From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  There were some exceptions.

  Law enforcement, government agencies, and of course, homeland security, were all paying attention. With so little information to work with, however, these institutions were slow to respond. Certainly, they became aware there was a problem, and by 9:15, the various machines were springing to life. It was not until much later (a little after 10:30, in fact), that they would come to realize just how big a problem it was.

  On the Internet, uncertain what exactly was going on, footage was being bounced around with quotes like, ‘Check out this weirdness from Bangor, Maine’ and ‘Woman bites Man’. In many cases, the number of hits compared favorably with cat videos, police shootings, and celebrity sightings. By 10:00, in places not already blacked out by the advancing threat, ‘Woman bites Man’ reached over a million hits, and was fast becoming the most outrageous news item on the dial.

  Still. If you were paying attention, there was plenty of warning.

  Sitting in his office at 9:00am on the University of Toronto campus, Professor Nicholas Scratchard had been paying attention. He’d been in a kind of gallows mood over his impending 9:30am undergraduate class (Tuesdays and Thursdays. God, had he been drinking when they harpooned him into that nightmare?), and had been desperately searching the Internet for some kind of psychological escape hatch, when he stumbled on to ‘Woman bites Man’.

  Startled, but intrigued nonetheless, he watched it all the way through, and then clicked on another video from Bangor, Maine titled ‘Drive-Thru Dust-Up’. This second clip showed two minutes of soundless argument between two drivers in a Drive-Thru, interrupted by a hoard of violent, rampaging pedestrians. What followed after was blurry and difficult to follow, as the camerawoman grew hysterical at what she was witnessing, causing the camera view to bounce and twist hopelessly. Then, clear and intelligible, the words ‘Oh my God, they’re eating them’ was heard close to the camera, and the feed turned off.

  Fascinated, Professor Scratchard stared at the footage, replaying it once. His impressive eyebrows furrowed with puzzled concentration atop his deep-lidded, brown-eyed gaze, and his unshaven cheeks scowled with concern. He reached for a pack of cigarettes, removed one and lit up without looking. Exhaling smoke, he continued surfing, hoping to find something to explain this phenomenon.

  There were false leads. ‘Strange Incident at the Supermarket’ had turned out to be a video of a dog pushing a shopping cart around a parking lot. ‘Bangor Bang’ was a car accident. But he found enough (‘Terrorists in Maine?’ ‘Superhuman Psycho’ ‘Man eats Human Prey’) to stoke the fires of his growing apprehension.

  If this was a hoax, he thought, it was a damn good one.

  Smoke flooded into his lungs as he considered the footage. On a positive note, he realized, he needn’t fear canceling his 9:30 lecture today. A bit distractedly, he noticed the clock now read 9:25 and curtly phoned his TA to inform his students to go home, or maybe even consider leaving school early today.

  He needed to know more. If it was a hoax, then he would be in for (yet another) stern lecture from the Dean of Sciences. Not pleasant, but he had become rather used to them. The implications of the footage he’d already seen, however incredible or farfetched, were too troubling to be ignored. He briefly considered trying to hack into the Bangor Police database. He was fairly confident in his ability to do so, if not the time it might take or his chances of getting away with it. His work in another life writing specialized algorithms and crunching numbers at MIT had left him more than qualified. He would almost certainly be caught, of course, but if what he was seeing was true, that was likely to be the least of his worries.

  Before he could decide, “Terrorist action in New England?” yielded a scene that caused his jaw to drop in astonishment.

  An apartment building a little after 9:30am was caught in the throes of collapsing. Masonry, glass, steel, and dust flooded the screen. The shrieks and shouts of surprise from the onlookers filming the event were nearly muffled by the cacophony of thunderous crashing and tortured, squealing metal. The cloud of debris closed in on the camera angle, engulfing it, but not before showing a sight to chill Nicholas’ heart.

  Human silhouettes, impossibly, were moving around in the haze. Like a scene from a horror movie, some moved with unnatural speed, or clutched other, struggling silhouettes in their terrible grasp, or moved menacingly in the direction of the camera, which flickered out only seconds later.

  Why, he thought in amazement, was the news not reporting this?

  They would. He glanced at the clock. 9:40am. They would report it, just as soon as they started taking it seriously, only… they couldn’t take it seriously because, first of all, it was insane, and second, the... the phenomenon had already shut down all the local news feeds. If you were anywhere in the vicinity of this… this… whatever it was, then you had only minutes before...

  “Are you smoking in here?”

  He jumped like an electrified cat, swiveling in his chair to face the open door.

  “Oh,” said the woman who’d spoken, softening her tone. She had short brown hair, thick glasses, a stocky body, and a face built for outrage. “It’s you, Professor Scratchard. For a moment, I thought it was someone else. You know… you’re not supposed to be smoking in here. You’ll have to put that out.”

  Nicolas glanced at the still burning cigarette in his hand (his second? When did he finish the first?) He looked back at the screen. Absently, he stood up from his chair, took a deep drag, and approached the door.

  “Did you hear me? I said-”

  The rest of her words were muffled as Professor Scratchard closed the door in her face. Then, he returned to his chair and spent the next ten minutes gaining access to the police database in Bangor.

  By 10:00am, roughly, he sat staring at the screen, mind blown.

  If the visuals were to be believed - if they weren’t, in fact, some kind of incredible hoax - then these improbable creatures defied at least half a dozen biological limitations. There were exactly zero organisms larger than a cockroach that could survive a collapsing apartment tower unscathed, let alone incite one to collapse. The human body simply wasn’t constructed for that sort of thing. Shatter concrete? Bend steel? Absolute rubbish. Better chance for a jellyfish to survive a two hundred mile per hour impact.

  And yet…

  Here was a phenomenon that spread like a virus and which… quite literally re-metabolized the human machine. Victims - the ones that weren’t outright eaten, as if that weren’t already insane enough – had their tissue altered into some sort of interchanging, translocating mutagen, like a kind of protoplasmic plasticine. Once converted, the vestigial human form and mechanics were paradoxically both enhanced and incidental to overall functionality. Strength, speed, durability, savage but selective predatory behavior… How does something like that evolve? Where does it get the caloric energy to regenerate or to perform feats of superhuman strength? Human muscles (fed by a blood flow these creatures didn’t seem to need) would rip apart from stress before they could ever exert that kind of force. And why hold onto to the human form at all? It’s wildly inefficient, and given the demonstrative polymorphic capabilities, the organism should be able to adopt any form it pleased.

  He closed the Bangor Police database and typed up a fresh search on any new information. Something had to be happening by now. The first time-stamped event had been an 8:00am summons to some tacky curio shop called ‘the Eighth Wonder’. There was an attached data file containing footage from a traffic-cam from across the street, and which Scratchard hadn’t looked at yet, but it hardly mattered. Two hours should be enough time for the government to get its act together.

  It was almost 10:15am. He lit up another cigarette in a plume of smoke, watching the screen...

  ... and froze with the lighter halfway back to his pocket.

  “Are there undead in Portland?” the file asked.

  His mouth went dry. Portland, Maine? He tapped the play button.

 
; It was footage from an apartment dweller, showing a riot of some kind at the base of his building. Looking down from a fifth or sixth floor balcony, the video shook as it recorded people being dragged to the ground. One attacker – Scratchard had to pause the video to get a good look, and still had trouble accepting what he saw – grabbed a fat man and, with a mouth that stretched to inhuman size, bit his head clean off. The blood sprayed, and the creature dropped its victim and moved on. Just before the footage ended, the headless body slowly climbed to its feet, with a swirl of liquid flesh regenerating the tissue and bone where the head had been.

  “If anybody sees this,” came the last desperate plea from the man, as he turned the camera on himself, “you have to send help. We’re going to try and make a run for it but…”

  A muffled ‘thump’ could be heard, and the cameraman looked up in panic, just before the feed turned off.

  Portland? They’ve reached Portland? But that’s impossible.

  He checked Google maps, just to be sure.

  The phenomena had spread from Bangor to Portland, a distance of almost two hundred kilometers in the span of just over two hours! On a clear stretch of highway, in a car with a full tank of gas, it might just be possible to match it without breaking any speed limits.

  His mind was a kaleidoscope of numbers as he considered the math, when another report caught his attention.

  Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, also had a report. But that was…

  He did another quick search.

  … over four hundred and fifty kilometers, including a ferry… unless you just started swimming when you hit water. Then, it was closer to two hundred kilometers! Jesus Christ. That meant that they meant that they swam almost as fast as they spread across land, which was somewhere in the range of seventy or eighty kilometers an hour.

  But how?

  There was no logical explanation for the phenomena. It HAD be a virus of some kind - although even that seemed like a stretch - for it to spread so quickly. A quick check of the weather patterns over Bangor eliminated the faint possibility of it being an airborne. The wind was blowing to the Northeast, which might explain Yarmouth, but certainly not Portland. Besides, Scratchard had already seen plenty of visual evidence to confirm his suspicion that the disease, while virulent, was transferred only by contact.

  He shook his head in amazement. This didn’t make any sense. If it was nothing more than a mindless organism, traveling outwards from the ground zero where it spawned, it would spread most quickly in the direction of the most food. It wouldn’t leave Bangor for the surrounding countryside until the more concentrated local food supply was exhausted. It might chase after fleeing refugees, or spread arbitrarily into new ground looking for more prey, but at an omni-directional, uniform eighty kilometers an hour? As voracious as these things were, hunger alone wouldn’t cause them to spread so quickly. There were vast, empty stretches of wilderness and farmland outside Bangor, where the lack of human prey shouldn’t provide any kind of attraction. And with that in mind, why go swimming? Not many humans in the water, far out to sea, so why go there? And at a velocity almost as fast as on land?

  The answer struck him like a twenty-car pile-up of colliding epiphanies, and for a few seconds, he could do nothing more than sort through the carnage.

  Here, he realized, was an… an organism that was aware of its own existence on a geographical scale, and which was actively trying to spread out as far and fast as it could. The effect was like a wave traveling outwards in all directions, trailing infected as it passed. Those infected were the ones who hung around to devour or convert the local human populations, allowing the initial wave front to continue spreading outward.

  At that rate of spread, it would encircle the planet in less than four days, arriving in Toronto somewhere around 3:30 this afternoon.

  For a long time, Professor Scratchard sat there, idly considering the glowing tip of his cigarette as he rolled it gently between his fingertips and wondering what, if anything, could be done. His mind played over the footage he’d seen, subjectively testing logical deductions, analyzing behaviors, and postulating ideas. Memories of the scene from the apartment balcony, filming uninterrupted until the devastation had all played out on the ground, circulated in his imagination. When his cigarette burned out, he lit another, pondering the loop and swirl of the curling smoke as it rose from the hot, orange tip. The faint buzz of the overhead lights quietly serenaded him in the silence.

  Finally, with a sigh, he checked his watch, and saw that a great deal of time had passed, and that it was now 10:45. He leapt from his chair with a vigor that left it spinning and strode from his office.

  Leaving the building at a brisk pace, he headed down St. George Street towards the McLennan Physical Laboratories building, which was, at fourteen floors, one of the taller buildings on the downtown, U of T campus. He arrived a little after 11:00am.

  Obtaining the assistance of maintenance, he found the electrical room that serviced all of the McLennan Physical Laboratories, the Astronomy and Astrophysics building, as well as the Earth Sciences Center across the street. With an air of condescension that Scratchard found almost adorable, the maintenance man warned him of the dangers, until a two hundred dollar donation to his ‘save-the-janitor’ charity fund sent him away.

  “Well, okay,” the janitor told him, pocketing the money. “I can let you in. But I can’t just leave you here, unless you got authorization.”

  Scratchard was fine with that, and assured the man that he was merely curious. Inside, surrounded by the static hum of enough power to fry him several times over, he felt the skeleton of his plan start to take shape.

  He checked his wallet and found it empty, so he ducked into the bank across the street and emptied his account. It came to just a little over eight thousand dollars, and took all of twenty minutes.

  From there, he marched over to the Astronomy building, right next door to McLennan. Other than a few bleary-eyed students, the building itself was as quiet as a frat house on a Sunday morning. In this building, however, as a tenured, high-profile professor, Scratchard was able to act with a certain level of impunity. He was still breaking rules, of course. It would just take longer for someone to come along and stop him.

  Indeed, as he unlocked the AV room and removed - among other things - three, thirty thousand dollar laser projectors from their shelves, two passing graduate students caught him red-handed. In the face of his guilt, Scratchard was able brazen it out. And rather than allow the two students to run off and report the indiscretion, he recruited them to his cause.

  “Is this allowed?” the timid young woman named Melissa asked him. She glanced over at Todd who, in addition to a projector, was carrying loops of wires and cords.

  “Do you recognize me?” Scratchard demanded by way of response.

  “Y-yes,” she said. “Y-you’re famous.”

  “Then that ought to be enough for you,” he snapped. “Step lively! This is a last minute project set up by the Dean. Rest assured, you’ll be well-paid.”

  He pulled out five hundred dollars and split it up between them.

  “Oh!” Melissa said. That put everything in a whole new light.

  “That’s awesome,” Todd grunted, staggering after them, visions of beer dancing through his head.

  “Yes, it is,” Scratchard agreed, checking his watch.

  It was 12:45 when they finished positioning the projectors to Scratchard’s satisfaction. They were now deployed in varying positions around the McLennan building, aimed at the flat walls and spaces in the open square between the McLennan and Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories building.

  “What exactly are we doing, professor?” Todd asked, looking confused.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Scratchard said, studying his work. “Melissa? Do you know how to wire these things?”

  “Yes, professor. They’re basically the same as -”

  “Good. Make sure they’re done in the next hour. Call my cell phone directly if y
ou have any problems. And by the way… Do either of you have an Ipod or MP3 player that I can borrow? Something I can plug into the back of a computer.”

  With Melissa’s Ipod tucked into his shirt pocket, he strode off, leaving them to their work.

  At 12:55, he arrived at the Rabba Food Mart at the corner of St. George and College Streets. It was busy at the lunch hour. Scratchard immediately asked to speak to the manager.

  A pudgy, goateed man, with a nametag that said Donald appeared from the back office. He looked aggravated in his wrinkled, undersized uniform.

  “Did you have a complaint, sir?”

  “Not at all,” Scratchard said, pulling out his gold card in a flourish. “Just thought it would be most expedient to talk to the man in charge. Here is my gold card. Here is my ID. Are you very busy, Donald? I’m going to be needing a liaison.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “I’d like to buy all your bottled water,” Scratchard said, glancing down into a bargain, DVD bin. “And all your soft drinks, all your… do you know what? Just ring me up for every drink in your store. And all your food items, candy bars, magazines, and…”

  He felt around in his pockets, pulling out a half-empty pack of cigarettes.

  “Yes,” he added. “Definitely all of your cigarettes. And also, ring me up for these three DVDs. Um. Harriet’s Wedding. The Gun Protocol. And Open Seige. I need everything except the DVDs delivered to the top floor of the McLennan Building within the next two hours. I’ll have some students come and help you with the move.”

  Donald turned pale, blinking rapidly. “Are… are you serious?”

  “Did you see my card? Do you see my face? Even if I am crazy, it’s still the biggest sale you’ve ever seen. In fact, I’d like to invite you up to see what we’re doing on the top floor, if you’re interested. Trust me. You’ll be interested. Here. Take my cell number. Call me if you encounter any problems. Oh! And here’s an additional six hundred dollar gratuity to you, Donald, for your time and patience, with a two thousand dollar bonus if you finish in the time allowed.”