by Alex Scarrow
Dead within two.
“The gun or jump? Or you can join us. That’s what you’re thinking about, right, MonkeyNuts?”
A figure emerged from the gloom behind Freya. Like her, it was in the rapidly accelerated process of completing itself. From both arms, from the stomach, the neck, throbbing umbilical tubes of gristly flesh dangled like gas station fuel hoses. The figure was a nightmarish form, but there was enough of its face for Leon to see it was Dad.
“You’ve done so well, Son. You managed to outlast everyone.”
Freya nodded. “He’s right. We’ve looked far and wide. Every corner of the planet. We really can’t find anyone else left. It really looks like it’s just you.”
“You’re the last man left on Earth,” his father said. “It’s one hell of an achievement, but it’s time to come home, Son.”
Leon backed away from the sight of both figures, out through the open door into the half-hearted daylight.
“Leon, please? Don’t do it,” pleaded Freya.
Both figures took hesitant steps forward.
He was outside now. Out in the unprotected cold. He took one more step backward and felt the small of his back bump up against the handrail. He felt the soft breeze chasing around the base of the lighthouse, chilling his hands and face.
In the daylight now, they stood framed in the doorway, dragging the pumping cords of fluid after them. In the full daylight, he could see through their membranous skin, see a faint webbing of bluish arteries, the pulsating of organic machinery simulating the tasks of human organs. He could see the pull and bulge of cord-like sinews, the gristle and gnarled ends of resinous bones.
It was horror made real.
“Leon, I nearly took my own life. Don’t make that mistake.”
His father and Freya, flayed of most of their skin and shambling like zombies.
“Leon,” implored Freya. “Please…I’ve missed you so much!”
He shook his head. “You…you’re not Freya. You’re not Dad!”
“Leon,” said Dad. “This isn’t how we are—how we look. This is not who we are anyway. On the inside, we’re complete. We’re just as you remember us. And everyone you ever knew is in there.”
“Not Mom though.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly, sadly. “Not Mom, I’m afraid.”
“What about Grace?”
“I’m here.”
The voice came from his left. He turned and saw her. Grace. Standing right there on the walkway, wrapped in a threadbare parka she must have scavenged from the basement. She was just as he remembered her before the fire, completely unscarred. Precocious and pretty. Small. Intense. The hood was pulled up around her face, her skinny, bare, and pale legs and feet poking comically out at the bottom.
“Oh my God,” he whimpered.
“It’s me, you big dork.” She smiled at him. “Please…” She held out a fully formed hand, her skin as pale and as unblemished as it had always been. “Please,” she said again, “believe it’s me.”
Leon could feel warmth trickling down both of his cheeks. Tears, he realized, as they quickly cooled and soaked into the scant few whiskers of an unconvincing beard.
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “Asking everyone, sending the word all around. Finally…we found you alone out here. Just in time.”
Alone. Yes.
He’d counted every day, every minute of his solitude. “What…what’s going to h-happen to…to me?”
“We want to take you home, Leo. We want to take you home where you belong.”
The gun. Or join. Decision time.
“You know, They told me something,” said Grace.
“They?”
“The virus. Deep down in their DNA is their history. It’s incredibly ancient, Leon. They’ve been around almost forever. And guess what.” She edged a fraction closer to him.
“W-what?”
“They think they might’ve been here before.”
He was getting very cold now. He wondered how Grace could bear to be standing there with the skin of her legs exposed to the freezing wind.
“B-been here?”
“Uh-huh. Something like this may have happened here before.”
He looked at Freya and Dad. With every passing second, they were becoming more and more humanlike. Freya’s extended hand looked complete, looked like the hand he’d held a long time ago. Held and squeezed. She had lips on her face, lips that he’d kissed once.
And only the once.
“We were like this”—Freya gestured back into the gloom behind her—“once before. Joining us now, coming down to live in the inner universe, it’s not an end to things, Leon. Trust me! It’s not death. It’s a transition. That’s all it is!”
Dad nodded. “It’s like heaven, Son.”
“It’s a return,” said Grace. Her hand closed the gap between them, one finger resting gently on the back of his. “Come on. Let’s go home, Bro.”
Leon closed his eyes, letting the ice-cold world fade away.
The voices were still, waiting for him to make the call. And in the calm silence inside his head…
He took in a deep breath and chose…
Afterword
From the speech of Dr. Edward Chan in the Astrobiology Science Conference, San Diego:
It’s known as the Fermi paradox—the assembling of a bunch of reasonable assumptions about the almost infinite number of stars and exoplanets out there in the universe and coming to the conclusion that we should be being bombarded with extraterrestrial ‘howdy’ messages.
There are only three conceivable explanations for why we aren’t. First, life on Earth was a unique one-off, a one-in-a-trillion chance encounter of variables. Second, that the assumptions we made are off by a significant factor. Or, third, there’s something else at work, some ‘filtering’ event that’s vacuuming up life wherever it finds it.
I’m inclined to believe life here was not unique. I’m also inclined to believe that we’ve got our science about right when it comes to considering the permissible boundaries within which life can develop. Therefore, I have to consider the third possibility.
It’s not beyond the bounds of probability that in the universe’s fourteen-billion-year history, some distant civilization, vastly more advanced than ours, came to the same conclusion that we’re encountering now—that space is simply far too big a thing to travel across, that the laws of physics and quantum physics uniformly say a clear and resounding no to interstellar travel.
What would an advanced civilization do when faced with such a damning conclusion? Give up? Accept their fate to remain alone forever? I could imagine they might create some kind of device designed to travel, endlessly reproduce, and spread the memory that they once existed. A viral device maybe. Something that might eventually evolve in its own right, rewrite its core programming. Become something more than how it had been when it started out. Perhaps, if RNA truly is a universal constant for life, it might even, one day, bring us the genes of creatures far and wide, and, in turn, gift our DNA to civilizations who would never otherwise have had a chance to meet us.
Acknowledgments
Writing this series required more than just a sick mind and a laptop. Behind my name on the cover exists a team whom I shall name and thank now.
Thank you, Debbie Scarrow, for countless rereads and feedback (sometimes necessarily blunt!). Thank you, Venetia Gosling and Lucy Pearse at Macmillan Children’s Books, for being my editors; your work has taken this series upward several notches in quality. Thanks to Rachel Vale and James Annal, for fantastic covers and design. And thank you, Veronica Lyons, Samantha Stewart, and Nick de Somogyi, for being the final line of defense and sparing my blushes!
About the Author
Alex Scarrow used to be a rock guitarist. After ten years in variou
s unsuccessful bands he ended up working in the computer games industry as a lead games designer. He now has his own games development company, Grrr Games. He is the author of the bestselling and award-winning TimeRiders series, which has been sold into over thirty foreign territories. Plague Land: No Escape is the third and final book in the explosive Plague Land trilogy with Sourcebooks Fire.
Visit his website at alexscarrow.com.
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