Spore

by Alex Scarrow

  SPORE

  Alex Scarrow

  PUFFIN

  Contents

  About Alex Scarrow

  Books by Alex Scarrow

  SPORE

  About Alex Scarrow

  Alex Scarrow used to be a graphic artist, then he decided to be a computer-games designer. Finally, he grew up and became an author. He has written a number of successful thrillers and several screenplays, but it’s YA fiction that has allowed him to really have fun with the ideas and concepts he was playing around with when designing games.

  He lives in Norwich with his son, Jacob, his wife, Frances, and his Jack Russell, Max.

  Find out more about Alex at www.alexscarrow.co.uk and www.time-riders.co.uk

  Books By Alex Scarrow

  The TimeRiders series

  TimeRiders

  TimeRiders: Day of the Predator

  TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code

  TimeRiders: The Eternal War

  TimeRiders: Gates of Rome

  TimeRiders: City of Shadows

  TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings

  TimeRiders: The Mayan Prophecy

  1

  The Doctor opened the TARDIS door and stepped out into the warm desert night. A gentle breeze stirred the dusty ground at his feet. The only sound was the cheep-cheep-cheep of nearby cicadas.

  That and the distant crackle of walkie-talkies, and the rumble and stutter of diesel engines idling.

  ‘This looks familiar,’ he muttered softly. The Nevada Desert, United States of America. He’d visited here before, not so far away and not so very long ago. 1947, wasn’t it? Place called Roswell if memory served him. He grinned in the dark.

  Now that was fun.

  He wondered if he ought to have another go at fixing the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit some time. Sitting out in the middle of the desert, it was going to look somewhat incongruous. Mind you, it was night and he’d put down several hundred metres from the highway. Probably no one was going to spot it out here. In the dark it would look like the stunted hump of yet another Joshua tree.

  The Doctor closed and locked the door behind him and then strode out across the dry packed earth towards the army trucks parked half a kilometre away, gathered on the gravel shoulder of the dust-and-grit highway.

  Closer now, he could hear the unsteady voices of frightened men, muffled by the thick rubber seals of oxygen masks. The night was dense with the crackles and beeps, and the garbled voices and sentence fragments of to-and-fro radio traffic. Floodlights picked out a weatherworn roadside billboard and, nearby, an abandoned gas station, the windows boarded up, the forecourt tufted with weeds. A sign beside the entrance read: Tired? Why Not Take a Break in Fort Casey? The Friendliest Welcome Outside of Home!

  The Doctor nodded. Fort Casey. This was where the probe he’d been tracking must have touched down.

  He had almost reached the cluster of army vehicles before someone actually spotted him emerging from the dark.

  ‘Hey!’ A muffled voice barked out at him. ‘YOU THERE! STOP!’

  The dazzling beam of a torch settled on his face. The Doctor squinted and shaded his eyes.

  ‘Stop right there!’ The muffled voice sounded young. Very young. And very frightened. ‘Raise your hands!’

  ‘Tsk, tsk,’ chided the Doctor. ‘Raise your hands … please!’

  ‘Shut up and show me your hands!’

  The Doctor raised them. ‘Charming.’

  The soldier spoke into his radio. ‘Major Platt? Got a civilian here … Just came out of the dark, sir … Infected? Don’t think so, sir.’

  The Doctor could discern the outline of the young soldier against the glare of his torch: cloaked in a biohazard suit, an oxygen cylinder on his back, an assault rifle wavering uncertainly in his gloved hands. Another man joined him a moment later.

  ‘You!’ A deeper, more commanding voice this time. ‘Where’ve you come from?’

  The Doctor smiled. ‘I’m not from round here.’

  ‘Have you come from the town, sir?’

  ‘Fort Casey, I presume?’

  ‘Yes. Have you been in direct contact with anyone from Fort Casey?’

  ‘No. I’ve only just come down.’

  A pause. ‘From Atlanta? You one of the team from the CDC?’

  The Doctor found himself nodding. The major did seem to want that to be the case rather badly so he decided to give the man what he wanted to hear. ‘Actually, yes … yes, I am.’

  ‘About time! We’d better get you suited up and briefed.’

  ‘Suited up?’ The Doctor clucked his tongue. ‘Really? Is that entirely necessary?’

  Major Platt didn’t seem to be in the mood for flippancy. ‘Follow me to the command tent, I’ll give you the sit-rep.’

  ‘The last logged communication from the town was seventeen hours ago: a 911 call for an ambulance. The caller only managed to say …’ The major flipped through a pad of paper on his desk. He was all buzz-cut silver hair and lean, tanned face like chiselled sandstone. Marines all the way. Booyah. He read what was scribbled down on the page in front of him. ‘They’re all dead … everyone’s dead, flesh turned to liquid. It moves … There are things! Moving things! They’re alive …’ Major Platt looked up at the Doctor. ‘The caller became incoherent after that and disconnected shortly after.’

  The Doctor drummed his fingers thoughtfully against the top of the aluminium folding-table between them. ‘Hmm … That really doesn’t sound very good.’

  The command tent was an airtight bubble of thick plastic, lit from within by several halogen stand lamps. The major had removed his mask and biohazard suit and now stared at the Doctor curiously. His Edwardian morning jacket, waistcoat and cravat seemed particularly to be drawing the major’s gaze.

  ‘I was at the opera,’ the Doctor explained, ‘when my phone went off.’

  The major waved that aside. ‘It appears the pathogen isn’t airborne, but we can’t be a hundred per cent sure of that. We have all entry/exit routes from the town locked down. It appears this thing, whatever it is, infects and kills very quickly.’

  ‘Which is probably a rather good thing.’

  Platt’s grey brow furrowed.

  ‘Quick to kill, Major, means we don’t have to worry about an infected carrier straying too far away from the town.’ The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘You said you sent some of your troops in?’

  He nodded. ‘Four hours ago. We’ve not heard from them in over three.’

  ‘What was the last thing you did hear?’

  The major shook his head. ‘Garbled transmission. Made no sense to me.’

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘Something about webs everywhere. Webs all over the town.’ The major squinted his grey eyes. ‘Webs? Everyone turned to liquid! You got any idea what on earth we’re dealing with?’

  The Doctor had a pretty good idea. But it was just that: an idea. A suspicion. He needed to know for sure. ‘You’re right. It’s not an airborne infection, Major. At least, not yet.’

  ‘You telling me you know what this is?’

  The Doctor nodded slowly. ‘I’ve come across it before, yes.’

  ‘You got a name for it?’

  ‘A nightmare.’ The Doctor thumbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘If it’s the pathogen I think it is, it will spread quickly. There are no species barriers. It can be carried and transmitted by any creature – anything organic, in fact.’

  ‘That’s impossible! No pathogen can do that!’

  ‘Within seventy hours of touchdown, this thing will become uncontainable. Within a month …’ The Doctor shook his head slowly. No words needed there.

  The major’s eyes narrowed. ‘You sure you’re from the Atlanta Centers of Disease Control? Because you sure ain’t like the usual pencil-neck swab-heads down th
ere.’

  ‘Ahh … you have me, Major,’ the Doctor said with a smile. ‘I lied.’

  Major Platt bristled. ‘Then you’d better tell me right now who sent you.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of the organisation, Major. Its name gets whispered every now and then in dark government corners.’

  ‘Who are you with?’

  ‘UNIT.’

  The major’s face paled. ‘UNIT?’

  The Unified Intelligence Taskforce; it operated off the radar and off the balance sheet for a number of the world’s governments. The Doctor had worked with UNIT before. While the average man in the street might not have heard of it, Major Platt most certainly would have, unless he had kept his head stuck firmly in the sand for all of his military career.

  ‘Good. It seems you are acquainted with it.’ The Doctor pushed himself back from the table. ‘That’s excellent. It will save us wasting valuable time, me explaining the situation to you.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t need much … just that you need to let me go in.’

  ‘Impossible! Class five containment protocol – nobody else goes in, nobody comes out!’

  ‘UNIT has the final say here, I believe. Not the army. And since I’m their man-on-the-spot … I think that makes me the one in charge here.’

  Major Platt’s eyes narrowed. ‘I received no notification that my authority –’

  ‘Major, every second we spend here, sitting in your lovely shiny tent, is a second we simply can’t afford to waste. This pathogen will become airborne very soon.’ The Doctor smiled sadly. ‘Then all your roadblocks, all your men in their amusing rubber suits, will simply be … an irrelevance.’

  2

  The Doctor made his way through the barrier laid out across the single-track road leading into the town. Floodlights cast his shadow long and thin down the empty, pitted tarmac towards the dark outline of the blink-and-you’d-miss-it town in the distance.

  He began to walk forward – hampered, clumsy and hot inside the heavy suit. The earpiece in his hood crackled with Major Platt’s voice.

  ‘UNIT have just confirmed your identity … Doctor.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘“The Doctor”. That’s, uh … that’s all they called you. Do you have a name, sir?’

  The Doctor smiled at that. He’d had a name once, long ago. Nine hundred years ago. So many memories in his head, many of them the memories of his previous incarnations, almost like someone else’s – memories so faded and indistinct they were barely the whispers of ghosts.

  ‘Just “the Doctor”. That’s all you need to call me.’

  ‘The Doctor, huh?’ The earpiece hissed, the channel still open. ‘Fine.’ Major Platt didn’t sound entirely convinced. ‘Well, you keep the comms channel open, OK, Doctor?’

  The Doctor had no intention of doing that. ‘Yes, of course.’

  Ten minutes later, the Doctor reached the outer buildings of the town: tired and abandoned clapboard houses, all sun-bleached wood and flaking paint. Fort Casey clearly had been a town dying a slow death long before tonight.

  Beyond the reach of the floodlights and out of sight of the major’s men, the Doctor decided here was as good a place as any. He undid the hood and pulled it off, savouring the cool night air on his face. He unzipped and shrugged his way out of the rest of the biohazard suit, and kicked it off his feet.

  Ridiculous outfit. It would be about as much use to him as a wet paper bag anyway.

  He sniffed the air and instantly detected the sweet smell of decaying flesh. To some degree that confirmed what he already strongly suspected. This infection – this scourge, if it was indeed the same pathogen that had once wiped out countless Gallifreyans, was well and truly into its primary stage: absorbing and breaking down the organic matter it had already assimilated. Turning it into a usable, fluid organic matrix.

  He proceeded up the small town’s main street. The street lights were still on, fizzing in the night, casting a sickly amber glow down on the dusty and potholed tarmac. To his right was a grocer’s store, a pink neon Budweiser beer sign blinking above the glass door.

  The Doctor shone his torch at the store. At the front, empty wooden pallets advertised watermelons at three dollars each. He wandered over, aiming his torch at one of the empty pallets. A dark puddle of thick viscous liquid covered the slats of wood. The liquid had spilled over the side to the ground. With the beam of his torch, he followed a snaking trail of the goo – thin and insubstantial as a length of forgotten twine. It looked like a black artery as it weaved, like a hairline crack, along the ground to the building next door. There it widened as other arteries of the black liquid joined it, thickening it into a dense rope.

  The ground floor of the two-storey building was a diner. Above were vacant apartments that seemed to be desperately seeking tenants. The ink-black liquid ran up the side wall, fanning out like webbing as it did so – tendrils of black feeling their way across the breeze blocks and cracked whitewash.

  The Doctor approached slowly.

  At the bottom of the wall, slumped against it, he saw the remains of what used to be a person. The Doctor squatted down in front of the body and inspected it. A pair of dockers’ boots, faded jeans and a checked shirt. Inside the clothes, an untidy jumble of bones held together by the last scraps of flesh. The skull was still topped with a few tufts of white hair. But no scalp. That was long gone, with every other scrap of soft organic matter. Black slime ran out of the cuffs of the shirt across the ground to unite with the other streams of organic soup.

  Completely liquefied. The watermelons in front of the grocer’s store and this man, both equally useful, equally digestible raw material for the pathogen to absorb. Precisely what the Doctor was expecting to find, but had been hoping he wouldn’t.

  The first stage looked well and truly established: infection, deconstruction and consolidation. It had evidently touched down in or near the town – one tiny pinhead-sized spore dispersed by the probe, possibly in the guise of a rock or meteor fragment, picked up on the heel of a boot perhaps, or the rim of a truck tyre. That’s all it would have taken.

  The rest would be depressingly inevitable. And horrifyingly fast.

  He panned his torch around and picked out more bodies in the main street. Across the road a car had mounted the kerb and tangled with some rubbish bins, the skeletal remains of the driver slumped half in, half out of the open door. Further up the street, a bundle of women’s clothing lay on the pavement and, beside it, a baby stroller over on its side.

  ‘They never stood a chance,’ the Doctor said with a sigh.

  ‘Hello?’ A voice from within the diner. ‘Is someone out there?’

  A survivor? The Doctor shook his head. Impossible. There was no immunity to this thing. No human immunity anyway. He walked to the front of the diner and pulled one of the glass swing doors wide open. ‘Is there anyone alive in here?’

  ‘STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!’ A muffled voice. A female voice. The Doctor froze in the doorway, then raised his hands to show he was unarmed.

  He saw a slight figure in a biohazard suit slowly emerge from behind the diner’s serving counter, the face obscured by an oxygen mask. ‘How … how are you alive?’

  The Doctor smiled and took a step forward. ‘As my mother used to say, I’m rather special.’

  The woman levelled the handgun she was holding at him. ‘You’d better stay right there! Right where you are!’

  He looked at the name patch on her chest. ‘Captain Chan, is it?’

  ‘Captain Evelyn Chan.’

  ‘I presume you must be one of Major Platt’s investigation team?’

  The woman dipped the gun slightly.

  ‘You know, the major’s rather worried that you haven’t been in touch recently.’

  ‘My comm system’s broken. I tossed it.’

  The Doctor looked at her equipment belt. He noted a twisted attachment buckle and a small tear in her suit there.

  She followed his gaze. ‘Some of that
gunk got on to my communication pack. I could see it spreading! I had to … had to tear it off. Get rid of it fast,’ she said quickly. ‘But I’m not infected, OK? It didn’t get inside my suit. It didn’t touch my skin –’

  ‘I know,’ interrupted the Doctor, offering her a reassuring smile. ‘I know. If it had made contact with you, you would be a puddle by now.’ He looked around the diner. ‘What about the others in your team?’

  A moment’s hesitation before she eventually replied. ‘I’m the only one left.’ Her voice hitched. ‘The others, they … they …’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Attacked.’

  ‘Attacked?’

  The woman’s mask nodded slowly. ‘Strange things … crawling things dropped down on us, attacked us …’

  The Doctor cursed under his breath. That meant the secondary stage was already under way. This thing was now building defensive constructs.

  He took another cautious step forward and Chan quickly raised her gun and aimed it at him. ‘Stay there!’

  ‘It’s all right!’ he said quickly. ‘I’m also not infected. In fact, I assure you, I’m quite immune.’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing’s immune!’

  The Doctor stepped sideways and sat down in a booth beside the window. ‘I’ll just sit here, Evelyn. If that’s all right with you?’

  She came out from behind the counter. He could see her glancing in all directions: at the floor, under the tables and seats. She advanced slowly towards him. ‘Everything. Human, animal, plant. This thing has infected everything in this town.’

  The Doctor nodded. ‘Yes, that’s precisely what it does.’

  She took several more steps towards him, her gun still levelled at his chest. She slumped down on a chair a couple of tables from him. ‘Nothing can do this! No pathogen can work across species boundaries like that! Jump from fauna to flora –’

  ‘No terrestrial pathogen,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘No terrestrial …?’ He saw Chan’s eyes narrow through the glass visor of her mask. ‘You’re saying … what? This has come from –’