Arachnosaur

by Richard Jeffries

  Cala looked around in confusion, seeing her fellow villagers doing the same. She met one’s eyes, and then the other, and then the next. It was like looking into her own eyes. Everyone in the village knew each other, so there were no strangers and no secrets. But then she looked at one of her schoolmates. He was a boy she liked, a boy she would often watch play soccer.

  As she watched he began to shake. Not shiver, not hum, not vibrate, but really shake. Then something black started oozing out of his eyes, nose, mouth, and even ears.

  Cala looked away, quickly, her own eyes wet. Banging sounds were coming over the hill, and getting louder. Sickening, cracking, wet bangs, one after another. And then came a wave of different noises. Women’s screams.

  She screamed herself when the boy she liked tore open right in front of her. Cala couldn’t think anymore. An unreasoning, unknowing terror had clamped into her. She spun and ran. She didn’t know where she was going, and she didn’t care. The screams were getting louder now, and closer. So were the thumping, cracking, and banging noises.

  The golden lace was showering down on her like netting. She tore at it, swinging her clawing fingers, as her feet and the ground slapped each other with every step. Her eyes were huge and unseeing, vaguely registering colors and shapes as muscle memory and instinct took over.

  She felt showers of slivers pinching her, and sharp wetness splash her, as she realized she was trying to run home. She finally got to the gate of her family’s house, and reached agonizingly for it. But just before her fingers clenched on the latch, it swung open.

  Cala slid to a stop directly in front of her father. His face was contorting, his eyes shredding. Lumpy, steaming, black blood pumped out every orifice. His fingernails cracked and steaming black blood poured out of them as well.

  Cala’s mother ran up behind him, hysterically crying his name, and reaching desperately for him. She had just touched him when he ripped open.

  The detonation sent Cala back four feet. She slammed onto the ground, and slid two feet more, covered in her father’s blood, guts, and bone. To her astonishment, she did not lose consciousness. She blinked up to the blue sky, its white cotton clouds knitted into golden doilies floating over her.

  She waited until she heard no more noises, not realizing that her father’s death had deafened her. She slowly managed to get to her feet, and saw that pieces of her father’s bones had pierced her mother’s throat and chest.

  Again Cala looked away. She tried to find solace in the beautiful countryside, but now the mountains and valleys were dotted with fast-moving things, all pouring over the hilltops and scuttling, scurrying, scampering down toward her.

  She had seen spiders before. She knew what spiders were. These were not spiders.

  All the women of her village were wailing, begging, and pleading as their husbands, brothers, and sons shredded open all around them. As she watched, the eight-legged things reached them.

  It was a curse that Cala was already deep in shock. It was the only way she could have witnessed the torn-open male corpses being pounced upon by the things while lumpy, pulsating, mucous was pumped into their steaming cavities while the screaming women were being eviscerated by swirling, lightning-fast, pincers.

  And the things just kept moving. They laid their venomous eggs in the males, exenterated the females, then went on to the next. Dozens and dozens of them swarmed nearing her.

  The first pincer stabbed into her stomach, but not the others. She had no idea her body was flayed open because she was already down, her skull hitting the dirt. For some reason the arachnosaur that reached her didn’t bother with destroying her head. Perhaps the thing’s appetite was slacked. Perhaps it saw a more attractive target beyond her.

  Whatever the reason, Cala lived on for a few seconds more, staring in the opposite direction, at the valley and the brooks and the villages beyond. What had the teacher once said? Oh yes. That Wuyan was very well positioned in the country. To the north was Shabhut and Dabuh. To the south was Medmahdah, Fusai, and finally the Gulf of Aden, which spread into the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. After that, no part of the world was out of reach. No part.

  Cala Haza died three weeks shy of her twelfth birthday.

  Chapter 28

  West of the Jumeirah Golf Estate, south of the Jebel Ali Village’s Lost City, east of the Medical & Hazardous Waste Treatment Plant, and near the Abu Dhabi border was Dubai Industrial City—an ominous-looking maze waiting for a figurative minotaur.

  It squatted on the edge of the city on steroids like a warning. This, it seemed to silently say, is what happens when the fun times, and financial credit, run out. It was the skeleton of another grand idea, with no soul to complete it.

  Deep within the skeletal labyrinth was another monstrosity that looked like a deserted industrial park, all pipes, concrete, unfinished walls, and construction cranes. At any given time, at least twenty percent of the world’s cranes were operating, or awaiting operation, in Dubai. Tourists were well known to complain that it was hard to get a good photo of the city’s skyline because of all the cranes slicing through it. Here, close to the edge of the Dubai Investment Park’s Steel Mill, was what looked like the crane cemetery.

  But, if like a small caravan of dark, bulletproof SUVs, you got closer, you could see a cunning design. A cunning design that had not been there a month before. Opaque, reflective walls, created to camouflage, hemmed in a ballroom-sized space deep in the heart of the park, complete with an innocuous entry hall, also cunningly disguised to blend in with the rest of the complex.

  It was more of that demented SADE Island genius, taking advantage of Dubai’s crazily conceived developments that were officially still under construction,. In reality, they were abandoned and vulnerable, making them prime targets for trespassers, or a top-secret presentation far away from the rest of the city’s glitz, glamor, and prying paparazzi eyes.

  Captain Patrick Logan was expected. He took not a single unprotected, unsecured, or even unobscured step from the private limo pick-up chamber of the Jumeirah Bab Al Shams Desert resort to this undisclosed, specially made, viewing compartment within the essentially invisible construction.

  More shrewdness, Logan thought. He was certain that the few other SUVs he had spotted in their short caravan had contained high-ranking representatives from China, Russia, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, but it was wise not to let any participant know exactly who. Logan thought he would have to wait as each representative was personally shown to their private viewing box, but even that was handled smoothly and efficiently in such a way that it seemed as if he was the only guest.

  His chaperone was a beautifully dressed Omani, but one whose head-covering ghutrah had an extra flap to obscure their face. He showed Logan into the ten-by-six soundproofed chamber, then silently closed the door behind him. Despite the state-of-the-art viewing screen and luxurious five-thousand-dollar Osaki OS-PRO recliner, complete with attached tablet, Logan couldn’t help feeling he was back in a video peep show room from his college days.

  He quickly shook off that feeling, and settled in to the perfectly padded cushions and noted that the tablet was already loaded with cutting-edge software that would allow him to bid while namelessly seeing the other bids. It even gave bidders the option to include anonymous, distant, representatives to pool their resources in real time.

  Smart, Logan marveled again. This way no one had to know who the other bidder was in order to become even more competitive. Just as he was settling in, numbers in English started appearing on the seventy-inch, high-definition screen, six feet in front of him.

  Five, four, three, two, one—

  A stark image appeared of two people in a simple, darkened room. One was a clearly frightened, naked, handcuffed man. The other was a young, fit, red-haired woman who was also nude except for a face-molding eye shield.

  Logan, being Logan, recognized neithe
r Terri Nichols nor Khalifa Al-Alam.

  The man started tried to pull away, but his handcuffs were attached to a thin, almost indiscernible cable. The woman’s eye-shield became transparent while unseen, recessed lights shone around them.

  The girl’s eyes glowed green, and vibrated. The man started shrieking as thin streams of black liquid came from the girl’s nostrils, eye ducts, and even out of her mouth. That was when the cable slowly, inexorably, pulled him toward the woman.

  Logan was almost out of his chair, opening his mouth to complain. No one had told him that it would be a live demonstration, with unwilling participants. But his conscience immediately chastised him. What did you expect?

  Apparently, the other attendees had no misgivings. The bidding on the tablet screen started popping like fireworks. Logan fell back into the chair, and gaped at the prices which went from six to seven digits within a second, and the weaponizing hadn’t even been revealed yet.

  I can’t let anyone else have this, he reprimanded himself. I have my orders!

  His finger hovered over the tablet’s number pad as the shrieking man got closer and closer to the quivering woman, as well as the liquid, which now looked like black veins etching her pale, freckled skin.

  It was just a few centimeters more. Just a few, and then the man and woman would unavoidably touch. Logan’s fingers hovered the same distance above the number pad. He would wait, he would see, and then he would outbid them all.

  Two millimeters away, one—

  Suddenly the ceiling and a wall of the room the man and woman were in collapsed. For a split-second Logan saw the jib of a construction crane poking in the wall like God’s forefinger. But that astonishing sight was bypassed by another crane’s trolley hook dropping in from the ceiling.

  Logan gaped in amazement. Attached to it was a metal coffin. And he could have sworn, on a stack of whatever holy book were handy, that there were men riding the crane jib and hook, one burly and one slim. Then their own human arms swung down, and Logan was blinded.

  When he could see again, the room on the screen was empty of people, but out the holes in the ceiling and wall he could see beautifully dressed, cowled men shooting at something above them. Logan leapt from the chair and kicked open the door.

  He charged down the hall, past bodyguards scurrying to protect their paychecks. He vaguely recognized an Arabic defense minister and a Chinese People’s Liberation Army general as he went, but he didn’t care. Logan burst into the open to see a small mob of bodyguards and security men firing a wide range of Glocks and Heckler & Kochs above their heads as Jean-Bernard Toussaint ran among them, waving his arms and screeching “Cessez-le! Cessez-le!”

  Dubai authorities frowned on discharging a firearm in public, especially by a foreign national. So much so, in fact, that their frowns could mean life imprisonment for any of these idiots.

  Logan looked toward the sky, his jaw tight, at two bullet-ridden cranes seemingly giving them all the middle finger, as a small, apparently homemade helicopter grew smaller and smaller in the distance.

  * * * *

  “How the hell—”

  Captain Logan was at something of a loss for words when he burst into the clinic of the American consulate.

  “What the—” He managed no better on his second try, standing amid the ample and various activities going on in what he always thought would be a small, simple room.

  In the far corner, Esherida Rahal was standing between two beds that lay beside several tables full of scientific equipment. On one lay a comatose Terri Nichols, only this time without her eye covering. On the other lay Josiah Key. They were attached by blood transfusion tubing. Standing beside him was a protective, encouraging Morton Daniels.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Logan heard in his ear. He spun to look up at General Charles Lancaster, retired.

  “Well, after what you’ve been through, I can’t say I’m surprised.” Lancaster, still wearing his uniform, walked by him. As he went, he called out to the beds, “You’ll be happy to know the bird is stowed.”

  The men nodded with appreciation and relief.

  “What bird?” Logan asked suspiciously.

  “As if you didn’t know.” Lancaster sat at a simple metal desk in the opposite corner, then motioned for Logan to join him. “A remarkable flying machine designed and piloted by the mechanic who created the crane yo-yo we also required. And all with remarkable speed. All with proper airspace permissions, I assure you. I believe you’ve already met the man in question. But no matter. He’ll be here presently.”

  Logan just stared at the retired general, trying to regain his moral equilibrium. “How did you do it?” he finally asked. “How did you even know?”

  “Despite appearances, we’ve been working on this project for some time.” Lancaster sniffed, looking at Key and Daniel. “But we couldn’t have done this particular operation without two great Americans,” he said flatly. “The first is a man named Dale Hood. He supplied intel he acquired at great personal risk.” Lancaster locked eyes with Logan. “Lost his way for a while, and may do so again, but when it came right down to it, he was a true American patriot.”

  Logan thought he got the message, but was about to find out he hadn’t quite. “And who was the second?” he asked resentfully.

  “You,” Lancaster said with a knowing smile.

  “Me?” Logan was flabbergasted as he thought about the secrecy and security he had gone through to attend the weapons auction. “How did you even know where I was?”

  Lancaster snorted. “Easy, we bugged you like you bugged them.” He motioned toward the soldiers. “But nothing so crude as injected trackers. Remember when I was so chummy with you before? I rubbed an odorless liquid on your neck that could be traced.” Lancaster looked at Rahal. “The Cerberus labs are far more advanced than the Marines’. But even we need to pool resources every now and again.”

  “It has to be in her chromosomes,” Rahal interrupted. “I’ve been working on this since Dr. Davi first collected samples in Shabhut. Infected men became explosive, but not women.”

  “Wait a minute,” Daniels said. “What about the women at Club Blue?”

  Key looked over with a placid expression. “Those were transvestites,” he told his friend. “Didn’t you see that?”

  Daniels looked at him with skepticism.

  Key shrugged. “I thought it was obvious.”

  Logan, finally unable to control the abuse on his ego, slammed his hand on the desk.

  Everyone except Lancaster flinched.

  “I’ve had it with your smartass attitude, Corporal.” Logan stood. The man’s cavalier attitude was infuriating, especially after he rode a hundred and eighty-foot crane sheave to pull off a magic trick amidst some of the most severe security possible. “Where do you get off being so smug in this mess?”

  Key looked up in all seriousness and opened his mouth to answer, but Lancaster beat him to it. “That’s sergeant major, Logan. I wasn’t joking about that. He’s with Cerberus now, and if I have to promote him to full major, I will.”

  Logan looked around the room as if it were a madhouse. “Cerberus? What the hell is Cerberus anyway?”

  “Dog who guarded the gates of hell, I think,” Key offered.

  Lancaster was about to elaborate in no uncertain terms when another, lightly accented, voice came from the door.

  “Excuse me, sir.” They all turned to see Manuel Gonzales. “You too, Captain. Think you both better come see this.” The man’s expression and tone cut through even Logan’s outrage.

  Leaving Rahal, Key, and Nichols behind, they marched down the consulate hall toward the communications center. Lancaster was striding with such certainty that he soon passed even Gonzales, allowing Daniels to catch up with his old friend.

  “What’s up?” he whispered.

  “Faisal and I were
clued in as we were coming back from the garage,” Gonzales whispered in return. “Surveillance satellite picked up something in south Yemen.”

  “Something bad?” Daniels asked blankly, trying to get his head around it. He was still trying to get his head around everything.

  “Something very bad,” Gonzales said as Lancaster and Logan went into the comm center. “Something end-of-the-world bad.”

  Chapter 29

  Tell me what I need to know.

  Key didn’t actually say that as he stood in the doorway of the briefing room onboard the USS Leon Amphibious Transport Dock. It would have been too limiting. After all, why leave it up to his listeners to determine what was important or not? Even if they told the truth, it would inevitably be interpretive, subjective.

  He did, however, hold up a forefinger to let Eshe Rahal and General Lancaster know when he wanted to listen to what Captain Logan was saying to the expeditionary warfare unit and rapid deployment force commanders gathered within.

  “I know this is even a more sudden notice than usual,” Logan said, “but we have no choice.”

  Key decided the captain wasn’t bending the truth even a little. The mission had come together quickly after Lancaster had seen the satellite video. Even in radiant imaging, the moving pictures were unmistakable. It was a horde of literally uncountable creatures sweeping across the Yemen countryside, laying waste to whatever was in their way.

  Within seconds, the general was communicating with his contacts, making Logan feel impelled to do the same. Cerberus apparently had great clout to convince normally cagey politicians of the urgency. Whatever the protocol and chain of command, the order came back to do what was necessary to halt, contain, or even eradicate the threat.