by Maxey, Phil
They arrived at floor two, the numbers increasing the deeper they moved. She briefly moved near the membrane-covered door and kept on going.
“Agh!” screamed Luci, jumping back and into Sanchez.
He swung around. “What?”
“The wall! Or whatever the hell this stuff is. There was an eye! Like it was full of them!” She fumbled the straps on her backpack open, pulling out one of the bricks then held it towards what she had just seen. “Look what I got! Yeah you watch! See what happens when all of this goes—” She flinched, pivoting as Scott placed his hand on her shoulder.
“Luci…”
She sighed. “I know… it’s cool. I’m cool… we’re here for the kid…”
“Yeah… We got this. Let’s keep going.”
Jess had seen what Luci had. It was as if the entire complex had become a living organism. Perhaps the creatures above ground were the same, just extensions of an insane mind. Perhaps that would mean—
A wave of skin and tissue bulged out, engulfing Sanchez, his arms and legs flailing but instantly losing the fight as it sucked him back, slamming him into the wall.
Scott and Luci grabbed his hands, pulling with what strength they had as new strands continued to grow across his arms.
“Get it… off.. me!” he shouted, straining every muscle he had to pull himself free before a blanket of oily liquid smothered him and he found himself falling forward as the gasoline burned the organic material and his skin alike. He jumped away from the wall, or as far as he could get being in such a confined space, then wiped his face. He looked up at Jess, her face illuminated by Scott and Luci’s flashlight. “Thank you.”
She looked at them both. Hold your arms out. They both knew the reason and quickly did so as she poured the remainder of her container over them.
“Same for you,” said Scott, unscrewing the lid on his and poured some over her.
“The dryer it gets the less effective it will be,” she said. They all looked at what was left in Scott’s jug, which was half full.
Luci walked to the top of the new set of stairs. “Let’s find your kid.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
3: 41 p.m. Town of Newgrove.
Landon looked through the dark, smoked window of the bank, across the intersection to the train freight cars, which spanned his entire view. He was in a large office area, just beyond the lobby and five others sat on desks and chairs around him.
“Track goes all the way down to New Mexico to the south and Texas the other way,” said Owen.
“The engine working?”
“Sure is.”
“Going to be useful after tomorrow,” said an elderly man, introduced to Landon as Dale.
A gray-blonde, middle-aged woman scoffed. “If those things have gone.”
“Well there are none around here anymore,” continued the old man. “That’s a good sign.”
“You all from this town?” said Landon to whoever would answer.
“Some,” said Owen. “Others been drifting in since the plague started.”
“You’re in charge?” Landon had been sizing up the stout, fifty-something since he first set eyes on him, and nothing about the older man’s demeanor gave him any caution. But still, he watched his actions and listened to every word. He wasn’t about to hang around another cult leader.
“I am,” said Owen. “Have a cattle ranch just outside of town. I don’t pay much attention to the city news but then these… things appeared, started killing the stock. Then…” He sighed. Landon had seen the same reaction on many a face over the past few days. “Then people started to change… until it was just me and few others in the town, left.”
A younger man, seated a bit further back looked at Landon. “You say you’re from Denver?”
“Originally, yeah.”
“Me too. Were there many with you?”
“My family...” Landon knew he had made a mistake. But the words had already left his lips. Now he just needed a good explanation as to how it was possible four members of the same family were immune. He didn’t need his wife’s mind for maths to know the chances of that were remote. He decided to go with honesty. “There was a vaccine…”
Owen wasn’t the only one that shifted in his chair. “Vaccine?” said Owen. “So you don’t change?”
Landon nodded. “Yup, and no I don’t have any. I wish I did… my wife is currently in Denver trying to get more.”
“Why aren’t you with her?” said Dale.
Landon held up his now dark blue hand. “I wanted to. But she’s with another group. We arranged for me and the other two to head south, find somewhere to wait.”
“You got any feeling in that?” said Owen.
Landon shook his head.
“Then I reckon it’s time you met Doc Barker.”
“So she’s coming here with the vaccine?” said the woman.
“That’s the plan if they can get to it, but we all just need to get through the next twenty-four hours and we won’t need it anyway.”
The room fell quiet. Landon knew what he’d just said had holes in it, but he wasn’t about to be completely honest as to why Jess was in the city. That could come later. After the six-days period was up and his family were back together.
Owen smiled. “Well, we appreciate the supplies. You’re welcome to wait here until this situation is over.”
*****
3: 51 p.m. Biochron complex.
Jess thought she was used to the stench which the virus created material released into the air, but as she moved off of the last step to level six, even she held her breath. She stood for a moment, trying to dredge up memories of the layout, sliding her beam across the wall, stalks, tendrils and other shapes she had no explanation for, all of which shrunk as the light moved over them then quickly grew again in the dark. At any other time and any other place, what she saw about her would have been the subject of decades of study, but in that moment she felt nothing other than rage for what her family had been put through.
The layers which covered everything were thicker here, making the space she and the three others could move within even smaller.
She looked at the door she had escaped from days before.
“She in there?” said Scott, trying to stifle a cough.
She wasn’t sure. There had been no more visions, or whatever they were. When she saw Sam on the ground floor and no one else had, she concluded the stress of the situation was making her hallucinate. But as they descended she wondered if maybe there was something else happening within her mind. It had been altered by the virus, that much was obvious and so had Sam’s. She also knew the creatures could communicate beyond their five senses. Could she and her daughter do the same? Was Sam trying to reach out to her?
That meant Sam was still alive, the only possibility Jess would allow herself to believe, even though deep down, somewhere dark and numb she also knew her daughter might no longer be breathing.
He needs her alive…
Another fact she didn’t understand, but knew to be true. Rackham wanted Sam for some awful reason. But whatever it was, it would have kept her alive. Jess just prayed as she turned to descend to the lowest level of the underground complex, that it was still the case. That somewhere below was Sam, waiting to be rescued. She would also deal with Rackham, once and for all. The man that had ended most life for some reason that didn’t matter. She nudged the pack on her back, feeling the weight of what it contained.
“I got a real bad feeling about this,” said Luci, her voice slightly distorting as the sound waves struggled through the thick air.
As they came around the second to last landing, Sanchez swung his light downwards to the lowest floor in this hell. “What’s that?” he said. A feint blue glow lit the constant flow of patterns permeating the ever changing walls and floor.
Jess slowly descended. “Bioluminesence. Whatever is on these walls, is creating its own light…”
“Like jellyfish…” said Luci.
“Yes…”
Jess stepped off the last step and looked at the door.
“Er… I just realized something,” said Scott, waving his weapon from one strange protrusion to another. “Where are the monsters?”
The same thought had occurred to Jess many floors up, but the answer she kept to herself, until now… “We’re looking at them. They’re all around us…”
Luci wasn’t the only one whose eyes grew large, her weapon and head flicking from side to side, wall to wall. Jess though was only focused in one direction. The vague shape of a door, a few feet in front of them. She took a step forward.
“Hey, wait, we need to use the—”
The blue-green tendons and skin pulled back, slithering to the frame, leaving perfectly clean steel. They all looked at her.
“Did you do that?” said Scott.
“I told you, he knows we’re here.” She walked the remaining few feet and pushed down the handle. She had seen a few painted scenes of hell in her time, sometimes up close in galleries from the medieval minds, but none of them came close to what the confined area through the doorway contained. Hands and other human and animal appendages formed and dissolved across the walls, floor and ceiling as if she were looking into the mind of Mother Nature herself.
Luci backed up. “Nah uh… I’m sorry, Jess, but this is as far as I go. It’s suicide going in there.”
Scott looked at Sanchez for support but he also took a step back. The soldier shook his head, looking back to Jess and what lay beyond the open door. “Just me and you then.” He stepped to her side. “Let’s get this done.”
“We’ll be here,” said Sanchez.
Luci looked at the ever changing walls. “Yeah…”
Jess walked forward into the room, instantly feeling the warmer air. As she did the few inches of pulsating tissue on the floor ahead, split apart, leaving just the tiles, hardly stained.
“Just when this couldn’t get any freakier,” said Scott, making sure to stand in the same empty area as the woman in front of him. “So er… Rackham is controlling all of—” The threshold he had just passed, closed then tendrils and strands, reached across the door’s surface, until that way of escape was gone. They both turned back to the end of the room, where another door had appeared.
“So we—”
Jess walked forward.
“— Okay, we go where he wants us to then.”
Jess could feel the fear of the man behind her, not just from his voice but also his increased heart rate and sweat. Her heart though remained steady, as resolute as her mind in its goal.
The new door opened by itself and they moved through it to the largest room they had seen so far, despite whatever covered most of it. Some corners and tops of desks peeked from gaps in the moist membrane and computer screens somehow still functioned across the walls. There were no other doors though, or if there were, they were being hidden from the two human imposters for now.
“So glad—”
Scott almost jumped in the air, his weapon being raised at Rackham’s voice which was echoing across the room from hundreds of human mouths which formed and instantly dissolved in the surrounding walls and every other possible surface. Several expletives came from his mouth, but Jess only had attention for what was forming in front of her.
“— You could join us, Mrs. Keller...” Fingers… then hand, wrist, forearm, followed by stomach, groin, hips, chest all grew from bone, then sinew, nerves, muscles and finally skin until a naked Charles Rackham stood fifteen-feet away. His facial scar had gone. His appearance as fresh as if he had just been created, which he had.
“Where’s my daughter?”
Rackham smiled, lifting a hand away from his body. Organic substance stretched up from the floor, covering his fingers then arms and the rest of his body until he was clothed in a kind of smooth, silky black material.
She removed the pack from her back, unlatched the flap then reached in. Her fingers finding the first of the explosives, and pushed open the plastic covering of one of the switches.
“You think, what you have in your bag will be sufficient to put an end to me? After all you have seen?”
“I’m going to ask one more time. Where is—”
He frowned, turning with a sigh. “Yes. Your offspring. I was hoping you would be more cooperative after how all of this is because of you. And your lineage.”
Jess could feel Scott looking at her, but didn’t care. How everything came about was something that would matter to historians in ten years’ time. Her finger felt the cold metal of the switch. “Give me my—”
A door sat at the end of the room, which wasn’t there a moment before. It slowly opened. The space behind was better lit than the room they were in and was less threatening in appearance. The substance which smothered every inch of where they were, was largely absent. From the equipment she could tell it was some kind of lab but what was at the end of it was nothing she had seen before outside of Saturday night movies. Large capsules filled with a green liquid. It somehow made sense considering what she had walked through to get there.
Rackham gestured towards the doorway. “Go. See for yourself how useful she has been…”
Jess looked at him, his smirk chilling her heart. She ran forward, through the doorway then stopped, looking for Sam, but she was nowhere to be seen. She spun around. “Wh…” The doorway had been removed, replaced with membrane. Was this the plan all along? Trap her in hell forever? Torment—
A clank came from behind making her quickly turn again. “Sam?” she said to an empty room, just the flickering light from computer screens giving any indication of life. She took a few steps further into the area then heard it. It was faint, but it was real. A heart beat. She scoured the walls, walking quickly forward to look behind gurneys, desks and large pipes which fed the room all the time trying to locate the repeating tremor which was growing louder the deeper she moved.
Her head flicked towards the nearest of the huge vials. The sound was coming from within the liquid, she was sure of it and took a step forward as a shape began to take form within the swirling green substance…
Thin bones emerged, skeletal fingers scratching the inside of the curved glass. No thoughts moved through Jess’s brain as she watched the hand become a wrist, containing pink-red tendons then an arm which contained a patchwork of skin. Something was alive within the world inside the chamber, a thing which should have been dead. As the figure grew more defined the heart beat grew stronger and with it came an image of death. The body inside the capsule was more bone than flesh, but somehow it was animated. Across its face which exposed skull was a breathing apparatus, not that Jess understood how…
A thought came to her, something so obscene it took the strength from her legs and she collapsed to the floor as a cackling laughter emanated around the room. The thing behind the glass tapped and tapped and tears flowed from her mother’s eyes.
“As you can see, your child has been most useful. Her essence will be used to fuel my own children. To stop them from—”
It was just a moments thought, but it was enough for Jess to act on. As Rackham detailed why Sam was inside the acidic green prison, Jess grabbed one of the remaining office chairs and with a swipe, smashed it into the ten-foot glass sheet which shattered instantly. A wave of green liquid surged from the jagged hole, spilling across the floor, but what remained of Sam, hung, suspended from the top of the chamber by chains. Jess jumped up, ripping the metal links apart and embraced her daughter, bringing her to the ground, and laying her on the green glutinous surface.
The surrounding walls were changing, but Jess didn’t care as she caressed the strands of black hair hanging from the side of her child’s head. “Don’t try to talk… I’m here… I’m never leaving…” She gently pulled the plastic mouthpiece from Sam’s damaged face, as the teen’s eyes flickered, her mouth opening and closing but no words and hardly any breath emerged. Jess took what remained of her daughter’s hand i
n her own. “You sleep now. I love you. We all love you.” The fingers of her other hand slid across the other devices in her bag and rested on the switch to the explosive.
A rasping sound came from Sam’s exposed vocal chords. Jess leaned in closer.
“J….oooshhh….”
Jess leaned back slightly. “Josh? Josh is fine… Don’t worry. He’s far from he—” Her daughter’s face contained an expression of concern, her lips moved again. Jess got close again. “Gone… ffffooo…. Jossh…”
The blanket of grief lifted somewhat, replaced with shock and the familiar bubbling rage which she entered the room with. “Someone’s gone after Josh?” Sam’s head tilted slowly up and down. Was there less skull apparent? Jess cleared the tears from her eyes, then realized the bony protrusions in her hand felt different. She released her light grip and examined what were now exposed muscles. No bones to be seen. A spark of hope ignited within her. She had no idea how it was possible, but she had seen it already in herself and with the boy. Sam’s body was regenerating… Cells dividing, tissue growing, blood vessels doing their job once again. Her hand was now fully formed, her head mostly covered in hair, the holes across her torso, gone, replaced with pink patches of skin.
Sam coughed. “They’re… going.” The words came out as a low growl. She coughed and tried again. “Going after Josh!”
Jess pulled her jacket off and quickly placed it around Sam, her daughter placing her almost normal looking arms into the sleeves.
“Did you really think—”
Jess’s head flicked up to Rackham standing at the entrance to the room.
“— I would let such a useful specimen, perish? I was merely draining her, but I would have allowed her to regenerate so I could repeat the process.”