by Jason Parent
He waited.
With no room to recoil as it had before, the snake-worm retracted into itself like a Slinky then shot forward. Dante was ready for it. He sidestepped out of the creature’s path, and it flew by him, but not into the waste-disposal unit, as he’d hoped. The monstrosity collided with the wall just above the unit, splatting as it had before and already re-forming. The waste-disposal unit’s door retracted.
Dante reached for the first thing he could find, a fancy-looking microscope that looked as though it had cost somebody a lot of money – not his problem. It sat on a nearby lab station. Without a second thought, he slammed its base into the creature with one hand while simultaneously pulling open the door to the disposal unit with the other.
Nothing happened. Dante went apeshit. He slammed the microscope over and over again into the creature until it oozed and simmered like soup on a stove top. The microscope broke apart in his hands, but not before the bludgeoned creature flattened back into pancake form. Its top portion curled back from the wall as it rolled into a burrito. With a slurp, the biomass fell into the drawer.
Dante slammed the door to the unit shut. He didn’t know how to work the device, but fortunately, the buttons were clearly labeled. He gritted his teeth and turned a dial that read ‘Incinerator’. He liked the sound of that.
“Waste analyzed. No danger of deleterious chemical release,” a computerized female voice said, which Dante found strangely arousing. “Incineration shall begin momentarily.”
He heard a whoosh as gas ignited. Warmth radiated from the unit.
He let out a breath and slumped against the lab station, staring at the drawer as if it were the best thing since the invention of the wheel. His mind, always slower in times of peace, tried to make sense of all that he’d just experienced.
His relief was short lived. Screaming followed by machine-gun fire came from the hallway. Dante staggered, biting his tongue in his surprise. He’d let his guard down for a second, only to learn the madness was still far from over. Suddenly short of breath, his ordeal finally catching up to him, he rested a moment, and his hand slipped across the lab table, pushing aside various scientific apparatuses he didn’t recognize and knocking over a flask that broke into pieces as it shattered against the floor.
He quickly recovered. He drew his gun and checked his ammo count then turned toward the commotion, ready to battle anew.
On the other side of the door was an ASAP security guard twitching and seizing much as Romanov had been. He didn’t recognize the guard, and the twinge of disappointment he felt when he realized it wasn’t Stearns dispersed quickly in the face of urgency. Thin worm tentacles like those that had spread from Patient Zero into Romanov’s face crept like vines up that unknown guard’s neck. Somehow, they’d broken through the plastic polymer seal that prevented the spread of all known contaminants outside the clean room. The guard’s eyes rolled back in their sockets, and foam surged from his mouth.
How? Dante wondered, but the answer became obvious. Through the window, he saw the tentacles and traced them back into the clean room. The tentacles writhed through a narrow crack. The seal was missing entirely. Following the lengths of the tentacles closer still, he saw their point of origin.
“He’s gone,” Dante muttered, though only Romanov’s head and torso were truly missing.
‘Gone’ might not have been the best word, either. ‘Stretched and liquefied’ described the sight. All that was left of the man was a pair of legs and a bundle of twisting, coiling strands that ran from those legs in a pool of viscous snot to freedom.
And if they could breach one secure doorway…. Dante shuddered.
Again, he was left searching for a means to fight the biohellspawn. He knew how to fight men – all kinds of men – fat men, skinny men, tall men, short men, strong men, trained men…and women, too. He even knew how to fight off trained dogs and had some experience in altercations with other wild and domesticated mammals.
But mutating piles of human flesh had never been on his need-to-know-how-to-kill checklist. Apparently, his training regimen had had a gaping hole in it. And presently, between him and the only way out, a mass of mutating flesh in need of killing awaited Dante.
“Acid, maybe?” he muttered, checking over his shoulder for the unconscious scientist sprawled in her wheelchair. He could have used her help, picked her brain. He envied her unconscious state, as reality was looking bleak, but he wished she’d wake her ass up and share some sage advice – anything that might give him an edge in his fight against what was nothing less than a child of Satan.
He’d heard nothing more from the creature he’d roasted in the waste-disposal unit, so perhaps fire would do the trick. If movies told it true, every lab had to be equipped with Prometheus’s bane. He just had to find its source.
“You’re going to burn, you disgusting pile of shit.” He examined several pieces of equipment, the functions of which he did not know. He stepped toward another lab station and heard a squish from underfoot.
He looked down to see the remains of the first scalp crab he’d crushed sliding up the sides of his boot toward his laces. “Merda! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
With his uncontaminated foot, he kicked off his infested boot by its heel. He grabbed it by its top and raced over to the waste-disposal unit. “Arrivederci!” Dante said and dropped the boot into the drawer. He cranked on the fire.
A red button flashed. “Several hazardous dioxins and furans likely to be released through incineration,” the computerized voice said. “However, a temperature increase to” – a pause followed by a series of beeps – “nine hundred eighty degrees Celsius will eliminate dangers to humans and environment. Do you wish to proceed with temperature increase?”
“Yes,” Dante said before realizing the machine was not voice activated. He tapped a flashing red button as soon as he noticed it.
“Incineration shall begin momentarily.”
Dante sighed. “Now that that’s done, back to Romanov.”
Outside the clean room, the screaming and twitching had stopped. Two guards were standing at the far end of the corridor, their faces ashen and mouths agape.
I know how you feel, boys. Dante found no humor in their horrified expressions.
One of them, a man as tall as an NBA center with long, lanky arms, stared through the horror, through Dante, as if what he’d seen had short-circuited his brain.
Fucking useless.
The other guard, who looked like a child beside his partner, fixed his gaze on something on the floor in front of the door. Since Dante had a good chunk of that something on his side of the door as well, he didn’t have to be one of the center’s overpaid, criminally reckless nerds to know that the ASAP fellow was staring at his fallen comrade, no doubt at a loss for what to do with him.
“Keep your distance!” Dante yelled. “Whatever you do, don’t touch him. Burn him if you can.”
He watched the two guards’ faces for recognition and understanding. They definitely heard him, as the shorter guard looked his way when he spoke. Neither guard seemed to register his words, though. Their faces remained as blank as fresh pieces of paper.
Dante would have to take it upon himself to purify the area. He fumbled under his testicles for a matchbook he’d hidden there, not seeing in the lab what he needed to produce a bigger, fiercer flame. It’ll have to do. But that didn’t mean he had to like it. Using a match would mean that he would have to get close.
Unless…. He scratched his head. Dried dirt snowflaked to the ground. Maybe I’m going about this the wrong way. He looked at the bottles lining a shelf along the back wall. “Benzene, silver nitrate, potassium chloride, isopropyl alcohol, toluene, ethyl ether, ethyl alcohol….” All, any, or none of those chemicals might’ve been flammable. He didn’t know what any of them were. But he knew alcohol. Molotov was his favorite cocktail.
&
nbsp; Damn, I could use a drink. He grabbed the ethyl alcohol. The flame symbol printed low on the label reinforced his decision. As if that wasn’t enough, beneath the symbol, the bottle read ‘Caution: Highly Flammable’.
Jackpot. Dante ran with the bottle back to Romanov’s disembodied legs. When he got there, he saw that what were once legs were legs no longer. At least, not human legs.
Romanov’s boots were off. His pants were still on, but jutting out of the fabric, the organic material had mutated. The change wasn’t as drastic as the complete reconfiguration of the guard’s upper torso. His legs lacked any contour or bone or muscle makeup, bumped peg legs stretching beyond his hemline like the legs of a starfish.
As Dante neared, the appendages stood erect as if sensing danger. They swiped at the air between them but weren’t long enough to reach him – not yet, but they were still stretching.
The starfish legs flopped and thudded against the ground more rapidly when Dante doused them with the chemical he’d grabbed. They flopped more frantically, which caused Dante to smile. With hatred in his heart and defiance in his eyes, Dante lit a match and flicked it at Romanov’s warped form.
The flame blew out before it hit the abomination. Dante groaned, rolled his eyes, and lit a second match. When he flicked that one, the creature burst into flames.
A high-pitched chorus of whines erupted from the mouthless mass. It was shrill enough to set every dog east of the Prime Meridian barking. Still, the creature burned and bubbled and blistered. The flame quickly spread across the creature’s entire form, as if its own living tissue were highly flammable. To Dante’s wondrous joy, the portion connecting torso A to hell-of-a-mess B ignited also, and the flame surged along the tentacles and under the door. Its warm glow climbed up the hallway walls outside.
An alarm sounded, and a sprinkler system sprouted from the ceiling inside the clean room. Dante cursed as he and the creature were doused by a torrent of water. Still, the fire raged, both inside the room and out. One of the guards disappeared and came back with a fire extinguisher.
“No!” Dante shouted. “Not until there’s nothing left of it but ash!”
At last, recognition registered on the guard’s face. He lowered the extinguisher and stepped away from the conflagration. Dante nodded his appreciation. He warmed himself by the fire, but not too close by it, trying to counteract the chill from the icy water. Streaks of mud ran into his eyes, and he blinked out the irritation.
Behind him came a clang then a rattle of metal against the floor. He turned to check on the unconscious scientist, hoping she was awake and alert, but she had not stirred.
The body that had lain beside her was gone. Out of the corner of his eye, Dante caught something wiggling into the now-coverless air vent before it, too, was gone.
Chapter Twelve
You used me, Sergei said. His voice sounded as if he were standing in the middle of a giant amphitheater buried deep beneath the earth, empty and otherwise soundless. The reality was far more terrifying. He was trapped, alone and desperate, inside a mind that was no longer his to control.
But in that mind, he was seeing wondrous, albeit horrifying, things. He saw what that sentient creature, older than the Earth itself, saw and some of what it had already seen through a million-plus eyes spread across time and space. He heard voices that were and voices that had been, yet all the same voice, through a million-plus ears. But he tasted nothing, smelled nothing, felt absolutely nothing, never doubting that that last part was for the better.
He knew he was lost – a mind without a brain, a soul without a body – yet that knowledge was not discomforting. Instead, it was…freeing? After the last few weeks of torment at the whims of an unrelenting malevolence – what had the researchers called it? Molli? – it had finally succeeded in its plan to become him and, in doing so, had released Sergei from the responsibilities of life and the struggles of living with the deepest heartache and an irreplaceable loss. In a way, perhaps he owed the creature a thank you. He snickered. The creature was shouldering all his burdens.
But he couldn’t forgive the creature for the cruel deception it had employed to gain its own freedom. Nor could he allow it to breed, to spread, at least not if he could help it.
Sergei had tried hard in life to be a good man, a good husband, a good father, and a good scientist. He had failed in all respects. A passenger in his own body, he was stuck watching a television program featuring a character bent on global annihilation. He had no way to stop watching, to turn off the program when it came to the rough parts and move on to an afterlife where he could possibly be reunited with his daughter, with the real Natalya, not that hateful creature’s decoy.
But since he couldn’t have that, Sergei figured he had the next best thing: an eternity to torture and torment his body’s new captain the same way it had tortured and tormented him. If he’d had a mouth, he would have smirked. He was never, ever, going to shut up.
Never.
You used me, he said again. And you used her to get to me.
“How does this one still speak?” the creature hissed, its form now more snake than man as it slithered through the air vent. “The other, the female…that one resists. How could that one resist? And I become this one, and this one is me. This one is no more, yet some part remains. No part must remain.”
Well, you best get used to it, shithead. I’m not going anywhere.
“This one must go! I am this one. This one is no more!”
This one is staying right where he is. Sergei said the words to provoke the creature, but the sad reality was that he had no way of leaving, no legs to carry him away. His fate seemed inextricably tied to the creature’s. His body wasn’t only no longer his, but it was no longer human. The process that had altered him seemed irreversible. The best he could hope for was a satisfying and excruciatingly painful demise, for the creature anyway.
“This one is infinitesimal. I am the ender of all things and the bringer of rebirth. I am the conqueror of species mighty and fierce, the instrument of an age of ice and nothingness. I bring oblivion. It is my time anew. This one’s kind is frail and inconsequential. This one’s kind will end like all planetary parasites that came before it.”
So what are you saying? You’re like some goddamn reset button for the whole planet Earth?
“Reset? Yessss! I like this one’s word! The planet will flourish. Life will flourish, free of vermin! This one is vermin.”
Yeah, well, good luck with that, asshole. In the meantime, let me ask you this: If you take over other humans, aren’t you going to have a lot more than just this one’s consciousness to manage? I have a feeling it will be getting awfully crowded in here really soon.
“This one must go! This one must go! I will destroy this one’s part that remains. I will twist and tear and render this one’s body into morsels, which I will then consume until I have found this one and eradicated him.”
I will never leave.
The creature stopped beside an adjoining air vent, where a fan blew into its animal face. It worked its way through the grating and the fan, getting lopped into pieces through the long process, only to reconstruct itself on the other side. Sergei wondered if the whole ordeal had hurt the creature at all. He hadn’t felt a thing.
The creature had worked its way from the clean room’s vent into the center’s main air ducts. It slithered along until it found itself over a grate, looking down upon humans through cheese-grater-sized slits. The creature stared, and Sergei stared with it. His defiance shriveled when he saw an ASAP security guard lying on a gurney, his eye bandaged, the same eye Sergei had impaled with a fork. He wished he could take back what he’d done or at least apologize to the man. He wished even more for a means to stop what the creature was about to do to the guard.
The creature began to push itself through the trellis, a process that closely resembled meat going through a grind
er, segmenting it into an immeasurable number of component parts.
The guard below stirred. Sergei tried to close his eyes, but they were no longer his to shut. He saw whatever the creature saw.
And all he could do was watch.
Chapter Thirteen
Dante shifted his weight off his left butt cheek and onto his right. He’d been handcuffed and ordered to sit on something called a Hitachi S-12480, a clean-room apparatus of unknown function. To his right was what appeared to be a centrifuge. To his left was a sink with dual nozzles that shot streams of water directly into one’s eyes.
Beyond the sink stood the man who’d cuffed him on Stearns’s orders, a slope-headed Neanderthal named Johnson. He looked three parts MMA heavyweight and one part gorilla, with fists as big and solid as sledgehammers. When he and the other guard – a square-jawed Russian named Belgrade – showed up to assist Stearns, Dante had enough sense not to resist their taking him into custody. He’d hoped that maybe, after what they had witnessed, he could reason with them about destroying the viruses. He’d underestimated Stearns’s dominion over the crisis and the guard’s willingness to neglect his need for medical attention in order to see Dante dealt with properly.
Ahead of him was the real concern, which ASAP did at least seem to be taking seriously and handling somewhat competently: an uncovered vent with little maggot-sized squirming things wriggling all over the opening and the grate below it. He’d told the ASAP guards in the room to torch it. Again to their credit, they seemed to be listening. Under a controlled fire, the leftovers of Romanov and the guard he’d infected were burned until they were nothing but piles of ash and bone, swept up, and tossed into the incinerator, where they were torched again as an insurance policy.
A big fellow with a milky-white complexion, rolled-up sleeves, and a black cowboy hat hanging low over his brow stepped into the room. He was smiling big and goofy, as if enjoying the excitement. A flamethrower hung over his back.