Mute (44 page)

“Oh, that’s right. I work so I can earn enough
money to repay you for all the kind things you’ve done for me,” Moni said with
more than a hint of sarcasm.

“Damn straight. Now, if only you meant it. I toughened
you up for the real world, Moni. The lessons I taught you saved you from the
Lagoon Watcher. You can’t deny that.”

Unbelievable, thought Moni. The yelling and the
hitting that tormented her every day of her life had become her father’s fond
memories of his strong parenting.

Now Moni could return the favor. She could take
pride in ridding the world of him. They could do that for her, and more, but
only if she agreed.

Peering at her father through binoculars, she saw
an old man alone on a walkway to nowhere. He had lost his family and all but
the most insensitive of his friends. He had paid a price. Yet, that was for
abusing Moni’s friend once—not for hurting her and her mother dozens of times.

What
punishment would serve as retribution for me and my mother?

Moni knew the answer. She also knew that she wasn’t
the kind of person who did such a thing. As Mariella squeezed her hand, the
memories returned more potent than ever. She had lost her first baby tooth when
her father slapped her in the face. He had twisted her fingers until they
swelled and she couldn’t hold a pencil straight. If she let him go again, he’d
find another vulnerable child. She wouldn’t cower in the closet any longer.

“Dad, you’ve caused me nothing but pain. I’ve
accomplished all of this, despite what you did to me. I owe you something, but
it’s not gratitude.”

“Yeah, I figured you’d say as much, you spoiled
runt.” Her father peered underneath the walkway for his daughter’s hiding
place. “You wanna pay up? Come out and greet me face-to-face. I got somethin’
for ya.”

Moni lowered her binoculars. She couldn’t stand
seeing him again, even from over a mile away. Mariella tightened her grip on
her hand. She felt her soul flutter in and out of her body. They were listening
to her. They wanted to know: Was she ready for it?

“And while you’re at it, bring that girl along.
I’ve got something for her too.”

With her mouth to the phone and her mind to an
instrument much more complex, Moni answered both of them at once.

“The only thing I’m giving you is a trip to the
grave. Say goodbye, daddy.”

She didn’t need binoculars this time. Bursts of
fire erupted from the lagoon on both sides of the causeway. One blast rocketed
from directly beneath where her father stood. The simultaneous explosions ignited
the hydrogen that the sulfuric acid in the lagoon had been spewing into the
air. The massive columns of the causeway cracked and toppled into each other
like trees bursting in a wildfire. Gray smoke smeared the sky. Moni couldn’t
see her father amid the cloud of black smoke rising from the detonation site,
but she saw that he wouldn’t die alone. The bridge tilted. A van swerved into
the guardrail and plummeted over the side. It splashed into the water like a
giant cannon ball. The passengers couldn’t even get the doors open before it
sank amid the bubbling acid and flames.

“What’s going on here?” Moni asked. No thoughts
answered her this time. “You didn’t tell me this would happen. You…”

It had begun. She had sworn that she would give
Mariella her home. They had promised they would rid her of the men who harmed
her. Their pact would soon be sealed.

As she tried to wrap her mind around what she had
agreed to, she saw a physical seal rising from the edges of the lagoon. A
yellow surface that resembled blurry glass emerged from the water. She didn’t
see any holes in it, yet it passed through the water as if it wasn’t there. It
oozed around the wrecked bridge. When it rose underneath the cars marooned atop
the bridge, the barrier solidified and hoisted them up. The glass formed a dome
nearly as tall as the hotel. The cars and trucks slid down like raindrops off
an elephant’s hide. Moni saw the drivers frantically waving their arms. Some
dove out as their vehicles smashed ashore. The vehicles ripped through homes
and restaurants. The people splattered. In seconds, nothing remained of the
cars besides rising smoke and smoldering fires.

Now free of vehicles, the causeway aged and
crumbled before her eyes. Soon it resembled ancient ruins. Within a few
minutes, the massive hulk of concrete and steel beams collapsed into the
lagoon, spawning enormous waves. The walls of water barreled for land. Before
reaching shore, they sloshed harmlessly up the side of the yellow bubble. When
they cleared, she saw the entire bridge lying on its side half-submerged in the
acidic lagoon.

Moni gazed up and down the devastated waterway. The
bubble had completely enclosed the lagoon as far as she could see, although it
had formed a narrow crease to spare the southern tip of Merritt Island. The
barrier thickened until she couldn’t see through it. Four columns of rising
smoke, two to the north and two to the south, caught her eye. They were right
on top of where the Melbourne Causeway and the Pineda Causeway should have
been. She couldn’t see them underneath the bubble, but she knew. Everything in
the lagoon had been claimed for the annexed alien territory, even the oblivious
people who had been on the bridges.

“Those people weren’t supposed to die,” Moni said.
“That’s not what I meant. I didn’t know…”

They had told her about small sacrifices—relative
to her planet’s population. Mariella’s people didn’t deserve to die but they
were exterminated on their home world. Sure that she would meet them soon, Moni
knew that she would love them all as much as she loved Mariella.

Chapter 43

Detective Sneed sat on the edge of his chair,
re-watching the deposition video of that meandering Lagoon Watcher when his
door flew open and slammed into the wall.

“What the hell are…” He bit his tongue when he saw
Sheriff Brandt in his doorway with his face as red as a mule pulling the plow.
“Excuse me, sir. I didn’t realize you had stopped by. I was fix’n to see you
soon anyways. I found a ton of inconsistencies in the Lagoon Watcher’s
statements that we can use…”

“Forget the Lagoon Watcher.” The sheriff often
interrupted rookies, but never senior officers like Sneed. “Those scientists
were right. This is bigger than one man. It’s bigger than all of humanity.”
Sneed raised his eyebrows as he waited for the sarcastic punch line that would
discredit those geeks. It never came. “For God’s sake, turn on your TV.”

Sneed usually left his desktop TV off; he didn’t
need any distractions. Yet, he had a feeling the sheriff didn’t mean to watch a
daytime soap opera with him. When he turned on a local station, he saw a
flashing breaking news logo underneath a round yellow blob. At first, he
thought it was some nasty clump of the bacteria that had floated ashore. Then,
the helicopter camera panned out and he saw that the blob covered the lagoon
from shore to shore. It shifted over to where the Melbourne Causeway should
have been. There was nothing besides two black smokestacks and a plume of gray
ashes—like the debris after the World Trade Center collapsed. Wrecked cars and
smashed buildings lined the edge of the bubble. One homeowner strolled across
his backyard and pelted his unwelcome new fence with shotgun shells. Even
though the bullets didn’t make a dent in the bubble, Sneed thought that he
would have done the same in the man’s shoes.

An olive blur flashed across the screen. The
homeowner toppled over in a pool of blood. A gator with spindly horse legs
dragged him through the barrier into the lagoon. The camera panned away.

How could he have missed it? The murders were
precursors to the possession of the lagoon. Sneed decided he better turn off
the prison cameras and kick the Lagoon Watcher’s ass until he tells him how to
reverse this ungodly mess. And he would reverse it. He wouldn’t fail this city.
No, it wasn’t his failure, Sneed thought. He hadn’t screwed this up. His
investigation had been impaired because the key witnesses had withheld the real
story.

“Sir, I know how we…”

“Here’s what I know.” The sheriff cut him off
again. “It goes from the northern tip of the lagoon, into the Banana River on
the east side of Merritt Island, and then stops down south at the Sebastian
Inlet. Eight bridges that were in its way exploded simultaneously. The casualty
count will be several hundred.” Sheriff Brandt lowered his head with a sigh. “The
beachside has been completely cut off from the mainland. The only way out over
land is the two-lane Kennedy Parkway all the way to the north. NASA has closed
that road to public traffic. It has focused on securing the Space Center. Their
bridges were destroyed too, so they’re pinned in by—I don’t know what the hell
it is. Terrorists? Aliens? Good Lord, Sneed this is your case. You must have
some kind of idea.”

Sneed opened his mouth, but all the answers he
could think of would make him sound like an incompetent boob. The Lagoon
Watcher had rambled on about these tiny Star Trek type things that controlled
the bacteria. At least, he thought they were the ramblings of an aged hippie on
a bad acid trip. Swartzman, and even his dopy student, had told him that the
Lagoon Watcher had a point. How could he have believed them? That would have
meant disregarding his investigation team’s work, which obviously had been
muddled up by the uncooperative witness.

An incoming call spared Sneed from answering the
sheriff’s questions.

“It’s from Patrick Air Force Base,” Sneed said.

“Put it on speaker,” the sheriff said.

Turning his head away from his boss, Sneed
grimaced. Brandt’s massive ego wouldn’t let his lead detective take charge of
this call.

“This is Sheriff Brandt. I’m here with Detective
Sneed.”

“We’re in a tough spot here, boys,” Brigadier
General Colon said before Sneed could even say hello. “I’ve patched Special
Agent Cam Carter with the FBI into this call.”

“This case is officially under federal
jurisdiction,” said a man with a deep voice, presumably Carter. Sneed expected
him to tell the local yokels to go fuck off and hang up. “Have your officers
set up a perimeter around the mainland side of the lagoon. Don’t let any
civilians approach it. If something emerges through the bubble, shoot to kill.
I don’t care if it’s a damn puppy. Send all your choppers and your best men to
the beachside. I’m talking SWAT team—the toughest sons of bitches you’ve got.
We’re commencing a civilian evacuation and it’ll be hell keeping this from
breaking into a riot.”

Oh great, Sneed thought, now the Brevard County
Sheriff’s Office gets to serve as tackling dummies for the FBI.

“And what, if you’ll don’t mind me asking, will
your federal agents and soldiers be doing to defend our country?” Sneed asked.

“We’re doing plenty,” Colon snapped. “We won’t let
any force—no matter where it came from—put our base under siege. The top
federal priorities are this air base and the Space Center. No one exits north
near NASA.”

“Do you realize how many chopper trips it’ll take
to evacuate the entire beachside? We’re talking about over 50,000 people.”
Sneed couldn’t handle any more spilt blood on his watch.

“I’ll put a call into state. We’ll get every
helicopter in Florida into the county,” Sheriff Brandt said. “Our team will
make it work.”

“That’s fine, but don’t forget that this is an
ongoing investigation,” Agent Carter said. “We’ve examined footage of the
explosions that destroyed the bridges. They’re consistent with the detonation
patterns of the bombs that were stolen from Patrick. There were sixteen blasts—one
for each missing bomb. That yellow shield is harder to explain.”

“Bullets bounce right off it. So do grenades,”
Colon said. “But when one of those creatures stages an attack, it steps right
through it like a ghost.”

Sneed couldn’t fathom any explanation besides the
work of those mini cyborgs that the Lagoon Watcher had described. He couldn’t
admit that now. How much of a moron would he look like if he revealed that the
main suspect had spilled his guts about the whole operation, and he didn’t do
shit about it?

A familiar sensation of pain seared Sneed’s heart.
He recognized it as a fleeting ember from the bonfire that had roasted him from
the inside out when his brother had been gunned down.

As the higher ups discussed the logistics of their
plan, Sneed saw an incoming call from the hospital. He knew only one person
holed up in there with his direct dial. Sneed patched it into the conference
call.

“Now hold on there partners,” Sneed said so loud
that he cut off their jabbering. “All this strategizing won’t do us a lick of
good if we don’t know what we’re up against. I’ve got somebody on this here
line that had a first-hand run in with one of those mutated animals.”

“Boss?” Nina Skillings asked.

When Skillings woke up two days ago, Sneed had
spoken with her briefly, but she hadn’t emerged from the post-surgery fog at
that point. Hoping she had regained her senses, Sneed told her to recount her
story.

“A pelican—of all things—crashed right through my
windshield,” Skillings said. “I’ve got a head wrapped with bandages and this
damn neck brace to prove it.”