Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  “We will be,” Jade said.

  “You should stay with the others,” Evans said.

  “And you should really stop trying to tell me what to do.”

  “I’m giving you five minutes,” Connor said.

  “We’ll only need three,” Evans said.

  “Be safe,” Richards said.

  Roche nodded to him and ducked out into the foyer. Kelly hurried to keep up with him and glanced back to make sure Evans and Jade were right behind her. The others took off in the opposite direction and headed for the Skyway.

  Their tread was uncomfortably loud on the stairs as they wound down into the darkness.

  Kelly stifled a shiver and rubbed her upper arms. Despite the fact that it was getting colder by the minute, she felt a sensation of numbness spreading from her core and realized with a start that she was dealing with the onset of shock. She couldn’t afford to let it take root or she was in big trouble.

  The silence on the lower level was suffocating. Her heartbeat in her own ears was deafening and each cautious step echoed like the beat of a drum. If there was something in there with them, it would hear them long before they heard it.

  Roche shined the flashlight from left to right ahead of him as he passed through the cafeteria, revealing tables covered with computers and monitors. Chairs were toppled, and the coffee cart was overturned in a mess of broken glass, grounds, and sugar.

  The greenhouse emerged from behind the stairs, the seams around its blackened windows highlighted by an inner glow.

  Roche stopped at the door and turned around. Shined his light past them and into the cafeteria to make sure there was nothing behind them.

  Evans slid back the door and pushed through the vinyl curtains, which dripped condensation down the back of Kelly’s neck as she followed. The light was inside the rear chamber and did precious little to illuminate the front half. The plants in the racks to either side passed in darkness. The grate in the floor clanged with every step. Evans hit his head on one of the hanging planters and cursed.

  “Dr. Bell?” Jade said from behind Kelly.

  Evans paused at the door to the paleobotanist’s inner sanctum. He waited for Roche to duck into the greenhouse and close the door behind him.

  “I don’t like this,” Roche whispered. “He should have heard us by now.”

  “He could be lost in his work,” Jade whispered.

  “Or wearing headphones,” Kelly whispered.

  “Only one way to find out,” Evans said.

  He slid the door open and passed through the curtains.

  Kelly hesitated before following him into the inner sanctum. She had flashes of all of the blood in the standby generator and server rooms and wanted nothing to do with carnage like that, but she cared for the prospect of distancing herself from Evans even less.

  The light came from the back corner, behind a rack brimming with saplings and a stand of primitive trees. The mist was so dense it nearly smothered the source of the glow. Impenetrable shadows clung to the bean trees and the bamboo. She wanted to call out for Dr. Bell, but something prevented her from doing so.

  Evans crept deeper into the foliage, brushing branches and leaves out of his face. Kelly ducked and shielded her head with her forearm, which kept her from getting slapped in the face, but did nothing to shield her from the freezing droplets. Broken glass sparkled from the floor and crunched underfoot.

  She watched the light as they neared. It was obscured by the bushy branches overflowing the five-gallon buckets Bell had used as pots. She was nearly on top of it before she saw the flashlight lying on the ground, its beam shining impotently onto the side of a dirty bucket and the blood shimmering on the floor.

  “Oh, God.”

  Kelly turned away and caught movement from the corner of her eye. Through the ferns. Motion. Low to the ground. A shadow moving among shadows, causing the fronds to sway.

  Roche shined his light at the source of the movement.

  What almost looked like a giant white egg bobbed up and down behind the ferns. Bell’s pallid face stared up at her from the ground below it.

  The egg abruptly tipped backward and revealed the face that had been buried in Bell’s neck. Roche’s flashlight reflected in crimson circles from its large eyes and the blood covering its misshapen face. It opened its mouth, arched its back, and issued a hissing sound.

  Kelly screamed and ran for the door.

  45

  RICHARDS

  Richards felt as though he were trapped inside his worst nightmare. Everything he’d worked his entire life to achieve was coming down around his ears. People had died because of him. Dreger, Mariah, Graves, and Wolski, for certain. And he could only assume that Rubley, Scott, and Rayburn hadn’t survived whatever happened on the elevator, either. They were as much his friends as his employees. Lord only knew how many others might join them before those who remained escaped this accursed place, yet deep down he felt a remarkable sensation of calmness accompanied by perfect mental clarity. For all the horrors transpiring around him, he couldn’t have been more excited. He knew with complete certainty that his lifelong dream of proving the existence of alien life was about to come true.

  How many nights had he fallen asleep in his bed envisioning how this day would come to pass? How many times had he closed his eyes as tightly as he could and held his hands over his ears to shut out the sounds of his father’s drunken rages while he prayed for the lights to again appear in the sky and take him away with them? How many times had he begged for the men in the black triangle to abduct his father and destroy that awful farmhouse and the horrors contained within its walls?

  The passage of time had changed his expectations, but his belief had never wavered. The idea of little green men in flying saucers was antiquated. Any extraterrestrial beings possessing such advanced technology wouldn’t content themselves with merely watching a lesser species bumble its way through an evolutionary process that could only culminate in self-destruction, not when it could easily supplant it as the dominant form of life or utilize humanity to its own ends, which is exactly what he believed had happened.

  The seeds of life had been planted in the toxic methane swamps of the earliest incarnation of the Earth and eventually bore fruit in the form of primates that could be bent to the will of a superior intelligence and whose evolution could be carefully monitored and controlled. The earliest men had worshiped the gods from the sky, who had instructed them in building techniques beyond their limited comprehension and utilized them to construct machines of great power for their own mysterious needs. They were the gods at whose altars the ferocious Aztecs and brilliant Egyptians knelt, the celestial deities to whom Christians and Muslims alike prayed, the omniscient beings who had made man in their image.

  Only it wasn’t man as he was, but rather man as he would become.

  Connor led the group down the stairs. The clanging of footsteps on the iron steps was deafening in the confines. The temperature plummeted as they descended. The cold air radiated from the Skyway and hit them like an invisible force as they passed through the open doorway and into the glass tunnel.

  The wall to the left was white with snow, completely concealing the view of the frozen plains and distant Troll. A drift had formed overhead in such a way that it looked like a wave preparing to break over the right side, where snowflakes blew straight away from them and into the chasm between the vertical black peaks. The tube shuddered at the behest of the howling wind. Without the heat pumping through the vents, they might as well have been outside.

  Connor was several strides ahead of them and nearly halfway across the bridge when a shadow passed over him and across the ground in front of him. Richards stopped and looked up at the rounded roof. The ice had been scraped away in spots and the snow sloughed off in others.

  “Wait,” he whispered.

  Anya blew past him on one side, Friden on the other.

  A dark shape was barely visible through the accumulation above the
m, moving at a frightening rate of speed toward the garage on the far side. Its shadow sped across the ground in front of Connor, who finally noticed and pulled up just past the halfway mark. He reached out to both sides to prevent anyone from passing him.

  “Stay where you are,” Connor said.

  He looked up at the shape clinging to the outside of the structure and raised his pistol.

  “Everyone slowly retreat to the station.”

  “We can’t go back,” Friden said.

  “We sure as hell can’t go forward.”

  A clump of snow tumbled down the clear side of the tube before being ripped away on a screaming gale.

  Whatever was up there adjusted its stance with a scratching sound that carved lines through the ice.

  Connor matched the movement with his weapon.

  “Is the glass bulletproof?” he asked.

  “Are you serious?” Richards said.

  “I have the shot, damn it. Is this thing bulletproof or not?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t in the specs.”

  The Skyway was made from the same polymethyl methacrylate as the tunnel under the shark tank at Sea-World and guaranteed to survive anything that Mother Nature could throw at it. Of course, Mother Nature had never been known to carry a Beretta M9 that could punch a hole through the side of a house.

  Another clump of snow slid down the side of the tunnel.

  Anya shrieked and ran back toward Richards.

  A clattering sound overhead.

  Clack-clack-clack-clack.

  “Stop!” Connor shouted.

  Anya froze where she was and closed her eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  The sound ceased. The scratches in the ice were deep enough to score the Plexiglas, but weren’t wide enough for them to see any details of whatever was up there.

  “Don’t . . . move,” Connor whispered.

  The faint shadow had halved the distance between Richards and Connor, who kept it in his sights as he moved stealthily toward it. He passed underneath it and swiveled as he walked, placing himself between it and the others.

  “Now slowly—slowly—walk back toward the station.” The shape advanced, but Connor retreated just far enough to keep pace. “When I start firing, I want you to run as fast as you can. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Friden whispered.

  “Answer me, Hollis. I need to know that you’re going to do what I tell you.”

  “Don’t do this, Will.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “With my life.”

  “Then do what I say. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then start walking.”

  Richards knew there was no point in arguing with Connor when he’d made up his mind, especially not when Richards’s position was as tenuous as it was hard to explain. He wasn’t so much concerned about his own life as much as that of what he believed to be an extraterrestrial life-form on the other side of the Plexiglas.

  He walked backward, one step at a time, never once taking his eyes from the shape he could barely see through the snow and ice.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  Clack.

  It inched forward and again Connor moved with it, just fast enough to keep it above his head.

  Richards felt the subtle warmth of the station behind him. He was maybe thirty feet from Connor, and the others had nearly caught up with him.

  Connor turned.

  The shadow started to move.

  The muzzle flashed and the Beretta kicked. The bullet pitted the Plexiglas.

  The report was deafening.

  Connor fired again and again. The bullets punched through the weakened Plexiglas and fractured the tube into a spiderweb of cracks.

  Richards saw the expressions of sheer terror on the faces of Anya and Friden as they blew past him. The ringing in his ears made it impossible to hear anything other than the repeated discharge, which sounded like it came from miles away.

  Anya pulled on his arm and shouted into his ear, but he shrugged out of her grasp.

  Thoom!

  Thoom!

  Thoom!

  The glass shattered and rained shards onto Connor, who ducked and scrambled backward. Clumps of crimson snow followed, a heartbeat before the shadow fell into the Skyway. Its legs crumpled beneath it when it hit the ground.

  Its skin was smooth and black, like that of a killer whale, with the exception of its bare hands and feet, which were remarkably humanoid.

  Richards stepped to the side in an effort to better see it past Connor, who stood over it and aimed his pistol down at where it lay.

  “Don’t,” Richards said. “Please.”

  Connor turned toward him with an expression of surprise on his face.

  That was all the distraction the creature needed.

  It lashed out at Connor from the ground, striking him in a black blur and lifting him from his feet.

  He shouted and fired. The bullet missed and punched a hole in the glass. Cracks raced down to meet it.

  Richards couldn’t seem to make himself move. He felt as though his feet were stuck to the floor and the world around him moved in slow motion.

  Connor used his forearm to push the creature up from on top of him and fired repeatedly into its thorax.

  Geysers of blood erupted from its back and spattered the Plexiglas, which shattered all the way down the side, dropping enormous chunks of thick glass onto the combatants.

  Connor leaned back and looked at Richards.

  A single word formed on his lips, one Richards read more than heard.

  Run.

  The creature buried its face in Connor’s exposed neck. He and Richards locked eyes across the distance. Richards recognized the pain and the fear he’d never seen there before, along with the certainty of the situation. His friend was going to die.

  Connor continued to fire until he emptied the clip, hitting the walls and the roof.

  The creature jerked its head to the side and released a spray of blood.

  The trigger clicked on an empty chamber several times before Connor’s arm fell limply to his side.

  “Will,” Richards sobbed.

  The creature’s head snapped up from the ruin of Connor’s neck and Richards truly saw it for the first time. Its cranium was elongated and the flesh of its scalp torn. Its eyes bulged from their sockets to such a degree that its lids had to remain mostly closed to contain them. The veins had ruptured, causing a skein of blood to form on the surface, so thick it was nearly black. Its cheekbones had broken from the inside in such a way as to make them appear broader and its chin disproportionately thin.

  It crouched on his old friend’s body and arched its back.

  Richards realized that what he’d initially mistaken for skin was actually a dry suit. It was torn straight up the back, the flaps folded over the creature’s bare, bony shoulders.

  Its chest swelled and blood spewed from its mouth when it issued a torrent of clicking sounds.

  Richards staggered backward. Tripped over his own feet. Hit the ground on his tailbone. Kicked at the floor to propel himself away from the monster.

  Despite the deformities, he recognized the face of one of the engineers who’d been inside the pyramid when they activated it. A man who, until that very moment, he believed had died in the elevator.

  It was Armand Scott.

  46

  ROCHE

  Roche shined his flashlight directly into the creature’s face. It swatted at the beam as though in an effort to get it out of its eyes, which reflected the light from behind a glistening layer of blood. It made a clicking sound and scuttled back into the foliage, through which Roche could barely see the seam of torn skin across its forehead and the bare, elongated skull above it. Even with the distorted facial architecture, that was more than enough. He’d looked down through the smoke at this same man’s seemingly lifeless body in the elevator before it was wrenched up through the shaft and hurled
through the wall of the power station.

  “Jesus,” he gasped, and backed toward the doorway dividing the greenhouse.

  Paul Rayburn made a guttural clicking sound and retreated into the shadows.

  Roche lost sight of him, but followed the shaking branches toward the rear wall and the broken panel that was the source of the glass scattered across the floor.

  He turned and sprinted through the barrier and the racks of plants.

  “Go!” he shouted as he burst from the vinyl curtains and knocked the sliding door from its track.

  His light struck the backs of the others as they ran, casting their long shadows across the ground into the cafeteria. The moment they rounded the stairwell they’d be out of the range of his flashlight and cut off from what little light emanated from the greenhouse.

  It was the perfect place for an ambush.

  Roche leaped up onto the pool table, lunged over the wreckage of the coffee cart, and grabbed Evans by the back of his jacket.

  “Stop!” he said as loud as he dared.

  Jade and Kelly whirled to face him, their eyes wide with fear.

  A clattering sound from the far side of the stairwell.

  Everyone turned toward the source and followed the progression of the sound with their eyes.

  It was hard to pinpoint precisely in the darkness and with the strange acoustics of the station, but Roche’s best estimate placed Rayburn somewhere in the cafeteria, near the mouth of the stairs, which was their only means of reaching the upper level. Surely by now Richards and the others were already barricading themselves inside the garage. If Connor was serious about only giving them five minutes, they were already on borrowed time.

  “What was that thing?” Jade whispered.

  “You mean who—” Evans started.

  “Shh!” Roche whispered.

  He couldn’t afford to lose track of Rayburn, not after what the man had done to Dr. Bell, assuming he was still a man. The way his eyes reflected the light, his movements and mannerisms, everything about him had a feral, almost animalian quality, as though something entirely unlike him somehow inhabited his form.

  A sharp scraping sound, like someone bumping into a chair and causing it to scoot across the floor.