by James King
“Very good, sir, we’ll send a fire engine out to you. We advise that you keep well back from the scene of the accident, but remain on hand for when the fire service arrives. Please could you repeat your name again sir...? Sir...? Sir, are you still there please sir..?”
Matt was still there. But, in that moment, Matt was quite unable to speak. He was also unable to move, or, it seemed, unable even to breathe. Because, in that moment, he had seen movement from within the flames.
Somebody was crawling out of the helicopter.
“Sir..?” the voice persisted in his ear, “...please, I need you to be able to verify that...”
The voice went on and on, a wasp caught in a jam jar, and its furious buzzing was every bit as meaningless. Matt’s eyes remained clamped upon the movement that he had thought – that he was sure – and yet did not believe he was seeing. No one could be alive within that inferno. It was impossible, and yet, from out of that wreathe of flame there suddenly clutched a blackened, smoking hand.
Suddenly, from somewhere, Matt found his voice. He whispered, more to himself than for the benefit of the man on the other end of his phone, “...oh my God, there are survivors...” and then let his hand fall from the side of his face. Dimly, he was aware that the phone had slipped out of his hand, that it had fallen into the barley at his feet. The phone had cost him fifty quid, and had been one of his prize possessions. Now, it fell from his hand as nonchalantly as if it had been a blade of grass. Once again, the world had become unreal for him, time had slowed.
The hand clutched outward at the blazing barley. It gripped a sheaf, the flames blazing through its fingers, but it seeming not too feel it. The fingers themselves were blackened corroded stumps, more the fingers of a skeleton than of a living man – and an incinerated skeleton at that. It scrabbled on the ground for a moment, then clawed outward, grasped the ground, and pulled. Gradually, inch by inch, the hand pulled itself along the ground, while behind it, hunching, hulking, blazing, the body that it was attached to emerged from the flames.
The man lay smoking on the ground for a moment. Flames leaped up from his back, from his arms, and from his legs. His head was on fire too, and from the back it looked like a melted lump of tar, a combination of incinerated hair and flesh fizzing and bubbling in the monstrous heat. It’s one hand and arm was flung out before it, and Matt saw why it was only using one hand to pull itself with. The other arm was gone, leaving only a blackened stump that was smoking, raw, like badly charred meat on a barbecue in hell.
Slowly, agonisingly, using his one arm, the man pushed himself up from the ground. A long runner of black drool poured downward from his face, pooling into the surrounding barley. Matt had not seen the man’s face yet. He didn’t want to see the man’s face either. He did not want to gaze upon the face of this smoking, blackened, burning impossibility. The black drool dribbled downward, a seemingly unending stream, and, when it hit the ground, it seemed to stream quickly away, as though it were some dark form of mercury.
Agonisingly, the man got his legs beneath him. He wore blackened jeans, and there was a hole in the knee, the knee pocking through that was seared of flesh. Slowly, the man stood, tottering, hesitant, an infant taking its first uncertain steps. Its head was still lowered though, as though it could not make the neck muscles work. Then they worked, and it raised its head. And Matt found himself staring into the face of a thing that had ended all pretence of being a man, and now had the aspect of a devil.
The eyes were gone. That was the first thing that Matt noticed. The sockets of the skull were not empty however. Instead, they contained a seething, boiling black substance, doubtless the same that had drooled from the man’s face into the corn a moment ago. The substance wept down the man’s seared cheeks in midnight tears, pouring from his fractured jaw bone and down onto his flaming shirt. The lips were gone, burned away, and the blackened teeth grinned merrily from the devastation, as though the thing was enjoying the hellish joke that had been played upon it. The flesh of the face was burned away almost to the bone, while atop the head was not hair but instead a blazing halo of fire.
More movement from the helicopter. Another figure crawling out of the inferno inch by painful inch. This one seemed even more devastated than the first, its jaw having been completed ripped away leaving a slobbering, gibbering hole. Incredibly though, one eye was still intact, and it rolled madly toward Matt, pinning him with its dead, and yet somehow knowing stare.
It was impossible that these things could still be alive. No living organism could survive such devastation. And yet here they were, tottering, crawling, their corroded muscles writhing beneath their blackened flesh, enervated by some impossible force.
The first figure slowly opened its jaw. A low, long, mewling sound issued from it, a tormented baying like a soul that had been drawn from Hell. Suddenly, it seemed as though it sensed Matt, because it stumbled forward, its skeletal hands outstretched, clutching, grasping, blindly groping. Its mouth opened wider, and Matt saw something drooling from its mouth. Not the black substance, but a clear, stringy gloop that hung in strands from its ravaged jaws. Matt thought that he knew what that substance was, and knew that, given the devastation that had been wreaked on the man, it was impossible, but then... was there anything possible about any of this?
The translucent substance that hung from the creature’s jaws was saliva.
It was hungry.
A sudden movement on the ground at his feet. The black substance had reached him, and it pooled around his shoes in a dark and languid tide.
And this realisation was enough to at last break Matt’s paralysis. Like a deer that suddenly realises a tiger is close at hand, he was running. Fast. Desperate. Flying across the ground as breakneck speed. He didn’t know where he was headed. He didn’t care where he was headed. All rational thought had been burned from his mind, and he had become a creature of nerve endings, a simple organism that sought its own survival, his higher reasoning shut down as his body and brain sought to transport oxygen to blood and blood to muscle at lightning speed, while adrenalin washed its sickening tsunami through his system.
Matt Dixon ran onward, away from the scorched, impossible monsters, away from the hell fire of the helicopter, away from the stench of burning aviation fuel and roasted human flesh, onward, across the golden acres of the yellow summer cornfield.
Four
Doctor Christian Morrell sat at his work bench in the laboratory at the Raddex Head Quarters and thought about life and death. He thought about the hundred or more mice, frogs, rats and invertebrates that he had revivified using the Necrovirus. Dead one minute, alive the next. Staggering, writhing, snapping, and maddened, but still – alive. Through decades of research, he had formulated the ultimate elixir, just as the Necromancers of old had searched that elixir for long and in vain. And he Doctor Christian Morrell, was a modern Necromancer, a raiser of the dead and a gleaner of the mysteries of life and the soul – him – who had wrought this miracle! He should have been lauded to the skies, heaped with garlands, bestowed the highest trophies that the scientific discipline could be attributed. The Nobel prize at least. But...
He remembered that night, several weeks gone now. The corpse of the prisoner, the chemical injected into the eyeball, the ultimate triumph of human revivification wrought before their amazed eyes. No longer the stuff of penny dreadful fiction and horror movies, but a fact of cold, hard science.
And it was he who had wrought it. Him!
And then he thought about Richard Gudrie. Richard bloody Gudrie with his gun and his outraged morals. Pah! Guns and outraged morals were fatal to the progress of science. That they should have been present in the same room as the very scientific discovery of the age was a stroke of misfortune that was almost too heavy to bear.
Richard bloody Gudrie...
Morrell’s hands were laid before him on the workbench, and now they formed into fists. He pounded them downward upon the surface, as his rage once again overcame him
. Morrell was a big man, heavy set, and the table shuddered beneath the onslaught. Then the moment of rage abated, he glanced upward, and his gaze happened to fall on a nearby mirror. His shoulders were huge beneath their white lab coat, the head that surmounted them huge too, topped with a large fluff of popcorn-blond frizzy hair. Heavy glasses were mounted on his face, and the eyes behind them were pale, blue, and as cold as a refrigerated corpse. The kind of eyes that might have gazed upon the experiments of Clauberg or Mengele and been unmoved by anything - save for the scientific possibilities they offered.
Suddenly, the intercom buzzed. Morrell was jolted out of self regard, and once again irritation seethed through him. He had told his secretary that he was not to be disturbed, and now here she was, damn the woman, destroying his calm with her little bitty intercom switch. Mrs Sanders. That was the secretary’s name. He had a sudden vision of her lying as a corpse on a laboratory table, cold and pale, her eyes open and glassy, as he drew a scalpel down her frigid flesh. Releasing dead blood.
Grinning, Morrell stabbed viciously with his finger at the intercom switch.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Felix is here to see you, Doctor.”
Felix! Ah, things were just going from bad to worse today. Of all people, he did not want to see Felix. More stress, more anguish, more argument. Felix had taken the cancellation of the Necrovirus project very hard. Indeed, it had pushed him close to psychosis, and Morrell had been obliged to administer certain drugs to prevent the boy from going on an all-out rampage. The worse had been averted, but still Felix hovered very close to the edge of... well... the edge of what was normal, shall we say. For a moment, Morrell was gripped with the desire to tell Mrs Sanders to send Felix away – but in the end, he couldn’t do it. Come what may, despite all, Doctor Morrell was unable to deny his own son.
“Doctor Morrell?” Mrs Sanderson was wittering in the intercom, “Doctor Morrell, would you like me to send Felix in?”
“Yes – yes, damn it yes. Send the boy in. But tell him that I won’t be able to see him for long!”
Savagely, Morrell disconnected the intercom. Then he sat back, ran his hands through his frizzy hair, and uttered a profound sigh. He tried to imagine Mrs Sanders telling Felix that his father would only see him for a short time, and found that he couldn’t. There were few people indeed who were able to say no to Felix. There were few people who could do anything with Felix. Not even the boy’s mother had been able to have much of an influence, as her death attested to, (ah, and let’s not start thinking about that!) These days, it was only Morrell who was able to control Felix – and then only with the use of drugs.
A knock at the laboratory door. The knock was thin, hollow somehow. It was easy to imagine a skeleton administering that knock.
“Yes, damn it, come in,” Morrell barked testily.
The door opened, and Felix Morrell stepped through it. Felix was a man of twenty three years of age. He was over six foot tall, and pale to the point of emaciation. His hair was black, (he definitely took after his mother in that department), and swept back from his forehead in a slick and greasy plume. A thin goatee beard hovered on his chin, cut to a point, and a thin mandarin-style moustache touched his upper lip. His eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and glittered there like deadly insects that might strike out at any second with poisonous spite. He was dressed in a sober blue suit and tie, a pale flower tucked in the button hole. It looked like a funeral parlour lily.
Standing there in the darkened laboratory, his thin pale flesh cut by shadows, his own shadow huge on the laboratory wall, Felix Morrell looked not unlike a vampire recently risen from its tomb and keen for the blood of the living.
“Father...” he said.
Felix’s voice was soft, light, delicate. Perhaps slightly spaced out? Yes, probably so. Morrell wasn’t administering him drugs at the moment, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the youth had found his own supplies. He didn’t need to search for puncture wounds on the young man’s arms to figure that much out.
“What the hell do you want?” Morrell asked at last.
“To see you...” Felix returned.
“Well, now you’ve seen me...” Morrell returned. He was on the verge of saying so go away... but couldn’t quite do it. Ah, blood... blood thicker than water... maybe Felix was a vampire of sorts, one that dined only on the blood of his kin.
Felix smiled, as though he had read all of these thoughts upon his father’s face, and was amused by them. Maybe even approved.
“Father...” he admonished, “thou shalt not forsake thy son,” and then he tittered, a sound that was high and delighted and as cruel as a needle inserted into an eye.
“Why not get to the point, Felix. I’m guessing that you didn’t just come here to pass the time of day. So spit it out. What do you want?
A serious expression fell across Felix Morrell’s face, and a brief look of rage. Had anyone else spoken to him like that then he might have attacked them. But not his father. He still had sufficient restraint where his own kin was concerned. And he knew where the money came from, so he quelled his look of rage, biting it down like the bitterest dish. Morrell took satisfaction that his son was in at least that much awe of him.
“The Necrovirus...” Felix said at last, allowing his voice to trail away into the shadows.
Morrell sighed, fetching air from deep within the chambers of his dark breast, “not this again, Felix. I thought that we’d settled this issue once and for all.”
“You thought that,” Felix spat back, his voice cold, hard, a dagger of hate, “you thought that, but did anyone else?”
Morrell allowed the thinnest, most humourless smile to settle on his lips. That last utterance was typical of Felix. By “anyone else”, Felix of course meant himself. Like most psychopaths, Felix thought that he was the world.
“What’s so funny?” Felix asked.
“Nothing...” Morrell returned, his voice dark, heavy, tired, “...there is very little indeed that is remotely amusing these days. But the Necrovirus – if we must indeed speak of it for the millionth time – is a thing of the past now. It’s something that you must just learn to accept. Gudrie has pulled the funding on it, and - ,”
“Gudrie,” said Felix, contempt in his voice. He swung away from his father and paced across to the other side of the laboratory. There seemed to be no purpose in his journey, other than to jettison the sudden energy of anger and hate that had been sparked within him. He paused by a row of test tubes, gazing down at them, their glass tubes twinkling in the fluorescent light. “Gudrie...” Felix said again, his voice calmer now, more considering, “...damn the man to hell. Why did he even agree to funding the project if he didn’t have the guts to go through with it?”
“You know why perfectly well, Felix,” Morrell returned, “it was all a part of the deal that he and I did. He would acquire my scientific expertise if he agreed to certain pet projects of my own. He was actually quite enthusiastic when I told him about the Necrovirus project. Raising the dead, revivifying the inanimate – who wouldn’t be compelled by that?”
“So why did he pull the funding, then?” Felix asked. He reached down and plucked one of the test tubes from the rack, and began turning it, slowly, reflectively in his fingers. Morrell stirred uneasily as he remembered what that test tube contained.
“You know why,” Morrell said at last, “Gudrie isn’t a scientist. And like most non-scientists, he allows emotion and sentiment to cloud his judgement.”
“So couldn’t we- ah- uncloud it?”
Morrell stirred uneasily again. He didn’t like the direction that this conversation was heading in at all. It seemed as though Felix might be considering some kind of positive action, some act of protest and rebellion, and when that happened, the results were usually dire. Morrell decided that it was time to end this conversation, to try and diffuse whatever bomb was ticking away inside his son’s skull. And then maybe offer him a draught of morphine. Felix didn’t usuall
y say no to that.
“Gudrie has made his decision,” Morrell said at last, “nothing that you or I say or do is going to change his mind. You know what the man is like. Stubborn, strong-willed, or pig-headed if you want to be less charitable. After all, you don’t become the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company by bending to each wind that blows. The Necrovirus project is at an end and that is that.”
“Father...” said Felix, and now there was a note of menace, a sound of threat that had previously been absent, “...you are too easily persuaded. It’s as if Gudrie has you on a leash, and you follow wherever he goes. His little pet scientist...”
“Why, how dare you - ,”
“I think it’s time we stood up for ourselves, we scientists, that we stopped being pushed around by these damned money men with their large wallets and small imaginations. Time we staged some act of protest or rebellion...”
For a moment, the breath caught in Morrell’s throat. Felix had used the very words that he, Morrell, had thought about a moment before. Was father-son telepathy possible? Maybe. Anything seemed possible where Felix was concerned.
“This test tube for example...” said Felix, holding the said item up and twirling it in his fingers, the light from the overhead fluorescent glinting on its glass, “I could go down to Gudrie’s office now, threaten to throw this on the ground, break it, spread what it contains to the four winds... Do you think that our man would be able to find money then for our project? I think that he probably would.”
“For God’s sake, Felix, don’t mess about with that thing,” said Morrell, his eyes fixed on the glass tube that twirled and glinted in his son’s fingers, “you do know what it contains, don’t you?”
Felix smiled, “of course I know what it contains. Typhus bacilli. Your new project. The one that Gudrie is happy enough to fork out his money for. Well, you need a test subject don’t you? Something to see if the new vaccine you’re developing will work. Why not make Mr Gudrie your lab mouse...?”