by SD Tanner
He looked up at the man leaning over the seat. “I think we need to talk to command about this.”
The man nodded at him. “Yeah, we need to get control of those labs.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Waking nightmare (Ally)
It had taken her a whole year to save enough money for her trip to Johnsondale. Sequoia National Park was somewhere she’d always wanted to go, and she planned to hike the area by taking what she needed with her, then pitching her tent at the many different campgrounds. For most people it wasn’t an expensive holiday, but with her short fuse she was prone to losing her job, and was always short on cash. Being fired didn’t bother her, she was only earning minimum wage as a waitress, and she didn’t care who she served or where she did it. At the age of twenty-six, her life was stalled, but even she had to admit it was largely her own fault. After leaving school, instead of going to college like many others had, she’d taken the less reliable path of modelling and failed dismally at it. It was one thing to be called the prettiest girl in her school, and quite another to convince people to pay her for it.
Although she was raised in Houston, she now shared an apartment in Lynwood, Los Angeles with three other people. Not wanting to go home and admit her life was a total failure, she drove a beat up Toyota, and barely made her rent each month. Even though she wasn’t considered pretty enough to make it in the bright lights of LA, she was still a striking looking woman, with long legs and curves in all the right places. Her dark hair, sculpted face and full mouth attracted attention wherever she went, and she was never short of men in her life. More than failing as a model, it was the men in her life that had disappointed her most. They’d lied to her, cheated on her and let her down in more ways than she could count. Her mother had always taught her to smile through her pain, but her face literally ached from trying to pretend none of it hurt when it did. Deciding there were no decent men to be found, she’d dumped the last one less than a week ago, and was determined to stay single.
Now her hard won holiday was ruined as well. While hiking along one of the many trails, she’d slipped awkwardly and twisted her ankle. It wasn’t so bad she couldn’t walk, but there was no way she could hike the route she’d planned. With her cap pulled low over her eyes, and her heavy backpack pulling against her shoulders, she’d gritted her teeth and limped back to the parking lot. She never seemed to cut a break, and frustration was bubbling up inside her in a way she was finding difficult to repress. Dropping her backpack onto the back seat of her car, she climbed behind the wheel and stared sullenly at the beautiful trees around her. Sighing to herself, she started the car and made her way along the road leading out of the park.
She was sick of being with other people and had wanted five days to herself. By finding secluded areas to set up her one-person tent, she hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days. Although she could call her roommates to tell them she was coming home early, her cell phone had run out of both credits and power. It wasn’t as if she was close to them, and she doubted they would care or even notice whether she was home or not. After driving for an hour, her ankle was aching, and the stretch of road in front of her was long and flat. In the distance, she could see a man standing by the side of the road next to his car. She didn’t intend to stop, but as she drew closer, he ran down the middle of the road waving his arms wildly. With her foot still hovering over the accelerator, she slowly came to stop, and wound down her window by no more than a few inches.
“What do you want?” She asked sharply.
The man was wearing filthy jeans with a matching flannel shirt, and he looked sweaty and disheveled. She guessed he was probably in his thirties, and he had an air of panic about him. “Where the hell have you been?”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you heard what’s happened?”
She wasn’t in the mood to play twenty questions, and eyeing the man suspiciously, she pressed the button to wind up her window. Before she could finish, she heard a sharp tapping against the glass, and looked across at the man again. The tapping was being made by a decent sized handgun, which suddenly smashed its way through her window, spraying shattered glass into her lap.
“Unlock the back door!” He shouted.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
He jabbed the gun in her face and snarled, “Open the back door or I’ll kill you. One way or another I’m taking this car.”
She couldn’t believe she was being carjacked. Rather than feeling subdued, her frustration hiked up yet another notch. Outrage filled her and she swore at him. “Fuck you.”
“Seriously, babes, I’m not kidding.”
The road was empty of any other cars, and it was more than feasible for the man to shoot her. He could easily throw her body out of the car, and there’d be no one to witness her untimely death. It’d be just her luck to die by the side of a dirty road, and end up as a Jane Doe on a slab in a morgue. She reluctantly used the central locking button on her car to release the doors.
Once the man had hurled himself into the seat behind her, she said flatly, “My name’s Ally.”
She didn’t know why she bothered to tell him her name, other than she’d always been told a person had to make themselves human to an attacker, but she doubted it would make any difference with this guy.
“My name’s Nigel.”
Inwardly she groaned. She was being threatened by some jackass called Nigel, and she could almost read the headlines. ‘Woman killed by Nigel’, didn’t have good ring to it. Life was determined to make a mockery of her existence to the bitter end. The leading emotion coursing through her was one of outrage and indignation, and she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t frightened. All she wanted to do was turn around and slap him across the head, but the barrel of his gun was still jabbing her in the back of the neck.
Stuffing down her frustration, she asked blandly, “Where do you want me to take you?”
“Anywhere there aren’t any people. Head to the desert, babes.”
“What? Arizona? Why do you wanna go there?”
“Where the fuck have you been, babes?” The man asked impatiently, while he began to roughly pull items from her backpack.
“Hiking in Sequoia National Park.”
Having found a snack bar and water in her backpack, the man scooted across the back seat, and put his feet up on the seat behind her. While he ripped open the health bar, he chuckled. “Oh, so you really don’t know.” Using the bedroll from her pack, he tucked it behind his head and leaned back. “You shoulda stayed where you were, babes.”
“Why?”
“The world’s gone to hell, babes. People just woke up one day and started killing one another.” With that comment, the man suddenly looked tired, and he leaned his head against the bedroll.
“Why are you carjacking me?”
“San Bernardino went crazy, babes, I barely managed to get out alive.” Waving his gun in her direction, he added, “Good thing I had this with me. I was heading to the desert and my car broke down. It’s survival of the fittest now, and I’m fitter than you, babes.”
His calling her ‘babes’ was getting on her nerves, and even though he had a gun, she’d pretty much reached the end of her patience. He was telling her some bullshit story about people murdering one another, and that the only safe place was in the desert. The man was clearly out of his mind, and she wanted to smack him for adding his problems to hers.
“Are you gonna let me go?”
“Nah, babes, you should come with me. You’re gonna need someone to cover your pretty ass.”
He needed to stop calling her babes, it was driving her nuts, and her frustration was turning into rage. Whereas an hour earlier she would have said she was in a bad mood, now she was ready to kill anyone who crossed her. She’d never had a good handle on her temper, and whenever she felt the sharp spike of anger running through her, she would do things she usually didn’t really regret later. Her mind registered a large abandoned looking building
on the side of the road looming in the near distance, while she continued to argue with the man.
“I’m not going with you.”
The man opened his eyes and leaned forward into the back of the front passenger seat. “Listen, babes, I’m telling the truth. There’s no TV, no phones, no radio, no nothin’. People have gone nuts, and the cops can’t control it. I thought the army would have shown up, but they haven’t. You need to come with me, babes, I’ll take care of you.”
He sounded genuine, but he’d also just carjacked her. There was no way she was going to let some jackass called Nigel shoot her and leave her as a Jane Doe on the side of the road. More importantly, he kept calling her babes, and she couldn’t listen to it one more time. Her spark of anger took control, and she violently twisted the steering wheel, slamming her foot down on the accelerator. The car bucked into action, and gathered speed as she headed towards the thick wall of the abandoned building.
“Do. Not. Call. Me. Babes!”
The man never had a chance to plead his case before her car slammed violently into the wall. He was flung past her, over the passenger seat, and head first through the windshield. Her head slammed forward into the deployed airbag, and she felt the seatbelt cut savagely into her chest plate. In the movies, she would have expected to hear the wailing of sirens as someone came to her rescue, but silence reigned. Every so often she would become aware of her surroundings, the dryness of the air, the heat or the cold. She didn’t seem to be able to hold onto her consciousness, and reality would drift away until she surfaced again.
Eventually she became conscious again and was able to stay vaguely aware. The blood on her face had dried, and when she tried to lift her head from the airbag, she felt her skin tear. Her head felt strangely heavy, and she rolled it back onto the headrest, while trying to make sense of her surroundings. The road she’d been driving along was on her left, and the man was crumpled across the hood of her car. He had his back to her, but there was blood across the hood, and it trailed thickly down the side of her car. His blood had already become brown and hardened, and she guessed she’d been unconscious for a long time.
If she didn’t get out of the car, she would die. Her body felt stiff and bruised, and she gingerly tried to move her left arm. It was working, but everything felt tight, and pain ripped through her shoulder. Groaning, she fumbled for the door handle, managing to pull it open. Now the door was unlatched she needed to push it, but lacked the strength in her arm. The magical sirens and helpful people had never materialized, and she didn’t understand why no one had stopped to investigate a crashed car by the side of the road. Using her right arm to brace herself against the passenger seat, she pushed her body into the door until it swung open. The movement sent shockwaves of pain down her spine and legs, but at least her ankle didn’t hurt anymore.
She needed to get to the road where someone might see her. Allowing herself to fall from the car, she landed with a thump, and it jarred her already bruised body. Standing didn’t seem to be an option, and she began to claw her way across the pebbly dirt, hoping to eventually reach the tarmac. Her arms and legs were working for her, but they felt weak and shaky. Her head hurt in a way she’d never felt before, and all her previous worries became insignificant. Feeling the dryness in her mouth, she realized she was badly dehydrated, and if she didn’t get water soon, that would be the thing that would kill her. She was only twenty-six years old and didn’t want to die, she wasn’t done with life yet. Inching her way across the dirt, bits of dust blew into her eyes, making her vision bleary. The hopelessness of her situation threatened to overwhelm her, but she was too dry to cry.
It wasn’t fair. She’d barely had a chance to live. Every dream she’d ever had was already crushed, and she was going to be left to die by the side of a road. Nobody cared enough to even know where she was to know she was missing. What had she ever done to deserve to die like this? Her unspoken question made her angry. She was a decent person and she deserved better. How dare the world destroy her life this way. The more she thought about it the harder she clawed at the ground beneath her. She was angrier now in what she guessed were her last moments on earth than she’d ever been. Unable to do anything with her rage, she determinedly dragged at the ground, and was rewarded with the hard texture of tarmac. She’d finally reached the road, and exhausted, she felt her mind drift away again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Born again (Steve)
His mind was fragmenting into a million little pieces and he was resisting its collapse. Behind him were hundreds of thousands of people following him across the desert like devoted fans. None of them spoke to him and he didn’t try to talk to them either. Anyone who crossed their path that didn’t belong with them was immediately slaughtered, but mostly people headed in the opposite direction when they saw them coming.
He stopped and stared at the sandy, scrubby land ahead of him. Immediately the people behind him stopped, and he finally turned to face them. Most of them were missing large patches of their flesh, and beneath their human form was a black, rubbery body. His own body was mostly a blackened surface now, and he thought he looked a bit like a soldier ant. The change didn’t bother him, and he was relieved the irritating itchy sensation had finally stopped.
Wanting to get a better view of the people following him, he climbed a low hill while they patiently watched him. It was only then he saw just how many people had followed him out of the city. At least two hundred thousand men, women and children were standing almost in a formation of rows and columns. He didn’t understand why they’d followed him or what they wanted. As if his entourage had understood his unspoken question, they began to rearrange themselves into groups. Without pushing, shoving or speaking, they slowly clustered themselves into teams, but he didn’t understand their logic.
A group of what he guessed were five thousand or more to his left began to shudder and shake. It was strange to watch, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were having some sort of a fit. A woman at the front of the group hunched her shoulders and began to heave. Slowly a black webbing emerged from her spine, and he realized she was growing wings. They were slightly sheer and black, with a thick, twisted rope running through them. At full width, the wings spread six feet behind her and were attached to the entire length of her arms. Her arms and legs lengthened and became thinner, and her wings began to vibrate. Suddenly her feet lifted from the ground, and her shoes landed on the desert floor, blowing dust into the air. Her movement was copied by all the others in her group, and they began to rise above the rest of the followers.
Another group began to undulate, becoming shorter and squat, until freed from their clothes, they sat like black turtles about three feet high. To his surprise, they began to scuttle about, crashing into one another until they formed a circle, and began to burrow rapidly into the sandy earth. All four of their shortened and thick limbs worked frantically into the dry ground, and they hit a denser layer under the sandy surface. Dirt began to fly into the air as they furiously tore into the earth, and he was stunned at how quickly a deep crater was forming around them. Their feet were shaped like shovels, with a row of thick, six-inch long claws on each end. With their stumpy wide limps, they dug powerfully into the ground, scattering the dirt behind them with an effortless fury.
Before he had time to absorb the impact of the diggers, another group began to evolve. Skinny, insect like legs sprung from their torso, and tipped them over until they were parallel with the land. At least twenty legs, ten on each side, held them about two feet above the earth, and they began to move rapidly around the area in front of him. Seeming to want to prove their worth, they sprinted around wildly, until one finally paused in front of him. What was once a human head had changed until it was a smooth black dome, and he couldn’t work out where its eyes were. The arms and legs had been absorbed into its body, and only the twenty insect-like limbs remained. These creatures resembled fat, squat spiders, and they leapt over and on top of one another
with manic speed. Their sharp, jerky movement made it difficult to guess which direction they would go. Clustered together as they were, the motion became a blur of angry buzzing, and the air filled with the loud rustling of thousands of bodies endlessly colliding with one another.
Clearly not wanting to be outdone, another group began to shake uncontrollably and grew taller. Their arms, legs and torsos became bulkier, and their heads expanded until they were smooth and bullet-shaped. In the middle of their featureless faces was a spout with a hole in the end. Their human skin split and fell away from their bodies, until they stood nine feet tall, with broad shoulders and heavy torsos. As they began to stomp heavily towards him, he noticed unlike their brother species, they lumbered with a steady gait. Struggling to understand the point of their type, he was quickly educated when one spat a long stream of fluid into the air from the spout in the middle of its oval head. It arced twenty feet and landed on the sand, which began to bubble and burn with its touch.
All of the groups erupted into a frenzy of motion as they evolved into the species they really were. More flyers rose high into the sky, and the spitters grew tall around the squat diggers. Two hundred thousand creatures, that moments before still resembled their human ancestry, expanded or shrank, abandoning clumps and sheets of human flesh as they did. His army was forming before his eyes and it felt familiar and right. Glancing at his own body, he shrugged off the last of his clothes and skin from his rubbery, black and angular frame. Like him, all the other creatures were composed of the same substance, and he knew they belonged to him.
The changes in his body and those around him stripped his brain of the last of its humanity, and he explored his new way of being. As a human he’d lived inside his own mind, and he could only see, hear, sense and touch what was in front of him. His new mind didn’t work the same way. All the creatures in front of him were extensions of himself. They weren’t separate beings, but a part of him that responded to his instructions just as the arms and legs attached to his body did. It was a strange way to live. His existence was spread across not just the two hundred thousand bodies he could see, but many more that were located in other places. He didn’t just control them, they were him.