Lampreys

by Alan Spencer

  He was winded after struggling on the ground for a minute. For Conrad to regain his energy to fight, it only took remembering Bavardi's guts unwinding from his body, and those guts spreading out across the platform and landing in a hungry mouth.

  He got back up and ran for his life. Dr. Sutherland was a phantom in the darkness. He moved faster than Conrad did. He felt the air tug back his hair and shirt.

  Soon, it would be flesh being tugged and torn.

  "Stop running! I'm very hun-gry!"

  There was a sonic boom. It was as if the doctor had saved up the strength for one great suck. A section of the roof was torn back like a tin can. The force of air had missed Conrad, and he thanked the ever-loving Lord that he was still wearing his skin.

  The next problem, the roof wasn't secure. Parts of it started to crumble beneath his feet. He stepped into a hole. Conrad was pitched down into the darkness below. Conrad didn't touch down; he splashed down. He came awake swimming for his life in ice-cold water. Had he fallen off of the platform and into the ocean? It was impossible to know. There was only darkness and water. Conrad thrashed his limbs and reached out for purchase of any kind. He swallowed a mouthful of nasty water. It wasn't salt water; it had a grainy texture and tasted like turpentine. Conrad was losing strength. He was dying in a cold and dark place alone. He imagined his father and his brother and how he'd never see them again.

  Conrad couldn't fight for his life a moment longer.

  His body failed him.

  Conrad sank down into the dark abyss.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The elevator opened up to another narrow hallway. There was only one way to go, and that was forward. Henry led the team. Everybody was back-to-back so every angle was accounted for. They couldn't afford to be flanked by any enemy, human or lamprey. If there was one break in the chain, they would be crippled. Half the lights in the ceiling were broken. The ones that did shed light were few and far between, leaving large patches of darkness. Henry didn't need every inch of the place illuminated to see the pools of blood on the floor. Wild splashes covered the walls. Every red puddle was congealed and curdled. The victims had died days, if not weeks, ago. There wasn't a single corpse on the ground, except for the occasional random finger, hand, or torn off body part. Scattered about were items of clothing, mostly shoes, lab coats, torn fabric, and random articles.

  Henry ordered for the group to stop.

  "Listen," Henry whispered, "can you tell from how far out where that sound is coming from?"

  Everybody tuned their ears to the faint sound. Something was crashing against metal. Steel was bending and warping under pressure. The noise was punctuated by the awful grating bone sound like from when Amati was being devoured earlier.

  Crickcrackcrickcrackcrickcrackcrickcrackcrickcrackcrickcrack.

  "What the hell is that?" Fryer said. His eyes had doubled. "Look, I know I did wrong. I deserve to be here standing with you guys, but I don't want to be eaten like Amati. I mean, fuck that. Those things are clicking their teeth together. They're licking their chops. They're thinking about eating us, and it makes me sick."

  Scoop scowled at him. She raised her Gatling gun. "You shove this down its throat and feed it a bullet supper. It’ll win you a one-way ticket off the dinner menu. So shut up and stick a tampon in it before your pussy bleeds so hard your twat falls off. Stupid bitch."

  Keyes wasn't having it. "You say that shit to me again —"

  Henry stepped between them. "We can't turn on each other. We'll deal with Fryer and Keyes later. Right now, we need them, and they need us, or we might as well all die like Amati. And you're forgetting, my son's out there with Bavardi."

  Duke shared his father's concern. "My brother's a college professor. He's helpless out there. He'll die like everybody else on this installation if we don't hurry, and if Bavardi doesn't do something worse to Conrad than the lampreys first. So show some respect for our family and get over the situation and get your heads on straight."

  That was enough motivation to get everybody back to the mission.

  Henry guided everybody down the bloody hallway. Room doors started to appear marked by numbers. Many of the doors were either completely ripped from their hinges, punched into splinters, or riddled with gaping holes. Henry viewed the rooms long enough to understand the personal living quarters had been ransacked and those inside were murdered. The holes in the walls and doors varied from fist-sized, fingertip sized to sewer pipe thick.

  Up ahead was a common area where several couches, a big screen television, and tables for a casual dining area were arranged. Henry imagined a college dorm setting. Scientists and workers congregated here during their social time. Now, the place was a bloodbath.

  "Point your light at that television," Henry said to Keyes. "You see that?"

  The large screen television had a lamprey stuck to the front. The teeth had latched in deep. The once slimy black body was now reduced to dried up beef jerky. Dirty Poncho made the connection before anybody else.

  "I bet that television showed a person's face, and that lamprey went right for it, and it got electrocuted. The bastard didn't let go, even when its ass was being fried."

  Keyes pointed at the floor. There was a limbless and headless human torso, and it was moving across the floor inch-by-inch. Sucking, slurping noises vibrated from the torso. "They're eating it from the inside out."

  Henry could see the black bodies slithering within the torso. They had snaked through muscle tissue and flesh as their teeth spun like the blades of a bone saw and devoured their prey. What he didn't understand, the lampreys lower half stuck out of the body, and they were using their bodies to drag the torso to another location.

  Henry asked, "Why didn't they just eat their kill and move on?"

  "Disgusting! I don't care!" Keyes growled. "I'm going to blast it before it tries to eat me!"

  Keyes unloaded eighty shots from the Gatling gun. The torso bounced as it took bullet after bullet. The lampreys that were within burst, each of them going up into mist. Their insides were like blackberry jelly.

  "Fuck you," Keyes spat. "You're not eating me."

  "They're not eating any of us," Fryer said, "but where are they? Why aren't they raining from the ceiling to get us?"

  "That I don't know," Henry said. "It's all a guess. They'll show up eventually. You remember the way they burst from the ground to get Amati? They could be nearby and we wouldn't know it. That's why we've got to keep moving."

  Henry kept imagining what Conrad would do up against a lamprey. It was a horrible thought he forced himself to avoid. Henry refused to believe his son was dead.

  The team exited the living quarters. Only blood, clothing, and random pieces of the human bodies remained scattered. Whatever battle ensued, it appeared to be an ambush on a wide scale. The attack happened at once, not over an extended period of time.

  Henry had a hard time accepting the idea the lampreys had formed a collective consciousness. Then again, he didn't know a damn thing about what was going on in this research installation. ENTECH was a prolific entity. Maybe government missions weren't all the company dealt with.

  The hallway fed into a much larger room. There was a well-equipped kitchen and mess hall style seating. Henry imagined several hundred people could occupy the space at any given time. The tables were upended or in so many pieces. Blood colored everything. The ceilings were torn and gaping wide open. Whatever form of lamprey had attacked here, it was much bigger than the snake-sized ones. The Gatling gun in Henry's hands started to feel insignificant up against the strange enemy.

  Henry couldn't see any of the posters or morale boosters on the walls of the dining area, they were so caked in gore. One sight made him pause. Bone shards from hundreds of bodies were embedded in the walls as if flung at many miles an hour.

  Duke followed his father's stare. He used two fingers to pry a shard from the wall. "Damn. The piece of bone is in there good. You saw their teeth spin. I bet they chew them
up, and then shit out the bones."

  Scoop was searching the rest of the mess hall. She was walking across turned over chairs, broken pieces of table, and widening her stride to avoid the deeper puddles of blood. "Bone remains are here, and here...and here. I think Duke's right. They eat them up, and they shit them right out."

  Keyes and Fryer were fixated on the ceiling. Keyes said, "There are bones and blood up in the duct systems too. It's as if these people were, I don't know, somehow sucked up into the ceiling, and this is what's left of the poor sons-of-bitches."

  "We're not scientists," Henry said. "I don't care what they shit out. I only want them dead. Keep moving. Nothing here."

  The team exited the cafeteria. They checked upstairs and located more living quarters that had been invaded. There were no survivors. Heading back down to the main floor, they located another narrow hallway that seemed to connect one building to another. The building they were about to enter had two steel double doors for an entrance. There was a sign marking the doors.

  RESTRICTED AREA

  LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE ONLY

  Two checkpoint stations were set up to regulate access. Those stations were empty. The glass windows were shattered, the inside walls painted in blood. The team crossed through the checkpoints knowing it could be their blood shed next if they didn't watch out. When they were right up against the steel doors, Henry read a message painted in blood on the wall.

  NOT SAFE INSIDE

  KEEP LOCKED

  DO NOT ENTER

  The coded key panel was dismantled. The face was taken off, and the guts of circuits were hanging out. It was obvious that someone rigged the door to remain closed.

  "Somebody has to be behind that door that knows what's going on," Henry said. "Dirty Poncho, work on that panel. We have to get inside. I don't care what that blood says."

  Dirty Poncho put down his Gatling gun, unstrapped the travel tool kit strapped around his leg, and went to work on the door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Conrad let his body go. He had nothing else left inside himself to fight. He would sink at the bottom of this unknown watery grave and never be found. If this mission was classified, friends and his old co-workers at Texas University would think Conrad killed himself because of Arielle. People would say he died of a broken heart and humiliation. He drank himself into suicide. The shocking truth of his death would remain untold. The downward spiraling of his life seemed so insignificant up against the threats on the installation. He'd seen more action in the past twelve hours than in his entire life, and now it was going to end on such a pathetic note.

  This wouldn't be a peaceful death. The longer he went without air, his lungs painfully expanded in his chest. Almost two minutes under, his lungs felt like they would burst. Conrad thrashed his body, coming alive to save himself.

  The pain overcame his weakness.

  Anything for one precious gulp of air!

  Then Conrad saw a hand reaching out to him. He couldn't see who it was in the dark depths of the strange waters. There was a faint bluish light above him that flickered on. Conrad stretched out his hand to grab hold of the lifeline. When he did, the hand didn't clasp onto him. It turned over, being a flimsy thing. The arm ended at the elbow. It had been crudely eaten at the stump.

  Conrad unleashed a water-choked scream, "Gaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

  There was a great swishing of water from beneath him. A wall of bubbles pounded into him. An invisible wave of motion worked like an undertow. He was sucked down and spun upside down. Forced down, he realized this would be his dying moment. Then suddenly the direction of the waves changed. Conrad was spit upwards. He was thrown above the surface. He struck a thick glass wall, and right next to him, was a metal ladder. Conrad clutched onto it for his life, gasping for air.

  Conrad realized what he'd fallen into and he was terrified. This was an aquarium. He imagined the type used at Sea World. He had no idea how deep this aquarium was, but he sensed movement of something gargantuan below him.

  Bobbing on the surface were random human appendages. They were mostly heads and hands. The bite marks on them were wild slashes and serrations. Those inflictions had caused decapitations and mutilations. Brown foam crowded each side of the tank. A vile mixture of deflated eyeballs, fingers, and chunks of faded intestines the color of hotdogs was mixed in that foam.

  When Conrad put everything together, he climbed up the ladder quickly. The foam, the random pieces, it was all shit out of great monster's ass.

  Conrad crawled onto a steel platform. He moved to get as far from the water's edge as possible. Every part of his body was exhausted from running from that crazy scientist on the roof. He could see the small gaping hole in the roof above. Rainwater was trickling down from outside. He was up at least three stories high, maybe more. Stairs channeled down the side of the aquarium. A man in a lab coat stood at the head of the stairway. He was clutching onto the rail for support with one hand, the other holding a bleeding wound on his side. The scientist wore an intense haggard expression of weariness and disappointment.

  "You're lucky you escaped like you did," the stranger said with little conviction. "She must be saving her strength, because she normally would've sucked you right down and chewed your ass up. If she's saving her strength, she must be close to ready."

  "Ready for what? How do you know so much?"

  "I'll tell you everything when we get down from here. I get nervous standing up here. She's unpredictable."

  "She, who?"

  "Mama."

  The scientist cut Conrad off before he could say anything else.

  "Hold on with the questions, just follow me. There isn't much time before everything goes to hell. We both deserve a moment of peace before we die."

  Chapter Twenty

  Dirty Poncho was talking about a hermaphrodite hooker who charged double the going rate down in Mexico as he was tinkering with the key panel to get to the other side of the restricted area. He twisted wires and rebuilt destroyed connections, all the while trying not to fry himself. While Dirty Poncho was sharing yet another version of how he got his special nickname, Henry asked Fryer and Keyes questions.

  "This place still has electricity, which is odd," Henry said. "How long has this place been out of commission, you think?"

  Fryer shook his head. "Man, I wish I knew. Amati hired me and said all I had to was help transport Conrad. We get here, leave, and bam, a paycheck. I didn't get any of the details about the place itself."

  "And bam, you're a piece of shit," Scoop said. "Wham, bam, go fuck yourself in your own ass."

  Keyes aimed her Gatling gun at Scoop's midsection. "Keep talking shit, bitch."

  Scoop grabbed the barrels and pointed them at the floor. "I'll take you in a fist fight any time. I don't need guns to back up my shit. You apparently do, Keyes."

  Fryer stepped between them. "Stop it and hear me out. Amati did tell me one thing. It kind of slipped out while we were on the mission. ENTECH's been recording teams like us while they're clean-sweeping the installation. They wanted to see this project reach its full potential. I guess every group before us was a test run for data and analysis. Data for what, who knows? My guess, it's to see what these killing machines can do against trained forces.

  "Amati said you and your team, Henry, were going to be the last resort before they did blow this place up with chemical weapons. The problem, and Amati said this himself, if any of the things fall into the ocean, there's a chance they can make it to land. If they find a populated area, it'll spread. We can't fail."

  Keyes was furious. "You knew all of this, and you're just now talking about it?"

  "I'm scared is all," Fryer admitted. "After seeing the number of dead bodies, I don't know how we're going to stop them. They're so many of those things. I thought this would be a straightforward search and destroy mission. I guess it's more involved than that."

  "We'll figure out a way to fix this mess," Henry said. "First things first, we have to survey the a
rea. Even more is on the line now. We're not just fighting for our lives. We're doing this for the lives of innocent people. We're in the Gulf of Mexico. It's not that far of a swim for a creature equipped for those kinds of conditions. If those people that hired Amati would've just talked to me instead of forcing us here, we could've mapped out a better strategy. But then again, it sounds like the people running the show doesn’t care, or their heads are too far up their asses to catch a breath of air. They'll kill as many of us to ensure this private research doesn't go public. We still don't know everything about this place and the reasons we're here."

  Scoop was more curious about the lampreys. "So why enhance the lamprey? I've done investigative journalism for years, and this installation doesn't make sense. It could be a terrorist weapon, maybe, but lampreys need water and moist conditions to survive. And outside of water, they don't travel well for too long. It'd be easier to create a super nuke rather than mutate a species of lamprey. There were hundreds of people working on this thing. I can only image the cost of this project. So why lampreys?"

  A demented voice boomed over the intercom, giving everybody a jolt.

  "YOU HAVE NO CONCEPT OF WHAT YOU'RE UP AGAINST. SHE WAS BORN HUNGRY AND SHE WILL DIE HUNGRY. ALL WE WANT TO DO IS DEVOUR YOU. WE'LL EAT AT YOUR SOFT MEAT AND SUCK THE MARROW FROM YOUR BONES. YOUR INSIDES ARE SO JUICY AND SO SWEET. TASTY SWEET MEAT IS ALL WE WANT. MY STOMACH IS GROWLING JUST WATCHING YOU IN THE SECURITY CAMERA FEED. BUT NO HUNGER CAN MATCH MAMA'S HUNGER.

  "GO AHEAD AND TRY TO STOP HER. THE ONES WHO CAME BEFORE YOU HAD BIG ARTILLERY JUST LIKE YOU. IT'LL DO YOU NO GOOD. SHE'S SO CLOSE TO BEING READY. SOON, VERY SOON, THIS PLACE WILL BE AN ABANDONED POST. YOU WILL ALL BE DEAD. THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING. WE WILL CHEW YOU UP AND SHIT YOU OUT. SO GO AHEAD. COME ON INSIDE. I'LL OPEN THE DOORS. BE MY GUESTS. I EXTEND A HEARTY INVITATION. COME IN AND DIE!"

  Dirty Poncho dropped his tools when the key panel shot out a furious ball of sparks. The steel double doors opened. Everybody took several steps back. Every Gatling gun was aimed ahead of them. The room was impossible to navigate because the area was draped in pitch-black darkness.