The Dark Freeze

by Peter Gregory

  At first, Theodore and his colleagues kept the strange experience to themselves but, as soon as the work on the superbugs was complete, someone was bound to mention it. And they did. As soon as the first one mentioned it, the floodgates opened. It all came pouring out. Everyone involved wanted to talk about their weird ‘supernatural’ experience.

  Listening to the account of their strange experience, Liz’s thoughts flashed back to the metaphysical conversation she’d shared with Rupert. But only briefly. More urgent matters demanded her attention.

  The completed superbugs, together with the encapsulated chemical trigger, were loaded into the mosquito drones, both in the USA and the UK, 40 with an 18 hour time delay to infect the aliens on the ground, and thousands with a six hour time delay to infect those on board the asteroid. Everything was ready. It was time to launch the attack.

  A few hours later, dozens of the latest long range bird drones took off from the northern tip of Norway and the North West tip of the United States en route to the Arctic and Alaska respectively. They’d considered using much faster jet fighters or even guided missiles as the delivery vehicles, but dismissed the idea. They’d be detected and destroyed. Hours later, dozens of birds landed out of sight of the aliens in both the Arctic and Alaska and released their deadly payloads.

  Thousands of mosquitos flew silently to their targets, to the twenty or so aliens at each site. Guided by remote control, 40 injected their deadly cargo into the aliens on the ground, whilst the remaining thousands slipped quietly and unnoticed into their scout ships. Unseen. Unheard. Waiting. Waiting to be transported back to the asteroid. Waiting for their chance to infect thousands more.

  The Earthlings waited too. Waited to see if their plan would succeed. There was nothing more they could do.

  36

  Whispers

  The following 18 hours were the longest of their entire lives. Time seemed to slow down. To stand still. It was the longest day in planet Earth’s history.

  Everyone was nervous and fidgety. Although no one actually said it, they all knew this was their last chance. The last throw of the dice. Failure meant extinction.

  To relieve the tension, people gathered in small groups to make small talk. They talked about anything other than what was happening. Anything to take their minds off the gravity of the situation. But the conversations were muted, subdued, almost whispered, as if they weren’t meant to be heard. The final, faint words of a dying world.

  As the day dragged on, people began to drift away from their small huddles to be alone, alone with their own thoughts. Liz was no exception. After enduring several hours of meaningless small talk, she excused herself to visit the toilet and grab some moments by herself. In the ladies, she thought about Baby Blu and Charlotte, about how they must be suffering, and burst into tears.

  ‘Don’t you think it strange what Theodore said?’ remarked Frank.

  ‘You mean the unworldly ideas that flooded his brain?’ said Viv. ‘Ideas on how to modify the DNA sequences of the psychrophiles?’

  ‘Well, not just that but also how he and his colleagues apparently had no option but to implement them, as if they were being controlled. As if they were puppets dancing to the Puppet Master’s tune.’

  ‘It’s probably a result of all the stress and pressure they’ve been under,’ said Gregg. ‘Stress can play strange tricks on the mind.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Rupert. ‘I don’t think it’s that at all.’

  Viv, Frank, Zak and Gregg looked at him with surprise. For a moment, no one spoke, stunned by his unexpected remark. Gregg broke the silence. ‘Why, what do you think it is, Rupert?’

  Rupert looked uncomfortable before answering. ‘I think a ‘‘Superintelligence’’ implanted the ideas into the brains of Theodore and his colleagues,’ said Rupert, glancing at Frank, ‘ideas to produce superbugs that would be effective against the aliens. Superbugs they couldn’t counteract.’

  Viv, Gregg and Zak looked at him in disbelief.

  ‘A ‘‘Superintelligence’’. What the hell do you mean by that?’ retorted Gregg.

  ‘What extremely advanced civilisations could evolve into,’ interjected Frank, trying to defuse the escalating tension developing between Rupert and Gregg. ‘I overheard a discussion he had with Liz, a metaphysical discussion, whereby really advanced civilisations could discard their physical bodies and exist as pure energy. Pure thought. Millions of minds coalesced into one ‘‘Superintelligence’’ patrolling the Universe. E = mc2 and all that.’

  ‘Have you gone stark raving mad?’ said Gregg. ‘That’s absolute, utter rubbish! I’ve never heard such bloody nonsense in all my life,’ he spat.

  ‘You should learn to open your mind to every possibility,’ replied Rupert, remembering his closed mind mentality to Liz’s ideas. ‘You shouldn’t dismiss anything that isn’t impossible.’

  ‘You’re fucking deluded,’ said Gregg angrily. ‘All this stress has addled your fucking brain.’

  ‘It’s what Liz believes too,’ said Rupert calmly. ‘Is she ‘‘fucking deluded’’ too?’

  ‘If she believes all that crap, yeah, she fucking well is,’ retorted Gregg.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ said Rupert, ‘but we’re entitled to our ideas.’

  ‘Not fucking stupid ideas,’ replied Gregg, going red in the face.

  ‘Why do you think they ‘‘intervened’’ with the DNA sequences,’ asked Viv, doing his bit to calm the situation. ‘What was wrong with Theodore’s ideas?’

  ‘They must have known they wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t be effective. That the aliens would have been able to counteract them. So they intervened to design superbugs that would work. Superbugs the aliens couldn’t counteract,’ replied Rupert.

  At that instant, Liz, who’d overheard the exchange between Rupert and Gregg on her way back from the toilet, made her decision. She knew immediately who she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

  37

  Decision Time

  It was decision time for Baby Blu and Rob. Should they eat him alive, or should they all commit suicide and die together? Killing themselves was just about bearable, but the thought of having to kill their three-year-old child first, well, they didn’t know if they could do that. To kill their only daughter. Their own flesh and blood. Someone they loved and cherished with all their heart. Someone who trusted them. Completely. Someone who loved them unconditionally. Someone who relied on them. How could they kill their only daughter? The very thought of it filled them with revulsion. It was abhorrent, an act that was against every mother and father’s instinct. Against every natural law. Yet they had to make a decision. The food, water, wood, everything, had run out. There was nothing left. Nothing but despair and a slow, lingering death.

  As he did every day, Rob went outside to dump their human waste into the garden and check the traps. As usual, they were empty. The rats had either got wise or they too had perished. But something was different. At first, he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Then it hit him. The ‘day’ wasn’t as dark as previous days – it was a little lighter. He looked up at the sky and, for the first time in months, saw a glimmer of light filtering through the gloom. A few rays of sunlight struggling to reach the Earth. Was it real or was he hallucinating? Had the lack of food and drink affected his senses? Made him imagine things that weren’t there? He rubbed his eyes and looked again at the sky. It was definitely lighter! He dropped the pan and dashed inside to tell Baby Blu. Perhaps there was a ray of hope after all. Perhaps they wouldn’t have to make that awful decision.

  38

  Success

  IT MUST HAVE WORKED! Twenty-four hours after the attack, the aliens began dismantling the buildings at the base camps and returning them to the asteroid. At about the same time, the asteroid’s fan-like array began to retract.

  ‘We’ve done it!’ exclaim
ed Viv triumphantly. ‘We’ve bloody well done it. We’ve beaten the bastards.’ Eyebrows were raised at his coarse, out of character language, but it was understandable given the circumstances.

  ‘We have,’ said Frank, staring intently at the video screens. ‘We most certainly have. It looks like they’re preparing to leave.’

  They hugged each other like there was no tomorrow. Everyone hugged everyone else. They danced and jumped around the room like little children, shouting and singing at the top of their voices, behaviour most unbecoming of scientists. Viv unlocked the drawer in his desk, pulled out a bottle of champagne, shook it vigorously and popped the cork. Then, he sprayed all of them with some of France’s finest. It was the kind of behaviour associated with the winning dressing room after a major cup final, or the podium of a Formula One race. Joy and celebration were the order of the day.

  ‘I thought I’d never get to use this,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d had it.’

  As the days went by, they watched teams of spacesuited aliens – they weren’t taking any chances – dismantle the buildings and return them to the asteroid. Within a week, the buildings from all five base camps were back on board the asteroid, as were all the scout ships. The aliens had retreated to the relative safety of their starship.

  As the fan-like array retracted, sunlight began to penetrate the darkness. For the first time in months, bright, warm, life-giving rays from our mother sun began to brighten the days, replacing the darkness and gloom of the dark freeze. Slowly, bit by bit, daylight began to return as more and more sunshine bathed the planet. And it began to warm up too.

  With the fan almost completely retracted – it had taken far less time to retract the fan than it had to expand it – a strange thing happened. One of the hexagonal panels on the asteroid began to open, revealing a small aperture. A small aperture from which an object emerged.

  ‘Isn’t that the manned rocket?’ said Frank, straining his eyes as he studied the image on the video screen. ‘Can’t we magnify it?’

  Rupert twiddled some knobs to enlarge the image.

  ‘IT IS!’ exclaimed Viv. ‘It’s the manned rocket we sent with Bubba and Nikolov on board. It looks like they’re sending it back to Earth.’

  A few minutes later, the aperture closed and the asteroid departed. Everyone clapped and cheered as it receded into the distance, a dim star returning to the depths of outer space. Very soon, it was just a distant speck. Moments later, it disappeared from view completely.

  Theodore couldn’t get over his strange experience. He was convinced some ‘supernatural force’ implanted the DNA structures into his brain – they were so different, so radical, so… alien, they couldn’t have come from a human brain. He thought their own ideas would have worked but obviously the ‘supernatural force’, or whatever it was, thought otherwise. Either way, it didn’t matter. The superbugs worked and the aliens had gone.

  The one person who wasn’t surprised was Rupert. He was convinced that a ‘Superintelligence’ had directed the work of Theodore and his fellow geneticists and molecular biologists. A ‘Superintelligence’ that patrolled the Universe to ensure it behaved itself. To observe wherever life originated; to let it evolve in whatever direction evolution took it; to let it develop into intelligent life, hopefully into a technologically advanced, peaceful civilisation.

  If a species developed nuclear technology and destroyed themselves, well, that was their own fault – they wouldn’t interfere. However, under no circumstances would they allow a technically advanced civilisation from one world destroy a less technically advanced civilisation from another world. That was strictly forbidden. It was completely and utterly unacceptable. Against the laws of the Universe. THAT’S WHEN THEY INTERVENED.

  Rupert believed it was them who designed the fatal gene sequences in the superbugs, the sequences that mystified Theodore and his colleagues. That it was them who tracked predatory civilisations to make sure they behaved themselves, and if they didn’t… well, they’d intervene. In Rupert’s eyes, they were THE GUARDIANS OF THE UNIVERSE.

  39

  Reunion

  Once the asteroid had departed, Liz dashed straight to Baby Blu’s apartment near Chester – she had to know if they’d survived.

  ‘Good luck,’ said the army driver as she raced up the steps carrying a large bag. She stopped at the door and tried to open it. It was locked. She hammered frantically on the door, calling out her sister’s name at the same time. Over and over. But no one answered. Just as she was beginning to despair, she heard footsteps. Faint at first but getting steadily louder. Someone was approaching the door. A few seconds later, she heard the unmistakable sound of a key entering a lock, followed by a click as the lock disengaged. She turned the handle and burst through the door like a whirlwind, almost knocking Rob off his feet.

  She couldn’t believe what met her eyes. The gaunt, thin ‘stranger’ stood before her was nothing more than skin and bone. A skeleton. He reminded her of her dad just before he died. If Rob looked like this, she feared the worst for Baby Blu and Charlotte. Especially little three-year-old Charlotte, her beloved niece.

  ‘How’s Baby Blu and Charlotte?’ she blurted out, dreading the reply as soon as the words had left her mouth. ‘Are they…’

  ‘They’re alive,’ said Rob. ‘I can’t say they’re fine because they aren’t, but they’re both still alive.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Liz, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Thank God for that.’

  The sound of Liz’s voice brought Baby Blu and Charlotte to the door. They were dirty, dishevelled and thin as rakes. Liz ran to meet them, scooped Charlotte into her arms and embraced her little sister. She sobbed uncontrollably, relieved that they were alive but shocked at their condition.

  ‘Here,’ she said, rummaging in her bag. ‘I’ve brought you some food and drink. Take it, but don’t eat and drink too much at once.’

  Her advice fell on deaf ears. Baby Blu, Charlotte and Rob ate and drank as if their lives depended on it. They were absolutely famished. If it made them sick, then so be it. Their emaciated bodies craved food. And drink. They simply couldn’t help it.

  As Liz watched them gorge themselves, she heard footsteps. Baby Blu heard them too. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked. ‘Is it Gregg?’

  Liz smiled and watched her sister’s face as the door opened and a man strode into the room.

  40

  A New Beginning

  Gradually, the world began to return to some semblance of normality. The temperature had reached its seasonal average and the first green shoots were sprouting from the soil. Livestock had returned to the fields. Cows and sheep that had been deliberately kept alive, grazing on the green shoots of recovery. The countryside began to look a little like the England of old. But the dark freeze had exacted a terrible toll. Ninety-nine per cent of all cold-blooded life had been exterminated. Ninety-nine per cent of the ectotherms. Ninety-nine per cent of all reptilian life. Gone forever. Extinct.

  The endotherms, the warm-blooded animals, fared better, but even these were decimated. In fact, much of the wildlife came close to extinction. Plants, animals, birds, fish, even insects. As usual, it was the microscopic life that fared best. The bacteria and viruses.

  The dark freeze exacted a heavy toll on humans too. Half the world’s population perished, some 3.5 billion people. Men, women, children and babies. Not surprisingly, Third World countries suffered most, countries in South America, Africa and Asia, although a billion people perished in the developed countries too. No country emerged unscathed.

  The sunlight and rising temperatures were most welcome but they had an unwanted side effect – they melted the piles of human waste, the frozen piles of urine and excrement, causing foul smells and, worse still, disease. They were a breeding ground for pathogenic bacteria. The authorities did their best to remove them, but the diseases claimed many lives, especially those of the
weak and vulnerable.

  Of more concern were the decomposing bodies of the dead. The 3.5 billion dead humans, half the world’s population. The stench of death was bad enough but it was the propensity for disease that worried the government. It might have been construed as callous, but in the UK the bodies were collected in huge, sealed trucks and dumped in massive lime pits. Hundreds of lime pits, each containing over ten thousand human bodies.

  It took time but, slowly and surely, things began to return to some semblance of normality. Food crops were grown, livestock reared, families reunited.

  The dark freeze had been horrific, yet some good emerged. It taught the citizens of planet Earth to cooperate more, to cease their petty feuding, to pull together for a brighter, better future. And, most importantly of all, it taught them to take nothing for granted.

  41

  An Unlikely Coupling

  ‘RUPERT!’ What are you doing here?’ said Baby Blu, startled by his appearance. ‘Where’s Gregg?’ she asked, looking at Liz.

  ‘Gregg and I have ended our relationship,’ said Liz. ‘It’s unfortunate but we weren’t really suited. Rupert’s the one I love and want to spend the rest of my life with.’

  ‘And Liz is the only one for me, the woman I want to share my life with,’ said Rupert, putting his arm around her and pecking her gently on the cheek.