by Jason Parent
The mud was climbing.
“Dear God,” the doctor muttered then proceeded to lose his shit. His breaths grew more and more rapid with each passing moment. He sounded as if he might be hyperventilating. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
“Calm down,” Dante said, trying to sound firm but calm himself. He poured flame over the cavern floor in front of them. Several of the puddles evaporated. Others ignited. They burned like oil drums in an urban campfire.
“Everyone,” Dante said, “stay clear of the puddles. They’re – oh shit!” A puddle beside Dante’s foot shifted on its own accord, splashing around his boot and fixing it in place. He tried to rip his foot free, but the liquid seemed to suction him down. He looked to his right and saw Dikembu still trying to pull her own foot free with no success. Her foot wasn’t going to budge, and worse, the black fluid had thickened into plasma and was slithering closer and closer to the top of her boot, where it could drop inside or slide up her pant leg. Tendrils crept up the leather like vines and looked like veins, black bulges over a black surface.
“Leave the boot!” Dante shouted. “It’s your only chance!” He looked down to see the fluid bubbling and thickening around his own foot. “Fucker,” he muttered. “I just got these boots, and already I have to give one up?”
Dikembu pulled a knife from a sheath at her hip and sliced through her laces with speed and precision. She pulled her foot out of the boot and hop-danced out of the puddle.
Dante aimed his flamethrower at the empty puddle and was just about to ignite it when Dr. Werniewski, still hyperventilating and stammering, barreled forward with submachine guns locked at his sides. Sparks flashed from the weapons in epileptic fury as he squeezed their triggers and refused to let go. He poured round after round after round into the puddle, causing it no visible damage but endangering the lives of everyone in the tunnel. The unsettling sound of out-of-control automatic machine-gun fire and ricocheting bullets echoed through the shaft until the weapons’ clips clicked empty and their barrels stopped spitting.
“Drop them,” Anju said. She had the muzzle of her pistol pressed flat against the back of her employer’s head. Dr. Werniewski didn’t appear to be listening. His mouth hung open, and he said nothing. After a moment, his arms dropped to his sides. The guns fell from his hands. He rocked on his feet and might have toppled, had Anju not been there to support him.
“A little help,” she said as she struggled to hold up the doctor’s deadweight. Jordan rushed to her aid.
A little help might be nice over here, too. Dante grumbled. No one seemed to want to get close, and he supposed he couldn’t blame them. He set fire to the nearby puddle that had endured the barrage of bullets. Cursing his bad luck, he yanked his foot free of his ensnared boot with such ferocity that he lost his balance and fell backward onto his buttocks. He let himself rock backward so his feet wouldn’t splash down in the puddle. Instead, they hovered. He pulled them in close, tucked his heels against his buttocks, and thanked God for the eight inches or so separating him from the puddle’s edge.
The surface of the liquid began to roll with waves, each one headed in Dante’s direction. He scooted backward and hosed the liquid monstrosity down with fire. He gritted and gnashed his teeth, grinning with rage as the puddle and his new boot burned.
“Regroup,” Belgrade said, huddling everyone together and gaining control of the situation. He traced the outline of the tunnel from where they’d come with fire three times over before saying anything more.
Everyone was standing and closing toward each other in the group – everyone except Dikembu. She was down on the dirt-and-rock floor, not moving.
Anju shifted Dr. Werniewski’s weight entirely onto Jordan and ran to Dikembu’s side. She crouched and reached out to the fallen guard—
“Don’t touch her!” Monty shouted, closing the gap between himself and the grad student in three long strides. “She may be infected.”
Anju examined Dikembu without touching. “There is a bullet hole or two in her bag, and her head is bleeding, but she does not appear to have been shot, no thanks to Dr. Werniewski.” She scowled at her boss, but the microbiologist had left them all for la-la land.
Anju continued her examination. “Her chest is rising and falling, so she is definitely alive. She is not seizing or mutating or blistering or doing anything else symptomatic of infection.”
“Not yet,” Dante muttered.
Dikembu moaned. Her fingers felt along the unforgiving floor like a blind person’s reading a face. Slowly, strength seemed to return to them. She placed her hands flat against the ground and pushed herself up to her knees then staggered drunkenly to her feet. “Spinning,” she mumbled. “Stop fucking spinning.”
Anju stepped back. Everyone watched Dikembu closely, waiting to see what she would do next.
Wincing, she pressed her dirty palms into her eyes, trying to clear them. “My fucking head,” she said, her words coming out a bit more clearly. She groaned as her fingers found the large gash, which could only have come from a collision with the wall or floor, too random and ugly to have been a graze from an errant bullet. She must have dived out of the way when Dr. Werniewski opened fire.
“It feels like the rebel shitbags back home are playing football with my head,” she said, her feet looking more solid beneath her.
“You are lucky to be alive,” Anju said. “At least one bullet just missed you. It tore a nice hole through your backpack, though.”
“My backpack?” The words seemed to mystify Dikembu, as if they had some important meaning to her she just couldn’t remember. Then her eyes jolted open, and all haziness left them. “My backpack!”
She tore her bag off her shoulders and pulled it in front of her. Like a dog digging up a bone, she ripped open the pack and shoveled through it with both hands. “The samples,” she whispered, barely audible. “No, no, no, no!”
She looked up from her bag but made eye contact with no one. Like Dr. Werniewski, Dikembu was in her own world then. But something suspicious was going on in her world, and Dante was watching closely to find out what.
Dikembu pulled her right hand from her backpack. She raised her thumb and index finger in front of her eyes and rubbed them together. “The samples…” she muttered absently.
“Samples?” Dante asked. A realization hit him like a slap to the face. He frowned. “Your hair and name are different, but you were included in my intel. You’re working for the Ugandans, aren’t you? Son of a bitch!” He raised his flamethrower.
Dikembu didn’t even seem to notice the weapon pointed at her. “The samples,” she said again, as if she hadn’t heard him, though she spoke directly to Dante. “They’re broken. My hand….” She held it out to him, palm up, displaying it for all to see.
Dante couldn’t see anything on it, but he knew what had been there. He knew what was inside her.
Dikembu bit down into her lip. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been infected.”
“Good,” Dante said. He lit her up like a Roman candle before she could even start to seize. Her screams of agony filled the tunnel. The others watched him, some with cold eyes, but no one tried to stop him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Clara paused and glanced at her companion. At least Alfonse was pretending not to notice her hopping, skipping, dancing, and jumping down the corridor. She didn’t mean to seem so, well, happy. The use of her legs had kind of made her happy. She wanted to test her limits, to see just how much healthier she really was, not to make her travel partner think she’d gone completely insane.
Maybe she had. People were turning into monsters all around her, and she was prancing around like a coked-up monkey. The world is a crazy place, my dear.
Clara had been a fairly decent long jumper at university, not quite athletic enough to compete at a national level, but good enough to clear a few sandbo
xes. She leaped forward without exerting much effort and covered an Olympian’s distance. She could have sworn her hair grazed the ten-foot ceiling. All the harder jobs, like checking around corners and remaining vigilant, went to Alfonse DiGregorio.
She paused a moment from her frolicking and stared at his back. Alfonse DiGregorio, Alfonse the astrobiologist, Alfonse the saint. That last distinction was a well-deserved suffix to his surname, unlike its placement in her own.
St. Pierre. Humph. She snorted. What good have you ever done for anyone other than yourself? Even worse, while everyone around her was experiencing loss – of friends, of loved ones, of their own minds – she couldn’t understand why she’d been the only one to gain. She wore her newfound health with mixed joy and disdain, like a favored scarf half eaten by moths.
She brushed a bang out of her eye, sniffled, then stood up straight. It’s not my fault. None of this is my fault. She was going to have to keep telling herself that if she ever expected to believe it.
“The hub is ahead, just beyond those doors.” Alfonse pointed toward two glass doors fitted with mechanical locks across their top, middle, and bottom.
“Right there, huh?” Clara peered down the corridor. “It looks simple enough. Are you sure you can get this moon buggy of yours flying once we get inside?”
“Mars rover,” Alfonse said flatly. “And yes, I’m sure.”
“Tomayto, tomahto,” she said, quickly dismissing the correction. Her thoughts were already past those double doors, into the hub, as she tried to foresee what kind of monsters awaited them there or lurked behind the corners or within the crevices between those doors and where they stood. She wondered what sorts of demons were crouching in the shadows.
But she saw only a few corners to hide behind and fewer shadows to lurk in. They strode down thirty meters of hallway toward the south entrance to the hub, cautious, always on guard, but without apparent cause. Their journey from the radiology lab to the hub had been delightfully free of things wanting to kill them. The ease of the trip made her more cautious, more suspicious. She tiptoed toward the double doors, expecting a trap.
When they reached the doors without incident, Alfonse shrugged. They looked at each other and turned to face a quiet, empty corridor.
He slapped his thighs. “I guess that’s it, then.” His shoulders noticeably relaxed and he let out a breath.
Clara wasn’t ready to let her guard down. She acted as lookout while Alfonse swiped his card through the reader. A red light flashed green. One by one, starting at the top, the rectangular locks split in half, and the resulting squares slid horizontally away from each other.
Once the locks stopped moving and nothing prevented Clara from opening the doors, she reached for the handle but saw none. She heard a sound similar to that of a hydraulic pump releasing. The doors slowly swung open. Though she could see clearly through the doors that nothing was lying in wait on the other side, Clara pressed her back flat against the corridor wall in case anyone inside might be watching. Alfonse hugged the opposite wall, flexing his fingers. Neither had a weapon, and Clara lacked any combat training. She doubted that mattered though, since hand-to-hand fighting skills were useless against something one couldn’t touch.
But she could touch it. She had touched it. More accurately, it had touched her. And as confounding and bittersweet as this apparent contradiction was becoming, she didn’t question what perhaps she should have been questioning all along – whether she truly was healed.
For the first time Clara could ever recall such a thought, she wished she had a weapon. A grenade launcher came to mind even though she knew little more about grenade launchers than the fact that they launched grenades. She didn’t even know what one looked like. But again, it launched grenades, and that had to count for something.
As soon as she stepped around the open door, she saw them: people, not mutated but not quite right, either. Alfonse saw them, too. He put out a hand, signaling her to stay back, the brave, defenseless fool raising his other hand and making a fist, ready to take on the enemy with strength and wits alone.
Doing so, Clara decided, would be proof positive he didn’t have much of the latter. But she didn’t stop him as he crept inside, her own body arresting her at the threshold, unable to do much of anything. Alfonse moved farther into the hub.
With unfocused determination, Clara managed to move one foot through the entrance. The glass doors behind her swung closed, and their weight pushed her into the room, where other people stood waiting…or doing whatever they were doing.
What the hell are they doing?
Around the helipad, seemingly stationed at random, stood three relatively human-looking humans, two males and a female. If Alfonse knew who they were, he didn’t say. Instead, he kept his distance, watching their every move – a simple task, since no one was moving.
The doors clicked, locking Clara in with the statue people. She studied the closest of the infected, as she assumed they must have been, and immediately looked for signs of aggression. The female stood only ten or twelve meters away. Clara didn’t recognize her. She was a short-haired, sharp-angled woman in her early forties who stood motionless except for a gentle, almost unperceivable sway. She wore a lab coat as did so many others at the center, but Clara couldn’t begin to guess whose team she’d been with. She supposed that no longer mattered.
Why isn’t she attacking? Is it because I’m already infected? She sneaked a glance at Alfonse. If so, why isn’t she attacking him?
For a moment, she allowed herself to stroll down that line of thought. If Molli was intelligent, and she knew it was, then maybe it had infected Alfonse and was playing coy in order to escape. That makes no sense. She tensed, angry at herself for doubting and showing such secret but altogether unwarranted ingratitude toward a man who had risked much to carry her to safety.
He’s normal – talking normal, acting normal, being normal – not like Sergei Kobozev. And even if he is infected, Molli would have all the knowledge it needs to escape, from him and the others it’s taken over, assuming it can retain the knowledge of its host, which an infected Alfonse would prove. It wouldn’t need me. I’m deadweight. Unless…unless it wants me for something else.
“Stupid,” she muttered aloud then remembered her audience, covering her mouth with her hand to try to push the sound back in.
The woman didn’t move, and Clara allowed her shoulders to retreat from her neck. The human statue stood in an awkward pose, as if about to take a step when her joints had locked up, in need of oil like the Tin Man from that ridiculous, oft-parodied musical. The stance would have been impossible for any normal person to hold for more than a few minutes. The control Molli had over each of its hosts was complete and, to Clara’s dismay, impressive.
The woman’s eyes were blank sheets, save for tiny purple ventricles reaching like branches across a white-cloud sky. The irises and pupils had either rolled back in the sockets or had been wiped clean from the eyeball. Her skin showed signs of blisters and boils, having miraculously already scarred over, but it, her hair, and her clothing had assumed an ashen color. She appeared as if she’d been coated with lime or flash-incinerated so thoroughly her body had yet to realize it was nothing but flakes of ash to be blown apart by the slightest breeze.
Though she had no pupils, the woman still seemed to be staring in Clara’s direction. She made no sign that she even knew that uninfected, or at least uncooperative, individuals were present.
“What can we do?” Clara whispered.
Alfonse had no answer. He was a few steps ahead of Clara. He looked left then right and apparently found what he’d been looking for because he crept to his right, toward what looked like a toolbox set beside some sort of drill assembly. He lingered on the corner of her peripheral vision, but she dared not take her eyes off the enemy, particularly if Alfonse had.
The woman’s eyes did not follow him
, remaining on Clara. Or, at least Clara felt as much, finding it difficult to tell by staring at those pupil-less sheets. They didn’t so much as twitch. If they could see, they would have been able to see Clara. The fact that the woman wasn’t attacking resigned her to the fact that, at the very least, the woman paid her no attention.
For now. She glanced past the women at two men, similarly frozen, watching them for any sign of deception.
A sharp, unnatural cold stung her neck. She whipped around, her hands out in front of her, but saw nothing besides the double doors they’d come through and the empty corridor beyond.
But it isn’t empty, is it? Not quite.
She stepped toward it, peering closer at the glass as it began to fog up. No, not the glass. The air itself was condensing on the opposite side. It was taking the shape of a man.
The ghost of someone she’d seen before.
Sebastian.
Clara glanced back at Alfonse and checked again on the stiffs while she was at it. Alfonse was pulling a very large wrench from the toolbox. It came free with a clink, the noise causing him and Clara to cringe and momentarily freeze. None of the three ash-statue people reacted. Alfonse smiled sheepishly and crept toward the woman with the wrench firmly in his grip. The woman didn’t move. Both seemed oblivious to the condensation man on the other side of the glass.
Clara said a silent prayer, thanking God that Alfonse hadn’t seen the apparition behind her. When she turned to face it again, the air that composed the Sebastian replica had transformed straight from gas to solid, skipping the liquid stage. He’d become a blue-white sculpture of glacial ice.
Or permafrost.
The Sebastian-thing didn’t look evil. His eyes, full of sorrow, stared at Clara through the glass.
Slowly, he raised his hand to the glass. Clara instinctively mimicked the action. Their hands inches apart, separated only by a single pane, the ice Sebastian smiled. He gave a slow, methodic wave.