The Earth Transformed - Ghost Book I

by Mike Stackpole

  Vargas nodded. “Unfortunately, there was a fight here too, and Finster got ahold of him.”

  “Right” said Angie. “But the clone got away. He was half dead, but he was free, so he went back to Sleeper One to make another copy of himself….”

  “And he died while he was waiting for the second clone to come out of the oven,” I said. “Which is where I found him when I woke up, on the floor outside the cloning chamber.”

  Hell Razor laughed. “Gotta hand it to you for tenacity, brother. Seriously.”

  I laughed too, then the laughter drained away, and all I could see was the brutalized face of the man who had traveled across half of Arizona with his head caved in to try to save the man on the metal tray in front of me, who had died by vivisection and lost a chance at a life of love and laughter with the woman who was dripping tears on his battered leather jacket.

  “Looks like I’m going to be the first guy in the world to take revenge on the guy that killed him — twice.”

  Vargas cleared his throat. “You got a whole village out there wants this guy. And they got a lot more bodies to avenge than you do.”

  “Well, they can get in line.”

  Angie raised a hand. “Hey. We can fight over who gets to kill him later. We still gotta find him first. Now let’s go.”

  ***

  As soon as we exited the dissection lab, an elevator door opened up on the far wall of the corridor we were in. We all stopped and pointed our weapons at it, but it was empty and the door remained open.

  Kate cocked her head. “Does that look like an invitation to you?”

  “Or a death trap,” growled Vargas.

  Nobody was moving.

  I sighed and stepped forward. “Fine, fine. Let the clone do it. He’s the only one with death experience on his resume.”

  “Ghost, wait.”

  I looked back. Angie was giving me a weird look.

  “What?” I asked. “I’m expendable. You said so yourself.”

  “But you’re not. Not anymore. You’re the last one of you left.”

  I stopped and turned around. “Wait. So now that you know the “original” me is dead, you’re going to change your mind about “now” me?”

  She chewed her lip. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Ace was about as happy about that as you’d expect. I didn’t blame him.

  “Listen, Angie,” I said. “I can see you’re having trouble making up your mind, so I’ll do it for you. I’m gonna get on the elevator and go see what’s what. If I come back, you can play eenie–meenie–mynie–mo with me and Ace to your heart’s content. If I don’t, I… I wish you all the best. I really—”

  “Nobody’s getting on that elevator,” said Vargas. “We’d be like sheep walking into a slaughterhouse, and the rangers don’t breed no sheep. Not even cloned ones.” He motioned us on down the corridor. “Now come on. We’ll find another way, and for fuck’s sake keep the goddamn soap opera to yourselves. Some of us have sensitive stomachs.”

  ***

  After following the corridor around a few more corners and searching a few more spotless and shiny rooms, we entered a room unlike any of the others. For one thing, it had a slanted ceiling like in the attic of a house with a pitched roof. For another thing, it was dirty. There was a fine layer of grit on the floor, the exposed steel beams of that slanted ceiling were spotted with rust, and the whole place smelled like raw, freshly–turned earth. There were also pipes and valves running under the beams, lockers, and benches along the walls, and machines that might have been air–conditioners or heaters cluttering up the floor. Strangest of all there was a door in the slanted ceiling — a heavy, air–lock–looking beast with steps leading up to it. The dirt on the floor was thickest under it.

  “So,” said Angie, drawing in the dirt with her toe, “does it go outside?”

  “Let’s find out,” said Hell Razor, and pushed a button near the door.

  “Guns up!” barked Vargas.

  We aimed our guns at the door and it began to groan and hiss like a waking monster. Finally, with a gasp of escaping pressure, a seal broke and it raised up and split in the middle to swing wide open onto what did indeed appear to be the night–time sky.

  My first thought was, “It was mid–afternoon when we entered the facility. Have we really been down here that long?” My second thought was, “Holy fucking hell, I’m choking to death!”

  All around me the others were choking and retching just like I was. It was like there wasn’t enough air, and at the same time like there was too much of something else, something sharp and stinging. It smelled like cat piss and hot rocks. My eyes teared up.

  “Close the door!” Vargas shouted. “Close the fucking door!”

  Hell Razor jammed his finger down on the button again, but nothing happened. The door didn’t even groan.

  “Fuck! Back into the hall! Quick!”

  Thrasher led the way, slamming into the hall door with a heavy shoulder. It didn’t budge. He tried the door handle. Nothing. It just rattled uselessly.

  With a grunt he stepped back and kicked the lock with a sasquatch–sized boot. The door boomed like it had been hit with a mortar round, but it still didn’t move.

  “Here!” shouted Kate.

  We all looked around. She was at one of the lockers, holding a gas mask of some kind. She threw it to Vargas, then tore open another locker. The rest of us followed suit, charging over and pulling out masks in a panicked frenzy.

  I tugged one over my head, tightened the straps, and inhaled. It was like trying to breathe through a plastic bag, and the “not enough air” sensation hardly went away at all. Really the only difference was that that burning and the cat–piss smell was gone. Mostly.

  “What the fuck,” snarled Hell Razor. “Do these things even fucking work?”

  “I still can’t breathe,” said Athalia. “What is—?”

  A metallic voice interrupted her. It was coming from a speaker bolted to the ceiling beams. There was a camera next to it. “Welcome to the next world, volunteers. And thank you for participating. Please step through the slanted door to begin the test.”

  We all looked up.

  “Who the fuck is that?” said Hell Razor.

  “Finster?” called Angie. “Is that you?”

  Vargas stepped toward the camera. “Let us out of here, asswipe!”

  “The exit is beyond the slanted door,” said the metallic voice. “Find it and you are free.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted. “We’re all gonna choke to death before we get five feet!”

  “You will not,” said the voice. “The air you are breathing has considerably less oxygen than you are used to, but now that you are wearing the masks, the toxins that otherwise would have killed you have been filtered out. You may pass out if you exert yourselves too much, but you will not die. Not from lack of oxygen.”

  “So what is this?” asked Angie, sucking in a big breath. “We’re rats in some maze you made up, looking for the cheese?”

  “No no. Not at all. You’re not the rats.” A laugh came over the speakers. It sounded even more metallic than the voice. “You are the cheese.”

  Everybody looked at the open door all at the same time. Suddenly the darkness beyond seemed to be staring at us.

  “Indeed,” continued the voice. “It would make things more even if you were to keep moving, please. I have had such difficulty getting the parameters of this test balanced correctly. It has been frustrating.”

  The voice was right. We were bottled up in a dead end. There was no way out except the door ahead of us, and anything that blocked it could box us in easy as pie. We’d be fish in a barrel. Around me, the others were coming to the same conclusion.

  “Right,” said Vargas. “Out we go. Eyes in every direction, and stick together.”

  We formed up in a rough circle with Kate in the center and walked up the stairs and out the door into…

  I honestly couldn’t tell what i
t was at first. It looked like we had stepped out into a walled–in nature preserve on the night–time surface of another planet. The moon and stars glowed red above us in a purple sky while all around us were strange plants and stranger animal shapes slinking through the shadows cast by massive red rock outcroppings. There was also a high brick wall at the top of the hill behind us, and the door we had come out of was built into the side of that hill, which was actually a room with a slanted ceiling. Made me wonder if all the hills and outcroppings around us were fake too. And of course we couldn’t be outside, could we? The air outside wasn’t poisonous, and this was.

  Hell Razor didn’t like it. “What the fuck is this shit?”

  He raised his pistol and squeezed off three rounds straight up. High above us we heard the tinkling of glass and some of the stars went out. A few seconds later the glass rained down on us along with a dusting of plaster.

  “Well, that answers that question,” said Angie.

  “Not entirely,” said the metallic voice. Now it was coming from a nearby bush. “This facility was created in order to develop new breeds of humans, animals, and plants able to thrive on an earth where unforeseen circumstances had drastically changed the air and environment for the worse. It was one of a number of contingency plans for the continued survival of the human race enacted before the apocalypse.”

  Angie sneered. “Looks like the apocalypse beat you to the punch.”

  “There were some set–backs, yes,” said the bush, “but we’re back on track now. This artificial biome, for example, which I use to test how well various subjects survive in various conditions, is state of the art. With the twist of one knob I can change the chemical mixture of the air to simulate any number of different environmental parameters — nuclear winter, ozone depletion, global warming, rainforest die–off. With the twist of another knob I can change the radiation level from pre–war normal, to current levels, to instantly fatal. You’re getting a fairly elevated dose right now, by the way. Another reason you should continue looking for the exit.”

  “And have you had any actual success?” asked Kate. “Have you actually bred humans or animals that can thrive on an earth where the air and the environment have been drastically changed for the worse?”

  The bush sounded disappointed. “Progress with humans has been less than satisfactory, as you will see. We are such complex creatures. But with the lower orders, yes. We have had great success — particularly with our alpha predators.”

  As if on cue, somewhere out in the darkness, something howled.

  Vargas cursed and turned back to the hill with the square hole in it. The brick wall at the top ran into the darkness in either direction farther than the eye could see. The “sky” arced over the wall, giving it the illusion of going on forever, like a real sky would.

  “Alright,” he said, “Enough gabbing. We gotta find that door, pronto. First things first. We need to peek over that wall and see what’s on the other side. Ghost, Hell Razor, Ace, and Athalia — keep an eye out for whatever’s making that noise. Thrasher, give Kate a boost up to the top of that wall. Angie and I will help.”

  We trudged to the top of the hill and watched Thrasher’s back as he picked Kate up and put her on his shoulders as easy as putting on a hat. Even on her tip–toes however, she could barely see over the wall, and she couldn’t see much.

  “It’s too dark,” she said.

  Vargas handed a flashlight up to her and she shined it around then shook her head. “The ceiling just curves down to the floor about ten feet back from the wall. It’s all dusty in there, but I don’t see any door.”

  “Hmmf,” said Vargas. He grimaced. “Uh, how are you with heights, Kate?”

  “Um… fine, I guess. Why?”

  “Because I was thinkin’, the best way to find this door might be to have you walk along the top of that wall all the way around the perimeter.”

  “And what if she fell off on the other side?” asked Angie. “Be a hell of a sweat climbing over and getting her out again.”

  “Not to mention I might break my leg,” said Kate.

  “Yeah,” said Vargas. “That too. Hmmm.”

  Hell Razor dropped his pack on the ground and undid the buckle, then pulled out a neat bundle of rope and held it up. “How about we put a leash on her?”

  Vargas looked up to Kate. “You okay with that?”

  She gave a weak laugh. “As long as it doesn’t go around my neck.”

  Thrasher swung her down again and Hell Razor tied the rope around her waist, then Thrasher picked her back up, put her feet in his hands, and pressed her almost to the top of the wall. She clambered on and they started moving along the wall — Kate shining the flashlight down into the far side while Thrasher walked along on the ground beside her, holding the rope and looking for all the world like a giant kid with a Kate–shaped balloon.

  “Awww,” said Angie, “ain’t that sweet?”

  Thrasher just grunted and kept walking. We walked with him, moving in a semi–circle around him, looking out into the dark landscape with guns at the ready, waiting for whatever had howled. The anticipation was killing me.

  “Why aren’t they coming?”

  Angie gave me a sidelong glance. “You want them to come?”

  “I just want to get it over with.”

  Athalia snorted. “I just want it to never happen.”

  Angie grinned. “Amen, sister.”

  As we walked we were constantly jumping and swinging our guns around as little half–seen creatures rustled through the underbrush, but nothing big came at us.

  A little later, in a patch of fake moonlight I saw what looked like a squirrel, except that it was the size of a small dog and had a prehensile tail, hanging from a branch over a trickling stream and stretching its neck for a drink. Then a fish that looked like a brook trout except with the wide smile of a shark leapt up and bit the creature’s head off in one bite. Blood jetted from the severed neck as the tail slowly uncurled and the body plopped into the water.

  Angie shivered. “Isn’t nature wonderful?”

  “This is nature?” I asked.

  After a few minutes of following the wall down the line of fake hills and valleys, we came to a corner. It was so filled with weird plants and mutant cacti that Thrasher couldn’t stick close to the wall, so he paid out the rope in order to edge around the mess without pulling Kate off the wall.

  And that’s when the thing attacked.

  I’m gonna call it a Night Screamer because, well, it was night — or a reasonable facsimile thereof — when it attacked, and it screamed. Boy did it scream. It stumbled out of the scrub, flailing at Thrasher with something it held in both hands, and shrieking like a tea–kettle.

  Thrasher flinched. I mean, I don’t blame him. We all flinched. That fucker was loud! But Thrasher was holding the end of Kate’s rope, and you can guess what happened next. One twitch and she toppled off the wall, right into the cacti.

  “Fuck!”

  “Goddamn it!”

  “What is it?”

  “Kill it!”

  “Kate, are you all right?”

  Thrasher backhanded the thing as it pitter–patted him with weak hits, and it went down sobbing at his feet. I aimed at it with my pistol and got my first good look at it. I almost lost my lunch.

  It looked like something that had tried to be human, but then given up halfway. It had a basic human shape — hands, feet, arms, legs, but they were all twisted and scrawny, and covered in infected sores. Its head was a horror, a pulpy green mass with a mouth like a hole in a rotting pumpkin. But the worst thing was the weapon it had attacked Thrasher with. It was a raggedy little baby doll, and the Screamer was clutching it to its concave chest and weeping like it was four years old.

  I winced and eased up on the trigger. “Aw, hell. How do you kill something like that?”

  Athalia shot it through the forehead. “Think of it as mercy.”

  I blinked at her. “Man, you are pretty
damn cold for a servant of—”

  “Incoming!”

  We whipped around. Angie was firing into the darkness, and in the bursts of her muzzle flash, I saw shapes bounding towards us — long, low and lean, with narrow snouts full of yellow teeth and eyes that mirrored red.

  Hell Razor laughed as he blasted at them. “Wolves! Finally something I understand in this goddamn mad house!”

  But they weren’t wolves. Not quite. Our bullets just sparked off their hides — didn’t slow them down, didn’t even make them stumble. And as they got closer, we saw why. Their fur wasn’t fur. It was like porcupine quills made out of ten–penny nails. Bullets slid off ‘em like water off a thatched roof.

  “Jesus!” I choked. “We can’t hurt ‘em! Jesus!”

  Athalia proved me wrong by shooting one straight through the eye and dropping it like a sack of meat, but then the rest were on us and we were fighting for our lives.

  A big gray bastard put me flat on my back in the middle of the cacti, and I only kept its teeth from my neck by jamming my forearm against its windpipe and pushing back as hard as I could. Its jaws snapped shut an inch from my nose and its claws tore through my leathers and my shirt and ripped into my chest.

  Hissing with agony, I jammed my pistol into its flank with my free hand, pushing the nose of it through the porcupine spines until it touched flesh. “Shrug this off, you son–of–a–bitch!”

  The wolf yelped as the bullet smashed through its ribs. I sat up and drilled a second shot through its forehead as it flopped around on the ground.

  Around me, everything was chaos. Thrasher was caving in the skull of a wolf with the yard–long piece of two–inch rebar he called his billy club. Angie was shooting point blank at a wolf that had Ace on the ground. Athalia was standing over a dead wolf and kicking another in the chops. Vargas and Hell Razor were back to back, blasting away at three circling wolves and, believe it or not, laughing.