Mute (36 page)

An eight-year-old girl couldn’t possess strength
like that, the teacher thought as she trashed around underwater. Finally, her
feet found the bottom. When she lifted her head and chest above the water’s
surface and drew a breath, she found Mariella watching her with eyes that
emitted a solid purple glow. The expression of a shy, frightened little girl
long gone, she resembled a vengeful goddess. Mrs. Mint had miserably failed at
protecting this astonishing creature. Now, no one would protect her.

Mrs. Mint stepped back. Her legs were snared in the
coil of the python slithering around her. It squeezed until she fell to her
knees. She found herself submerged up to her shoulders. Despite sitting in the
clutches of a man-eating snake, the teacher felt that the real menace wafted
towards her through the water with deceptively skimpy arms, and hair dripping
with muck. Those purple eyes entranced her mind. She couldn’t move a muscle.
For once, Mrs. Mint went speechless.

She’s
only a little girl. This can’t be happening. The Lagoon Watcher is the killer.
He kidnapped her.

But
that’s not what he said. He said he came to help her. What the hell happened to
her?

When Mariella seized the hair atop her teacher’s
head, Mrs. Mint feared that she would soon find out. The grown woman throttled
the little girl’s single arm with both hands. It didn’t help. Mariella plunged
her teacher’s head into the canal. She couldn’t even kick with the snake around
her calves. She punched the girl in the legs and stomach. Mariella didn’t
relent. Mrs. Mint couldn’t breathe. Soon, that became the least of her
problems.

Her ears burned. Then her mouth. Then her eyes. She
felt them invading her body through every opening. They were smaller than
grains of sand. She probably wouldn’t have noticed them if they didn’t stab her
with blistering pain on every surface they touched. It felt as if she had a
blowtorch blazing down her throat. The fluid encasing her skull boiled. She
realized that the invaders had caught a ride on her arteries as she felt
flashes of stinging lightening shoot through her heart, and down into her arms
and legs. The lower half of her body numbed as its suffering dulled in
comparison to the brutal shredding of muscle and tendons around her neck and
collarbone.

Somehow in her frantic struggle, Mrs. Mint popped
her head above water. She opened her mouth to draw a breath. The air didn’t
seep through her lips. She felt her saliva drip down her throat and out her
open windpipe. As her severed head bobbed in the water, her darkening vision
caught a glimpse of purple eyes hovering over her like a vulture awaiting the
demise of its prey.

It didn’t have to be this way, if only I would have
looked out for the child, Mrs. Mint thought. I deserve this.

No.
That’s not a child. No human child could do this. She must be—

The teacher’s thoughts faded away, but her brain
would prove useful.

Chapter 35

The shadows in the Enchanted Forest loomed long and
large as the sun descended toward its date with nightfall. When the darkness
smothers the trees, Moni knew that would signal her chances of finding Mariella
in the dense wilderness as worse than remote.

Even with Aaron at her side hacking away at the
bushes and providing her words of overly optimistic encouragement, Moni
prepared herself for the worst with every step. Having Mariella in her life,
for even this brief time, had been a gift from God. Like everything else she
had cherished—her mother, what had once been a loving relationship with Darren—this
too would crumble to dust in her fingers. The only thing that would remain was
the voice of her father repeating the word “failure” inside her skull.

Thankfully, Aaron’s naïve enthusiasm kept her from
admitting defeat after five hours of searching.

“She must be somewhere around here,” Aaron said as
he scanned the forest. The visibility measured less than 20 feet in most places
because of all the foliage. “The rangers said her tracks and the teacher’s
tracks led up to the canal and then went cold. She probably chased her in the
canal for a while, caught the kid and then turned around. I bet the teacher
knew enough to go south, but she could still get lost on her way to the trail.”

“And why didn’t she just use her cell phone?” Moni
asked.

“She could have lost it, or the battery died, or
the water shorted it. There are plenty of ways to waste one. I’ve trashed like
five phones on research missions. Believe me, my dad lets me hear it every
time.”

Moni squeezed his hand and nodded. The possibility
existed, however slim, that Mariella and her teacher were out there. Judging
from her experience in the mangroves the morning after the girl’s parents were
murdered, Mariella could hide for hours on end. She wouldn’t let anyone find
her until she felt like it.

“Please Mariella, come back!” Moni shouted into the
woods. “If you hate school that much, I promise you’ll never have to go again.”

Aaron sent her a glance of admiration for that
ploy. He probably wished that his parents had made him the same offer, Moni
thought. She clasped her hand around his bicep as they strolled through the
increasingly shadowy forest.

The harmony between them got interrupted by a
rustling of leaves in a patch of slash pines ahead of them. Even knowing that
bobcats, wild boars and snakes populated these woods, Moni disregarded her
fears, and charged towards it shouting for Mariella. Aaron’s hesitation lasted
only a split second before he followed her.

The sharp palm fronds swiftly parted. When Mariella
poked her head out, Moni nearly spilled over onto her face. A grin spread
across the girl’s lips that made her brown eyes light up. She sprang from the
palms and hugged Moni around the waist with her head buried into her stomach.
As Moni patted her on the back, and wiped away her tears, she found it
remarkable that Mariella’s excitement at seeing her didn’t seem any more or
less intense than it did when she had picked her up after a typical day at
school. This kid had toughened up.

“You had me so worried, baby. Please don’t run off
again.” As soon as the words left Moni’s mouth, she wondered what had happened
to the carefully rehearsed chewing out she had reserved for the girl after she
had once again put lives in danger by running away. Her relief at seeing
Mariella alive put any such condemnation on the back burner. “Praise the Lord
that you didn’t get hurt out here. You must have an angel looking out for you.”

Shrugging her shoulders, the girl offered a smirk.
Moni scooped Mariella up in her arms, consulted the GPS map on her phone and
headed back towards the trail.

“Wait a minute before you go hurrying off,” Aaron
said as he jogged behind them.

Moni didn’t realize how fast she skipped through
the forest until she saw that the young man who carried nothing but a small
backpack trailed her even as she had the girl weighing her down. It reminded
Moni of how robbers could carry huge televisions all by themselves when the
alarms sounded.

“Come on, boy. Hustle it up,” Moni said with a
playful grin. A few minutes ago, she thought she’d never smile again.

 
“Why are we
running off? Mrs. Mint is still out here. If Mariella was hiding here, her
teacher can’t be far away.”

Moni shifted the girl on her hip so she faced her.
“Baby, have you seen Mrs. Mint?”

Biting her lips, Mariella shook her head. Her dour
eyes met the darkening forest floor.

“Maybe her teacher couldn’t find her, or she could
be hurt,” Aaron said. “We can’t leave her out here all night.”

Moni agreed with him, but only for a few seconds.
Then she stared into Mariella’s pleading eyes, and felt the girl’s trembling
fingers clutching at her jacket. She couldn’t spend another minute in these
woods.

“You do whatever you want, but I’m taking her home
now,” Moni said.

Aaron groaned and snapped off a branch in
frustration. He followed her anyway.

* * * *

Sneed bumped his way through the medics to become
the first greeter for Moni and Mariella when they emerged back onto the trail.
His nostrils flared with anger. To Moni, he seemed more like an actor who took
great pleasure in playing the part of an obnoxious jerk.

“Here’s our hero, and she’s rescued the girl and
not the teacher. I’m deeply shocked,” Sneed said as he scampered at Moni’s heel
like a yapping dog. “Once again, everybody dies except the little girl, and the
detective—and I use that title very loosely.”

Moni ignored him, along with the medics, and ramped
up her pace towards the parking lot.

“The girl is totally freaking out. We’ve gotta get
her out of here,” said Aaron, who apparently didn’t mind masking his true
feelings when it meant backing Moni up in front of Sneed. “I’m sure the teacher
is still out there. If you want, I’ll go back and help look for her.”

“That won’t be necessary, kid.” Sneed jutted his
finger into Aaron’s chest. “You and that professor of yours have a date with
the Lagoon Watcher in the county jail tonight.” He paused for a moment and
watched Aaron squirm. “I can’t understand what the hell that old coot is
jabbering about. I need some scientific mumbo-jumbo translators, and you and
your buddy fit the bill.”

“I guess that’s better than the other thing that
could happen to us in jail,” Aaron said. “I’ll see you ladies later. Call me.”
He waved at Moni as he halted on Sneed’s leash.

Meanwhile, the lead detective reigned in Moni’s
rope. “Hold up!” Sneed snorted. “Aren’t you going to hand her off to the
medics? They need to check her out. Who knows what kinda crap she picked up in
these woods.”

Moni took one glance over her shoulder at the two
medics wheeling a pint-sized stretcher after her. The strides of her brisk trot
grew longer.

“Thanks for the warm thoughts, honey, but my baby
is fine. How many times do I gotta tell you there’s nothing wrong with her?”

Chapter 36

“I don’t choose who dies. I have nothing to do with
it,” the Lagoon Watcher crowed from behind the table as he shook his cuffed
wrists, which had a chain connected to his ankle restraints. “It’s all done at
the molecular level—maybe even the sub-molecular level. We’re talking chemical
and genetic manipulation. It’s like a virus, but fully sentient and
intelligent.”

Harry Trainer nodded at his three interrogators as
if he had just made a brilliant point that would make them throw open the door,
strip off his orange jumpsuit and let him walk on home. Apparently, he didn’t
notice Sneed’s dumbfounded gawk, Aaron’s amused smirk, and even his friend
Swartzman shaking his head with a frown. The accused murderer had rambled on
for a half hour without any of the three men getting more than a sentence or
two in at a time. As Trainer recited the whole ecological history of the lagoon—practically
from the Big Bang—Aaron had déjà vu from his high school days when he just
planted his head on his desk and dozed off.

No worries. All they had was a trail of dead
bodies, a swarm of psychotic animals, sixteen missing explosives and a toxic
lagoon. Meanwhile, this guy kept playing the Mr. Green card. Every time they
asked him how he did it, he insistently denied responsibility. He blamed
polluters and politicians for laying the foundation for what he called a
“computerized bacteria invasion.”

Trainer’s hair looked frazzled and nearly
electrified; he sported a bandage covering the cut an eight-year-old supposedly
inflicted on him. With all that, and the gaunt cheeks tracing the outline of
his jaw, he resembled just the kind of street-corner sign man that warns of
tiny invaders.

“I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re
yammering about,” Sneed said. “Don’t you dare screw with me, old man.” He
cocked his head towards the suspect with such a menacing scowl that even the
Lagoon Watcher took notice. Trainer straightened his back in his wooden chair.
“I have enough evidence to lock you away until your final breath. You might
even earn a date with a syringe just like the ones you were carrying in your
jacket in that elementary school—you sick son of bitch. You can forget an
insanity plea. No jury will accept that from a man with a doctoral degree
hanging on his wall. As I see it, you’ve got two options. You can admit what
you did, tell me where you hid the bombs, and help us clean up this toxic shit.
Maybe then, a jury will have just an ounce of pity for you. Option Two: You can
keep speaking in riddles like you’re fucking Nostradamus. If you wanna see
where that’ll end you up, I’d be much obliged to show you.”

The Lagoon Watcher tried throwing up his hands. His
shackles prevented him from raising them above chest level. “You didn’t even
consider the truth for one second. The evidence clearly demonstrates the
impossibility of my involvement. I tried to prevent this calamity. It’s the Big
Sugar and the Big Cattle and the…”

“Quit sticking the blame on everybody else!” Sneed
growled. “You murdered all those people in cold blood.”