by Jonah Buck
She lunged backward, unsure if she’d actually hit the creature. There was a loud thud directly in front of her, the sound of something fleshy collapsing onto the concrete floor. Poole was still screaming, but his shrieks were turning into strangled gurgles. Denise tuned the awful noises out for a moment and focused on whether the creature in front of her was dead or not.
Fletch rushed over to help Poole, and he brought the glow of his lighter with him. The flickering light revealed the shape in front of her. The Nitro Express had excavated a hole in its chest region, blowing one of the creature’s arms off in the process. Pulped innards lay strewn around.
She turned around. Poole was in bad shape. He was flat on his back, his hands clawing at what was left of his face. Most of the flesh had dribbled off like melting chocolate. There was just runny sludge, dripping onto the floor. The bone was starting to sizzle and pit, too. Nearby, Metrodora turned around and threw up.
The creature that had just attacked them had the ability to spew acid, just like the dragon. Maybe the two were distant relatives. If these things really had come from some distant corner of the cosmos, maybe the entire ecology was based around that little trick. Maybe big grazing herbivores spat acid on the rocks, slurped the nutrients out, and were in turn sprayed with acid by hungry carnivores like these things. She didn’t know how the rules of evolution worked on whatever hell-planet these things came from.
Cornelia straddled Poole, trying to prevent him from clawing what skin he had left off and working to keep the stuff at bay. There wasn’t much she could do, even with her medical experience. They needed an operating room and a staff of doctors and equipment and adequate lighting. They had none of that. Cornelia had ripped the sleeve off her jacket and was using it to try to shovel the caustic gunk off Poole’s face. The vile ooze was eating through the jacket material as fast as Cornelia could work. She yelped as a drop ate through her gloves.
Some of the burning slime had landed on Poole’s neck. The stuff was bubbling and eating its way through the flesh. Poole’s gibbering screams changed timbre as the walls of his esophagus started to melt away. Blood and liquid flesh spread away from Poole in a growing pool. After a minute, the man went still at last. The soft tissues below his eyes and above his Adam’s apple were mostly gone. What was left looked like it had been sent through a blender.
Denise rubbed her face with the back of her hand. There were only four of them left now. Four people against an unknown number of monsters and the French military. Those weren’t good odds.
“Is everyone alright?” Denise asked.
Cornelia nodded. She’d taken her gloves off. There were a couple of angry raw spots on her hands, but most of the acid had been blunted after chewing through a few layers of clothing.
Fletch ran his fingers through his hair. “Yeah. I’m fine. I just had a really strong memory from back during the war, but I’m okay. Wouldn’t mind a drink or twelve right about now, though.”
“No injuries,” Metrodora said, hunched over with her hands on her knees. She was still turned around so she couldn’t see Poole.
“Right,” Denise said. Everyone had been pushed too far, but they were still holding it together. They needed some sort of reprieve, even if it was only temporary. “Okay, get the generator up and running. Let’s try to get it done quick.”
She didn’t bother to mention that there could be more of the creatures in here with them right now. If there were more monsters in the warehouse, the noise and bright flash of light from firing the elephant gun had just given away exactly where they were. Everyone turned around and started working. They didn’t need to be told that they were still in danger. It was as apparent as the darkness all around them.
Denise crouched down to make herself a smaller target in case anything else started lobbing acid in her direction. She moved forward a little bit and looked at the body of the creature in front of her. It looked the part of something that conspiracy theorists would believe was on ice in a secret government facility somewhere. Most biologists would probably give their eyeteeth to be able to examine this cadaver on a slab.
The head was the strangest feature. It had two large, compound eyes, like an insect. The bulging, lidless eyeballs were both a bit bigger than Denise’s fists. It didn’t have any nose to speak of, just a couple of pits in the middle of its head. Denise assumed they were nostrils of some sort, but they could be mating orifices for all she knew.
From what she could see, the creature didn’t have a jaw. Instead, its mouth was just a gaping hole. A thick, runny fluid dribbled from the creature’s mouth. Denise didn’t dare touch anything. That seemed like a good way to get her fingers melted off. There were some sort of parts inside the creature’s mouth. It almost looked like baleen, the material whales used to filter tiny organisms out of the seawater.
This thing couldn’t bite anyone. Instead, it spat acid and reduced its prey to a slurry, kind of like a spider. Then it slurped up the resulting mess and filtered everything through its mouthparts. Once it had killed, it probably lapped its meal up.
There was a series of whirrs followed by a sort of rapid clicking. A second later, the lights snapped on overhead. Denise blinked in the sudden light, squinting against the fluorescent brilliance. Somewhere out amid the field of crates and tarp-covered equipment, something skittered across the floor in surprise.
Denise swiveled her Nitro Express in that direction, but she couldn’t see anything. “Let’s get to a location we can secure and then work on gathering supplies,” she said as she backed toward the closest door. If they could fortify a large office or someplace, they’d be able to rest and warm up a little bit without the constant fear that something was about to sneak up on them. Then they could grab some equipment and evaluate their options.
She turned the knob the nearest door until it was ready to swing open, then she let it open just an inch. Both hands firmly on the Nitro Express again, she pushed the door the rest of the way open with her foot. She stuck the rifle’s barrels through the open doorway first and swiveled them around, taking in the large room beyond.
Denise looked down the sights, but her vision soon drifted upward. There, standing on a pedestal in the middle of the room, was the meteor.
THIRTEEN
THE SOURCE
The meteor was a gigantic, potato-shaped hunk of blackened rock. Almost the entire surface was covered in dark scorch marks from its entry into the atmosphere. The only exceptions were some places where pieces had obviously been chipped off by the scientists here for further study. Overall, the giant hunk of space debris was perhaps the length of two transport trucks and as tall as a two-story building. The entire meteor had been placed in a giant glass structure, separating it from the rest of the building.
There were workstations and equipment lining the walls. Overturned chairs and binders swept from desks lay on the floor. More papers lay on the desks themselves, along with black and white photographs of wives and families. There were various knickknacks and diplomas hanging on the walls. This place had been the heart of the station before everything went to hell.
Denise wondered what the French government had told all those wives and children in the various photos. Their loved ones fell down a frozen crevasse? Gas leak at the science quarters? Transport ship sank in icy waters with no survivors? She was guessing that they hadn’t been told their loved ones had been devoured by undead colleagues and bug-eyed monsters from outer space. Maybe they hadn’t been told anything at all yet. As far as anyone in the outside world knew, the French research stations down here were humming along just fine.
Denise could now report that things were, in fact, not fine.
“They must have winched the meteor out of its impact site and then built the facility around it,” Metrodora said. “I don’t see any other way they could have gotten it in here.”
“Most of its mass probably burned up when it hit the atmosphere. It was a lot bigger when it was just floating along in space. This is just what’s l
eft,” Cornelia said.
“So, this is what the monsters hitched a ride on?” Fletch asked.
Denise looked the meteor over. It was big, but it wasn’t enormous. There was no way that the dragon creature that attacked the snow tractor could have ridden around inside this thing. Nor could it have simply attached itself to the outside and surfed through the atmosphere. As Cornelia pointed out, the temperatures would have been immense. Anything on the outside would be charcoal in a matter of seconds.
“I don’t see how,” Cornelia said. “I mean, the only safe place on this thing when it entered the atmosphere would have been the interior, deep toward the center. Maybe the slugs could make the journey safely in there. I don’t think the creatures that killed Poole would fit, though.”
“Do you have another explanation about where they came from?” Metrodora asked.
“Hell,” Fletch suggested.
“Maybe the meteor opened up a subterranean cave system or something. Maybe they’re not from space at all. I have no idea, and I’m not about to ask them,” Cornelia said.
“I think they probably have to be from space,” Denise said. “Otherwise, why bother dragging the meteor up here in the first place? They were obviously studying it before everything went wrong. This whole facility was a costly endeavor. They wouldn’t build it just to study a single meteorite, even if it is a sizable specimen. There had to be something special about it. I’m guessing it’s because they found life on this one.”
“So where does that leave us? Fast-tracked evolution? These things started out as microbes and diverged into giant flying monsters, slugs, and bug men in the span of a couple of months?” Metrodora asked. She pulled out her notebook and jotted something down inside.
Denise hadn’t even noticed that Metrodora still had the little book. “Maybe. Could be. Could be something completely different. I’ll bet good money that’s the source right there, though.”
The air was starting to warm up a little as the heating system kicked in. It wasn’t very dramatic, but it still sent a painful tingle across Denise’s skin as she started to thaw out. A few more hours outside, and she would have been in real trouble.
“Let’s focus on doing what we can to keep this area safe. Now that we’ve got the power back on, this is our chance to get what supplies we need and try to contact the outside world. There were a lot of supplies in the warehouse back there, but I think we should try to find some weapons,” Denise said.
“Right. They had a guard hut at the front entrance. There was probably some sort of security team located here. If we can find their offices, they probably had an armory or at least a gun locker,” Cornelia said.
“We shouldn’t split up to look. Not until we’re all armed to the teeth, at least,” Denise said. “Stick with me. We’ll see what we can scrounge up.” Everyone nodded. They liked the idea of getting their mitts on some guns of their own.
There were several doors leading off in various directions from the meteor laboratory. This seemed to be the central hub for the entire facility, which confirmed in Denise’s mind that the researchers here had been interested in the hunk of rock because it harbored some traces of life. A couple of the nearby entrances were barricaded up.
Denise didn’t want to go through the effort of pulling the desks and equipment away only to discover that they had been piled there for good reasons in the first place. Instead, she chose one of the doors on the opposite side of the room and started toward it.
Walking past the glass enclosure the meteor had been placed in, Denise noticed that one of the glass panels had been shattered. The shards sat glittering on the floor nearby, drops of blood glistening from some of them. From the way the glass had landed, she could tell that whatever had broken the glass had come from the inside and burst out rather than in. Maybe that represented the exact moment the researchers here lost control. It was impossible to say.
She opened the door she’d chosen and poked her rifle through. This was not the door they wanted. That much was obvious at a glance. What lay beyond was mostly just a single long hallway without any doors leading off it. There appeared to be the entrance to an industrial-sized cable car at the far end of the hallway. The hallway stretched far enough that it probably reached the melted rim of the crater, and the cable car allowed people to descend down and retrieve anything of interest.
There was a gate near their position, though. A sign hung from the metal grating. The sign was in French of course, and most of it appeared to consist of warnings and admonitions. There was a lot of red lettering marked with exclamation points.
A smaller sign seemed to be a directory of sorts, though. Denise could puzzle out a few pieces of French on that one. One line in particular caught her eye. Espace de stockage: équipement d'urgence. She didn’t need to be a linguistic savant to figure that one out. Space of stocking: equipment of urgency. Or less cumbersomely, “storage area: emergency equipment.” Something like that, anyway.
That option intrigued her. Emergency equipment might include all kinds of goodies in a place like this, maybe everything they needed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to travel straight into the belly of the beast yet, though. There’d be only one way in or out of that pit. With only one weapon between all of them, things could get really ugly if something went wrong down there. Maybe there were easier pickings up here on the surface.
She backed out into the meteorite observation chamber again and picked another door. Once again, she stuck her gun barrels through first, just in case something was in the mood to jump out at them. So far, the interior of the base itself was relatively quiet.
Denise thought back to the bodies she’d seen outside and in the science laboratory at Delambre Station. A lot of people had fled from this place. Maybe some of them made it back to the coast and were rescued. The dead had followed them out and killed or infected a lot of them, though. Apparently, the exodus had left the original site relatively abandoned. Benoit and his team had probably wrangled a lot of their specimens from here and the surrounding environment too, further reducing the local monster population. Denise was thankful for the service. Too bad Benoit and his crew apparently knew nothing about the dragon creature and how to get rid of it, though. Everything might have stayed under control if they had been able to capture or kill that particular beastie. Its arrival had brought Colonel Dagenais into the game and gotten Benoit and his team killed at the front door to this station.
The hallway ahead was empty, but it had several doorways leading off of it. Offices of some kind. The first door led to something unexpected.
It was a cellblock. There were about twenty cells, all lined up next to each other like a prison. Concrete walls separated each cell, but the front of each was simply made of cold iron bars. Each cell had two cots and a couple of basic amenities. The space was small enough that prisoners could have laid on their respective cots and held hands if they wanted to.
Most of the cells were empty. A few weren’t though. The one nearest to Denise held two emaciated bodies. The prisoners wore matching jumpsuits that practically fell off their skeletal frames. Denise thought back to some of the dead men she’d seen in the burning science wing of Delambre Station. They’d been wearing jumpsuits identical to the two bodies in the cage.
“Looks like they starved to death,” Cornelia said.
“They were protected from the creatures that took over the station, but there was no one left to feed them,” Metrodora said.
Denise shuddered at the thought of being trapped in a place like this, left to slowly die. There wouldn’t have been anything the men in there could do about any of it. Maybe that wasn’t even the worst way to go around here, though.
Another cell also contained two dead bodies. The difference was, one of the men was moving around. The corpse stuck its arms through the bars and grasped at them. It banged its head against the metal over and over again, trying to reach them. The steady beat of the man’s skull against the iron set Denise’s teeth
on edge as the sound rattled out over and over again. Another body sat on the floor of the cell, the flesh chewed off its bones. At some point, a slug had made it in here and infected one of the men, with unfortunate results for his cellmate.
“Who were these poor suckers?” Fletch looked the occupied cells over.
“Test subjects, I would guess,” Denise said, thinking again about what she’d seen at Delambre Station. There had been a disproportionate number of ghouls in jumpsuits locked in the laboratory out there. She was guessing they’d been deliberately infected.
“Probably condemned criminals,” Cornelia said. “Easy to get ahold of, and most people won’t miss them.”
Denise looked around the room. The cells were of a different construction than the rest of the facility. The concrete walls were painted a different color, and the room was in an odd location within the facility for holding prisoners. She was guessing that this area was only turned into a makeshift prison after the researchers studying the meteorite met the slugs and bug men. It didn’t look like it was part of the original plans for the place but something that had been set up later, like a bad home renovation.
Delambre Station had been a relatively unsecured complex. It was built in such a way that even visiting scientists could walk into certain parts of it. It had probably only been co-opted for studying the dead after this place fell.
Merovée Station on the other hand, was clearly never meant to be seen by anyone from the outside. The place had been guarded, and the cellblock reeked of unethical experiments and human guinea pigs. She had no doubt that Dagenais had orders to raze this place to the ground in due course, too. Not only would it help contain the monsters, but it would also eliminate evidence of complicity in such conditions.
Whoever was in charge here would probably be hanged by some secret military court if the evidence of human experimentation came to light. That, or quietly shuffled off to some new position and given a medal. The same people who originally approved of this place might not be too concerned with the excesses if they gained something valuable out of it. There’d still be hell to pay for the government, trying to explain just what had been going on here, though. Yes, this place was going to be demolished and the rubble burnt and bulldozed into the crater as soon as the military got the chance.