And I suspect even that will rise exponentially in days to come.
The first indications that the green rain was only the start of something more came in the early hours of daylight and Hiscock might have been among the first to see the next phase.
The green snow in New York had turned to what looked like perfectly normal rain when he returned to the view of the bandstand. Much to his amazement some of the teenagers were still alive, having spent the night huddled in a tight bunch. As they walked off the structure they left three of their companions dead on the floor inside. There were seven of them remaining as they stood in the rain surveying the damage.
The green sludge coated everything around them, lying like spilled guacamole all around as far as the camera could see. One bent and put a finger in it, withdrawing it immediately as his flesh burned.
He wasn’t given much time to register the fact that much of his hand had started to melt as the sludge seemed to raise in a wave several feet high, washing over his feet and those of his friends. Two of them didn’t even try to move, merely let the slime take them. The other five made a run back to the bandstand, the flesh on their legs already sloughing off. Another wave flowed over the floor of the structure and the last thing the camera showed were three arms raised above the flood.
They waved frantically, but only for two seconds, until they too disappeared into the seething morass.
Hiscock threw up several pints of coffee into a wastepaper basket.
It took him twenty minutes to clean up his mess. By that time the story that the sludge could be mobile had spread to all the main news sources. One reporter called it “a creeping carpet of terror” and all reporters covering the story took up the phrase almost immediately. Unfortunately the man who coined it did not live to bask in his glory. He was standing on Wall Street and Broadway reflecting on what the catastrophe meant for the world financial system when a six-foot wave of green washed through the streets of Manhattan cleansing everything in its path.
By now Hiscock was remembering the amount of green goop he had seen falling from the trees in his back yard – and, even closer to his new home, the spray his AK-47 had sent over the walls of the room above him.
He eyed his ceiling warily.
***
Alice came out of a rum induced sleep the next morning to the sound of heavy thumping. At first she thought it was the hangover, then she realized she was still on the sofa in the front room, and that someone was pounding heavily on her front door.
She had a quick check of the weather situation before opening the door. The skies were clear, and there was no trace of green in her garden, just a dull brownish-black where whatever had fallen had frozen.
She opened the door to two large figures dressed all in white overalls apart from thick black rubber boots. Incongruously they wore beekeeper’s helmets over the top. They both carried shotguns, but had them slung, open, in the crook of their elbows. She saw fresh cartridges in all four barrels.
Someone has McGyvered a pair of survival suits.
As soon as she had the thought she knew who was at the door – Dave and John Roddie, the brothers who ran the farm – and the apiary – at the north end of the island.
Their expressions were grim as they came inside and took off the helmets. Dave, the older, saw Alice’s survival suit and nodded, unsmiling.
“Good thinking,” he said. “Could you lend us a couple?”
“I’ve got enough for everybody on the island,” Alice said, then saw the look in the man’s eye.
“I think we are everybody left on the island,” he said. He nodded towards the television that was showing only microwave static. “Have you been keeping up with what’s going on?”
Alice looked shame-faced at the rum bottle and shook her head.
“I saw what happened to the Duprees. That was enough for me.”
John looked like he might puke.
“We saw them too – what was left of them. We went to the B&B as well, but Jack and Irene weren’t there. We couldn’t find hide or hair of them.
That just left one other house to consider.
No. Not the Collins family.
Not the kids.
John had fresh tears in his eyes, and replied as if he’d read her thoughts.
“The kids are gone. Doug and Bettie too. It looks like their front room window blew in during the storm. They all tried to fix it and… and…”
Alice put a hand on his arm.
“I can imagine,” she said softly.
“No. You can’t,” he said, and turned away so that she wouldn’t see him cry.
Dave looked again at the television.
“Everything’s gone to shit,” he said softly. “We need to get our act together, and quick, or we’ll be joining them.”
“Surely help will come…” Alice began, but stopped when she saw the look on his face.
“No one’s coming. Anyone who is left will be dealing with their own survival.”
She heard the horror in his voice.
Anyone who is left.
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s worse,” John said. While they’d been talking, he’d been tuning the television.
The screen showed a familiar view of Manhattan, taken from a boat out on the river. What was completely unfamiliar was the green sludge that coated the bottom third of all the buildings. An announcer spoke over the top of the scene.
“If you look closely, and for long enough, you will see that the creeping carpet of terror seems intent on swallowing the whole island.”
Dave put a hand on Alice’s shoulder and she jumped a good six inches.
“It’s the same all the way up the coast,” he said. “And there’s reports of outbreaks all across the world. It’s the same in all cases where it hasn’t frozen – the green rain falls, seems to eat everything living, then it starts to ooze.”
“But what is it?” she said. She couldn’t drag her eyes from the view on the screen.
John shrugged. “No one knows yet. And if they don’t figure it out soon, I doubt anyone will ever know. It’s raining more of that green shit over the Western forests this morning. That’s a lot of greenery for this stuff to feed on.”
“But the government…”
Dave laughed grimly.
“Those that are still alive will be in their bunkers by now. And that’s where we should be, metaphorically speaking. We need to get ourselves set up – before any more of that green stuff falls.”
I can’t fault that sentiment.
“Okay,” she said. “Where do we start?”
Firstly she got them both fitted with survival suits, then all three of them took a tour of the island, calling out from time to time just in case Jack and Irene from the B&B were lying low in hiding. No one made any reply to any of the shouting, and although there were no signs of anything amiss at the B&B, the proprietors were nowhere to be found.
“We have to decide on the best place to hole up,” Dave said after the circuit was complete. “Somewhere that’ll stay tight against anything thrown at us. And somewhere we can stock with as much as we need if a long period of being shut in is required.”
After some discussion, they settled on the Dupree’s house. The extent of their larder and their basement stock of the fruits of their gardening was legendary across all of the islands in the group, and the house was the sturdiest of all available to them.
Alice gave it one last try.
“We could take the Zodiac across to Grand Manan?”
Dave shook his head.
“We tried for hours on the FM bands overnight. If there was anyone left, they’d have contacted us by now.”
“Okay then… what about Saint John? I’m fuelled up and ready to go. All it needs is to get the pump going to inflate the dinghy and…”
Dave put a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eye.
“Alice… it’s all gone… or going. All of it.” He waved a hand to indicate
the island around them. “This is all we’ve got.”
A call from John rang out across the island. He’d gone to investigate the greenhouses at the rear of the Dupree’s house.
“Get over here fast. You need to see this.”
***
Hiscock got some broken sleep in his chair. He had a proper bedroom set up at the rear of the bunker, but he was afraid that if he left to lie down on the camp bed he might miss something vital.
The news from around the globe just kept getting worse. The green rain fell on every continent, even falling as snow across Antarctica. What remained of global governance seemed at a loss as to how to combat the menace. Vast tracts of land in China were burned as they tried to napalm the problem away. It didn’t work. Reports came in that the Russians had nuked Vladivostok, but they couldn’t be confirmed.
Confirmation of anything at all was getting harder by the hour as news stations closed and reporters fell to the creeping carpet of terror. Hiscock knew from his FM system that there were others like him -- hunkered down in safety. Like him, they were, as yet, too fearful to give their position away. Like him, they knew that the looters wouldn’t be far behind such a disastrous breakdown in civilization.
Indeed, he could see it happen, on those CCTV systems that were still operable. After just one night of disaster, parts of the US, especially in the cities, had already reverted to the law of the jungle. Packs of armed men hunted for food, and were killing to get it. There was no sign of any organized policing, either from the police themselves, or from FEMA. The sheer scale of the disaster had brought the country to its knees, like a hundred Katrinas, all at the same time.
By now the Department of Homeland Security in the States was broadcasting emergency reports on most of the major television networks. It was one of the few news sources still in constant operation, still capable of reporting on events beyond the borders of North America.
Hiscock didn’t know how much of its output to believe.
But I can believe what my eyes can see.
The pictures from the cities were the hardest to bear. The carpet rolled in from the country and washed through the streets as if propelled by a tidal wave. The depth of the wave depended on how much feeding the slime had done in the surrounding countryside, but in some cases it was nearly six feet deep as it barreled along.
People died in thousands in front of Hiscock’s eyes.
After several hours of this he thought he was immune to further shocks, but there was more yet to come.
The combined forces of the US and Canadian armies were mustered – at least as many of them that could be found. They started to take the fight to the slime, with napalm, explosives and aerial firepower.
As far as Hiscock could see, they were, as yet, having no discernible effect.
The slime just kept on flowing.
***
Alice and Dave arrived at the rear of the Dupree house to find John staring, wide-eyed, at one of the greenhouses.
“In there,” he said. He didn’t move to go with them as they carefully approached the open door. Dave gently nudged Alice aside and closed the shotgun, readying it to be fired.
“Me first.”
The greenhouse was some twenty feet long and eight feet wide. Chuck Dupree successfully grew many pounds of fruit here in the summer, and even now a lot of the plants still had evidence of having green leaves, and several showed fresh shoots poking from the ground. It felt warm in here – Chuck had obviously kept the place heated as much as possible.
Halfway along one of the panes of glass in the roof had been partly dislodged in the storm – enough for some of the green snow to get in.
It had taken full advantage of the fact. Alice looked, expecting to see more of the bubbling sludge. But the heat in the greenhouse had allowed the sludge time to get settled in.
And something else was now happening to it.
The slime had hardened into a long patch of green along one side of the greenhouse, ridged and furrowed like a badly ploughed field. Things grew from these ridges – a small forest of tall, spear-like extrusions, four and five feet high, and gray-black in color. When she looked closer Alice saw that the spears at the end were large pods of some kind, each of them a foot in length. The surface looked leathery but she wasn’t about to take her gloves off to check. Each pod had a seam running along what would have been the sharp edges of the spear. As she looked closer she saw that the seam was splitting in some of them, showing deep purple fleshy tissue inside.
They’re ripening.
She didn’t want to see what might be the fruit of this unnatural growth.
“We need to burn this. And quick.”
Dave nodded and left at a run.
He was only gone five minutes, but in that short time more than half of the pods showed signs of splitting down the seams. One opened even further, revealing blacker pustules in the purple tissue. They throbbed, twice a second, and there was evidence of something small squirming in the depths.
“Hurry, Dave,” she murmured under her breath, and started to back out of the greenhouse.
She met John at the door. It was only as she lowered her faceplate that she noticed he had removed the beekeeper’s helmet. She didn’t get time to berate him as Dave arrived with two large plastic containers.
“Kerosene,” he said. “But we really shouldn’t waste it…”
“Trust me,” Alice replied. “This won’t be going to waste.”
She stood at the door as the two men poured the kerosene on and around the new growth. The stalks writhed and swayed as if buffeted by a strong wind. Several of the pods split wide down the seams and started to open.
They know they’re under attack. Somehow, they know.
“Faster,” she called.
Dave turned back towards her – just as one of the pods split with a loud thwack. Black spheres flew like scattered shot.
“Light them up,” Dave screamed, ducking to avoid a seed that was headed for his head.
John turned and spun the wheel of a lighter he had at the ready, tossing it into the growth.
The stalks went up with a whoosh and the three of them had to retreat to the door.
That was close.
Even as she thought it, John turned back to close the door.
The fire raged inside and glass cracked and shattered as the searing heat reached it. Black seeds rattled like gunfire against the glass. As John closed the door one managed to get through. The seed hit him, just below the right eye. Immediately it touched his skin a pair of pincers, eerily like those of a small crab, burst from the seed and gripped tightly.
It started to burrow.
Alice slammed the greenhouse door shut as Dave dragged John away.
She turned just in time to see the older brother grip the seed and tear it from John’s cheek. Blood sprayed and John wailed, but after Dave stomped the seed into slushy mush there was no trace of blackness in the wound.
They watched the greenhouse burn. When the fires finally went out they searched the ashes, looking for seeds. All they found was burnt vegetation.
For now.
***
Hiscock watched the end-of-the-world unfold on the screens in his bunker – at least that’s what it felt like.
Green rain was now falling over the American grain belt, the steppes of Russia and the vast rain forests of Central Africa. The world’s armies, united as never before, threw everything they had at the growing swathes of green. In some cases they even managed to slash and burn the sludge away, but that was at the expense of laying such waste to the countryside that it would take decades, maybe even centuries, to recover.
But they couldn’t control the rain.
Europe had, thus far, remained relatively untouched, but by late afternoon the green rain started to fall over Germany and Poland.
After the rain came the creeping sludge. And now reports had started of something stranger yet – of forests of lance-like seedpods. Reports were ev
en sketchier from these areas. It seemed that after the seeds ripened, no one was left alive to report on what happened next.
We’re being wiped out – and we don’t know why – or how.
News reports grew scarcer, and most of the remaining television networks were reduced to broadcasting ever more creative theorizing.
The theories came to an end just as dusk started to fall on the second day. It came in the form of a NASA announcement on the US Department of Homeland Security broadcast.
“We are now in a position to confirm that this attack is not of terrestrial origin. I repeat - this attack is not of terrestrial origin.”
The screen showed a slightly out of focus picture of a huge dark craft hanging in space.
“As of noon today we have confirmation that an invasion fleet is in orbit over our planet. This is not a hoax. The fleet is composed of large crafts, each over twenty kilometers in diameter. We have counted fifty of them so far.”
PART TWO
THE TAKING
John Roddie’s cheek wound began to fester on the third day.
Alice tended to it as best she could, trying to avoid the fear she saw dancing in the man’s eyes. But when she applied a new bandage just after noon, she was dismayed to see a tinge of green deep in the wound.
When John fell into a feverish sleep she went back downstairs to the kitchen to join Dave. The older man merely lifted an eyebrow in question. She responded in kind by seesawing her hand backwards and forwards.
“He needs a doctor,” she said. “And proper antibiotics.”
Dave snorted.
“You know how little chance there is of that. You saw the reports.”
Indeed she had. It had taken the best part of a bottle of whisky to get her to sleep after watching them. Even now the images of worldwide carnage played at the back of her mind -- that, and the thought of the giant ships, unseen, but looming large over their heads. As yet the ships didn’t seem to have moved from the geo-stationary orbits they’d taken up on their approach.
Not that they have to do much of anything -- their rain is doing all the work.
The Invasion (Extended Version) Page 3
