by A. R. Daun
They spent the next half hour trudging slowly forward as the crowd flowed sluggishly onto the gangway. Crew members directed the traffic as best as they could, and once in awhile Miriam caught glimpses of the large man who now seemed to be their de facto captain. She could sense a tension in the crew, an anxiousness in their postures that went beyond the normal reaction to some savage event that had already passed, and she suddenly knew that the lead time to evacuate the doomed ship was shorter than they had been told.
“Whatever happens, just keep holding my hand,” James whispered in her ear, as if he had read her mind.
She nodded, grateful for his presence, and tightened her grip on his hand.
“I think...” She started, then glanced at Henry, who was staring wide-eyed at something behind them. Sarah also noticed the change and turned her head back to look, then started screaming in a hoarse voice that hit the high registers and only continued to go up.
In the shadows of the empty promenade and stairways behind them, their strikingly lean figures illuminated by the photoluminescence, dozens of forms bounded towards the massed crowd. Miriam could only catch quick glimpses of the creatures as they flickered in the rapidly-dimming emergency lighting to create a horrific kaleidoscope of elongated bodies and knife-like flashing appendages.
“Go! Run!” James shouted as he pulled her forward, using his long arms to wade through the still petrified passengers and crew, and they got to within a few yards of the debarkation gangway when the paralysis of the crowd broke and the stampede began.
Miriam could barely breathe as the mob surged forward in a frenzy of terror, washing away the few crew members left to contain them like so much flotsam before a tsunami. She was borne on a tide of sweaty bodies and agitated limbs down the gangway and finally onto the open dock, where the light from a full moon shone on a scene that almost froze Miriam in her tracks.
People were fleeing away from the Odyssey and towards a cluster of low slung buildings several hundred feet to the northwest. Miriam had never been to this port, but she assumed those would be the terminal buildings. To their immediate south she saw a lone edifice in the center of a small grassy park. It was about a hundred feet tall, rectangular in profile, with a polished teardrop shape dangling by its tail within the hollow center of the structure. It was a monument of some kind, and clinging along its sides, like low hanging fruits ripened and ready to fall, were dozens of dark man-like figures.
The figures released their hold and dropped silently to the ground below, vanishing into the shadowed base of the monument, and Miriam looked away and just concentrated on her running. She could feel James' hand tightly gripping her own, and that was good, because she knew that if he let go she would simply collapse and give up.
Behind them she could sense the immense bulk of the great ship as it receded into the distance, and around her she could hear the gasps and sighs and groans of other passengers as they limped, walked, perhaps even crawled for all she knew, away from their last refuge.
Someone screamed to her left, a long ululating sound that cut off abruptly. This was followed by more screams from behind, then a series of wailing imprecations that rose from around her as the fleeing passengers and crew realized they were being hunted.
“Oh Jesus! Help us!”
“Fuck Fuck Fuck!”
“Auuuuughhhhh!!!! Augghhhhh!!!!”
“Help me! I can't run anymore...oh please somebody help me!”
“Oh God! Oh God!”
Miriam looked to her left and saw Henry and his girlfriend Sarah running beside them. Their eyes met, and the man smiled weakly as his breath came in and out in short puffs. She nodded slightly in return, then her eyes widened in shock as she saw a shadowy figure emerge from the darkness and spring towards them.
Henry must have seen her expression, but it was too late. One moment Sarah was next to him, her hand firmly in his grasp, then there was a blur and she was gone. He stumbled and fell as her disappearance caused him to overbalance, then sat up on the hard pavement as people swirled around him like a river parted by rocks.
“Saraaaahhhhhh!!!!!” he shouted despairingly into the night. “Saraaaahhhhhh!!!!”
Miriam stopped and run back to him.
“We have to go,” she said, as she tried to pull him up by one arm. She was being buffeted by fleeing people, and she was worried she might fall down too, and once that happened they would both be trampled.
Henry looked up at her. There were tears running down his face.
“I have to find Sarah,” he said simply, then turned away from her and shouted. “Saraaahhhh!!!!”
“We have to go now, Henry,” she said again. “Sarah's gone.”
He turned back to her.
“Please help me find her,” he said, his eyes wide and in shock, like some young boy pleading to an adult. “I have to find her.”
James was suddenly by her side, pulling her by the shoulders.
“For God's sakes Mir,” James shouted over the din of the panicked herd. “We can't do anything for him.”
As if on cue, Henry stood up shakily and started walking back towards the ship.
“Saraaahhhh!!!” he cried over and over again, his voice becoming hoarser with every utterance.
Miriam stared at his departing figure for a moment, then let James lead her away. She was horrified to discover that the main group of fleeing people had passed them by, and they both started running in earnest to catch up with the group, which had by now reached one of low buildings in the distance.
She noticed a tall slender black woman standing by herself to one side of the fleeing crowd. The figure had placed herself between the main group of people rushing into the building and several of the creatures, who were milling about as if in some confusion. One or two of the bolder ones rushed at the woman, only to come to a screeching halt several yards from her, before retreating back to their comrades. Once or twice one of the rushers would stumble and fall awkwardly to the ground in their haste to stop from touching the standing woman. If their situation had not been so dire Miriam would have almost found the scene funny.
She took a quick look behind her and an icy hand gripped her heart. There was no one else behind them, only darkness and the dual silhouettes of the ship and monument, which rose from the flat terrain like ancient artifacts in some barren landscape. Here and there she could barely make out drawn figures crouched and huddled close to the ground, like incomplete and shadowy sketches in some Rorschach test.
But then the woman in the distance started shouting at them and pointing to their left, and when Miriam glanced that way she could make out fast moving blurs sprinting across one of the many empty parking lots that spread out from the docks like concrete scabs.
“James!!!!” she shouted, but he had already seen them.
Miriam suddenly knew they were not going to make it. The elongated figures were going to be between them and the safety of the buildings, and when James realized this as well he came to a jarring stop, and it was all Miriam could do not to smash into his back and topple both of them forward. Behind them she could hear more movement as some of the other creatures finished their gruesome meals and finally noticed them.
They looked fearfully around. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run now that the deadly creatures had closed off their last remaining path to refuge. The black woman started running towards them, but Miriam could tell she would be too late. They were hemmed in on all sides, and it would take more than two terrified and unarmed people to break the blockade.
James took her in his arms, and she leaned against him. She could feel a cool night breeze brushing against them.
“I love you James,” she said clearly.
“Hey, I love you too babe,” he said softly, then held her face between his hands and kissed her gently on the forehead.
They embraced each other tightly, eyes closed, and in the final moments before the end, Miriam thought how she was still the luckiest girl in the w
orld.
CHAPTER 27
Day 5 (12 pm EST)
University of Southern California Campus, Los Angeles
Is this really me? For one thing, old biological Ray (that's me) still exists. I'll still be here in my carbon-cell-based brain. Alas, I will have to sit back and watch the new Ray succeed in endeavors that I could only dream of.
- Ray Kurzweil
John Chen woke up.
The last thing he remembered was staring up at the sky. No, that wasn't entirely correct. He had been marveling at the clear blue sky, that was true, but then he remembered faces looking down at him. Weird expressionless faces that had slits for eyes, but which had nothing resembling noses nor mouths. That was the last thing he remembered. That, and the pain that followed right after and seemed to last for several eternities. An endless parade of wrenching torment as he was literally torn apart and eaten before the welcome darkness.
So why was he still alive? That was the million dollar question. He had kept his eyes closed, but his consciousness pulsed with the vibrancy of awareness. He could feel his chest moving up and down as he took in air to breathe. He could feel the warmth of the sun on his skin, and smell the sweet sickly odor of Jacaranda flowers. He could even hear the faint rustling of leaves as the wind orchestrated a whispered melody.
John tried to open his eyes. He did so slowly, perhaps even a bit anxiously, though he would never admit this to himself even later. It was while straining to do so that he realized with some surprise that it was a struggle just to get his lids open. They seemed glued to each other, even welded together. And yet with the conscious thought that he wanted to see came a flash, and suddenly he could sense the terribly bright sunlight of another cloudless blue Los Angeles sky.
The interesting thing was that he could suddenly “see” a full 360 degrees. It was if one took pics at each radian with a standard camera, then meshed them together to form a single panoramic whole. But instead of taking pics with a single camera, imagine dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them simultaneously in action sending a kaleidoscope of images from every conceivable angle and height to his brain. He could not imagine the visual processing needed to sort out such a stream of input and make any sense of them, but somehow he was doing so in real time.
He was still on campus. He could barely make out the rounded arches and Romanesque architecture of the Doheny Memorial Library in the distance, flanked by two towering Canary Island date palms and fronted by a low flat pool made by stone coping. Brick cross-walks crisscrossed the grassy mall and park that led up to the library, and California sycamores dressed in their mottled white finery stood here and there like lanky guardians of the grandiose building.
Behind him was one of the USC Moreton Fig trees. He almost stumbled on its massive roots, and he reflexively extended one arm and propped himself against the smooth bark. The arm that reached out and gripped the old wood was not his own, and he jerked back in surprise.
He examined it. It was long, much longer than his real arm, and of a rust red color like dried blood. His hands too were stretched out, like malleable taffy, and ended in fingers that were tipped with robust and deadly looking claws. At sporadic intervals along the length of the arm curved spikes almost 3 inches long erupted from roughened callus-like bases encrusted into the skin.
“What the hell is going on?” he said out loud. That was what he had meant to say, but in reality, he had instead uttered a weird high-pitched mewling sound.
The sound must have attracted some attention, because from out of the shadowy recesses of the Doheny building another lone figure came into view. It came slowly towards him in a series of flickering motions that were interspersed with moment of stillness that was almost insectile. John had no idea what it would make of him, but based on the similarity of its limbs to what he had just examined as his own he had a feeling that he bore a striking resemblance to it.
He compared it to Tommy Trojan and guessed that it stood perhaps 2-3 meters tall. It had a tear drop shaped head that tapered towards the back, and its face was almost featureless save for a fleshy protuberance where the mouth and nose should have been. Its blood red torso pulsated with ropy muscles and tendons and hardened ligaments, and its muscular legs ended in wicked looking claws. John thought that it was the most formidable creature he had ever seen.
And I'm one of them, he thought in amazement.
The creature came to within a few yards of him, and John had the sudden notion that it was confused by his presence. Perhaps it knew that there was something strange about him, but it did not have the intelligence to determine the difference.
He raised one arm in greeting. He felt somewhat foolish doing so, but he could not think of any other way of moving forward. John wished he had some idea what it was thinking, some way of getting into its head and seeing how it saw him.
With a start, John realized the other creature had also raised one arm in greeting, and a surge of elation coursed through him at this small step in communication. But this was followed almost immediately by bafflement when he saw that behind the creature loomed the towering outline of a mature banyan fig, its gnarled aerial roots dropping from gigantic branches to burrow deep into the arid California soil.
His mind whirled. It took several heartbeats before he finally realized that he was now seeing the world through the eyes of the second creature. Even more perplexing though was that he still felt connected to the first, and a wave of vertigo passed through his consciousness as BOTH viewpoints suddenly overlapped in his minds' eye.
John screamed inwardly. A third creature had materialized, this time from within the Campus Center, and a fourth had leaped down with feline grace from one of the plane trees to one side of Doheny. They emerged from every nook and cranny, every shadowy refuge and hidden vestibule of the campus, and as more and more of the creatures came into view their sensory perceptions had become accessible to John, threatening to overwhelm his sense of self.
He blacked out.
And woke up several hours later to discover that he had become legion, as the dusky skies gave way to full night.
CHAPTER 28
Year 1 A.R.
Captiva Island, Florida
I realize that my longing is not for the future, but for the past, and that for me the future is fear, and uncertainty, and the vision of a looming storm swirling in the far horizon.
- Ammara Lewis
The man dropped to one knee and probed at the sand, his fingers adroitly picking up then discarding shells that littered the deserted beach. He was bare on top, but wore a beach short with deep pockets on its sides, and the colorful outlines of palm trees imprinted on the cotton fabric.
He examined one shell specimen, a curved concave shape whose outer ribbed surfaces were tinged with purple stripes. He brought it close to one eye and squinted, then grunted and let it drop. Calico Scallop shells were common among the colorful litter that washed up on the shores of Captiva Island. The plastic sandwich bag he held in his other hand was almost half full with the various sea shells that he had collected during the morning. For the last several days he had the vague notion of stringing the best pieces together to form decorative necklaces or bracelets.
Denzel stood up and lifted his face, letting the warm rays of the morning sun bathe him. A slight breeze came in from the Gulf and brought with it the tangy smell of the sea, while the rhythmic sound of waves crashing on the white sands brought an acoustic counterpoint to the scene. There was much to be said about having a beach all to yourself, he thought.
Well, almost all to himself. He could hear the two as they crunched through the gravelly path on the far side of the beach, perhaps wanting to get closer and see why he had knelt down. They had been following him rather noisily for the last several hours, and Denzel had the strong urge to drop his pants and moon them, just to see what their reaction would be.
He snorted. He had first noticed them skulking in the low bushes that ringed the Shell Museum in next door Sanibel I
sland a few hours back. The museum billed itself as the most comprehensive institution in the western hemisphere devoted solely to shells, and Denzel was not about to argue the point.
He had been admiring the various displays, and especially its collection of cowrie shells, when he had happened to glance out the glass doors and glimpse one of the stalkers moving stealthily from the parking lot towards one of the palms that towered around the double octagonal museum building.
The man, for Denzel was pretty sure he was male, had been wearing a garish red shirt with buttons down the entire front, black long pants, and a red cap with a thin bill, which made him look for all the world like the world's flashiest bellboy. It was in his opinion a somewhat absurd outfit to wear in the semi-tropical ambiance and heat of southwestern Florida.
Denzel reached the northernmost tip of Captiva Island, which was marked by a jumble of large uneven rocks that stretched from the beach and several meters into the water. He clambered up and balanced on one end of the pile, being careful not to slip as some of the rocks had streaks of slippery green algae on their surfaces. He faced inland and breathe in deeply, savoring the refreshing gulf air. In the distance, extravagant white-painted villas hid behind rows of palm trees.
“You can come out now,” he said clearly. “If you two don't properly introduce yourselves, then I'm going to drag you both out of hiding because I am one ornery pissed off mother-fucker, and you better believe that.”
He waited for a few seconds, then smiled to himself as he heard them slowly shuffle uncertainly towards him. They came out of the rise at the end of the beach and trudged carefully across the shell-littered sand. One was the fellow he had seen earlier, a small thin man with matted dark hair who looked somewhat sheepish, while his companion was a slender young woman in a plain white blouse and dark shorts.
They stopped near the base of the rocks, looking up at him, and Denzel realized the woman was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.