Growth

by Jeff Jacobson

  “For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about,” Dr. Deemer’s gaze swept across the table, “please believe me when I say to you that there is something altogether unnatural on this island. Something that does not belong anywhere on earth.” Dr. Deemer started to cough, the way a cat hacks up a hairball.

  He cleared his throat enough to breathe. “The results of our work were not foreseen. Certain safety measures . . . did not work. It appears that the fungal defense has been successful in jumping from species to species. Last night, we discovered that this . . . new species of fungus is not only able to spread between species as vastly different as insects and mammals, but that it can also latch on to the somatic nervous system, thereby controlling individual muscle groups within an organism.” He started retching again, until he could barely keep his feet; he doubled over, dry heaving spatters of wet air, until the rasping sounds grew more liquid and he suddenly vomited half-digested blood all over the podium.

  “I think this has gone on long enough,” Slade said, snapping the pocketknife blade shut with one hand as if that would provide the necessary authority to back up his statement.

  A few of the executives stood up and started moving to the front of the table, getting closer to the doors.

  Dr. Deemer spit clots of blood onto his shoes and whipped his gaze back up to the long scythe of a table. His skin glowed a ghastly white in the soft tropical light from the windows. “Sit down.”

  Everybody slowed down until they were almost standing still, but none went back to their chairs.

  “I said sit down.” He pulled the trigger six times, hitting two executives. One caught a bullet in the head, another in the elbow. The rest of the standing men dropped to the floor while everybody still at the table froze. “Listen to me very carefully. This may be difficult for you to comprehend, at least at first. However, you deserve to know the truth. Every single one of you have been infected since the moment you landed on this island and took your first breath.”

  Something that looked like slick black blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. He wiped at it absentmindedly, the way a toddler will wipe away drool. “Even now, you may be feeling a little warm, a little dry mouth, clogged nose, a little tickle in the back of your throat, like nothing more than a summer cold.” He gave a slow, sad smile. “I am truly sorry. I wish . . .” He shook his head and looked at the bottle in surprise, as if he’d never seen it before. He took another long drink. “You do not understand.” He gave a horrible gagging gasp, as a toe-curling dry heave wrenched its way through his torso. “You . . . We are all dead.” He hacked again, and another torrent of whiskey and thick blood splattered across the sticky podium.

  “You all just don’t know it yet.” He spoke with the conviction of a borderline alcoholic pleading with his maker for mercy as his body expelled the poison. “I’m so sorry,” he gasped. “I am, truly.”

  His breathing increased, until it caught for a second, stuttered, gaining volume as it spiraled around the vocal cords, and the pitch grew higher and higher, till he sounded like a little girl having an asthma attack. His arms whipped at the air in grabbing motions.

  None of the executives moved.

  Dr. Deemer pulled off his glasses with a shaking hand. He dropped them and shivered. Straightened. His hands twisted inward and his arms folded into his chest as if he were trying to imitate the corpse of the funky chicken. Something marched up his spine, cranking it backward, vertebrae by vertebrae. The whine built to a shriek as the muscles ripped his shoulders and head back, arching his back until his entire body strained against itself in a crude mockery of the curved table.

  The howl drained his lungs of oxygen and he did not take another breath. His body swayed for a moment, but he did not fall. He opened his eyes far too wide and a blackened, thick tongue emerged from between his cracked lips. He struggled to breathe through his nose.

  Everyone heard a muffled crack that sounded like stepping on a rotten board in a carpeted staircase.

  Dr. Deemer trembled. He pivoted slowly, as if he wanted to admire the view, then jerked away from the windows as if repelled by the light. The table recoiled. Blood flowed through the scientist’s wispy gray hair at the back of his head. Bob Jr. thought he could see the jagged edges of broken, bare skull.

  His face was now nearly unrecognizable, as pressure built inside, driving the tongue out even farther. His eyes bulged until they all could hear two soft pops in quick succession as his eyes erupted like two small land mines, vaporizing the muscles and nerves and jelly, spraying a fine mist into the air. Whatever life was left in his body vanished, and it collapsed.

  A gray cloud floated out of the empty, moist eye sockets.

  CHAPTER 2

  Fred Lockwood, head of the International Relations division, was the first one to break for the doors. Three more immediately followed. The rest of the executives looked at each other with wide, calculating eyes. The slow trickle to the door became a flood. Even the exec with the shattered elbow managed to run.

  Bob Jr.’s first instinct was to follow the rest of the herd, but Slade grabbed his arm. “You help me out of this building, I’ll get you off this island. Please. Help me.”

  Bob Jr. looked down at the sixty-year-old man, a skeleton trembling with a mixture of anger and anxiety. Slade might have been frail, but he was way, way up the corporate totem pole. He could be a hell of an asset to Bob Jr.’s career. And he might know about a back door somewhere. “Okay. Where?”

  “Wait. Just wait. Let these fools run,” Slade said. “They will undoubtedly attempt to reach the jet. If there truly is a Level Five Containment Breach on this island, then measures have already been taken. Nothing will be permitted to leave. Even if they manage to take off, it will be shot out of the sky.”

  Slade caught Bob Jr.’s look of astonishment. “You do realize, don’t you, that a containment breach of this magnitude demands an armed response? There is a scorched-earth policy in motion.”

  Slade could tell that Bob Jr. still hadn’t gotten with the program. He shook his head. “I can’t believe your father talked Henry into hiring you.” His clawed hand snatched at Bob Jr.’s tie and yanked him closer. “This company will leave nothing to chance. They have the men and the means to come here and burn everything. This company will protect itself. They will burn everything. This island will cease to exist.” Spittle landed on Bob Jr.’s cheek.

  Bob Jr.’s thought process moved sluggishly in the best of times, and these latest developments had really thrown a wrench into the gears of his mind, leaving him nearly paralyzed with incomprehension. Finally though, current events snapped into understanding, and panic bloomed in his eyes like a match dropped into a backyard grill.

  He edged around the table to check on Dr. Deemer.

  Something was growing out of the old man’s skull. Gray and bulbous, it seemed fragile and dense at the same time. It reminded Bob Jr. of the body of an octopus somehow, as if the creature had been quietly growing inside Deemer’s head and had gotten too big for its cage. Bob Jr. used the tip of his shoe to nudge the scientist’s knee.

  The gray sac wobbled with the movement, but did not break.

  Bob Jr. blinked. Had it gotten bigger since he was standing here?

  He looked around. Except for the two men and the three corpses, the conference room was now empty. “We gotta go,” Bob Jr. said.

  “No. Now is precisely the time to be patient. Let the rest distract whatever measures the company has prepared.”

  “Look at him. C’mere and look! There’s something growing inside his head. We need to get out of this room. We gotta get far away.”

  Slade peered at Dr. Deemer and thought about it for a moment. “Very well.” He pushed away from the table and struggled to his feet. His cane tumbled to the floor. “Help me up, dammit!”

  Bob Jr. didn’t need any more encouragement and half-lifted, half-dragged the older man out of the room. The hallways were empty and quiet. There were no alarms.
No screaming people rushing around. Except for a few white pages scattered on the floor where the hallway intersected a wider corridor, there was nothing to suggest an island-wide evacuation.

  No, not an evacuation, Bob Jr. reminded himself. If what Slade said was true, then this was more like a hunt, or flat-out extermination. Even if he didn’t quite believe it was happening, the rest of the executives sure as hell did, and that was enough to kick Bob Jr.’s self-preservation instincts into high gear. He slung Slade’s left arm around his neck and pulled the old man along. “Where? Where to?”

  “Through the labs, out to the greenhouses,” Slade said, gasping for breath. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose in a slick sheen of sweat, despite the frigid air-conditioning.

  “Then what? Tell me you’ve got a plan.” Bob Jr. felt a little sick when they came upon an airlock that stood wide open. After all the precautions they had to tolerate just to pass through the membrane, seeing it gaping and exposed now was, in some ways, almost worse than seeing the VP get shot.

  God knew what all was in the air.

  “We have to hurry,” Slade said.

  No shit, Bob Jr. thought. It’d be a lot faster if I didn’t have to drag your lame ass. Out loud, he asked again, “What’s your plan?” Bob Jr. was starting to wonder if he even needed the old man once he knew where they were going.

  But Slade didn’t claw his way up near the top of the Allagro food chain by being an idiot. He knew damn well what Bob Jr. was thinking. He would have done the same thing, except he would have gotten the plan back in the conference room. He said, “Shut up and keep going.”

  They found the first bodies soon after. Three of them, all wearing the protective scrubs, slumped in their chairs around a low table strewn with a frantic storm of printouts and graphs. One had fallen to the floor and lay twisted and tangled, one arm propped against the wall.

  Bob Jr. noticed all three had empty coffee cups nearby and faltered, trying to put the pieces together.

  “I told you this was no joke. Keep moving,” Slade said.

  The second airlock was closed, not that it mattered. It hissed open upon command and they stumbled through, feeling the temperature rise at least fifteen or twenty degrees. The greenhouses were close.

  The next body they found, some local wearing the uniform of one of the fieldworkers, was on his stomach in the middle of the corridor. He had a small hole in the back of his head and a gaping, ragged maw where his face used to be. Bob Jr. had to look away. Before today, he’d only seen one dead person in his entire life. That had been when he was twelve, at the open-casket funeral of his church’s former pastor. That man had looked asleep, at peace.

  These people looked interrupted, violated.

  The corridor started up a gentle incline, and Bob Jr. and Slade struggled on, both drenched in sweat. Bob Jr.’s sides hitched and he could feel the morning’s rum threatening to boil back up his throat. Slade’s arm kept slipping, so they switched sides. Slade’s thin fingers were surprisingly strong, and Slade wasn’t shy about using his fingernails to sink his grip into the side of Bob Jr.’s neck.

  Sunlight appeared through the glass doors at the end of the corridor. At first, it was so bright it washed out the artificial lights down there, but as they got closer, it grew dim for some reason, as if heavy storm clouds had covered the sun.

  The panic swelled within Bob Jr., sending bursts of herky-jerky twitches through his muscles, making him lurch along as if he were stepping on exposed electrical currents. Slade’s fingernails left bleeding trails on Bob Jr.’s neck as he struggled to hang on.

  They both heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire.

  The island burned.

  They had reached the glass doors and saw that the cornfields were on fire. Boiling black smoke filled the sky. Another stitch of gunfire.

  They heard a muffled whump, and a mushroom cloud of fire appeared, roiling above the corn before transforming into a bubbling fountain of smoke. “Fuel truck,” Slade said.

  Bob Jr. craned his head and saw one of the Range Rovers, stalled at an angle across the main road. Smoke seeped from under the hood, the doors hung open, and the bodies of men in bloody gray suits were clustered around it as if a bunch of drunks had all staggered from the vehicle and passed out.

  A man dressed as a lab tech, his blue scrubs startlingly pale against the vivid red and black chaos, moved into sight from behind the SUV. He carried an assault rifle. Another man, a fieldworker, darted at the lab tech with a machete raised over his head.

  The lab tech turned and calmly fired a burst of bullets into the fieldworker’s chest. The fieldworker hadn’t even hit the ground before the lab tech turned back toward the facility’s main entrance, moving with a methodical, unhurried precision. The burning fields threw skittering shadows around him, as if he were illuminated by false gods while a black funeral shroud cloaked the noon sun above.

  Bob Jr. shifted Slade to get a better look. “He . . . he works here. He must. Who the hell is he?”

  Slade panted, struggling for breath. “A mole. Somebody kept here just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “In case of something like today.”

  “But you said they would kill everyone on the island.”

  “They will.”

  “But he’s . . . that’s suicide. Isn’t it?”

  Slade gave a slight shrug. “Sometimes suicide is the preferred option. Perhaps he’s here to repay a debt. Perhaps he is willing to die so his family does not.” Bob Jr.’s face made it clear he could not fathom dying intentionally. Slade smiled, a cadaverous, sick expression. “It’s a big, bad world out there, farm boy.”

  They watched as the man strolled through the koi ponds and the sweeping lawns that had been clipped more carefully than most putting greens. The lab tech stopped for a moment, then leaned over a low hedge.

  One of the secretaries rose from her hiding place behind the hedge and tried to run on wobbling high heels. The lab tech emptied the rest of his clip into her back and reloaded. He moved out of Bob Jr. and Slade’s line of sight, heading for the main entrance.

  “Whoever he is, they had him here for a reason,” Slade said. “I’d be willing to wager he is not the only one. Let’s move, before the rest of the team gets here. Their arrival is imminent, make no mistake.”

  Bob Jr. eased open the door and they moved cautiously into the murky light. Blackened flecks of corn leaves and gritty ash floated in the gentle breeze. The air smelled of smoke and ash. Bob Jr. shifted his grip once again on Slade, putting the old man between himself and the main entrance, and dragged him along the flagstone walk as it curved around to the massive greenhouses.

  This was the only upside to hauling the old man around; he might provide a shield for any bullets.

  Slade realized this as well and said again, “Hurry up, dammit!”

  The greenhouses had been built along a low cliff and looked down on a boulder-strewn shore. “A boat is waiting down there,” Slade said. “It is secret, hidden, and reserved for upper management, regularly maintained in case of emergency. I would say that today certainly qualifies.” Slade caught Bob Jr.’s eyes. “Understand this. You will not gain access without me. The stairway is locked with a code. I know the code. Get me to the boat and you will live.”

  “That’s the plan,” Bob Jr. lied.

  The doors to the greenhouse had been sealed in red biohazard tape. A short chain encircled the handles, secured with a padlock. The distant lights of the sun and fires reflected in the myriad windows, making it impossible to see inside. Bob Jr. didn’t want to think about what that meant. He stopped short. “We can’t go in there. We’ll have to find another way around.”

  “There is no other way. The stairwell to the dock is inside.”

  “Then how? It’s locked.”

  Slade shot Bob Jr. a withering stare. “Break the glass, moron.”

  Bob Jr. didn’t want to make any more noise than necessary, so he
lugged Slade around the far side of the building, near the cliff, leaned the older man against the wall, and lifted a football-size rock out of the border separating the bushes from the grass. He held his breath.

  Slade looked back to the main building. “Do it. Now.”

  Bob Jr. heaved the rock at the nearest pane. It bounced off.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Slade said.

  Bob Jr. retrieved the rock, lifted it over his head, and threw it so hard both feet left the ground. This time, the rock smashed through the glass with a tinkling explosion. Spinning red lights flickered to life inside, and a deep, insistent buzzing erupted. Bob Jr. felt his insides go watery.

  “Go, go!” Slade said, clutching at his arm and pushing him inside. Bob Jr. tried to ignore the broken glass in the soft dirt and crawled into a forest of cornstalks. A cobweb smeared across his face but he couldn’t stop to wipe it away. Some of the strands pulled taut across his tongue, then broke free, drying against his teeth. He gagged and spit, hating the feeling of the threads disintegrating in his saliva even more than the glass slivers in his palms.

  He turned back and wasn’t gentle about dragging Slade through the shards. If the old fuck got cut, then he deserved it.

  Slade was tough enough to keep quiet and not complain. They pushed through the glass and dirt, cracking cornstalks as they crawled deeper into the greenhouse. The temperature wasn’t much different from outside. If anything, it was cooler.

  They slid over a wooden partition, landing in an aisle of some kind. Rows of corn stretched into the gloom, lit only by the spinning red lights high above. The deep, throbbing buzz of the alarm reverberated through Bob Jr., rattling his bones. He caught sight of his bleeding hands and knees and whirled on Slade. “Where’s that goddamn staircase, old man?”

  Slade wiped soil and cobwebs from his eyes. “Down . . . down there. I think.”

  “You better be fucking right,” Bob Jr. said, hauling Slade to a standing position.