The Rain In The Sky

by Antony J Woodward

  There was a shriek as the door slammed shut onto the pale arm clawing after her. She retreated swiftly, her gun up and aimed instantly. Nat came to her side, her own gun levelled.

  The door slammed back on the arm twice as the creature struggled, and then it was swung back and open with a violent force. A tall and pallid figure tore out from the room swinging its talons wildly. The two women fired, two slugs slamming into the creature. One perforating each shoulder perfectly. The creature moaned but it didn’t stop. It came forth wildly charging, its arms flailing wildly. It closed in hastily. Sky fired again, her shot missing the mark slightly and lodging in its throat.

  Nat changed tactic and aimed for the shin.

  She missed.

  The creature was suddenly almost upon them. Its face was inhuman, it was green, swollen and shiny. It looked like a monstrous hybrid of a Venus fly trap and a grossly disfigured human face. A long tendril emerged from the top of its skull and trailed away like a power lead.

  Sky fired once more, taking a step back. Her bullet tore straight through the creature’s face, a little chunk of leafy flesh blew out the other side and left a neat hole. Yet it didn’t stop. It kept coming.

  Nat fired once more, this time shattering its shin. It fell violently, it slammed to the deck. Almost instantly it was crawling towards them. The women hopped backwards, aware of the plant-like jaw that opened up ready to sink into their legs. A monstrous cavern of barbs, white foam and red flesh threatened to sink into their flesh.

  Sky fired again. A second headshot. Nat fired, her first headshot.

  It suddenly dropped dead and laid flat on its front.

  Both women were ready for it rise once more, but it didn’t. It laid perfectly still.

  “What the hell…” Nat cried finally taking breath. She hadn’t realised she’d been clenching everything tightly until her lungs and knuckles began to scream with the pressure.

  Sky didn’t respond but she hesitantly slowly lowered the pistol.

  What the hell was it?

  A small jerk made both women jump and aim their guns straight back onto the creature. A little tug, and then something began to pull the creature back via the tendril on its head. Slowly it curled back over itself like it was made of rubbery elastic.

  Both women watched speechlessly as the creature was slowly pulled back into the room from where it came. Then it was gone and the pair of them were left alone.

  It made both women feel very uneasy. Just what the fuck was it? Neither women had seen an organism like it. Sky took a deep breath, if only to try and settle her stomach just a little. She checked the bullets in her clip. She discarded the clip and slotted a new one into place.

  “Did that thing have a lab coat on…” Nat whispered in disbelief.

  “I didn’t see. I was more concerned with the fact it was trying to kill us…” Sky answered a little flatly. Nat gave her a small sideways look.

  “I just wonder if that’s one of the scientists…” their absence had been rather conspicuous.

  Sky wasn’t sure if that was a comforting idea.

  “One way to find out,”

  “You’re going to go in there?”

  “What choice do we have? We need a key card. If that thing was indeed once a scientist, then perhaps it’ll have a key card…”

  Nat gulped a bubble of unease down. She adjusted her grip on her handgun, her hands were a little clammy with fear. She nodded in agreement with the plan, but she didn’t feel enthusiastic in the slightest. There was a slow wet and mulching sound emanating from the room as they closed in. It didn’t bode very well, but the women had come this far and they really needed a key card. The door was stood open, the creature had snapped it off one hinge. The dense thicket of plants beckoned.

  Sky stepped forward and cautiously entered the room. She swept it as she had once been trained to do, the room was a wilder mess of foliage and plants than she‘d realised. View was limited severely. She couldn’t see the other sides of the room for leaves and tendrils. Nor could she see where the strange creature had gone either.

  It could be hidden in the brush before her, she quickly threw that thought away.

  “Is that,” Nat appeared alongside her, “is that the floor below?”

  Sky hadn’t noticed but the foliage she was looking at had actually burst through the floor from the level beneath. Down below the women could see a jungle of shadowy roots, flora and fauna. It was like a garden had grown wild, but in a basement.

  “How many floors are there?” Sky remarked in surprise. She’d never read anything in the plans of there being an additional floor. As far as she’d been aware there was only one basement level to the bio dome. Why was the second level never mentioned? Was it a secret, and why was it? That nagging feeling she knew very little about the corporation was there in her mind once more.

  “Look,” Nat crouched at the lip of the hole, “There’s a woman down there. I think I recognise her. I think she’s the head researcher… She’ll surely have a key card with the relevant security clearance for the main labs…” She glanced excitedly up to Sky.

  Sky followed her pointed finger and saw through the mess of roots and leaves an unidentifiable organic mass. It wasn’t just one woman, it was several. As well as several men. It was the whole of the research team it seemed, in varying states of decomposition in one big oozing biomass. They were bound and tied up in a mass of roots, mulch and wildflowers.

  Sky didn’t know which woman Nat was interested in exactly but it was a lead nonetheless.

  Now they just needed to get down there. Her stomach rolled over a little at the thought.

  “We need to find a way down…” She voiced her thoughts aloud.

  Her eyes snagged on a different fabric in the mess of bodies, it stuck out as unusual. She squinted and saw that it was grey camouflage. She followed the shape and deduced a faint visage of a male. A tattooed Hispanic male. One of the mercenaries? She recalled the conversation from earlier. Was this one of them who‘d gone looking, or one of the ones the two were searching for? The mercenary was in a state of mid-decomposition. His features were slowly losing their human qualities.

  Nat too had noticed what had attracted Sky’s attention but she didn‘t say anything. The mercenaries were not her business. “The lift won‘t take us any lower. There must be another way…” she offered.

  “Lets find it then,”

  The two women stepped back from the hole. Neither of them knew where to start, where would they hide a secret access to a secret floor?

  “I reckon it’ll be in the Main Lab down here…” Nat answered their simultaneous thoughts, “But we need a key card to get into it,”

  It was beginning to feel like one of those riddles that involved a farmer and his boat and a plethora of animals. “…Actually…” Sky trailed off. She had her attention snagged on something new. Something in the corner of the room behind Nat. Perhaps that would do?

  “What is it?” Nat followed her gaze. There was a collection of machines housing metal tanks. Nat didn’t know what they were, but she guessed that Sky did.

  “Liquid Nitrogen…” Sky pointed to a canister in the furthest corner. A thick bush had descend from the ceiling around it threatening to wholly consume it, so it wasn’t immediately noticeable in the room.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Sky was already crossing the room.

  “Make a way through that door,” Sky answered as she began wrestling the tank free from the machine and around the bush. The chill of the metal permeated through her gloves, she halted. A quick glance around the immediate area and she spotted a pair of thick safety gloves on the corner of the nearby counter. She collected them and put them over her own gloves. Nat watched curiously as Sky then dragged the heavy tank out of the room and took it down the corridor to the main lab door. Her curiosity was definitely whetted when Sky began to unscrew the cap. She then hoisted it up and carefully splashed the pressurised contents up against the g
lass door that led into the Main-Lab. The liquid nitrogen made a cracking noise as it met with the glass and instantly froze it to sub-zero temperatures. Sky nearly splashed some on her toes but she quickly bolted her feet backwards. She dropped the tank in a nearby corner and stepped backwards. She then fired a bullet into the frozen glass, just in case the glass exploded. A jagged small gouge was punctured in the glass door but it wasn’t enough for anyone to fit through. It was about the width of a human hand.

  Sky closed back in, and while carefully avoiding the spillage of liquid nitrogen, set about smashing the edges of the hole with the butt of her gun. After a few good swipes and careful hammerings, she enlarged the hole significantly. While it would’ve been nice if the entire door shattered, she was content with what she made.

  Nat was quite impressed with the woman’s ingenuity. It wasn’t an idea she’d have thought of herself. “Well,” she gestured a little speechless her arms raising up.

  “What? Expecting an explosion? Not everything is like the Hollywood movies…” Sky remarked dryly with a smirk. Was it an attempt at a joke?

  The choice of phrase struck Nat for a moment. It just didn’t seem plausible that someone so soldier-like, so odd in that removed from society kind of way, would compare something to Hollywood movies. She couldn’t see Sky sitting in a cinema watching the latest movie. Nor could she picture her doing something as simple as lazing around on the sofa in her pyjamas. She just didn’t look the type.

  Nat’s strange expression snagged Sky’s attention and she lingered halfway through the hole. “What?”

  Nat didn’t have a response, so she just shook her head and mimed being speechless.

  Sky disappeared into the main lab.

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  The main lab was worthy of the title. It was large and grand, filled with tall organic specimens preserved in glass tanks. The research data was written on a procession of white-boards that bore the etchings of numerous people working together towards a common goal. Red marker pen overwrote purple, green added to black - it was a mess of colours and a fantastic representation of different perspectives and ideas coming to together.

  To Sky the extended formulae was gobbledygook, utter nonsense that she had no hope of understanding. Nat however lingered over it for a few moments.

  In the centre of the room a giant floating counter housed countless encyclopaedias, microscopes, notepads, highlighter pens, tissue samples, buff notes, coffee cups, tablet devices and binders filled with plant samples. Sky gave it an idle glance but nothing jumped out, certainly no key card.

  In the furthest stretch of the room was a tall cylindrical plant encased in a vertical tank, it was something out of a horror movie. It looked like a Venus fly trap should one ever grow legs. Its green shiny jaws and red lips looked sinister. A mouthful of teeth made it the sort of thing to haunt your nightmares. Two long thick roots trailed like legs and Sky briefly wondered if this plant was indeed capable of mobilising. What would that mean for humanity if suddenly plants were a predator too? Had they really been cooking up killer plants in this lab? Wasn’t genetically modified crops enough?

  For a moment she wondered if this ghastly looking plant was responsible for the strange creature they’d killed less than ten minutes earlier. Was it all connected?

  She’d have been able to write it off as imaginative nonsense if she wasn’t having the type of day she was. This morning she would’ve written off infected civilians turned into ferocious cannibals as utter nonsense, now she knew better. As Sky ventured further around the floating central counter, she saw there was more tanks of those strange plants. And one very conspicuously empty tank.

  Nat came in close behind her and took stock of the room too.

  She studied the tanks before she settled on a notebook nearby, she flicked through it idly.

  “They created these…” she summed up, “the ‘rabies froth’ infected the plants they’d been keeping…”

  “Why create something like this?” Sky posed rhetorically.

  “Because they could, sometimes people just want to be God…” Nat offered. She closed the book. She was surprised that the mysterious white gunk in the infected civilian’s mouths had infected the fauna, more surprised that even as the infection ravaged the island the researchers holed themselves away and experimented.

  Sky stopped near a collection of photographs, it clearly illustrated the initial experiment upon the first plant. She saw a group of scientists working on a monstrously mutated Venus fly trap plant. Someone had written a caption under a disturbing profile of the plant, “Seymour three”. She didn’t understand why.

  Nat’s remark rattled in her mind. It cut Sky deeper than Nat would ever understand. People playing God, wasn’t that how she’d been created herself? She scanned her eyes over the strange plants entombed in glass and water, and wondered if perhaps they were similar to one another? Both of them had been constructed from the basis of something else and then developed in a lab. All because people wanted to be God…

  Now Sky questioned what exactly the corporation had been up to on this Island. Was the crop modifications just a front for nefarious interests? If they were creating monsters like this, what else were they creating elsewhere? She suddenly felt a little foolish, if the corporation had the lack of ethics to clone and genetically modify a person, then what would stop them from cooking something else up worse? Did they have their own bio-weapon hidden in the main lab? Why wouldn’t they? They’d grown her in a test tube after all…

  Nat had headed in the opposite direction towards the bookshelves crammed with a whole library’s worth of books. The shelves were six rows high and filled majority of the wall.

  Sky jumped when Nat suddenly took it upon herself to hastily tear the books down. Sky slowly turned and with a bemused sense of entertainment watched Nat unload row after row of books. After a few moments, and a lot of ruckus, the entire itinerary of books was on the floor. Slowly, very slowly, Nat became aware of Sky’s idle gaze. She turned and shrugged a little embarrassedly. “I thought that there might be a secret switch or something…”

  Sky smirked and made a small point towards a panel to her left. It was slightly differently shaded than the other panels of white metal. She had clocked it moments ago, but had been occupied with the plants. Nat didn’t understand.

  She watched Sky shake her head slightly and then pad to the mismatched panel. She then made a pointed gesture of pushing it herself. It clinked and a nearby partition then slid to one side. Nat felt even more embarrassed and a little foolish. It burnt hotly in her cheeks.

  The panel revealed a small recess with a solitary ladder. It was a secret entrance to a secret floor after all.

  Sky climbed into the opening and began to descend the ladder.

  The floor beneath was swamped in large pools of darkness. A few lights flickered randomly but it offered very little in the way of light. There had been a flood at some point and the water had crept to ankle height. Despite this, the many towers of servers and computer drives were all fully functional. They made a small whirring noise and blinked different colours sporadically.

  This secret floor felt far less significant when Sky realised it was more of an elaborate server room than a genuine secret floor. The towers were set out in such a way it felt maze-like in the gloom. She trudged forward, splashing audibly in the water as she did so. The darkness was pervading yet not completely encompassing, she still clicked her torch back on. As she passed the first series of towers, heading deeper, Sky walked into a thick canopy of roots and leafy tendrils. The foliage was thick and it made the room smell strongly of earth. Somehow the unknown plant had grown in an extremely accelerated fashion, but she didn’t understand how. Maybe the scientist had engineered it so? She was living proof of the powers of science. Nat landed at the foot of the ladders and saw Sky weave away into a curtain of roots. She was pleasantly surprised to see servers.

  She looked over the nearest towers, but instead of h
eading after Sky, she turned towards them. She trailed a hand along the block of servers as she perused the identifying codes welded into the panels on the front of them. She was looking for a particular number. As Sky found herself emerging from the curtain directly in front of a great and monstrously overgrown plant, Nat found a server she recognised. Her hands made deft movements up the series of recesses and buttons until she found the small little nub.

  She pushed the nub and set about pressing the next one in the sequence.

  The plant stirred a little as it detected Sky’s presence before it. It was large and bulbous, the size of a small car. Its main bud was a red and fleshy pod with long green spikes that looked like teeth. The thick white slime that oozed out of its jaws glowed in Sky’s torchlight. The plant was infected with the same thing as the residents, now she had irrefutable proof… What the hell had the mercenaries brought to the island?

  She glanced around but the gloom made it difficult. Torchlight revealed a huge network of roots that spanned the room and under the slowly rising flood at her ankles. The walls were obscured with mould and dirt and disguised most of the room.

  “M-m-mother,” a familiar voice croaked somewhere nearby. Sky procured her gun and cocked it. For a moment she thought it had been the plant who’d spoke, but she was convinced it came from elsewhere.

  Nat heard the voice and she sensed Sky was in trouble. She quickly pressed the third nub and ejected the hard disk. It was the size of her fist and as thick as a mobile phone. She concealed it in an inner pocket of her uniform jacket.

  The plant rustled and stirred further before Sky. It was waking up. Sky felt a small shiver run down her spine. This was something straight out of Hell. Something stirred beyond a nearby curtain of roots. It wasn’t just the overgrown mutated flytrap that was waking it seemed. She steeled herself and concentrated.

  Nat arrived by Sky’s side just in time to see the plant bloom, its thick jaws opening up and revealing a collection of purple spiky petals that looked like tongues.