The Black: Outbreak

by Paul E. Cooley

  The body thumped to the hard tile floor. Something, a bone no doubt, cracked, but Roche ignored it. The only thing left to do was to turn off the lights, jump into the tray, and do his best to hide inside. Unless the goddamned thing could see in the dark, it wouldn’t find him.

  He sprinted across the room and hit the master switch. The bright halogen examination lights went dead in an instant. The room was impossibly dark. He pulled his keys from his pocket and hit the button on the fob. Weak LED light streamed out from the embedded bulb. As quickly as he could, he stepped around the examination table and the corpses on the floor. Behind him, the room’s door was coming apart. Metal squealed and he heard the pop of a bolt from one of the hinges. Frantic, adrenaline roaring in his veins, he rushed to the open tray, jumped into it, and did his best to pull himself into the wall.

  Without leverage from the outside, the tray was difficult to move. He couldn’t get enough purchase. Whimpering and doing his best not to panic, and failing, he dug in with his paired fingernails and pushed backward. The tray moved further into the steel crypt. The room shuddered with the crash of the heavy steel door finally flying off its hinges. Roche stopped moving at once. The LED light died as his finger released the switch. He held his breath.

  Click. Click. Click.

  It was in the room. With the exception of its talons on the tile, it was silent. In some ways, he wished it would growl, snort, snuffle, anything but that oppressive, suffocating silence. A sizzling sound erupted in the room and he shivered.

  Click. Click. Click.

  A smell between overcooked meat and something rancid filled the air. Roche wrinkled his nose and barely breathed through his mouth. Just small sips of air. If it heard him, it could get to him. He wasn’t safe. Wasn’t safe. Wasn’t—

  The sizzling rose to a crescendo and then ceased. Something jingled on the tile floor. Roche didn’t even want to know what that was. The clicking of the creature’s talons grew louder. He sipped a long breath and held it. The damned thing had to be less than two meters from him now. Had it reached the corpse that once occupied this shelf? Or was it—

  The clicking stopped. Roche closed his eyes and wished he’d been able to do more than get himself 3/4 into the wall. He was done for, and he knew it.

  Crunch. Crunch. Sizzle.

  It had found the corpse. The stench was overpowering. He exhaled as quietly as he could. His next sip of breath nearly ended in a cough. The air was foul. It was worse than the stink of week-old drowning victims. The volume of the sizzling hurt his ears and even the thump of his own heartbeat was drowned out by it. Roche wanted to scream, to plead to the unnatural thing for his life. And then the sizzling stopped.

  Had it heard him breathing? Had it heard his heartbeat?

  He squeezed his eyes shut against the darkness. What could he do to distract it? There had to be something he—

  A new sound filled the room. Something like the breaking of bones mixed with the stretching of hemp rope. It was even creepier than the click click click of its talons on the tile or the spit and crackle smack of it eating. He wanted to look, but didn’t dare turn his head. The creature was close enough to hear any movement he made. If, that was, it could hear at all.

  The sound continued, accompanied by more clicks, and the sliding of something across the tile floor. What the fuck was it doing?

  Roche lay as still as possible, his eyes scrunched shut in the absolute darkness. The hundreds of faces from autopsies flashed through his mind. Bisected bodies, butterfly incisions, blood running through the stainless-steel sluices, dead eyes, pale dead lips, red and ruined flesh—

  Then he felt it. It was looking at him. Roche cracked one eye open, but still saw nothing. It was so incredibly dark in the room he couldn’t even make out the lip of the morgue wall. That crackling sound again. Regardless of not being able to see it, he knew one of its appendages was right above him, probing the wall, looking for him. Searching. And then it touched his shoulder.

  He squealed and then went rigid as something hard scratched across his collarbone, caressing it like a lover. Then it bore down. Exquisite pain flooded his brain as its incredibly sharp talon sliced through his collarbone, severing muscle, tendon, and bone like a scalpel through tissue paper. Roche screamed.

  Another talon punctured his other shoulder and ripped backward. It pulled him from the tray while his legs kicked and his arms flailed in useless spasms of terror and pain. A crunching sound filled his ears and then he stopped hearing or feeling anything as he dissolved in the creature’s maw.

  Chapter 25

  Even inside the relatively soundproofed security room, they heard the screams. Both Givens and Perkins raised their rifles instantly. The two security guards whimpered and clutched themselves as they looked for somewhere to hide.

  Perkins tapped his mic. “Alpha to Control, over.”

  “Control,” Celianne’s voice replied.

  “There are screams coming from the other side of the basement. Please advise, over.”

  Pause. He glanced at his partner. The Kentuckian’s narrowed eyes looked back at him. He knew that look. Givens wanted to leave the room and find the damned thing. Perkins felt the same way. The difference was that Givens would chase it down without a thought. Perkins needed to keep his partner on a leash at least until they figured out what they were facing.

  “Alpha. You are a go to investigate. Do not engage. I repeat, do not engage, without backup. Let us know what we’re dealing with and evacuate any civilians you can. Over.”

  “Acknowledged, Control. Out.”

  Perkins waved a finger in the air and Givens nodded. He looked at the two security guards. “Do you have better weapons than those little pistols?”

  Max looked up at him and blinked.

  The SWAT sergeant rolled his eyes. “Just answer the goddamned question, man.”

  The terrified security guard shook his head. “These are all we got.”

  “Perfect,” Givens muttered.

  “Okay,” Perkins said. “Stay here. Don’t let anyone through that door unless it’s us or members of our team. Understood?”

  Max nodded.

  “And,” Givens drawled, “you shoot through that fucking door again, and I’ll shoot back.”

  Max gulped. “Y-y-yes, sir.”

  Givens nodded and then faced the security room’s door.

  “We’ll be back,” Perkins said. He gestured to his partner and Givens swung open the door, Perkins’ rifle pointed at the threshold. The twilight gloom awaited them. Perkins and Givens crouch-walked from the room and into the hall. They closed the door behind them.

  Max rose from his seat and practically ran to the door. He locked it and then stood with his back against it. Carter, eyes wide with terror, hugged himself.

  “Are we safe?” the younger guard asked.

  “No fucking way,” Max said. “But we’re safer than they are.”

  *****

  Their strong LED beams bounced off the glistening concrete floor. Tiny divots pockmarked the surface. Whatever passed through here was heavy and its legs sharp enough to dent the concrete. Perkins followed Givens through the darkened hallway and to the apron connecting the two buildings.

  Givens’ rifle light shone down the hall. Up ahead, security lights broke through the gloom. Metal shined in the dim spotlight cast by the nearest one. Givens raised a fist for a heartbeat and then pointed ahead. He didn’t look back to see if his partner received the message. He lowered into a crouch and duckwalked forward through the apron and into the hospital’s main basement area, Perkins following close behind and to the left.

  The two men continued walking, their eyes flicking around the area, including the high roof, searching for targets. When they reached the area with the metal, Givens knelt down. Perkins didn’t follow his partner’s movements with his eyes. Instead, he continued checking for hostiles. Then he saw a wrecked and smashed door beneath the sign that read “Morgue.”

  Give
ns rose from his crouch and held out a hand to his partner. Perkins glanced at what was inside the gloved hand—a set of keys and the skeletal metal frame of a phone, its glass screen intact, but all the non-metal parts completely burned off.

  Perkins reached out, grabbed the parts, and shoved them into one of his pockets while Givens took up position to cover them. He looked over his partner’s shoulder and saw a similar pile of metal not too far ahead. It had been here. It had killed. He tapped Givens on the shoulder and pointed to the morgue. Givens nodded curtly and crouched again. Perkins waited for his partner to move a few steps before taking up position behind him and to the side.

  The staggered formation moved as one to the morgue door. Perkins kept swiveling his head, making sure nothing was behind them, or going to come at them from the deep nest of shadows. Givens was in bloodhound mode, his rifle pointed before him, eyes and body completely focused on a possible threat coming at them from the morgue.

  Adrenaline surged in Perkins’ bloodstream. The air was thick with the smell of rot and burned flesh. Mind over matter, he thought to himself. Mind over fear. Just as when they were knocking down doors in Iraq, he forced himself to go forward step by step. There could be someone with a rifle in that hallway, or the creature, but he and his partner had to keep going. It was their job. It was what they lived for.

  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. Quite the opposite. Perhaps the biggest difference between him and Givens was that his partner just plain didn’t give a damn. He’d been born in a shit hole, beaten by a drunk father, nearly condemned to die in one of the last operating Kentucky coal mines, and somehow managed to escape it all. In Givens’ mind, he was already living on borrowed time. The man knew the bill would come due at some point and had told Perkins as much. The only question for him was when. Perkins hoped it wasn’t today—he had his own bill to pay.

  He did his best to push the thoughts away and focus, but the voices of worry and fear made it difficult. Finally, he managed to replace them with Celianne’s face. The headstrong woman had saved an entire squad, risked her life to make up for a commanding officer’s fuck up, and refused to give up. His lips twitched into something like a grin.

  The morgue was nearly a black hole. The sole security light in the inner hallway barely managed to cast enough light to see the floor. The heavy steel door was ripped nearly in half, the hinges separated from the wall. He noted the deep indentions in its surface. They were much the same as those in the floor. The thing’s sharp, taloned feet did that, he thought. Or its tentacles. Or whatever the hell you call them.

  The smell was stronger and Perkins’ nose wrinkled. He felt as though his damned nostril hairs were being singed by the abhorrent scent. More like wilting, he thought. Givens held up a fist and halted at the threshold. The Kentuckian cocked his head to one side. Perkins did the same. And then he heard it too.

  It sounded like liquid flowing through a metal hose. Whatever it was, it was rushing at incredible speed. Givens flung his hand out in front of him and then continued crouch walking. Perkins followed.

  They stopped at autopsy room one. The door didn’t move when Givens tried the handle. The security card box glowed red as if in challenge. But that wasn’t where the sound was coming from.

  Givens’ rifle light finally found the twisted metal wreckage that was autopsy room two’s strong metal door. Just as with the entrance to the morgue, its surface was pockmarked with deep craters. Whatever had done that had also ripped it from its hinges. There was no dust or broken wood or even missing paint from the wall. Just metal, wrecked, deformed, and twisted.

  Perkins waited for his partner to move again. Givens had stopped, his head cocked once more. Then Perkins realized what it was that had stopped him. The sound was retreating. Givens moved faster. Perkins kept up easily, his rifle to the side so as not to shoot his partner if it came to that.

  When Givens reached the threshold, he flattened himself against the wall and waited. Perkins took a slow deep breath, counted to three, pointed his rifle into the room and stepped so he could see inside.

  There was no light and it might as well have been the dark side of the moon. The strong LED lamp on his rifle stabbed through the shadows, but was hardly bright enough to show him more than a glimmer from the back wall.

  He stepped inside the room on the balls of his feet and took one hand off the rifle. Givens was behind him now, looking into the room over his shoulder and ready to provide cover. Perkins used his free hand to search for a wall switch. His index finger finally found a recessed panel. He closed his eyes and pressed.

  Hellishly bright light filled the room. Even with his eyes closed, the glare flashed through the thin eyelid skin and onto his retinas. He quickly opened his eyes and suffered through the afterimage.

  The room was empty except for an all too-clean-floor, an empty autopsy table, and a mess of incredibly well-polished surgical tools. A single shelf was pulled partway out of the far steel wall. Metal buttons, keys, and the remains of a cellphone stared back at him from the empty shelf.

  “Where the hell did it go?” Givens drawled.

  It wasn’t on the ceiling. It couldn’t possibly have made its way through the wall. And there were no holes for it to pass through. So where the hell did it go?

  They searched the room looking for any place it could have gone. On his second circuit of the room, his foot crunched on something. Perkins looked down and pulled his foot back. He’d stepped on the heavy, recessed, stainless steel drain cover. It had snapped beneath the pressure of his weight.

  Frowning, he reached down and picked up the cracked and broken pieces in his gloved hand. The metal was several centimeters thick. There was no way he should have been able to break it just by standing on it. He walked to the autopsy table and spread the three pieces on it. The metal made a strange sound when it hit the steel. Flakes peeled off.

  “Oh, shit,” he breathed.

  “What?” Givens asked.

  Perkins looked at the floor and pointed. “Grab that hammer. The steel one down there.”

  Givens leaned down and picked it up, his face lit with a question he didn’t ask. He handed it to Perkins without a word.

  He stared at it for a moment. It felt solid, heavy. He cocked it backward in his fingers and then brought it forward down on the autopsy table.

  The outer metal shattered as if it was glass. The inner shape of the solid steel hammer remained intact and as firm as steel should be.

  Something gurgled and the two men immediately lowered the rifles to the drain. A bubble of water rose and then popped. Perkins was afraid of the drain. The fact Givens seemed cautious about it made him feel better; he wasn’t the only one freaking out.

  Givens pressed forward until he stood almost over the drain. He pointed his rifle at it, and turned the LED light on. The darkness inside the drain vanished at once. The metal pipe interior gleamed, the light dancing in crazy circles as it flowed into a U junction.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Givens asked.

  Perkins pointed at the drain. “I think that’s how it got out.”

  Chapter 26

  “Alpha to Control, over.”

  Sarah stood outside the Trauma Center hallway. She had grown tired of the doctors. The two CDC docs were practically in shock and the trauma surgeons were most definitely in shock. None of them spoke and they all huddled together like frightened children. Dr. Mathis at least seemed to be coming out of it. Maybe he’d bring his partner out of it too. She had no such illusions about the rest of them.

  When Perkins’ voice issued from the radio, she was not only happy for the distraction, but relieved. It had been a while since their last report.

  “Control. Go.”

  “We have no one, I repeat, no one in the main basement area. Whatever happened here, we missed it. Over.”

  She swallowed. “Any sign of the creature? Over.”

  “None. But it left a hell of a mess down here. And we think it got ou
t. Over.”

  She frowned. “The hell you mean it got out?”

  Pause. She imagined Perkins glaring at his mic and trying to find the words to explain just what the hell was going on. He sounded flustered and that made her nauseous. Perkins and Givens didn’t get flustered. Even when someone was shooting at them and it didn’t seem like they could get out of whatever mess they were in, the pair were always calm and deliberate.

  “Boss? This thing was in here. And there’s no way it could get out. Except the drain. Over.”

  She blinked. “The drain? What drain? Over.”

  Pause. When he spoke again, Perkins sounded sheepish. “The autopsy room, boss. It has a big drain in the floor. I guess to catch any excess liquid that rolls off when they’re cutting up stiffs. We heard a gurgling noise before we got in here. Sounded like something flowing through it. But the room is bone dry. Over.”

  Her head hurt. This made no damned sense. “Alpha, are you sure you checked the entire basement? It has to be there somewhere. Over.”

  “We’re sure, boss. It’s not here anymore.” There was another pause. “I don’t know where that pipe leads, but if that’s where it went, it’ll pop up somewhere else. I think it can, well, turn itself into liquid? Over.”

  She turned in a slow circle and looked through the glass and into the trauma theater hall. Dr. Mathis was talking to Harrel, the two of them seeming locked in a pretty serious conversation. “Alpha. When you saw the video of the attack, just what the hell did you see?”

  Although Perkins described it in less than colorful terms, she got the gist. She told her team to hold and then opened the door. Mathis and Harrel looked up at her.

  “This thing. It was liquid.”

  The two doctors blinked at her and then at one another. “Okay,” said Harrel. “And?”

  “My team believes it has returned to that state.”

  Harrel and Mathis shared another glance. Mathis pulled himself up and stood a few feet away from Sarah. “It gestated inside the patient. Consumed her. And maybe when it had finished, um, ‘becoming,’ the thing went looking for more food.”