Pandemonium Read Free

flies, and crabs. Generations of juveniles unloaded from the backs of the disk-shaped bugs and gnawed through the joints of the island’s native arthropods, consuming them from the inside, and recycling them into more of themselves, each one of them an assembly line.
    10:02 A.M.
    The zoologist’s bony hands clutched a jar on his chest. A breeze moaned in the jar’s mouth as a winged creature with three legs and wings took flight from the jar, drawn by the smell of land. A single green scale of what appeared to be lichen clung to one of its three legs.
    11:21 P.M.
    Out of every thousand juveniles clinging to the sides of the rolling bugs, one dropped off and extended legs on one side like mangrove roots. Then their disk-shaped bodies expanded into tiny cylinders as their upper legs morphed into fronds. Multicolored egg clusters formed like coconuts under the fronds. Within each color of egg, a different species of “tree” began to incubate.…

 
    FEBRUARY 21
    10:14 A.M.
    Clouds colored the sea gray like the shore except for a spill of vivid hues on the rocky coast of a tiny island Captain Tezuka was studying with his binoculars. His crab boat, the Kirishima, had been poaching the contested waters north of Japan when his crew drew his attention to the strange sight on the shore. It looked like a melted circus growing out of the island. He rubbed his eyes and smoothed back the white stubble on his shaved scalp, stumped.
    This fragment of the Khabomai Rocks was one of a hundred islets dotting a political limbo claimed by both Russia and Japan. With both countries’ navies asserting their authority over them, it was effectively a no-man’s-land, where a fortune in snow and king crab could be harvested for a gambler like Tezuka.
    “Captain, we shouldn’t stay here any longer,” his first mate implored.
    Captain Tezuka knew he was right, but in all his travels, he had never seen what he was looking at now. “Send three men in for a closer look, Hiro. Have them bring back some of that stuff,” he ordered. Tezuka had a gut feeling this might be a lot more valuable than crabs, to the right buyer. And he knew the right buyer. Telling the authorities was out of the question, of course. After all, it was illegal for him to be here in the first place. “Tell them to use your camera case!”
    Hiro sighed. In that camera case was his new video camera, which he was hoping to use to make a reality show pilot of their crab-fishing adventures and sell it to one of Japan’s television networks.
    “Empty the case and give it to them,” Tezuka ordered.
    Hiro sadly removed his camera and the foam forms inside, placing them inside an empty ice chest. Tezuka threw the empty aluminum case down to three men in the inflatable launch, who gunned the outboard engine and whipped a creamy curve across the sea toward the eruption on the shore of the island.
    When they hit the shore, one man dragged the launch above the surf onto the gray pebble beach as the other two men trotted toward the lurid garden growing on the rocky shelf above.
    At the base of the ledge, they found the remains of a large Zodiac, half-buried in seaweed. Oddly, no swarms of flies rose as they approached to inspect it. Inside the raft was a corpse wearing a bleached cargo vest, jeans, and shriveled Nikes. The mummy’s bearded face was frozen in a scream and its eye sockets followed them as they passed.
    The younger man took the aluminum camera case and lunged up footholds in the escarpment to the ledge. He reached out to a purple coral-like growth and broke off a branch, throwing it into the open case. Reaching down with his other hand, he scooped handfuls of some kind of flat-leafed square-edged moss into the open case, along with what looked like two hard brown dates and some skittering white bugs that suddenly appeared all around him, crawling over the rock.
    Transparent blue flower petals popped out on the branches of the coral tree next to his face, startling him.