Minutes to Burn

He stepped through the narrow door frame into the night. The cry stopped, cut off mid-scream. He froze, breathing hard, lips trembling. Even from across the field, he could make out a stillness in the block of light from the window. The wind blew hot and lazy across his face, carrying with it the smells of moss and decomposing wood from the forest. He tried desperately to slow his breathing but could not.

He called his wife's name, just once. His voice sounded hollow and weak in the night.

The air reverberated with silence. He was filled with a sudden and unde-niable dread. The ax slid from his hand, disappearing into the tall grass.

His eyes fixed on the window, he trudged toward his house, his boots dragging reluctantly across the furrowed soil and damp grass. The rope was slick in his hands, a rough-skinned eel.

After an eternity, he reached the side of the house. He headed for the door, leaning weakly against the wall. Bloque scraped against his bare shoulder, drawing blood.

He tried to call Floreana's name again, but his throat was too raspy and the sound came out a hoarse whisper. He paused just beside the doorway, gathering the threads of his fear. The silence unrolled around him like a black sea, endless and unremitting.

His teeth chattering, he stepped into the single room of his house. The rope slid from his hand to the floor.

His wife lay on the mattress, her lower body a muddle of flesh and blood. She'd been torn open from the inside. A splatter of blood ran up the wall beside the mattress, nearly four feet away. Her body was stiff and twisted, her back still arched.

On the floor lay a tangle of limbs and claws and half-shaped organs laid open to the outside air. The fetus. His child. A gnarled, cursed crea-ture that looked as though it had been forged in some hell's oven-a col-lection of viscera and tissue, only some of it human.

It had expired before ever drawing air, and it lay, dead, beside its dead mother. Ramon's wife.

His skin felt intensely hot, as if it were burning off his bones. With slow, drugged movements, he walked to the mattress and straightened his wife's limbs, trying his best to lay her arms by her sides so that she looked relaxed. He pulled the thin, stained blanket across her lower body, thumbed her eyes closed, kissed her still-moist forehead.

He dragged a chair from the table over to the fireplace, above which some bloque had fallen away to reveal a brief stretch of rafter.

He fetched the rope from the doorway.

Chapter 49

29 DEC 07 MISSION DAY 5

Derek lay on his back in the dark of early morning, watching the rain patter on the roof of the tent. It slid to the sides and formed puddles, moving patterns of darkness. The tent looked alive, as if he were lying in the belly of some great beast and watching its stomach digest him.

The rain slowed, then stopped, leaving the canvas above bowed. Though morning was only a few minutes away, the sky was still gray. Cameron slept soundly on her sleeping pad to Derek's right, and the cruise box containing the larva was still safely latched.

Again, he had not slept. Frustration had honed its edge on his sleep-lessness, but he resisted it. He rose and walked outside, where Justin was standing watch.

Justin turned his fingers in a reverse temple and cracked them sharply across his forehead as he yawned. He shifted on the log, groaning. "My ass feels like I just spent the night with the Marquis de Sade."

Derek stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the waving tops of the Scalesias. His face was swollen, puffy around the eyes and through the cheeks. He blinked long and hard and looked back at Justin, forcing his eyes to adjust. The spikes from the GPS tripods were lined up on the ground by Justin's feet. Beside them were four flares and the bolt Tank had taken from the specimen freezer.

He walked a few paces off and urinated into the higher grass. "Get the others mustered for recon," he mumbled over his shoulder.

The softness of the forest floor was surprising. Cameron felt it was yielding to her, giving way beneath her heavy boots. The spike swung at her side.

Moving stealthily through the trees in their cammies, their skin tender from the sun and greasy with sunblock, Cameron and Derek blurred from spot to spot like shadows. If they needed to, they could just disap-pear, stepping back against the trunk of a tree, lying flat on the forest floor, fading into bushes.

Once, in Iraq, she and Derek had been caught by surprise by a truck-ful of enemy soldiers. They'd been wearing their desert cammies, and they'd leaned back on the steep dune behind them, kicking sand over their black boots and letting more sand crumble down over their faces. The truck had rattled past them so close she'd been worried it would run over her feet.