The Dark Side: Alex Hunter 9

by Greig Beck

  CHAPTER 48

  John F Kennedy Moon Base – Rec Room Isolated Group

  “Who’s there?” Andy Clark had his ear to the door after someone had pounded on it, making his heart jump into his throat. It was his turn on door duties, and the way things were on the base he did not want any surprises.

  He turned to the group and saw twenty faces all silent, and staring with a mix of apprehension, and perhaps hope that the next visit would bring good news – maybe about the contagion being under control or even about going home.

  “Andy, it’s Mia. I’ve just come from the control room and have a message from Captain Briggs.”

  Clark grinned at the sound of his casual girlfriend’s voice. “Enter, friend.” He hit the button and the door slid back.

  Mia came inside, and looked briefly over the people, then back to Andy Clark.

  “What’s the message?” he asked eagerly.

  Mia turned to him. “That help is coming soon, and to stay right here.”

  “That’s it?” He couldn’t help his disappointment showing.

  “And this …” She leaned forward, grabbed his face in both her hands and kissed him on the mouth, hard.

  They broke apart and his first thought was that Mia had been a bit distant lately, so maybe she was trying to make it up to him. And that was fine with him. But then he noticed that her mouth tasted like spoiled fruit and perhaps she hadn’t cleaned her teeth for, like, ages.

  Mia smiled, without the expression reaching her eyes. She turned to hit the door button. It slid open and she backed out without another word.

  The door slid closed after her.

  Well that was weird, Andy thought, and went to sit back down among his fellow crew members.

  It wasn’t long before Andy started to find it hard to concentrate on the conversation around him. He leaned his head back against the wall in the center of a group of about a half-dozen of his colleagues. He blinked several times and tried hard to listen – they talked about food shortages, then began fantasising about the first meal they’d have when they got back home.

  Andy’s head throbbed and his stomach roiled, and just hearing about the food made him belch a fruity, flowery taste similar to what he’d detected on Mia’s breath.

  Andy Clark closed his eyes. The throbbing became more centralized, and moved to pulse on his neck, scalp, forehead, and even his face. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyelids closed and wished it all away.

  A small lump on his scalp turned into a bulge. Another grew beside it. Then another and another. After a few more seconds, the lumps lifted on stalks, grayish, run through with veins. More lumps rose from his neck, and several others from his forehead and cheek.

  Just as the woman beside Andy noticed them, and screamed, the first acorn-sized protuberance burst open, spraying a cloud of powdery granules over those closest to him.

  CHAPTER 49

  Briggs could hear the cacophony of panicked voices even before he entered the secure room. He had to enter a pass code to the recreation room’s door panel, where over twenty of his people had been holed up. The door slid back, and he went in fast but not without a high degree of apprehension.

  He steeled himself, but the sight that met his eyes sent a shock wave from his head to his toes – there was chaos and screaming, and the large room had separated into three groups, with the smallest group in the center of the room.

  To one side the larger group cowered, and many left it to run toward him, all babbling and screaming at the same time. He pushed them aside to focus on what was happening in the center of the room: a small group of his crew seemed to be holding something at bay, or guarding something. But all they managed to do was move from foot to foot while cursing and yelling instructions to no one in particular and holding pieces of furniture up in front of themselves.

  Briggs saw Stevens among them and went to the man, pulling him back by the shoulder.

  “What the hell is going on?” he shouted over the din.

  It was only then he noticed that there was another sound as well as the yelling, screaming, and cursing human voices. It was a moaning that was as eerie as it was unearthly.

  Stevens grabbed his arm. “Thank God, Tom. It got in, somehow. Or was always here.” He stood aside. “Look.”

  Closer to the external wall there was a group of perhaps half-a-dozen people all huddled together. But as Briggs focused, he could see the guy in the middle was literally covered in spikes or knobs that bloomed open like putrid flowers. His body had broadened, and as well as the protuberances, there was also some sort of veined structure bursting from his tattered clothing and reaching across to the people close to him. Some of them, covered in the sticky-looking mesh, were slumped, unconscious, and others had faces of extreme physical agony or perhaps just psychological torment, aware of what was happening to them.

  “Jesus Christ!” Briggs yelled then grimaced, feeling his stomach flip.

  The glistening strings like spidery veins penetrated their clothing, their mouths, and even their eyes, and wormed in deeper as he watched. The bodies of the meshed victims swelled and at first became lumpy, their features grotesquely distorting, before they simply collapsed in on themselves.

  Briggs’ mouth hung open and he felt numb as he watched as their suits emptied, their heads shrinking down into the collars of their clothing before disappearing.

  But not the person in the middle. Briggs recognized the young man as Andy Clark, who used to be in charge of the storeroom and tended bar sometimes. He still seemed to be dozing, as if he wasn’t aware that his own body was absorbing the people next to him.

  Is that the way it worked? Briggs wondered. Did Andy even know he was already taken over, and was now ingesting and converting his friends?

  Soon there was just empty clothing covered in black slime, the same as they’d been finding throughout the base.

  Briggs started to back up. “Everyone get back.” Now he understood what had happened to his people and where and how they had vanished. It gave him a jittery feeling in his gut to think his friends and base team members had encountered this thing in the corridors when they were alone.

  The mouth of Andy Clark opened and that eerie howl bellowed out, filling the room as if he was in agony – or maybe it was a call of triumph. It was too much for the group, and the remaining people in the room headed for the door.

  They were panicking, Briggs knew. He also knew that the fear-maddened crowd would be just as deadly as the creature.

  “Stop!” he yelled. But his own feet moved him away from the alien thing in the corner.

  Briggs turned back and saw that Andy’s eyes were open, coal black and glistening like oil. Ominously, the man started to rise to his feet. It was a gruesome sight, as now budding from his body were bulbous growths hanging on stalks like rapidly ripening fruit.

  “Stay back, Andy!” Briggs yelled.

  And then the red-veined polyps burst.

  Those closest were covered in powder that was like sticky grains of sand. They wiped and brushed at themselves, but then they doubled over, either holding their bellies and throwing up or grabbing their heads as if a ferocious migraine racked their minds.

  It was too much for an already frightened crowd – they went mad. Briggs was shouldered aside as they went for the door closed door.

  “Don’t let it out!” he yelled.

  No one heard.

  Or no one listened.

  CHAPTER 50

  The rec room door opened, and Alex filled it with his huge, silver form. He took it all in within seconds – a cyclone of madness – and he strode in and pushed Briggs aside. He felt a visceral revulsion for what he was seeing. Even though he had just encountered the creature in a raw form on the lunar landscape, this abomination was human degradation on an unprecedented scale. It also told him what would be in store for all of them if this thing was allowed to continue to move among them undetected.

  A small group of people toward the
far end of the room was enmeshed in some sort of fibrous webbing and tendril-like roots covered their bodies. As he watched, most of them collapsed into piles of empty clothing. All except for a central male figure, who seemed asleep.

  Briggs tried to quieten the remaining crowd and restore a semblance of sanity, but his words were drowned out by the mad screams and wailing of the people still in the room.

  “Calm down!” Alex’s roar was like a physical force, and the group silenced and looked at him with round eyes and trembling chins. He turned to Briggs. “Get ’em out. Orderly.”

  “But –” Briggs pointed.

  “No choice,” Alex replied and stepped forward. “Do it, now.”

  Briggs pushed and pulled the remaining people into a semblance of a line so they weren’t all jammed up. Even then, the open doorway was quickly overwhelmed. People started to clog the doorframe as elbows and shoulders came into play.

  “It’s Andy Clark,” Briggs said through clamped teeth. “I know him.”

  “Not anymore,” Alex replied.

  Andy stood like a ghastly reanimated corpse, stalks and pods on stems still sprouting from his body. A fruiting body. Alex remembered Marion’s reference to the fungi’s ability to spore.

  Andy opened his eyes. “Where am I?” he asked. “What’s happening?” The young man held up his hands in front of his face as if examining them for the first time. “What’s happening?” he asked again as he frowned at the digits. “Tom?” He looked across to Briggs. “These aren’t my hands.”

  As Alex watched, one of his fingers audibly snapped and pointed at an impossible angle. Andy’s face screwed up in both pain and anguish.

  “These aren’t my hands!” he screamed.

  They watched another of Andy’s fingers lengthen as a veined bulb formed from its end, a pod, starting to swell. He looked toward the two remaining guards. “Heeelp meee.” He took a step toward them.

  “Don’t! Don’t you fucking move!” one guard yelled. In his hand he had a rivet gun, probably from the maintenance shop.

  “Stay back!” the other guard yelled, but his voice was breaking. He held a chair up.

  “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sick.” But Andy came on anyway. More of the budding polyps were rising from all over the young man. The first guard lifted the rivet gun, aiming it dead center at Andy’s chest.

  Alex could immediately see what was about to happen. “Stop!” he yelled and raised the toxin dart gun, which he knew was safe in the enclosed space.

  Andy looked at it, froze, and then changed course, moving toward the guards. He took another step and shot an arm out.

  Too late, the panicked guard fired. The bolt went straight through Andy’s face as if it was boneless, and on into the wall. And kept going. The hole it made in the exterior wall was walnut sized, making a scream like a steaming kettle as the air in the room was sucked out.

  Briggs began to physically ram people through the doorway. “Get out, get out!”

  But there was too much atmosphere in too much of a hurry. The breached outer wall’s skin began to peel back, and the hole enlarged from walnut to baseball sized in seconds. The rushing scream got louder, and the air inside the room became a hurricane.

  Most people made it out, save the guards, and Alex and Andy Clark, who still stood with a hole in the center of his forehead, mouth hanging open, and a confused look in his eyes. As Alex watched, the hole in his forehead closed up like a mouth, and the confused look left his face.

  The two security guards in the center of the room with Alex were torn between fleeing for the door or holding Andy at bay. Alex felt the drag of the rushing atmosphere against his frame and a quick glance at the hole in the wall told him they had little time.

  He turned to Briggs. “Shut the door, or you’ll decompress the entire base.”

  Briggs shook his head and yelled, “Not without my people.”

  Then the decision was taken out of Briggs’ hands as the wall of the base exploded outwards.

  Alex lowered his shoulder and rammed Briggs and the last few people in the doorway through then punched the close button. He tried to grab for a metal railing but was too late.

  The two guards screamed and held their heads as the air vanished and the vacuum of the moon replaced the benign rec room environment.

  The room decompressed explosively, and Alex, the two guards, and what was once Andy Clark were violently ejected onto the moon’s surface.

  * * *

  Normally, Alex’s helmet would have auto engaged following the explosive decompression, but the damage it had previously sustained prevented that and left his entire head exposed. When he stopped rolling, he felt the agony of the freezing, super-dry atmosphere against his skin – and it burned like hell.

  His mind ticked off all the data he knew from his training – in a vacuum, the average human body had around fifteen seconds before the remaining oxygen reserves in its bloodstream were used up. But the danger was some people automatically held their breath – a fatal mistake, as the loss of external pressure would cause the gas inside your lungs to expand enormously, which would rupture the lungs and pull air into the circulatory system.

  So, the first thing to do if you ever found yourself suddenly expelled into the vacuum of space was to exhale, hard, and also screw your eyes tightly closed. Unfortunately, the other things you couldn’t really do much about – after about ten seconds or so, your skin and the tissue underneath would begin to swell as the water in your body started to vaporize in the absence of atmospheric pressure. You wouldn’t balloon to the point of exploding, since human skin is strong and elastic enough to keep from bursting. But seconds mattered if you wanted to avoid permanent damage or death.

  Alex kept his eyes screwed shut and also his mouth closed as he remembered another titbit from his moon briefing – in a vacuum the moisture in your tongue and gums can freeze-boil.

  Alex’s abnormal recuperative powers and enormous strength allowed him to fight back against the pain, and as his body was being decimated by the vacuum, it also tried to repair itself – cells were destroyed, cells were repaired – it was a race he knew he’d eventually lose.

  He dragged himself to his feet. He knew he wouldn’t freeze straight away, despite the extreme cold temperatures, as the heat didn’t leave the body quickly enough to freeze on the spot. He’d die of suffocation long before that.

  Flakes of Alex’s skin began to peel away and knew he was running out of time to locate the base personnel blown out with him while trying to avoid encountering the infected man, Andy Clark, who was also out there. But the Andy Clark thing wouldn’t be bothered by the vacuum.

  He had to risk it, he had to see, so he opened and closed his eyes in blinks, as fully opening them would cause the moisture to be sucked out and the eyeball itself to solidify. But quickly shutting them allowed his supercharged metabolism to repair them enough for him to then chance another glance.

  He placed one foot in front of the other and every second he was outside more of his skin began to crack, dry, and peel away. A thousand needles of super-dry cold pierced his flesh and so he took himself out of his body, left the pain behind, and worked to ignore the agony.

  He found the first security guard and lifted him under his arm. Alex opened his eyes in another blink and spotted the remaining two bodies lying twenty feet away – only one of them was human.

  The pain forced itself back in on him. It was becoming intolerable. The cracks on his face were now spilling blood that floated away in a dry mist. Alex felt like there were flames covering his body as the freeze burn started to rip his skin down to the inner layers. His blood was beginning to cold-boil. Ridiculous facts intruded as his consciousness began to swim – if you do die in space, your body would never decompose in the normal way, since there was no oxygen. In some cases, your body would mummify like a huge chunk of jerky.

  He screwed his eyes shut and grimaced from the pain. His lungs began to rebel against him, threa
tening to force his mouth open to try and drag in a breath that just wouldn’t be there.

  He moved toward the two men, counting the paces – one would be human, and one would be a monster. Laying his hands on the wrong one at this time would be the end of him.

  When Alex arrived, he opened his eyes for another second. In that moment, confusion tore at him as now there was only one body there, the final guard. Next to him was the charred outline of another body, as if it had been totally incinerated.

  He had no time to wonder about it as pops of light started to explode in his head from lack of oxygen. He grabbed the remaining figure and moved back to the hole in the rec room wall. He dragged both the unconscious bodies inside and went to the door. The room was fully decompressed now, and his hearing was almost gone from the vacuum.

  Alex’s head spun and then he saw Aimee smiling and holding her arms out to him. Next came Joshua, laughing as he played with the huge dog – his life was flashing before him as the remnants of oxygen in his system became exhausted. He knew he’d black out soon and his mouth would automatically open as it tried to take in the last breath of air that didn’t exist.

  With his remaining strength, he banged on the door. No one opened it.

  Why would they? he thought. No one should be alive in here – just us monsters.

  He banged again with his fist, giving it everything he had and making the metal ring like a gong.

  Alex slid to his knees and let the bodies of the guards drop as he felt his consciousness slipping away. His mouth opened.

  CHAPTER 51

  Midnight, Joshua fell to the floor in his room. He clawed at his throat and gasped like a stranded fish, trying to breathe. There was a psychological storm in his mind conjured by his father’s pain, and then the sensation of his life force growing dimmer.