The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  The thing we’d encountered in the smelling room had been round-shouldered, squat. There had been a rotation to its movements, a lumbering quality that you might have hoped to have been able to avoid if you were faster and better on your feet than I was.

  Not this thing. It came in hard, fast, and straight, with clinical precision and ferocious speed.

  I barely knew it was upon us until Pierre had already been swatted out of the way—sailing back into the dark.

  Once he was dispatched I saw the thing’s eyes flick between Molly and me, then back again, swiftly making a judgment (possibly wrongly) that I was the second-biggest threat.

  Those eyes had ten times more depth than Dylan’s. This creature wasn’t human but it possessed equal and perhaps similar intelligence. An enlarged, souped-up, weaponized version of us. The end-times cleanup squad.

  It started to lower its head, arms out wide.

  Pierre hadn’t moved or made a sound since he’d been thrown from the fight. He’d been counted out of the equation for now, possibly for good. I was next on the creature’s list.

  But Molly ran straight at it, pummeling it with her fists. It felt the blows. It wasn’t impervious, but it wasn’t troubled. It tore her off with one hand, unfurling the motion to sling her down the tunnel past me.

  “Go,” I told her. “Just go.”

  Molly was pushing herself back to her feet. She looked me in the eye. “Do it,” I said. “Get out of here, Moll. Please.”

  She nodded, took off the light, and left it on the floor. Then she grabbed Pierre and started trying to haul him away. He was moving, but slowly. She kept at it. Molly Mom wasn’t going to give up, I knew that. Good for her.

  I turned back just in time to see the thing’s fist coming toward my face. Managed to twist my head enough to stop it smacking me front-on. Instead the blow caught my ear and the back of my head. The impact threw me straight across the tunnel to crash into the wall.

  The creature did not immediately pile into me after I landed on the floor.

  It waited. It judged the situation.

  I tried to stand. Got halfway, but my legs collapsed under me. My ears were ringing. I tried to stand again and made it farther this time, but then a swinging blow from its other fist caught me in the temple and I was down again.

  Down and nearly out.

  The clanging in my head was so loud now I could barely hear. My vision was doubled and darkening. It felt like all the pains in my body were joining together.

  And deep in the shadows, beyond the thing standing over me, I saw movement and knew another one of them was coming. Out of the ark, two by two…And then many, many more.

  An army unleashed. The end of the world.

  It kicked me, a crunching impact to the rib cage that had me crashing into the wall once again. The edges of my vision were folding in now as shadows came flooding into my mind, turning my thoughts upside down, breaking continuity like a movie cut up into single frames.

  I knew I was right to do this, to have stayed behind. Not just because I’d given the other two something closer to a fighting chance, but because I’d spent so long running from things that didn’t work or that hurt. Turning and facing this one had always been doomed to failure, but sometimes failure is what happens next. What happens last.

  Another kick and everything was broken in my head. Nothing connected anymore. Time itself was malfunctioning and I couldn’t tell the difference between what was happening now and my memories. I had a flickering recollection of lounging in the bar back at the hotel, a brief delicious illusion of the sensation of a cold beer going down my throat. A momentary snapshot of the view from my balcony back in Santa Monica.

  A memory of Kristy looking across at me when we were out walking in the woods somewhere, years ago, with the crooked half smile that meant there was nowhere she’d rather be.

  I even thought I heard Ken’s voice, making fun of my shirt one last time.

  The creature reached down and pulled me up by the throat. It was not monstrous; that was the worst thing. This was no chaotic blow from an uncaring universe, no car crash or landslide. This was a living, intelligent thing, as I was, and it was going to do what it had been created to do, and carry on doing it. For once in my life, I was going to be first.

  It pulled back its fist, and I noticed that it had a thumb and five fingers, rather than four. It was a real-life actual giant and it was going to kill me, and unless unconsciousness claimed me first, I was going to be there as that happened. I was going to die in real time.

  It opened its mouth, revealing that it had two rows of teeth. The better to eat me with. It stared down at me with eyes that were hazel flecked with green, as Gemma’s had been.

  Then the right side of its head exploded over my face.

  I heard five more shots.

  As I lost consciousness, pretty sure it was going to be for the last time, I experienced a strange vision.

  It was of Ken, standing grinning over me. “Stop dicking around, Nolan,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

  Then darkness.

  Chapter

  54

  I wasn’t out long. Five minutes, they said. It seemed longer. It felt like a million years, and like returning from a very great distance. There was a brief phase where I was apparently conscious but in no pain, as though everything to do with the body was an optional extra that I didn’t need to be concerned with. It was nice that way.

  Then it wasn’t, and everything hurt. Very badly.

  My ears were still ringing. I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t seem to move the lids.

  “He’s concussed.”

  The voice was Molly’s. That disappointed me, because I thought she’d probably know what she was talking about, and if she believed I had a concussion she was most likely right. On the other hand, it presumably also meant I wasn’t dead.

  “Nah. He’s just a tool.”

  That was enough to open my eyes.

  Ken was sitting opposite, his back against the wall of the tunnel. His shirt was torn, there was a big cut up his arm, half his face was covered in grime, and he was missing a shoe. Other than that, frankly I’ve seen him looking worse.

  “Seriously,” he said, exasperated. “Why’d you leave the gun up there, you muppet?”

  “I didn’t think I was going to need it,” I said, hauling myself into a more upright position. “And, you know, fingerprints and shit.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, fair point. Well, whatever.” He winked. “I stand by my decision to pick it up.”

  “Me too. But…how are you still alive? How?”

  “No one’s more surprised than me, mate.”

  “But we heard you…”

  “Covered this already while you were snoozing. The executive summary is that yelling out like an injured thing was the best idea I could come up with to draw those creatures away from you all. And it worked. Bit too well, if I’m honest. Suddenly they’re both haring after me and I’m running but bottom line is it’s dark, I have no idea where I’m going, and it’s seeming increasingly likely I’m on my way to meet my maker, which is not an encounter either of us would be likely to enjoy. Anyway, so I’m pelting down the opposite corridor and they’re getting closer and I realize I’m nearly at the end and have nowhere to go except…The room with the original pool in it. So I do the only thing I can do, which is run down there and jump in.

  “And you know the funny thing? They can’t fucking swim, either. Worse than me, even. Who’s going to have taught them, right? So I went to the end, scrabbled up onto that platform. As I’m watching them I grabbed the smallest of the balls you and Pierre got out, and dropped it down onto the console thing. Smashed it up like a beauty. Anyway, so they’re thrashing around in the water still trying to get me and I see they’re getting their shit together disappointingly quickly. So I jump back in and get back to the other side and go running back the other way. They follow. So I’m back to square one. Except…”

>   “What’s that smell?” I said.

  “Exactly. Come on—stand up.”

  He and Pierre pulled me up to my feet. My legs felt woolly and insubstantial. Molly was standing a couple of yards up the corridor, looking tense.

  “Hey, Moll,” I said groggily.

  “We should go,” she said. “We have no idea what else is coming down that shaft.”

  “She’s right,” Ken said. “But okay, look.”

  He pointed down at the giant. Portions of its skin were sloughing off, rotting down to a black, thick liquid. The rest was darker than it had been, too. The smell, though as yet mild, was the same as we’d encountered in the room upstairs.

  “What’s happening to it?”

  “Got me, mate. But it’s happening upstairs, too. One of the things after me had killed one of the wolves prior to that, and the remains were doing exactly the same thing. And something else. That big ball? It started moving.”

  “What?”

  “Very slowly. But it was starting to come back up the passageway. I have no idea how, but whatever. Those little pyramid things are getting hotter and hotter, too. I put my hand on one and it was actually pulsing. I think the site’s being reset, Nolan—like they’re preparing to film the whole sequence again. Take two. When I was in the pool room, there were new balls up on the platform at the end.”

  Pierre stared at him. “From where?”

  “Dunno. Out of the wall. Or dropped out of the ceiling. There were a lot of thuds going on. Anyway, I get to the room that smells and it’s drained out—and you know what? I’m wondering if all that gunk was in fact the remains of creatures from the last time this happened. I got across and up into the fissure and the rest is history. Somehow, whatever runs this thing knows it got triggered too early. It’s turning itself off. Winding everything back. You saw the map room, right?”

  “Saw it and took pictures.”

  “Nice. You’re a pro, Nolan. I’ve always said so. Well, sometimes. Once, maybe.”

  “Was one of the lights flashing when you came through? Quite slowly?”

  “Yeah, but no. It was going really fast.”

  “Please, guys,” Molly said. “Let’s leave. So far we’ve only gotten rid of one of the cleanup crew, remember?”

  “I emptied the gun into it, too,” Ken said. “So, yeah. No more bullets. Moll’s right. It’s time to vacate the premises.”

  I looked at him. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

  “Yeah, me too, mate. You still got that cigarette?”

  I pulled out the pack. Inside was the unsmokably broken remains of the last Marlboro Light. “Oh.”

  “Fuck’s sake. Wish I hadn’t bothered to save you now.”

  We made it to the end of the corridor—Molly supporting me around my waist, Ken doing the same for Pierre, who’d gotten a twisted knee when he was thrown down the tunnel by the giant.

  We stood for a moment at the opening, looking out into the night. The air was cold and fresh and pure. There were stars. There was moonlight.

  I had something like a panic attack when it came to starting the climb. A full-body I can’t do this reaction. It didn’t last long. I had to do it.

  “We’re going to take it slow,” Molly said.

  I hadn’t voiced anything out loud, wouldn’t have thought anybody could have known what was going through my head. But she knew.

  Pierre went first. Me second, then Ken and finally Molly. In our current states, every single one of the men was more likely to fall off the wall than she was, and we knew it.

  It was the middle of the night and dark but it was a different kind of dark. It was the kind of dark where you know there will be light at some future time.

  A few minutes into the climb the side of the canyon seemed to shake as if something deep within was finally triggered, and then a wall of fire burst out of the cavern entrance above us. We waited, clinging onto the wall, in case anything else happened afterward, but it did not.

  We climbed down slowly, ten feet apart. It took a long time. It took forever. I had to keep stopping every few yards to catch my breath, to refocus my attention on the rock in front of me. There was water at the bottom, I knew. I had no idea how safe it was to drink the Colorado River but there was no question it was going to happen.

  We climbed in isolation but we climbed together.

  We made it down.

  Chapter

  55

  The dinghy was tied to a rock at the bottom, for which I was very grateful. We clambered and half fell in, and then leaned over the edge and—mindful of not overdoing it—got some water in our mouths. And over our faces. It was very, very cold. It tasted of the outside. It was unbelievably awesome.

  The river was flowing fast but we realized we didn’t even know how far we had to go to reach anything passing for civilization. Molly’s GPS device was back up in the main room of the complex: after so many hours of it being useless, she’d forgotten to add it to the hard drives in Pierre’s backpack. My phone ran out of battery and died as I tried to use it. Even if we’d known the right place to head for, we were in no shape to make a six-hour hike up to the top.

  We sat staring at each other, goggle-eyed at this latest realization, and when Ken suggested trying to make it back to the beach we’d last camped on and setting off in the morning, nobody disagreed.

  Molly and I took the oars and Ken untied us. After a hectic period of almost capsizing the boat as a result of near-total ignorance of how to work a dinghy, we got it together and started floating down the river. It felt like emerging from a spaceship onto the waterway of some new, unknown planet.

  After about twenty minutes the general shape of the outcroppings on the right bank began to look familiar—and then yes, the beach was there, a hundred yards away.

  We used the oars to direct us toward it. I couldn’t tell whether my stomach and chest muscles were hurting a little less or maybe I wasn’t actually feeling them anymore, but trying to move fluently—shoving against water that felt like it was actively fighting our attempts to change course—made it clear they weren’t working properly. Ken saw I was struggling and stood up to come over and help.

  And that’s when the big raft came sailing silently out of the darkness behind and rammed straight into us.

  I landed in shallow water, on my head. My face, in fact, smacking down into the stones under the surface with a crunch that had me seeing stars. Again.

  When I got up to hands and knees, still trying to work out what the hell had just happened, I saw that Pierre had landed worse. He was unconscious, head half-under the water.

  I grabbed his good arm and hauled him up onto the beach. He spluttered, pulled in huge breaths. Molly was already on the shore, turning to look back at the river.

  The raft was jammed up against the rock on the side of the beach, where it had overturned the dinghy.

  Feather was standing on it.

  “You people really don’t give up, do you,” she said as she jumped down onto the gravel. She was holding a chef’s knife—the knife, presumably, that Dylan had used to make our food.

  “Dylan said you’d left to bring in Palinhem.”

  “They’re on their way. In the meantime he was supposed to kill you if you got out, which is the only thing he’s actually any good at. Clearly he failed. Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. He was an asshole.”

  “Is…is what he told us true?”

  “I’ve no idea what he said. He’s just a field grunt. Or was. He wasn’t supposed to say anything. I simply need you three remaining problems resolved so matters can unfold in the manner of my choosing.”

  “Your choosing?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You don’t think I’m going to let the old fools at Palinhem actually run this, do you? All they do is hide. They’ve spent a thousand years navel-gazing and have forgotten how to act. I found you. I found this. It will be for me and my associates to govern.”

 
; “It’s not going to happen,” I said. “You failed. The site’s resetting.”

  “I don’t believe you, and I don’t have time for this. I’m sorry, Nolan. You’re the anomaly in this situation. You have to go.”

  “Three?” Molly said. “Shit, Nolan—Ken!”

  I realized he wasn’t on the beach with us. He wasn’t in the dinghy, either.

  “Go!” Molly shouted.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Feather said, advancing on me with the knife. “This is the end of it.”

  She slashed out at me, the movement measured and assured. I know nothing about knife-fighting but even I could tell she knew what she was doing.

  I took a hurried step back, turned my foot on the pebbles and started to lose my balance. She side-kicked me in the chest, right where the gashes were.

  Half a second later I was flat on my back and Feather was standing over me. “Webcasts season two, episode five,” she said. “‘Is There an Afterlife?’ You’re about to find out.”

  But Molly came running in from the side and tackled her, sending the two of them sprawling in the pebbles.

  “Go!” she screamed at me.

  I ran to the water. Saw—or thought I saw—a head bobbing in the river, forty feet downstream. I wasn’t even sure in the darkness but I didn’t know where else Ken could be so I threw myself into the water.

  I’ve never understood people who are scared of flying. I mean, okay, there you are, defying gravity, tens of thousands of feet above the ground in a machine that may be a couple of decades old and flown by a person who for all you know could be…Fine, maybe I do get it. But large bodies of water have always unnerved me far more. The ocean, specifically. It is huge and restless and strong and it owes us nothing. Weak as I was and with a head swirling with concussion, I felt much the same about the river.

  It felt as if it was moving more quickly than before we’d entered the site, too. Maybe because of the rain. I hoped so, because otherwise it seemed like I was going to be dealing with rapids and I simply didn’t have what it took to win that fight.