The Black: Arrival

by Paul E. Cooley

  *****

  Hoyt stood motionless and breathless as she peered at the image on the screen. She’d checked the settings on the SEM twice and still couldn’t believe her eyes. “That’s not possible.”

  Kate ground her teeth. “Where’s my daughter?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Hoyt said. She wished the chemist would calm down. Hoyt made a mental note to call the hospital and see if any of the other contaminated personnel were also delusional. She pointed at the screen. “I don’t understand.”

  Neil chuckled. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “It’s just…black.”

  “That’s the point,” Bill said. “It’s just black. No molecules. No electrons. It’s not possible. And yet you don’t believe,” he said and pointed to Jay and Kate, “what they’re saying? Call your people and get us the hell out of here!”

  Hoyt sighed. All four of them were crazy. The SEM was obviously broken or the calibration was wrong. She didn’t know how that was possible either, but it was the only thing that made sense. Still, she needed to check in with the hospital anyway.

  She clicked the control box attached to her belt. “Dr. Harrel? This is Hoyt. Over.”

  A jolt of static came through the line and made her wince. Somewhere out there in the world, a bolt of lightning had come down. God, but she hated the radios. “Harrel? Come in.” No response. “This is Dr. Hoyt at HAL. Is anyone reading me?”

  She frowned. The storm could have knocked out comms, but she doubted it. She looked down at the radio frequency to double check. Yup, she was on the right one. She clicked the knob over another spot. “Dugger? Glaze?”

  “Melanie!” a voice shouted back. “I’ve got the kid. But we are seriously fucked.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Keep your head, Glaze. Where’s Dugger?”

  “We’re heading back your way. Be there in a few. Melanie? We need to get the hell out of here and now.”

  She sighed. Maybe the crazy was contagious. “Report when you get here. And get Dugger back down here. We have—”

  “Dugger’s dead,” Glaze said.

  Hoyt’s mouth dropped open. “Just get here.” She flicked the radio switch again. “Control? This is Dr. Hoyt at HAL.”

  “Go ahead, Hoyt.”

  “We’ve lost communications with Ben Taub. Have they reported in?”

  “Negative, Hoyt. HPD is on the scene outside the building. Nothing’s moving.”

  “Get them in there and find out what’s going on.”

  The radio crackled with static. “We don’t have suits for them.”

  She growled into the mic. “Then get them suits! Get them in there and figure out what’s going on!”

  “What’s your situation, Hoyt?”

  “Glaze reports we have casualties. We’ll need more personnel in as soon as possible.”

  “Casualties? Do you have an outbreak situation?”

  Hoyt licked her lips. Her next words might condemn her team to staying in the building. “Unknown, Control. Will report back ASAP. Glazer will be reporting to me in a moment.”

  “Understood, Hoyt. Report situation as soon as possible. Control out.”

  She stared at Kate. “Dr. Glaze has your child. He’s heading here now.”

  A flush of color rose in Kate’s cheeks. Hoyt was actually glad about that. When they’d first entered the now broken quarantine area of the labs, all four scientists had looked as though they were in shock. Especially Kate and Jay. Those two looked like they’d seen a nightmare. Something in Hoyt’s stomach started to flutter. This was starting to seem a little too real.

  “Well?” Kate said. “What’s going on? How’s Marie?”

  Hoyt put her hands on her hips. “We’ve lost contact with the hospital.”

  Jay and Kate exchanged stares.

  “What?” Hoyt asked.

  Kate opened her mouth as the phone rang on the desk. She glared at Hoyt and then walked to the desk and punched the speakerphone button. “Bio-lab. This is Kate.”

  “Kate! Thank God!” Darren’s voice yelled through the speakers.

  A shiver of confusion rose up Hoyt’s back. “Mr. Strange? Aren’t you supposed to be in—”

  “Shut up, you twat! Kate! It was in Marie! It ate everything! People, plastic, oh Jesus, it ate everything but—”

  “Darren, slow down,” Kate said. “What are you talking about? What do you mean—”

  “Something burst out of her. Some kind of creature. Just all black goo and—” He started to cry. “It ate the doctors.”

  Kate put her hands on the table and leaned over. “Where are you, Darren?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We have to call the cops! We have to call somebody!” Something banged on the other end of the line. The entire room echoed with the tinny sounds of Darren sobbing.

  “Hello?” Kate said.

  The receiver crackled. “My name is Richard. Darren is at my house. Who is this?”

  Kate took a deep breath. “Hello, Richard. Can you keep him safe? And tell me where you are?”

  The man gave his address. Kate wrote it down on a slip of paper. “I think he needs a doctor,” Richard said. “I can take him to an ER. I’m right near the med center—”

  “Don’t go to the med center!” Kate yelled. “If he needs a doctor, take him to a 24-hour doc in the box. But make sure it’s away from the med center.”

  “Okay, lady. Okay. I get it.”

  Kate hissed through her teeth. “You have a cell number, Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the number, please.” Kate scribbled it down on a piece of paper. “Okay. Get him to the doctor. I’ll call you as soon as we can get someone to help you. And Richard? Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” the voice said.

  The speakerphone dropped to a dial tone. Kate hit a button and the speakers went silent. She looked at Hoyt. “You believe us now?”

  A beeping sound caught her attention. Hoyt turned and looked through the glass to the same door she and her team had come through. Glaze led a teenage girl into the hallway. She was barely walking on her own. Her hands gripped Glaze’s moon-suit.

  Kate looked up and saw her daughter. She sprinted toward the door.

  “No!” Hoyt yelled. “You’re in quarantine! You could infect—”

  Kate pushed her aside and headed into the hallway. The teenager dropped her hands and ran to her mother. They embraced. Hoyt heard sobbing, but wasn’t sure which of them was crying.

  “Glaze?”

  The man walked into the room. His eyes seemed vacant and dazed. “Yes, Mel.”

  “What happened to Dugger?”

  Glaze stared down at the floor. “It ate him. At least that’s what the kid says.”

  “Ate him?” She walked to Glaze and grabbed his shoulders. “John? What do you mean it ate him?” He didn’t respond. She shook him. “John! Snap out of it. What happened?”

  He blinked twice and then met her stare. “I saw it. Dugger took the elevator. I got things prepped in the foyer. I walked up the stairs and saw the girl.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I looked through the window in the fire door.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “John?” Hoyt’s voice dropped into a whisper. “What did you see?”

  His eyes flicked open again. What she saw in them was terror. “It. I saw it.”

  Chapter 6

  The rain was dying down, but he knew it was damned cold outside. At least for November. With the central heating set to 68°, the new building was normally comfortably cool, but the heater seemed to have stopped working. When he walked down to the second floor, the temperature must have dropped at least five degrees.

  Mike headed to the new NOC. If he found Chuckles there, they could gather some gear and get the hell over to building 1. If he didn’t, then it’d be up to him to try and find Chuckles. That could take some time. And Kate didn’t seem to think he had any.

  Her words played over and over in his mind. Some
thing was loose in the building. From the barrel? That made absolutely no sense. But he’d known Kate for nearly a decade. There was no way she’d say something like that unless it was true. He patted the Glock in his waistband just to make sure it was still there.

  As he walked toward the NOC, his eyes drifted up to the exposed ceiling. Some of the duct work hadn’t even been connected yet. No wonder the goddamned heating wasn’t working down here. Mike hissed a sigh and continued down the hallway. The fluorescent lights dispelled the darkness, but they somehow seemed less than bright. Maybe it was the fact at least a third of them were out. Or maybe it was the time of the morning. Didn’t matter.

  He reached the door to the new NOC and pulled his keycard from his front pocket. He flashed it in front of the sensor. It beeped, a green LED lit up, and the door clicked as the lock slid back. Mike pulled the door open and a wall of sound hit his ears.

  With the inner door still closed, the sound wasn’t ear-crushing, but it was still loud enough to be annoying. He peered into the NOC control center. Empty. Mike went in anyway. He checked the camera displays. The server room was blanketed in darkness. If he remembered correctly, the lights were supposed to go on if anyone walked in there, or if there was any motion. With the room in pitch black, it was obvious Chuckles wasn’t in there either.

  The security displays showed nothing but darkness. A monitor high on the wall displayed temperature and power readings of each rack. If they ever got the damned building finished, HAL would have the most advanced computational system in the chemical and bio-chem industries. His teams could couple nuclear magnetic resonance and scanning electron microscope analytics and model molecular structures faster than their largest competitors.

  Mike pulled a sheet of paper out from one of the log books. He scrawled a message on it telling whoever read it to head to the floor 1 foyer in the old building. He signed the piece of paper and left it on one of the consoles.

  With one last look at the server room’s impenetrable darkness, he turned to leave the room. He stopped in mid-stride and stared at the wall. Tool belts, filled with screw drivers, ratchet sets, and chip removers, hung from hooks. But that wasn’t what caught his attention.

  Several headbands with built in lights hung below them. He grabbed one of them and put it in his pocket. He took another, said a prayer that the gods of fashion never noticed this sleight, and put it on his head. He snapped the plastic switch on the top and a bright white cone of light hit the wall. He smiled.

  A few emergency flashlights were plugged into a power strip. He took one of those as well. He slid the heavy cylinder into his belt. He wondered how much more his pants could take before they simply slid down to his ankles.

  Mike walked out of the control room and headed back into the hallway. The door closed and locked behind him. The growl of the servers immediately disappeared.

  He made his way across the skybridge and then stopped. When he’d come down from his office on the third floor, he’d taken the stairwell that dropped him near the skybridge. He hadn’t paid attention to the rest of the floor. But he was now.

  The floor’s carpet was gone. Just gone. The sheetrock walls were ripped and burned. Wooden studs, metal fasteners, and piping were visible through the ragged holes.

  The old NOC was down the hall and to the left. He hoped Chuckles was still in there. If they could evacuate everyone to the first floor foyer, they could get the hell out of here before, well, before whatever did that came back.

  Mike looked up at the ceiling and stopped in mid-step. He fingered the Glock on his belt. Several of the ceiling tiles had disappeared. Exposed wires, pipes, and metal gleamed. “Fuck me,” Mike whispered.

  He moved to the wall and stepped past the holes in the ceiling. The rational part of him knew there was nothing up there, but the reptilian part of his brain refused to believe that.

  By the time he reached the door to the old NOC, he’d seen more destruction in the interconnecting halls: no carpet, holes in the walls, missing ceiling tiles, and broken fluorescent lights. Whatever roamed the building wasn’t screwing around.

  The area around the NOC, however, was untouched. That was strange to say the least. Mike pulled his badge again and swiped it across the card reader. It beeped and the door unlocked. Mike slowly pushed it open.

  The room was its usual dark cave. The server fans were loud as hell and Mike winced. There at the back of the room, dim lights bathing his workstation, Chuckles sat at his terminals. His displays were lit up with code and the output from monitoring software. His headphones were clamped on his skull.

  Mike moved so he was in view of the glass mirror attached to the wall. If Chuckles saw the movement, maybe he wouldn’t be startled. Mike continued walking to the workstation and stopped. Chuckles’ body stiffened. The head of network operations pulled off his headphones, placed them on the desk, and then slowly swiveled in his chair.

  His eyes were bloodshot and he looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. “What’s up, Mike?”

  Mike barely heard the words. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

  “You need to what?”

  “The CDC wants us to evacuate to the first floor foyer.”

  Chuckles blinked and stood from his chair. The left side of his face twitched. “Um, okay.”

  “Let’s— Wait, do you have any halogen flashlights?”

  Chuckles cocked an eyebrow. “Halogen lights?”

  “Yeah. Do you have any?”

  “Um, we should. More shit we were planning on recycling.” He left his desk and walked to the makeshift storage closet. He opened it. Coils of network cords, network cards, stacks of drives, both dead and new, stared back at him. Chuckles bent down, his cap staying put on his bald head, and pulled out a heavy cardboard box. He reached into it and brought out two small lights. “These should work,” he said. He clicked the power button of each and a strong cone of light flashed out. He nodded. “Perfect. Good batteries.” He turned to Mike and held them out. “You need these?”

  “More like we need them. You hang on to one. Give me the other.”

  Chuckles blinked and handed one of them to Mike. “We getting ready for a blackout or something?” Chuckles asked. “I have plenty of LED—”

  “LEDs won’t do it.” Mike lifted his phone from his pocket. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Why is the CDC—”

  “Let it go, man. We have to go.”

  Chuckles stood, closed the supply cabinet, and stared at Mike. “What the hell is going on?”

  Mike raised an eyebrow. “Please. We need to get out of here. Come on.”

  The tech straightened his cap and blew a sigh through his teeth. “Okay, boss.”

  Chuckles walked to the door, opened it, and stopped. “Did someone pull up the carpets? And what the hell is that smell?”

  Mike walked up behind him and peered over his shoulder. The carpet that had been intact when they entered the NOC was gone. “Oh, shit,” Mike said. He pulled the Glock from his waist. “Chuckles? I think we’re in trouble. Turn on your flashlight.”

  “What? Mike, this is bullshit. What’s—”

  “Shut the hell up,” Mike whispered. “Look, just do it. Turn on the flashlight, and keep it ready. If you see something moving, point your light at it. Okay?”

  Chuckles shrugged. “Fine. Where’s Kate’s team? Marie down there with them? I didn’t see them at their break.”

  Mike bit his lip. “Let’s talk about that when we get to the foyer, okay? Just believe me when I say we have a problem.”

  “Sure.” Chuckles sighed. “Lead on.”

  “Vamanos,” Mike said. With the pistol in his right hand, the emergency flashlight in his left, he stepped into the hallway.

  Chuckles was right about the smell. His nostrils singed with the stench of burned meat and something fetid. The skin at the back of his neck crawled with tension. His flashlight wasn’t very powerful, but the one Chuckles held was. The tight cone of bright white
light waved around the walls and cut through the fluorescent’s blue-white light.

  As they walked toward the emergency stairwell, the only sounds were of heavy breathing behind him, and the storm outside the building. Even the central heating’s soft hum seemed to have disappeared.

  With the carpet missing, their footsteps formed a strange clumping cadence. Mike winced with every step. Chuckles had obviously never learned how to walk in the woods. They were making too much noise. It, whatever It was, would no doubt hear them. And then—

  He felt silly. This had to be a joke. Or a misunderstanding. Or both. But the CDC call hadn’t been a joke. And neither had Kate’s.

  He continued walking, Chuckles’ stomping feet behind him. The red “EXIT” sign glowed at the end of the hall. As they walked, his eyes flicked upward to the ceiling. The fluorescents were still flicking on as they walked, but all they showed was the damage to the sheetrock, exposed plumbing and ductwork, and the all too clean concrete.

  The fire door shined beneath the overhead light mounted next to the “EXIT” sign. Mike gulped. Whatever was in the building, he hoped like hell it wasn’t behind that door. If it was, they were in big trouble.

  They came to a hallway intersection. Mike held up his hand and peered around the corner. The tile in front of the elevator bank was clean. The metal doors shined brighter than any steel he’d ever seen. Carpet on either side was gone as were entire sections of sheetrock. Pieces of metal were scattered across the floor. A zipper, buttons, and a smartphone stripped to the bone lay on the tile. Bits of wire connected to a metal disc stared back at him. Was that a headset?

  Mike ignored the elevator bank. They weren’t going that way. Just needed to get to the stairwell. Just needed to get there.

  He waved his hand forward and continued walking. Chuckles’ flashlight pointed up at the ceiling and Mike’s eyes followed the cone of light. Something up there moved. Or maybe it was his imagination. The tickle of nervous tension in his spine switched to a freezing shudder. His mind raced with scenes from horror movies. The thing in the ceiling. The serial killer behind the door. Mike’s feet moved faster. By the time he’d taken five steps, he was sprinting to the door.