Black Rain

She smiled but didn’t reply; instead she used a pair of tongs to extract a slimy, gray object from the man’s chest cavity. It resembled a leech, but with two long tendrils trailing that remained attached to something in his chest.

She put the parasite down without cutting the tendrils and went for the connection point, a major blood vessel just above the man’s heart. Cutting out a section of the artery, she pulled the bloodsucker free.

The leechlike parasite wriggled impatiently against the grip of the tongs. The tendrils released the section of artery and began snaking back and forth, curling in on themselves like a pair of miniature fire hoses that had broken loose. They seemed to be searching for something.

“What is that?” McCarter asked.

“I’m guessing it’s the reproductive form of those animals,” she said.

Hawker looked even less enthusiastic than before. “A larva?”

She nodded. “Deposited as a parasite.”

Hawker’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Are you sure?”

“No,” she said. “But it seems likely. Many species reproduce through parasitic means, insects especially. Wasps in particular. They sting other insects, paralyze them and deposit their eggs. In such cases the host lives while it is consumed from the inside.”

“More insectlike traits,” McCarter noted.

Danielle pointed out the thin, veinlike tendrils, which were longer than the larva itself. “I’d bet it’s been feeding off the nutrients in his bloodstream. Its own waste gasses probably caused those bubbles.”

She held it toward Hawker for a better look.

He stepped back again. “Take it easy with that thing.”

Laughing, she turned to McCarter, who seemed more interested.

“What about the other welts?” he asked.

She placed the grub in a container and went back to the body. Sure enough, each dark bruiselike blister contained another larva.

“I’m going to study this thing,” Danielle said. “It might tell us something.”

Hawker looked unhappy. “I knew you were going to say that. Just don’t lose track of it, all right? I’d hate to wake up with that thing in my foxhole.”

As she placed the last of the larvae in a jar, Hawker used his radio to call Verhoven. “Bring out some of Kaufman’s C-4, a handful of fuses and some wire,” he said.

“What are you going to do with that?” Danielle asked.

“I’m going to booby-trap it,” Hawker said.

“What?” Danielle and McCarter asked the question simultaneously, shock and disgust in their voices.

“Look,” he said. “They took the bodies we buried. They’re going to get this poor son of a bitch anyway. Going to get him again, apparently. I’m going to use it to our advantage.”

There was something vile in the thought of using a dead human body as bait for a trap, but at this point survival was all that mattered, and neither Danielle or McCarter questioned him further.

While Danielle finished taking samples, Verhoven arrived with the explosives. Hawker rigged the body and then climbed the trees to do the same here. The others waited for him to come down and then they walked back to camp together.

McCarter turned to Hawker. “Did we learn what we needed to know?”

“More than we even wanted to,” Hawker said.

McCarter nodded, thinking Hawker meant the body and the larva, and indirectly, he was right, but Hawker was concerned with more than the body of one dead soldier and the grubs that had come from it. At the top of the trees he’d seen cocoons of all sizes spread out among the branches, dozens of them, like an orchard of rotting fruit. Some appeared to be new, with dark mud and smooth sides, while others were older and dried out and still others were only broken husks, the larvae—and whatever else had been inside—long since gone.

He now understood why they’d seen no wildlife to speak of. The animals had been clearing the forest of every living thing. The proof hung rotting in the trees.

CHAPTER 42

As soon as he made it back to the camp, McCarter began searching for the things that had been taken from them, his notebook and drawings in particular. He dug through piles of Kaufman’s supplies and equipment, violently slinging aside anything that wasn’t what he was looking for. And feeling triumphantly empowered as he did so.

A cough from behind him put a stop to it. “Professor?”

He turned to see Susan, dirty-faced, her rifle slung over her shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” he asked.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “Every sound makes me jump, and I’d rather not sleep than keep waking up like that.”

He could understand that, he’d found sleep hard to come by himself.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “I mean, it looks like fun but—”

“Ah yes, I’m looking for something,” he said. “Trying to take back what’s ours, actually.”

She held up his old leather-bound notebooks. “I didn’t want you to forget them when we got out of here,” she said.

McCarter could almost feel his eyes welling up with tears. She was just a kid. He couldn’t imagine how she was dealing with what she’d been through. What they were all going through. “And your family didn’t think you could hack it out here,” he said.