by Michael Kerr
George showered, shaved, and dressed in smart casual clothes; clothes that had not seen the light of day for months. He was about to leave his apartment when he felt dizzy. His head swam and his vision blurred, causing him to sit on the nearest chair and wait for the sensation to pass. His top lip felt wet, and wiping it with the back of his hand, he found that blood was running from his nostrils. His stomach cramped in a leaden knot, and a fleeting surge of anger and undirected hate overran his mind. Staggering into the kitchen, he splashed cold water on his face, then poured himself a large scotch and gulped it down, relieved as the alcohol settled him, calming the inexplicable rush of fury that had swept through him. Taking off his blood-spotted shirt, he went back through to the bedroom, dumped it in the laundry basket and quickly donned another. Leaving the apartment, he felt a lot better. The air was fresh and cold and invigorating, and the three block walk to the Northern Light ̶ a bar situated at the corner of Jefferson and 23rd Avenue ̶ gave him time to recover and put the episode behind him.
Pushing open the door, George almost felt his usual chipper self. After the months of being in self-imposed exile at Beechey Point, he wasn’t going to let a nosebleed or a few flu symptoms stop him from hitting the town and having a few...hell, more than a few drinks, before taking a working girl back to his place for a much needed release of sexual tension. He was already stretching the front of his pants as he imagined a naked broad sat astride him, her breasts jiggling as he held onto her and entered the Promised Land...Hallelujah!
George was a pudding of a man. He stood five-six in his bare feet, and always wore a pair of stack-heeled western boots to enhance his diminutive stature a tad. He was overweight and flabby, due mainly to a lifelong aversion to physical exercise, and a predilection for junk food, usually in the shape of quarter-pounders and fries. At forty-three, he looked a decade older, with thinning, grey-shot hair augmenting the illusion.
“Hi, George. How’s it hangin’?” Bruno Manning, the owner of the joint shouted, his booming voice only just audible over the shit-kicking country dirge emanating from the juke, and the boisterous revelry of the punters that crowded the bar.
“Yo, Bruno, it ain’t hangin’, it’s chompin’ at the bit,” George shouted back, elbowing his way to the counter, feeling as though it were only a couple of nights since he had last been in the place, not months.
He enjoyed four large shots of single malt, then zeroed in on a hooker at the bar, who was perched on a stool; tight tube top almost restraining her large breasts, and short leather skirt riding high on her thighs. Everything was just tickety-boo. George could see them now, back at his pad, maybe doing a line or two of nose candy before she was made to earn every dollar she would charge for her services. He liked it rough, and after four months without, this broad was going to get more than she bargained for… every which way but loose.
As he sidled up to the spiky-haired bimbo, blood began to drip into his glass, clouding the amber liquor, signalling that all was far from well. As he wiped it away with the back of his hand, the pressure of fluid on his brain increased. He fell to his knees, hands clamped to the sides of his head as if to stop it from coming apart like an exploding melon. His rotting lungs ruptured, and he swayed back and forth moaning in agony, then tried to scream as a red tide welled up and gushed from his mouth, nostrils, ears and eyes. Fellow drinkers jumped back to form a circle and stare in revulsion at the spectacle of the haemorrhaging man. Not one went to his aid as he keeled over, gurgling, drowning in his own blood.
It left George, to circulate throughout the bar and be rapidly ingested by over a hundred unsuspecting hosts. And later, as George was pronounced dead on arrival at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital and was wheeled to the mortuary, the residue of the entity within him seeped out to explore every corridor and room, missing no one.
At the precise moment that George died, Zebra was burning down, and James Keating was outside the blazing base, taking little comfort from the heat that would soon dwindle and leave him stranded in the chill Arctic night.
Three of the six man team had attacked each other with murderous intent, punching, kicking, biting and clawing, as a loathing abhorrence for their colleagues compelled each of them to rip and gouge, with the need to extinguish life overruling all rational thought.
Travis Jacobs knelt next to the bodies of the two other scientists, his eyes shining, wide and wild, unconcerned that his jaw was fractured, or that part of his nose had been bitten off. He chuckled as his major organs began to shut down, and then he fell forward into a spreading pool of his own blood, as it jetted from every orifice.
Errol Brent was not bleeding or even feeling unwell. An almost unbearable headache had now lessened, and a force within controlled him, as a puppet master, using his form as a living marionette, infusing him with a ravenous appetite for the destruction of everything about him.
Joe Costello was working in ‘A’ lab when Errol walked in with a Very pistol in his hand, pointing it at the lab technician’s chest as he approached him with eyes glaring; glowing with an inhuman incandescent green, empty of any recognition, but brimming with malefic intent.
“What the hell are you doing, Errol?” Joe asked, backing away until the metal filing cabinets that lined the wall behind him, halted his retreat. “Why the flare-gun? What’s wrong, man? Talk to me, for Christ’s sake.”
Errol said nothing, just pulled the trigger and watched, lips drawn back in a feral sneer as the other man ̶ up until that night a close friend ̶ was blown backwards, smashing into a cabinet, denting it with the force of impact.
Joe heard a high-pitched scream, unaware for a moment that it was escaping from his mouth, as he clawed at his stomach, which was now alight, his innards burning bright with phosphorus.
Errol slipped another cartridge into the pistol and left the lab, closing the door on the dying technician, whose strident shrieks were aggravating and rekindling his dull headache.
Within ten minutes, Errol had destroyed the radio equipment, trashed half of the base, and fired a second flare into the living area, which he had first liberally doused in gas from a two-gallon can. The room burst into flame, and thick black smoke rose to the ceiling, mushrooming, threatening to choke him as he ran out of the H block.
Walking stiff-legged across the crisp snow to the generator shack, eyes darting in every direction, Errol searched for nonexistent enemies.
By the time Keating had investigated the noise that had woken him, the fire was already beyond extinguishing. He dressed quickly and, armed with a 9mm Browning (that was kept under lock and key, for use in the event of emergency), he ascertained that only Brent was unaccounted for. The others were dead. He rushed out of the burning building, which was quickly becoming a raging inferno, and saw the door to the hut that housed the generators was wide open.
“Brent!” he shouted, on seeing the mineralogist pouring fuel over and around the machinery. “Have you gone totally mad?”
The strange light that flashed in Errol’s eyes as he raised the Very pistol was enough to spur Keating into action. He fired the Browning, emptying the magazine at the other man. Four of the slugs found their mark, ploughing into Brent; one entering his right shoulder, two his chest, and the fourth, his throat.
Errol’s finger squeezed the trigger of the flare-gun as the first bullet simultaneously tore into his shoulder, shattering bone and ricocheting, exiting from his armpit. The cartridge that he fired hit his left foot, disintegrating his toes as it burst onto the fuel-soaked floor and turned him into a human torch. He pitched forward, already dead, a bullet in his heart, and his body a crackling fireball of blazing, melting flesh.
Keating threw himself back through the open door, aided by the blast from the ignited gas. With his face seared by flame, he rolled sideways in the snow, away from the shack and the main building. Rising, stumbling, he lurched away from the base, only stopping and turning back to face it when the heat on his back became more tolerable; a warmth, not a fiery
discomfort. He watched as the station was engulfed, again diving to the ground as both of the snow-cats exploded, their fuel tanks detonating, ripping the vehicles asunder as though they had been bombed. Flames and a dense pall of black smoke shot several hundred feet into the air, and the shrapnel from the destroyed cats sizzled as it flew out into the snow, peppering the ground to within inches of where he was laid face down, hands clasped over the back of his head.
Rising shakily to his feet, Keating stood trembling, shoulders slumped, and was devastated at the events that had destroyed everything in a single catastrophic stroke, as he stared at what was now little more than a bonfire. Explosions rocked the ruins as chemicals and fuel ignited, lighting the ash-grey sky with a pyrotechnic display worthy of that seen nightly at Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
He waited until the fire died and the cold embraced him. His choice was simple, he could stay and die, or try to walk out. The prospect of a two day trek to the nearest settlement in temperatures of minus 50F was more than a challenge, it was a daunting and probably impossible task. He set off with purpose and hoped for a miracle.
After six hours of walking, bent forward, fighting to remain upright against the cutting wind that whipped sharp, hard snow into his face, he saw the shape appear ahead of him.
The adult male polar bear shambled into view and stopped, to stand up to its full height of almost nine feet, and turn its head from side to side as it sniffed the air to home in on his scent. Keating was exhausted, nearly but not quite ready to just give up, lie down and go to sleep. He watched as the beast dropped back down onto all fours and lumbered towards him, and it crossed his dulled mind that it was a majestic animal. He only wished that he were as well adapted to survive in such a harsh, unforgiving environment. It also crossed his mind that his handgun was empty, and that he had not picked up a spare magazine. The bear looked to be a little thin, probably half-starved, and was no doubt rightly considering him to be easy prey. He clapped his hands, shouted, and even jumped up and down in an effort to dissuade it. He had always associated being eaten alive with sharks, having never forgotten the film Jaws, which had put the fear of God into him when he had first seen it, back in the seventies; a fear that had kept his feet planted firmly on terra firma ever since.
The bear was not alarmed or put off by his histrionics. Increasing speed, fur rippling over its massive body, it attacked. He thrust his arm out in an ineffectual but reflex attempt to ward off the inevitable, only to feel sharp fangs bite through his thickly padded parka, tearing into flesh and crunching bone. He was tossed several feet through the air, as though he had all the weight and substance of a rag doll. And as he landed on his back, the bear straddled him, and he could smell the hot, fetid breath as the open maw closed over his face.
It was in the final instant, before his head was crushed and he was gnawed in the way that meat is ripped off a bone by a hungry dog that the bear stopped. Its coal-black eyes, that had studied him with an expression of impervious concentration, widened and registered fear. It reared back, fell sideways, then found its feet and loped off into the driving snow; white on white.
What now only appeared to be James Keating stood up and took bearings. It was oblivious to the pain in the mangled arm. It walked steadily if woodenly in the direction of an Inuit settlement, guiding and sustaining the being that it had pervaded back at the generator shack, after transferring from the thing known as Errol Brent, due to it being damaged beyond usefulness. Now, as it reached the huddle of dwellings, its glowing green eyes dimmed and returned to their previous mid-brown hue, and it staggered appropriately, and held the damaged limb, feigning pain that would assure it attention from the approaching life forms, whose intellect it would harvest for nourishment, before spreading out to encompass and assimilate the planet’s bounty into its collective awareness.
Initially, it was to be wrongly diagnosed as a mutated strain of the 1918 Spanish Flu, which had been a viral infection responsible for the deaths of up to a hundred million people, predominantly the young and fit, before it finally and for no apparent reason went to ground. But this was not the Spanish Flu. It was an even more lethal killer, with no discernible incubation period, and which, in the majority of cases, extinguished life in less than twenty-four hours. A minority of victims survived for several days, or even weeks. Others became carriers with no visible symptoms, and a very small percentage remained unaffected, immune to its assault.
Within a matter of weeks, civilisation had been toppled like a house of cards, and the rotting dead began to significantly outnumber the living. With no vaccine, the rampaging, sentient contagion undermined the cohesion of society, which spiralled ever faster into chaos with each passing day.
Time passed, and with over ninety percent of the available life energy absorbed, it gathered the sum of its myriad parts above the Pacific Ocean, to rise up out of the earth’s atmosphere, where it was carried by solar wind to continue its timeless journey in other quadrants of the galaxy.
24
THE RETURN
Sometimes when all rational explanation has been investigated and dismissed, then the extraordinary – however improbable and bizarre – is not so hard to believe or accept.
Black and sinister; a portent of doom, the shadow clung to the land, describing wide circles over the undulating terrain. It gave stark warning of the predator that wheeled high above on a rising thermal of warm air, casting its dark shape on the ground far below.
The rabbit hopped out from the shade of a clump of gorse, paused and sat up, its nose twitching, sensing danger a fraction of a second too late.
The hawk struck like lightning, smacking into the rabbit at incredible speed. Fur flew as sharp talons clenched deeply into flesh, and a razor beak darted at the fear-frozen prey’s throat.
Fifty yards from where blood soaked into the grass, the morning sun shone through the bedroom window, and Alec Parker threw back the single cotton sheet and swung up to sit on the edge of the bed. He rubbed at his sleep-filled eyes, and then glanced at the clock-radio on the bedside table. The ruby LCD read 8:02 AM. He was running just a tad late, blissfully unaware of his date with death within the hour.
Alec was a printer. He had transferred his small business lock, stock and barrel from Hounslow in West London to his birthplace of Keswick in the Lake District; a town that he had left as a restless nineteen-year-old, eager to spread his wings and step on as much of that ‘greener grass’ the outside world was growing as he could. He had returned home a married man, his wild oats sown, and disenchanted with the rat-race of big-city life. The notion to be back in the slower-paced small town roots of his childhood had just crept up on him, as a bulb will push up through warm, damp soil to just grow and grow. Sara, Alec’s wife, was not only enthusiastic over the idea, but downright pushy in wanting to quit London and head for the hills post-haste. The move had proved, thus far, to be the right one, and the past two years had been nigh on perfect in every respect.
At the time she had met Alec, Sara was working for Symposium; a glossy lifestyle magazine, where she was a sub editor with a background in journalism. Moving to the back of beyond had been a personal challenge to her fiercely independent nature, but by maintaining her contacts, and with the invaluable aid of her PC and the Internet, she had been able to reach out from her isolated home and continue to work, freelance.
Sara was twenty-seven, which was four years younger than Alec, and stood a lithe five-seven, barefoot. She had eyes even darker than her shoulder length mahogany hair, and possessed the complexion of fine porcelain. She was deliriously happy with their new life. They still returned for the occasional weekend visit to Sara’s parents in Staines, and to see the dwindling number of friends that they had remained in contact with. But it was always a relief to be back on the road again, heading north.
Alec stretched, shuffled his feet into the moccasins at the side of the bed, stood up and padded through to the bathroom for a quick shower.
“Coffee’s pou
red,” Sara called from the kitchen, hearing him up and about.
He towelled himself dry, then wiped the steamed-up mirror clear enough to see his reflection in. Alec was reasonably happy with the craggy, handsome face that smiled back at him. There were already a few threads of grey hair skulking among the black at his temples, but he chose to think that they added character. His eyes were ‘Newman blue’, he had been told – always by women of a certain age who remembered the late movie star – so many times that the compliment had started to become irksome. He stood five-eleven, but claimed to be spot on six foot, and was lean and muscular, with broad shoulders and a trim waist.
Alec was an above average specimen, and knew it.
Sauntering through to the kitchen wearing only a Disney bath towel around his waist, Alec picked up the mug of coffee from the counter and went out onto the patio to join Sara, who was already taking in the fresh morning air and the warming rays of the sun.
“Good morning, Pooh,” he said, using his nickname for her as he hunkered down to kiss her full lips.
“Mmmm, nice,” Sara purred, getting up from the rocking chair, that had been outside the house when they had moved in, and which she had immediately renovated and claimed as her own. “Let me freshen your coffee, it’ll be stone cold.”
Half an hour later, Alec drove out onto the narrow, winding lane and began the two mile journey down into Keswick.
This was to be Alec’s last day on earth, in his present form. Life was moving on, and would do so without him in it.