Fragment

Balboa Bilbo

“That’s our girl!” Jesse shouted, banging his hand on the stern.

They circled the boat and saw the upper deck, which was tilted toward them at a thirty-degree angle. The boat had been de-masted and her rig wrenched overboard. She had obviously been at sea a long time before coming aground.

“OK, let’s check it out,” Glyn said, doing a little impromptu narrating and looking at Zero, who waved him off.

Jesse climbed onto the deck.

Glyn climbed aboard behind Jesse, and Zero followed.

Jesse crawled into the cabin. The glass was missing from its hatches and windows. Much of the cabin’s interior seemed to have been stripped: cabinet doors were gone, hinges and all; the glass from the windows seemed to have been pried out. Jesse spotted the beacon in the pilot’s seat and picked it up.

“Yep, here’s the EPIRB all right. It’s still in the ‘on’ position.”

He aimed the antenna of the cylindrical yellow device at Glyn like a gun, laughing.

“What does that mean?” Glyn said, looking at the camera. Zero quickly cut him out of the shot.

Jesse looked around the wreckage-strewn cabin. “Well, something had to turn this EPIRB on, Professor.”

Copepod barked frantically in the distance.

“Maybe a bird flew through the window and pecked on it or something.” Glyn pointed out the window. “The glass is missing, see?”

Jesse looked right at the camera and shook his head. “It’d take three birds working as a team to turn on an EPIRB, dude.” He made the cuckoo sign against his head.

“Oh.” Glyn nodded. “Right!”

Nell stood on the rocks above the prone body of the sailboat.

Holding the bill of her baseball cap, she searched the base of the cliff. A purple patch of vegetation caught her eye some distance to the left of the crevasse. Everything else around her seemed to disappear as she focused on the vividly colored growth.

“Hey, where’s Copepod?” Dawn shouted.

The cameramen panned. The frantic barking had stopped abruptly. The bull terrier was nowhere to be seen.

Nell jumped across the rocks until she reached the coarse reddish sand of the beach. She jogged up toward the cliff. The afternoon sun lit up the wall of rock and the bright purple plants at its base. Nell saw flecks of gold in the sand. Fool’s gold, she thought-there must be a lot of iron sulfide in the cliffs.

She was relieved that no cameraman had followed her. The commotion of the landing party receded behind her as adrenaline quickened her steps.

Nell dug her knees into the sand before the patch of purple spears at the base of the cliff, catching her breath.

The stalks looked like a jade plant’s, she thought, except the straight shafts had no branches like jade plants, and the color was a vivid lavender. She noticed that the core of each stalk was purplish-blue, while its artichoke-like leaves were tinged green at their fuzzy points. They resembled fat asparagus spears, but she couldn’t identify the family they belonged to-let alone their genus or species, as there was no recognizable growth pattern.

She tried to calm her heartbeat as she rifled through the botanical taxonomy in her mind, telling herself that she must be overexcited and overlooking something obvious.

She reached out to the largest of the specimens and pulled a spiked leaf from the plant. It ripped like old felt and melted into juice that stung her fingertips.

She flicked her fingers, startled, and wiped away the blue juice on her white shirt. Opening her Evian bottle she splashed water over her left hand and shirt.

To her astonishment, the plant reacted like an air fern to her touch, folding all its leaflike appendages against its stalk. Then it retracted underground, an action that required internal muscles- mechanisms that plants did not have.

Surprised, she was about to call the others when she saw what looked like a trail of white ants moving along the base of the cliff.

She leaned forward and watched the large, evenly spaced creatures hurl down a groove in the sand, toward a crab carcass. They moved faster than any bug she had ever seen.