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
