by Jason Parent
“Unknown organism detected,” the machine announced in a loud, clear voice. “Location contained.” The image of the burning mound of humans turned red. The scanner beeped in rapid staccato. “Unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected….”
“Will someone shut that thing up?” Stearns said, glancing back and forth from the scanner to the infirmary and back again. His rifle shook in his hands as he backpedaled on his heels.
“Is it broken?” Monty asked.
Belgrade played with the keyboard. “I…I don’t know. I have no idea how to work this thing and am just following the prompts.”
All the while, the robot voice said again and again, “Unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected….”
Monty stared at the image at the top of the scanner. “Is it…turning red?” They all stared at the image. Dot by tiny dot, the scanned image of the infirmary ran red.
The infirmary’s double doors swung open quickly, as if they’d been kicked. They crashed against the hallway wall and swung shut again, then back open, rocking back and forth and creaking on their hinges. Monty watched those doors with increasing panic. The scanner wouldn’t quiet, its toneless voice drilling into his skull with its monotonous repetition. As he stared without blinking into the infirmary through the opening left by the swaying doors, he saw nothing. At least, nothing alive. No worms, no melting people, no nothing – just the infirmary as it should have been, same as it had always been. The doors creaked in a final sway before closing.
“Unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected – unknown organism detected….”
Monty howled. He charged at the stranger and grabbed him by his tattered vest. “Did you do this, you son of a bitch? Did you make this all happen?”
With a sinister slowness, the man’s head lowered as if to examine the hands latched to his coat then raised just as slowly, revealing a scowl and eyes that burned with an intensity Monty didn’t quite understand. The man spoke. “If I had known something like this existed within these walls, I would have brought this whole building down on top of everyone in it. I still may, if given the—”
The scanner fell silent except for the low hum of some fan or gear spinning inside it. Monty held his breath, waiting for it to do or say something, not knowing what it was supposed to do or say.
At last, the scanner broke its silence. “Locations of organism uncontained. Identified in red.”
Monty looked at the image at the top of the machine. “I don’t understand,” he muttered. Judging by the masks of terror worn by everyone else, he wasn’t the only one who didn’t.
The entire screen was red.
“Air quality normal,” the robotic female said, almost mocking. “No other contaminants detected.”
“Are we infected?” Kelly asked.
“Shh!” Stearns said. His ears perked up as he stared at the ceiling.
Monty listened too, for what, he couldn’t be sure. He wondered if maggot-worms made sounds. All he heard were the occasional squeaks of a door hinge in desperate need of oil and the crackling fire toasting a coworker he’d known fairly well and a nurse with a booty that could have duped him into falling in love.
His gaze fell upon the burning mound, and he thought it strange that he could no longer distinguish male parts from female parts. A transformation had completed while he hadn’t been looking. Their bodies had become one.
He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, amazed the fire had yet to set off the alarms and sprinkler system. No one said a word, their focus not on him but on the double doors and whatever lay unseen behind them. Kelly held his flamethrower high, ready to ignite anything that moved.
As Monty raised the extinguisher and pointed its nozzle at the still-raging heap, the vagrant criminal said, “I wouldn’t do that. Not just yet.”
Monty didn’t listen. In fact, he considered dousing the flames just to spite that stinking son of a bitch. A cloud of cold white partially obscured his view of the infirmary.
The doors exploded open again.
Monty saw nothing at first, but he did hear something he couldn’t quite place, like a handful of dice – no, something lighter, softer than dice – like a handful of teeth skipped over a wooden floor. However, the noise sounded like a hell of a lot more than a handful of teeth. He imagined a giant cauldron like those filled with burning pitch that castles poured onto invaders in medieval movies, but that cauldron poured out millions and millions of teeth. The sound didn’t only come from the floor but the ceiling and walls, too.
The maggot-worms’ larval stage was over. A metamorphosis had begun.
“Oh, shit!” Kelly shouted. He floored the gas on his new ride, shooting fire in wide horizontal arcs across the floor one way, the ceiling back the other. Fire alarms blared, seemingly from everywhere in the facility. The corridors flashed with blinking red light.
The smoke in front of Monty cleared. His mouth opened to scream, but he stifled it by biting down on his knuckles. Hordes, goddamn infinite legions, of nickel-sized bugs swarmed into the hallway, their tiny needle feet carrying them speedily across the floor or clinging them to the walls and ceiling.
In the center of a skittering mass inside the infirmary, one of the nurses stood, whole and unfazed. He raised his arms out to his sides as if the creatures were his gifts to the ASAP team, then he fell apart into thousands of the ugly pinkish-purple flesh-bugs. All that remained was his clothes and ID badge, crumpled in a heap from which an army of insects scuttled.
Monty screamed but held his ground. Wave after wave scoured new paths beneath their burning brethren. Many were unable to dodge Kelly’s skilled aim. The bugs exploded like engorged mosquitoes against a match, the blood inside them boiling. They burst everywhere on the walls and floor, leaving little red-and-purple paintball-type splatters where not dissolved entirely in flame.
Kelly was doing a fantastic job of holding them off, considering he was one against millions, but they were too many and too small not to miss a few hundred here or there. Monty couldn’t comprehend their numbers. At least four or five staff members had been inside the infirmary and maybe another patient or two. Did all these…these things…come from so few people?
Monty couldn’t wrap his head around it, and he didn’t want to. The scene was like something out of a horror movie, not real. It can’t be real. His chin quivered. Can it?
Can I take the chance that it isn’t?
“Everyone, get back,” he said. “There’s too many of them.”
Belgrade shook off his stupor. He nodded, grabbed Stearns’s arm, slid it over his shoulder, and began walking him at a snail’s pace down the corridor, away from the conflagration.
“Let me help,” their forgotten captive said. His hands were still cuffed though somehow in front of him — how the criminal had managed to shimmy the cuffs under his butt and slip his legs through without being quadruple jointed and anyone noticing, Monty had no time to consider — but the captured man was nevertheless able to grab Stearns’s other arm and sling it over his shoulders.
Stearns pulled back at first but then gave in. The three of them scurried away like participants in a three-legged race, in their case four-legged.
Monty stood as close to Kelly as he dared. “I’ll stay with you and make sure the path behind you is clear, but we need to get the fuck out of here. Keep suppression fire on them but keep moving back—”
Kelly shrieked as a dart shot into his neck. A purple tube jutted from the charred mound that had been Sampson and Nurse Valentina. It reminded Monty of a stint he had done in Brazil and those crazy rainforest tribes and their fucking blowguns. He stared at the mound as blackened skin flaked off from one spot, then another. New tubes surfaced in the clearings.
Turning to run, he glan
ced once more at Kelly, who’d begun to seize, his flamethrower spurting erratically. Monty made one half-hearted attempted to take it, but he doubted he could pull it off Kelly’s back before either the bugs or Kelly got him.
The dart in Kelly’s neck was mostly gone, having wriggled its way inside its new host. Monty walked backward, his legs weakening as if they might refuse to support him in his hour of need, while the critters climbed up Kelly’s legs and burrowed under his skin, moving inside Monty’s former coworker.
And the bugs were inches from his own feet.
Running, Monty looked around for the others. He wondered how they could have gotten so far so quickly, how they could have just left him behind. Where the hell are they?
Another question mattered more: How close are those motherfuckers? He dared not turn around to look. He wondered if the bugs could jump. He wondered if the bugs were already on him.
But as Monty ran, he wasn’t alone for long. A young woman stumbled out of a doorway and stopped almost directly in his path. She wore a bathrobe and slippers, and she rubbed sleep from her eyes.
“What’s going on?” she asked, halfway through a yawn. “Is there a fire?”
“Christ!” Monty shouted, managing to jerk sideways enough to avoid collision. As he passed by her, he grabbed her sleeve, trying to pull her along with him.
The woman yanked her arm free. “Jerk!” she yelled. Then she started to scream.
Again, Monty wasted no time looking back. He’d seen too much of that horror show already. The woman’s screams were quickly snuffed out. The bugs were too close.
Keep running, he pleaded with himself. And run he did. More doors appeared ahead of him. They lined the main hallway and the offshoots, too.
Living quarters. Monty’s good eye blurred with tears. Where ASAP confined everyone when the explosion occurred.
“No,” he mouthed when another door opened. The fire alarm would have everyone coming out into the halls. Monty kept running. He could do nothing for them now.
Chapter Sixteen
The incessant clamor of the fire alarm was beating a migraine into Clara’s skull. “Do you still think we should sit tight?” She massaged her temples. “The entire building sounds like it’s on fire. Anyone remember our assigned evacuation route?”
Dr. Werniewski looked to his assistant. “Anju, grab the scanner. We’ll just check out the hallway and make sure it’s safe, see if we can’t find someone from ASAP and get an update.” He peeked out into the hallway. Flashing red light cascaded into the room. “Where are those jerks from ASAP when you actually need them?”
Anju strained as she lifted the cumbersome apparatus of her own making. Jordan moved to help her, but Anju smiled and nodded him off. Still, Clara thought it nice to see at least one man who hadn’t given up on chivalry in the face of feminism, or worse, who used feminism as an excuse to be lazy.
Dr. Werniewski and his grad-student accomplice disappeared into the corridor. They left Jordan and Clara in awkward silence, notwithstanding the unrelenting fire alarm.
“Initiating scan for biological contamination,” the scanner announced from somewhere outside her room. She didn’t say a word or even move until she heard, “Scan completed. No biological contaminants detected.”
“What do you suppose they would have done had the scanner picked up something?” Jordan asked, chuckling. “Can you picture ol’ Dr. W. taking on anything bigger than a hamster?”
“Hopefully, we’ll never have to.” Clara’s severity wiped the grin from Jordan’s face. She knew she was being unfair to him, but the time wasn’t right for levity. The fire alarm was driving her insane, and people were infected with an organism that could alter their genetic makeup, herself included. She had no way of telling if the organism was contained or if it even could be contained.
The thing that made her heart sink lowest was that Monty had been right all along. She’d been blind to his observations, deaf to his warnings. She doubted he was waiting somewhere out in the halls for her to pass just so he could say he told her so. That’s not Monty. The poor, poor man…. She did hope he was somewhere out there, still Monty, still alive and well.
She hadn’t realized that Jordan had risen and was standing by the door until she heard it click open. The sharp sound snapped her from her reverie. Jordan poked his neck out into the corridor.
“That’s funny,” he muttered. “The guard’s gone.”
“What are you doing?” Clara asked.
“They’re not back yet. It’s making me restless.”
“They’ve only been gone for a few minutes.”
“I know. It’s just…. I don’t know.” Jordan slapped his sides. “This whole thing’s kind of crazy, huh?” He laughed, but his eyes didn’t. A shaky edge underlined his tone. “We never have these sorts of issues back at Stanford. Our idea of excitement is a clogged toilet or an extra umbrella in our umbrella drinks.”
Clara tried on a comforting smile. It didn’t feel right on her face, but it seemed to settle Jordan. He stepped inside the room and let the door swing back into place. He blocked it from fully closing with his foot. They heard someone running down the hall, coming fast.
Jordan stepped out into the hall. “Hey,” he called out, but Clara couldn’t see to whom he was speaking.
A blur passed by the open door, then another. The blurs kept coming.
“Stop!” Jordan shouted. “Where’s the fire? How bad is it? Can someone please tell us what’s going on?”
Clara rolled up to the door and pulled it all the way open. She saw the back of an ASAP uniform as its owner raced by, huffing and wheezing. The guard had gauze wound around his head. Monty?
“Where do you suppose he’s going in such a hurry?” she asked. “If this is a fire, shouldn’t we be instructed along our evacuation routes in an orderly fashion? Announcements over the intercom? Why’s everyone running, even the people charged with keeping us safe?” She frowned. “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t think it’s where they’re going that we should be worried about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen.”
Clara did. She hadn’t heard it sooner, with that obnoxious fire alarm drowning out most other sounds and banging a beat into the bass drum of her brain. Someone was screaming.
No, not someone. Someones. A whole bunch of them.
“Clara,” Jordan said, eyes widening with fear. “I think we should go.”
“Please.” Clara reached out to a frenzied passerby who paid her no heed. “What’s happening?” she asked another whom she didn’t recognize as the woman sped by.
The woman’s eyes were wide-open orbs, her mouth spraying spittle as she bounded down the hall.
“Run!” another woman shouted at them. She turned a corner and disappeared.
Bouncing on his toes, Jordan looked down the hall, then back at Clara. He hurried toward her, stepping in front of a short, round rock of a man.
The man didn’t brake. Instead, he dropped a shoulder and drove it into Jordan’s gut. The botanist keeled over with a loud grunt then fell on his side.
Clara was pushing her chair over to help Jordan up when a goliath of a man ran past her, scooped Jordan up, and planted the scientist on his feet with what looked like no effort at all. The man was built like an Olympic power lifter. His hair was black and slick, combed back tightly against his scalp. His nose was prominent, his jaw was prominent, and his pecs, his glutes, his bis and tris were all prominent. Only his eyes were soft, the softest sky blue. He grabbed Jordan by his arms and held him straight.
“I’m good.” Though coughing, Jordan waved him off even as the gentle giant tried to hurry him along. “Thank you.”
The big guy’s brow crinkled. He started toward Clara, who was just about to thank him for stopping when her chair lurched forward.
; “I got her, Alfie,” a man said with a heavy Bostonian accent from over her shoulder. “We need to keep moving.”
“Mon Dieu. It’s loose, isn’t it?” Clara’s stomach panged hollow, and her mouth went desert dry. She suddenly wanted to be anywhere but right there, in that hallway, waiting for whatever the men were running from to show itself.
“If by ‘it’,” the man pushing her wheelchair said, “you mean whatever the fuck is turning people into human skin puppets, then yeah, I’d say it has definitely gotten out of its cage.”
As if to demonstrate the American’s point, a woman in a white lab coat and fuzzy rabbit slippers had gained on Clara’s wheelchair and was about to pass her when five long strands of stringy living tissue shot into her spine and neck and yanked her back down the hall in the direction she’d come. Her cries for help ended abruptly, replaced by what sounded like a padded hammer repeatedly whacking into a concrete slab.
Clara wondered if the woman was seizing, if her head was pounding against the floor and making the sound. She didn’t look back to check.
“Faster, Sebastian!” the one called Alfie shouted.
The man behind her answered the call, popping the chair into a wheelie and driving them forward, faster and faster. Jordan ran a few meters ahead, Alfie between Jordan and them.
Jordan glanced back, did a double take, turned sideways, and stared back. The color left his face and hands until they went bleached white. The hair over his ears went just as white, unless it had always been that way and she was just noticing it for the first time. She couldn’t fathom terror so powerful that it could alter hair pigmentation, even on a day she’d seen an astrobiologist mutate and attack her and an ASAP guard, using his skin like silly putty to impregnate the latter with an infectious organism. She had a feeling Jordan was seeing something much, much worse.
“Wh-Wh-Where d-do we go?” he managed to ask.
Alfie took a glance behind them and gasped. “I don’t know. Not back that way” – he threw a thumb over his shoulder – “that’s for sure. We need to get out.”