Juggernaut

by Adam Baker

  Slow pan. I surveyed the suit head to toe. Ignatiev took still photographs from every angle.

  ‘Who was this man?’ I asked.

  ‘Hard to be sure. We have background information concerning a group of young men that passed through Soviet flight school in the eighties. I think he might be Vasily Konstantin. Born in Riga. Joined the air force. Trained at Akhtubinsk. Test pilot, second class. Seconded to the Yuri Gagarin cosmonaut school, Star City. He was part of the civilian space programme for a while, then dropped off the map. Declared dead three years later. No details. “Deceased” stamped on the cover of his personnel file. He was post-humously awarded Hero of the Russian Federation.’

  ‘Do you think he had a family?’

  ‘I imagine his parents buried a coffin full of rocks. They’ve been laying flowers on an empty grave, while Konstantin slowly orbited the Earth. Let’s get him out of his suit.’

  Ignatiev unscrewed retaining bolts and unlatched the gauntlet lock-ring.

  ‘My God,’ said Hassim, as the glove slid clear.

  I’m not a religious man, but I murmured a prayer.

  ‘Bismillah ar rahman ar rahim.’

  Mummified fingers. Strange metallic ropes and tendrils woven into flesh.

  ‘Film it,’ said Ignatiev. ‘Film it all.’

  I held the video camera while they cut the cosmonaut free. They sliced through the canvas oversuit with trauma shears. They couldn’t release the helmet lock-ring, so they cut through neck fabric and lifted the helmet clear.

  ‘In the name of God the merciful,’ muttered Hassim.

  ‘Keep filming.’

  An emaciated skull. Dried skin taut like leather. Sharp metal spines bristled from his mouth, his eyes.

  Ignatiev pushed me aside. He leaned forward and examined the spines.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked. ‘What in God’s name happened to him?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  ‘But your people created this monstrosity. The Soviet military.’

  ‘You assume this is the work of man.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  Ignatiev didn’t reply. He took more pictures.

  Hassim and Ignatiev continued to strip the astronaut. They cut away the temperature regulated undersuit. Stretch fabric webbed with heating pipes.

  They peeled away electrodes planted on the cosmonaut’s chest and abdomen to monitor bio-function.

  Hassim held the cosmonaut’s head while Ignatiev peeled away the grey communications skull-cap with forceps. A scalp rippled and knotted with tumorous metallic growths.

  Hassim winced. He pulled off the outer glove of his suit and examined his forefinger. A smear of blood beneath blue Nitrile rubber.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Ignatiev.

  ‘Nothing. I’m all right. I just pricked my finger.’

  Ignatiev opened a plastic case. He loaded a vial of liquid into an injector gun.

  ‘Show me your hand.’

  Hassim held out his hand. Ignatiev gripped his wrist, twisted his arm and locked him in a half-nelson.

  He fired the hypodermic through the bicep of the Hassim’s bio-suit.

  Hassim pulled himself away. He clutched his arm.

  ‘What did you do?’ he asked, looking at the spent injector gun in Ignatiev’s hand.

  He stumbled and fell to his knees.

  ‘You bastard.’

  He toppled face forward onto the polythene floor and passed out.

  Ignatiev pulled off the technician’s hood and checked his pupils for dilation.

  ‘Let’s get him in quarantine. Get him out of this suit. Rig some restraints. I want multiple cameras. Regular biopsies. Minute-by-minute analysis.’

  ‘He’s got some kind of infection?’ I asked. ‘We have antibiotics. Antivirals. We should set up an intravenous drip.’

  ‘Koell showed you pictures of the installation drifting in deep space?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is breaking up. Piece by piece. Spektr isn’t the first chunk of debris to fall to Earth. The station is locked in a slow-decaying polar orbit. Fragments have re-entered the atmosphere over Mongolia, Latvia, Greenland. I visited a crash site myself. China, near the border with Kyrgyzstan. A four-day journey. I made the last sixty miles on horseback. The villagers showed me pictures. A spherical object, big as a van, burned black by the heat of re-entry. It fell one night like a shooting star. Dug a fifty-foot crater in a rice paddy. The crash was quickly followed by the outbreak of a strange and terrible disease. By the time I arrived at the impact site with my team, there was nothing left to see. The local militia had incinerated the infected bodies. They had pushed the module down the shaft of an abandoned coal mine and used dynamite to bury it beneath a cascade of rubble.

  ‘But now we have Spektr. This is our chance to observe the pathology of this illness first-hand.’

  ‘Will Hassim die? Can he be saved?’

  ‘There is nothing I can do for him.’

  ‘He’s my friend. He’s a good man.’

  ‘The virus is already replicating in his bloodstream, attacking sheath-fibres in his brain and spinal column. The process is irreversible.’

  ‘Dear God.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But he’s not your friend any more. He is Test Subject Number One.’

  Battalion

  Huang wandered through the temple precincts, gun in hand, looking for a good place to die.

  The moon was eclipsed by cloud. The night wind brought a rising sandstorm. He took a Maglite from his pocket and switched full-beam.

  Movement up ahead. One of Jabril’s undead legion sliding along a temple wall. Spines and tumours erupting from rotting flesh. The mutant creature ignored Huang and kept walking.

  I’m not a target, thought Huang. They know I’m infected. They know I’m one of them. Must be the smell. They sniff out fresh meat. I have taken on their signature stench of disease and death.

  He found shelter. Some kind of subsidiary chapel built against the high perimeter wall. The little chamber was intact. The walls and roof had withstood squalling desert cyclones for countless aeons.

  His flashlight lit a small dais with a scorpion chiselled on the front. An altar dedicated to a minor god.

  He reclined on the step. He switched off his torch and sat in darkness. He listened to the mournful whisper of the breeze outside.

  Huang always knew he would die young. A gut conviction, ever since he was a kid. He carried a tarot deck in his backpack. Each time he shuffled, he drew the death card.

  He always pictured a soldier’s homecoming. Sent back to Greenville, Michigan, in a coffin. Unloaded from a C-17 Globemaster, folded flag and dress-blue photograph on the lid. White-gloved reservists firing a blank fusillade as his casket got lowered into the ground.

  He held the Glock. He stroked the rough polymer grip with his thumb. His whole life – boyhood, adolescence, college and army years – concluding in this godforsaken necropolis, miles from home. His body would not be discovered for decades, possibly centuries. Nothing but a pile of dried bones picked over by men from some science-fiction future, so augmented by cybernetics and gene manipulation they were no longer homo-sapien. They would see rotted teeth plugged with amalgam, an old break in his leg crudely pinned with titanium screws. They would think him impossibly primitive, some kind of troglodyte.

  Or maybe his body would never be discovered. His bones would crumble to dust. He would merge with the desert. Meld with an ocean of silica.

  He arched his back. Sudden indescribable pain as if his spine were white-hot metal. The disease, the strange parasite boring into his central nervous system.

  He crouched on all fours in the dark. He ran his hands over the flagstones, trying to find his flashlight, trying to find his gun. He sobbed. He wept blood. He shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts.

  ‘My name is . . . My name is . . .’

  He couldn’t remember his name. Mind slipping away.

  A last, rando
m memory:

  The sweet smell of cut grass.

  Huang crawled towards the chamber doorway. He hauled himself to his feet. Scudding cloud. Brief moonlight.

  The thing that used to be Huang roared into the rising storm.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ asked Voss. He stood at the temple entrance, staring into swirling sand.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sounded like a scream.’

  ‘Man or a woman?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  Lucy pressed transmit.

  ‘Mandy? Mandy, can you hear me?’

  No response.

  ‘I heard something a couple of minutes ago,’ said Voss. ‘Over the comms. Sounded like her voice. I couldn’t make out words. The signal was breaking up. Might be atmospherics.’

  Flickering light. The remaining arcs were dying. Softening to an amber glow as the batteries ran dry.

  ‘What about the gold?’ asked Voss.

  ‘Hide it, I guess.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Let’s ask Jabril.’

  Lucy crouched next to the extinct campfire.

  ‘Hey. Jabril. You know a lot about this place. Where should we hide the gold?’

  ‘Just leave. Forget the gold. Take all the water you can carry and walk out of this valley. Right now.’

  ‘Two of my boys died today. I won’t let it be for nothing.’

  Jabril sighed.

  ‘There’s a crypt beneath this temple. A deep catacomb.’

  ‘Where’s the entrance?’

  ‘There are steps out there, among the ruins.’

  ‘I don’t want to head outside with those fucks running around.’

  ‘I heard a rumour there was a second entrance. Here, in the temple.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘A slab by the altar. I’m not sure which one.’

  Lucy and Voss walked across the vast hall to the altar. Lucy crouched and brushed sand from granite flagstones. One of the slabs had been etched with astrological symbols. Constellations. Planet and stars.

  Lucy stood and stamped her boot. Hollow thud.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Voss.

  ‘Maybe Jabril is right,’ she said. ‘We should just grab our shit and go.’

  ‘I’m not leaving the gold,’ said Voss. ‘It’s ours. We earned it. We stash it and come back with fresh choppers. We don’t leave it out in the open so the next fuck that wanders through this valley can fill his pockets.’

  They fetched a tyre iron from the truck.

  They crouched. They hammered the crowbar between flagstones and levered the granite slab from its bed. They strained to push the slab aside. Grind of heavy stone.

  Lucy shone her barrel light into the dark aperture. Ancient steps descended into subterranean darkness.

  A vaulted catacomb. Grotesque hieroglyphs. Pillars and archways.

  ‘Doubt anyone will go looking down there, among the bones.’

  Voss carried a box of gold from the armoured truck. He set it down on the flagstones and flipped the lid. He pawed through the jewellery. He selected a gold signet ring and twisted it on to his finger.

  He held out a silver watch. The face was ringed with diamonds.

  ‘Rolex.’

  Lucy shook her head.

  ‘I don’t want a souvenir. I just want to get out of this fucking hell-hole.’

  Voss clipped the watch to her wrist.

  ‘We might as well get something out of the trip, right?’

  Footfalls. Something scrambling up the crypt steps.

  Lucy stood over the crypt entrance and trained her barrel light down into the subterranean gloom.

  Amanda, dazzled, shielding her eyes from the beam.

  ‘Mandy. You okay?’

  Amanda scrambled clear of the crypt. She dropped to her knees and tried to slide the heavy lid across to seal the crypt entrance.

  ‘Help me, for God’s sake.’

  Lucy glimpsed a jostling crowd of rotted soldiers crawling from the dark recesses of the crypt. Grasping, stumbling gangrenous things dragging themselves up the steps. Charred, ragged uniforms. Bloody, dirt-caked hands. Slavering moans and death-rattle hisses.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

  Voss joined Amanda as she struggled to shift the flagstone slab and plug the crypt entrance.

  Lucy switched full auto and emptied a clip down into the advancing army. She swept the assault rifle left and right. Stuttering muzzle flash. Chests ripped open. Shattered ribs. Torn flesh and burning uniforms.

  The mummified battalion continued to advance.

  Lucy ejected the magazine and slapped a fresh clip into her rifle. She cranked the charging handle. Disciplined fire. Snarling faces shattered by green-tip penetrator rounds. Brain-burst exit wounds. Stink of gunsmoke and burned hair.

  She threw down her weapon and joined Amanda and Voss as they struggled to push the heavy flagstone lid back in place.

  Jabril kicked at the ashes of the campfire. The noose round his neck pulled taut as he stretched out his leg.

  He pushed aside charcoal fragments of ammo crates. Something clinked. Something metal. A scorched bullet case. An empty 5.56mm cartridge. He snagged it with the heel of his boot. He raked it, clinking and clattering across the flagstones, towards him.

  Jabril’s left arm was twisted behind his back and bound to his belt by a plastic tuff-tie. The stump of his right arm hung free.

  He pawed at the cartridge with the stump of his forearm and pushed the brass shell case behind his back. He picked it up with his left hand, and used the crimped neck of the cartridge to saw at the vinyl cuff. The serrated brass began to scratch and score plastic.

  A distant clatter. He looked towards the temple entrance. The rotted figure of a Republican Guard clumsily stepped over the quad bike. It stumbled and fell to the temple floor. The ghoul looked up, saw Jabril and slowly leered.

  The granite lid rasped across the flagstones and settled over the crypt aperture with a dull thud.

  They could hear the muffled slap and scratch of hands scrabbling at the flagstone lid from below.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Lucy. ‘How many of those fuckers are down there?’

  ‘They can’t lift that thing, can they?’ asked Voss.

  The lid trembled and shifted.

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  Lucy and Amanda threw themselves onto the slab and held it down. It began to rise, despite their combined bodyweight.

  ‘Get me something to pin this damn thing,’ shouted Lucy.

  Voss looked around. He grabbed boxes of gold stacked beside the truck and piled them onto the slab.

  Lucy drew her pistol, reached around the slab and fired blind down into the crypt. She shot the magazine dry.

  More boxes. Accumulating weight slowly forced the slab downward. A snarling, squirming skull-face crushed flat. Bone-crackle and pulped brain. Fingers sliced through. The lid settled in place.

  A distant shout from Jabril:

  ‘Over here.’

  Three Republic Guards lumbered towards Jabril as he lay bound and helpless. He kicked the dead campfire, scattered charred sticks in a feeble attempt to trip the shambling creatures.

  Amanda dropped to one knee and shouldered her rifle.

  Gunshot. A soldier reeled like he took a blow to the face. He fell forward, a smoking void in the back of his head.

  She worked the bolt.

  Gunshot. Second soldier shot through his open mouth. He choked and toppled backwards into the extinct campfire.

  Voss fired his shotgun. The blast slammed into the third soldier’s belly like a heavy gut punch and sent him skidding across the flagstone floor.

  Voss walked towards the prone soldier. He racked the shotgun slide. He spat tobacco.

  The soldier struggled to sit up. Entrails slid from his belly wound in gelatinous knots. Voss shot him in the face.

  Lucy flicked open her knife and cut Jabril free.

  ‘No more fucking around,’ she said. ‘It’s time we got the hell out o
f here.’

  The creature that used to be Huang prowled through the desolate precincts of the necropolis. He couldn’t see the main temple building, but he could smell it up ahead. Heartbeats like an earth tremor. Lucy and her crew. Their blood, sweat and fear.

  He stumbled through rubble-strewn courtyards. He scrambled across tumbled masonry. Skin torn by jagged stone. Bleeding hands, bleeding knees. He felt no pain. He was drawn inexorably towards the sweet scent of fresh meat.

  Jabril’s battalion. They squirmed from every dark doorway and crevice like agitated ants pouring from a nest. Clawing hands and snapping skeletal faces. They emerged from shadows into the swirling dust storm.

  Huang walked alongside infected soldiers. Tattered uniforms. Taut, cankerous flesh. Brief moonlight revealed the stumbling, shambling horde as they groped through the megalithic ruins towards the temple entrance. A wraith army.

  Distant gunfire.

  He crossed a pillared avenue.

  The sudden whine and slap of bullets hitting granite. Tracer rounds streaked out of the dust storm. Soldiers toppled and fell dead.

  Huang grabbed the soldier next to him. He used him as a shield. Shotgun hits like sledgehammer blows.

  Huang threw the smouldering, headless body aside, and took cover behind a pillar. He pressed his face against the stone. Residual instinct. Conditioned response. A faint memory of Ranger school summoned by a crippled, cockroach brain.

  Soldiers cut down around him. Clean headshots. Shattered skulls.

  Bodies toppled and slumped.

  Huang crept closer to the temple entrance. A slithering, belly crawl. He could see light shafting from the interior. A weak glow through swirling dust.

  Silhouettes. Three figures crouched behind a quad bike.

  Steady gunfire. Bodies littered the causeway in front of the temple entrance, lay sprawled at the feet of the great stone colossi that flanked the doorway. Uniforms shot to smouldering rags. Bloody exit wounds.

  Huang inched closer. One of the figures wore a hat. A big straw Stetson. A girl. The faint echo of emotion, an unrequited yearning.

  More gunfire. Soldiers span and fell. Dumb, lumbering targets. No pain. No fear. Limbs shot away. Skulls smashed. No screams. Just the grunt of impact, the gurgling sigh of a dying breath.