. "Us not knowing what this worm is would be like a military history professor not knowing the date of the Battle of Hastings."

  "October fourteen, 1066," Loren said. "The English were winning the battle until their king, Harold the First, caught a flaming arrow in the face."

  "Oh, Loren. You really are a hopeless nerd."

  "1 know, but your point is well taken. These worms are big-time super-duper screwed up. They shouldn't even be in an environment like this. They look like land-dwelling worms, but we know they're marine because they attacked a lobster. And that means their motile ova are water-dwelling, too, but we found a much larger version of the same ova in the shower and on Trent's shirt-hundreds of yards away from the closest seawater. Which means they're obviously land dwellers."

  Nora sprang up in her seat. "Wait a minute. We took samples of the shower ova, didn't we?*

  "Yeah. I vialed a bunch of them up.7

  'Let's compare them directly to the ova from the lobster."

  'Why didn't I think of that?"

  "Because I'm the boss."

  They both hustled to one of the other tables where they'd placed their specimens. The small plastic saltwater tanks Loren had hooked up for the scarlet bristleworms bubbled away from their air pumps. Loren's hand eagerly reached for the vials he put the ovum in, but-

  "What the hell!"

  Nora stared.

  The small vials were all empty.

  Loren held several up to the overhead lights. "They're burned through at the bottoms. It's like the ova melted the plastic and got out."

  "There's a few of them there." Nora pointed.

  Several of the grotesque yellow nodes were inching up the wall. "The ova must possess the same corrosive enzymes of the worms that bred them."

  "Chitin-penetrating and plastic-penetrating," Loren remarked. His mouth fell open when he turned his head. "Hey, Nora ..."

  "What?"

  "Look at the tanks."

  Nora lowered her face to the pair of mini aquariums. "Holy shit!" she yelled. "They've infected the bristleworms!"

  In the farthest tank, all of the scarlet bristleworms had at least one yellow ovum attached to their bodies. The worms themselves shuddered. But events had progressed further in the closer tank.

  Several ova lay dead on the tank's floor. But the bristleworms they'd attacked seemed to throb, and were bloated from within. The worms were still alive but barely moving. Then one of them-

  "Unbelievable!" Loren exclaimed.

  The bristleworm began to disgorge a slew of much tinier worms.

  Within a few minutes, the other bristleworms in the tank did the same, until the water was tinted pink with so many tiny worms.

  Nora was flabbergasted.

  "Like the Tessae worms in central Africa," Loren murmured. "And the-"

  "And some of the Trichinella family. Our little pink parasite has the ability to attack a different annelid species with free-ranging ovum and force it to bear its young."

  But the revelations didn't stop there. Nora and Loren squinted harder as the minuscule newborn worms began to slither en masse up the face of the tank. Eventually they were twitching out over the side.

  I'm starting to get a little freaked," Loren said in a low drone. "They're coming out of the friggin' water, Nora."

  "Just wait a minute. It won't take them long to die. They have to suffocate ..."

  They waited for another minute, then another.

  "Jesus.. . ."

  Ten minutes later, the newborn worms hadn't died. They were all out of the tank and moving across the table.

  "Well, how many impossibilities can we take for one day?"

  "A marine worm with air-breathing capabilities," Nora said very slowly. "Every worm in the world that can do this has been exhaustively catalogued." Her face felt hot in aggravation. "There's no way-no fucking way in the world-that an annelid like this could remain uncatalogued."

  "No fucking way in the world, huh?" Loren directed his displeasure in the obvious direction of the mass of worms. They were moving toward them on the table. And the bean-sized ova that had crawled up the wall, too, had changed direction now, once Loren and Nora had come over to the table.

  "They're detecting our presence," Loren said.

  "Fibrotic sensory pores," Nora guessed. "They're reading the carbon dioxide we exhale-which triggers their instinct ganglia that a potential host is near."

  "Uh-huh, and I -don't want to find out what happens if one of those little things gets on me."

  Nora sloughed that one off. "If one of them got into your bloodstream, your immune-system. would kill it."

  "Yeah? I'm not going to wait for my immune system to do the job." Loren picked up a can of mosquito spray. Nora was about to object-they were specimensbut...

  Not a bad idea, she recanted. The chlordane and diethyl-meta groups in the repellent would kill the worms just as it had killed the ova in the shower stall. The just-hatched worms on the table were so tiny yet so abundant that they looked more like spilled pink lemonade-lemonade that moved of its own instincts.

  Loren smirked as he sprayed down the table and wall. He sprayed more directly into the tanks.

  In a few moments, the ova on the wall dropped off dead, and the worms shriveled and died.

  "So much for them," Loren said.

  "Loren the Worm Killer. But we're going to have to preserve some of these and take them to Florida Natural Resources. I guarantee you, they don't know about this. Chitin-penetrating parasites like these? That reproduce this actively and can attack multiple hosts? If these things broke out, they could decimate the gulf's crustacean harvest."

  "Well, at least only one lobster was infected," Loren noted, calmed down now. "This could be a fluke infection, you know."

  Could be, Nora thought. Maybe it was a lucky hit on the part of the worm. But if they wiped out these bristleworms that easily, it could wipe out an entire food chain.

  Loren had used the lab's forceps to place one of the dead shower ovum under his microscope. "These are the same, Nora. Just a lot bigger."

  Nora had figured as much. The hunch wouldn't let go. She took Loren's slide and placed it under her own dual-lensed scope, to properly compare the dead ova against the smaller ones mixed with the worms from the lobster. When she switched on both fields ...

  "Oh my God."

  "What"

  "See for yourself," Nora said.

  Loren looked in the comparator scope. He only looked for a second before he lifted his eyes away.

  "Oh my God is an understatement," he said.

  Nora had seen it first, and wanted clarification.

  The tiny worms from the lobster weren't so tiny anymore. They filled the entire space of the slide's viewing perimeter now, and the ova in their proximity could now easily be detailed.

  Loren stood erect, dumbfounded. Confusion made his eyes looked glazed. "This can't be."

  "Tell me about it," Nora said. "Those things are ten times bigger than they were twenty minutes ago."

  Loren nudged her back to the microscope. "Look back in there," he said, a little jittery now. "Keep your eye on them fora full minute, then tell me your observations."

  Nora did so.

  She knew what he was driving at in significantly less than a minute.

  She could actually see the worms and ova growing before her eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  (I)

  "What do you make of it, Sergeant?" the colonel asked, having made a rare appearance from his makeshift field office. The sergeant had logged the observed activity at the old head shack, believing it to be "atypical."

  We must be getting ready to leave, the sergeant pondered. Why's he so interested in a bunch of civilians all of a sudden?

  The corporal was manning the monitor controls, zooming the military's very best lenses, but he seemed more fixed on the slender woman with frizzed hair. Have to get that kid's mind out of the garbage, the sergeant thought.

  "Look at that," the colonel said. The image onscreen lurched forward from the zoom: a closer shot of the slender woman in the dark one-piece swimsuit. She was leaning over a computer now, typing something. The colonel added, "I don't like it. It looks like she's recording data. Data on what?"

  The sergeant stepped closer. "I'm not sure, sir. As I noted in my log, the civilian activity in that building seemed harmless. But I could be mistaken."

  "It looks like they're keeping specimens of some kind in there."

  "That wasn't the case earlier, sir."

  The colonel faced the sergeant directly. "In your estimation, is there any way the civilians know we're here?"

  "In my estimation, sir-no."

  "What about you, Corporal?"

  "No signs of detection, sir."

  "The only civilian who ever saw me was in the second arrival group . . . and he's dead. That's verified and recorded. The fourth group's craft has been disabled. In fact, every civilian to come on the island is now infected, this third group being the only exception. What they're doing seems routine and unalarmed. I think it's some kind of nature excursion-the blond woman appears to be a photographer."

  The colonel thought on it, then watched the screen some more. "You're always right, Sergeant, and I'm not disputing your assessment. But I still need to know what they're up to. I need you two men to make another trip outside and guarantee me that what they're doing won't compromise our tests."

  "Yes, sir," the sergeant said.

  "Good, then do it. Do it tonight."

  The colonel's boots snapped as he left the room.

  The corporal looked up when the door closed. "I wonder what's up his ass."

  "He's bucking for general, and he'll probably get it if this mission yields positive results. That guy's been do ing these field jaunts for years-it racks up promotion points. He's not going to let anything screw this up."

  The corporal rolled back in the chair, put his feet up on the old desk that was once used by missile-control officers. "The hybrids are duplicating better than we ever expected. We already know that they don't hesitate to attack human hosts. The worms and the ova alike have already proved that they can live in multiple environments. Why can't we just go home now?"

  "Because the brass says so, and you can bitch about it all you want, but it won't do any good." The sergeant laughed and slapped the corporal's back. "Just think of all that extra-duty pay you'll get."

  Fuck that, the corporal thought. I want to get laid. He'd been in the military long enough to know that whenever you thought sure a mission was about to end ... you could slap on another week or even a month.

  "I'm going to go finish my shift log," the sergeant said. "In the meantime, keep an eye on the civilians." He pointed to the screen. "Let me know when they lock that place up for the-night.-That's when we go back out."

  "Sure thing, Sarge."

  The corporal switched to another camera once the sergeant left. Now he had the low-light on and was watching the blonde.

  That's more like it.

  The blonde was already naked, and sprawled out on the beach. When she climbed on top of the guy, her back arched, which couldn't have displayed her breasts more perfectly in the moonlight.

  But the corporal knew that looking would suffice for only so long.

  One thing I know for sure, he told himself, before we leave this island, I'm going to bang that blonde ...

  (II)

  That wasn't bad, Annabelle thought in the so-called afterglow. Out here I have to take what I can get. She wasn't used to that-not with her looks and her social status back in New York. Young power players were more her speed-and Trent was neither of those-but he did have an aggressive way about him. He was perfunctory and direct, no frills, all business. If she viewed the island photo shoot as an adventure, she'd feel more content.

  Cool gulf breezes diced up the night's blanket of heat. They both lay naked and sweating right up at the wood line, their clothes flung this way and that before them. Soft waves fell twenty yards beyond-the tide was coming up-and the beach sand looked bizarre in the subdued moonlight, like cold smoky glitter.

  Trent looked haggard in the same light. I'm wearing him out, Annabelle thought with an inner giggle. She reached into her beach bag and pulled out a flask.

  "Holding out on me, huh?" he said.

  "I wouldn't call what we just spent the last hour doing 'holding out.'" She took a long sip-dark rumand smiled. The sudden swell of heat in her belly made her think of a penis going from soft to hard in the channel of her sex. I'm a dirty girl tonight, she joked in thought. Can't get my mind off anything but sex. It was the hot night, she knew, and this exotic environ and its circumstances: stuck on an island with no way off, and only two men in her midst, both lusting for her faultless physique. The notion lit primal fuses in her psyche, unleashing the bitchy, antsy, slut-in-heat disposition. She knew she shouldn't be drinking-it only laxed her inhibitions more-but the moment seemed to warrant it. She passed Trent the flask, deliberately brushing his shoulder with a hot breast.