The Fall

by Michael McBride

  “You’re a doctor, right?” Peckham whispered into his ear from behind. “Ever heard of anything that can drop a pair of deer without putting a hole through them?”

  Adam shook his head. His experience with animals was limited to dissection.

  “Awfully coincidental there’s a dead man in the same field, don’t you think?” Peckham whispered, then crawled silently over to the others.

  Adam studied the man, waiting for some sign of movement, any little twitch or rise of the chest wall, but there was nothing.

  He grabbed his own sleeve and gave it a quick jerk, tearing the seam and slipping it down over his hand. The other men looked at him as though he’d just blown a bullhorn.

  Bunching up the sleeve, Adam pinched it over his mouth and nose and stepped out of the forest into the open.

  “What are you doing?” he heard someone gasp.

  “Get down!” another barked, but it was too late for that now.

  Adam trotted out into the middle of the field, scouring the expanse of meadow as he went for any sign of what might have caused the deaths. The only thing he could think of that was powerful enough to kill anything without a bullet was a biological agent, especially one affecting the respiratory tract. If such an agent were still around, they’d have been dead already, but Adam wasn’t prepared to take any chances.

  There was something odd about the entire scene. The grass rippled on the wind like water, lightning crashing all around.

  The farther he got into the field, the faster he began to move. It felt like eyes were on him from every direction at once. He felt naked so far from cover, but there was only one way to figure out what was going on.

  Racing right up to the man, Adam crouched in front of him. With his left hand he felt for a carotid pulse, while his right tipped the man’s head back. He was prepared to look into the man’s eyes to check his pupils, but there weren’t any.

  He glanced over his shoulder to the others, who were already halfway across the field.

  Adam turned back to the man leaning against the rock wall. He’d seen hundreds of dead bodies through medical school and his residency. While it was a sight one never truly grew accustomed to, it was definitely easy enough to recognize after a while. The lips and nail beds took on a bluish hue as the cells became hypoxic, followed by the other superficial layers of skin, which appeared to have a grayish cast. Bruised rings began to circle the eyes and rim the nostrils, the swelling tongue slowly parting the lips. And there was the smell. There was always the smell. Adam likened it to the aroma that had crept out from beneath his dead cat when he peeled it from the roadside as a boy. There was a hint of ammonia, the stench of fecal matter, and the indescribable gas that seeped past the body’s lips as it slowly deflated.

  The man before him now looked nothing like any dead man he’d ever seen.

  There was no pulse, which he checked a second time to confirm.

  It’s not that the pupils had constricted to pinpricks as they occasionally did, but were completely absent. As were the irises. The only living thing that reminded him even remotely of this man’s eyes were those of a Tokay gecko. The base color of the man’s sclera was a uniform yellow from corner to corner and top to bottom, as though the eyeball had been removed and dunked in canary yellow dye. Amoeboid black shapes marred the surface of the eyes, swirling as though being stirred in liquid. They almost looked like sentient creatures skimming the surface of the eyes.

  The man’s skin had turned as black as a diabetic’s necrotic toe, but the texture was all wrong. Rather than the skin drying and losing elasticity, becoming scaly, it had plumped almost like a boiled hot dog. Instead of simply dimpling when he applied pressure to it, the fluids beneath the flesh flowed back into place. As he watched, streaks of a blue darker than the deepest depths of the ocean rose to the surface, marbling to black as though rather than dying, the body had turned into one enormous mess of bruises. It wasn’t until he noticed the fingernails peeling away from the skin that he realized the body was still swelling from the inside. That meant there had to be some sort of cellular metabolism happening beneath the skin, but since the body was dead, there had to be something else growing or multiplying inside the man’s husk.

  “Good God A’mighty!” Samuels said. “What does that look like to you? We talking bioterrorism here? Anthrax? What?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Adam said, pressing his finger into the man’s cheek only to watch it spring back into place. “It’s as though there’s something infesting him.”

  “Like roaches?” Carter asked.

  “Not like roaches, you idiot!” Peckham barked. “He’s talking about microscopic stuff.”

  Adam stood up and looked past the men to where the deer was heaped at the edge of the field. He started walking toward the carcasses, but his curiosity urged him to a jog. When he reached the buck, he went right around to the head and lowered his face so that he was looking right into the creature’s eyes. There was a milky haze over the wide brown eyes and they were bereft of moisture as they were supposed to be. Nothing unusual, at least not like the man now across the field. The stag’s muzzle was lodged in the dirt, the nostrils packed clear up to the sinuses and the mouth unable to open. There was absolutely no way on the planet that this thing could have breathed if it wanted to.

  He stared down at his hands, then carefully placed his right on its furry shoulder and pressed the coarse hairs back against the grain. The skin beneath wasn’t black like the man’s. Nor was it a healthy skin color. It was as gray as ashes and dotted with red as though it had been assaulted by millions of needles. No blood rose to the surface, only small puckers of flesh dotted with so many little red caps. His first thought was that they must have been caused by ticks, but no matter how he moved the fur, he didn’t see a single insect. He traced the shoulder down to the middle of the back, toward the neck, and then stopped. Pressing with his fingertips, he followed the course of the spine all the way up to the base of the deer’s skull.

  “That can’t be right,” Adam said, a perplexed look washing over him.

  “What is it?” Norman asked from behind him, but Adam was already hustling back across the field toward the dead man.

  Winded, Adam dropped to his knees in front of the man’s body, grabbing the man’s shoulders and leaning him forward. The man’s face fell over Adam’s shoulder, but he didn’t care as he was already palpating the swelling on the back of the man’s neck leading up to his head.

  “Encephalitis,” he said, lowering the man onto his side and rolling him onto his chest. He pushed at two barely noticeable lines of swelling paralleling the corpse’s spinal column.

  “What does that mean?” Peckham asked.

  “See all of this swollen tissue to either side of his cervical spine? Those are layers of the sheath that covers his spinal cord to protect it from damage within the vertebral column. When these layers get irritated or filled with fluid, the spine can no longer contain them, and they end up increasing in pressure until they finally rupture through whatever gaps they can find between bones.”

  “What causes something like that?” Norman asked. “I’ve seen a couple cases of encephalitis, but this looks nothing like those.”

  “It more closely resembles a meningocele, which is a birth defect where spinal fluid accumulates between the layers of the sheath.”

  “So you think this guy’s got a meningocele?”

  “No…not specifically, but both this guy and the deer have an abnormal amount of fluid collected in their spinal cords, which would lead me to believe that either there was some sort of organism inside them capable of stimulating the production of cerebrospinal fluid or some other kind of fluid has been injected into that space.”

  “And that would have killed him?” Peckham asked.

  “A large amount of pressure on the spinal cord or brain could definitely kill someone…”

  “You don’t sound so sure,” Samuels said.

  �
��I’ve never seen anything quite like this, it’s as if—”

  “Down!” Samuels shouted, slamming Adam in the middle of the back. His chin bounced off the ground before he even felt himself falling. He scrabbled forward until he felt the cold stone wall in front of him and blinked frantically to try to chase the stars from his vision.

  “What happened?” he asked, wiping a smear of blood from his lips. He’d nipped his tongue when he landed.

  Samuels leaned into his face and held a single finger in front of his lips to shush him.

  Adam nodded weakly and slowly rose to his knees so he could see through a gap in the wall.

  Past the barn, the field sloped upward toward the tree line. It was hard to discern the shape from the shadows beneath the trees, but Adam could certainly feel its eyes upon him.

  There was a series of faint clicks as safeties were disengaged from weapons.

  Adam couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away. It was as though whatever was up there held some sort of power over him. Faint contrast finally drew its silhouette against the darkness with each ferocious explosion of lightning overhead.

  A man sat atop a steed, his pallid skin reflecting the shifting glare as though he skin were made of polished pearl. Electrical forks stabbed the ground all around him, dancing in circles about him, making the horse appear as though all but his bones were transparent; an x-rayed equine image. The forest behind the rider cringed, the trees bowing away from him as though blown by a ferocious gale. Though it couldn’t have been possible, Adam was certain that the rider stared directly at him through the small gap in the stone wall.

  “What the hell is that?” Norman gasped. “That horse has no skin!”

  As if on cue, the horse rose to its full height on its rear legs, punching at the air with its front hooves. The man astride the beast knotted his fists into a mane that looked like a tangle of heavily thorned briars, his head buckling backward against his shoulders. Lightning tore up the ground all around him, his opaque skin not just reflecting the attacking bolts, but absorbing them until he was the same shade of electric blue. Darkness erupted from his open mouth, as though the tail of a tornado was trapped in his throat, swirling and flagging, trying to tear free. The conical whirlwind rose above the man, funneling up into the sky until it appeared to connect the rider directly to the storm, and then raced outward like a flood.

  “Jesus Christ!” one of the men shouted.

  By the time Adam spun to face the sound of the voice, all he could see was one of the men’s backs as he sprinted away. Darkness blotted out the sky, smothering even the lightning, which barely passed through in shimmering arcs like the evening light through the rustling leaves of an aspen.

  It sounded as though a jet engine had been turned on them from the other side of the wall, but it wasn’t just the nearly deafening drone of the buzzing, but the tremendous wind that blew hard enough to topple some of the loose rocks from atop the wall.

  A tsunami of seething blackness hammered whoever had decided to run squarely in the middle of the back, cleaving him from his feet and tossing him forward into the air before engulfing him whole. A bolt of lightning crashed right down where he fell.

  Adam spun back to the safety of the stone wall, even though it felt as though it were being rammed by a tank from the other side. A solid stream of darkness blasted over his head above the wall, but it wasn’t until he stared directly up into the heart of the darkness that he was able to discern what it was.

  Locusts. Millions of them, flowing like shotgun pellets fired from guns. The buzzing wasn’t a single sound, but the cacophonous roar of an infinite number of wings beating the air.

  Throwing himself to the ground, Adam scurried along his belly toward where he assumed the other men to be, ramming headfirst into something soft and forgiving. He quickly looked up and found himself staring into the open eyes of the dead man. Locusts crawled across his face, darting in and out of every available orifice, before arising as one and merging back into the impossible swarm racing past overhead.

  As quickly as they had descended upon them, the locusts were gone, their buzzing fading like a trucker’s horn on the interstate. It was only a moment before the sound was gone entirely.

  A soldier lay face down in the field a dozen strides away.

  Adam scurried toward him on all fours, grabbing the man by the shoulder as soon as he was within reach and flopping him over onto his back.

  Merton’s rag doll arms flopped uselessly to his sides.

  “Talk to me soldier!” Adam shouted, but Adam could already tell from his vacuous eyes that the man was dead. His mouth hung askew with triangular chips missing from his front teeth.

  “What’s his status?” Peckham hissed just loud enough to be heard.

  When Adam turned to face him, the lieutenant could read his answer in the doctor’s face.

  The crest of the hill behind Peckham was now abandoned. Only the fragmented trunks of trees remained around a ring of scorched earth, the lightning now stabbing further in the distance beyond the forest.

  He grabbed Merton’s legs and dragged him back to the relative security behind the wall. What wasn’t burned was broken, the body flopping behind him as he pulled it through the tall grass. He didn’t know what they intended to do with Merton’s body, but leaving it out there in the middle of the field wasn’t an option.

  Adam felt as though his skin was covered with locusts, crawling beneath his clothing and setting every nerve ending to tingling. He’d never seen so many insects in all of his life combined, let alone all at one time…and so many moving at such great velocity was far beyond his comprehension. Nothing made any sort of coherent sense as his mind flashed images past at blinding speed. The plane crash. The dead soldiers smashed flat in their seats. The deer. The locusts. Encephalitis. The man.

  Adam scrambled up against the wall, his heart beating fit to burst.

  Pressing himself uncomfortably against the stacks of stones, feeling as though his life was in dire danger, but not knowing from what, he looked to his right.

  Yellow eyes with a skein of swirling black oil stared back at him from the corpse.

  And blinked.

  Chapter 6

  I

  Washington, D.C.

  SECRETARY OF DEFENSE JACK REMINGTON LAY ON THE FLOOR AT THE HEAD of the table in the War Room, his feet tangled in the legs of the toppled chair. A dozen other bodies littered the floor like a child’s forgotten plastic soldiers. Bottles of champagne sat in the middle of the table, the foil wrappers over the corks perfectly intact.

  Dim red and blue light lit the room like the stilled sirens of a police cruiser from the large screen in the wall past the foot of the table, where a map of the United States was prominently displayed.

  The Star Wars defenses had been ninety-eight point six percent effective in destroying the surface to air nuclear warheads launched from nearly a hundred different sites across China. Only three missiles reached their desired targets, leaving little more than smoldering craters where Tucson, Albuquerque, and Amarillo once were. The other two hundred and thirteen warheads were now sifting into the silt on the bottom of the ocean.

  Rows of high definition monitors lined the walls behind the overturned chairs. They featured live satellite reconnaissance feeds of various important international sites. There were no signs of movement on an aerial view of Buckingham Palace. Tanks and military vehicles ringed the outer gates, the inner courtyard packed with the corpses of fallen soldiers. The outer expanses were filled with the corpses of the citizenry who had erroneously sought protection by the Crown, piled one atop the other throughout the entire frame, a cemetery of the unburied lorded over by the golden angel with trumpet in hand atop a fountain covered with corpses, heralding the rebirth of the scurrying black things that swarmed over the fields of the dead like ants. Smoke shrouded the Kremlin, the wind alternately exposing vast fields of carcasses under a settling mat of gray snow and ash, and the ornate golden parapets ato
p buildings and cathedrals violated by black shapes slithering in and out of the shattered windows. The streets surrounding the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin were packed with the bodies of the picketers who had been protesting the war from afar, their signs blowing across their bloated remains. Atop the stone gate itself, someone had spray-painted the words “More Man Tea” and punctuated them with a wash of blood several dark things now fought over. There was nothing left of Tiananmen Square but the gray and red rubble atop charred bodies fueling the nuclear fires.

  Jack had been preparing to pop the champagne when the buzzing had begun in the ductwork leading up to surface above the subterranean compound. Mosquitoes poured through the grates before anyone was even able to identify the sound.

  The war had been over before the United States’ retaliatory nuclear strike ever reached its targets. The dogs lay still, felled before they could celebrate that only the eight hundred thousand in Tucson, five hundred fifty thousand in Albuquerque, and one hundred ninety thousand in Amarillo were the only casualties. Though compared to what was soon to come for Jack Remington and his mongering compatriots, their deaths were merciful and swift.

  The bodies had already plumped and bruised, threatening to tear through the confining clothes when the locusts funneled down through the ductwork and covered their corpses, scuttling in and out of every orifice unnoticed, until they were finally called away by their master to continue the westward infestation.

  Now, the toils of their labor began to bear fruit.

  A knot of flesh arose on Jack’s bloated black neck over his spine, followed by another, and then another like an unborn child’s hands through a mother’s belly. The flesh stretched taut until it looked as though pyramids were growing all up and down his neck. With a tearing sound, his flimsy flesh ripped right down the center, peeling back to either side and issuing a gust of steam like a freshly opened baked potato. A series of long black spines rose to their full height from the middle of the chasm of flesh.