The Apocalypse Strain

by Jason Parent

  Well, maybe not much better. Still, she had no plan. She had no plan, not even the beginnings of an idea pertaining to one. Come on, girl. You are smart, so think!

  Anju missed her family. She missed her little girl, Safia. She missed home.

  She had always been a good person, kind and patient, never uttering a harsh word to anyone. She genuinely cared for people, regardless of their race, creed, nationality, gender, and all that other nonsense people used to make other people feel inferior. But she was being made to feel inferior, subjugated by a force that would eliminate the characteristics that made people individuals by mixing them altogether into one homogeneous mass of…of shit!

  “You are shit, you hear me! You are nothing but shit!” Anju was not particularly proud of her insult, but the spark of rebellion did make her feel a little better, and it helped her to think just a little more clearly.

  It opened the floodgates, letting in wave after wave of self-pity. She did not deserve this hell that God, or karma, or whatever force had set before her. What have I done to warrant this torture? Am I being punished for leaving Safia home where she is warm and safe? I do this for Safia.

  That was it, the reason that had brought her to the research center, her reason to carry on: Safia. Anju had put herself through course after course and project after project to better herself and, in turn, make a better life for both her and her child. At that moment, she would have given anything to be back home with her little girl. She would wrap Safia up in her arms, blot her head with tears and kisses, and squeeze her tightly for as long as her daughter would let her. “I should never have left you, Safia.”

  She wiped her eyes, having found her reason to be strong, to keep on going. “I hope I get to see you again.”

  As if a guardian angel had heard her wish, she saw something up ahead that seemed too good to be true. A hatch cover had been removed from the floor. She remembered that guard, Belgrade, saying that there were other tunnels, other ways out. She wondered if it was wise to allow herself to hope that she was approaching one of them.

  It does look like someone else tried to escape through the tunnels. Maybe they made it out.

  Her heart continued to thump faster than a techno dance beat, but the discomfort in her chest diminished. She raced to the cover, crouched over the opening, and peered down into the hole. She saw nothing below except the black oblivion of darkness.

  She patted her coat for the flashlight she had taken from the armory. It was gone. “Shit!” She realized she must have dropped it and did not waste time trying to figure out where. It was gone, and that was that.

  She stood but continued staring into the tunnel below. She had a decision to make: run around aimlessly in the light until she found the hub or the purple people eaters found her, or brave the tunnel that, she knew, would lead to a way out that might or might not have been blocked.

  When she couched her dilemma in those terms, her decision seemed easy. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then crawled into the hole.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Facility purification will commence in sixty minutes,” the English gentleman computer voice announced over the intercom.

  Oh, shut up, Dante thought as his feet pounded across the floor. Even a man in his tip-top shape couldn’t keep up forever the way he was going. He doubted he would live sixty more minutes. He would consider himself lucky to live another six. The research center’s self-destruction was the least of his worries.

  Belgrade ran beside him, his company a small comfort. The Russian was doing a fine job of slowing down infected with his assault rifle and staying out of the way of Dante’s flame-throwing. Human flesh and hair went up like fireworks at Carnevale di Venezia. It stank with that acrid nastiness that only burning hair smelled like. Still, the mutant freaks kept coming.

  Dante skidded to a halt. He blasted both ways down the hall.

  “We have to keep moving,” Belgrade said. “It’s our only chance. There’s way too many—”

  “I have an idea,” Dante said. “Actually, it was your idea. Let’s pray it works better than that last guy’s did.” He pulled out the two smoke grenades Belgrade had stuffed into his pockets and pulled the pins on both. He tossed them down the hall, one in each direction, then covered his mouth and nose with his shirt. Belgrade lowered his mask and goggles.

  A pair of newly formed conjoined twins stopped short as the canister bounced their way, spewing gray smoke that quickly filled the hallway. The twins turned and ran off in the opposite direction, no longer interested in joining Dante and Belgrade to their brood. The other critters coming up behind the pair did the same. Much like those outside the radiology lab, they fled from the gas even though it didn’t seem to harm them.

  Dante coughed and wheezed. His lungs burned, and his eyes watered. As his cough became a hoarse hacking, he kneeled in search of fresher air near the ground. Belgrade crouched beside him, took a deep breath, ripped off his mask and goggles, and handed them to Dante.

  Dante put them on and slowly began to recover. A minute passed, and Belgrade was still holding his breath. He seemed unaffected by the smoke, which had begun to disperse.

  “That trick will only work once,” Dante said between coughs. “I only had the two smoke grenades. Do you want to press forward or try to duck into one of these rooms and wait until the hallways clear a bit…if they clear a bit?”

  Belgrade pulled a clip from his belt and switched it with the empty cartridge in his rifle. The new clip clicked into place. “I say we keep moving.”

  Dante smiled, though his Russian pal couldn’t see it. He stood and saluted the guard. “It’s been an honor, comrade.”

  Belgrade saluted him back. “The honor has been mine.”

  “All right. Enough sappy shit. Let’s move.”

  A moment later, they were running full speed down the corridor. Dante’s lungs were on fire, burning from smoke inhalation and exertion. His eyes no longer burned, but the goggles were fogging up except where his sweat trickled down them. Visibility was bad enough with the smoke that lingered and the tears it produced. He tore off the goggles and let them fall behind him.

  His sight slowly improved, but he still nearly ran straight into the biggest creature of them all.

  He tried to stop his momentum by shifting his feet sideways, much like a skier would to turn. He fell into a slide, his knuckles ringing off the hard floor, jarring his weapon loose. His momentum carried him within a few meters of a gigantic amalgamation of flesh, blood, organs, and bone, with no rhyme or reason to its makeup. A bulbous, blistering, purple-veined garbage heap of human stew, composed of easily more than a hundred people, clogged the hallway like fat in an artery. All of the creatures the smoke had chased up that way had joined the mass. Anything that made its component parts human was gone.

  The way the blob pulsated and throbbed, everywhere bursting with party-balloon-sized blisters, oozing and spattering the walls and ceiling with pus, blood, and bile, was enough to make Dante want to retch. Its smell, worse than of an infected pimple wafted directly into his nose and finished the job.

  He turned onto his stomach and threw up, partly on himself, as he scrambled to his feet and gathered up the nozzle. He was turning to shoot, Belgrade beckoning him back all the while, when something tripped him up. Whatever it was snapped him into the air and spun him. He crashed down onto his back, and the flamethrower’s tank broke his fall. He heard a crack and felt a stabbing pain in his chest. He prayed only a rib had broken.

  The impact sent him bouncing off the tank and continuing in the direction of the pull. The strap around his left arm slid down and off his flailing arms. The strap around his right caught in the crook of his elbow. The sprayer skidded across the floor somewhere behind him.

  The creature had him by the leg. He raised his head to look down at the fat, pulsating tentacle that had wrapped itself around his
ankle. It tightened and began to drag him toward the growing heap.

  Desperate to stop his motion, he dug his free heel into the floor, but all he had on was a sock that kept slipping. Finally, something caught.

  Or someone caught him. “I’ve got you,” Belgrade said. His hand vise-gripped Dante’s, but the tentacle continued to pull. Suddenly, Dante was free. The tentacle retracted with the boot and sock it had stolen from him. Belgrade helped him to his feet, and they both turned to run, Dante holding on to the strap of the flamethrower as it dragged behind him.

  He was almost around a bend when the mucous tentacle slithered around his ankle once more – his bare ankle.

  “Merda!”

  The tentacle snapped tight and yanked him down to the ground again. As he fell, he clung to the flamethrower’s strap as if it were his only lifeline. When he hit the floor, his wind escaped him. His grip on his weapon slipped. The strap slid across his fingers and was almost lost, when Dante caught it around his middle finger.

  “No!” Belgrade yelled.

  Dante knew the Russian would not be helping him this time. Belgrade must have known Dante had been infected, must have seen the tentacle touching his skin. Dante himself knew his fate even before he started to seize.

  His eyes rolled back in his sockets. The hallway, the blob, Belgrade, his many lost boots – all ceased to exist. He was no longer part of the human world, but he was not yet part of that thing’s world either.

  He didn’t know where he was, some dark plane of existence between reality and dream, conscious and subconscious. In it he saw night, emptiness, nothingness…and that astrobiologist, the one responsible for everything that had happened.

  Dick. Dante wanted to kill the bastard all over again.

  I’ve been waiting for someone like you, the dickhead said without moving his lips. Since no one else was there and Dante hadn’t said it, the words had obviously come from him.

  I’ve been waiting for someone who would listen, could listen, and could do something about it.

  “Where am I?”

  Somewhere you don’t want to stay. But you can end this. In your hands is the means to destroy her.

  “Who?”

  You know who, Dante. She is getting smarter. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? With the water, with Monty…. She’s learning how to hide, how to deceive. The astrobiologist chuckled. She’s becoming more like us, Dante. And she’ll do anything to get out.

  “I’m dying, aren’t I?” Dante was strangely at peace with the idea. “What can I do?”

  Destroy her, Dante, while you still can. Time moves slower here, but time is still short. You must be quick. You need to act before you’re trapped here completely and your will is snuffed out. Please, Dante! Feel what’s in your hand!

  “What’s in my hand?” Dante asked. His voice echoed through the darkness, loud and terrifying. In that dreamlike realm, he looked at his hands and saw them empty. He blinked then looked again.

  In his right hand, he saw a strap.

  Set us free, Dante, the astrobiologist said. Set us all free.

  And Dante was no longer alone with the astrobiologist. Beside him stood Romanov and Monty and that asshole doctor and a whole shitload of people Dante had never seen before. Each of them stared at him with hopeful eyes as if Dante could lead them out of that limbo and into the Promised Land.

  Dante had his own ass to worry about, and that was enough. He pulled the strap in his hand across his chest. A sharp pain ran through his shoulder as something jabbed into it. The tank! Reaching back with his left hand, he fumbled for the hose connecting the tank to the sprayer. When he found it, he tugged it toward him, closer and closer, until the sprayer knocked him in the head.

  He grabbed it, rested it on his chest, and jammed the nozzle beneath his chin. The astrobiologist smiled. Thank you.

  Dante closed his eyes. He pulled the trigger.

  Blue-orange light broke through the darkness around him.

  “Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel anything.” And he continued to not feel anything as his entire body was consumed by flames. He looked down to see the tentacle around his ankle ignite. And like a chain reaction, the fire leaped down the length of the tentacle, continuing past Dante’s realm of sight.

  The fires of hell await. Then his thoughts began to leave him.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Clara couldn’t hold Alfonse back. The man was simply too big and too strong.

  “Sebastian?” Alfonse’s voice quivered, sounding small and weak.

  “Take me with you,” Sebastian repeated.

  The voice sounded right, and the man looked right, but Clara had been there when that serpent creature had wriggled its way into the real Sebastian’s chest. She didn’t need years of scientific study to tell her that people didn’t just rebound from something like that in a matter of hours. They didn’t just get better.

  “That’s not him, Alfonse!” she shouted, hoping to startle some sense into him.

  “It is me.” Sebastian took a step closer.

  Clara raised her blowtorch, its nozzle glowing. “Stay back. I’m warning you….”

  “How can you be so sure it’s not him?” Alfonse asked. “You said so yourself, you’re infected. Yet you’re still you. Why can’t he still be him?”

  The logic was simplistic yet difficult to argue against. ‘Because I didn’t have a meter-long eel burrowing into my heart’ doesn’t seem like an answer that’ll convince him. Then again, Clara was staring into the eyes of a monster in disguise, one that could attack at any moment. She had no time for tact. Sebastian was getting closer. Fuck considerate.

  “I don’t think he’s anything like me, I’m sorry to say. You’re believing what you want to believe, willfully blinding yourself to the truth. The organism…it’s been manipulating our form all day. Is it so strange to think that it might try to manipulate our minds? It’s running out of food inside this petri dish. As horrifying as it sounds, I think its learning from us, maturing.”

  “That can’t be.” Alfonse whimpered. “Sebastian, it’s really you, isn’t it?”

  “I doubt there’s much I could say or do to convince you that that’s not Sebastian at this point beyond lighting him on fire and seeing what happens. Think, Alfonse. Would the real Sebastian need to ask us to take him with us?”

  “It’s me, Alfonse.” Sebastian stepped closer. He was smiling just a little too big to look warm and friendly.

  Before she knew it was happening, Alfonse snatched the blowtorch from her hands. She tried to steal it back, but he kept her at a distance with a meaty paw. “Get in the rover,” he told her, surprisingly calm. “I’ve got this.”

  “But—”

  “I know. Trust me.”

  “Take me with you.” Sebastian took another step closer.

  Clara stepped back. She circled to the far side of the rover and got in, leaving the closer seat for Alfonse’s easy access, should he ever choose to take it. From her seat, she could see the two members of the Mars excavation project squaring off. Please, Alfonse, just set him on fire and jump in.

  Alfonse’s massive frame was shaking. She couldn’t see his face, but by the way his body was moving, she guessed he was sobbing. He slid to his right, positioning himself directly between Sebastian and the rover.

  “You’re not him,” he said. “I know. Sebastian never used my full name.”

  The Sebastian-thing stopped smiling. It lunged forward with inhuman speed, too fast for Alfonse to react effectively. Caught off guard, Alfonse didn’t use the blowtorch to ignite the monster. Instead he swung it with all his might at its head. The torch connected with the top of Sebastian’s forehead and continued through it as though it had the consistency of pudding. Alfonse’s wrist followed. When he tried to pull away, the pudding flesh solidified around his arm.

  “Fu
ck me,” Alfonse cursed, trying to tear his arm free. After a moment’s resistance, he pulled out his arm with a slurp, ripping off much of Sebastian’s face with it. His forearm was slick with blood and speckled with tiny mounds of purple cauliflower, which bore holes into his skin and continued up his arm underneath its cover.

  Clara covered her mouth to stifle her screams. She had no weapon, no way of helping poor Alfonse now that the weapon she’d chosen for herself was covered in the biological slush of the infected.

  Alfonse was nothing if not strong. He shot her a glance and smiled, trying to comfort her even while his own life was ending. He ran over to a computer and typed madly. The rover thrummed and vibrated beneath her.

  The Sebastian clone’s head wound closed. Its face reconstructed, no longer Sebastian’s but that of….

  Clara gasped. The creature turned toward her and snarled. She stared into the wild-mad eyes of her father.

  “You wouldn’t burn your father, would you, Clarabelle?” It grinned and raised a hand toward her. “Not again, would you?”

  Before it could attack her, Alfonse charged. Whatever the spell the creature had over its shape fell away, and the form of Sebastian returned. Alfonse punched his phony partner in the chest and watched his fist come out the other side. He raised his arm and the Sebastian-thing with it, moving as quickly as he could, undoubtedly realizing his time was short.

  “Hit the thruster as soon as we’re behind you!” He flung himself, and the creature with him, toward the back of the rover. “Now!” he shouted, circling the final wheel. He collapsed over the back of the Herald. As he started to seize, he latched on to the top of what resembled a very large cone turned on its side.

  “Thrusters…” Clara muttered, not knowing exactly what Alfonse had in mind. She looked everywhere before finding the clearly marked lever right beside her hand, where a stick shift would’ve been in a more conventional vehicle. She pushed the lever forward.

  An explosion of gas and fire shot from the cone and incinerated Alfonse and his attached parasite. It also set much of the hub behind her on fire. For a long while, Clara sat frozen in shock, her mind trying to grasp exactly what she’d done. She had killed a man. Part of her had to have known that would happen. She had to know that thrusters meant the expulsion of rocket fuel, that anyone caught in that expulsion….