by Kris Ashton
“They’ve been hitting earth since the turn of the century. We’ve tried detecting them and we’ve tried looking for a pattern in their arrival, but they’re too small for radar or satellites to pick up and they just seem to come at random. So far we’ve been lucky here in the States—one hit a small island off the coast of Maine in 1966 and then in ’68 one dropped into a Mississippi backwater. Not everyone’s been so lucky. You ever read about that meteor that hit Siberia back in 1908?”
Bert expelled a little puff of air. It formed the word “vaguely”.
“Well, the meteor itself did next to no damage at all on impact—burnt some grass, that’s all. The Russians themselves destroyed the area.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I’ll get to that in the fullness of time, my friend, but you need to understand a bit better what we’re dealing with first. God, I could use a drink. How about you?”
Bert nodded. Snuggled into the front corner of the van’s cargo area was a cooler box. Richard opened it and took out two cans of soda, tossing one to Bert. Richard took two small swallows of his.
“Ah, that’s better. Now the spores. We’ve only had the opportunity to study one—they’re just too damned dangerous to have around. They’re essentially part of a larger reproductive cycle. No one knows where they originally came from, but given the laws of physics, we think they must have been one of the earliest forms of life ever seen in the universe—we’re talking billions of years old. If our scientists’ theories are right, the first group of spores were blasted out of their home planet and drifted through space until, by pure chance, they found a suitable planet. Given the vast distances involved, we must also be talking billions of spores.”
“Who fires the spores?” Bert asked.
“We’ll get to that as well. Now, there must be some constants—or things that are close to constant—among the higher beings throughout the universe, because these spores have evolved to target them. First of all, we’re fascinated by new, shiny things and we can’t help but be curious and investigate. The second is the directive to propagate the species.
“So, when these spores fall to ground there’s a good chance they’ll attract the attention of the dominant species on that planet. When the poor, unfortunate creature picks up the bright, shiny spore it ‘stings’ him. We never quite worked out how, but the spore seems to inject some sort of substance that creates a mutation in DNA. Once the victim—”
“Wait, wait,” Bert said, his head reeling. “What stops it injecting something else? What if a dragonfly lands on it or a cow comes along and licks it?”
“The spores can apparently detect differences in DNA, chromosomal structure—the basic building blocks of life at any rate—and only when a specific set of criteria are met will the ‘injection’ be triggered.”
“Which I guess explains why children can handle the damned things unharmed?”
“Right. Either the spores want fully-grown, healthy hosts or the shifting levels of hormones and DNA instructions would prevent the mutation from taking place. Whatever it is, once a kid reaches puberty, he or she is susceptible.”
Bert thought of the children wandering the streets of Bald Eagle like some new master race, made immune by the very fact of their undeveloped bodies. “How the hell do you know all this, Richard?”
“The truth is, we don’t know it. Most of what I just told you is speculation borne of limited observations and gigantic leaps of logic. That’s part of the problem.”
Scratching his head, Bert said, “Well, go on, I guess.”
“Once the victim is infected, their DNA is changed and they start to mutate. It can take up to twenty-four hours, but it’s usually much faster. As soon as the mutation takes full effect, any sort of sexual contact will pass the infected DNA onto a new host. It’s really like a complex sort of virus, not so different from herpes or the clap, in its way.
“The females get about trying to mate”—Bert winced at this word—“with any uninfected males who will have them, and also start producing more of these spores or eggs for the inquisitive sucker to pick up.”
“What about the men?” Bert said.
Richard looked startled for the first time. “You mean you haven’t seen the nest?”
An oily dread seeped into Bert’s veins. “What nest?”
“Oh, lord. So you haven’t seen what the infected people become, either?”
“They become strange, I know that much. Acting like they’re stoned the whole time.”
“I’m not talking about how they act, Bert. I’m talking about a full physical transmogrification.”
“They look different, you mean?”
“Wait, I should keep this all in order or we’re going to get confused. The first person infected effectively becomes the ‘king’ or ‘queen’ of the race on the new planet. They keep their human form for a few days, infecting as many people as they can in whatever way they can. All the subsequent men that are infected are drawn to a nest site and start constructing underground tunnels. These tunnels are easy to spot from the air, because they have a kind of silver funnel at the entrance. We think this is where the spores are fired from—although we’ve never waited long enough to find out for sure.”
“So these infected men…what do they—”
Something hit the van with enough force to rattle its windows and rock it on its specially engineered suspension. A sound followed, one that confused Bert’s ears because they could find no frame of reference for comparison. It was, he thought in that instant, how a newborn child must feel as it took its first gulp of air. Several gunshots rang out and a muffled voice said, “Hold your fire, you idiots! The boss is in there!”
Richard leaped up and ripped open the van door. It clanged against its hinges as he jumped onto the road with Bert in close pursuit. Richard drew his weapon and put his back flat against the driver’s side door, peeking through the window.
That weird, ululating noise started up again, like someone dragging their hands across a lacquered table—only as it would be heard underwater. Yet even that did not go close to describing the sound. One might as well have tried to describe a color.
“What is it?” Bert said, tucked in behind Richard with his own gun drawn.
“One of them.”
Bert dropped into a crouch and with due care got on his hands and knees. He peered under the van, which sat high off the road. He saw one of Richard’s agents lying on his side, his sunglasses smashed and twisted and half his face torn off. His left arm had been wrenched up and back with such force that it now almost touched his right shoulder. Just in front of the unlucky agent, Bert saw what looked like two thick steel poles tilted at a gradual angle. But these poles were polished to an impossible sheen, almost liquid in their smoothness, and featured two cruel barbs that protruded like the spurs on old-time cowboy boots.
“Get your men clear, Richard,” Bert said.
Richard looked down. “Can you see it?”
“Just get them clear.”
“Fall back!” Richard yelled upwards so he could be heard clearly over the van. “All of you get clear of the road.”
Shoes—some sturdy army issue, some business, all polished—backed away towards the grassy banks. Bert lay flat on his side and brought his gun to bear on one of those strange steel poles. Although his target could not have been more than six or seven feet away, he closed one eye to perfect his aim. Before this moment he had fired on nothing but tin cans out the back of the station and effigies at the academy range in Denver. When he thought his hands were steady, he squeezed off a single round.
A hundred things seemed to happen in the gun’s split-second roar. A huge, bowing dent appeared in the pole and a wild, alien scream followed—Bert’s ears heard the scream but didn’t know what to do with it. From the right came a dull thud and a hiss, and then one back corner of the van started to sink towards the road. Bert had time to register that his ricocheting bullet must have punctured the
tire before the rest of the thing attached to that buckled pole fell over and hit the road with the clang of an iron girder and the thump of a potato sack.
The creature’s torso first caught Bert’s eye—a darker shade of liquid silver and ridged like the underside of a cockroach. From this protruded four wriggling spines that that appeared to serve no purpose. Above these were a pair of humanoid arms—or at least they were jointed in a humanoid fashion, but there the semblance ended. Where one might have expected skin or flesh there was none, only a skeleton of hinged silver bones. The slender fingers ended in hooks, like the talons of an oversized falcon. Its feet, which Bert could now see, were of a similar make to the hands, and the angled legs reminded him of a grasshopper’s in their powerful angled crouch.
Then his frantic eyes lighted on its face.
Insectoid orbs, the color of the sea under overcast skies, stared back at him, emotive yet insensate, seeing all yet acquiring nothing. While they were featureless—no whites, no pupil, no iris—their dark pools sent out murderous spears of hatred, unmitigated by mercy or remorse or scruples. They were the robotic eyes of unyielding purpose…and yet…did that face, taken overall, look familiar?
Prostrate and stilled with a fascinated horror, Bert identified that smooth face as Digger O’Malley’s. The imitation was crude, like a bust of Abraham Lincoln on a penny, but it was there.
“Christ,” Bert whispered.
The Digger-thing opened its mouth and ejected another brain-bending, ear-quivering cry. Bert found himself torn between natural human sympathy and utter xenophobic revulsion, one side of his brain wanting to empty every chamber of his gun into the beast, the other able to dissect Digger’s face from the depths of the monstrosity around it and feel sorrow.
Then the thing broke eye contact with Bert and commenced to thrash and writhe and try to get up on its one good leg. Before it could hope to find balance, Richard gave the order to fire and a swarm of bullets dented its sculpted torso, in seconds decimating its hideous beauty and leaving it like a chewed apple core. The air became hot and loud and smoky with dozens of spent rounds, but the onslaught did not stop until finally a bullet broke through the creature’s silver skin and a substance like cream cheese spewed out of the wound. With the armor’s integrity compromised, more and more holes started to appear and the creature’s off-white blood oozed out as if under pressure, coating the road like some unspeakable pus. A second later the smell reached Bert’s nose and told it unforgivable tales of decomposing flesh and mangrove swamps and rotten eggs and atrocities undreamed of in the human mind. Bert put the back of his wrist to his mouth as his gorge rose and trickled onto his tongue. Somehow he held off the reflex and then rolled away, not caring where he ended up, just so long as he could put distance between himself and the alien’s foul innards. When his regular senses returned he got to his hands and knees and half-crawled, half-scrambled off the road and faced the forest, sucking up its plentiful supply of unpolluted air. He holstered his gun and bent forward, putting his hands on his knees, trying to calm the tremors that had taken hold of his body.
After a while he felt a hand pat him on the shoulder. “The first time’s always the worst,” Richard said. “I guess now you know what you’re dealing with.”
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” Bert agreed. He spat into the grass, trying to expel the vomit taste from his tongue.
“Bert, it’s time for the hard truth. I didn’t want to tell you this until you properly understood the gravity of the situation, and you’ve just had a first-hand demonstration of it. This is…shit, I knew this job would be hard when I signed up for it, but I never imagined…”
Bert stood erect, unsettled by the shakiness in his friend’s voice. “You might as well just say it, Richard.”
Richard’s eyes found the highway’s vanishing point for a moment, and when they came back to Bert they were as heavy as thunderclouds gathered at the death of a sweltering afternoon.
“If you weren’t my friend, Bert, you would already be dead. The official stance from up high is that any infestation of these things is to be wiped out straight away. Any level of collateral damage acceptable.”
Bert tried to breathe but his lungs would not take any air. “By collateral damage, you mean civilian casualties.”
“I don’t make up the terminology, Bert, I just use it. Truth is, if there’s an investigation into this incident, I could wind up in jail for a long, long time. I might even die in there.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing. The government would sanction the slaughter of four thousand civilians?”
“You have to consider the alternative, my friend. The Chinese wiped out ten times that many innocent civilians to protect the other five-hundred-million of them. For the greater good, you understand?”
My friend. Those two words started an off-key ringing inside Bert’s head. “So what do they call this kind of mass murder for the greater good?”
“I don’t know what the Chinese call it. We call it an eradication.”
“What do you use? An atomic bomb?”
“No, that would attract too much attention, and besides, we need something that can get underground to kill these alien bastards in their nests. We’ve developed a special kind of cluster bomb that is delivered via an air strike. Each individual bomb is—”
“I don’t really want to know the specifics, Richard. How long do we have to evacuate the town?”
“There can’t be an evacuation.”
Bert played this sentence over in his head a few times, just to make sure he had not misheard or misconstrued it. “What do you mean there can’t be an evacuation?”
“It’s too hard to be sure who is okay and who isn’t,” Richard said. “If you study one of them long enough, you can usually pick it up, I’ll admit that. Before they shed the outer human shell, they’re a bit like a five-year-old wielding a hammer—they know how to do it, but they’re clumsy and obtuse in their actions. They seem to have access to all our memories and language, but it’s almost as if acting human makes them sick or something. But that’s irrelevant anyway—we don’t have time to run checks on every person walking out of this town. Those things will have spread to Denver by then.”
“Goddammit Richard, will you stop being a government asshole for one minute? I have a church full of kids in the center of town. Can’t they at least—”
“Bert, you need to use this,” Richard said, tapping himself on the temple. “For all we know, one of those kids might be infected, changing over as we speak. He or she just reached puberty the day before they touched a spore, so the transmutation takes longer to occur. The kid rides the bus out of town with everyone else and the next thing we know the infection is spreading unchecked.”
“That sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” Bert said.
Richard laughed, a bitter, cynical bleat. “My job is far-fetched, Bert. But it’s real and it has to be done. We don’t know enough about these things to just let people roll out of here.”
Bert took a few steps away, as if he intended to walk out of town, then turned around and put his hands on his hips, glaring at Richard. “So what the hell am I supposed to do? What was the point of holding back your precious air strike?”
Richard gave a self-conscious shrug. “You’re my best friend, Bert. I wanted to give you every chance to get out of this alive.”
“And how do you propose I do that?”
Another shrug. “Necessity is the father of invention. I’ll give you anything you need.”
“This is really cold, Richard.”
“I’m sorry you see it that way, but I don’t have a choice.”
“Surely you can give me something more to go on. Haven’t you had scientists studying these things?”
Richard shook his head. “As I said, too hard to control, too unpredictable. Most specimens have been destroyed on sight. You know as much as I do.”
“Thanks for nothing, Richard,” Bert said, stalking bac
k towards his town.
“Bert?”
He stopped, paused for a moment, looked back. “What?”
“You have twelve hours. If I put off the strike any longer, my superiors will start to get suspicious.”
Bert nodded and continued on.
PART TWO
1:13 p.m.
Sitting back with his feet propped on the dashboard, Derek felt like he was at the drive-in watching some sort of dull, drawn-out experimental film. The only things missing were popcorn, beer and a window speaker.
He and Hank had turned back only four cars before the government people descended on Bald Eagle’s eastern turnpike and started flashing badges and squawking orders at the military personnel. Hank’s and Derek’s roadblock had soon become obsolete as two army trucks formed a nose-to-nose V twenty feet closer to the i70. Dozens and dozens of soldiers spilled out the back of these trucks, and under the direction from the men in the suits and sunglasses, had fanned out into the forest. From the three or four soldiers Derek could see, they appeared to have formed a perimeter. One of the government agents—he supposedly worked for ADETI, and although Derek was au fait with most national agencies, had never heard of that one—had told them they could leave whenever they liked, but Derek had told him they would stay put until they got word from Sheriff Brolin. The agent had taken a half-interested look at Stan’s sleeping form in the back seat and then said, “Suit yourself. But if I give the order to move, you move. ADETI has assumed jurisdiction of this area.”
“Aye-aye, cap’n,” Derek had replied, capping off a salute.
Stan had watched the military’s comings and goings for a few minutes, his eyes trained on their guns, but when it became clear they were on guard duty and nothing more, he had stretched out on the cruiser’s back seat and slept.
“It’s my fault,” Hank said out of nowhere.
“What, this mess?” Derek asked.
“No, Denise,” Hank said. “The mess with Denise.”