Nearby bushes thrust their branches through pockets of fog like questing hands. He snapped off the longest he could reach. Two feet, and not nearly as long as he’d like. Weston cast a nervous glance behind him. In the golden pool cast by the Honda’s headlights, he could still make out the dark shadow of the thing lying there. Brandishing his twig like a weapon, he crept forward. The Honda was only a few feet behind him, he chided himself, closing the distance.
Up close it was bigger than he’d realized. The size of large, city raccoon, or a decent sized dog. The oily hide and indistinct head, made it seem malformed somehow, wrong.
It looked like something that belonged under water. Weston glanced at the shrouded roadway. There had to be water somewhere nearby to account for all that fog. But that wouldn’t explain the claws.
Well, whatever it was, it was dead. All he wanted was a glance at its face and he’d be back on his way to Guelph. It’d make a great drinking story if nothing else. Weston extended the stick, realizing for the first time just how big it was and exactly how close he stood to it. The tip of the twig closed the distance between them.
Massive ribs rose. The thing expelled a fetid breath. Weston leapt backward, the rubber soles of his shoes catching on the wet pavement. Fog smothered his hoarse scream. He floundered, his arms windmilling helplessly for a second before he crashed to the pavement, landing badly, scraping his palms.
In one fluid movement that betrayed its bulk, the thing was on its feet. The blunt head snapped in his direction. Lidless gold eyes zeroed in on Weston. He scrambled backward, desperately trying to get his feet under him. It slunk toward him, liquid black against the darkness. The dark gash of its mouth opened, revealing a row of jagged teeth. Weston’s back collided with the Honda’s bumper.
Hauling himself to halfway to his feet, he glanced back finding the car door still open. Another couple of feet.
Around him, the fog lit up with a myriad points of golden light. He watched in fascinated horror as one they blinked, a momentary dimming, followed by another flash of gold. He groped for the Honda’s engine hood, raising himself higher as the points of light swiftly became black shapes moving rapidly toward him out of the fog.
He cast wildly around him, looking for any avenue of escape, and found himself completely surrounded. The steep embankment that led to the hidden river fell away on one side. A jagged line of trees blended to a darker gray within the fog. From out of the trees, up from the river, before and behind him, dark shapes materialized out of the mist, rushing in his direction.
Claws scraped against the pavement as they drew close enough to catch their wet, rancid scent. They moved as if they were truly under water, silently swimming toward him through the mist. No sound marked their passage, except for the grating of their claws and the low grunting of their synchronized indrawn breath.
A stray gust of wind momentarily parted the fog like a curtain. Crisscrossing the road like black scars, skid marks ran in all directions. In that moment of clearing he was certain he could see a white-wall tire lying abandoned by the side of the road. Another bank of fog moved in, covering the tire, yet revealing the shadow of a car door. Red, he thought dimly. Like the splotches that gleamed against the pavement in the damp air.
Weston lunged for the car door, wrenching it open further.
Blinding light riveted him to the spot. He looked up, uncomprehendingly, caught in the sudden glare. A horn blared, impossibly close, followed by the thunder of the massive vehicle bearing down on him through the fog. The emblem on the truck’s grill rushed toward him. Mack, he thought.
Then nothing more.
A hundred feet down the road, the truck slowed. The driver peered into the side mirror, but the fog robbed him of the rear view. Sticking his head out the window for a better look, he wondered...
Did I hit something?
ASSIMILATION PROTOCOL
(excerpt)
Brian F. H. Clement
Ren pushed off the manhole cover and tossed it to the side with a loud echoing clank. Bits of plastic and flotsam fell and drifted past Thomas on the ladder behind her. She looked around, waited a moment, and turned to him. “It’s okay,” she said, and climbed out. She offered her hand and pulled him up and out to the street. The sun beat down on the desolate block, as sooty trash and debris stirred in the breeze. Thomas squinted his eyes in the dry air to survey the scene. Nearby were several stripped car hulks. Pieces of their metal frames swayed and squeaked in the growing wind. An antiquated refrigerator looked as if it had been blown apart with handmade explosives and had black blast streaks across it. Houses on the block reminded him of the ones he saw upon leaving the institution, but were much worse off. These appeared to have been riddled with bullets or used for artillery practice. Patches of land that were once spacious green lawns were now dead black earth, pockmarked with scorched craters. One house had a van driven and crashed through the front wall, and was now overgrown with sickly brown vines. Other buildings were boarded over or burned. In more than one he was sure he saw shadows flit by. Squatters. Down the street he saw a rusted barricade across the road with a large faded sign that indicated the demarcation of the Hazardous Exclusionary Zone. If this is what’s outside the Zone I’m not sure I want to see what’s inside.
Thomas, wary of any potential pursuers, turned to replace the manhole cover. He pulled the blown open refrigerator over, rolled it onto the manhole, and brushed his hands together triumphantly with a smile. Ren smirked. The wind picked up further, gathered into a torrent of dust, and blew gray sand and debris past them. Ren pulled out a pair of large goggles to fit her amphibian features and slipped on a dust mask. She handed a mask and set of swimming goggles to Thomas. He put them on as she watched. The wind increased. Deep black clouds overtook the sky above them at a frightening rate. The dust sprayed Thomas. After the murk of the sewer city and now the dusty Hez border, Thomas realized he was filthy.
“Should have just left you in the coveralls!” Ren yelled above the wind. “But at least you won’t stand out where we’re going.” She moved past him toward a boarded-up house and gestured for Thomas to follow.
It looked as if many of the boards on the house had been pried off already, or shot apart by vandals. The house stood silent, a dried out shell slumped in its death pose of forlorn emptiness. Ren approached and peered through the windows, but the strengthening storm gave them little choice. She moved to the front door. Thomas came after, shielding his face behind his arm. Ren kicked away the few boards over the door that still hung fast.
They door, jammed in place by years of rot, the frame warped, was easy to shove in. Desiccated debris was pushed aside behind the door, forming a pile. They stumbled inside and pushed the door shut with their shoulders. Ren turned and gasped, while Thomas coughed away the dust as he brushed his face off. Ren pulled her goggles down and Thomas put his on his head, leaving upon both the shape of them around their eyes formed by the dust. They brushed away the remains.
“We’ll just wait here until it dies down a bit.” Ren coughed and took a drink from her canteen. “Need to find more clean water.” She trudged down the hall through the ankle deep trash and looked over the rooms. “In here,” she said, and nodded to the side. Thomas followed her into the kitchen. The appliances had long since been torn out. Cupboards were pulled open and trash covered the floor. Ren tried the taps at the sink, but found them predictably dry and useless. She sighed, clearly frustrated. “This dry air isn’t doing anything for me,” she said, and took another drink.
Ren pulled off her jacket and laid it on the yellowed counter. Thomas watched as she looked down at the bandage on her arm. She peeled it away and tossed it in the sink. The wound had completely disappeared.
“Healed already?” Thomas asked.
“I regenerate quickly. Like a regular salamander, but enhanced. I’ve grown back fingers before. Probably would grow back limbs too, but I’d prefer not to find out the hard way if it works.” She raised and lowered h
er arm as if working with an invisible dumbbell, then clenched and unclenched her fist.
“You know how long the storm will last?” Thomas asked.
“Anywhere from five minutes to an hour. It’ll blow itself out after a while,” Ren said, moving to the kitchen window. Dust blew through the gaps between the boards over the smashed window. The frame of the house groaned in the wind. The sound of debris spraying against the house in the gusts sounded like a rainstorm.
Thomas heard a rumble of thunder in the distance. Of course. Lightning must have struck more than one of the houses out there, and fires would go unchecked. I’d rather not meet who shot up the others, still. He wandered back into the hall and looked into other rooms. They were picked clean, save for a few sticks of smashed furniture, more trash, and a few knickknacks that had been shattered into uselessness. He walked into a large main room, what must have been the living room. A sofa was overturned, stained, and chewed. Huge teeth marks in it looked as if they belonged to rats he preferred not to encounter. Junk food packaging faded by sunlight and coated in a gray-brown dusty film was littered about.
In the corner, a bookshelf had toppled over, spilling its contents. Books with pages rumpled with age and largely intact were scattered around it. Thomas bent to pick up a photo album and knocked it against the floor to shake off dust. He brushed another layer of dirt off it with his hand and carefully opened it, the spine creaking as he did.
Baby pictures. A young boy smiling with his parents. Sleeping cozily with a tiny puppy. Having a picnic in a lush park. Watching a parade on a downtown street. Sitting in the lap of an obese bearded man in a red and white suit, crying. The family, posing together, all of them holding hands. I never knew a life like this, a “normal” family. I wonder if such a thing ever really existed. Thomas brushed a hand over the photo. This house was alive once with these people. They lived here, laughed, grew up. He looked at his fingertips, now black with soot from the page. Nothing left but a sullied dream of a life long gone. The house is a mausoleum, a memorial to a dead way of life. The sadness almost hangs in the air. If home is where the heart is, this one’s stopped beating, dried up, and gone black. Now it’s alone. Every one of those homes out there is dead and alone.
“Find something?” Ren said, startling him. She was standing at the entrance to the room, drinking from her canteen.
Thomas shook off the dream of vanished families and blinked. He swallowed and turned to her, “A photo book. Family pictures, I think.” He held it up for her to see.
Ren, visibly uncomfortable, cringed slightly at the sight of it and furrowed her brow. “Should probably leave it,” she said.
Thomas looked at it again. “I wonder where these people are now. Are they alive, dead, or mutated into something else? Did they escape somewhere, away from this? Maybe the kid survived. Maybe he mutated into something and they gave him up to a quarantine camp. Maybe they cried their eyes out, thinking their son was dead, but he came back different. Maybe he really was dead.”
“That’s enough, damn it,” Ren grunted. “Can’t take it with us,” she said and yanked the album from his hands. She tossed it back on the pile of books.
“I…I’m sorry Ren. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just…I never knew a family like that. My mother…I told you about her.”
“Like I said before, I don’t remember my parents. Might be best if I didn’t.”
“But sometimes you wish you did.”
Ren sighed. “I probably could if I tried,” she said, looking to the window. “Sometimes in dreams, I told you, people show up who might be my parents. The ones crying over me, like they think I’m dying. Or maybe I was dying.”
“You said ‘my parents’ in the first person.”
“What?”
“Yesterday when you told me about it, you said, ‘her parents’.”
Ren swallowed, still turned to the window. “A British man, and a Japanese woman. Sometimes I can see them so clearly, like they’re right in front of me. And they say this name, ‘Karen, Karen’, over and over, screaming and crying. They think I’m dead, but I’m just asleep. I can see them. I can hear them. But I can’t wake up and tell them. Is that the dream? Is this?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry Ren.”
“I probably won’t ever know what’s the truth. Not really.”
“When I said you seemed familiar, I wasn’t sure how. But I dreamed last night about a memory, or something mixed up with memories. You were there. Well, not ‘you-Ren’. Someone who was you, or used to be you. Something in the way you moved, talked. Someone I met for a blink of an eye when I was a kid. It’s in there, still.”
“Maybe. Maybe she is. Maybe I am.” It was like listening to a different person speak, someone familiar.
“You can talk to me about it. I want to help you,” Thomas said. He felt like he was echoing words back to her she was associated with in decades past. Why does this all make sense, somehow?
She sniffed. “It’s not me anymore. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. And I can’t go back. If that was ever even real.” The hard outer shell had parted for a moment, intentionally or not, and she had let him in again.
“That’s what I told myself when I left the institution. Nature’s green is gold, right?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just a stupid poem.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, turning to him. “We’re wasting energy going back into memories. We need to be here, right now, because that Hez out there will kill us unless we’re right in the moment, and aware of what’s going on.” She turned to look back at the windows. “Anyway, the storm’s died down. We can get moving.” Her face returned to its usual intent semi-scowl. The emotion was gone, the memories forgotten. She was right. The wind had abated and the dust and dirty sand no longer gusted through the windows.
The thumps of Bio-unit 119’s boots echoed through the darkened apothecary as it entered. It stopped and stood over the body of the Grent, motionless on the floor. Orange fluid leaked from the broken carapace and pooled around it. All evidence had led the Bio-unit here. It used everything it gathered and sensed about the two targets’ path after they fled the former Landic’s building. It was focused like the Cleaner, but made a new and more insidious form of hunter than the lycanthrope and Matango. Unlike the others, it wasn’t simply controlled by Hul-Net. It was more a part of Hul-Net, like a cluster of Hul-Net’s programming and organic components broken off and formed anew into a partially autonomous unit.
Flaps on its helmet opened and dozens of small, hair-like white flagella emerged, waving slowly in the air. They sampled scent molecules, the first traces it sensed of anything left behind by Ren and Thomas. Pads on its feet opened, and tendrils spread out onto the floor to feel and taste the footfalls. They withdrew, along with the flagella, and the flaps closed. Bio-unit 119 scanned the room visually and completed its analysis. Scuffs on the floor and variances in cellular residue led toward a piece of carpet behind the smashed counter. It was crooked, leaving a corner of something metal beneath it visible. Bio-unit 119 reached down and threw aside the tattered fabric to reveal a trap door in the floor. It reached for the handle, pulled it open, and descended.
Thomas and Ren walked toward the flimsy road barricade marked by the enormous sign indicating the Hazardous Exclusionary Zone. A corner had been blasted off somehow, leaving scorch marks across the lower right portion. Graffiti had been scribbled all around the lettering. Thomas stopped for a moment to read it, feeling wary. Ren stepped around the barricade. Patches of oily black weeds sprouted around it. Or were they normal weeds in the process of slowly dying? Thomas was unable to discern which.
Ren turned back to him. “Coming?”
Thomas frowned. “What’s in there?”
“Lots of things. Most of it’s not as bad as you expect, but some of it’s a lot worse.”
Thomas grimaced at the convoluted statement. Ren turned and continued walking. Thomas trotted up behind h
er to keep pace. He saw ahead increasing ruination and remnants of suburban life. It was a blasted and broken landscape of desolation and despair. He shivered to think what it might look-– and feel like–- at night. Everything Landic had spoken of made him anxious at how much time they had before dark. He moved up beside her and spoke, “Wait. It makes no sense for you to keep me in suspense until we run into something awful that surprises me. I’m not a kid. You don’t need to shield me. Just tell me what the hell we might be facing, and I’ll be ready.”
Ren kept walking and faced forward as she spoke. “We shouldn’t see anything until after dark, like I said. So we’re fine for now.”
Thomas grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to stay and turn to him. “Not good enough. Tell me now. What if I fall into a hole over a nest of giant mutant centipedes? I want to know if shooting them with this gun,” he said, drawing the revolver, “will do anything, or if I should just yell goodbye to you as they munch on me.”
Ren sighed, “Alright. There are feral mutants. I’ve seen anthills the size of houses, with ants as big as dogs. They usually mind their own business. But there’s also hungry rats out here bigger than cats, swarms of eight-legged arachnoids that will cut you in half and suck out your innards, and carnivorous fish-mutants the size of sharks that crawl up out of the toxic pools formed in the basements of collapsed buildings. Fungal spores that will choke you and sprout from your body in a matter of hours until you’re a giant walking mushroom. But don’t worry, they’re almost entirely underground, I’ve only ever seen them a few times. What we really need to worry about are the former human residents.”
“What, they mutated into something worse?”
“Oh no. Not at all. It’s the gangs of looters and bandits from outside with guns. They hunt the mutants in the Hez for sport. They’ll hunt us too. And it gets better! Many people who used to live here, or wound up here with nowhere else to go, are chemically poisoned due to the high exposure levels. They become crazed savages, driven mad as a result of absorbing the high levels of toxicity. Castoffs, they’re called.”
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