Instinct (2010)

by Kay, Ben

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Do you not want us to help them?’

  ‘I would love to assist in any way I can, but there is a substantial element of risk to that endeavour.’

  ‘Hey, we’re OK with that. You let us know what the risk is and we’ll let you know if we’re willing to go for it.’

  ‘The risk to you is not my concern, Ms Jacobs.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Ms Jacobs, and the rest of you, without indulging in the kind of indiscretion that would cause me to commit a felony or a betrayal of my country, I think I can explain that the one absolute rule of MEROS is that its contents must never reach the outside world without being under complete control. I do not believe that would be the case if you were to attempt a rescue operation.’

  ‘So you’re saying we just leave them down there?’

  ‘I would go one step further, Ms Jacobs. I would prefer it if you were to ensure the complete destruction of MEROS.’

  ‘Are you shittin’ us?’ asked Madison.

  ‘Ah, a new voice. To whom am I speaking?’

  ‘Er … Gary Madison, sir. Pilot.’

  ‘Thank you. Well, Mr Madison, I am not, to employ your vernacular, shitting you. You work in some capacity for a project that requires the strictest controls, and that, as I said, is the one absolute rule.’

  ‘Even if it means sacrificing the lives of nine or ten innocent people?’ asked Jacobs.

  ‘I’m afraid so. Now, if we’ve all finished our little game of try to make Mr Pentagon go boo-hoo, what I would like to do is explain to you the steps that are required to annihilate the entire facility.’

  65

  Except for a couple of pounds she was keeping back for emergencies, Garrett had packed all the remaining C4 on to the nest. It was going to take a hell of a lot to put a good-sized hole in the concrete and she didn’t want to risk going in weak with their only shot. All she had to do now was rig the detonator and they were ready.

  ‘All set, Major,’ she yelled. The hissing was now so loud she had to raise her voice to be heard. Webster pointed to the other side of the room.

  ‘OK, everyone stand against the east wall. We’re going to set the fuses on a two-minute timer.’

  The only clear route to the other side of Level One passed within sight of the cockroach hole. As if it were a car crash, they all took at least a glance at the compelling sight of the jerking web of nets. It was too dark to see anything of the roaches but the noise cut through them like ground glass.

  They had all suffered along with Lisa but now they could only imagine what was making a sound of that screeching volume. Susan visualized a cracking, clattering mess of hard shell and searching jaws just waiting for more prey. Bishop felt the approaching inevitability of nightmares becoming real.

  There were ten of them now, their faces pressed up against the wall. Some were glad of the support as their legs shook and their bodies loosened with faintness. Garrett warned them to look away because the explosion would be bright and hot, not something they wanted to expose their retinas to after an hour in the dark. She also explained that there would be fallout from the explosion: lumps of nest, floor, ceiling, concrete wall, and whatever else lay between it and them.

  ‘Don’t know exactly what we’re going to get out of this, but at the very least it’s gonna look like the biggest Fourth of July you’ve ever seen being let off in your basement,’ was how she put it.

  Checking her stopwatch, Garrett shouted down the seconds from the moment Webster had primed the detonators. The others had no idea what would really happen or when until –

  The light exploded in a shock of white. It led a quake of shuddering vibration that pushed them harder into the wall, bending their knees, and heating their backs like a roar of sunburn.

  The flash continued to pulse out behind them. Hands over their eyes or not, they saw pure, inescapable white. It curled around them like needle-thin fingers that slipped in everywhere. Half-gaps and chinks were filled to the brim even though they shut their eyes tight enough to ache.

  The sound was like being inside a thunderstorm: pitch-dark booms spread and throbbed around them, bouncing and swelling into every corner.

  The heat, light and noise rose to a roaring peak then tailed off slowly, reverberating around the enclosed space before echoing to a silence that could not compete with the ringing in their ears.

  Garrett blinked hard as she turned round. It was as if the house lights had come up at the end of a rock concert. The space was now lit by pockets of burning nest and she could see every part of Level One: its cavernous size; the thoughtless, rectangular arrangement of its grey walls and the chaos that had spread across the floor.

  But all that was nothing compared to the shock of the human bones and dried-out insect corpses that littered the ground. There were so many that the Abdomen was a chamber of horrors where the evil masks of massive beetles and giant ants lay next to crushed bones and broken skulls. Now they could see clearly what had lived and died here, they could also see what might have survived.

  Dealing with this alongside the confusion of dust blindness and the full ache of ringing in their ears was too much for some. Takeshi tried to steady himself on a table, but it only had three good legs, so he overbalanced and crashed to the ground. Susan held on to George for support, while Andrew clung hard to his mum. Laura simply couldn’t take in all the death at once. She bit her lip and held her son tight.

  Neither Webster nor Bishop had explained how many people had worked here, so the sheer number of skeletons came as a foul shock. The bones were strewn about the floor like giant grains of rice outside a wedding. Some told a story, like the four skeletons that lay beneath the dessicated remains of six enormous desert locusts. Skulls had been bitten in half, pelvises smashed into hundreds of pieces, femurs and tibia chewed like toothpicks.

  Envisaging the massacre that had led to this scene was unavoidable. Like a battlefield that had been left for ten years, it preserved far more than its physical objects. Collectively, they observed a stunned, then respectful, silence as more of the grim remnants were revealed.

  They also had no choice but to wait. The explosion had thrown up a murky cloud of dust that was inflating its way through the air. There was no point trying to examine the blast until it had settled.

  Despite the explosion, the room had taken on an insidious calm. The hissing had stopped, the explosion had muffled everything that came to their ears and the fire had revealed the unknown horrors of the dark to be harmless, on this floor at least.

  The dustcloud was slowing, so they watched as it settled, each passing second showing more of what the explosion had left behind. The highest parts cleared first, and they were relieved to see that there was little damage to the ceiling, only an angry black scorch mark that fanned out from the point of the blast.

  The wall and its hard brown covering were revealed next. They watched without blinking as each new inch became visible, hoping to see a hole blasting back to a staircase free from obstruction. But the more they saw, the greater their disappointment: the explosion had made little impact. The north wall looked as it had done earlier, only a few feet further back.

  ‘That could have gone better,’ said George.

  Mike and Wainhouse headed towards the nest to take a closer look.

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Webster. The dust was settling faster than they expected and now they could see why: the explosives had had their greatest effect on the floor. The cloud was falling into a wide, jagged-edged hole that stretched over thirty feet from the wall.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s something,’ said Garrett. She moved forward to see if they were left with access to the stairs from Level Two.

  ‘Hold on,’ warned Webster. ‘If the blast made a hole that big then the floor could be weak. Let’s take this carefully.’

&nbs
p; ‘Aye-aye, Major.’

  As if they were making their way on to thin ice, Garrett and Carter edged ahead, testing the ground before giving it their full weight. The others followed behind in the same way, a chorus of dusty coughs.

  Garrett inched past the cockroach hole. The Kevlar web had been blown clean away, leaving an uneven circle with a surprising amount of light coming from it, but nothing alive. There was no time to waste on what might or might not be down there, so she continued towards the wall.

  The floor felt solid enough. What they couldn’t see were the struts that ran between the ceiling and floor of Level Two. Made of great steel girders, they had held up with no damage.

  Carter looked over the edge. To his amazement, Level Two was clearly illuminated and full of broad green leaves and wide, twisting stalks.

  ‘How come the lights are on down there, Major?’ he asked.

  Webster followed Carter’s eyeline. ‘Level Two was the greenhouse. I guess the generator just kept it going.’

  ‘When we wanted to simulate jungle conditions in a …’ Bishop was going to say controlled environment, but thought better of it, ‘… way we could use for experiments, we used Level Two.’

  ‘Well, you did a pretty good job. It looks like an indoor rainforest,’ said Carter.

  ‘Hydroponics would explain the humidity,’ said Mike. ‘There must be metal halide or high-pressure sodium lights down there, and a hell of a lot of moisture.’ George looked surprised at this knowledge. ‘I paid my way through college by growing the best sativa on the Eastern seaboard,’ Mike explained. ‘But how come they’re still burning after all this time?’

  ‘LED-based innovations from our boys at MIT. Heat and light plus longevity – but I don’t think any of us expected them to last ten years,’ explained Bishop.

  Carter leaned further over. He could see into the staircase on the level below, but only the part that led downwards. Further down, he could also see that the blast had taken out the floor of Level Two, revealing Level Three. It was crowded with plants that looked like pure white versions of the bushes and creepers that surrounded them on the surface.

  ‘And what was on Level Three?’ he asked.

  ‘That was storage,’ said Bishop, moving next to Carter to see what he could see.

  ‘Storage of what?’

  ‘All the genetic compounds, including those that had gone wrong, just in case we needed to refer back to them at a later date.’ He took a look for himself. ‘Good Lord. I don’t remember anything like that.’

  The dust finally cleared all the way back, confirming that they would have to drop down a level to see if there was any access to the stairway.

  ‘Well, shit,’ said Garrett, shaking her head.

  ‘I thought that hole was supposed to go backwards, not down,’ said Carter.

  ‘Yeah? Me too,’ Garrett replied.

  At the back of the group, Andrew and Laura could tell that this was not what the others had been hoping for. With all the debris and mess, they found spaces on opposite ends of the hole and moved in to take a look for themselves.

  Laura stared in wonder at the insects that were now visible on the floor below. They didn’t look like the blanched, thin corpses that had been lying on Level One for years. They were darker, more substantial, perhaps deceased only recently, possibly in the last ten minutes. It was impossible to say for sure, because the effect of the genetics was unknown, but it looked as if the inhabitants of the Abdomen had not only been living, they’d been thriving.

  There was a woodlouse on its back. It was about half the size of Andrew, and its pseudotrachea were clearly visible. Laura could barely take her eyes off it. A praying mantis the length of a car poked out from under the foliage, its bristled coax resembling the blade of a hedge trimmer. Beside it were the antlers of a stag beetle. They were the same size as the antlers of a stag. If they were going to encounter living versions of these monsters, she didn’t see how they could possibly get out alive.

  A loud cracking sound broke her thoughts. She looked up to see Andrew losing his balance.

  ‘Mum?’ he yelled.

  Mike was closest. He turned towards Andrew.

  Another crack.

  ‘Help him!’ screamed Laura.

  She started running.

  Mike looked around and suddenly knew this was up to him. He broke forward but there was a table between him and Andrew. He leaped to hurdle it but caught his foot and crashed to the ground.

  Shaking off the confusion, he heard another crack. Andrew’s right leg dropped through the floor.

  Meanwhile, Laura was vaulting over three upturned chairs, her only focus the boy in front of her.

  Mike started running again. He caught the terrified look in Andrew’s eyes as more cracks rang through the air.

  ‘Andrew!’ Laura was bolting across the floor. Her only clear route took her round where the others were standing, unsure how they could help.

  Webster moved Bishop aside and joined the chase.

  Laura was level with him and they were both running towards George. He didn’t know who he should let past, so he turned side on and hoped.

  Laura got to him first and shoved him into Webster’s path. They collided in a 400 lb smash that sent George flying backwards through the debris.

  One more crack, then the floor broke away completely and Andrew was falling.

  He spread his arms out to stop himself. His palms found the verge of the hole, but it was a sharp, jagged edge of concrete.

  Scraping through his skin to the blood of his small fingers, the pain shocked him.

  He reacted instinctively, lifting his fingers up and losing any grip he had. He tried to stop himself sliding downwards but the momentum and pain were too great.

  Mike dived for the hole. Just reaching the edge, his hand stretched out in a desperate grasp. His ribs crushed a rack of test tubes, smashing them beneath him. Broken shards of thin glass stabbed into his chest and stomach, shredding it like the pass of a grater.

  Ignoring the pain, he plunged his hand down and into the darkness. The tip of his finger found Andrew’s palm, but for the briefest of moments.

  He felt Andrew’s blood-wet fingers closing around his, but he was falling too fast. The moisture made any contact slide away to nothing, leaving a red smear on Mike’s hand.

  ‘Muuuuuummmmm!’ Andrew screamed as he dropped through the floor. Mike could hear the ragged thrash of the boy’s weight through trees and branches. It continued, softer and more distant, until it ended in a deadened thud and a shout of pain.

  Laura leaped over a glass partition wall. Tripping over her last stride, she landed full and fast on Mike’s back. The pain of the deeper stab of glass shards was like the swipe of a lion’s claw across his chest.

  Laura hardly noticed. ‘Andrew!’ she screamed, scrabbling across to where he had fallen.

  Mike’s arm was still reaching down into the hole. He used it to pull himself forward and joined his voice with Laura’s as she called Andrew’s name.

  There was just enough space for both heads. Although there was still light from the emergency electricity, it quickly dimmed to a green-tinged darkness as the dense leaves blocked the way.

  ‘Aaaaandrewwwwww!’

  ‘Ssshh! I think I hear him,’ said Mike.

  Laura half-turned her head to point her ear into the hole. The blood was pounding in her skull but she could still make out the sound:

  ‘Muuuummmmmmm …’

  It was surprisingly distant, struggling to reach them through a wall of leaves and branches.

  ‘Andrew! Stay where you are. I’m coming!’

  Laura crouched down and dangled her feet into the hole.

  ‘Wait. I’ll go,’ said Webster.

  Laura ignored him. Another glance downwards then she dropped.

  Shhshhshhing and cracking her way through firm, wide
leaves and bending branches, she tumbled to the floor of Level Two with Webster following right behind.

  66

  ‘Does that sound like something you can all manage?’

  Tobias Paine had just finished explaining how to set off the nuclear detonation of MEROS. It involved passing through a series of security checks on the main computer then setting a code that would give them one hour to fly clear of the facility.

  ‘Yes it does. What if we don’t want to help you kill our friends?’ asked Jacobs.

  ‘I thought you might ask that. Let me explain the situation they are in. It might give you some idea of how unlikely it is they will get out alive.

  ‘They are in an area called the Abdomen. It is where the initial research of MEROS happened ten years ago. The experimentation went wrong and the insects killed everyone except for Heath, Bishop and Webster. It was sealed off and the facility was restarted in the area with which you are now familiar.

  ‘Lady and gentlemen, that area is almost certainly stuffed to the gunwales with giant insects who have had nothing to eat but each other for some ten-odd years; insects that have been bred for size, aggression and appetite, and the genetic compounds used for those purposes have been available to them, possibly creating mutations that would only otherwise exist in your most disturbed nightmares.’

  ‘Yeah? And what if all the bugs are dead?’ asked Madison.

  ‘Was that Mr Madison again? Mr Taj has already told me that the motion sensors have picked up movements beyond those of the humans, but even if he hadn’t, I’m now looking at the same screen as you.’

  Jacobs mouthed ‘the satellite’ to the others.

  ‘If you’d been paying close attention to that screen during our conversation, you would have noticed that another of their number has perished. By what means we can only guess.’

  ‘But we can still get the others out alive,’ said Mills.

  ‘And you must be Mr Mills. You appear to be English. Congratulations, but I’m afraid you won’t be able to get the others out alive. Without my assistance there is no way in, and even if you managed to bypass that inconvenience, I will access the relevant codes here and activate the destruction remotely. The same conclusion will be reached, only with four more corpses.