The Alien Plague- Book 2

by A. T. Avon

  She wasn’t disappointed with what she found. There was a dome. She didn’t know which of the countless viruses had facilitated it exactly, but there was definitely a dome. The substance had made contact with life and was now running its protocols.

  So far, so good.

  She watched for roughly half an hour, in between adding food and water and taking a series of basic notes. Ideally, she would’ve taken photographs with her phone, annotating them as she did so. But in addition to restricting her internet access, along with her access to the pen, her phone’s camera had been deactivated. Tang had her on quite the leash.

  Phone frustrations aside, there was plenty to document. The dome had ten rats in it when she arrived, but over the course of thirty minutes another fifteen gravitated towards it, while three left. All the rats that left looked ill.

  Again she thought of Tumenzhen. She had assumed everyone in that village was a native, but what if some had left while others arrived from surrounding towns? The healthy swapping places with the ill? She had never asked Zhang if everyone was local, or if some of the people she had met in Tumenzhen were actually from surrounding towns like Houjiawan.

  There was one newborn rat in a nest just on the edge of the dome, and Missy couldn’t help feeling sympathy for it. It was still too young even to have its eyes open, yet it had been born into a life which held absolutely no promise. She had to resist the urge to save it, instead letting the substance, along with nature, run its course.

  She watched the rats that had left the dome join a small enclave, where they proceeded to fornicate. Other nests had already established themselves in different segments of the hexagonal base. This was different to the experiment her father had run. Her father’s experiment, to the best of her knowledge, had resulted in less nests. It was hard to say how, but she was confident this experiment was already diverging from its predecessor.

  She looked for the spider, but couldn’t find any evidence of it. It was as if the creature had disappeared. The wall of the pen was particularly high tech: the small compartments, with various delivery mechanisms and complex equipment for monitoring results; the robotic arms which could be used to extract either corpses or samples… it all provided nooks and crannies, overhangs.

  Was the spider hiding?

  Missy’s gut said no. Something else was happening here, something she couldn’t yet pin down.

  She heard the airlock behind her. She turned to find West entering. ‘Where’s it at?’ he asked.

  ‘Really, you’re going to pretend you don’t have a live feed on your phone?’

  He smiled sheepishly. ‘Perks,’ he said, sliding in beside her like they were old friends.

  He’s not your friend.

  He studied the dome.

  ‘You think it’s that spider?’ he asked. ‘I found a few more after you left. I put them in.’

  This surprised Missy. ‘How many?’

  ‘A few.’ He shrugged, then relented. ‘Okay, one. But it was big. Fat.’

  ‘So where is it?’ Missy asked, looking back down into the pen. ‘We should have two spiders in there and we’ve got zero that I can see.’

  ‘Probably hiding. I know if I was a spider and you threw me into a rat nest, I’d hide.’

  There were a lot of things Missy could’ve said to this, but she resisted the urge to make a cutting remark. West’s lack of loyalty and long-standing allegiance to the Chinese was entirely on West, and her condemnation wasn’t going to make a difference one way or the other.

  She also resisted the urge to mention him shooting her again. She certainly hadn’t forgiven him for that, but she was done complaining about it. From a purely practical standpoint, West was working hard to get back in her good books, so she would exploit that. Better an ally, even a fake one, than a foe.

  Putting on an air of casual indifference, she said, ‘So what do you know about all this that you aren’t telling me?’

  ‘Plenty,’ came the reply, delivered with an irritatingly wry smile.

  ‘So you’re here to help, but you won’t tell me what you know?’

  ‘Truthfully, I’m here to supervise.’

  ‘Is it true about Houellebecq?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Being my brother?’

  West hesitated, glancing at her. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Tang. Is it true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Missy studied his eyes. He wasn’t lying. In fact, he looked nervous confirming it, as if maybe she was the one lying about Tang telling her. ‘How did you two meet anyway?’ she asked.

  West shrugged. ‘I was assigned to him.’

  ‘Assigned? What, by Tang?’

  ‘By Tang.’ He nodded.

  ‘Why didn’t Houellebecq tell me himself?’

  ‘That he was your sibling? He was looking for the right time, that’s all.’

  Looking for the right time… That had to be a joke. And yet at some level Missy understood. Had things been reversed, had she kidnapped and lied to Houellebecq, she would’ve been looking for the right time, too.

  There was a sibling relationship at stake.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ said West drawing her out of these thoughts. He pointed. ‘See it? One of the nests is on the move.’

  ‘Like maybe it’s planning to circle the dome.’ Missy lent over the Perspex ceiling of the pen and peered down. West was right. Five or six of the rats were now closing in on the dome, and she watched as one of them approached and then bit the baby rat. For a while, nothing happened. Then the baby rat began to shiver, tremble. ‘What are you all doing?’ she asked under her breath. Then, to West, she said: ‘That wasn’t a playful bite. And look at the thing, it doesn’t even have its eyes open yet. It hardly has fur. Why attack it?’

  They continued watching. For a long time, nothing happened. The rats from the nest closed in around the dome, but retreated when it continued to grow. The mice inside the dome huddled together, always focused outward, as if expecting the worst.

  ‘It’s like they’re anticipating an attack,’ Missy said.

  ‘If I was in their situation,’ West said, ‘I would too. I mean, why else are these guys closing in on the dome like this? This didn’t happen in the previous experiment, right?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘So what’s the difference? A spider. Two spiders?’

  Missy shrugged. ‘That and the extra viruses.’

  As she said this, she recognized her error. She had introduced to many variables all at once, but what choice was there? She only had one experiment and limited time, and she needed it to work. If it did work, there was every chance she’d replicate what was happening in the real world. That was the break they needed right now.

  Even so… now she had no way of knowing which variable had caused the change. From here on in, she could only experiment with outcomes.

  ‘You think that baby rat’s dead?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure hasn’t moved in a while.’

  ‘Are we able to get it out?’

  West nodded. ‘There’s a robotic arm down there – actually, there are three – which can extract more or less anything. But it’ll interrupt what’s happening. It’ll potentially thwart this attack on the dome. That what you want?’

  ‘Do it,’ Missy said.

  Chapter 15

  Somewhere in the Gobi

  Tang was obviously still listening – or someone representing Tang – because no sooner has Missy said this than did the robotic arm appear out of the pen wall. It needed to make hundreds of small adjustments, but it made each one so quickly and decisively it gave the illusion of fluid movement. It collected the dead baby rat and retreated back into a segment in the wall of the pen.

  ‘I need to know if it’s dead,’ Missy, said, addressing the room at large. ‘And if it is dead, I need to know what killed it.’

  ‘Where are you heading with this?’ West asked. ‘You have a theory or…?’

 
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a theory. How long on those results?’ She waited. It wasn’t Tang who replied, but another voice, a voice she didn’t recognize. In heavily accented English, a Chinese tech or soldier – Missy had no way of knowing which – informed her she was facing at least a five-minute wait.

  ‘But you can tell me if the thing is dead, right?’

  The reply was immediate and definitive. ‘It’s dead.’

  Her confidence grew ever so slightly. She glanced sideways to see West examining her face. ‘You’re excited,’ he said.

  Was she? Yes. ‘I think it worked. I think we’ve replicated what’s happening outside.’

  No sooner had Missy said this, than did one of the rats from the nest begin its attack on the dome. She watched in amazement as it took a run at the wall, then ran sideways up it. ‘How did I miss that?’ she said to herself, before grabbing West by his shirt sleeve. ‘Look.’

  ‘It’s climbing.’

  ‘No, not just that. Look – at the legs. Under the chest there, you see?’

  ‘Shit. That’s not possible.’

  But there was no denying what they were both now looking at. The rat had two small legs emerging from its rib cage, legs which were approximately two thirds the size of its front legs. As it came to a stop on the wall, losing all speed, it’s back legs scrabbled, lost grip and dropped down. Then its front legs, also scraping, also looking for traction, flailed too. But not its new legs. These gripped the wall with effortless strength, and after a moment of struggle, the rat seemed to realize it could trust these new feet. It hung from them while twisting its head around and looking down towards the dome.

  ‘Eyes,’ Missy said. ‘The eyes, too.’

  West let out a low whistle, which Missy decided it was an appropriate reaction. The rat had its two ordinary eyes, plus two more: two tiny eyes located halfway down its nose. These weren’t situated either side of the nose, but rather on top. They were small and circular, half hidden by fur, and they were staring straight up.

  At her.

  Chapter 16

  Somewhere in the Gobi

  Something wasn’t right. She had missed something here, but what?

  She cocked her head ever so slightly and was alarmed to see the rat do the same in return. The two eyes on top of its nose didn’t blink, they just went on staring up, like two glossy black pimples.

  Missy felt like she was on the cusp of panic when the other rats from the nest suddenly attacked the dome. They charged into it, turned and then crawled up the inside, all also using new legs. ‘It’s the whole nest,’ she said. ‘They’ve all grown legs.’

  The attacking rats were now in the dome, hanging from inside it, with their backs facing the rats clumped in the center. The rats at the center seemed to realize they were in trouble. They kept exchanging positions pointlessly with one another, before raising their noses and sniffing, only to duck down and pointlessly change position again. Over and over.

  The rats overhead, hanging from their newly grown feet, let their heads drop down limply. Their regular feet, front and back, fell outwards, taken by gravity. They looked like little mountain climbers, hanging by ropes, taking a rest.

  Only, they weren’t little mountain climbers. They were rats, mutant rats, hanging from the inside of an alien dome.

  Missy had been so focused on this development, she was slow to detect the movement coming at her. In fact, she didn’t detect it until it struck the Perspex. It hit with a thunk, then dropped all the way back down.

  What the… With horror, she saw it was the rat that had been hanging from the pen wall. It had somehow managed to propel itself up, launching an attack on the pen’s Perspex roof.

  It now leaped back up onto the pen wall and resumed staring at her, while the other rats dropped and spun in the air, landing on the backs of the uninfected rats and sinking their teeth into their necks. Some bit from behind, chewing through spine, others managed to curl around, ripping at tiny rat throats.

  Either way, the outcome was the same. There was suddenly blood everywhere in the dome.

  Missy backed away from the Perspex, no longer simply unnerved by what she was seeing but frightened. She heard the thunk again and knew what it was even though she didn’t actually see the rat.

  It sounded wrong. The weight of it, the lack of softness… She wasn’t exactly sure what a rat hitting Perspex at that speed was meant to sound like, but it seemed to be hitting with far too much force: like the end of a small hammer, rather than rodent flesh. She heard it again. Thunk.

  She took four or five steps back, turning and beginning to run towards the airlock. West was following her. She could hear him, swearing over what was now an irregular but persistent thunking.

  ‘They’re trying to get out,’ she screamed to the implacable Chinese soldiers on the other side of the airlock. But if they heard her, they showed no concern. Instead, they simply raised their assault rifles, pointing them directly at her.

  Even before she reached the airlock, Missy knew.

  Like it or not, she was now the experiment.

  Chapter 17

  Somewhere in the Gobi

  Missy banged on the airlock, but the soldiers remained implacable. ‘The pen!’ she screamed. ‘The experiment, it’s unstable! You have to let us out. We stay here, we die.’ The expressions on the soldiers’ faces didn’t change. They went on pointing their assault rifles, refusing to stand down.

  ‘Incoming,’ said West. There was a cool professionalism to his voice, a soldier’s calm under pressure which Missy almost found reassuring. She spun just in time to see rats galloping across the floor towards her. Her eyes flicked to the top of the pen, and she saw that the Perspex had been forced up. Had she not been staring straight at it, she wouldn’t have believed it possible. But it was breached, and rats were streaming out.

  There was no time to question how or why. The rats closed in fast, and she saw them leap. She screamed as one struck the glass just to the left of her head. Then two more struck, this time off to her right.

  She closed her eyes and cowered in on herself, crouching. ‘No!’ she yelled, curling down into a tight ball even though she held no real hope this defensive posture could help her. How could it? She was going to die in here, either from blunt force trauma or rat teeth.

  The thunking continued and she heard West screaming. She could hear rats on his Hazmat suit, could hear it ripping. She was expecting pain, too, but there wasn’t any. There was no blunt force trauma, no teeth ripping at her flesh. She could hear the rats on West, just as she could hear them charging the airlock over and over, but still nothing on her. She was untouched.

  Slowly, she opened her eyes and stood. She took a few steps back from West, who was ripping off his suit. He had rats gripping his face with their teeth, ripping at his chin and cheeks. In some ways he had been lucky. Most rats were more interested in escape than West, but he hadn’t been as lucky as Missy – she still remained untouched.

  She wanted to reach out and help him, but she couldn’t find the courage. She couldn’t will her arm, her hand, to do it.

  Plus, she owed him nothing.

  He got the suit off, then went after the rats. Now that he could see them, his movements were quick and deliberate. He’d identify an attacker, pull it from his skin. Even where it had its teeth in his flesh, drawing blood, he’d simply rip it off like a parent removing a Band-Aid. Then he’d throw the animal hard down on the ground and stomp on it.

  This didn’t kill the rats, but it did maim them. And once maimed, they invariably gave up on West and joined the group effort to break free.

  Most rats, it seemed, just wanted to get out through the airlock. They wanted out as badly as Missy herself wanted out. ‘How do we get out of here?’

  She felt West grab her with a bloodied hand, pulling her towards him and tearing her Hazmat suit in the process. ‘We need to get away from this airlock,’ he grunted. ‘They want to get out. They know that’s the weake
st point and we’re in their way – simple as that.’

  Missy let him guide her, stumbling past the broken pen, all the way to the other side of the room. There was nothing much to hide behind, but it didn’t seem to matter. West was right. The rats wanted out and the airlock now had their full attention. They were using the same primitive technique they had used for the Perspex. Running, leaping, thunking. Over and over, the sound of each thunk causing Missy to flinch.

  There was no shrieking, no other noise. The rats were silent and almost robotic in their pursuit of freedom, hundreds of them now flinging themselves at the soldiers on the other side of the airlock.

  Missy waited for gunfire, for pandemonium, but it never came. Somehow, the Chinese soldiers on the other side of the airlock kept their nerve. They were staring down this attack, and Missy could only hope that meant they had a plan.

  Chapter 18

  Somewhere in the Gobi

  Two hours later, Missy’s rescue still hadn’t come; but at least the rat assault had died down. There was still the occasional thunk as a rat summoned the energy to try for one last go; but for all intents and purposes, the rats appeared to be accepting defeat. They were trapped.

  At first, Missy had worried the animals would seek out a new target – namely her. She worried they would scamper around the pen and sniff her out. She worried they would seek sustenance in the form of human flesh or blood. But so far, thankfully, these fears had proved unfounded.

  She hadn’t shared these fears with West. In fact, she hadn’t said much to West at all, not beyond helping him with his wounds. The two of them had sat in near total silence at the back of the container, their breathing soft and low. West was scanning the floor to the left of the broken pen, Missy to the right.

  They still didn’t have weapons, but they had decided searching for weapons (or something that could pass for a weapon) was too dangerous. So long as they were still, so long as they were quiet, they seemed to be forgotten. That was what they wanted. That was what they needed.