by Sean Wallace
I turned sharply, because the sound was unexpected, and felt the burn of a pinched nerve lance down my neck.
Gwen stood at the same spot she’d been in while we watched Randy’s take off, her face twisted into a mask of tragedy for the first time since everything had started going to pieces.
It was easy to forget that she was dealing with losing her husband at the same time I was dealing with losing my best friend. Easy because I kept trying not to think of them together; easy because she was always so strong, always so good at hiding everything behind the mask of serenity almost every person in the medical field adopts after a while. With Randy away from the scene, she let down her guard and cried almost silently, her eyes tracking the horizon where the ’copter had disappeared as if she could see where he was going even past the mountains that blocked her view.
I think I loved her right then more than at any other time. I know seeing her that way broke my damned heart.
I gave Gwen a hug and pulled her to me. Part of me wanted to do more than comfort her and I think she knew it. Still, I behaved myself. The indiscretions came later.
After the funeral.
Eyewitnesses said that the helicopter was heading for the landing field behind Denver Memorial when it exploded. The fragments scarred the west side of the main building and blew out four windows. Shrapnel that went through one of the windows chopped halfway through one patient’s leg and resulted in death a few minutes later. In all of the ensuing chaos, no one bothered to check on the poor bastard and he bled to death. Pretty sad; as I understand it he was there to get his tonsils removed.
Here’s the thing about explosions: any way you look at it they’re messy. Despite all of the personnel who were there and on call, no one could help much with the wreckage of the ’copter until it was far too late. They found Randy’s body some fifteen minutes after the crash. According to the forensic reconstruction, Randy crawled away from the downed aircraft on hands and knees. They could tell because of the blood patterns on the asphalt and the markings in the grass.
Poor Randy crawled through fire and twisted metal and burning fuel and air hot enough to scorch his lungs. The autopsy confirmed every single blister and laceration. The photos documented them in color and black and white alike. I watched the goddamned footage of the autopsy on the man who was my brother, my family, and I memorized every word.
Because there were three other facts the autopsy revealed that left me numb and reeling every time I let myself think about them.
Fact one: the top of Randy’s head had effectively exploded by the end of his burning, pain-wracked journey through the hellish landscape of the helicopter’s remains. The top of his skull was blasted open and fragmented. His face was mostly intact, but the eye sockets were shattered and his eyes had blown out from the internal pressure. Fact two: Randy’s brain was gone. Missing. Completely removed from his body. Not a single identifiable cell of his gray matter could be found inside of his cranium and believe me, they looked and then they looked again. His brain was gone, baby, gone; lost to the world and not to be found.
Fact three: the cancer that had grown and riddled every part of Randy’s body was gone too. I know because they involved me in that part. Despite the possible contamination of my emotional connection, they sent me sample after sample to reconfirm what they had already discovered. Randy’s body was completely cancer-free.
I still remember the comment I got from Edward Langley, my direct superior when he read my report, right before he remembered that the subject of the report was my dearest friend in the world.
He shook his head and said, “What the fuck, Mike? Did the cancer just get up and walk away?”
I wish I could have taken it as a joke.
Word got out, of course. It’s impossible to avoid having someone tell somebody they shouldn’t have about something that bizarre. I had endless requests for interviews and so did Gwen. It wasn’t long before people were cracking jokes about brain-eating cancers and cancer-eating brains. I suppose that it was just human nature. I guess that’s maybe why I’ve always been rather pessimistic about the human race. We buried what little was left of Randy three weeks after his body had been taken for examination. Gwen cried and I cried and somewhere along the way we wound up in my hotel room and in each other’s arms. I know neither of us planned it, at least not on a conscious level.
I think we might have had a chance as a couple, but there was this ghost between us. I won’t say the sex was awkward or uncomfortable for either of us because it wasn’t. It’s just there were too many memories associated with Randy for either of us to feel right about our sexual tryst.
We were human and it cost us a lot in the long run. Hell, it cost the world when you get down to it. You see, we both knew Randy well enough to know not only the sorts of things he would do, but where he would do them.
We could have stopped a lot of it. Not all, maybe, but a lot. The reports were sporadic at first and easily dismissed.
The first sighting that got a police report came from Denver. As the helicopter crash was still on a lot of people’s minds the news brought the story to the attention of the city and condemned the caller as a sad specimen of a human being who suffered from a miserable lack of taste. That was one of the nicer comments I heard. I agreed with every one of them.
The reports grew. Several people swore they’d seen something in the woods, not a brain, but something with an exposed brain and that it was far too large to belong to a human being. Stories, rumors, suppositions and in the end they were all scoffed at as seemed perfectly normal.
I didn’t pay too much attention to the stories, because I was still reeling from the death of my friend, the guilt over having slept with Gwen and the mysteries surrounding his mortal remains.
Here’s a simple fact of life: cancer doesn’t just vanish. Not when it’s so advanced that damned near every organ in the body has been compromised. I couldn’t get around that part of the equation. There was no way I had been wrong in my diagnosis. I had seen the evidence and I wasn’t the only person to see it. Hell, I still had slides of the stuff on file, but there was no evidence of its existence in the autopsy reports.
There were peculiarities aplenty though, I can tell you that. Areas in the soft tissues were extremely aggravated, swollen, and distended, with no sign of what had caused the irritation. Reading those notes again and again, I came to realize that the answer to Ed Langley’s question was a resounding yes.
The cancer in Randy’s body got up and walked away. The points of irritation fit almost exactly with the areas where the cancer had become most aggressive. For all the world it looked like the damned stuff had pulled out of his body like the proverbial rats from a sinking ship.
I wanted to laugh, because it sounded so preposterous until I looked at the facts.
Randy died at the helicopter crash site, but his body kept moving, kept pushing him along even as he burned and inhaled toxic gases that scorched the inside of his throat and lungs. He only stopped when his head exploded, presumably from some sort of internal force. But I’ve never seen or heard of anyone who had his or her cranium blow itself out like a bad tire. In most any case you hear about, the only way to ease pressure from a swollen brain is by opening the skull. Here’s a thought for you, what if the brain itself understood that? What if the cancerous lumps that had infiltrated the brain and the body of Randy decided the only way to survive was to get the hell out of Dodge? Where would they go?
Insanity. I knew that, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the cancer vanished, along with Randy’s brain. That was just as impossible and as insane.
His parents had suffered from the exact same cancer. Not one that was similar, but one that was genetically identical. Not a mutation of cells reacting in the same way, but a mutation of cells spreading between members of the same family.
I thought about that a lot, as if I wasn’t already trying to make myself crazy. I thought about the impossibilities and about the
possible causes for them. What did all three of them have in common? Damned near everything. They lived together for years, they ate the same foods, vacationed in the same places.
They worked in the same unusual fields, as researchers and parts of think tanks. Well, Randy’s parents did. He was just along for the ride. A whole Pandora’s box of possibilities lay down that path.
I’d been worried that the cancer I was studying could be virulent, but what if it was something worse? What if it was somehow sentient? What if it actually understood enough of its surroundings to pull free from Randy’s body when he burned?
What if the cancer that had invaded his parents had managed to evolve and then move on to him when they died?
I was still considering every twist of that scenario I could come up with when the first confirmed sightings came in.
They were on every news station and fed across the Internet as well. I couldn’t very well call it a brain in the purest sense, but it’s a close enough physical description. It was huge, of course. Easily half the size of a house, and it bobbed in the air like a bad prop from a drive-in era monster show, sliding across the landscape on a thick column of black.
One look and I knew. I understood. The blackness under it was flesh or sorts, the same flesh that surrounded the gray brain in a fine run of delicate black, almost like a spider’s web. It was not solid but a fall of tendrils that slithered and danced along the edge of the ground, holding that tremendous weight.
The thing was spotted moving near Interstate 70, heading for Denver. In hindsight, I suppose it had to start in Denver and then come back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I believe the first people who reported it must have been scoffed at, but after a highway patrol car spotted it as well, everything happened very quickly.
Despite the look of the thing, no one fired at it initially. They merely followed it and tried to warn traffic away from it. The Colorado Highway Patrol has cameras in most of their cars these days. The pictures weren’t exactly crystal clear but there was a long stretch of video where you could see the thing moving along the side of the road, the fall of black matter undulating under it, the finer threads of the stuff sometimes reaching out and touching one thing or another as it moved along.
While the news cameras were on their way to catch additional footage of the giant brain, the news broke about Harts Bluff. A trucker trying to make a delivery discovered everyone in the town was dead. He was nearly incoherent with panic, but eventually the state patrol got the news out of him. Seems when he went to make his delivery the bodies were already laid out and gathering flies.
Each person in the town had been murdered; their skulls crushed and emptied of their contents. It didn’t take a genius to do the math, especially when the brain moving along the side of the road lashed out at a man trying to . . . flat tire and snatched him up into that nest of tendrils.
It was all on tape; the man screaming, rising higher and then dropping to the ground, his head already opened and bleeding. The same footage showed the highway patrol driving toward the thing, climbing from their vehicle. They inadvertently recorded their own deaths on the dashboard camera.
Two men in uniforms fired up into the thing towering above them. The camera didn’t show all of it, couldn’t show all of it, but there was enough detail to make clear that their target was the same obscenity. They hadn’t even emptied their side arms before the thing retaliated. Those seemingly thin filaments of flesh were sharp and strong enough to cut their skulls apart in seconds. The details were blurry, but good enough to show the feeding process. The cops’ brains were torn free and lifted up to the creature’s underside, to vanish into that thick array of seething black tentacles.
Three people died on that film. I can’t tell you how many more died when the thing hit Denver.
It was too big to miss when it was near the road, but the thing—the brain and the mass under it—hid just fine in the woods. Helicopters and planes tried to spot it, but without any luck.
For two days after the film had been released the world waited for another sighting. I did not have that luxury. I was called in immediately under the belief that there might be something that I could tell them about the thing. It seemed that they managed to get a sample of the creature as a result of a few bullets.
I studied the samples for only a few seconds before knowing the answer. It was the same cancerous mass that had riddled Randy’s body. There was no mistaking the cellular design. I could damn near have identified it by scent.
I reported my findings. I had no choice. I couldn’t very well let the ramifications go unexplored. Ten minutes after I’d made my report I was calling Gwen and trying to explain to her what I had discovered. I tried, but by the time I got to her she already knew. You see, Gwen had gone to Denver as soon as she saw the footage. She knew. Somehow she knew that what was left of Randy was on a killing spree.
I guess you probably know the rest of it. There isn’t that much more to tell. By the time the giant brain was seen again it had evolved, or perhaps simply matured.
The shape was still the same. The basic form of a brain was still there, but the images were much clearer. I could see that the deep curls of the gray matter were filled with still more twists and turns and folds of flesh and that entire mass had to be closer to seventy or eighty feet long and easily half as wide. The black mass of cancerous material had wrapped itself around that brain, growing like roots across the surface and forming a strange black node in the front that looked almost like a gigantic eye waiting to open. The cilia that spilled down from the massive shape drifted further and further out, sweeping along streets and gathering bodies as they moved. Each person snared was lifted and then efficiently murdered. Each skull was split and opened as easily as a chef could cut a melon, and the brains were removed, and consumed, pulled into the greater mass.
It moved on cancerous tentacles that had adapted, you see, developed internal organs and a respiratory system that was unique. We’ll be years understanding the mutations and how they could happen so quickly.
I remember watching the carnage on the television, the casual power it threw around, waves of force that blew police cars, military vehicles and all of the personnel trying to use them through the air and into the sides of buildings. Whether that strength was purely physical or something more is another mystery we may never fully understand.
It lifted high up into the air as it lashed out and shattered the bodies of soldiers and the buildings around them with equal ease.
I remember watching the barrages of firepower that did nothing at all to touch the thing. Bullets, mortar shells, hell, flame throwers blasting out plumes of fire that should have roasted the thing alive. Nothing so much as scratched it.
Not until the end, when Gwen stepped out into the street and called out Randy’s name. I couldn’t hear her, of course. No one could have. But I saw her lips move and I saw the way the gigantic thing stopped its forward progression and dropped down until it almost touched the ground and swayed in front of her as if mesmerized.
Those drifting tendrils, capable of killing with such ease, reached for Gwen and I screamed, terrified that they would carve her apart. Instead they merely touched her face. Leave it to the press to get it right. I believe it was a cameraman from CBS who zoomed in and recorded each gentle touch and the pale, terrified expression on Gwen’s face as she endured the contact. Her chest heaved with a barely restrained scream, and her eyes closed as the tears started falling.
And a moment later, she stepped back four paces and then dropped to the ground as the soldiers cut loose with a final volley. Bullets, grenades, flames . . . They fired whatever they could find and, in the end, it worked. Of all the scenes they’ve shown again and again since the attack on Denver, the one everyone enjoys the most is the series of explosions that tore chunks out of the gigantic floating brain and the resulting rain of blood and sludge.
Gwen would have probably died in the mess, but what
had been Randy once upon a time pushed her aside at the last moment. It could have easily killed her. I have no doubt of that. Instead, and if you watch the films as many times as I have you can see it for yourself, it nudged her, she was pushed through the air and drifted to the ground almost a dozen yards away. There wasn’t a scratch on her when they examined her.
I barely saw her. I really never had a chance. I was called back to work, asked to examine more of the same materials I had already studied and to verify that the resulting biological stew wasn’t contagious.
I spoke to Gwen once on the phone, and even then I could tell it was a waste of time. The media had noticed her and they have never been known for their gentle methods of persuasion. Overnight Gwen went from grieving widow to American hero. She had bravely risked herself to give the military their opening and no one was likely to forget that.
Because of who she was and the very likely origin of the nightmare that killed an estimated hundreds of people (no one knows for sure, because they haven’t had a chance to check everywhere between Harts Bluff and Denver) and the man she married, more tests were performed before she could leave the hospital. There were blood tests, cat scans, X-rays, ultrasounds. Whatever they could think of, they did it.
I know, because I’m the one who ordered the tests. I haven’t spoken to Gwen but that once. I haven’t had the time and neither has she. Despite the constantly confused look on her face the press still wants to ask her the same questions again and again. There are rumors of a book deal and even possibly a movie deal. Like I said, she’s an American hero.
I’ve got the results in front of me on my desk. I’ve looked at them a dozen times and then I’ve looked at them some more.
Just to be safe, I’ve gone over the video footage at least as many times, all to make sure that I wasn’t imagining things.
First, a careful examination of the footage shows the giant brain reaching out with its tentacles and scaling the buildings on either side of it, lifting into the air before it took a savage barrage of fire without flinching. It also shows, if you’re looking very carefully, a fine substance falling from the thing as it ascended and again as it fell down to be close to Gwen. I had to look repeatedly to confirm because there was so much already going on and I wanted to make sure my eyes weren’t fooling me.