Chameleon

by E. R. Torre

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Touch him,” the Prospector insisted. “Just touch him.”

  The Sheriff took another step back. He shook his head before facing the rock and metal sculpture. Behind him, the Prospector remained perfectly still. He said nothing more, for he had said all he needed to say.

  The Sheriff let out a deep breath. During the Great War, he faced so many horrors, from mustard gas to tanks to bullets and bombs hurled down from the skies. The Prospector was right: There wasn’t anyone within hundreds of miles who knew the military might of the world powers like he did.

  But why did that matter? Why bring him to this statue?

  Despite his anger, despite the certainty the old man was crazy, the Sheriff could not deny a growing sense of curiosity. The Prospector showed incredible ingenuity getting him here. Why go to such trouble? What could possibly be so damn urgent about seeing –about touching– this thing before him? As much as he hated to admit it, the Sheriff was interested in it. Whatever the hell it was.

  You’re here, a voice deep in his mind told him. What harm is there in doing what the old bastard wants? Why not just touch the damn thing and get it over with?

  The Sheriff fought the urge and tried to think of a reason to not do what the old man asked. Yet as eager as he was to get back to town and his family, he knew he’d do so only after doing what the old man asked of him.

  You’re here.

  As if he were in a dream, the Sheriff finally relented. He approached the statue until he stood directly before it. He gazed at it for a few seconds, appraising it. The light of the Moon revealed the statue’s featureless face. Blank eyes stared up and away at the stars. The figure’s mouth was open, as if in mid-scream. The statue’s face reminded the Sheriff of the old and weathered Roman and Greek statues he saw in museums. On the figure’s lower left arm was exposed a very large patch of metal. It seemed like the rock sediment of the statue was hardened skin, the metal bone. Below, rock formations surrounded and encased the figures’ legs. Though the Sheriff didn’t know much about geology, he knew enough about the formation of this rock to estimate this particular object had been here for many, many thousands of years.

  His eyes came up and again settled on that very large patch of metal. The Sheriff was transfixed by this sight. The metal glowed in the Moon’s light.

  So shiny. So very shiny.

  The Sheriff swallowed and shook his head. Whatever logic he possessed managed one last, pointless protest. This whole thing was crazy. Why wasn’t he on his way home, to see his family? To see his daughter? To make sure she was indeed safe?

  What was he still doing here?

  That protest was duly noted and allowed to drift away.

  The Sheriff reached out and, with only a slight hesitancy, touched the exposed metal.

  At first, he felt nothing. He let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Still nothing. The Sheriff felt foolish. After a couple of seconds passed, he felt like he was going to laugh. What exactly did he expect? He was dealing with a person that should be locked up and—

  The Sheriff felt heat at the tips of his fingers. He looked down at the statue’s exposed metal and, in his eyes, it appeared to…glow. But it couldn’t. It was just metal. How could it…?

  Fear gripped the Sheriff.

  What have I done?

  His eyes moved from the metal to the statue’s eyes. They were still wide open, looking up at the night sky. And then, very, very slightly…they moved. They moved until the statue was looking directly at him.

  The fear turned to panic. The Sheriff wanted to pull back, to run with all his might. The heat at his fingertips became red hot. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t. He felt a jolt of pain. It emanated from his fingertips and radiated through his hand, then his arm, then his body. His entire body felt like it was on fire and he tried to scream, to move, but he couldn’t. He stared at the statue and the statue’s eyes looked deep into his…

  …and, as the Prospector promised, all was revealed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  EIGHTY YEARS LATER

  If one happened to be out in that damp forest carrying a flashlight on this particular night and shined it in the right place and at the right time, the small, soiled animal making its way through the low lying brush could easily be identified –further assuming you also happened to be a zoologist– as a rattus norvegicus. To the more ordinary observer, the animal before you was the all too common brown rat. Even with that information, it would take a near supernatural awareness and perception for anyone to realize this particular rat’s final moments of life would, in turn, lead to the deaths of so many others.

  She moved along slowly as her body was far heavier than usual. She was pregnant, fifteen days into a typical twenty one to twenty three day gestation. She was also very, very hungry. The rat darted forward. At times, she stopped to sniff the air and turned her head from side to side. This allowed her highly sensitive ears to listen to everything going on around her. Course corrections were made and the rat picked her path. She continued working her way through the thick forest brush.

  Hunger was a near constant the past few days and her erratic movements reflected a growing irritability. At one point, she let out a low level hiss. Perhaps it was a warning directed to other creatures she sensed lying unseen around her. Then again, it might well have been an almost human curse directed at her current fate.

  She hurried along and looked and listened and sniffed, until she came to a full stop. Her ears and nose twitched almost in unison, and her head turned slowly to her right. She remained in place a full ten seconds, a lifetime given her current pace, and absorbed the sensory data while ignoring the now extreme hunger gripping her body. She blinked, as if making a decision and, after a few more seconds of deliberation, moved on to the right, until she came to a stop before the smooth metal wall.

  She sniffed at the wall and clawed at it with her paws. She found a hold for her nails and pulled herself up and into a standing position. With a very ungraceful leap, she was over the wall and on a flat plain. She sniffed some more, moving forward until a draft of cool air brushed past her whiskers. It came from somewhere below, and with it came the delightful smell of food. The rat leaned down, attempting to press her body closer to the source of that smell, but she was stopped by a thin and unmovable barricade.

  Though she couldn’t know it, between her and the distant food was a wire mesh. She sniffed some more, taking in the odor coming from below. She released an excited, and frustrated, squeak. Her goal was so very close, yet this thing before her impeded all progress.

  The rat pushed her nose into the edge of the mesh. She pushed and pushed until, finally, a piece of it gave way, though not enough to allow her entire body entry. The rat pulled back. She sniffed the edge of the mesh and moved along, poking and prodding until, finally, she found a loose corner. With a little more prodding, she worked her way in.

  The joy of entry to the place that promised food was followed immediately with horror. She fell far faster than her mind could process. And then, just as abruptly, she landed with a jarring thud.

  The rat squealed in pain as thick drops of blood rolled out of her mouth. There was serious damage to her body, she knew, yet she fought through it and, after a few seconds, staggered to her feet. The triumph was temporary. She could not remain standing and lay back down. She panted hard and her eyes closed.

  Her body became very still.

  When she awoke, the pain was even worse and dry blood coated her mouth. She cautiously rose and found her legs were not broken. Much of the pain she felt came from her stomach. She could no longer feel the movement of her offspring within.

  The rat took a couple of steps and realized the world around her was radically changed from her forest walk. There were no leaves swaying and the ground was no longer sandy and damp. She was in an immense, cool, and very slippery metal tube. It angled downward, and she had to fight both the slippery f
loor and the pull of gravity. She did not want to fall again.

  Though the searing pain urged her to remain in place, the hunger –and the lingering smell of food– motivated her to keep going. The smell rushed past her on the breeze and up and back to the forest where she came from. Cautiously she moved on, driven even more desperate by the promise of a meal. She moved on until she ran into another wire mesh.

  This one, she found, was even more solid than the last and far too strong to push through. She circled around, hoping to find some weak point, driven nearly mad by the smell and the pain.

  Perhaps it was at that point that she knew she was going to die.

  The realization made her even more desperate. If she was to die, she would do so with a full belly. She retraced her steps, re-examining the edge of this new barricade. She discovered a small cavity and pressed her head into it. Within, she felt a series of long, flexible rods.

  Wires.

  They were not edible but, perhaps, she could chew through them and somehow squeeze by. She set about doing just that, her work fevered and aggressive. Sharp teeth made progress against the wires, and soon enough one of them was chewed all the way through. The rat pushed past it, ignoring the fact that the cut wire brushed up against her small body.

  She chewed on a second wire. This one proved even easier to work through. As she chewed, her excitement grew. She would find the food that had brought her here, to this place of pain. She would fill her belly. Her last moments would be happy ones.

  She made it only halfway through that second wire before being hit with two hundred and twenty volts of electricity. The rat’s body convulsed only once. Her death was instantaneous.

  Around her, all was quiet. All was dark. For the moment.

  Then, from somewhere far, far below, came a low, throbbing alarm.

  From deep down below appeared a flood of lights. The sounds of footsteps –many footsteps– were heard. Some walked, most ran. Their actions were frantic, as frantic as the rat’s. Had the rat lived, she would have surely heard the shouts.

  After five minutes and twenty seconds, all was silent once again.

  But the damage was done.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Agnes Livingstone was a week shy of her sixtieth birthday and, as was her annual mid-October custom, put in for her two week vacation. She eagerly looked forward to it, especially this year. She worked as a systems analyst for the better part of thirty years and was a widow of a little more than a year and a half. After her husband unexpectedly passed, she fell into a depression so deep that her friends and co-workers worried whether her melancholia would affect her life and work.

  Nearly a year to the day of her husband’s death, Agnes met a fellow widower while out in the food market. His name was Charlie and he had a twinkle in his eyes and a roguish charm Agnes found impossible to resist. Soon, they were inseparable and Agnes’ melancholia lifted. Much as she still missed her late husband, Agnes made the surprising realization that she had successfully moved on, and her life was once again full of promise.

  She eagerly eyed the clock mounted at the end of the oversized office, where all her fellow systems analysts worked in their individual cubicles. There was one hour left in her shift and one hour before she was on vacation. Charlie and she would be off to Rotterdam. At this time tomorrow, the glowing widow thought, she’d be with her new sweetie on a cruise ship taking a round trip along the beautiful Scandinavian coast.

  So eager was she for her shift to end that she hurried through the latest satellite images, skipping past them as if they were a bothersome friend’s bad family pictures.

  In part her rush was also because the images were virtually identical to those she processed the day before and the day before that. They covered the same general terrain and it was her job to notice any irregularities from previous days.

  As she worked, her mind wandered back to thoughts of Charlie and her vacation. She clicked the computer’s mouse and the next satellite image appeared, but her eyes had drifted from the all too familiar image and to the windows on the north side of the room. There, she saw the buildings along Whitechapel High Street and, without meaning to, she let out an audible sigh. Her sigh was immediately followed by a sharp grunt, this one coming from somewhere behind her. Surprised, Agnes spun in her chair and found Corporal Thomas Hedley, her boss, standing beside the entrance to her cubicle. His arms were folded across his chest.

  “You scared me,” she said.

  Corporal Hedley shook his head. He surveyed the room and noted several of his staff looking his way.

  “Get back to work,” Hedley told them.

  Like scared gophers, the curious staffs’ heads disappeared into their respective cubicles. When the Corporal was satisfied the others were minding their own business, he entered Agnes’ space and leaned in close to the widow. He too eyed the Whitechapel High street.

  “I know the hour is late,” Hedley whispered. “But could we trouble you to finish your work before your vacation starts?”

  Agnes gave her boss a warm smile. Despite his gruff demeanor, Hedley, more than any of the others in this office, showed the most concern for Agnes during her tough times. He, more than any of the others, lent her a hand and offered her a shoulder to cry upon.

  He can be a bear, Agnes thought, but there’s no denying underneath it all is a very caring man.

  “Yes sir,” Agnes said.

  “He won’t leave without you,” Headley added before retreating from the cubicle.

  “I know,” Agnes whispered.

  She shook her head and again focused on the computer monitor. She clicked through the next series of images, finishing the daytime satellite photos and shifting to the nighttime thermals. One followed the other and nothing appeared out of place.

  Agnes let out a yawn.

  She tried hard not to look at the clock or out the window.

  Be professional, she admonished herself. Even if you only have a short time before—

  The thought died quickly.

  The thermal image before her looked much like all the images she just examined but something stood out. The thermal was almost entirely dark. The darkness was punctuated by a very small rectangular group of lights. The lights were square blobs, man-made but amorphous in shape. None of those six lights captured Agnes’ attention. No, it was the seventh light south of the others that intrigued her. That light was very faint. Had it not been for Agnes’ familiarity with previous nights’ thermals taken at the time, this oddity might well have escaped even her attention.

  She clicked her mouse button a few times and another display appeared on the monitor. It was another thermal image, this one taken two nights before. She moved that image to the left of the screen until it was side by side with the previous night’s image. She compared the two, checking to see if this ghostly seventh light was an artifact.

  “Are you for real?” she muttered after a while.

  She clicked the mouse button a few more times, getting a close up of a small section of the faint light in the otherwise absolute black. She sharpened the image and boosted the contrast. She tired other enhancements to make out a shape. She turned the image around, spinning it clockwise and counterclockwise.

  She was so engrossed with the thermal image that she didn’t notice her fellow workers pack their gear and begin leaving. The day shift was over, but Agnes continued, her mind focused entirely on this small, mysterious blob of light. After a while, all the cubicles were empty and Agnes was the only one left in the large office.

  “Agnes?”

  Agnes spun in her chair. Corporal Hedley again stood beside her cubicle. He pointed at his watch.

  “I thought you were eager to start your vacation?” he said and smiled. “You aren’t planning to apply for overtime, are you?”

  Agnes let out a laugh.

  “I didn’t think we had the budget.”

  “We don’t,” Hedley replied. “So what say you get out of here and go enjoy yoursel
f?”

  “I will sir,” Agnes said. But she didn’t move from her desk. Instead, she faced her monitor.

  Hedley frowned. He approached Agnes and looked over her shoulder.

  “What has you so entranced, my dear?”

  “I’m not sure,” Agnes replied. “It’s something…At first I thought it might be a glitch, some kind of camera glare. I’m still not sure…”

  Hedley looked at the image.

  “Rectangular electronic light source.”

  “Yes. But faint. Too faint.”

  Agnes pulled back on the image and compared the faint lights with the other six regular lights she saw in each of the nocturnal pictures.

  “Maybe they had a party and put up some low watt lights?”

  “No,” Agnes said. “It’s too faint, even for that. It’s almost like…” She let out a chuckle. “It’s almost like these lights are coming from underground.”

  Thought she didn’t notice it, Hedley stiffened. His eyes were suddenly razor sharp and took in every single detail of the image on Agnes’ screen.

  “I must be losing my mind,” Agnes said after a while.

  Hedley’s stare didn’t deviate.

  “I think you were right the first time.”

  “About?”

  “I think it’s a glitch,” Hedley said. “Probably a software problem.”

  “You think?” Agnes said.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Hedley said. He reached over Agnes’ shoulder and switched her monitor off. “When the tech boys come in, I’ll have them run some diagnostics. By the time you’re back, everything will be fine.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t want me to double check?”

  Hedley shook his head.

  “Agnes, my dear, what I want you to do is enjoy your vacation.”

  “But sir—”

  “That’s an order.”

  Agnes nodded.

  “Wouldn’t want to keep Charlie waiting,” she said and giggled.

  “Indeed.”