by Jacob Rayne
Hammett’s brow furrowed in confusion.
‘You’re in the test facility,’ the voice said. ‘First we want you to feed, because there’s a lot for you to see.’
A section of wall turned dark and a tray with a sandwich and a cup of water appeared in the slot.
‘Eat up. Then we’ll show you everything there is to see.’
Though he was highly suspicious of the food, Hammett was ravenous, so it wasn’t long before he dropped to his knees and started to cram the sandwich into his mouth.
The van caught up to Duggan’s car and slammed into the rear.
The noise was horrendous, as was the jolting sensation.
Something in Mark’s neck tore as he was thrown forwards in his seat.
‘Hang on, son, I’m doing my best,’ Duggan said.
The van pulled alongside them and veered towards the car.
Duggan floored the accelerator and moved past them.
It looked, at least for a few seconds, like they were going to be alright, but then the van shunted the side of the car, knocking the right hand wheels off the edge of the road.
The car flipped to the right, throwing Mark and Duggan into disarray.
Mark noticed, through his panic, that Duggan had taken his hands off the wheel and crossed his arms over his chest.
The way he was sitting made him look like a corpse, but this was not a line of thought that Mark wanted to pursue.
The car flipped again and again.
Mark tried to fight off panic by telling himself that he was on a fairground ride.
As the car landed on its roof at the bottom of the hill, Mark’s head collided with the window, knocking him out.
The dregs of dried mayonnaise still clung to Hammett’s face when the door to his cell opened.
Jeffries, the man to whom he and Abbott had forced an introduction, stood in the doorway. He was smiling and freshly shaven.
‘Hello, my friend. I know you were eager to look around so… enjoy.’
Hammett muttered something even he didn’t understand.
‘Now, Sergeant Hammett, please don’t touch anything. You will see some very fragile things and I’d hate for you to disrupt any of the work we’re carrying out here.’
Hammett nodded.
‘So, this was the first thing we found.’ Jeffries said with the air of a man giving a tour of a particularly expensive art gallery. He pointed at a baseball-sized lump of black porous rock.
‘This is a fragment of an alien planet that landed on earth a few years ago. Amazing, isn’t it? The planet was light years away. Inexplicably it just disintegrated and drifted through space and one of the chunks of rock happened to land in the sea off the shore of the island where you and Abbott hunted Morgan Sands.’
The words registered in Hammett’s mind, but they didn’t make much sense to him.
All that he’d picked up so far was the word ‘alien’ and Jeffries’ enthusiasm for the subject.
‘When you’re ready, we’ll move on to the next room.’
Hammett nodded.
The door opened into another room. Like the last, this one was bare except for a small glass case set into the wall.
Hammett stared through the glass, unsure of what he was looking at.
‘You have to look carefully,’ Jeffries said. ‘It’s very small.’
Hammett was fucked if he could see what had gotten Jeffries so excited.
‘Here,’ Jeffries said, handing him a magnifying glass. ‘You should be able to see it with this.’
Hammett resisted the urge to wrap the heavy magnifying glass round Jeffries’ head and instead put the glass to the case and peered through. He saw a tiny black thread on the red velvet of the display case. Nothing else stood out.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘The black thread.’
‘What is it?’
‘It was the first life form to crawl out of the rock that landed.’
‘Is it alive?’
‘No. It’s long dead. But it was the first living thing we found. We managed – with great difficulty, I might add – to clone it. At first it wouldn’t work, but when we spliced the alien DNA with that of our insects it gave the research a new lease of life.’
‘Not much to look at.’
‘There’s plenty more to see. Don’t you worry about that.’
The next room was more impressive, the glass cases displaying a variety of black, bloated worms that made Hammett suspect his sandwich was about to come flying back up his throat.
‘This is how the life forms start out. From this humble beginning they emerge into the beauty and awe we will see in the next room.’
The next room showed a glass case containing several tiny, moth-like creatures.
For a change to the earlier exhibits, the moths flew around their case. They were all translucent and moved so gracefully that it looked like they were made of liquid.
Hammett found it hard to take his eyes off them.
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Jeffries smiled. ‘Once they get to this stage, they start to search for a host. They crawl into a human, or sometimes an animal, and take control of the brain stem. The host is forced to do their bidding. I know what you’re thinking: such a majestic creature surely can’t also be powerful.’
He raised a finger as if to tell Hammett to pay attention, then he placed the flat of his palm against the glass.
After a second he took it away. Hammett watched in amazement as the moths all flew for the handprint.
One of them splayed itself, attaching the spines that were mounted around the edges of its wings to the glass. Its mouth worked at the glass, as though it could taste Jeffries through the case.
‘Good job that’s reinforced glass,’ Hammett said with a shudder.
Jeffries nodded. ‘Are you ready for the next room?’
‘Not yet.’ Hammett watched the creatures fly around the display case. He found that his eyes didn’t want to leave them.
‘I could watch them for hours, myself,’ Jeffries said. ‘But I assure you that greater wonders await us in the next room.’
Hammett nodded and they passed through the next door.
‘On the left is the first ever human to be a host for these graceful creatures.’ Jeffries pointed at an embalmed corpse on the wall.
The frozen expression of pain and terror made Hammett certain he was going to hurl.
‘The gentleman here was working on an offshore fishing boat. He hauled in a netful of fish, one of which was being controlled by one of the creatures we saw in the last room. When the fish died in the boat, the moth thing burst out from its head and crawled in through the fisherman’s open mouth.
‘Unfortunately, the fisherman never recovered from the shock of having one of these things crawl inside him. He didn’t wake up and, even more unfortunately, neither did the creature inside him.’
He pressed a button and an X-ray photo of a human skull taken from the rear popped up on the back wall of the room.
Attached to the skull was one of the moth creatures.
Jeffries used a touch screen to manipulate the image.
As he turned it to the side, Hammett saw a thin spiked tube sticking through the back of the skull into the base of the brain. He shuddered as he imagined how that would feel. The image also showed eight small but murderously sharp clawed limbs, sunk deep into the fisherman’s spinal column.
Hammett looked away from the image, unable to stomach it any longer.
The next case along showed another man’s body, but this time the back of the head was torn open, the flesh hanging away from his skull like paint that had peeled from a damp wall.
‘This is what happened when we tried to separate the creature from the host,’ Jeffries said. ‘Both embryo and man died.’
Duggan came round first. For long seconds he thought he was imagining the situation, pinned against the roof of the car with the smells of blood and petrol thick in his nostrils.
His head was foggy and he felt blood dripping down from his forehead. It clogged his eyes, reducing his vision to next to nothing.
He wiped a hand across his eyes, leaving his face slick with blood, and looked to his right to see Mark slumped against the window.
The boy was pale and bleeding so profusely that he initially took him to be dead.
It wasn’t clear what had happened until the headlights of the van that had knocked them off the road blazed into his eyes.
Figures garbed in darkness were heading down the hill towards the car.
They carried huge machine guns and wore gas masks.
He knew he had to get out. Trapped in the car like this he and Mark were easy prey.
He fumbled around to his left, searching for the knife he had held on his hip, but, in the upside down world of the smashed car, nothing was in its right place.
More blood dripped into his eyes. He palmed it away and stared at the car’s ceiling, searching for the knife.
While he looked, he nudged Mark in an attempt to wake him.
Mark didn’t move.
He left him for now.
Smoke started to come from behind him. He cursed as he saw yellow flames licking at the rear of the car.
The seatbelt was stuck fast and he knew his only option was to find the knife.
His fingertips brushed something that felt cold and sharp. He stretched towards it, feeling his back and shoulder groan in protest.
As he looked over his shoulder, he saw that the gas-masked men were halfway down the hill.
He didn’t have much time.
It seemed either the men or the smoke would claim him.
Or he could always look forward to the detonation of the fuel tank.
None of these options appealed to him so he pulled up the knife and frantically sawed at the seat belt.
For a few panicked seconds he didn’t think the knife was sharp enough, but suddenly the belt gave way, dumping him on the roof of the car.
He slapped Mark’s face a couple of times, fighting back panic when the boy didn’t move.
If there was the slightest chance he could save Mark, he would. For a second, Mark’s face became the face of Duggan’s dead son.
Duggan palmed away tears and blood and started to saw at Mark’s seatbelt.
The back door to the car came open and a gas-masked face appeared in the gap.
Duggan hastily aimed the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The blast hit the guard in the chest, knocking him out of the door.
Duggan glanced out of the shattered back windscreen and saw that two more guards had almost reached the car.
Mark’s seatbelt gave and he pulled him out of the seat.
The boy felt too cold for his liking.
Bullets thudded into the seat above them.
Duggan laid on top of Mark as cover while he lined up a shot through the back windscreen and pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t clear whether the blast hit its target, due to the spiderwebs of cracks in the glass, but the returned fire let him know his enemy was not dead yet.
The door on Mark’s side of the car opened a little, but caught on a rock. It would probably be wide enough for him to get through, but there wasn’t room for both of them.
He poked the shotgun barrel out of the gap and fired a warning shot at a guard approaching the passenger side of the car.
He squeezed out of the gap and crouched behind the car.
Machine gun fire raked the paintwork above his head.
There were two guards from what he could tell. One to his left, one to his right.
The third guard was still down from the shotgun blast he’d taken to the chest.
Duggan looked up and saw a fourth guard crouching behind a rock halfway down the hill.
While he tried to think, more bullets slammed into the car.
He knew he had to get Mark out of the car soon.
Flames were already starting to consume the bottom of the vehicle.
He needed to get to the rear driver door and pull Mark out through there.
But he needed enough time to do so without getting shot at.
The three guards wouldn’t give him anywhere near long enough to reach the car and drag Mark to safety.
He needed a miracle.
‘We decided, after the fisherman’s unfortunate death, to try the parasite in a more passive host,’ Jeffries said.
Hammett considered what he was saying. His head was still fuzzy. All of this was too much to take in.
‘What do you mean?’
Jeffries opened the next room.
‘I mean that we started putting the creatures we’d made into human corpses.’
In here were four display cases, one on each wall. Each showed a human body, their faces alive with false life, like computer-generated talking corpses.
‘So, these are the lucky corpses we used to host the creatures,’ Jeffries said. ‘And there’s a decent result, but the bodies are too decaying and dead to be fully useful. Still, it was a step in the right direction.’
Hammett studied the four bodies.
All of them looked in agony, their faces twisted into grotesque masks of pain, their movements stiff, tentative, as though every second brought fresh despair and anguish.
‘They are useless, really,’ Jeffries said, disdain plain to hear in his voice.
‘Why don’t you put them out of their misery then?’ Hammett snapped.
‘In case they improve.’
Hammett felt a mixture of pity and revulsion as he surveyed them.
The bodies had been resurrected from death into a new life of pain and despair. He shook his head and looked away, feeling sickened by their plight.
‘Next room,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand to look at the poor bastards anymore.’
Jeffries frowned and opened the door. ‘Do I detect a hint of anger in your voice, Sergeant Hammett?’
‘I think we both know that those hapless fuckers are no use to anyone. They deserve a quick death.’
Jeffries smiled. ‘Once we carried out a few more experiments we discovered that putting the moth creatures into living human subjects gave noticeably different results. You see, when the host is alive and in their prime, their skills and attributes are enhanced by the creature’s DNA. And, I must say, the results have been spectacular. As you can see here.’
He pointed to a display case which was barely large enough to house the human female who slept with her bare back to the screen.
Hammett couldn’t help but notice the large bulge beneath the skin on the back of her head. It repulsed and fascinated him at the same time.
‘Ah, she’s asleep,’ Jeffries frowned. ‘She’s the first one we ever produced who was worth a damn. What a beautiful specimen, huh?’
Hammett said nothing.
Jeffries pounded a hand on the glass.
‘What are you doing?’ Hammett said.
‘Why, waking her up, of course.’
The woman sat up. Her chest rose and fell quickly like she was having a panic attack.
Her head whipped round to look at the people observing her. Her face was white, her eyes pure black, no pupils.
Still, Hammett could feel her stare upon him.
She approached the glass slowly, showing no concern for being naked.
Hammett did his best not to stare at her full breasts and the dark triangle of hair between her legs.
The woman pressed her body against the glass.
Hammett felt a coldness run through the glass into his hand.
The woman’s lips drew back over her teeth in a snarl.
‘She’s trying to smile,’ Jeffries said.
Hammett found himself unnerved by the smile, even more so by the fact that the woman was pleased to see him.
‘This whole place wants razing to the ground,’ he spat. ‘None of this is right.’
‘Fuck right,’ Jeffries said. ‘Fuck morality. We can make an army of these thin
gs and make them do whatever we like. We’d massacre anyone who stood in our way.’
‘You’re dumber than you look if you think you can control them, you don’t know the first thing about them.’
Jeffries shrugged and gave a smile that made Hammett want to bury his fist in the businessman’s face.
‘You want to stay here and admire those titties for a while?’ he grinned.
‘Next room,’ Hammett said.
‘Suit yourself.’
The next room had an enclosure on each of the four walls. Behind three of the four glass barriers was a test subject. In total there were two males, one female. One cell stood empty.
‘We’re wondering if they can breed like humans,’ Jeffries smiled. ‘And if they can, what would come out?’
Hammett shuddered at the thought.
As with the last room, all three of the subjects were sleeping.
‘Why’s one cell empty?’ Hammett asked.
‘That was Morgan’s cell. Since he’s gone, we thought it best not to put anyone in his place.’
Hammett felt a cold rush as he remembered his encounter with Morgan.
‘These three were bred at the same time as Morgan and displayed similar capabilities. But Morgan was the pick of the group. That’s why we road-tested him.’
‘So what we went through on that island was just a test for Morgan?’
‘Why, yes. We had to see what he was capable of.’
He was furious at this, but a thought hit him like a sledgehammer blow. ‘If there was one of those butterfly things in Morgan’s head, what happened to it?’
‘Well, after Morgan’s body died for the second time, the embryo must have escaped.’
‘So is it alive or dead?’
‘We have no idea. No one has been able to find it.’
Duggan’s miracle came right on cue. It was as though God was making up for taking his son by helping him save Mark.
Twin beacons of hope shone down on them and a car swerved off the road and plummeted over the edge of the hill.
While the guards turned to look at the falling vehicle, Duggan fired off a few rounds from the shotgun. The first hit the guard to the left in the face, punching bloody holes in the gas mask.
The guard fell face-down in the grass.
