Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  It was farther to the right than Roche had expected. Whatever now animated Rayburn’s body, which he was certain had been lifeless when last he saw it, was circling around the far side of the cafeteria in an attempt to outflank them. All he could see in his mind was Rayburn’s malformed face when he looked up from where he tore the flesh from Bell’s throat with his teeth. They had nothing resembling a weapon and no alternate route of climbing to the upper—

  Roche grabbed Evans by the jacket and pulled him so close that when his spoke, his lips nearly touched the archeologist’s ear.

  “The climbing wall on the other side of the stairs. Do you remember it?”

  Evans hesitated before replying.

  “I think so.”

  “Take the others around to it and get upstairs as fast as you can.”

  “What about you?”

  “If you don’t get to the garage before they barricade the doors, it won’t matter what I do.”

  A clattering sound.

  Roche swung his light across the cafeteria, casting shadows from the equipment-covered tables. He detected a hint of movement, low to the ground, but couldn’t pin it down with the beam.

  “Go,” he whispered.

  He didn’t dare look away from the light as he searched for—

  A chair scooted from beneath a table with a screech.

  He hit it with the light, but by then Rayburn was already gone.

  The shuffling tread of the others became muffled when they rounded the back side of the spiral staircase. He heard the tap of a boot on one of the ledges and a grunt as someone transferred their weight to the wall, but he wasn’t the only one.

  A shadow raced in their direction, sending chairs toppling to the floor and knocking a monitor from the table with a crash.

  “Hey!” Roche shouted.

  The sound of his own voice startled him more than Rayburn, who skidded to a halt on the tiled floor in a crouch and cocked his head like a bird of prey.

  Roche blinded him with the light and hurried to his left in an effort to position himself between Rayburn and the others, who were maybe halfway up the wall and moving at a rapid pace.

  Rayburn made a clicking sound and held his hand in front of his eyes.

  Roche used the opportunity to go on the offensive. If he could somehow advance another ten feet and drive Rayburn back in the process, he might be able to reach the stairs, but he needed to buy the others more time first.

  Rayburn scuttled toward the serving bar.

  Roche ran to intercept. He couldn’t afford to let him get behind the stainless-steel island or he wouldn’t be able to see him. Worse, he wouldn’t be able to blind him with the flashlight, although he couldn’t imagine that ploy would work for very much longer. He needed to get into a position to make his move now, while he still held anything resembling an advantage.

  “What happened to you?”

  Roche spoke while he moved stealthily toward the stairs. He kept his beam in Rayburn’s eyes and listened for the sound of footsteps striking the floor above him.

  Rayburn propelled himself toward the kitchen, but Roche anticipated the move and cut him off.

  The man crouched with his thighs drawn to his chest and his palms flat on the floor between his feet. He arched his back to an inhuman degree in an effort to lower his head far enough to shield his face behind his knee and made a clicking sound that echoed throughout the cafeteria.

  Roche crossed one foot over the other as he moved sideways toward the staircase.

  “Let me help you.”

  More clicking sounds.

  Rayburn lunged in the opposite direction and sought refuge behind the nearest table, where he passed behind the legs of the chairs like a tiger behind the bars of its cage. His skin was a sickly shade of pale, almost gray. The vessels in his neck stood out in stark contrast and struck like lightning bolts across his cheeks, temples, and forehead before running out from beneath the raw skin and over his exposed cranium, where it almost looked like scar tissue was beginning to form.

  A thudding sound overhead as the first of them hopped down from the climbing wall.

  Rayburn made a high-pitched shrieking sound and feinted deeper into the cafeteria before scurrying back toward the stairs.

  Roche struggled to keep his light on him and nearly tripped over the bottom step of the spiral staircase in the process.

  Another set of footsteps joined the first.

  Rayburn lunged at him and lashed out with his hand. Ducked back. Tried again to dodge the beam, which reflected from his eyes like headlights from those of a deer in the middle of the highway.

  “Talk to me,” Roche said.

  Rayburn released a rapid-fire series of clicks and Roche realized with sudden clarity that Rayburn was attempting to do just that.

  Roche started up the staircase backward, one step at a time, his flashlight never wavering from the creature’s bloody face. It watched him from behind its raised hand, its teeth bared.

  One final thump, and the thunder of running footsteps overhead.

  Roche backed into the bend in the staircase and recognized what was about to happen. As soon as he rounded the turn, he wouldn’t be able to hold the creature at bay with his light, nor would he have any kind of room to maneuver in the tight spiral.

  The Rayburn-creature knew it, too. It shrieked and transferred all of its weight to its hands, its legs bunched beneath it like a sprinter at the starting blocks.

  Roche had only one option.

  A hideous smile formed on Rayburn’s face.

  Roche blew out a long, slow breath and steadied his nerves. In one fluid motion, he took his eyes off the creature, turned, and sprinted up the stairs.

  47

  ANYA

  Anya screamed and ran to Richards. Grabbed him by the back of the jacket and pulled.

  “You have to help me!”

  The freezing air buffeted her in the face when she looked up and saw a man only vaguely resembling Armand Scott pounce to the ground from on top of Connor. Snowflakes blew sideways past him and stuck to the walkway between them. His cranial deformity was identical to that of the remains she’d unearthed in Russia, only the physical expression of the flesh was far more terrifying than she could ever have imagined. She’d envisioned its face as being similar to that of modern man, but there was nothing remotely human about Scott’s appearance. Everything about him was alien, from the grayish cast of his skin to the way he twitched and moved in lurches, as though unfamiliar with the mechanics of motion.

  Fissures crackled as they raced through the Plexiglas.

  The creature scuttled forward and cocked its head, first one way and then the other. Blood dribbled from its mouth when it issued a hiss that sounded like steam firing from a ruptured pipe.

  Anya screamed and threw herself to her knees.

  “Come on!”

  She grabbed Richards underneath his arms and shouted with the effort of lifting him. He found his feet, but couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the creature.

  “It’s magnificent,” he said.

  “Hurry!” Friden shouted.

  The stairwell echoed with the drumroll of footsteps hitting the iron steps.

  Anya looked back and saw several silhouettes bounding down the staircase toward them. She jerked Richards so hard she nearly sent him sprawling once more, but he regained his balance and stumbled backward with her. She took advantage of his newfound momentum to drag him away from the creature, which lunged forward, cutting the distance between them in half.

  A scream from behind her.

  She whirled to find Kelly in the opening to the Skyway, her hands clapped over her mouth. When Anya looked back, the creature was within ten feet of them and tensed to make another advance.

  More popping sounds from above her. The cracks spread through the walls in her peripheral vision. Chunks of Plexiglas fell to the ground between her and the creature, which released a series of clicking sounds and retreated into the blowin
g snow.

  A loud snap and a cable sang past to her right. The entire bridge shuddered.

  “Hurry, Anya!” Friden shouted.

  “There’s another one behind us!” Jade screamed.

  “Start barricading the stairwell,” Evans shouted.

  “And then what?” Jade asked. “We’ll be trapped in here without light or heat or any way to signal for help.”

  Anya pulled Richards toward them. If she could just cross the threshold at the end of the Skyway, they could seal the creature on the other side.

  Another cable snapped and the floor dropped.

  Anya hit the ground on her knees and barely scrambled out of the way before Richards landed on top of her.

  The walkway sloped downward toward where the creature crouched. The domed Plexiglas shattered and dropped enormous shards between them. The storm raced through the gaps, creating a moving wall of snow between them that nearly concealed the creature as it approached, low to the ground and coming up fast.

  A resounding thud.

  The Skyway slanted downward, so steeply that Anya started to slide. She grabbed Richards by the back of the jacket with one hand and reached for anything at all with the other.

  “Hang on!” Evans shouted and dove for her. He caught her by the wrist and halted her slide.

  Another cable snapped and whipped the frozen glass beside them hard enough to shatter the glass and impale her cheek with tiny fragments.

  Evans groaned and pulled her up toward the doorway, the seal around which was already buckled and peeling away from the building.

  “Give me a hand!” he shouted.

  Friden tentatively crawled to Evans’s side, grabbed Richards, and pulled hard enough on the back of his coat to pry him from Anya’s grasp, lightening her burden enough that Evans could drag her up the slope and over the fractured edge.

  She scurried past Evans, turned around, and helped the others pull Richards into the stairwell.

  Bolts snapped and structural rings disengaged. Bits of Plexiglas cascaded down the bridge toward where the creature crawled toward them.

  A chasm opened behind it. Connor’s body slid through, tumbled out over the nothingness, and vanished into the storm.

  “Close the door!” Anya screamed.

  The creature slapped at the floor with its bare hands as the bridge grew steeper, digging its fingernails into the tiles in an effort to gain traction.

  Evans pried the door from the recess until the others were able to help him drag it across the entryway.

  The creature shrieked and scrambled uphill, blood dribbling from the gunshot wounds on its chest.

  Ten feet.

  Five.

  It was nearly upon them when the Skyway broke away from the building.

  The creature’s eyes widened. Its nails tore from the cuticles. It screeched and flailed.

  The last thing Anya saw before they sealed the door was the expression of sheer terror on its face as it plummeted into the blowing snow.

  “Someone help me!” Roche shouted from the landing at the top of the staircase, where he struggled to jerk the door from its slot in the wall. “It’s right behind me!”

  Anya rushed for the stairs and hit them behind Kelly and Jade, who were already halfway up. She barely had the strength to climb and had to use the railing to pull herself higher. She nearly lost her balance when her hand slipped in something wet, but she managed to stumble forward and made it to the landing, where the others already had the gap down to a mere foot. A dark shape streaked straight toward the opening from the foyer on the other side, the light reflecting from its inhuman eyes.

  “It’s coming!” Anya screamed.

  She threw herself against the face of the door and used her shoulder to help the others drive it closed with a resounding thud.

  The creature struck it from the other side, hard enough to knock her backward, but she braced herself and leaned into it again.

  Kelly screamed beside her as the creature hurled itself against the steel door, over and over.

  Until, finally, it stopped.

  Anya desperately listened for any indication of what it was doing on the other side but couldn’t hear anything over the combination of their heavy breathing and whimpering.

  She pictured Arkaim, with its twin fortified rings, a veritable fortress that should have been able to withstand any siege, reduced to little more than scorched rubble in the middle of a field, and the strange remains she exhumed near its outskirts. She’d made a terrible mistake in assuming that the coneheaded species represented a terminal branch in the human evolutionary tree rather than an offshoot from modern man, one facilitated by something lacking in humanity, something subhuman, the outward physical manifestation of which looked an awful lot like the alien species referred to as Grays.

  Only there was nothing fictional about this being. The creature shrieked and threw itself against the door one final time. It released a torrent of guttural clicks, then retreated into the station. The sound of its footsteps diminished until she couldn’t hear anything from the other side at all.

  Anya stepped back and looked at the door. Her hand had left a smear of blood on the steel. She glanced down at her palm, expecting to find a laceration, but the skin was intact.

  She took Roche’s flashlight from him and traced the railing down to where she’d slipped. There was blood on the rail, and even more on the wall above it, leading up to a hole in the exposed ductwork. Her heart sank when she gave voice to what they were all thinking.

  “We’re going to die in here.”

  48

  FRIDEN

  “We can’t just do nothing,” Jade said.

  “I activated the McMurdo Protocol,” Richards said. “They’ll come.”

  “You said yourself there’s no way of knowing if they understood the nature of our emergency, let alone if they’re going to send anyone.”

  “Trust me. They’ll come.”

  “We won’t even know for what? Another eight hours? We can’t just sit here waiting for whatever that thing is to come in here after us.”

  “It’s an alien organism,” Friden said.

  He stared at the hole in the duct. They’d managed to cram everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor or walls into the orifice, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Kelly said.

  “The archaea from the lake is the same species that was collected from the Vigorano meteorite, which means that whatever you want to call it, it’s extraterrestrial in origin.”

  “You’re suggesting they were able to infest and subsume the bodies of these men,” Anya said.

  “Duh. Haven’t you been listening? Once I triggered the metamorphic process in my lab, they immediately sought out a suitable host. You should have seen what they did to poor Speedy.”

  “Regardless of their origin,” Jade said, “no species can stimulate such rapid and dramatic physical changes.”

  “You saw the PCR results. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is or where it comes from,” Roche said. “All that matters now is that we find a way to get out of here in one piece.”

  “It matters to me,” Richards said. “And deep down I know it matters to you, too. You can’t spend your life in search of something only to abandon your quest when you’re so close to the end.”

  “I study symbols. That’s all.”

  “Symbols created by extraterrestrial life-forms.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Then how else do you explain them?”

  “You can’t just say ‘must have been aliens’ every time you encounter something you don’t understand.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  “Whatever that thing out there is, I promise you it’s not running around the English countryside leaving messages in the barley.”

  “But those very messages led to its creation.”

  “And I suppose now it�
��s going to whip up a spaceship and go abduct some drunken rednecks.”

  “Don’t you think a species capable of building a machine as powerful as the one inside the pyramid would have the ability to achieve flight?”

  “That’s not some advanced life-form,” Anya said. “You saw what it did to Connor. It killed him with its teeth, for God’s sake. That’s not a hallmark of superior intelligence; that’s a predatory instinct.”

  “We’ve found the skeletal remains of coneheads near the ruins of pretty much every major ancient civilization on every continent,” Evans said. “They’ve been buried or entombed near pyramids of similar structure at sites sacred to people who never possibly could have come into physical contact with one another.”

  “None of this changes the fact that what we need to do right now is establish a defensible position without anything resembling a weapon between us,” Roche said. “Or else we need to figure out how the hell to get out of here.”

  “The only vehicles are on the other side of that canyon,” Anya said.

  “There’s not even a foot trail down the mountain from here,” Richards said.

  “Bright lights blind them,” Roche said.

  “Then all we have to do is restore the power—”

  “Don’t you think I would have done that already if I’d been able to? It looked like someone tore the guts out of the generator. Are there any more battery-powered lights?”

  “If so, I wouldn’t know where to start looking.”

  “We could always start a fire,” Roche said.

  “With us inside? You’re out of your mind.”

  “We can’t just do nothing,” Roche said.

  He paced back and forth with the flashlight, shining it all around the barren room as though hoping to magically find something they’d all somehow overlooked. The beam settled upon the outer door and he turned to face them.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Jade said. “If you open that door, we’ll lose what little heat is trapped in here with us.”

  “How long before it dissipates on its own?”

  “Like it hasn’t already,” Friden said. He wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to preserve his body heat. Once it was gone, there was no way of getting it back. As it was, they could already see their breath. Further decreasing the temperature would force them to prematurely abandon the stairwell, which he had absolutely no desire to do.