Doom

by John Shirley

  There was a flash of spiky teeth, a flicker of something rocketing from its maw—a sickly pink tongue stabbing like a stinger but coming like the tongue of a frog zapping an insect, flying harpoonlike into Goat’s throat—and he felt the impact on his neck, stabbing and pumping to gush a fluid into him, a venom or worse.

  Goat shrieked and fell, thrashing. Hot pain spread rippling out from his neck, washed over him—and then a terrifying numbness. Not the numbness of blessed relief, but a malevolent dullness. Paralysis started in his lower body, making it go rigid and he slid down into the water. His hands flailed at the barbed tongue embedded in his neck…

  The creature that’d injected Goat stepped back—and as it did, its tongue unspooled from its throat. It reeled out, out…longer and longer, an absurd connection of flesh between its drooling maw and Goat’s jolting form…

  Then, as it was supposed to, the tongue snapped free, detaching itself, shortening, becoming about two feet long; pumping its fluid sack furiously into Goat as it writhed around his body, finishing its work. Goat tried to pull the tongue off, but it was no use, he was losing control of his upper body…

  The creature moved away from its detached tongue. The tongue would follow a homing instinct back to it, in time to be ready for the next anointing.

  But then it turned, startled by a flash of light—Reaper was there, splashing up the tunnel toward it. It ducked down in the water.

  “Man down!” Reaper shouted, seeing Goat twitching in the water.

  He’d seen the thing shoot its tongue into Goat—but where had it gotten to?

  There was an eruption from the foul water just two yards from him, then the creature was transfixed for a strobic moment by his gunlight beam: sheathed in sliding water, its semihuman head lifted; a cluster of eyes like a spider’s, no nose to speak of, most of its head taken up by vast jaws bristling with teeth, its skin raw-looking, its hands ending in talons, its body rippling in muscle.

  And then it charged.

  Reaper fired, and the creature let out a long, high-pitched sirening screech as the bullets struck it—black blood fountaining as it clawed at the wounds, dancing in the ripping impact of a whole clip from the light machine gun: a hellstorm of gunfire into the darkness, lighting up the tunnel with flashing chaos, the bullets zipping and ricocheting around the tunnel where the creature had gone, scoring the walls, smashing through pipes, chipping metal. Cloaked in shadow, the thing shrieked as it was hit, the sound otherworldly, quavering, echoing on and on.

  Reaper finally ran out of bullets—only the bullets had kept it from falling, the last few rounds: it flopped down with a splash into the muck.

  The rest of the team came up from behind. Stopped to stare at the thing floating, slowly turning, faceup, twitching in death.

  They gaped at it…and saw its tongue detaching from Goat to swim off down the tunnel like a sea snake seeking its den.

  Then Reaper splashed over to Goat—only the top half of his head was sticking out the polluted water. His eyes open, unblinking, staring.

  Reaper looked at him for a moment, then picked him up in his arms. Sarge led the way back to the ladder.

  Sarge and Reaper carried Goat together, almost double-timing it through the atrium; Duke and Destroyer followed, dragging something behind them; the Kid and Portman brought up the rear…

  Mac grinned when he saw them come in, and ran over to join them—but his smile fell away when he saw Goat. He gave Portman a questioning look. Short explanations were mumbled at him, but the explanations only baffled Mac more.

  Hunegs came hurrying up, giving them a look of white-faced inquiry.

  “We gotta move the quarantine zone,” Sarge told him. “Evacuate the entire facility. Get all personnel to the Ark immediately.”

  Hunegs chewed the inside of his cheek as if wondering whether Sarge had the authority to issue that order to the whole facility.

  Reaper decided there was no time to play “who’s higher on the chain of command.”

  “Get those people out of here now! Move! Move!”

  “What’s going on out there?” Hunegs demanded.

  Sarge tried keeping it simple. “Everybody through the Ark!”

  Hunegs pursed his lips—then nodded, started barking orders to the security men staring at the reeking squadron and their disturbing burdens.

  “Move! Everybody out!”

  That was it—the milling became running, panic set in, and people, voices high-pitched as they told one another to get out of the way, ran for the Ark.

  Though there was pandemonium in the atrium, it was still quiet in the infirmary; the only sounds were the occasional low moan from Dr. Carmack and the humming of the biomonitoring equipment. But Sam was at least as tense as the people running to the Ark, as she dropped samples of Carmack’s blood into a spectrographic analyzer.

  “Attention!” Lieutenant Hunegs’s voice, coming tinnily over the public address system. “All personnel, please report to the Ark chamber for immediate evacuation. Attention—all personnel…”

  “Dr. Willits,” Sam said, as she frowned over the readout, “listen, his condition is stable. You should go.”

  “I want to stay.” She shined a light into Carmack’s eyes. She wasn’t about to get too close to Carmack, though he was now in restraints.

  “Steve’ll be okay,” Sam said. “The guys looking for him are the best….”

  Dr. Willits looked at Sam—and Sam could tell she didn’t trust the squadron to find her husband, Steve.

  Sam herself doubted that Dr. Willits’s husband—one of the genetics researchers in the labs—would be found alive. But you had to reassure people, didn’t you? Why obvious lies were supposed to be reassuring was another mystery.

  “Jenny—go…please.”

  Dr. Willits looked at Carmack, twitching in the restraints. She wouldn’t be sorry to leave—she didn’t feel safe with Carmack, whatever she’d pretended.

  At last she nodded. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” She gathered up a few things, waved good-bye to Sam, and left the infirmary, the nanowall melting back into place behind her, once more going flat and gray and permanent-looking, as if someone hadn’t just walked right through it.

  Sam turned back to the spectrograph. She squinted at it, trying to comprehend what it was telling her about Carmack’s blood. Five words blinked up at her, in luminous green LCD letters.

  BLOOD GROUP CANNOT BE IDENTIFIED

  “What the hell?” she muttered aloud. As she puzzled over the spectrographic reading, some part of her mind registered an odd noise from the gurney, behind her—a creaking sound.

  “Blood group cannot be identified?” Black the blood might be—perhaps from a dysfunctional liver—but it was some kind of human blood. Wasn’t it?

  Duke came back in and looked over her shoulder. Read the same message from the spectrograph. “No blood match? That can’t be good, right?”

  Sam shook her head. It simply didn’t make sense.

  She went to a glass-doored cabinet, found another blood draw kit. She’d just have to test him again…she turned back to Carmack…

  He was gone. Nothing remained on the gurney but broken restraints and a dark, bloody smear across the sheet.

  The squadron went down a corridor and through the nanowall, on into the infirmary. Looking up from the spectrograph, Samantha Grimm recoiled a little at the lingering smell of the sewer they brought with them, then stared at the lumpy poncho that Duke and Destroyer dragged after them into the room, the plastic folded over a hump. Something hard to identify was sticking out in back. Legs? Not human, if legs they were.

  They laid Goat on a gurney—and Sam held back a moment before approaching him. He looked dead—but things weren’t always the way they looked, anymore.

  It had looked like Carmack couldn’t have gotten off that gurney, too…

  “What happened?” Sam asked, looking at the wound on Goat’s neck. She’d never seen one like it.

  Reaper shoo
k his head. He tried to think of a way to describe what’d happened. Well, this thing shot its ten-foot-long tongue into him, then the tongue scrolled out, then it unlatched, then the tongue…

  Right. He ended up saying nothing. The whole team lifted Goat on the table to work on him, their training kicking in. Duke cut open Goat’s uniform. Experienced in battlefield medical dressing, Reaper set up an IV—all the makings were to hand on the infirmary shelves—and the Kid held a bloody bandage pressed against Goat’s neck.

  They were all helping except for Portman. He was simply staring at Goat in shock.

  “He was talking about devils…” Portman mumbled.

  Sam looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Devils?”

  Portman flapped a hand at Goat. “…all his Bible shit…angels, good and evil, the devil among us…” Mouth slack, he kept staring at Goat.

  Reaper glanced at Portman, decided he needed to be kept busy. “Portman, get a second line in here. I need to hit him with some adrenaline.”

  Portman snapped out of his fog and started moving around, looking for another IV line and the adrenaline.

  “Attention all personnel!” came Hunegs’s voice, booming over the PA system. “Please report to the Ark for immediate evacuation! All personnel, please report for immediate evacuation…”

  “Like to hit that exit myself,” Portman murmured.

  Reaper watched his sister work on Goat. She moved intelligently, efficiently, her hands in rubber gloves but otherwise showing no concern for the blood and gore she was getting on herself. As for Goat…

  “He’s not breathing,” Reaper observed. “Fuck.”

  Sarge was looking around, frowning. “Where’s the hell’s Carmack?”

  “He disappeared,” Sam said, stanching the wound on Goat’s neck with a compress.

  “He what?”

  “I said he’s gone! He disappeared!”

  Duke was looking at the heart monitor. “Lost the pulse!”

  Reaper grabbed a couple of defibrillators off a console, slapped them on Goat’s chest. “Clear!”

  The others stepped back, and he thumbed a switch. Goat’s body jerked, and fell back. No response. He tried it again.

  “Shit…”

  Tried it again…nothing.

  Goat flopped again and the air smelled of burnt skin and ozone—and he still registered a flat line. Goat was staring at the ceiling…or past it, Reaper imagined. Through the ceiling, through the roof, through the toxic atmosphere of Mars, into the starry heavens. Like a guy watching for a bus—he was waiting for his ride to show up…

  The men looked on, helpless, trying to think of some way to help. Goat wasn’t the most popular guy in the squadron, but he was still their brother in arms.

  There was nothing to be done. You could see that the life had gone out of that body.

  So Reaper closed Goat’s eyelids. Then he reached under Goat’s Kevlar vest, drew out his old Bible, now splattered with blood. He handed it to Portman. Who looked down at it uneasily.

  Sarge let out a long slow breath, then turned to Sam. “All right. We need answers. What the fuck is going on up here?”

  Sam was taken aback by his bluntness—and maybe the generality of his question. “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? Come here!” Sarge commanded.

  He nodded to Destroyer, who threw back the poncho, revealing what they’d dragged in here.

  Sam took a quick step back, seeing the creature on the floor.

  It was dead, already decaying, and a hellish waft rose as they exposed it, overwhelming the fetor of sewage. The thing was much bigger than a man, with a thick black exoskeleton and a cluster of eight eyes. The head was spiky, mostly jaws.

  A kind of hideous imp, Sam thought. Something from Hell.

  She was afraid to get any closer.

  Stop being childish, she told herself. Her brother was here, watching. Was she going to show she was scared in front of him? This was a new species, that was all. She should be excited about the scientific possibilities. She shouldn’t be reacting with this visceral repugnance…

  Sam walked up to the creature—which she fervently hoped was as dead as it looked—and looked it over, trying to understand what it might be, where it had come from. And failed.

  “Have you people found anything like this on your archaeological dig?” Sarge asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Is there any way this thing came from outside, from the surface?”

  She shook her head. “The planet is completely dead.”

  “It came from somewhere, lady!” Portman put in.

  “Portman,” Sarge said, “shut up!”

  “The atmosphere on the surface can’t support life,” Sam went on. She was about to explain just how toxic the atmosphere of Mars was when Portman interrupted her.

  “You just said you don’t know what the fuck it is.” He waved his hands in the air. Looking a little crazy, to her—possibly stoned. “Maybe it doesn’t need air! It could be from another planet or something!”

  “An alien?”

  “Look at that thing!”

  “Portman,” Sarge roared, “shut the fuck up!”

  “That’s not what we saw,” Reaper said, looking at the creature. They all turned toward him, every face showing confusion, and he had to explain: “This isn’t exactly what Goat and I shot at in the genetics lab. This is something different.”

  Portman looked at him in shock. “You’re telling me there could be more of these fucking things?”

  Sarge turned slowly to Sam. “Where are the surface entry points?”

  She shrugged. “There’s a pressure door at the end of the north corridor…”

  “Portman, Destroyer, Kid,” Sarge barked, “you’ll get there on the double, gimme a sit-rep.”

  “Yes, sir,” Destroyer said, for all of them. Seeing Sarge’s mood, seemed like a good time for a yes sir.

  “Whatever this thing is,” Sarge went on, “we can’t let it get back through the Ark. Mac, give Pinky a sidearm and some STs, seal the Ark door, and rendezvous at the atrium—now!”

  Mac nodded and stalked off through the nanowall.

  “There’s another door,” Sam said, realizing it even as she said it.

  “Where?” Sarge asked.

  Sam hesitated—and Sarge seemed about to slap her with his impatience.

  Reaper knew he’d never allow anybody to raise a hand to his sister, whatever issues he might have with her. But a potential fight with Sarge would probably end badly for Reaper.

  John Grimm was good. But Sarge was a killing machine.

  Anyway, Reaper had the answer to Sarge’s question.

  “…The entrance to the archaeological dig,” Reaper said, after a moment.

  In the wormhole chamber, the last few scared evacuees were filing through the huge steel chamber door toward the Ark, shepherded by Hunegs. There were flashes at regular intervals as they went through.

  “This is the last of them,” Hunegs called to Mac, as he came in. Just a few more technicians…

  Mac nodded, went to Pinky who was sitting at a workstation, puzzling over the digital file of Carmack’s research journal.

  As Mac walked over to him, Pinky read the second-to-last entry again:

  Twined, twined they are, into the DNA sequence. The fingerprints of the satanic, the darkest of darknesses within us. I dare not call it the supernatural, though it also cannot be called part of the natural world as we understand it. But something inhuman and other-dimensional hid the keys to the gates of Hell in our DNA…what is its agenda? Who has left this cunning lure for us?

  Pinky just shook his head. Carmack had to have been out of his mind.

  Mac dropped a gun and three ST grenades on Pinky’s console.

  Pinky raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

  “ST grenade. Pop the top, hit the button, throw. Don’t forget the last part,” Mac said.

  As if that said it all, he turned and headed for
the exit.

  “What? Whoa!” Pinky called after him. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to work.”

  Mac went through the doorway, pressed the release, and the enormous steel door rolled into place.

  “Wait!” Pinky yelled, starting after him. “Wait up! You can’t!”

  But Mac was locked away on the other side of the door. His voice came cracklingly over the intercom:

  “Ark secure.”

  Heavy bolts clanged into place. Pinky was sealed in.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Behind him, Hunegs and the last evacuee went through. The last tech to pass through was pale, sweating, stumbling as he went through the metal doors into the Ark chamber.

  Hunegs helped him up; helped him go through. Never looking at him closely—busily thinking about his own chance to escape.

  So Hunegs didn’t see the mark on the man’s neck; didn’t see the wound just visible, low, under his bloody collar.

  Eight

  THEY WERE ALL there but Duke, who’d been assigned to stay with Samantha. Seemed like Duke hadn’t minded that assignment much, Reaper reflected.

  The squad stood nervously in the atrium, waiting for orders.

  Portman wanted to make up his own orders. “We’re not calling in backup?” Acting shocked, amazed.

  Sarge shot him a cold look. “The Ark is sealed. Nothing crosses back here until everything on this planet is dead.” He examined his own weapon, adding, “Weapons check. We’re going in hot.” As if to say that settled the issue.

  Portman just stood there, his weapon on the floor beside him, staring at Sarge in disbelief. “You’re serious?”

  Reaper looked at him. Was this guy really ignoring an order? “Pick up your weapon, Portman.”

  Destroyer slapped a belt of ammo into his chaingun. “Come on, Portman—move out.”

  Portman didn’t move anywhere. “Didn’t you see the way that thing greased Goat?” His voice was getting shrill. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with!”

  Sarge chambered a round, slammed the breach.

  “It’s SOP,” Portman continued, insistently, almost whining, “to call in reinforcements when a situation—”