by Edward Crae
Toby struggled to carry the propane cylinder with him as he followed the rest of the group outside. Though small enough for an adult to carry on his or her back, it was a bit too big for the kid. Royce helped him out a bit, easing some of the burden.
Jeff and Cliff carried Frankie to the center of the parking lot as everyone else kept watch. There seemed to be no activity around the area, as if all the creatures had disappeared when the big explosion sounded. Something strange had happened.
“Where is everything?” Toni asked. “All the monsters, zombies and shit.”
“Something scared them off,” Grace said, keeping close to the front of the store. “Or maybe they were transported like Dan and Jake.”
“We don’t even know if that’s what happened,” Toni said. “That’s just Royce’s idea.”
Royce shook his head, snickering at Toby as the kid got the torch ready to go. Toby smiled back at him, and stepped forward toward Frankie’s body.
“Frankie,” Jeff said. “You were an asshole. I love ya, man, but we gotta burn ya.”
With that, Toby pointed the torch at the body and turned on the flow. He clicked the ignitor, and the flames sprayed out, engulfing Frankie’s body immediately.
But Frankie wasn’t dead.
He jumped to his feet, screeching loudly and flapping his arms in the air. Toby backed away, keeping the flames on him. Jeff looked wide-eyed, and Toby thought for sure he would yell at him to stop. But Jeff evidently knew Frankie wasn’t Frankie anymore.
“Keep going,” Jeff said, pulling out his revolver.
He took aim and shot Frankie in the head. Frankie continued to flail and scream, but fell to the ground. Strange limbs tore through his flesh, slamming onto the asphalt in an attempt to get the burning body mobile and escape.
Toni and Cliff drew their guns as well, firing into the flaming bulk. The screeching continued, and now the strange limbs were dying down as their flesh was charred and blistered. Jeff stepped forward and fired one last shot at the head. Frankie’s brain splattered all over the pavement, sizzling and boiling as they gushed out.
Now Frankie was dead.
“Jesus Christ,” Cliff said. “That was fucking intense.”
“Hey, guys?” Toni said. “Has anyone seen Eric?”
“Fuck you,” Eric hissed, chopping through the head of a shuffler as he stalked the McDonald’s.
“Fuck you,” he said again, killing another. “And you. And you. Fuck yourself. And fuck off.”
He stopped, staring down at the half dozen shufflers he had just killed. His stomach turned, and his throat tightened. Not that he was squeamish—not about killing the creatures, anyway—but the thought of having to live the rest of his life doing this same shit over and over again did not appeal to him at all.
He wanted it to end. He wanted to settle down and just live.
“Fuck you,” he hissed again, stomping the head of a dead shuffler.
Jeff’s offer to take them back to his camp was appealing. The man said it was like a whole city nestled there in the old French Lick resort. He had been there several times with Travis, losing a shit ton of money every time, but enjoying it nonetheless. And that’s when he began to sob to himself. He missed his dad. The old pot-smoking hippie bastard.
“Dad,” he whispered. “I wish I could have saved you.”
He dropped his machete and punched the nearby wall, cracking the strange, plastic covering that was molded to look like plaster. It hurt, but he didn’t give a shit. However, within just a few seconds, there was a hissing sound in the back, somewhere in the kitchen.
“Alright, fuckface,” he hissed, bouncing the flat side of his machete against his other hand.
He climbed up on the counter, slowly lowering himself on the other side. He kept crouched as he walked toward the fryers, where he stopped and peered around the corner into the kitchen. Though it was dark, he could see a shadow cast by the moonlight that came in through the windows. Something was crawling on the floor, quietly hissing—breathing. Something.
“What are you?” he whispered.
The walking stopped, followed by a deep rumbling hiss. Eric froze, his machete held to his side, ready to strike. He took a few steps forward into the kitchen, realizing that whatever was stalking around was on the other side of the grill line. He grinned, ready to leap to the side and expose himself to the creature.
He jumped, landing square on his feet with his machete reared back to strike. There was nothing there.
“What the fuck?” he asked outloud.
Then, the hiss returned… from above. Eric jumped back and swung his machete just as a claw swiped at the empty air. His blade caught flesh, and he heard a creature hiss and howl as he turned and bolted over the counter. When he reached the glass door, he turned, crouched down and ready. He watched in horror as a spindly, fleshless creature crawled over the counter. Its eyes glowed red, and a huge, fanged maw opened and closed as it dripped thick saliva.
It was the lack of skin that was the most disturbing. Eric remembered something like it at the impound lot. Something like a stalker, but with transparent skin that showed the corded and squirming muscles underneath. It wasn’t easy to kill.
“Come on, you ugly shit,” Eric said, ready to slam his weight onto the door if the creature pounced.
It did.
Eric pushed back against the door, opening it with his weight. The creature sailed right passed him, swiping thin air with its razor sharp claws. Eric followed his movement with a back hand swing of his machete as it passed. Slicing open its flank. The creature crashed into the concrete, rolling a few times before gaining its balance.
Black fluid dripped from the creature’s wound, but it didn’t seem fazed at all. Eric backed into the restaurant, pulling the door closed. The creature pounced again, smashing into the glass, but only bending the handle that stretched across the midsection of the door. Eric brought the machete down hard, splitting the creature’s skull in half. Its brains leaked out, forming a wretched pile of gray matter on the floor.
Eric laughed, flinging the blood off of his blade. He would return to the hardware store a new man, he realized; one that took on a beast by himself. He was no longer Eric the beta male. He was Eric the mutant slayer.
He would take the creature’s claw as a trophy.
Chapter Nine
Dan, Jake, and Max followed Drew through the maze of ruins. It was dark; the area being lit only by the glow of nearby fires. The air was strangely hot and dry, and Dan found it hard to keep his mouth moist enough to speak. There seemed to be some kind of dust in the air that stuck to his teeth, as well.
“Where do you think she is?” Max asked Drew.
“Not sure,” he answered. “We should have caught her when she was here last time, like you said. My bad.”
“Surely you know of a place where she usually goes to hide,” Jake suggested.
“She does have a few places,” Drew replied. “Places we’ve found her all the times we tried to get her to come back with us.”
“Why didn’t she ever join you?” Dan asked.
Drew stopped at the edge of a large, broken wall, peeking around the corner. Then, he turned back to look at Dan.
“She didn’t trust us,” he said. “She thought we would use her for our own purposes.”
“Like we’re about to do now?” Max said.
Drew shrugged. “No point in hiding it. We need her. Not only to get you guys back, but to maybe get some of us through to your Earth, too.”
“That’d be awesome,” Dan said. “It would be like old times.”
Drew shrugged again. “It’s nice to meet you guys, I suppose. But I don’t know any of you. It wouldn’t be the same.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Max said. “The Drew of our world is dead, just like Barty is here. I’m absorbing Barty’s knowledge, I think. Maybe you’ll absorb Drew’s knowledge, too.”
“That’s fuckin’ weird, bro,” Jake said. “But
kinda cool at the same time.”
There was a high-pitched shriek that startled everyone, followed by a distant explosion. Drew’s eyes went wide in a knowing expression.
“What was that?” Jake asked. “More bombs?”
“Not sure,” Drew said. “They usually don’t whistle. Let’s just keep going. One of Rose’s hiding places is just ahead.”
He led them through a tunnel made of debris and old vehicles. It was lit by glowing bits of green material that Dan was unsure of. Maybe some kind of radioactive lighting he guessed. They emerged in what looked like the courtyard of an old building, with the four walls mostly collapsed. The rooms beyond the inner walls were alight with fires, as if it had been recently bombed.
“She hides here?” Max asked.
“Not quite,” Drew said. “There’s a sewer grate ahead that leads to the drainage for this building. She goes there, along with some other weirdos who are too cowardly to fight for their own lives.”
“Lefties,” Jake joked.
They approached a concrete pad with a large square hole in the center. Drew looked around quickly and then turned on his rifle light, shining it down into the hole. Everyone else looked down, seeing nothing but a broken concrete floor.
“This is it,” Drew said. “Down we go.”
Eric had ignored the ruckus at the hardware store, knowing that whatever it was causing trouble, Toni and the others would take care of it. But now, after everyone had gone inside and left the smoking pile of whatever it was on the asphalt, Eric noticed another figure skulking around in the dark.
It was not a creature of any kind, he noticed, but what looked like a man dressed in strangely clean and normal clothing. He was carrying some sort of device in his outstretched hand, and a metal briefcase in the other. He wore a backpack, and carried a shotgun strapped across his shoulder as well as a handgun of some type at his belt.
Eric shrugged, walking out of the shadows near the man. He fully expected a reaction, but all he got was a “Hey.”
“Um,” Eric said walking toward him. “Did you know I was here?”
The man looked up. Eric noticed that he was Asian and about in his mid to late thirties.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t sense any danger. You didn’t look like an asshole.”
“Well, thanks. Who are you, and what’s all that shit you have?”
The man hung the device at his belt next to his gun and held out his hand in greeting. “George Wong,” he said. “I’m a scientist. Or I was at least… before all this.”
Eric took his hand and shook it. “What kind of scientist?” he asked. “We have one of our own.”
“Oh?” George said. “I’m a microbiologist. Who is this scientist who is with you?”
“Grace Hill,” Eric replied. “Not sure what kind of scientist she is.”
George shook his head. “Never heard of her, but I’d like to meet her. It would be interesting to share what I’ve found with someone who would actually understand it.”
Eric wasn’t sure what he really meant by that, but he ignored it. “Alright,” he said. “We’re in the hardware store over there. Let’s go.”
The bunker—or whatever it was—was dark and damp. The floor was broken in several places, with mud and slime seeping up through it. The walls were mostly intact, but cracked and sprayed with graffiti. Dan was reminded of the times he and his friends would sneak into the storm sewers at night and smoke weed or drink beer. The smell reinforced it.
“Memories,” he sung softly to himself.
Jake snickered, but followed along, shining his own light ahead as Drew led on. The tunnel turned to the right about ten yards in front of them, and that’s where a shallow channel of mud showed where the original flow was.
“Watch your step,” Drew said. “It’s shallow but you never know what’s underneath the mud.”
“I can’t believe she hides here,” Jake said. “What a fucking shithole.”
“The aliens don’t like it here,” Drew said. “They stay away mostly. They’ll only send drones down here but Rose smashes them every time. Or, at least, somebody does.”
“Stay away!” came a little girl’s voice from around the corner.
They picked up their pace, turning the corner to make sure Rose wouldn’t get away. Dan’s heart pounded with excitement, knowing this girl could be the key to getting back home.
“I said stay away!” she said again.
As they rounded the corner, they could see Rose’s little fort. There were a number of slab of OSB, crates, and other scraps arranged like a little shanty hut. There was a fire pit in the center of the chamber, with the smoke of a recent fire trailing up through a vent that led to the surface. Rose was there, huddled around the dying embers, wrapped in a blanket and rocking back and forth.
“Rose,” Drew said quietly. “We need your help.”
“I know what you want,” she said. “You want to poke and prod me with your knives and blinky things.”
“No,” Drew said. “I’m not a scientist, and I promise nobody is going to hurt you. We just need you to help us get away; back to Dan’s world.”
“Why? How?”
“You know how,” Drew said. “These guys want to get home. You’re the one who brought them here. You can send them back, and maybe some of us can go with them.”
“You could see the sun again,” Dan said. “The comet didn’t crash on our world. It just flew by.”
“A few pieces crashed,” Jake began, but Drew held up his hand.
“Their world has promise,” Drew said. “We could all start a new life there.”
“It’s fine here,” Rose said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I don’t really want to either,” Drew said. “But everything here will be destroyed soon.”
“Why?” Rose asked.
“Have you noticed how the moon is getting bigger?” Max asked, finally speaking up.
“It always gets bigger when it rises or sets,” Rose said. “It’s called atmospheric lensing, stupid.”
“No,” Max said. “It’s getting bigger, even when it’s high up in the sky. That’s because it’s getting closer and closer. It’s going to crash into the Earth.”
“Nuh uh,” Rose said, her face scrunching up sadly.
“It will,” Drew said.
“Are you a scientist?” Rose asked Max.
Max shrugged. “Not really, but I’m a lot smarter than most people. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m the same person as Barty. There might even be a Rose on our world.”
“There isn’t,” she said. “There can’t be. That would mean…”
She began crying then, and Dan realized it was because her twin was dead. Maynard had killed her, having figured out her pattern of “blinking” between dimensions. Max had figured it out, too, which is what got them in this fucking mess to begin with.
“Look,” Max said. “We can’t recreate another seizure in you and open a portal we can all go through. I can use some of the equipment to amplify the effects.”
“But it hurts,” Rose said. “And if you make it stronger, it will hurt even more.”
“I won’t make the seizure stronger,” Max said. “Just the field that it creates.”
Rose was quiet for a moment, as if in deep thought. Everyone sat in silence as she pondered the situation, all of them having their fingers crossed. Finally, Jake spoke up.
“We have puppies and ice cream,” he said.
Rose smiled, throwing her blanket off. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“This is George Wong,” Eric said, introducing him to the rest. “He’s a scientist. George, this is—“
“Ahhh!” George exclaimed. “Grace! I do know who you are. You were at the microbiology symposium at the IU campus in 2010, I think.”
Grace smiled, cocking her head. “Okay,” she said. “I think I remember you vaguely. You were the student who asked all the questions about exobacteria.”
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“Right,” George said. “It’s good to see you again.”
Cliff cleared his throat.
“Oh, this is Cliff,” she said. “He’s my…”
She patted her belly, smiling.
“Baby daddy,” Toni finished for her. Royce and Toby snickered.
Eric introduced the rest of them, noting that they had just lost two of their friends. He wasn’t sure whether he should even go into Max, Dan and Jake’s disappearance, though.
“So George here knows what’s going on,” Eric said.
“Well, mostly.”
“Alright, let’s hear it,” Grace said.
“Okay,” George began. “Here’s what we know:
The comet contained some kind of biological time bomb, like a virus but not exactly. A virus is a strand of DNA surrounded by a protein shell. When that virus invades a living cell, the DNA strand is injected into it, and the cell’s own DNA is altered and forced to reproduce more viruses.
This new thing is like a virus, but the protein shell was engineered; artificial. Someone or something created it. Why? We don’t know. What we do know is that it has the ability to mutate the entire host, or kill it almost instantly. It all depends on the lifeform it inhabits, its overall health, and its mental state.
We experimented with it when it first showed up, and found that the key factor in what really happens is the subject’s brain. In most normal specimens, the virus kills immediately. Some lifeforms were immune, and others were susceptible to mutation. The first lifeform it encountered was fungus; floating spores that were in the upper atmosphere.
It was these fungi that caused the orange fog as it descended to the ground. The mutation caused the fungus to attack and invade the brains of humans and turn them into raving lunatics. Only humans seemed to be affected by it. But the virus itself also fell to the ground. It killed off a large portion of the population almost immediately. Others weren’t so lucky.
The mutative nature of the virus cause those it infected to undergo changes to their biology. They weren’t just mutants; they were changing into completely different lifeforms. What’s really crazy is that most of them had similar features—the tentacles, the shiny white skin, everything else. But there was one type that was horrifying, and it’s what finally destroyed our facility.
