Minutes to Burn

The boat hit shore hard and skidded up onto the beach. Diego ran toward it. Ramoncito tried to step over the side but collapsed, falling face first onto the sand. Diego turned him over just as the others arrived. A deep maroon had taken hold beneath the smooth dark surface of his face. He was sun-scorched-lips cracked and bleeding, eyes swollen, hands blistered. He mouthed Diego's name, but no sound issued from his lips.

Cameron tipped her canteen to his face, spilling fresh water through his mouth. His tongue worked slowly in the water, lapping it.

Justin leaned against the Zodiac's bow, his shoulder brushing the Dar-win Station decal. He gazed into the boat. It was stocked with twenty-four six-gallon fuel cans, many of them empty. Squeezed in the back near the rudder were two wooden crates, TNT written on their sides in red.

"Holy shit," he said. "Kid motored this thing all the way from Santa Cruz."

Chapter 59

They headed back for base camp, Cameron taking a long detour through the field where they'd burned the mantid. She returned to the others, who had assembled in Derek's old tent. It felt divine to be out of the sun in the soothing shade of the tent. Ramoncito was lying on his back on a sleeping pad. Diego and he spoke softly as the others looked on.

"I got the SOS," Ramoncito said. "And I understood it." He tried to smile, but the movement cracked his lips even more, and he winced from the pain.

Justin leaned over, examining the blistering on Ramoncito's back. He winked at Cameron. The burns weren't too bad.

"Single thirty-five-horsepower engine bringing you one seventy-some nautical miles at ten knots." Diego pushed Ramoncito's hair off his fore-head and rubbed more lotion onto his sunburnt face. "You must've been on the open water for seventeen hours."

Ramoncito tried to smile. "Sixteen."

"Glass sea state," Cameron murmured.

Diego said, "You never should have come."

"You asked me to."

"Not you. If you received the message, I thought you'd get help."

"From who? I know my way home better than anyone. Besides, who would have listened to me?"

"The Captain of the Port."

"Yeah right. I had to steal the TNT from him. Fresh in from the army."

"You stole the-" Diego cut himself off, shaking his head. "Puta madre."

Szabla was on her knees in the corner, looking through one of the TNT boxes Ramoncito had brought along. Row after row of two-pound blocks lined the bottom beneath coils of wire and a scattering of blasting caps. Szabla picked up an olive-drab Clacker detonator and examined it with a smile. The two sides of the Clacker could be pushed together like a stapler to detonate a charge.

"Why'd you bring so much?" Diego asked. "There must be two, three hundred pounds here."

"I thought there might have been a slide, and we'd have to blast some-thing out from under tons of rock. Like we did with that generator up by Media Luna. That was fun." He propped himself on an elbow and drank some more from the canteen.

"Not too much too quickly," Diego cautioned.

"You sound like papa." Ramoncito lowered the canteen. "Where are my parents?"

Diego turned to the soldiers. "You'd better give us a moment alone," he said to the others in English. Cameron nodded and led the other soldiers out. It was clear from Ramoncito's face that he was anticipating bad news.

Savage stopped at the flap. "Kid," he said. "You're one brave little motherfucker."

They all walked a few paces from the tent, leaving Diego to tell Ramoncito that his parents had died. Rex shook his head. "What a thing," he said.

"What're we gonna do?" Szabla said. "Our extraction's not till tomor-row night, but there's no way that boat can pull the weight of all of us, not on limited gas like that."

"Plus there's a space issue," Justin said. "Even once we toss the emp-ties, there's at least thirteen full fuel cans, and it'll take all of them to get back to Santa Cruz." He glanced at the others. "I don't know who the hell's gonna want to wait behind, though."

Cameron was watching a hawk hover above a knotted patch of shrubs just beyond the watchtower. It folded its wings, accelerating toward the ground. It dipped and then rose, and Cameron made out the silhouette of a rat struggling in its talons as it flew toward the sun. "We're the only thing that'll hold them on the island," Cameron said.

Szabla looked at her, head cocked. "Excuse me?"

"The creatures. You heard what Donald said-we're the only 'sizable and appropriate food source.' If those larvae metamorphose into adults, they're gonna be hungry. If there's no food here, they could very well fly elsewhere in search of it." Her face hardened. "I don't want that virus leaving the island."

"You want to stay here?" Justin asked. "As bait?"

"Yes," Cameron said. "I do."

"It's not likely that the adults can fly," Rex said. "Even though they have wings."