by Greg Dragon
After what happened to him in Cloudland, Louis had no intention of being imprisoned. He hoped to defuse the situation by bargaining from the one place he felt comfortable. His lab.
“Doctor Janzen!” an officer shouted.
Louis wasn’t surprised he followed. Everyone in the building had common door keys.
Passing the main research lab, he saw his dedicated lab team bent over their microscopes. He turned down another hallway to confuse the men behind him. His AL team kept working, unaware of his current ordeal. Louis would never want his personal problems to hobble their work. Finding the cure for AL was a noble endeavor. Whatever happened to him, his colleagues would be safe inside the shielded lab.
If he hurried, he would make it to his private cubby before the police caught him. He turned and across the hall in the AL war room, he saw his nephew, Justin Janzen, drinking coffee. Louis had forgotten about their standing breakfast date every Friday. Justin, a pre-med student, reminded Louis of himself. Behind him, he heard booted footsteps.
“Justin,” Louis yelled, “go back to your dorm.”
“Freeze!”
Justin looked up grinning, and then his eyes widened. He grabbed his head like he had been shot and staggered to the side.
“Justin!” Louis screamed.
No. His nephew wasn’t shot, but a force, something big, struck the building. A tornado? The entire structure wobbled and oxygen disappeared. He gasped for air. Concussion waves passed through walls and shoved Louis to the floor. Glass windows shattered, except in the sturdy AL research lab. Too late Louis realized the force waves might throw the AL lab into an emergency lockdown. Sure enough, he heard the alarm. Louis didn’t know what happened. A bomb? He felt too feeble to think.
Inside his head, a scratching sensation made him think the Anchorons gnawed their way to freedom. He dropped to his knees, screaming. His brain burned. Then he noticed, between tears and snot, the policemen rolled and jerked on the floor. Could this be the Hum eruption Eddie Jean predicted? Didn’t she say Hum survival mattered most?
How did he sense the wave coming?
His tympanic membranes stopped aching, and he staggered to his feet. The floor rippled beneath him. Floor tiles shot up from their grout and into the air like square bullets. The force tossed him up and threw him down the hallway. He skidded headfirst into the far wall. Air popped out of his lungs with a belch, and he felt loopy. Inside his ear canal, something stung.
Grunting, he jabbed his finger in one ear and encountered a soft, squishy gel not unlike the inside of a grape. Louis tried to pull it out and figured it caused his dizziness. He couldn’t breathe. It felt like he was underwater, floating and twisting into a deformed shape.
Underwater. Louis flashed back to his vacation in May. A weird, dangerous jellyfish had washed up on the Mexican beach. A crowd gathered around it and many locals looked disturbed. Louis had never seen anything like the strange, twisted creature. Brave boys poked the jellyfish with shell fragments, but the membrane wasn’t punctured. He asked a surf fisherman to tell him about the jellyfish. The old guy spoke bad English. “New kind. Globe warming.”
Were new species popping up and going unnoticed? Global warming became a convenient scapegoat for those too scared to explain the science. Last time he heard, oil spills had caused minor mutations. No one had ever suggested an oil spill would produce an entire new species. Where had the jellyfish come from?
He had read about hybrids in the Arctic, even though he denied knowing it to Eddie Jean. Matings between grizzly and polar bears, bowhead and right whales, and narwhal and beluga whales had made new species. Hybrids were a normal part of evolution. The articles had omitted details on the speed at which the new species were produced. The theory of evolution happening slowly, trashed. Few paid attention. Even me.
He had returned the next day and asked the same fisherman what symptoms the new jellyfish breed caused when it stung human flesh.
“Stinger makes deep, uh, sores.”
Louis used hand gestures to help his speech. “The stinger is alive and motile?”
Laughing, the man answered, “No like sperm, okay, maybe yes. Not sure what you mean. Stinger needles move around. But no worries, season over.”
Louis felt relieved he hadn’t run into the hideous jellyfish while swimming. Knowing it existed wouldn’t have kept him out of the ocean. He lived on borrowed AL time. In Mexico, he had decided to change his life. He planned to get the family all together in one place, build connected housing, so they could all share in the care of their Alzheimer’s relatives in a group. He knew retired nurses willing to take shifts to ease the workload.
His aging mother was exhausted from moving from house to house to assist with the nursing care of her grown children. His sisters-in-laws were devastated by the AL situation and the physical care their spouses required. Distance killed the family’s chances of helping one another. Louis believed life should end with self-respect intact. To ensure the possibility for his relatives, he planned to cash in his 401k, buy the land, and build a Janzen compound so his relatives could live their final years in dignity together.
Louis dropped out of his vacation daydream when his ears popped again and sticky fluid drained down his neck. He smelled sulfur when he sniffed the exudate from his ears. The stench woke him from a daze, similar to popping an ammonia vial under his nose.
He crawled on his knees toward the lab viewing window, feeling dopey. Even jagged glass shards didn’t faze him. He needed to see if his lab team was safe. Louis used his hands to claw up the wall and stood, panting. His vision had changed, and he couldn’t focus his mind.
He glanced inside the lab, blinking his eyes while swaying on his feet. His thoughts were cluttered and sticky. He noticed the lab specimens stored in shatter-proof containers had exploded. Dead samples looked alive on the counters multiplying and growing in size. How could that be? Even as he considered the reason, he marveled at his excellent vision. But he couldn’t focus his attention. His AL research team lied scattered on the floor in odd positions. No, two were standing like him. Theo Frazier, a leader, looked asleep on his feet. Why didn’t he try to reset the alarm? Louis fumbled with the intercom.
“Theo, put the code in to reset the locks!”
No one moved. The alarm trapped them in the lab. Focus. His brain couldn’t work out what occurred. What he saw wasn’t possible, therefore he was hallucinating or he suffered from brain injury. He refused to believe what he saw because it skewed all tenets of basic science. He blinked and stared at the unbelievable.
Louis lived for the science. Life made sense based on scientific principles. Science created order out of chaos. A bleed, yeah, the head injury caused bleeding in his brain, and it affected his vision like people described out-of-body experiences. Besides, he felt faint again, but before he collapsed his rational mind told him what he saw was impossible. Good. If he believed his eyes, then monsters of legend walked the earth again. And legends weren’t true, right?
Eddie Jean
Where am I? Eddie Jean blinked, staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. The air was stuffy and too warm. A hand dropped over her mouth and she flinched. Scot’s lips touched her ear as he whispered, “Swarmers. Half the roof has caved in. We’re sealed in for now. I’m going for the weapons bag.”
She nodded, listening. The Hum was gone. Slowly, she raised her legs and moved her arms and fingers. Normal. No lights were on, but the interior was as clear as day. Maybe she had night vision now. She scratched her arm. Her skin felt scorching hot under the shirt. She looked down and gaped.
A colorful, phosphorescent sheen gleamed from her hands. She rolled up her sleeve. The startling effect went up her arms. Charles Darwin had been intrigued by the lights in the ocean. He studied them during his five-year science journey on the Beagle. Her skin glowed with the same weird, silver-green ocean color. She tried to wipe it off, and the layer under her epidermis crunched like potato chips.
Fingers quiverin
g, she pressed the skin on her chest under her necklaces. Crunch. Crunch. The same brittle sensation extended to her back and legs. She started to touch her face and hesitated. Scot looked the same to her, and then she noticed his pupils as he crept back. His pupils had a cat-eye effect. Instead of a vertical slit, he had a slit from his pupil, across his blue iris, and into the tear ducts at the inner edge of his eye.
“Other bag is pinned under debris,” he said. “They tracked us here. There’s at least twenty and more coming. What’s wrong?”
“Your eyes—there’s a black slit in your iris. Does it hurt?”
“No, I see in the dark even better than before, though.” He tilted her chin. “Same with you, but it looks more like a light bulb shape to me. Maybe its purpose is to let in more light.”
“How else am I different?”
He sucked in his lips and said, “Your skin glows. My uncle called it bioluminescence and my aunt called it fire in the water.”
She couldn’t look at him. “Anything else?”
“You can’t feel the color wheals on your skin?” he asked. “Even on your face?”
“No!” She examined her hands and upper arms. All she noticed was the phosphorescent sheen. Her palms covered her face before she could think. “I’m a freak?”
“You look like those tough chicks in fantasy games. Makes you look hot.”
She wanted to cry. “You dork.”
A Swarmer banged on the door and bellowed.
“I’ll try to probe them with telep.” He closed his eyes for a few minutes. “No mind intelligence.”
“They followed us here. How?”
“Don’t know.”
In some ways, he had more skills than her. When she tried to tune in with her finger pads resting on temporal pulses, she got a piercing headache. She dropped her hands. Loud, static gibberish beamed in and her head throbbed from the sound.
Scot nudged her with his elbow and beamed, {What is wrong}
“Static.”
He shrugged, and then the Swarmer at the door went wild. It kicked, punched, and threw its body weight into it. Then it left.
“My hearing is…” she said.
“Fantastic. Mine too.”
He stood and pulled her up. They both stretched. She wouldn’t let her mind drift to what would have happened if the Hum rupture occurred when they were outside.
Scot cleared his throat. “Once we open the door we need to know what we’re doing.”
Then she heard feet snapping wood splinters and pushing aside rocks. She heard a low growl and a sudden high-pitched roar as they hit the door. The sound echoed inside their safe space. It was an impressive display of power.
“No intelligence? They’re working as a team,” she said.
“We can’t intercept their communications either.”
“The Hum changed all. Before the Hum we controlled the Swarmers because they weren’t smart. Maybe they control us in the new future,” she said.
“Stop with the gloom and doom, okay?”
“Have you called the others to help us?”
“No, this is our fight. We’ll meet up when we get clear. They’ve had their own problems.”
“Twenty against two?”
“My call. If you have a better option, let’s hear it.”
She sighed. “What if my sister and my mother are out there?”
They locked stares.
“You want Kimmy to live on as a Swarmer?”
“Maybe they’ve evolved or will evolve in the next few days.”
He grunted but didn’t laugh at her. “You have to let them go. I’m sorry.”
She bit her lip and hung her head. He surprised her when he hugged her. She groaned at the idea of hurting them. Scot patted her back. “You okay?”
She sniffed and flipped hair behind her shoulders. “So, we’ve been given amazing upgrades, but we’re trapped.”
He grinned. “Gotta love Mother Nature. Ready for the blitz, soccer girl?”
“The sole option is to fight our way out?”
He nodded.
“If we didn’t have the weapons bag?”
“Same. We’d have to fight with what we could find. They’re coming in.”
After everything she went through yesterday, she had hoped day one post-Hum, would be better. Much better. If humans were making their last evolutionary stand, she’d go down fighting. First, she would pray the Swarmers would leave even though the resumed banging on the door didn’t give her much hope.
Eddie Jean selected a rifle from the bag and pulled out extra clips. “Better show me how to load and reload.”
“Now you’re talking.”
Louis
Louis’s hands ached and itched. He tried to sit up but couldn’t. He’d passed out, he guessed. He quit wearing a wristwatch years ago—why count something he couldn’t control? He had no way to gauge the time or how long he’d been down. Pictures of various AL research teams he’d hung with pride along the hallway had tumbled to the floor. He sneezed and brushed slivers of glass off his face. His eyes were fine, thank goodness. In the distance, he heard shrill alarms.
All unanswered.
Louis tried three more times before he could sit up without feeling faint. He took a deep breath and decided to check for serious injuries. The first oddity he found was a huge blood clot the size of a plum attached to his left ear. Louis knew he should wait for paramedics, but they took their sweet time. Impatient, he ripped the clot off and felt nothing. He squeezed the black clot and found dried blood and tiny gray and red worms inside.
What? Panting, he tried to make sense of his body. He stared at his hands, but they didn’t register—almost as if they weren’t there. Was he in surgery? No, he recognized the hallway.
What’s happening? Where are the paramedics?
Look in the lab.
Panic made him nervous, jumpy. His thoughts were muddled and he couldn’t focus.
Something tapped on the lab viewing window.
He couldn’t look up, much less stand.
See us in the lab.
I don’t want to.
Louis started shaking. He didn’t want answers anymore. All he ever wanted was to be free from a soul-stealing disease. He didn’t sit back, helpless, waiting for others to do the work. He searched for the cure. Was a cure for AL too much to ask for? He shook his head to clear it and foul sulfurous fluids escaped his ears.
Okay, he owed it to his lab assistants to check on them. Tears blurred his vision, but he managed to stand, swaying a bit, with his back to the viewing window. He grabbed his stomach and doubled over with cramps. Pain seared his gut, creating an overwhelming need to eat bloody, raw meat.
Gases must have been released by the earthquake like the yellow mist in Cloudland. No, he rejected the thought. He didn’t have Swarm disease. Nope. No way.
No one called for help, unless he counted the nonstop tapping on the glass.
Tap-tap. The sound heard in nightmares. He shivered.
Stop worrying about losing thoughts.
Now he heard voices in his head. Schizophrenia? Louis rubbed his temples and his head felt rougher. Different.
“I’m Doctor Louis Janzen and this is my lab.” He felt stupid talking out loud, but it helped him focus even if his voice sounded muffled. The force wave had damaged his ears, he concluded. Inhaling, he turned to look inside the lab.
Two faces, two alien faces stared back.
Shaking, he blinked and decided he was under anesthesia. He hoped so, anyway. He looked down at his hand, or maybe he should say his claw. He swallowed, and stared at their faces again with his stomach flip-flopping in revulsion. Human-like, but not what had been seen on earth lately. His clinical side couldn’t stop noting the new characteristics:
Protective eye scales
Superior musculature
Cutting edge incisors
Could the force wave have rearranged human DNA? Was such a thing even possible? No, it wasn’t possi
ble. But he stared into the face of evidence. His staff had changed from human to other? He pressed his face against the glass to examine them closer.
Threaded into the skin across their cheekbones were floaters that looked thin and long, like transparent spaghetti or long, fleshy worms. They undulated back and forth like animal whiskers. Did they pick up sound vibrations? The floaters gave the appearance of gills, or maybe a filtering type of apparatus made from a natural substance. He sensed one was male and the other female, but couldn’t tell a difference from the neck up. The one on the left was smaller—female.
Both made clicking noises at him, not from the mouths, but telepathically. Louis’s bladder nearly released on him. Telepathy?
Release us. Tap tap. Release us. Hunger.
Hunger? Did they…He stared at the inert bodies scattered on the lab floor. Some of his staff’s faces and even their brains had been scooped out. Dark blood congealed on the floor. They were still hungry? He jerked back from the viewing window.
Wait, it made sense. Blood was salty. Searching for essential minerals, enzymes, or vitamins to complete their physical needs must require incredible energy. The idea repulsed him. He should’ve been in the lab with his colleagues, like a captain on a sinking ship.
Louis waited, hoping to pass out again, relieving him of his responsibilities.
When he didn’t respond, one slammed a fist into the glass. Work to do. Release us.
Confused, Louis concluded he retained human thoughts and feelings, but they didn’t. In the next eureka instant, he realized that to survive, he had to keep his humanity secret.
And then, Louis sent back, Danger, let me clear path.
Hurry Tap-tap-tap hurry. Hunger-hunger-hunger.
Rett
“Vampire!”
“Move!”
