The rest of the troop followed, Lucy scurrying to keep up, anxious to stay close to her human ticket.
“Oh, and she killed Kerman’s gang,” added the major, calling back to Coleman, who nearly dropped his clipboard.
The corridor was long and uninviting, poorly lit by two inadequate emergency strip lights at each end. The cold air condensed on the colder concrete interior, forming droplets along the ceiling and walls. Lucy’s breath preceded her as they marched towards the far end.
Major Lopez stopped and turned to Lucy as they reached an unmarked door.
“Wait in here,” he said, standing side on in the threshold, pinning the door back with a muscular arm. “The general will want to meet you. Don’t touch anything.”
From the dim wedge of light spilling over from the corridor, Lucy could make out a sliver of the otherwise pitch-black office. It was unkempt; piles of open maps and papers were spread across the desk, covered in rulers and pencils. Next to them was an ashtray stoked to the brim, which pinned several more papers down. By the looks of it, a route was being charted.
Venetian blinds covered both of the far windows. Lucy tiptoed towards the nearest one and stuck her fingers between the dusty slats. Pushing them apart she peered out, only to see nothing but her own reflection in the black glass.
“Not much of a view I’m afraid,” came a gravelly voice from behind her.
Lucy whipped around.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you,” the stranger added. The man in the doorway looked somewhere between fifty and ninety; he had the hair of a younger man, but the bags under his eyes and wrinkles across his face told a longer, more arduous story. He was immaculately dressed, and his uniform well decorated with a series of stars adorning his epaulettes.
“I think we owe you a little light, after that,” he said, flicking the switch on the wall and bringing on the overhead strip light. “Please,” he added, gesturing to the visitor seat, and then settling into the chair behind the desk. “Apologies for the mess. As you can see, things are a little busy here.”
Lucy nodded, not sure whether it was appropriate to speak unless called upon to do so.
“I’m General Whitaker. I’m in charge of this facility and the people in it. You are?”
“Lucy Young,” she replied.
“Welcome to Fort Leonard Wood, Lucy. Major Lopez tells me you killed Kerman’s gang. Is this true?”
“I’m not a murderer – they were going to kill me,” she explained. “It was self-defense. They raided my house a couple of weeks ago and took all my stuff, then came back today and tried to …”
Her fists clenched as she relived the attempted rape, mentally shooting the men from the window all over again, and driving the knife into Garrick’s neck.
“They were depraved,” said the general, sensing her discomfort. “You did the right thing in defending yourself. Although truthfully, I’d like to know how you managed to beat them, given their numbers.”
“The beasts,” said Lucy. “If they hadn’t arrived when they did – well, I’d either be dead or the gang’s prisoner. I managed to shoot two of the gang members at the start, but then Garrick and the guy I’m guessing is Kerman caught me. They were assaulting me in the barn when the beasts arrived and attacked the fifth gang member. I stabbed Garrick and Kerman while their attention was diverted, then shot the beasts. Then I stole their SUV, but you guys shot the wheels out. So here I am now, in your office, which has freakin’ electricity, wondering what the hell you guys have been doing for the past four months while I was starving to death and nearly being raped on some abandoned farm. You’re the army, for Christ’s sake! Where were you?”
The general looked at her patiently.
“Sorry,” she added, “I just … Can I get a shower, please? And I could use some food. And water.”
“Of course,” replied the general. “But there’s someone you need to meet first. Your experience with the creatures is something of a priority. Come with me.”
He left the room, flicking the switch as he went, leaving Lucy jogging to catch up.
“I’m sorry to have to be so abrupt,” continued Whitaker, as he paced down the corridor ahead of her, past the off-white walls and military photographs, “but we move out in less than forty-eight hours.”
Lucy took a double step as the general hooked left and began climbing a staircase. He was faster than she’d expected.
“There’s a huge mustering operation underway in DC,” he continued, exiting the staircase a floor higher and proceeding along the first corridor. “Apparently they’re close to getting new satellites online. Balloons or something. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but the intel’s good. Once we’ve got GPS back, we’ll have coordinated aerial firepower at our disposal, and we will erase those creatures off the face of the Earth.”
“When you say ‘DC’?” queried Lucy.
“Yes, as in the capital,” replied the general.
“Oh. Last I heard, it had been compromised?”
The general laughed. “That’s one way of putting it. Personally I’d go with annihilated. Although technically there weren’t any explosions – just several thousand people got their faces chewed off, is all. And there they were, thinking they’d been lucky to survive the virus. Anyhow, the beasts died out – round there, anyway – and the military’s taken it back as a stronghold. So far they’ve managed to keep it that way. Now it’s becoming a rallying point. We’re due to converge there soon, along with every surviving camp in the country.”
“There are more camps? How many?” pressed Lucy.
“I’m reckoning on a few thousand,” replied Whitaker. “Assuming ours is average size, that’s gotta be several hundred thousand people? Not a bad-sized army. We were a training facility before all this kicked off. But when the satellites went down, we received orders that all bases across the country were to fortify themselves immediately – which we did. I moved the whole company into this central building and we built a razor-wire perimeter – plus the watchtowers. Believe it or not, this place was overcrowded when we started. Then the virus hit, and that was that; three quarters of the company died, along with most of the town. But then the virus itself died, and those creatures started to emerge. So we opened the doors to any survivors in the town. They took refuge here, and in exchange we trained them all up pretty quick for basic combat.”
As they neared the end of the corridor, the general stopped suddenly and knocked on a door. Lucy narrowly avoided walking straight into his back. A soldier with glasses opened the door and saluted Whitaker.
“At ease, Captain. Lucy, this is Captain Rangecroft. He’s responsible for gathering intelligence on the creatures so we can figure out how to beat them. Tell him everything you’ve discovered. Captain, see to it that she gets some food and drink tonight. I’m afraid the shower will have to wait until morning, Lucy, but Rangecroft here will show you to your dorm. In the morning, find the lieutenant – he’ll assign you a duty.”
The general turned on his heel and left them, his footsteps echoing away down the dark corridor.
Lucy surveyed the room before her. It was much like Whitaker’s, only littered with incongruous scientific instruments. Microscopes, centrifuges, Petri dishes, flasks and beakers of different sizes held in small clamps; all were dotted around the otherwise regular office in a haphazard fashion. Instead of the tiled or vinyl floor of a laboratory, there was industrial-strength nylon carpet. Small plain tables that didn’t match the central desk had been pushed together against the three far walls, creating a wrap-around worktop.
“Please, come in,” urged the captain. His short, unkempt brown hair was several shades lighter than Lucy’s. “I’ve got to ask you – where did you get this?”
He held up the tub of white powder.
“Hey, that’s mine!” protested Lucy, realizing they’d kept her backpack.
“How did you get it?” pressed Rangecroft, gently, his thirty-something skin in better
shape than the browbeaten general’s.
“I collected it,” replied Lucy. “It was inside a dead beast I found. In one of the black tubes they have coiled up inside them.”
He flipped through a notebook until he found the page he wanted, and thrust it under her eyes. “Like this?”
The pencil sketch of a coiled black tentacle was similar to the one she’d discovered, only this one ended in two sharp peaks instead of one.
“Yes. A lot like that,” said Lucy. “I take it you’ve been through my notebook too, then?”
“Not yet. They only brought your stuff a moment before the general brought you. Should I?”
“Pass me my backpack – I’ll show you.”
Rangecroft reached under the desk and pulled it out, handing it over.
“The one I found was similar to yours,” continued Lucy, taking out her notebook and flicking to the appropriate diagrams.
“Oh my! Yes, but look. There are some crazy differences,” replied Rangecroft, flipping to his own drawing of a creature’s chest cavity. His had a different rib structure, and two large lungs instead of Lucy’s smaller four.
Swapping notebooks, they silently trawled through the other’s sketches and annotations in mutual fascination. His were more extensive than hers – he’d encountered several different types of beast – but to her surprise his terminology was no more sophisticated; it was speculative, observational.
“Have you had a chance to analyze the white powder yet?” asked the captain, handing Lucy back her notebook.
“What?” said Lucy, perplexed. “No, I’ve been living on a farm.”
“But you’re clearly a scientist? Otherwise I’m pretty sure the general would’ve had you mopping the floors by now.”
“I’m technically –”
“Here,” he interrupted, eagerly swinging her around to a microscope.
A Petri dish holding a tiny sample of chalky powder sat under the lens. She peered down the eyepiece. The white molecules were tubular in shape, and lay at random angles to each other, un-bonded.
“Here – you won’t have had anything to compare it with,” said Rangecroft, snatching the Petri dish away and immediately inserting another – this time containing a liquid. “Look! Very different, right?”
“Gen Water,” said Lucy, recoiling from the lens in horror. “Was this a person?”
“No,” said the captain, “but I can show you a person if you –”
“No,” said Lucy, firmly. “I’m good.”
“Noted. Well, this sample’s from a domestic cat,” continued Rangecroft. “The remains of one, anyway. What did you just call it – ‘Gen Water’?”
“Yeah, it’s what they –” Lucy gathered her thoughts as her mind did a somersault back to the train, and the crash, and the hike along the tracks. “That’s what it’s called.”
“Alright then. I’ve been calling it ‘X’ up until now, but your version’s way better.”
“It’s not my –”
“So you know that’s what its prey turns to, right?” pressed Rangecroft. “After they attack it? Of course you do, of course you do,” he muttered. “Do you see how the Gen Water molecules are all uniform? Isn’t that insane? They came from a cat – a complex organism – less than twenty-four hours ago! All those different cell types reduced to a monoculture. The question is, then, if Gen Water is the by-product, then what’s the attacking agent?”
“D4,” replied Lucy. “The thing that does the attacking is called D4 – it started out as a single-celled organism, then evolved crazy quickly by appropriating the DNA of any species it interacted with on Earth. The airborne virus that killed everyone was an early form of it – now these beast things are the most advanced manifestation so far.”
“Wait, so you’re saying the airborne pathogen has now become a mammal?”
“Among other things, yeah. It’s advanced insanely fast. Each time D4 attacks, it turns its prey into this Gen Water stuff – which is basically a big genetic soup. I guess you’d need a functioning electron microscope to see that. But the point is, Gen Water is where D4 gets its next form from; it’s how it keeps adapting. I think it also acts as their food source.”
Lucy peered down the eyepiece at the Gen Water Petri dish. Unlike the powder, these transparent cells were both perfectly round and conjoined – most drifted freely, but a few had clustered together to form small “rafts”.
She stepped back from the microscope and looked at Rangecroft. “Have you ever seen the creatures reproduce?”
He shook his head, lips slightly parted.
“I’ve only seen small ones reproduce,” continued Lucy. “I saw butterflies ‘develop’, if that’s the right word. From a single transparent blob of liquid, suddenly all these butterflies emerged. Just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “It’s called an MRE: a massive re-specialization event. And I think Gen Water,” she said, pointing to the Petri dish, “might be the precursor. Massive de-specialization. It would figure.”
“But there needs to be a catalyst, then,” pondered Rangecroft. “If the Gen Water is inert, something else must be triggering the re-specialization?”
“Right,” replied Lucy, “which I guess is where D4 comes in again. Exactly how that works, though, I have no idea.”
She turned her attention to the rest of the makeshift laboratory. “How long have you known about the white powder?” she asked, picking up a jar containing a partially decayed dog paw.
“I only discovered it this week,” confessed Rangecroft, eyeing up the paw anxiously. “We’ve not had the resources to do proper autopsies or experiments until recently, what with the losses we’ve sustained. It was a push getting the general to give me the time – but he’s on board now that I’ve got things to show for it.”
Lucy placed the jar down on the worktop. “It’s the only way we’ll win. Have you tested it as a poison yet?”
“A poison?”
“I did some experiments on the farm. The creatures seem to avoid carcasses that have white powder on them. Which makes me think it could be toxic to them,” she explained.
Rangecroft frowned, thinking.
“What if this is a corruption of their de-specialization process?” Lucy continued. “But not inert like the Gen Water. What if it’s more than just a toxic substance? Maybe it’s some kind of organic agent?”
“Like D4?” suggested Rangecroft.
“Exactly – but a cancerous form of it.”
Rangecroft’s hazel eyes widened. “That would mean we could harvest it – from infected creatures.”
“And use it against them,” completed Lucy. “Precisely.”
“If the powder’s organic, we could potentially cultivate it. Then we’d have a reproducible weapon!” gasped Rangecroft. “But to do this …”
“To do this,” replied Lucy, finishing his sentence, “we need to capture one alive.”
***
Feb 18th (est.) – This place has electricity and proper rations. There’s gotta be at least two hundred people here. I think only around a third are professional soldiers though – the rest are civilians like me who they’ve rescued and are training up. Turns out Captain Rangecroft is a qualified chemist. The green paste that the cold woman – Jackson – put on my head injury yesterday is one of the captain’s discoveries. Cpt. Rangecroft says it’s a blend of leaves and minerals, but he’s not yet sure what the active ingredient is. Either way, something in the paste appears to mask the scent of blood from the beasts.
Rangecroft helped me pitch “Operation Beast Capture” to General Whitaker, who agreed after a lot of persuading. “People and ammunition are precious resources here. The nature of the mission is extremely risky.” The general made that point at least eight times. But in the end we convinced him that it’s worth doing. Because it is worth doing – this powder could be the beasts’ primary weakness, and knowing that for sure will give us the upper hand for the first time since the satellites failed. If we could synth
esize the powder, the possibilities are vast. We could make it rain with the stuff, or put it into tiny particles in the air as they did to us in the beginning – there’d be no way they could escape it. The general’s allowed us to put a task force together. With Major Lopez’s help, we’ve planned a mission. It begins at nightfall.
***
The four volunteers sat silently in the open-top jeep. It was night-time and they had precious few hours to complete the mission – the entire camp was due to move out at dawn. Lucy wore a bulletproof vest and a helmet like the other soldiers. She nervously consulted her kit over and over, routinely feeling to check the military-issue handgun was still there. Captain Rangecroft’s back jostled against hers as the jeep rocked over the field, both of them facing outwards over their respective sides, scanning the dark horizon.
“OK squad. That’s a half-mile,” crackled Whitaker’s voice over the radio, and the jeep slowed to a stop. They were back on the open road, just beyond the purview of the fort’s rocky welcome sculpture. Grass rippled in the breeze, swaying gently either side of the tar.
“Roger, base. Over,” replied Major Lopez from the front.
Lucy peered back at the watchtower; the sniper’s figure was rendered blurry green through her night-vision goggles. The fact that the daylight beasts hadn’t yet made it this far was reassuring on one level, but it had meant the experiment had to be conducted by night, making Lucy’s task force significantly more vulnerable.
The mission had three stages. Firstly, they had to infect one of the creatures with the white powder. For this purpose, they had prepared specially coated rubber bullets. The idea was that the infected creature would be ostracized by any others with it. This would make the capture part easier, for which they would use a combination of net guns and tranquillizers. Meanwhile the watchtowers would provide lethal force should any other beasts require neutralizing.
Rangecroft had suggested that they could later feed small doses of their Gen Water samples, mixed with sedatives, to the captured creature. His aim was to see if, by keeping the beast alive for longer, they could “grow” more of the cancerous white powder for harvesting, before the beast succumbed.
Convulsive Box Set Page 29
