As he made his way back toward the hallway, Danny spotted the Second running through the flames. They both froze and Danny looked into its eyes. If the monster had a soul it was as black; there was no trace of anything resembling emotion. It was watching him curiously and Danny felt uncomfortable, like he was under a microscope. Even though he stood inches from chemical fuelled flames, the chill the creature’s gaze sent through him numbed him to the core. Danny had connected to every living thing on the planet and there was nothing like the creature that stood before him. It wore stolen parts, watched him with borrowed eyes, but there was nothing in it but hatred. Its body had shifted into a crab form and the long tentacle still grew from the center of its chest. It whipped the sharpened, barbed appendage at Danny but he tore it in half with tiger sharp claws made of red power. The power pulsed through him, granting him a whole new level of enhanced super human abilities. It was building up and he felt justified in using it, letting it loose.
“I like your face, hero man.” The Second rasped.
“Come on and fight you ugly little bastard.” Danny retorted.
The creature scrambled to the right, looking as if it was going to charge. Instead it leapt sideways and smashed through the soft ceiling panels. It was digging its way up and out and Danny was too slow to stop it. Something exploded in the room and the sealed windows blasted outwards. Danny could see the sun and he headed for it, letting the creature go its own direction. He caught a glimpse of fire fighters below before flying straight into the air, high over top of the burning building. Hitting the quarantine bubble, he swore to himself and prepared to tear through it. Then he realized there were people below, innocent people. The monster had escaped and it could have gone anywhere. The Growth was on the loose again in San Diego.
Danny continued to pull energy up from the Earth, invisible to anyone else but visible to him as a twisting bright red umbilical cord. It flowed up and around the building and washed over him. Floating on the energy wave, he closed his eyes and raised his left hand. As he spread his fingers open wide he pushed outwards with his power, sending his mind out into the city below him. The anger and frustration boiling inside him pushed his power to new levels, letting him connect and control it far better than he ever had before. New ideas raced through his brain, new ways of manipulating the life force he connected to.
Suddenly he could see through the eyes of every animal in the city and each of them looked for any glimpse of the Second. Hopping from body to body, animal to animal, Danny saw every inch of the city. He thought he might have glimpsed it once or twice but it was too inefficient, most of the animals were hiding or comfortable at home. As useful as it was, they were not watching, not on guard, so Danny would have to find the alien another way.
Frustrated he opened his eyes and considered a simpler plan. He kicked himself for not thinking of it sooner and then dived back into the burning building. The Second had left a big enough hole for him to drop back through and he scanned the room quickly. Flying above the flames, the entire place seemed considerably less unstable and dangerous than he’d thought it was just a moment before.
He borrowed the sense of smell from every animal in the city, finding the most natural level of power he could handle. Just as the influx of scents began to overwhelm him, he picked up the scent of the alien corpse still smouldering on the floor. The Second would smell identical to its mate, or at least as close as anything else on the planet would. It was easy enough for Danny to sniff it out; the air was rich with the scent of its burnt body. He opened the visor on his helmet and breathed in deep through his nose, getting as close and as low to the ground to the remains as he could. With all the dead bodies in the room and the burning toxic fumes Danny reached the limit of what he could tolerate and he raced back out of the building. The smell was oily and sickly, like fish and rotting tomatoes, it made him feel dirty to have it in his nose. As he flew out of the hole in the roof he just missed being doused by water as the building sprinkler system finally kicked in. The burst of steam that came out of the building helped push the scent up and out to him and he found the Second’s trail easily. It was so clear it was almost visible to him, like a trail of vapour suspended in the air. The Second had climbed down two stories and re-entered the building though another window. Danny flew into the window, the splintered broken glass barely scratching his leather outfit. There had been no attempt by the alien to be subtle; it had torn straight through the building offices and straight out the far wall. It had even tore a hole through the quarantine bubble, probably by leaping from the window and slashing straight through it. Danny flew through the torn tarp and out into the city.
Five blocks was as far as he got before a vision slammed into his mind. He’d experienced it twice before, but this time it was different, it had crept up on him slowly and then slammed full force into his conscious. Danny spun out of control, crashing into a building air conditioning unit. He’d felt the tingling as soon as he left the building but it struck so fast he was not prepared for it. As he lay curled upon the rooftop, he clutched his head in shock. It did not hurt him, not in the way it had before, but it was strange and unnerving.
Drawing his power inward, he tried to push back the images that were forcing themselves into his mind. It was not the Earth communicating with him; it was the Growth. Somehow Danny had absorbed fragments of what was left of the dead alien, not just the scent but the essence of the creature itself. Even though it was clearly burnt to a husk, some spark of life had passed on through the cells and skin of it. When he’d breathed in the scent, he’d inhaled pieces of the monster and its memories were downloading into his brain. It had taken just a few minutes for his body to absorb it into his bloodstream and send it up to his brain. Yet it did not hurt him and Danny stopped fighting it, taking a breath as he sat against the air conditioner. Scanning the skyline to see if anyone was watching him, Danny sat firming with his back to the cold metal and he used his power to ease the vision in slowly. Using his Earth powers to control the flow Danny let the flood of memories through, witnessing the life of an alien who had come to destroy the human race.
Africa. The two aliens were nothing more than separate parts of the same intelligent virus, slowly descending toward Africa inside burning meteorites. The heat did not bother them, not when they had no flesh. They were no larger than a snowflake, nothing more than spores floating through space. They had travelled together for a long, long, time. A species that shared one mind began to change into separate but inseparable entities. Each of them began to think of the other as an appendage of itself; two beings amongst a species of millions were left alone and became a union of their own.
They landed together in a small village caught in the throes of a violent uprising. By moving up the food chain they were able to get close to the humans who seemed to dominate the globe and then they had the bodies they needed. Armed men ran from hut to hut, dragging people out and murdering them in the night. The First managed to take the body of an injured woman as she lay face down in the mud. As the First merged with the dying human, it picked up her rage and anger and unleashed it on everyone within reach. Taking a human hostage, the First held the body while the Second infected him. Together they travelled Africa, biding their time, watching humanity at its most terrible. They watched massacres and murder occur with cold, silent fascination. African men and women tore each other apart in a variety of ways and the Growth watched and remembered it all.
Eventually the pair grew brave; they had seen no sign of any Avatar to stop them. They moved in amongst humanity in one of the major cities near Egypt. Danny recognized the pyramids when they passed them but he had no clue where they had travelled; his knowledge of the Middle East was limited. Both of them had dark human bodies, their skin almost ebony. They switched bodies minimally, growing fond of each one and mourning over its loss when it was burnt out or destroyed. The Growth was enthralled and perhaps even a little cautious when they learned how cruel humans could be t
o one another. They imitated everything they saw, everything except rape, that crime they had no comprehension or use for. The concept of sex was as foreign to them as their biology was to humans; it was as useless to them as oxygen. Instead they pushed their bodies to extremes, through burning and piercing and pushing them to physical capacity. Danny saw all of it in his mind, but he could control it, he did not let it overwhelm him. As horrible as some of the images were, he needed to learn all he could about the Growth.
The aliens constantly looked to the stars, expecting to see their brethren, hoping more of their kind would flutter down and join them in their revelry. Danny knew they were not human but he could not help but see them as a couple; as demented as they were, as psychotic as their actions, they shared a bond between them. As the aliens grew inside the bodies of humans, they absorbed more than just the human meat and bone. They became like us, in their behaviour and in their affection for each other. There was a dark streak of romance to the way they treated each other. They slept with their limbs entwined in one another, intimately sharing their thoughts and dreams as one mind.
Controlling the flow of memory, Danny felt a sense of impending doom for the pair. They were so involved in themselves that the Growth never realized humanity had noticed them and were preparing. Danny saw it all from her point of view, the First, after all he’d seen he could not help but refer to her as a person, a female entity. All of her human bodies had the same look, almost as if she had the same taste. She chose tall, slim, ebony-skinned victims, the darker the skin the more she coveted them. Every one of her victims had small, doll-like faces, if they didn’t she would change their face to match her view of herself.
The Chem-X team came for her in the middle of the afternoon as they slept in an abandoned hut, somewhere in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. They were unprepared for the twelve white men in white plastic suits. The Second fled but the First was too slow. They sprayed her with a chemical weapon that froze the body solid, the limbs utterly paralyzed. They took the frozen meat and sealed it into a box, breaking her down into squares and shipping them off to their secret laboratory. Danny could not help but feel sympathy for her as they took her apart piece by piece. The creature showed no care for itself, the First laughed as it was dissected until it longer had a mouth to mock them with. The black, infected brain was all that remained of it, sitting inside a plastic box for months until the scientists who’d taken her apart could decide what to do with information they’d learned. The body the First had worn was once a human, a beautiful, living, breathing woman but the scientists at Chem-X showed as much concern for the body and who it had been as the Growth.
After what seemed like ages the First was given eyes again and with them it looked upon a familiar face. Dr. Glass leaned over her/it, his eyes cold and without mercy as they peeked out from behind his darkened glasses. The doctor seemed to smile and then all that remained of the host body was gone and the First was returned to its natural state. Somehow they had found it, removed it and kept it safely locked away. Danny thought the vision would come to an end but the horrific images did not stop there.
The scientists began by feeding the First, Danny couldn’t see or understand how but they began to give it meat and blood. As it grew it began to change, the flesh it was fed contained no spirit, no soul, no living, malleable DNA it could use. It was dead flesh and inside it the First scream in agony. Soon the alien began to change, to create more of itself inside its own body. The torture of existence inside dead meat forced it to adapt, it began replicating clones to spread out, to survive beyond it once it learned that it had only death to look forward to. Somehow inside the First was the means by which its alien race could multiply, but in the hands of Chem-X its natural cycle was distorted and mutated. The alien had fallen to Earth and lived a human life, as murderous and barbaric as it was, yet it had become nothing more than a swollen, pregnant monster, bloated with the spores of itself inside it. The First had been loved and wanted and it remembered how that felt. It was haunted by the human experience, desperate for a brain and body again, desperate to breathe. All of what it had become was stripped away inside that secret Chem-X laboratory. What it was left as was something far worse than what it had been before coming to Earth. Dr. Glass had taken a strange, beautiful, alien/human hybrid and turned it into a biological weapon, a mindless hungry virus.
When the doctor finally realized what he had done, he panicked. They sprayed the First with chemicals to sterilize and kill the spores and it felt each tiny clone of itself blink out of existence. Its body created more, each strain more resistant than the last. Finally they simply sealed it into an air tight clear plastic coffin and left it to starve to death. While the Second had searched desperately for it, it had waited patiently for Danny. It had chosen its enemy, not its mate, to be the one to end its pitiful life. Only the Avatar, the chosen defender of the planet, would have the power to truly end her suffering. Danny felt good knowing he’d helped it and by destroying it saved the human race. The creature had known that what it had become threatened even its own kind. While the monsters had taken human bodies and corrupted them, humanity had proven to have the ability to do the exact same thing in return. It was over though, Danny had burned it to ashes and when the visions faded, he knew he’d forget all about the monster. He’d gotten the information he’d needed; he had the Second’s scent and he knew where it was heading. There was only one place it would go now that it was all alone, it would return to where it was safe and most familiar. The Second would try to return to Africa but Danny knew it was not heading to the airport.
Walking to the edge of the building, Danny reached out with his abilities, letting the red energy flow out of him in small, waving ribbons. He connected to every animal in the city and immediately knew his hunch was right. The animals knew something was among them; a foreign predator had enter the jungle. The animals could feel it and they began to panic. The Second had arrived at the San Diego Zoo and the animals screamed inside their cages.
Using the energy as a form of rocket propulsion Danny flew like a missile straight toward the Zoo. The scent was different and difficult to track from the air but Danny didn’t need it now; the animals were everywhere. Birds fill the skies overhead, all of them relaying the Second’s arrival to him like a direct video feed. It had run across town to get to the Zoo and was able to leap the outside barrier with ease. It leaped clear over the wall and landed in the petting zoo. It tore the front of a cage off, stepping inside and grabbing the hapless vulture by the neck. It consumed the large bird easily, the wings still flapping as it was eaten alive by the alien. The Second had resumed a human shape and strode through the zoo like it was a buffet laid out just for its arrival. There were only a few families in the petting zoo and they ran at the first sight of the monster, grabbing their children close and fleeing without looking back. The goats and ponies were not so lucky; with no way out of the pen they could not escape the alien's grasp. It dropped the corpse of the bird it had picked clean and smashed through the wooden fence that stood between it and the goats. It was able to use any of the gifts it had absorbed simply by activating the victims DNA inside itself and it easily formed a pair of massive black wings using bones consumed from the vulture itself. The wings lifted it off the ground and it picked off the goats easily. Their meat was young and soft and tender from a life of incarceration. A large black beak formed over its mouth, helping it break the small animal bones into smaller pieces. The Second had no interest in the few humans in the zoo that day, for a variety of Earth’s life-forms lay before it for the taking. It planned on tasting them all.
When Phil had jumped in his car he figured his plan was going to work, but his every attempt to reach the Chem-X building seemed to end up turned around. For the life of him he could not understand how he’d ended up on a highway overpass headed toward the San Diego Zoo. Every time he tried to change lanes the traffic would come to a halt. Even as he told himself he was headed the wrong way, h
e’d find himself slipping back into the same direction or absentmindedly turning away from where he thought he wanted to go. Something was drawing him toward the Zoo but Phil refused to comply with it; he was in charge of his life and the more he lost control, the harder he fought for it. Some force was carefully nudging him along, trying to place him where he needed to be, but Phil was determined to control his own destiny.
After trying time and again to change directions and finding traffic congestion, disaster or bad luck, he reluctantly let whatever was pushing him take control. All the while telling himself he was not collaborating. Instead he thought of it as trusting in a benevolent force. He was reluctant to think of himself as a servant of the Lord and he was not even sure the God he believed in was involved in all that had happened to him and Danny, but he had to believe that he’d know if he was a vassal for evil. All he wanted to do was help his best friend and if some kind of outside power seemed to know how to do that, he thought it best to listen. The only other option was to continually drive around in circles until he was so confused he couldn’t think.
From the moment he'd left Monica's he'd felt befuddled and confused. At one point Phil even tried to do a complete U-turn and somehow ended up facing the same direction. The old car was unreliable and finally he had to tell himself that maybe, in some way, it was Danny pulling him to the Zoo. Almost as if they were on the same page, just when he thought he’d gone completely crazy, he saw Danny fly past overhead. He was nothing more than a red blur overhead but Phil knew it was him. He’d flown directly over Phil’s car, headed in the same direction Phil was being drawn. It was too much of a coincidence to be ignored.
It had all begun with a hunting trip in the woods and now, in the heart of San Diego, Phil had an awful sense of foreboding. He knew as he passed the cars fleeing the Zoo parking lot that whatever had started that day in the forest was coming to an end. Their strange adventure had come full circle, from the quiet solitude of nature to the heart of a bustling city. Phil thought back to the movies he’d seen, running through the scenarios he’d pictured in his head. Every time he’d imagined the human race coming to an end, he thought mankind would be standing side by side, fighting to the last man and woman against their alien aggressors. If they were all to be exterminated, Phil had thought it would have been face to face with their conquerors. The Growth wore human faces and bodies and Phil was deeply worried that no one would even recognize them. Even he was not familiar with them, he had no clue what Danny was up against, but he hoped someone, somewhere with authority and power was aware of what was happening. He’d considered calling the police and warning someone but dialling 911 and sharing everything that had happened seemed like a great way to get himself locked up. Even when there was overwhelming evidence and scientific fact to back up stories, people still disregarded the truth in place of their opinion. Phil had lost most of his trust in humanity after spending a day reading Moon Landing Conspiracies on the internet.
Earth Man Page 18
