Pinching the lobster leg with a pair of tongs, Aaron held it steady underneath the microscope as he guided a tiny pair of wire tweezers toward a miniscule purple growth. It resembled the large one they had extracted several hours ago from the severed leg, which he had salvaged from the acid-washed lobster trap earlier that day.
He had the tweezers pinched firmly around the growth when his phone vibrated inside his pocket. The tweezers stabbed into the lobster leg and sprang away like a vaulting pole. Aaron whirled around. As he adjusted to seeing things in normal size, he realized that he could spend hours searching for the set of wire tweezers in the cluttered Atlantic Marine Research Institute lab. Luckily, this late at night, the other students and scientists had left unoccupied the rows of workstations, with all their gas tubes and priceless equipment. No one would notice that he had lost another tool.
Scanning the lab until he felt certain Professor Swartzman hadn’t returned from his coffee run, Aaron answered his phone. Big whoops.
“It’s a quarter after three in the morning. Why the hell aren’t you home?” Aaron’s father grumbled.
The 23-year-old slept in the same room in his parents’ Beachside home that he’d called his digs since he was two. His father treated him as if he still wore Mickey Mouse PJs.
“Chill, dad. I’m in the lab down at the AMRI.”
“Right, and you’re not in Orlando getting wasted. Don’t you know this is a work night? I have to get my ass up at 6:30 in the morning.”
The old man had pleaded with Aaron so many times about dropping this “birds, beetles and bullshit” science and becoming an aerospace engineer like him. He didn’t see value in science unless it involved selling outrageously inefficient and costly equipment to the government.
“Does it sound like I’m in Orlando?” He held the phone up and swept it through the quiet lab. “It sounds like a crappy party, right? No thumping music and everyone’s asleep.”
“And you’re not hopped up on something that makes your pulse race so fast that you can’t sleep? Come on, I pay all your expenses out of my damn pocket. The least you can do is put all your effort into getting your degree so you can, I don’t know, save Willie the Whale or some crap.”
Squeezing the phone, Aaron felt like smashing it against the floor as if it were a surfboard nose-diving into the rocks.
“As much as I love animals, I’m not just saving them here,” Aaron said. “There’s some serious shit going on. Like, you don’t know. The professor and I are working overtime to make sure the lagoon is safe. All you’re doing is interrupting me.”
“Right, I’m interrupting you. I’m the one who needs to wake up in three hours.”
“Then go to sleep! Stop worrying about me. I’m a grown man.”
He heard a long silence on the other end of the line. “Goodnight, Aaron.” Click.
Fanning off his sweltering forehead, Aaron felt as if he has surfed across a 400 mile-wide hurricane. He shuffled to the lab refrigerator, the one that said, “Lab Material Only” on it. Aaron yanked it open and let the cool air blow over his face before reaching inside between all the sealed Petri dishes and grabbing his half-finished soda. He chugged it down.
Aaron heard footsteps and kicked the refrigerator door closed.
With a steaming cup of black coffee in hand, Professor Swartzman spied him with a raised eyebrow.
“Where’d you get that soda?” he asked. “I didn’t see you in the break room.”
“Uh…” Aaron fingered the bottle cap between his slippery fingers. “I couldn’t finish it, so I left it in my bag. I hate warm soda, but I’m so freaking thirsty.”
He tossed the bottle in the trash before his professor could mention the cold condensation on the plastic.
“Right. Anyway, did you remove the last tumor from the lobster leg?” Swartzman asked.
“I’m working on it. He’s a tricky little guy.”
“Get to it. I need to make sure we have a match.”
Aaron turned toward the lobster leg, and then doubled around with his head cocked on its side and his eyebrow raised. “A match with what?”
“The first purple tumor we pulled off.” The professor held up his touch screen phone. “The computer e-mailed the test results to me. I know it’s never wrong, but I should run the test again just to be sure. It’s just… weird.”
Aaron hadn’t heard the seasoned scientist bandy that word around much. Things were either common or rare. “Weird” carried no empirical weight-like a word Aaron might use.
“It belongs to a family of bacteria-one that isn’t found in the Indian River Lagoon,” Swartzman said. “It’s part of the genus thiobacillus, but the computer couldn’t recognize the exact species.”
“A theo-baci-what-us? You haven’t taught us about those.”
“If we were studying pollutants from metal mines, we’d learn about this bacteria in week one, but not when the subject is a saltwater estuary. Thiobacillus thrives in acidic environments that are rich in sulfur and iron. It oxidizes those compounds and produces sulfuric acid. It lives in conditions few organisms could tolerate-an extremeophile.”
“Sulfuric acid? The lobster trap and the shell I found were partially dissolved. The murder victims-they were burned by acid too, weren’t they?”
“That’s what it looked like on the photos the medical examiner sent me,” Swartzman said. “I’ll have a closer look when I examine the body tomorrow. You should definitely come. The examiner said he found a few tiny purple pimples on the corpses.”
Despite the disgusting deed at hand, Aaron was stoked. Until then, the professor hadn’t invited Aaron on a task with him without first calling every other number stored on his cell phone. This meant more than taking water or algae samples-this was murder. Or, at the very least, heinous new bacteria that chows down on corpses.
Swartzman told him about how the bodies were found with thinned out, iron-depleted blood. A thiobacillus infection could have sucked the iron right out of the blood and caused those internal acid burns, the professor surmised. The big hole in that theory, he acknowledged, was that thiobacillus doesn’t infect people or marine mammals. It’s not invasive bacteria-not until now, perhaps. This thiobacillus must have mutated, since the computer didn’t recognize the exact species, the professor said.
“There’s not enough sulfur or iron in the lagoon for these bacteria to thrive,” Swartzman said.
“That’s why it’s latched onto hosts-survival instinct,” Aaron said with a snarl. He imagined the microscopic organisms as mini tigers hunting for giant prey and pouncing inside their bloodstreams. “We should track down that sea turtle with all the tumors. That’s the only living infection we’ve seen.”
“Assuming he is infected, catching him won’t be easy.” Swartzman switched his phone to GPS tracking mode. He showed Aaron the timeline of its movements. In just two days, the sea turtle had coasted up to the Volusia County line, down to Sebastian and up again. That’s hundreds of miles. The professor shot Aaron a suspicious look.
“Dude, I didn’t give it a speed ball. I swear!” Aaron said.
“I know. I know.” Swartzman chuckled. “But someone helped this turtle travel in spurts as fast as 40 miles per hour.”
“So unless someone stuck a propeller up its green ass…”
“Somebody gave it a lift. But they didn’t remove it from the lagoon.”
Aaron scratched his head. “Well, if it wasn’t one of our researchers and it wasn’t someone with the state, who else does that leave? Know anybody who’s obsessed with the lagoon?” His professor responded to the obvious hint with a blank look. “Hello? It leaves the Lagoon Watcher.”
“No, no, no.” Swartzman waved his hand dismissively and turned his back on his student. He started toweling off a workstation-a task he usually left for the undergrads. “Harry would have told me if he picked up the turtle with the purple tumor.”
“Oh yeah? Judging by how he didn’t blink when we showed him the freak show, I’m guessing he’s seen plenty of them before. And he didn’t tell you squat, did he?”
Swartzman froze in the middle of his menial labor. He stared at the filthy paper towel in his hand with the chemical residue dripping from it. He chucked it into the sink as if he just realized he had been cradling a snake. The last time Aaron had seen his professor so discombobulated was when the Lagoon Watcher had brought up something that happened between him and NASA.
“Hey doc, I know the Watcher’s your bro and all…”
“He’s an independent researcher-that’s all,” Swartzman said as he scooped up his bag and flung it over his shoulder. “I’ll talk to him about this, but don’t forget that many other scientists have an interest in the lagoon and they don’t all report to me.”
“Right. I’m not saying that…”
“Exactly, you’re not saying anything,” Swartzman snapped.
Aaron bowed his head in silence. He had totally squandered that good vibe. Wipeout.
“Get some sleep,” the professor said. “Tomorrow will be a rough day-and not just for us.”