Extinction Shadow

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  Around him, Team Ghost completed their descents, chutes falling to the ground like deflating balloons sucked to the grass. Fitz crouched down, raising his rifle while his team shed their harnesses and chutes. The team collected their jump gear, and Fitz looked for a place to stow it. He thought the base of a tree at the field edge would work, but something in the back of his mind told him to hold off. Wishing they had time to bury the gear properly, Fitz gave the signal to move out to the Bohemian Flats park.

  A wall of trees lined the perimeter of the park except where a pedestrian path stretched across the river toward the university campus. All the vegetation seemed sapped of life, dry and brown.

  Even the overgrown grass had died off, crunching beneath their feet.

  A mobile construction office trailer sat at the near edge of the park, beside the pedestrian path. Its door hung open and the windows were all broken. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do as a storage spot for their jump gear and, once inside, he could break radio silence to check on Mendez.

  Turning, Fitz scanned the shadows in the forested area. Nothing moved in the darkness. He checked the rest of his team as they finished stowing their gear.

  Their discarded chutes caught the wind rustling through the grass, flapping and creating a muffled scratching sound. But that wasn’t the only thing Fitz heard.

  Distant groans and clicks echoed over the park.

  Somewhere out there, the Variants were on the prowl.

  Beyond the trees, a beast suddenly screamed, freezing Fitz in place. Scanning the pines, Fitz knew the monsters were close, and he wondered if they had heard the chutes snapping open at such a low altitude.

  Fitz signaled them to form up on him, then gestured for Dohi and Ace to take point and head for the construction trailer. Team Ghost moved out, rifles coming up quickly, probing the darkness.

  Their advance wasn’t easy with the extra bulk of the HALO gear. They walked with clumsy gaits trying to manage it all toward the construction trailer. None of this stuff was supposed to be carried once they had hit the ground.

  Ace pushed the door open, cleared the space, and then gestured for the team to go inside. Once everyone was in, Lincoln shut the door, and the Team stowed their chutes and oxygen supplies under the desks in there.

  Fitz directed the rest of the team to watch out the windows for hostiles. He hated to make any sound, even inside, but he had to know if Mendez was alive.

  “Ghost 3, Ghost 1, do you copy?” he whispered into his mic.

  Static filled his earpiece.

  “Ghost 3, Ghost 1, do you copy? Over.”

  The channel remained silent.

  Fitz pictured the Variants ripping Mendez to pieces. The imagery filled him with dread. He could do nothing to help his teammate.

  “Ghost 3, I say again, do you copy?” Fitz whispered a final time.

  The only response he got was the wind rushing through the blinds of the office trailer and the constant noise of the distant Variants.

  Dohi and Lincoln glanced at Fitz. Rico signaled to him that she had eyes on a hostile, and it was headed into the open fields.

  The comm channel suddenly fired with a voice.

  “Ghost 1, Ghost 3. I’m holed up, but I think they got my scent,” Mendez whispered back.

  “Location?” Fitz asked.

  “Inside a condo at the corner of 11th and South Washington.”

  “Can you make it to Gold Medal Park?”

  “Negative. At least not yet. Soon as I set foot outside this place, I’m toast.”

  “Keep your head down. We’ll come to you.”

  Rico pointed at the tree line.

  Fitz heard the clicking of joints and looked out the window as Variants emerged from the darkness. The pack prowled on all fours, their tongues lashing against their sucker lips.

  A brute led them down the slope toward the fence along the river.

  Team Ghost was being surrounded, just like Mendez.

  Dread welled up inside his gut as Fitz considered their next move. They would have to split off in order to save Mendez.

  And that meant sending Rico off with Dohi.

  Fitz cursed his anger, but managed to separate his feelings like all the other times they had run into issues like this.

  “Rico,” he whispered. “After we get out of here, I want you and Dohi to go after Mendez. Then sweep downtown, find any signs of the tunnel origins and the webbing.”

  He turned to Ace and Lincoln next.

  “We’re going straight to the university. But first, we take down this pack,” Fitz said.

  The Variants swept the area, changing direction, as they approached the trailer, while another pack emerged at the edges of the park. They were closing in.

  The leading monster skittered over toward the mobile office, stopping about one hundred yards away to sniff the air. Its bony back went rigid like an angry cat, confirming it had picked up their scent.

  It let out a screech that sent the other beasts into a frenzy.

  The creatures bolted toward the trailer. If Team Ghost fired now they might be able to hold them off for a little while, but more would be drawn to their location.

  An idea simmered in Fitz’s mind.

  He grabbed an oxygen tank from their HALO equipment and moved toward one of the broken open windows. He heaved the football-sized tank as far as he could. It sailed silently over the heads of the Variants before thudding into the ground.

  The noise drew their attention and several creatures galloped over.

  Taking a breath, Fitz raised his rifle and moved his finger over the trigger.

  “Everyone down,” he whispered.

  The team crouched, and Fitz fired.

  A round flew from the suppressed barrel and hit home, puncturing the oxygen tank and sparking against its shell. The spark was enough to ignite it, and the tank ruptured, exploding.

  A low boom echoed over the park. The fireball bloomed overhead. Flames rolled over the bodies of the Variants, burning away their flesh.

  “Open fire,” Fitz said.

  Team Ghost angled their suppressed rifles out the window, and they slaughtered the rest of the beasts. As the last of the Variants hit the ground, Fitz motioned for the team to abandon their shelter.

  “All it takes is all you got,” Fitz said. “Good luck, Bravo team.”

  “Good luck,” Rico responded back.

  Fitz suddenly experienced the same dread that came on every mission where they had to split up. Watching her venture out into enemy territory without him now was one of the hardest things he’d had to do on any mission.

  While her skills in the field were unrivaled by most soldiers, all it took was one mistake, one errant Variant claw, and that was it. All he could do was hope for the best and trust she would make it back alive.

  “Let’s move,” Lincoln said.

  Fitz nodded and set off with Ace and Lincoln in the opposite direction of Rico and Dohi. It wasn’t ideal, but it would hopefully save Mendez’s life.

  An old military adage surfaced in his mind as Fitz ran on his carbon fiber blades.

  No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he whispered.

  — 17 —

  Normally the underground laboratory on Peaks Island smelled strongly of antiseptic cleaning solutions and crisp filtered air, but not today.

  Instead the air had an almost tangy, gamey bite to it and with Kate’s full white bunny suit, it seemed as if Kate were running a full-scale butcher shop in a fabrication cleanroom.

  A surgical mask clung to her face and goggles pressed against her forehead. She leaned over a laboratory bench in the cell culture room. Beside her was Doctor Carr.

  The scientist hemmed and hawed as he peered over the acrylic cylinder nearly a foot in diameter lying between them. A mess of smaller tubes hung off the end of the clear cylinder, providing the nutrient-rich media that kept the tissues inside of it alive.

  To the
untrained eye, the mass of red inside looked like chopped up hamburger meat, which might have been horrifying to someone like Big Horn, but Kate found it fascinating.

  “You think this bioreactor is enough to contain these tissues?” Carr asked, pointing to the acrylic tube.

  “Nothing’s escaped yet,” Kate said. “And it’s not like these tissues have a mind of their own.”

  “They grow extraordinarily fast, though. How long until they outgrow the bioreactor?”

  Kate glanced at the window separating the cell culture room from the main portion of the lab. The handful of techs Carr had brought with him were working in there. Some peered through microscopes. Other pipetted samples into tubes for PCR or other quantitative analyses.

  “The cells, as fast as they grow, still obey the basic laws of physics and nature,” Kate said. “They only grow so long as we’re feeding them. If I cut off their nutrient supply, they go dormant.”

  “Dormant?” Carr asked. “Not just into a senescent state?”

  “From my observations, that’s not the case with these things. It seems like there’s nothing they like to do more than divide, and they’re damned hard to kill.”

  “Strange. Almost as if they’re cancerous.”

  Kate pressed a finger to the acrylic tube with the cells throbbing inside it. The acrylic was warm to the touch. “All the phenotypic analyses I performed before you arrived confirmed my initial suspicions. These cells are a mix of white blood, nerve, and muscle cells.”

  “Did you test for any cancer markers?”

  “No,” Kate replied. “Didn’t have the bandwidth by myself.”

  Carr’s brow furrowed beneath his goggles. He seemed agitated. “I suppose I can allocate one of our team members to look into it.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Knowing what kind of cells we’re dealing with is great, but there’s something else beyond cell phenotype that we need to figure out.”

  “I am already one step ahead of you, Doctor Lovato.”

  Carr wheeled over a cart from a corner of the cell culture room. He pulled back a blue sheet covering the top.

  “This is from the autopsy,” Carr said.

  He waved a hand over a long slice of tissue from a metal tray. The tissue had been isolated from one of the spindly growths jutting out of the Alpha’s spine.

  “Excellent,” Kate said. “So far, every cell culture that I’ve grown looks like this.”

  She gestured to the mess within the bioreactor.

  “Once I grow these cells on their own, even if it’s a piece of intact webbing obtained from the field, they invariably grow into a blob of tissue with no organization.”

  “These tumorous monstrosities look nothing like nerve cells or the webbing,” Carr said. “I suspect it has something to do with a lack of external stimulus.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.” Kate rotated the bioreactor to get a view of the chunky tissue floating around within. “Normally, the cells in our body depend on microenvironmental cues to direct cell behavior. The cells I’ve been growing in here have no directional cues.”

  “Yes, yes, this is very basic biology.” Carr picked up the tray with the Alpha spindle and placed it next to the bioreactor. “And that’s all correct, I have the key to this dilemma right here.”

  Carr held up a small box-shaped device with dials. A few wires stuck out of the sides attached to metal clips.

  “My hope is to show you how we can induce the web-like growths you’ve seen with the external stimulus missing from your cell cultures,” he said.

  “And how is that?” Kate asked.

  Carr began attaching the metal clips to the exposed nerves in the Alpha spindle. An electric wire then went between another batch of nerves, and he handed the free end to Kate.

  “Connect this to the webbing samples within your bioreactor,” he instructed. “It should stimulate an electrical signal.”

  Kate wormed the wire into a valve and pushed it through the liquid media until it made contact with the tissue mass inside the bioreactor. She could’ve sworn the tissue recoiled at the touch.

  But that was impossible.

  This thing couldn’t feel or react, right?

  It was just a bunch of mindless cells.

  “Is it embedded in the tissue?” Carr asked.

  Kate jostled the wire. She was feeling more like an assistant than a full-blown scientist with Carr demanding these things of her.

  “Cut the suspense and tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.

  Carr started to mess with the dials on the box. “This here is a controller. I’ve attached electrodes to one end of the Alpha spindle. I’m hoping to apply an electric stimulus to it.”

  Now Kate could clearly see where he was going with this. Her eyes traced the spindle then the wire that led into the bioreactor. “You’re going to stimulate a nerve response from the Alpha into the tissue.”

  “Precisely.” Carr smiled confidently. “I believe that these Alphas exude the electrical stimuli necessary to direct the proper hierarchical growths of the webbing. The spindles and growths jutting out of the Alpha’s spine likely serve as antennae.”

  Carr initialized the controller. It buzzed to life.

  “From those antennae, I believe the Alpha spreads a signal that tells the webbing to grow, using it to communicate with the Variants around it,” he said.

  “How did you get all that from one autopsy?” Kate asked, unable to contain her skepticism on this simple solution.

  If she had learned one thing from the Variants, it was that the more you thought you knew about them, the less you actually did.

  Still, she hoped Carr was right. Figuring out how this webbing worked and, most importantly, what the Variants were using it for would greatly help Team Ghost and all the others stuck in the field with these monsters.

  “If this works, we should see the tissue begin to pulse, just like reports indicate in the tunnels,” Carr said. “And after that, the tissue will begin to self-organize into web-like formations.”

  “Let’s try it out.”

  Carr turned the dial on the controller. The Alpha spindle contracted. Clearly the electrical signal was having some effect.

  The spindle soon began to shiver, and Carr had to grab hold of the tray to keep it from shaking the spindle off the lab bench and onto the floor.

  “This is not exactly what I expected. The muscles within the thin spindle are reacting far more violently than one would anticipate. In fact, I wouldn’t have thought, given the proper connections, we’d see any reaction at all based off the footage of the Alpha.”

  Kate monitored the cells within the bioreactor. They didn’t seem to be doing anything yet.

  “Are you sure you have that wire connected properly?” Carr asked.

  Kate adjusted the wire to ensure it was embedded deep within the mass of tissue. She could feel the resistance as she tried to push it through the robust cells.

  “It’s definitely in there good.” Kate bent to eye-level with the bioreactor. “Wait, I see something.”

  “What? Are they forming webbing already?”

  Kate narrowed her eyes. The tissue was pulsing. But the cells weren’t forming webbing. Instead, the tissue seemed to be bulging. Almost like a flexing muscle.

  “It’s not thinning out and forming a spider web,” Kate said. “In fact, it looks like it’s doing the opposite. Something isn’t right.”

  “Likely the electrical stimulus. I’m turning it up.”

  “No,” Kate said. “I think—”

  But it was too late. Carr had already turned the dial, increasing the voltage. The Alpha spindle thrashed like a snake missing the head. It bucked out of the metal pan as electricity flowed through it and into the bioreactor.

  The tissue inside went wild. Sections ballooned and deflated, pressing against the clear acrylic walls containing it. Pieces of tissue spread out in jagged spikes, pushing into the tubes feeding the cells liquid media.

 
; Kate turned off the pump, afraid adding pressure to the system would rupture it. But the tissue didn’t seem to care. Part of it migrated into the tubes leading into the main bioreactor.

  The tubes popped off, unable to contain the intense pressure of the tissues pushing on the liquid. Pink cell media sprayed over the lab bench and floor.

  Fractures spread through the acrylic. Before Kate could do anything, the plastic split and the throbbing mass of red tissue expanded.

  “Turn off the controller!” Kate yelled at Carr.

  He didn’t react in time.

  The tissue inside exploded, sending red globules throughout the space. The meaty hunks smacked against the walls and peppered the scientists.

  Frozen in place, Kate simply stared. Then she reached up to wipe off the chunks from her goggles and the front of her suit.

  Carr did the same thing, cursing.

  “Next time, maybe you should be a little more cautious, and listen to me,” Kate said somewhat angrily.

  If Carr had heard her, he didn’t seem to react.

  “Doctor?”

  She turned to see bits of tissue dripping off him.

  “I’m just trying to think of where I went wrong,” he said quietly.

  “I think you had the right idea, but you can’t rush science. You should know that.”

  A few of the lab techs were gawking at them beyond the window to the cell culture room. Carr waved them in and ordered them to start assisting the cleanup. Kate and Carr exited the room to exchange their lab garments for clean suits, goggles, and gloves while the techs worked.

  When Kate and Carr were changed, they reentered the cell culture room.

  “Instead of going big right away, we need to start small and work our way up,” Kate suggested. “Something definitely happened with the electrical signal, and I want to figure out if we can control it.”

  Carr slid the controller over to her on the table. “I’ll let you drive this time.”

  Kate prepared smaller plastic plates full of tissue to scale down the experiment. This time, even if there was an accident, there wouldn’t be much more than a tiny splash. She attached the spindle and the electrical wire to the small tissue samples.