by Alex Scarrow
Lewis really couldn’t see it. Looking around, this island off the north coast of mainland Cuba was several hundred square miles of stinking marsh that would be better served as a landfill or a cesspit. But clearly, more imaginative people than him had seen the potential in this place. They’d put money into it and appeared to have gotten things started.
“Nuked them?” said Jorge. “You shit me!”
Lewis nodded. “That’s what the boys are saying back in the barracks. Something like a dozen warheads were launched this morning, taking out viral concentrations in the Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti. It’s part of the president’s fightback.”
Jorge made a face. “Your president thinks he can do this?”
Lewis shrugged. “Why not? If we’ve got the weapons, why not use the damn things? These virals can burn just as easily as firewood. So, if we have to, we’ll take this world back scorched mile by scorched mile.”
“Kings of a scorched kingdom?”
Lewis could see Jorge was needling him. “Well, buddy, you gotta start somewhere. Baby steps, man.”
He turned to look back at the other three. They were sitting beneath a green tarp erected as a sun shelter and throwing dice onto a garbage can lid. The clattering sound was irritating as hell, and he wondered what they were using for betting chips, since neither Cuban nor American dollars had any value or purpose now. Cigarettes, probably.
Jorge nudged his arm. “Lewis?”
He turned back around to see him pointing out toward the sea. “You see that?”
His finger was pointing toward an ochre bloom of shallow water and coral reefs.
“What is it?”
Jorge leaned closer, so Lewis could sight down the length of his outstretched arm. “There! Right there!”
Lewis narrowed his eyes as he tried to make sense of what Jorge was pointing at. He could see the crests of waves breaking over a coral head. That was all.
“What? I see waves, dude.”
“It is moving!”
Lewis studied the oddly colored patch of sea again. The gentle southerly waves were breaking over a hump of coral that he guessed was only half a yard or so below the water. So far, so normal. Pretty, actually. But…
Shit.
It was moving.
The faint beige discoloration in the water was growing more distinct, and it was definitely slowly advancing toward them. No doubt about it, that “coral head” was on the move.
For a moment, he imagined it might be some gnarly old parasite-covered whale that had decided to find a way through the corals and beach itself on the shingle right in front of them. It continued its gradual advance toward them and finally broke the surface.
“Shit! What the hell is that!”
Instinctively, he reached for his assault rifle. Jorge called out to his compatriots.
It surged forward. Lewis could see it was the front end of something long—very long.
“¡Dios mio!” cried Jorge.
The other Cuban soldiers were on their feet now, scrambling for their guns.
“Crap!” shouted Lewis.
It was surging up onto the beach before them; its front seemed to be bulging out, expanding, the encrusted old surface crackling and flaking as it did so.
“¡Válgame Dios!”
It finally slowed down and then stopped halfway up the beach, twenty feet from them, like some creature too exhausted to pull itself any farther out of the sea. Its front continued to contort and expand, flakes of darkened scab-like material dropping away and revealing a lighter, pink, and raw-looking substance beneath it.
The other three soldiers joined them. All five of them pointed their guns at this squirming kraken, none of them knowing whether it made sense to open fire on it or not.
“The virus,” hissed Jorge. “It is here!”
Without warning, the front of the beast suddenly tore open: three pink flaps of skin folded back on themselves to reveal the dark, ribbed, glistening walls of some giant throat. From way back down inside, he caught the gleam of something—some things—scrambling toward the light.
“Oh crap.”
The glimmers of reflection became a clearer impression of form as the things inside surged forward and finally emerged from the ragged mouth into the evening sunlight: pale crustaceans, like spider crabs, long-limbed, small-bodied, pale shellac shells like mother-of-pearl and—good God!—they were huge.
All five men started firing a volley at the exact same moment. The first few creatures exploded, ejecting shards of shell and strings of mucus. But behind them were dozens more.
No, hundreds more.
Lewis’s finger was locked down on the trigger until his M16 clattered uselessly, the clip empty. He fumbled in his webbing for more ammo, muscle memory guiding him as he ejected the exhausted clip, flipped around the new one, and slapped it into the base of his gun.
Just as he started firing, the Cuban soldiers’ steady fire began to falter as they ran out of bullets. Lewis turned his fire from a constant panicked spray into short, targeted bursts at the nearest creatures. Their bodies erupted in a satisfying way; if this had been a computer game, he’d have been raving about it.
The first to finish reloading was Jorge. Like Lewis, he was firing short and aimed disciplined bursts now, conserving what ammo he had.
The creatures’ bodies were beginning to stack up on the sand just beyond the mouth, becoming an obstacle that was tangling with them and slowing them down. But then the creatures began to wise up and fan out, spreading around the tangle of weeping limbs and broken shells left and right.
Ah, shit. We’re getting flanked.
“BACK UP!” he shouted. “BACK UP! BACKUP! BACKUPBACKUP!”
His order came too late to make much of a difference. One of the creatures leaped forward from the side, landing on the left-most Cuban. Lewis was vaguely aware of the man going down, the sounds of his screaming, the sound of ripping material, then flesh, then bones cracking.
Screw tactics now. He realized they were beyond army training and down to simple survival: run or die.
One more clip. Again, by finger touch and muscle memory, he found it in his webbing and slapped it firmly into his gun. “Jorge! I’m running!” he shouted.
“I’m out of ammo!”
“Then for God’s sake, go. Go. Go. Go!”
Jorge backed up, out of his view. Just then, another of the Cubans to his right went down, the man and the creature rolling across the sand in a wrestler’s embrace, his two arms outnumbered by far too many appendages to keep him from being gutted from the groin upward.
Lewis fired four and five round bursts to his left, then to his right, until finally the gun rattled uselessly in his hands.
He hurled it at the nearest of them, then turned and ran across the concrete parking lot toward the M3 half-track parked by the canvas awning. He allowed himself a glimmer of hope that he would be faster across firm ground than these spindly nightmare things behind him and that, once he got to the vehicle, Jorge would already have the half-track fired up and belching clouds of diesel exhaust.
Lewis’s hopes were short-lived.
He felt his feet whipped out from beneath him as something long swiped the ground behind him. He tumbled forward, landing face-first. A moment later, something dropped heavily onto his back, knocking the wind out of him. He could hear skittering, clicking sounds right next to his ear.
“Screw you!” he snarled between gritted teeth as he gathered himself and pushed up to try to get his legs under his body again.
He managed only one more step forward before feeling something close quickly and firmly around his neck. Rough against his skin. It felt sharp, like the blades of a large pair of scissors. It hesitated a moment…
And then…
Snip.
Chapter 43
Outsiders are a threat.
The message propagated quickly, spreading from one artery to another, the synaptic links of a brain lighting up like a Christmas tree. Its journey began at the cauterized end of the giant umbilical that snaked its way across miles of ocean to northwest Africa. It traveled at the speed of chemistry, which is to say faster than the speed of cellular migration. Within eight hours, it had reached the shores of a place that had been called Algeria before. There, the message followed numerous paths: northward, across the Strait of Gibraltar into Europe; eastward along the Mediterranean coast of Africa; south, into the beating heart of the continent.
The counterreaction by Them was simply to protect the billions of innocent human lives shrunk down to fit into Their almost-infinite biological universe. There was no knowing yet how many complete conscious entities had been incinerated in the three nuclear blasts, not to mention how many Earth species might just have been lost from Their consolidated memory, the residual trace memories of species from ancient worlds.
They had followed mission instructions and permitted the native intelligent species to come together and decide the fate of those stubborn few of them left behind. That decision had been difficult and contentious—not to absorb them by force, but to convince them to join.
The detonation of three nuclear warheads had changed things. They were taking matters into their own hands. They now had no choice but to follow their encoded mission orders. Safety first.
Preservation was essential.
The reaction was immediate in the wake of the mass incineration of life. The other umbilical cords that had grown ahead of the island, running along the seafloor and sloping upward as the waters warmed, surged forward toward the source of the threat.
Within a few hours of the apocalyptic blasts, those cords farthest forward had extended their reach and broken the surface. Inside, within their brittle, salt-resistant walls, unthinking automatons in their tens of thousands were hurriedly being fabricated from biomass. In many cases, their shells would still be as soft as shoe leather as they emerged into the outside world, hordes of glistening newborns programmed with very simple instructions now—not to scout for resources, not to map the lay of the land, not to detect further sources of carbohydrate fuel.
They were simply instructed to kill.
That same reactive instruction spread throughout the global network. They could only do what was best for the mission now; the majority-data was important, the minority-data represented a threat; a binary switch was unequivocally flipped and would remain so until this job was done.
Then—and only then—would They return to their role as knowing and benign chaperones.
Chapter 44
Leon hurried down the road toward their parked truck, his flashlight picking out the way ahead through the mist. He carefully stepped over the shriveled veins of several abandoned viral threads, an all-too-serious game of Don’t Step on the Cracks. To his eyes, they looked like the roots and limbs of plants left to die and fossilize in a dusty old greenhouse. However, they might still contain enough of a thread of life within to alert the virus to their presence if he clumsily stepped on one.
The truck was right there, where they’d left it weeks ago: two wheels up on the curb, two on the road. He paused, waiting for the others to catch up as they cautiously picked their way forward in his wake. Before he got too close, he ducked down and shone his flashlight at the dark space beneath the vehicle.
That’s where they’d be hiding.
If they were lying in wait, that is.
Adewale came to a halt beside him. “Can you see any of them under there?”
There’d be glimmers of reflection of their shells if they were, like fragments of broken glass. “No. I think we’re good.”
He made his way forward again, flashlight aimed down at the road, picking out the thin, black, snaking lines, looking very much like random saving stones. A few more yards of careful steps and he finally reached the truck. He walked around to the back of it, steadied himself with a one, two, three, then quickly lifted aside the green canvas awning.
His flashlight picked out nothing but the supplies they’d left in the back.
He let out a puff of air, and Adewale, beside him, hissed an edgy breath out of his nose. “It is like a game of dice.”
The others were now joining them around the truck. “Does it still work?” asked Kim.
“Don’t know,” said Leon. “I hope so.”
“Let’s just get in and get going!” hissed Cora.
Leon nodded. He was surprised at how easy it had been to get to the vehicle, but the virals had to be out there in the swirling, gray mist, somewhere nearby, waiting for the right moment to catch them off guard and swarm them.
“Come on, everyone,” urged Cora. “Get in! Get in!”
He watched Finley, Kim, and Howard climb up, Adewale holding out one of his big hands to help them. Cora clambered up into the cabin on the driver’s side and Leon was just about to pull himself up when he saw the silhouette of a lone figure picking its way down the bridge road toward them.
“Hold on a sec!” he called to Cora before she could turn the engine on.
Leon wondered if it might be Peter or Dereck. One of the old men might have had a change of heart.
He hurried forward, holding a hand back at Cora to indicate he wanted her to wait.
“Hello? That you, Peter?”
The figure stepped nimbly over a thick root. Clearly not an old man, by the way he moved. Leon snapped on his flashlight and shone it at the figure.
“Hey, Leon.”
Jake.
Jake stopped dead in his tracks.
Leon ran his flashlight beam up and down him. “Jake…is that you? I mean, really you?”
“Yeah, Leon, it’s me.” He stopped where he was, just ten feet away. Close enough to talk without shouting but still a wary distance between them. “But I’m not going to try and tell you I’m virus free, because I’m not. Yeah, I’m infected.”
“OK.” They stared in silence at each other for a moment. “You know we can’t take you with us?”
“Duh.” Jake smiled. “I’m not here trying to catch a lift.”
“You’re a fool,” said Leon. “You didn’t have to do it.”
“You sound really pissed off with me.”
“I am. I…we needed you.”
“I’m so glad I did it. I see what Camille means now.”
Glad? The word made hairs on Leon’s neck stir.
“Leon, there really is nowhere to go, mate. Nowhere.”
“That’s up to us to find out.”
“Something happened. I’m not sure what, but now They feel threatened by you. Time’s up. Time to join us or…”
“Or what?”
Jake shrugged. “What do you think?” He turned to look back over his shoulder at the bridge and the community beyond. “It’s all going down over there. You obviously guessed we were coming tonight. The virus will try its best to preserve as many of you as it can. If you don’t fight, if you don’t run…”
“Is that what you’re asking us to do? Lie down and let ourselves get infected?”
“Infected. It’s a shit word for how this feels. And I know it looks horrific. I know! It’s not an easy thing to ask. But…can you trust me, Leon? Can you just hear me out?”
“No way.” Leon backed up a step. “There’s no way I’m dying that way.”
“It’s not death, Leon. It’s life.”
Leon pointed at the dried-out network of lines crisscrossing the road. “That’s not life. The creatures, those roots…that’s not any kind of goddamn life!”
“Those things are, like…they’re just the infrastructure. But what’s inside is life. Life 2.0. It’s the future of life.” Jake closed the distance by several steps.
“Jake…” Leon backed up. “I told you…if you came back, there’s no way we could trust you.”
“Leon, please! Just listen to me for a second. This is a new beginning!”
“You sound like that girl Camille. Except she wasn’t a girl, was she? She was a viral impostor.”
“She was—is a ‘girl.’ So am I. I’m human still. I’m Jacob Sutherland. But I’m a lot more than that now.”
“Leon!” Cora called out across the dark. “Get back here! WE GOTTA GO!”
“Time’s up, mate. This really is the last chance.” Jake took another step forward. “After this, if you run, They’re going to hunt you down.”
“That’s what the virus has been doing since the beginning. Hunting us.”
“No, Leon. There’s a difference. Getting infected is getting invited, absorbed. That’s the important part. But getting hunted down by these stupid-ass crabs means you’re gonna end up as meat chunks. Dead. That’s it, mate. Biomass material, bits and pieces to be used to make more of them.”
“We’re running, and we’ll fight for as long as we can.”
Jake nodded his head slowly. “I was really hoping I could convince you…but I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m just going to do it.” Jake turned to his side as if he were whistling for a dog. Immediately they appeared, clambering over the sides of the bridge. Through the handrails. Crabs, big ones—monsters designed to move quickly and kill efficiently.
Shit. They must have been hiding right underneath the bridge.
Jake stepped forward and held his hand out. “Take my hand!”
“Screw you!” Leon backed up.
“Take my hand, mate! Please!” He glanced at the creatures pulling themselves over the railing onto the road. “Those crabs don’t do invites. They just kill!”
Leon stared at Jake’s hand, just a yard or so away from him, fingers outstretched, desperately beckoning him.
