The Black: Outbreak

by Paul E. Cooley

  “Sure he is,” Mixon said.

  They walked beneath the last security light. Mixon pulled the flashlight from his belt and pressed the recessed button. It clicked softly and a tight beam of bluish-white light slashed the darkness.

  “After you, boss,” Mixon said.

  Macumber turned his head and stared. “I, um— I think you should go first. You know this place better than I do.”

  Mixon grunted. Fucking coward. Shaking his head, Mixon stepped forward into the darkness, Macumber a meter behind. The walls seemed to close in with each step. He didn’t want the boss to sniff it out, but the basement was starting to freak him out too. Mixon had never seen it this dark in the building.

  He wanted to stop walking and rethink this. Come back with more lights, maybe. There had to be a better way than just heading into the—

  “What’s that smell?” Macumber asked.

  Mixon stopped. His every nerve shook with electricity. Macumber was right. There was a scent that didn’t belong. His nostrils had been trying to tell him that for several moments, but his fear had distracted him.

  “Maybe whatever took out the lights broke a sewer line.” The words had come out in a hesitant, shuddering stream. Mixon bit his lip. Calm the hell down, he told himself. Mixon took a deep breath and then coughed. The smell was so strong it practically singed his nostrils.

  “Doesn’t smell like shit,” Macumber said. His voice was so tremulous that Mixon turned to him. Lines of worry crisscrossed Macumber’s pale face.

  Mixon was about to agree when he realized what it did smell like. He swallowed hard and tried to speak. His voice did little more than make a croaking sound. He cleared his throat and tried again. “We might have a homeless guy down here, boss. Cooking rats or some damned thing.”

  “No,” Macumber said. “Something got fried by a short circuit. Don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” Mixon lied. “That’s more plausible.” He moved the flashlight in a slow circle. At first, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The concrete apron running between the two buildings was white and clean as— Wait. Clean? The janitorial staff hardly ever came down here to clean, let alone polish the goddamned floor. But it shined back at him as if someone had spent hours mopping and polishing it. No, he thought. You can’t shine concrete. He took a step backward.

  Macumber narrowed his eyes. “Something wrong?”

  “I’m not going down there,” Mixon whispered.

  “Sure we are.” Macumber’s voice was filled with false bravado. “We have to get the electricity back. For security.”

  Security, Mixon thought. If there was ever a time he wanted an armed guard in this gloomy dungeon, now was it. But Macumber was right. They had to get the phones back up. Not to mention find out what the hell happened to the lights. If there was an emergency and they needed the guards, how would they contact them?

  “Okay,” Mixon said and started walking forward. He made it three steps before a shadow jittered in the beam of his flashlight. He stopped suddenly and Macumber walked into the back of him. Mixon didn’t scream in fright, but it was a near thing. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  He felt like screaming. “If you weren’t hiding behind me, you’d know.”

  Macumber giggled. “Sorry.”

  Mixon wanted to yell at him, but he couldn’t. His eyes were fixed on the spooky shadow dancing in the beam of light. It moved like a worm wriggling on a hook. But it was too big. “See that shadow?”

  He felt Macumber move beside him. The man’s breathing was more snuffly than ever. “That’s fucked up. I mean,” Macumber said haltingly, “what’s casting the shadow?”

  That’s when Mixon’s balls turned to ice. He wasn’t looking at a shadow. That thing was real. It was moving. And then it started moving toward them.

  His stunned brain processed the information a little faster than Macumber’s. And that’s all that saved him. He took three steps backward, tripped over his own feet, and fell to the concrete floor. His tailbone shrieked in pain, but Mixon barely noticed. He was too focused on the tentacle lashing out from the darkness and spearing Macumber through the chest.

  Blood and bone sprayed out the man’s lower back. Moisture peppered Mixon’s face. Macumber’s body went rigid. A creaking sound erupted from his open mouth as the hooked appendage jutting from Macumber’s back flattened, and then the large man flew into the darkness.

  The stench that had underlain everything was now palpable enough to sting his eyes. A deep-frying crackle filled the junction and echoed off the concrete walls. Mixon’s frozen claw of a hand held the flashlight. The beam stabbed forward, showing only the floor directly ahead of him. He shuffled backward, the light in his hands jittering wildly. Something moved in the darkness with a clicking sound.

  Mixon’s brain screamed at him to move. To get the hell up and flee. His body finally listened.

  As if in a dream, time slowed to a crawl. He pushed up with his arms and managed to get his feet under him. His knuckles bled from scraping the concrete, but he hardly noticed. He stood in a half-crouch, the flashlight still gripped in his hand, the beam pointed into the darkness. He wasn’t sticking around to watch. He turned to run.

  He made it four meters from the gloom before he stumbled. The stumble turned into an awkward, painful roll across the concrete. When he came to a stop, a volcanic eruption of pain soared up his right leg. Mixon rolled onto his back and reached for the wounded extremity. His hands passed through where flesh and denim should have been and touched wet concrete. Still screaming, he sat up and looked down. His leg was gone from the calf down.

  The scream stopped with a choke of horror as his brain finally managed to process what he was seeing. A meter away, the severed length of flesh, foot still in the shoe, lay in a slick ribbon of dull crimson. Blood poured from the stump, looking strangely bright beneath the dull glow of the security lamps.

  Still cradling the remains of his leg, a billion thoughts went through his mind. He knew he should remove his belt and wrap it around his thigh as a tourniquet. He wondered if the trauma team could reattach the severed portion of his leg. He didn’t want to be a cripple, goddammit. He couldn’t do his job on crutches or a wheelchair or whatever the fuck. He’d never be able to play darts with a prosthetic leg. He’d never—

  A sound finally dragged his mind back to reality. He slowly looked up into the gloom. A leg appeared. And then another. And another. The darkness seemed to fold into a shape that was even darker. A long tentacle that ended in a bloody hook flipped through the air and then across the concrete. It speared his missing limb and dragged it backward.

  The pain was suddenly forgotten as were all the mundane thoughts of mortality. There was nothing left but the gibbering madness of fear as the shape coalesced into the light. The tentacle holding his leg flipped backward and deposited the meaty flesh into a maw of black.

  Click. Clickety. Click.

  The creature moved forward and the scream that had been locked in his throat erupted through his mouth. Vocal cords tearing from the strain, it quickly devolved into a guttural drone. Eyestalks waved from the squat thing’s rounded body, the bulbs atop each of them peering at him with alien malevolence. Five tentacles fluttered through the air making a whistling sound.

  But it was the mouth. The goddamned mouth was filled with jagged obsidian teeth, the inside glistening like the blackest oil imaginable.

  When Mixon’s attempt at a scream finally gave out, he couldn’t draw breath. The creature was a mere meter away when it bent toward him. The stench of rotted, fried meat mixed with the coppery tang of fresh blood emanated from the tooth-filled hole in reality. Mixon stared in horrified wonder, his mouth open in a silent scream.

  The creature sizzled and crackled and then lunged at his other leg. His foot disappeared into its mouth. A tentacle lashed out and punctured his shoulder. He scrambled to keep it from dragging him inside its mouth, but he couldn’t get purchase. He tr
ied to scream again as the thing dissolved his legs and torso. Finally, his glassy-eyed dead face disappeared into the maw.

  A moment later, his keys, cellphone, and the metal fasteners from his jeans dropped through the creature’s bottom and fell to the concrete floor with a cheery jingle.

  Chapter 24

  The night shift was Roche’s favorite. It was why he’d volunteered for the job years ago. Every other doctor whined and complained when their rotation put them in the morgue at night. But Roche? Shit, if he had his way, he’d never see the sun again unless it was during vacation. And hell, even then he’d sleep all day until it was time to go out on the town.

  Working at night had certain advantages. For one thing, he never had to deal with much traffic. For another, his breakfast was always an early dinner at a swanky restaurant. While all the other poor slobs in the city were stuck in traffic, he drank coffee or iced tea and watched them struggle to make their way through the snarled freeways. Dealing with that insanity was more than enough to make any sane person find a way out. Roche had found his escape many years ago.

  The morgue was always quiet, but at night, it was deathly so. The day shift left him plenty of work to do and some very interesting cases to be sure. But at night was the car wrecks, the shootings, the emergency cases that even God couldn’t put back together.

  And the only thing Roche liked better than being awake at night was working on papers about traumatic injuries. Thus far, he’d had seven published, been invited to speak at ten different conferences, and held a somewhat infamous distinction of being a phenom when it came to death. Medical examiners from all over the United States asked him to consult on their more difficult cases. And Roche had seen some absolutely strange shit in his time at Ben Taub. One day, he’d have to find some new digs, but for now, the basement and the chilly, stainless steel morgue was his home. And home was a happy place.

  When the basement lights went out, he didn’t even notice. They’d moved the morgue storage and examination suites to their own circuit to ensure the bodies stayed cold and they didn’t have a repeat of what happened after Hurricane Ike. He hadn’t been at the hospital then, but he’d heard the stories of the rotting bodies and the meal-worm infestation that had taken months to get rid of. For all he knew, the little bastards were still in the sheet rock, living, and waiting for the next chance to chomp on some dead flesh.

  Roche, dressed in a Skinny Puppy T-shirt beneath his warm smock and apron, stood before the body of a once beautiful woman. “Once” was the key word. Now she was little more than a crispy critter.

  A dark crust of blackened flesh covered her face. Her aquiline nose had practically melted, the edges puffed out like a burned marshmallow. Her hairless head, covered in third and fourth-degree burns, was a monument to the effects of extreme heat on human skin.

  Roche didn’t have any details about the accident. He only knew she’d been brought into the ER six hours ago. DOA. If she’d been alive when they tossed her in the ambulance, he’d be amazed. He imagined the poor bastards that scraped her remains from the fire were too horrified to try and take her pulse. And there was little they could have done anyway.

  The damage to her body’s exterior had only been part of the cause of death. Once Roche opened her up, he found something much worse.

  Her lungs were black and scorched. The heat had boiled her stomach acid and punctured the lining. Even her blood had turned to steam inside her veins. In short, she’d been cooked inside and out. Not even Christ could come back from this kind of damage.

  He was in the midst of taking his third round of pictures of the chest cavity when he heard something outside the morgue. Something in the hallway. Roche put the camera on the tool tray and looked at the closed door for suite two.

  The noise came again. It sounded like a scream. He walked to the door, his blood-streaked apron flapping with his steps. He opened the steel door and stared into the dark hallway. Yup, the lights had gone out. Again.

  Roche sighed. That big bastard Mixon would no doubt be heading this way soon. He smiled. He couldn’t wait to show him the woman on the table. The last time he’d tortured the man with a stiff, he thought the maintenance engineer was going to pass out. Which would have been hilarious. But the look on the man’s face had been enough to put a smile on Roche’s face for weeks. This was going to be good.

  He walked to the phone hanging from the wall. The emergency lights barely provided enough illumination for him to see the keypad. He typed in the super’s number and waited. He frowned. The buttons made noise, but there was no ring. No dial tone. He jiggled the fang, but nothing happened. He placed the phone back on its cradle with a sigh.

  He had two options. He could wait for Mixon to arrive, or he could go out and get him. He peered back into the autopsy room. She’d wait. There wasn’t much more he could do anyway. The cause of death was stupidly simple. Unless, of course, there was a chemical compliment he didn’t know about. He found that rather unlikely, but he’d have to check anyway.

  Regardless, he was going to need a computer for his report. He checked his watch and whistled. It was halfway through his shift. Mixon was probably sleeping. Sighing, he removed the apron and smock, hung them from the hooks inside the morgue room, and then stripped off his gloves. He relished the snap of putting on a new pair as well as taking them off. It was the little things in life that made him smile. He tossed them in the bin and then washed his hands in the steel sink.

  Another scream wailed from outside the morgue. Roche frowned. That sounded like Mixon. What the hell was going on out there? He ran down the hall to the security door and pressed the emergency bar.

  The door flew open and Roche stopped in his tracks. The mounted basement security lights lit the area with a garish glow, but it was more than enough light to show him why Mixon was screaming. And then suddenly Roche was screaming too.

  In the middle of the basement hall, a massive shadow dragged Mixon’s portly body into itself. And then Roche realized it wasn’t a shadow at all. Several eyestalks protruded from the creature’s head. They all swung in his direction as Mixon’s body disappeared completely. The creature turned on its multi-jointed legs, the hallway echoing with loud clicks as each talon hit the concrete.

  A mouth, blacker than anything he’d thought possible, opened as if in hunger. And then the thing was running toward him.

  Roche was still screaming in terror when his brain finally realized it was coming for him. The thrash drumbeat of its clicking claws pounded in his ears. It was a mere three meters away when he slammed the metal door shut. The security door banged as the auto-lock engaged.

  Roche screeched when the thing crashed into the door. The steel held, but a dimple appeared in its middle. And then another. And another. He stepped backward down the hall, his eyes riveted on the steel door’s surface.

  This wasn’t happening. Simply wasn’t happening. No fucking way this was happening.

  More dimples appeared in the door. The creature was battering it with something sharp and strong. Roche continued walking backward until he hit the back wall. He shrieked again, thinking at first he’d somehow wandered into the thing. When he realized it was just the wall, he swallowed his gorge, and peered to the right.

  The morgue! Have to stay in the morgue! He side-stepped into the autopsy room with the crispy critter and closed the inner steel door. He locked it from the inside. The room’s brightness hurt his eyes after the long stint in the gloom, but he didn’t care. Light. Light was good.

  Something crashed in the hallway and a jet of urine shot into his underwear. The creature had made its way inside. He was so fucked.

  Roche stepped away from the heavy door and walked backward until his ass hit something. He let out a little squeal and turned. He’d run into the autopsy table. The charred and crispy corpse was still there. Roche loosed a relieved sigh.

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  He whirled around. The door to autopsy room two shivered. Three dimples h
ad appeared in its previously unblemished surface. Roche stepped around the table. Heart pounding in his ears, he flicked his eyes from side to side. There was nowhere to hide and no weapons besides the steel instruments next to the examination table.

  The roar in his ears from his trip-hammering heart and elevated blood pressure made it hard to think. Roche moved around so he could reach the instruments. Weapons, he reminded himself. Weapons. Yeah, right. He’d just watched the goddamned thing swallow a human being whole. What good were scalpels, bone hammers, and saws going to do against it?

  More dimples appeared in the door. It was coming. It would smash the door off the hinges just like it did with the outer one. He was fucked. There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.

  Wait, he thought. There is somewhere to hide. He cast a glance backward to the stainless-steel shelves. He could make like a corpse, use one of the empties, and wait the thing out. He could do that. He could.

  But first, he needed a distraction. He needed to confuse it. He didn’t know how smart it was, but this was his only option. If it figured out he was in one of the shelves, he’d be trapped. He stared at the corpse on the table, mumbled an apology, and then pushed it.

  The body hit the floor with a wet, crunchy thud. The fluids that hadn’t boiled away in the fire spread in a yellow and red pool. Curls of blackened, crusty flesh shook off the corpse like fried chicken skin.

  He’d give it something to eat. Anything. Just as long as it stayed the fuck away from him. He turned and opened one of the six doors in the storage wall. A light appeared inside and showed him the shape of a corpse covered in a sheet. Roche cursed, closed it, and then opened another with the same result.

  The creature banged on the autopsy room door again. More dimples in the metal. The goddamned thing was using itself like a battering ram. He didn’t even bother apologizing this time. He rolled out the shelf and flung the sheet off the corpse. He caught the sight of a very pale male face, but didn’t take a good look. It didn’t matter. That’s a corpse, he told himself as he pulled it off the tray. I need to keep from being one.