Extinction Plague: Matt Kearns 4

by Greig Beck

“Yes, yes, in the cabinet locker.” Karen sat down again.

  Another scream came, followed by a dog barking madly that became a yowl of pain. Belle ran in circles for a moment before tilting her head back and howling her distress like a wolf.

  “Stop that, Belle.” Karen grabbed the dog and held it close to her leg, where it immediately quietened.

  “Phone.” Megan pointed.

  Karen nodded, and then grabbed the phone to her ear, but crouched down beside the bedside table as though trying to make herself as small as possible. Belle sat rod straight in front of her as though acting as a wall of furred defense.

  “You two just stay put, back in a few minutes.” Megan closed the bedroom door.

  *

  Megan went down the steps on her toes and headed straight to the living-room gun cabinet. She remembered the keys were in the drawer below and, while there, she thought she heard someone outside the house. She hurried to unlock the cabinet and remove the shotgun, a Remington 870 that still smelt of gun oil.

  She grabbed a box of shells, opened it one-handed and hurriedly loaded several shells into the port. She also dropped a few more into her pajama shirt pocket.

  She stood silently for a few moments holding the gun two-handed at waist level as she continued to listen for noises. She felt the coolness of the polished floorboards beneath her feet, smelt the fruit in the bowl on the table, and even heard the soft ticking of her wristwatch; such was the heightened level of her senses.

  Megan was just contemplating heading back upstairs when she heard someone trying the front door handle.

  The hell you will, she thought.

  “Don’t even think about it. I’m armed, and I will shoot.” She yelled at the door, lifting the gun.

  Megan gripped the gun hard to stop her hands shaking. She knew how to use firearms, but had never fired one at another human being. Fact was, she never wanted to. She didn’t want to hurt or kill anyone, but she’d damn well do what was necessary to protect her family, and so, she advanced.

  “The sheriff has been called. Last warning, asshole.” She shouldered the gun.

  There came an enormous weight against the door and the frame creaked ominously. From above her she started to hear the roof tiles being torn up, and then a window smashed out back somewhere.

  “Ah, Jesus,” she whispered, feeling a tingle of fear run from her scalp to her ass. She racked the gun, more to use the noise as a signal of her real intent. “I am fucking warning you.” She hated that her voice trembled now.

  The front door began to slowly open, but that was only because the wooden doorframe was being crushed inwards, and splinters rained down to the linoleum floor. Whatever was opening it had enormous strength, and it made Megan swallow in a dry throat. At least the latch-chain was still on, she saw.

  Around the door came a hand, shiny black, and looking like it was wearing gloves. The fingers were enormously long and ended in sharp points. Then another hand appeared above it, and then another below it. All only had three fingers. They combined to push against the door chain.

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph, give me strength, Megan prayed, as she aimed.

  More tiles were torn from the roof and then something dropped into the room above her. Karen, she thought, and heard Belle growling.

  “Give me strength,” she said through fear-gritted teeth and watering eyes.

  Upstairs she heard the dog working herself into a snarling fury, just as the chain exploded into pieces and the front door burst open.

  She fired.

  Time seemed to slow down. In the split-second flash of the discharge Megan saw the things that had broken in. They stood about five feet tall, were in three segments and had multiple arms and legs. But the eyes were large, human-like and dispassionate, and they fixed on her with deadly interest.

  The blast blew the first thing backwards, but then the ceiling caved in and more dropped into the room with the sound of armor plating landing on a hard surface. From upstairs she heard Karen’s fear-filled scream.

  “What are you?” She yelled and fired again, and again, until she was grabbed and stabbed by something in the neck. It was so agonizing she dropped the gun.

  She raised her hands, but they went stiff as something freezing flooded her body. She fell to the floor, stunned and unable to move.

  Megan felt herself lifted up, and from the corner of her eye she saw another of the horrifying beings dragging Karen by the hair down from her bedroom. Somewhere, a long way away, she heard a dog’s mournful howl as she was dragged out into the cold night air.

  *

  Belle circled in the bedroom where she had been shut in. Den mother had gone out to investigate the bad smells, and then came the sound that had been a dagger to the dog’s heart – her den mother’s scream.

  The hundred-pound German shepherd looked at the bar door handle, trembling now with rage and fear, and tried to calm herself as she remembered watching how it had been used. She lifted a paw to rake at it, again and again, until the handle lever was dragged down, and the door opened a crack – it was enough to get her nose in and then to shoulder it open.

  Belle sprinted down the upstairs hallway and skidded to a stop at the top of the steps in time to see den mother being dragged. White-hot fury shot through the dog, and base impulses were all that remained: defend, attack, kill.

  Massive teeth bared, she leaped.

  *

  Hammerson sat, still as stone, his eyes unblinking as one of the drone operators followed the huge silicoid bugs on the outskirts of Walnut Grove.

  He was in awe of its size as the things were nearly as tall as a man now. He gripped the armrests of the chair so hard the leather popped as he watched one of the horrors drag a body, or stunned person, into the mouth of a disused mine shaft.

  “How many are missing?” he asked evenly.

  The young soldier checked the data, and then half turned. “Very few heeded the evacuation call, sir, so just over four hundred stayed behind. They’re all missing.”

  Hammerson ground his teeth for a moment. “Follow it in.”

  The drone pilot dropped the near soundless, compact flying machine to ground level and entered the shaft. Inside, the walls and floor were coated in a thick resin mixture like solidified molasses. After another few minutes of tracking the strange creature they entered a larger juncture point in the mine.

  “Found ’em,” the soldier announced.

  Hammerson sat forward – there were the missing people, hundreds of them, all stacked and piled around the shaft sides. The drone camera zoomed in on one of the bodies. Thankfully it still seemed to have bone mass within it and hadn’t been sucked dry.

  He suddenly had a thought. “Are they alive?”

  The pilot pressed some buttons and then read the data. “Got heat signatures, but very low.” He turned. “Like those people are in hibernation.”

  As the drone panned around in a slow 360-degree spin it picked out all of the bodies.

  “Get in lower.” Hammerson said.

  The drone approached one and lowered to hover only a few feet above it. Hammerson craned forward, speaking softly through clenched teeth when he saw what had been done to them.

  “You sons of bitches.”

  The body was covered with what looked like opalescent pearls the size of golf balls. It didn’t take a genius to work out what they were – eggs.

  They’re eating us and also using us as freaking incubators. Hammerson bit back the gorge that rose in his throat.

  This is what they’re doing now, he thought, taking the bodies and storing them in a hive. This must be the newest form of their evolution, to rapidly increase their swarm population.

  His first instinct was to incinerate it and turn it all to ash, if he even could. But with living people in there, he needed to try and get them out. He pressed a button on his speaker.

  “We need to get a team –”

  “Sir … they’re hatching.”

  Hammerson star
ed back at the screen as the soft eggs bulged, blackened, then finally burst open with splash of muscousy fluid. The fist-sized creatures immediately swarmed over their immobile hosts, seeking out exposed skin.

  One of the creatures stopped at a female arm, the bicep, near a tattoo. Hammerson squinted, it looked a little like the mathematical symbol for pi. As he stared the tiny horrors buried their heads into the flesh.

  Hammerson watched the bodies soften and flatten as the bones and silicon were liquefied and then drawn out.

  “I’ve seen enough.” Hammerson got to his feet. “From now on evacuation orders will be militarily enforced.”

  The HAWC leader looked one last time at the screen as the drone withdrew. All the bodies were now covered in the feeding bug larvae, and there would be no survivors.

  He lifted the phone and called through to General Chilton. It was time for the president to authorize a deep burn. Starting with this damn mine shaft.

  CHAPTER 37

  Matt felt a sense of gloominess as they headed for the large stone doorway. He’d never even thought about having a plan B, so this setback was beyond depressing. Added to the personal failure, he felt he had let everyone down: his team, Hammerson, and maybe the entire human race.

  As they came to the huge slab of door, Maddock pushed past the group. “Hold.” He pointed to Vin and Klara. “HAWCs, take us out, eyes open.”

  The pair lifted their guns, and went out spreading left and right. They waited for a second or two, and then Maddock nodded for Matt, Lana and Hartigan to follow.

  “I don’t know where we go from here,” Matt said to Lana.

  She gave him a crooked smile. “Well, my dad used to say that sometimes opportunity knocks, and if we don’t answer, then it just goes and waits around the corner until we’re ready.”

  He chuckled. “Wow, that dad of yours was the ultimate optimist.”

  “That he was.” She grinned back. “The answers are still there for us to find them, you’ll see.”

  He shrugged. “I’d feel better if someone else hadn’t beat us to them. I just hope they use them for the same reason we were.”

  He looked at her in the beam of his flashlight, and saw her mouth turned down. “Yeah, I’m not confident,” she said. “You said Hitler thought they were a weapon.”

  Matt nodded. “Whoever controls the solution will control the world.”

  “Let’s go.” Maddock herded the rest of the group out.

  They came out onto the rock platform, and saw the submersible hard up against the shelf waiting for them. Miguel lifted his head above the waterline behind the domed glass front to give them a small salute.

  Lana waved back, just as something swooped at her. She shrieked and ducked. “Damn things again.”

  “We got company.” Klara had her gun up and swung about. “Too fast.”

  In the flashlight and headlamp beams the things darted by far too quick to see what they were.

  Then Vin cursed, and they turned to see something hanging onto the side of his face. His reflexes were like lightning and he reached up to grab and tear it away before it did too much damage. His face still bled profusely and in the glare of their lights they saw him holding something about the size of a large bat that wriggled and thrashed in his gloved hand. A scaly tail whipped for a moment and then wrapped around his wrist.

  He held it out. “A lizard,” he said. “It’s a flying fucking lizard.”

  The thing was about a foot long with a flat tail, wedge-shaped head and large round black eyes. It squealed and snapped vicious jaws lined with razor-sharp teeth like a piranha.

  “Wow, evolution at work,” Matt said. “There’s a gecko native to Easter Island. I’m guessing this is what happens when they get trapped in a cave for twelve thousand years.”

  Suddenly, as if in response to the captured creature’s squeals, the air was full of the creatures. Vin tossed the thing away hard, but more came at him. They also landed on Lana.

  “They smell the blood, they’re going into a frenzy,” Vin shouted.

  Lana covered her head and cried out, “Get them off me.”

  Matt leaped to her and threw his arms over her head as they crouched together.

  “Everyone get down!” Maddock yelled.

  Klara remained on her feet as one came at her. She shot a hand out to grab it from the air. The crunch of bones was audible as she crumpled the body in her grip. Another shot past, this one taking the tip from her ear.

  “Sonofabitch.” Klara drew her gun, held it two-handed with the flashlight along the barrel, and started firing. Her aim was deadly, or there were just so many that she couldn’t miss, but every shot exploded one of the things out of the air.

  “Hold your fire, goddamnit,” Maddock roared. “And get the hell down.”

  Klara screamed, teeth bared, blood running down her neck. She pointed her gun in the air as something much larger landed on her upper back. Large talons sunk into her shoulders.

  In the glare of the wavering beams, it looked like a scaly chimpanzee with triangular mouth and slit eyes. On the top of its membranous wings were hooks that it used to fix itself to the female HAWC.

  Vin swung to aim at it, but Klara fired upwards and it flapped away. But as soon as it was gone, another even larger reptilian creature slammed into her, and she staggered for a moment under its weight. Then, with a few beats of huge wings, it began to lift off taking Klara with it.

  “Shit.” Maddock ran at his HAWC, but already she was ten feet in the air screaming curses, and firing wildly.

  Blood rained down as more of the flying reptiles landed on her and assisted in taking their prize back to whatever loft they had waiting high in the cavern.

  Klara fired and fired, with most shots missing their target, until high up in the darkness above them one must had struck a weak spot in the cave roof.

  The high-energy projectile cracked the rock. Already under enormous pressure from the seawater, the thin skin of the dome was capping and holding down millions of tons of pressure from the compressed air in the cavern.

  The small crack lengthened. Like spidery veins it branched out in all directions. And then a fist-sized section of the cave roof blew out.

  A shaft of light was thrown down onto the cave floor like a spotlight and an unearthly scream filled the cavern. But it wasn’t from any animal’s scream of pain, instead it was the air rushing to be released from its many millennia-old prison.

  The ancient environment was breached. The fist-sized hole blew out to a basketball-sized opening, and then manhole-sized. The air rushed around them like a tornado.

  The reptiles panicked and fled. And then, from out of the air, Klara crashed to the ground. Amazingly, the torn and bloodied woman staggered to her feet, and tried to reload.

  Maddock sprinted over and grabbed hold of her. He planted his legs wide to keep his balance and stared upwards, yelling something to her over the maelstrom and then pointing upwards.

  Klara looked up, nodded, and then widened her own stance. Vin stood and did the same, but Matt, Lana and Hartigan crouched and hugged the rock. Everyone continued to watch until a louder noise dragged their heads around – the sound of steel scraping on rock.

  “The submersible!” Vin yelled over the gale force winds.

  They turned to see the water rising and lifting over the rock shelf. The submersible was also lifted, but being dragged onto its side. They could see Miguel working frantically on the controls, and the propeller kicked up water behind it as it began to tip over.

  Oh shit, Matt thought, we left the hatch open. “Miguel!” he yelled and motioned to the top of the craft.

  Miguel left his seat, maybe to attend to the hatch. But in a blink the submarine went from being upright to being sideways and flooding with water. The steel craft went from buoyancy to dead weight in a matter of seconds. If Miguel tried for the exit he never made it, as he would have been pushing against the torrent of water rushing in.

  “The ocean is
coming in, the cave’s going to be flooded!” Maddock yelled.

  Matt turned from the HAWC leader back to the water, but the submersible was already gone. And Miguel with it.

  There was now only one option. “Climb!” Matt yelled.

  They sprinted for the cave walls. Matt grabbed a handhold and then briefly turned. As the water started to rise higher, so too came the water’s occupants.

  “Ah, shit no.”

  The shark fins circled ever faster as if excited at the prospect of getting access to the warm and soft land-dwellers.

  Matt had surfed all his life, and the one thing that scared the hell out of him when he was sitting far out behind the breakers was seeing a shadow in the water. He felt his scalp crawl from fear.

  “Lana,” he yelled.

  “Get moving,” she yelled back, already way ahead of him and a dozen feet up from the platform floor.

  They scaled up the inside of the hollow seamount, Matt climbing beside Lana who was proving more capable than he was. Vin, Klara and Maddock also scaled the rock face like professional rock climbers, only Hartigan seemed to struggle.

  Perhaps the scientist had chosen a poor place to climb or had never before scaled anything but he quickly fell behind, and in a few seconds, he was only just keeping ahead of the fast rising water.

  From above, a large chunk of stone fell away. It struck like a bomb and showered them with seawater. It also threw down even more sunlight, further illuminating their prison.

  Matt looked up to see the flying lizards being sucked through the hole, and he wondered whether they’d enjoy their freedom, or would soon perish in a world that had different rules, different predators.

  “Look.” Lana hugged the wall momentarily.

  Matt gripped onto a stony protrusion and turned. Lana nodded with her head toward the wall just across from them.

  “A message,” he said and squinted. An area of the rock face had been smoothed, and there was writing, and images. Matt squinted as he tried to quickly read it.

  It was from the Aztlanteans – their final message for the future.

  Matt grimaced as he tried to get a little closer. The water was coming up fast, but he had to read it. It showed images of the sky, and what had to be things striking the ground with long, fiery tails.