Human.4

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Is there a point to this story?” Kate asked impatiently.

  “The point is that if you want to get in touch with a single person then you might send them a letter. An actual, physical, tangible piece of mail. But if you wanted to get in touch with everyone instantly—”

  “You’d do it digitally,” Lilly finished.

  Mr. Peterson nodded.

  “Electronically,” he said. “With computers.”

  “A digital invasion?” I mused. “What would that even be?”

  Mr. Peterson shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But mightn’t it look a little like today?”

  “Hang on a moment,” Kate said with horror. “Are we seriously still talking aliens here? I mean, come on, there has to be another, rational explanation.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” Mr. Peterson said.

  “I just can’t believe that we’re suddenly in a world where ‘aliens’ is the first place we’re looking for answers,” she said incredulously. “Not ‘we’re still hypnotized and all of this is just imaginary.’ Not ‘mass hysteria’ or ‘sunspot activity.’ Not a ‘virus’ or ‘something in the water.’ You know—the kind of answers that sound like they didn’t originate on Fringe or Doctor Who.”

  The only one of Kate O’Donnell’s explanations that held any water for me—that we were still in a trance and the whole thing was just a fantasy—was the very one that was impossible to prove or disprove. It was like the old question that the film The Matrix was based upon: how can you tell if you’re just a brain in a jar, experiencing a sophisticated virtual reality program that is flawless in its execution?

  The answer is: you can’t. So it actually doesn’t make much sense entertaining it. If we woke up and found out the day had just been a weird dream, then that would be great, but we couldn’t bank on it.

  And we certainly couldn’t close our minds to other answers in the hope that it was right, because we could …

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  The thought here is never returned to. Kyle must have finished the thought on the blank bit of tape. Ernest Merrivale sees the fact as proof that the tapes are all recorded one after the other, without breaks. He suggests that if there had been any break between each tape, Kyle would have rewound the tape to see what he had last said, and thus would have realized that the blank tape was cutting off his words. The error would never have been repeated.

  KYLE STRAKER’S LAST TAPE

  … going round and round in my head. My brain was making so much noise, but it was about time I started to put all of those thoughts to some good use.

  I tried to think about everything I had seen since waking from the trance on the stage, to find something that would point the way for us to move forwards.

  It was then that I remembered Mrs. Birnie.

  Proudly recording Danny’s act so that there would be a physical record of his appearance at the talent show.

  The video camera.

  She had been filming it all … So what had the video camera caught?

  CHAPTER 23

  Aware of the odd glances I was getting from the others, I rushed down onto the village green, hoping that Mrs. Birnie had done what most everyone else had—left behind the thing that she was carrying.

  It took a couple of minutes of looking around the area to find it, nestled in a discarded sweater. At first I thought that wishing too hard for the thing had made me imagine the flash of reflected sunlight, then I saw it again and headed straight to it.

  It was one of the new type of Canon camcorders, a thin slice of metal that concealed some pretty cool tech specs. It was the kind that no longer even needed a tape, working from memory cards and an internal hard drive.

  I held it in the air like I’d just won the FA Cup.

  Lilly, Kate, and Mr. Peterson were all staring at me as if I had just lost my mind.

  “Mrs. Birnie was filming it!” I shouted. “She was filming the whole thing!”

  They just kept staring, and I realized that they weren’t looking at me at all.

  They were looking behind me.

  I felt like a pantomime character who had suddenly been warned: “Behind you!” as I turned my head and stared back over my shoulder.

  Then I just felt sick.

  The whole village, it seemed, was moving in an unnaturally neat formation: utterly silent, perfectly organized, and heading down the High Street.

  Heading towards the village green.

  Heading towards us.

  CHAPTER 24

  It was like some kind of waking nightmare.

  The entire village was marching towards us silently.

  I moved nearer to the stage and to the people there who were, I was certain, the only people I could trust; the only people I could rely on now.

  We put up our hands and volunteered to be a part of Danny’s act, and from that moment on we were set along a different path from the rest of the people of Millgrove.

  Call it “chance,” “fate,” “karma” or “luck,” the end result was the same.

  We were screwed.

  Royally screwed.

  I counted the front row of people approaching and there was a straight line of twenty. With twenty behind them. And twenty behind them. Keep repeating until you reach a thousand.

  They came across the green towards us, perfectly synchronized.

  I recognized every face. People I loved. People I just said hi to. People I didn’t like but still managed a smile when I saw them. People I’d done odd jobs for to raise extra pocket money. People I had bought things from. People who had taught me. People I had played with.

  I had an impulse to run, to turn and flee, just like Lilly and I had done earlier, but there was another part of me that was tired and scared and just wanted to know what was going on.

  Then I wanted it to end.

  If that meant aliens were going to take over my mind too then, actually, so be it.

  I just couldn’t take it anymore. Whatever the crowd wanted of me, I think I was probably prepared to give it to them.

  In that moment I had given up.

  The crowd was close now. Very close, moving towards us like a single entity, like flocking birds or marching army ants.

  Still silent.

  And in the front row was my mother; my father; my brother; Dr. Campbell; Mr. and Mrs. Dartington; Simon; Mrs. Carlton, the local busybody; Len Waites, the butcher; Eddie Crichton, who’d never got to hand out a prize at the talent show; Mr. and Mrs. Parnese, who had a stall selling mobile phone accessories on Cambridge Market; Laura Jones, who was a year behind me at school; Peter Parker, who was a librarian, not Spider-Man; a red-faced man I knew by sight, but not by name; Barry and Dennis Geary, the nearest thing to bad boys you got in Millgrove; Karl Raines, the best soccer player at our school; Ellie What’s-her-name, barmaid at the Blue Nun in Crowley; some bloke that is always hanging around her like a faithful puppy.

  They stopped about three meters away from us.

  Perfectly in sync.

  Perfectly silent.

  They were looking at us, and they were looking through us, at the same time. A thousand people in a block.

  Lilly took hold of my hand and her palm was cold, her hand was shaking. I held it tight and drew strength from that simple gesture.

  We stood there together, facing the crowd, waiting for them to make their move.

  CHAPTER 25

  Kate O’Donnell took a step forwards.

  “What do you want from us?” she demanded.

  There was no answer. The crowd just stood there. It was almost as if they had been frozen again.

  “They’re not even blinking,” Lilly whispered.

  It was true.

  They weren’t blinking. Or breathing, it seemed. They weren’t moving at all.

  “What do you want?” Kate screamed this time. She looked red-faced and terrified.

  Again, nothing.

  The crowd seemed to be ignoring us.

/>   They were just standing there.

  Kate jumped from the stage and homed in on Dr. Campbell.

  “All right, you idiot quack,” she said spitefully. “Tell me what the hell is going on!”

  She put her face just centimeters from the doctor’s face and screamed, “Tell me!”

  She was so close that he must have felt her words on his face.

  But he didn’t appear to flinch.

  Kate let out a sound of frustration and sank to her knees, like all the air had been let out of her. I could hear her sobbing. I even felt like joining her. Lilly’s hand tightened its grip on mine, and her fingernails bit into the meat of my palm.

  Then I heard it.

  A low sound that could have been the thrum of an electrical power source, except it seemed to be coming from the crowd of people in front of us. I realized it had been building for a while, but that I had only just become aware of it. It was a deep throbbing sound I could feel throughout my body.

  I was vibrating along with the noise.

  I felt on the very brink of panic, and still the sound continued to develop, getting louder and deeper and making my body vibrate even more, like the heavy bass you get at a rock concert when the PA is really kicking.

  Lilly let go of my hand and put her hands up to cover her ears.

  “What is that?” she said loudly to compete with the sound that was rising up around us.

  The crowd still didn’t move.

  They just stood there.

  “My God.” Kate’s voice was quiet and full of fear. “Look.”

  She was still on her knees, and she was staring at Dr. Campbell in front of her. I looked over but couldn’t see what she meant.

  “His hands!” she said. “Oh, God, look at his hands!”

  I thought she had lost her mind.

  And then I looked at Dr. Campbell’s hands.

  And then I thought maybe I had lost mine.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Kyle pauses here and creates a silence that lasts almost a whole minute. Sounds of breathing can be discerned, but nothing else.

  Bernadette Luce has written much about this pause. In “The Importance of What Isn’t There: Finding Truth in the Gaps,” she hypothesizes about the reason for this pause, deciding, after a particularly long discourse, that “(T)his is the moment where the power of silence overtakes the weakness of language. Kyle Straker, with his silence, tells us all we need to know about this part of the greater narrative. That it is beyond words, it transcends language, and the gap he leaves as he attempts to find a way to describe what happens next are a silent scream that we hear echoing through the rest of the tape. Gaps always provide a good environment for the manufacture of echoes.”

  The fact that Kyle then manages to describe what he saw when he looked at Dr. Campbell’s hands seems to be ignored by Luce.

  CHAPTER 26

  At first I thought it was a trick of the light.

  With the sun starting its climb down from its high point in the sky towards a resting place on the horizon, it could have been the result of light and shadow across his skin.

  But it was nothing to do with the light, and all to do with the physical appearance of the doctor’s hands. The skin of his hands was shifting, as if moved by ripples across its surface, or currents below. It was like the skin itself had suddenly become capable of moving, and it wasn’t using muscles to do it, it was doing it itself.

  As I watched in a horrified fascination, a sudden rush of tiny bumps spread across his skin like a rash. It looked a little like gooseflesh, and before long there were thousands of the bumps covering his skin.

  Each bump was crowned with a tiny black dot.

  The doctor didn’t seem to notice, he just stood there, utterly still while the rash seemed to harden upon the surface of his skin and then, suddenly, began to disgorge thin, whiplike threads from each of the bumps. Skin-colored and minutely thin, these threads sprayed out of the dot at the center of each bump, like water under pressure, or pink Silly String from a can. Each thread, or filament, was ten to fifteen centimeters long, and seemed able to support itself, standing out from his flesh like thin, hard fibers.

  The filaments began to stretch, pulling themselves farther from the bumps that housed them, adding twenty centimeters to their length with every second that passed.

  The bass vibration deepened again in the air around us.

  The filaments on the doctor’s left hand were reaching out towards the person next to him.

  My dad.

  The fibers were moving towards my dad’s hand and I had an urge to swat at them, to keep them away from him, to stop them touching him.

  Except I didn’t want them touching me.

  And then it was too late.

  The filaments seemed to sense their proximity to Dad’s hand and homed straight in on it, flailing at the back of his hand and then sticking to it. Where each filament touched, a bump appeared, identical to the bumps that had spread across the doctor’s own skin.

  The pores of the bumps opened to accept the filaments, before sucking them inside and sealing themselves closed.

  The doctor’s hand was now linked to my dad’s hand by hundreds—maybe thousands—of flesh-colored threads.

  The bass sound ceased abruptly.

  “What are they doing?” Lilly asked with disgust in her voice.

  “They’re mutating,” Kate O’Donnell said.

  I shook my head.

  Things started coming together in my head.

  Digital code. Data. Computer code as a means of invasion. Thin flesh-colored threads. Fiber-optic cables.

  “Not mutating,” I said. “Connecting.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Three simple words.

  “Not mutating. Connecting.”

  The keys that started unlocking the puzzle.

  Of course it wasn’t until we reached the barn that it all came together…. But now I’m doing what I have been avoiding: I’m getting ahead of myself.

  It’s all starting to blur together, and the pieces are starting to bleed in over other pieces. I have to keep it together.

  So you’ll know.

  So you’ll understand.

  CHAPTER 28

  When things start moving, they can really start moving.

  We were still reacting to the bizarre sight of the doctor and my dad connecting when suddenly everyone in the crowd was at it.

  Filaments began spreading from person to person, to the right, to the left, behind and in front, connecting the crowd into a vast network, bound together by those unnatural fibers.

  As a group we stepped back, edging away from the sight before us.

  Dr. Campbell was blinking in a definite pattern of blinks—two quick, one slow, three very quick indeed, two slow, then a lot of fluttering blinks, then the whole pattern repeated again—and every member of the crowd did exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Connected by those terrible fleshy fibers, the crowd was now utterly in sync.

  We turned and walked away from them.

  I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t even look back.

  No one followed.

  We headed out of the village, along the High Street. We were driven by an impulse to get as far away from the village green as we could, and it was a few minutes before any of us managed to speak.

  So we carried on, along the road that led out to Crowley, and eventually on to Cambridge.

  Finally, as pavement faded out to grass verge beneath our feet, Kate O’Donnell managed to speak.

  “We’re nothing to them,” she said helplessly. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Then we’ll get help,” Mr. Peterson told her. “The police. The army. Someone.”

  “That’s if there’s anyone left,” Lilly said. “What if it’s not just Millgrove? What if it’s Crowley? And Cambridge? And London? Paris? New York? What if it’s everybody? Who’s going to help us then?”

  On either side of us spread the countryside
, with fields and trees and hedges. It seemed too ordinary, too normal, for anything to be truly wrong.

  Birds sang in the trees and swooped across the landscape.

  Grasshoppers and crickets leapt from the grass as we passed.

  It all looked so peaceful, so tranquil, so safe.

  But the road was quieter than I had ever seen it, and that made the stillness seem artificial, sinister. There were no cars driving in from Crowley, or Cambridge, or from anywhere at all. Perhaps the thing we were fleeing was widespread.

  But still we walked.

  There was nothing else to do.

  The sky was reddening on the horizon as the sun sank in the sky, setting the clouds on fire as it went, and we walked towards that horizon.

  CHAPTER 29

  Twin towers pulled me out of my downward mental spiral.

  I saw them silhouetted against the bloodied sky and stopped dead in my tracks. Lots of things suddenly collided inside my head, adding up, making some weird kind of sense.

  Old man Naylor’s grain silos.

  A couple of hundred meters away.

  Lilly stopped next to me and followed my gaze. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face, lined by the red of the setting sun.

  “Isn’t that where …?” she asked, trailing off to avoid having to finish the sentence with the science-fiction stuff she hated.

  I nodded.

  “UFO central,” I said.

  “But Robbie Knox and Sally Baker made that story up to get attention,” Lilly said. She paused and then asked, “Didn’t they?”

  I shrugged.

  Yes, they probably did just make it up.

  They said they saw bright lights hovering over one of the silos. Not helicopters. Not planes.

  Everyone said that they weren’t the type to make up a story like that, but Simon and I had seen the way it had made them minor celebrities among their peers.