Brainpan wasn’t named for his high IQ.
“Crazy fucker,” I snarled at him. “You almost took me out with that grenade. Next time a heads-up would be appreciated.”
“If it comes to it, I’d rather go out to a grenade than torn limb from limb by those things,” Brainpan replied. “Promise me, if they’re gonna get me, you stick a frag down my pipe first.”
RP smacked a gloved hand across Brainpan’s helmet. “Don’t fucking tempt me,” he snarled. “I might just as well do it now as later.”
Shaking my head, I checked on Hooky. The blaze of the sergeant’s carbine told me where he was in the opposite corner, and only his covering fire had given Brainpan and me a moment to chat. There was no more time for talk, just saving our butts.
We backed into the entrance vestibule. The shuffling, creaking and bubbling noises of our enemies filled the space as Hooky’s shooting fell silent. He jerked his head at the door we’d so recently blown open. “We can’t let them get out,” he said. “If they do that, and in these numbers, they’ll be all over town like sweat rash on a crack addict’s arse.”
He was correct. We thought we’d only to deal with a small bunch of infected people, not a horde. If they escaped the warehouse – an easy egress through the demolished door – their numbers would spread like wildfire once they got among civilians. We had to deny them escape, but I didn’t see how our guns, or even frag grenades, were up to the task.
But I guess that was what we were being paid for.
“When the fuck did I sign up for this shit?” Brainpan moaned.
“The same time the rest of us did,” I said, “after the red rain fell. Now suck it the fuck up, Brainpan. I don’t intend joining the flock, but neither am I going to let these bastards out if I can help it.”
“The world’s already gone to hell,” Brainpan reminded me. “Why fight it?”
“Because we can,” I said, full of shit. “No, because we must.”
My understanding of the plague is at a layman’s level, but here’s what I know. Back in 2009, after sending up high-altitude weather balloons, the Indian Space Research Organisation discovered three types of bacteria living in the extreme conditions of the upper atmosphere, at heights of more than forty kilometres, hailing them as proof of extra-terrestrial life. Debate was lively among scientists, some claiming that the bacteria could have originated on Earth, thrown into the upper atmosphere by volcanic eruptions, rather than having arrived there from outer space. Regardless of where the bacteria originated, it had to contend with conditions deadly to terrestrial bacteria. The UV rays alone were intense enough to kill them, let alone the extremes of temperature, lack of organic matter and sparse air particles, yet they flourished. Those were only the first of many discoveries concerning new life forms over the next few years, though nobody deemed them a threat to humanity. How wrong they were.
Intense solar flare activity, unprecedented weather patterns, and the shifting of the air currents all conspired against mankind, and in true Biblical fashion deluges from the heavens brought with them other uncategorised life that fell in gobbets of scarlet jelly-like lumps throughout many regions of the Earth. These scarlet globs were colonies of bacteria, and they responded robustly to the kinder conditions of the Earth’s surface, propagating wildly, and largely unchecked. Within days the simple bacterial forms had mutated into something more akin to parasitic amoebas. They weren’t picky about what they infested. Though they had no interest in the planet’s flora, everything else they contacted was fair game. All animal life was under threat of infestation, and the major culling of livestock and household pets wasn’t enough to stop the advance of the plague spreading throughout the world. How did you cull the wildlife, the vermin, or the insects, that continued the spread at exponential rates?
Throughout history there have been many major extinction events, most famously the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and people began fearing that we were on the verge of the next and greatest extinction event the Earth had faced. But they were wrong. This wasn’t about extinction, it was about transformation. Infected creatures didn’t die, they became. Parasites require hosts to survive, and they need a manner in which they can continue to propagate their species. The mutations they caused were as wildly different and numerous as the creatures they infected. Seeing a beloved pet dog sprouting insectile mandibles and writhing tentacles armed with thousands of stinging needles can kind of throw you a loop, but seeing your fellow man transform into something equally unrecognisable, a walking delivery system for the alien species, can seriously fuck up your day.
There was a rudimentary intelligence in these new beings, one with singular focus. To spread their kind. It wasn’t about killing – apparently humans held the monopoly on that intent – but they weren’t beyond protecting themselves, and anything they deemed a threat was responded to with devastating consequences. Take Duke and the way he’d been torn to shreds. A similar fate was on the cards for the rest of us who’d the temerity to attempt stopping their progress. But as I’d just told Brainpan, we must.
The infected poured into the room. Literally poured, like thick lumpy soup from an overturned cauldron. It was easy to see now why our guns were proving ineffective against them, because they had truly assimilated their hive mind now only one conjoined thing about them. Their jellied flesh and contorting bones had merged and moulded together, so that instead of hundreds they had become one immense writhing mass of mutated inhumanity. The pulpy mass was enough to engulf and drown us, before we too would become one with it, but the creature felt threatened and wished only to see us destroyed. It had sprouted spines and claws, and huge scythe-like protuberances, and without thinking too much on it I now knew what had minced Duke Dickinson.
RP said he’d wear its skull for a hard hat. Well, he had the choice of dozens, because the heads that once belonged to living, breathing human beings were now bobbing and weaving on thick tubular arms, and in those warped faces the eyes bulged and glared, and again without too much thought, I knew that the monstrous creature could see through them all at once. The heads swivelled on those tubes like crab eyes, simultaneously fixing all four of us under baleful stares. It weighed and judged us, and made its own target acquisition. A barbed tentacle shot from the mass, the tip formed of something like hardened chitin, and it cut through RP’s chest armour like it wasn’t there. He barely had time to croak out his agony, before the tentacle spasmed and he flew off his feet, suspended in the air a moment before he was slammed against the ceiling, then the floor, his body was a sack of broken bones. The monster wasn’t done with him though. The spear tip must have parted down the middle, because it scissored open, and the upper half of RP landed wetly at my feet while his legs flew over the mass, where other snatching claws tore them into bony fragments.
“Fuck me…” What else could I say?