Never Fear Page 23

  “Christ, the biodiversity of this place is unbelievable. It’s covered with all manner of independent ecosystems,” Adams observed, slicing through the thorny undergrowth with his blade, face slicked with sweat. Merritt nodded in breathless agreement, but before he could speak, an awful shriek peeled through the tangled wilderness. It was human: female.

  “Faust, you mentioned that Australis had a woman on board?” Merritt asked, wiping sweat away with his sleeve. They paused, quietly trying to ascertain the direction that the scream had come from.

  “Yes.” Faust replied, staring at Merritt, his face waxen, his demeanor indifferent. After another moment, he pointed. “That way.”

  X.

  The breath of a sigh,

  Or the blink of an eye

  Is all that it takes;

  And then the dreamer wakes—

  “What if Earth

  Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein?”

  XI.

  The explorers had reached an opening in the mega-flora, the evident remnants of a collapsed volcano caldera: It was hot, humid; the otherworldly antithesis of Antarctica. Even more incredibly, inside the caldera were the apparent ruins of a vast city, with indications of a long dead, yet obviously advanced, civilization. Merritt was in a state of mental shock as the team hacked away at more overgrowth: Caressing the intricate stone buildings, marveling at the complex etchings which scored the coarse rock edifices, some more than three stories tall, he was astonished that this place existed, and wondered about the people that had carved these stones. How many other places are like this on Earth, just waiting to be uncovered? The commander took note of the sky: It was getting dark, and he observed that, strangely, there were no animals or insects to be found in this area. The heavy air was still, musky, preternaturally quiet.

  “Help… Help us!” It was a hushed, breathy cry from somewhere in the twilight.

  Merritt: “Adams! Did you hear that?”

  The rest of the search crew paused to listen. Once more: “Help…”

  Deep in the interior, the landing party found her: Julia Murphy—former crewmember of the Terra Australis Incognita.

  What was left of her, at least.

  XII.

  As the Moon’s shadow eclipses the Sun,

  So Man stumbles; and thus ends his run—

  XIII.

  Murphy was lying in a supine position, naked on the ground near one of the buildings: The dim light from the sky overpowered the brilliant light originating from large, ornate green and blue fungi covering the lower part of her torso and obliterating her legs. As they watched, the men could see the carnivorous fungus creeping across her skin, dissolving it and fueling their grim, heatless glow.

  “Help me… Please help… “ Her face was sweaty, her breath shallow, her dry lips cracked.

  Even though he was horrified, Merritt felt compelled to act, and rushed past the stunned group to get near the stricken woman. “I’m Commander Scott Merritt, of the USS Higgins.” Leaning closer to her, he swallowed back a stab of bile, fighting a surge of nausea at the sickly sweet odor coming from her mouth. His mind was racing as he suddenly yearned to be home with his family. He felt for this poor girl; she reminded him not only of his wife, but also of all the things he most cherished, that he was compelled to do anything to protect. She smiled wanly, then unleashed a blood-freezing scream of agony. Merritt’s chest thundered in pity and terror.

  “It… it chased us in here… “ Julia’s bony arms were shriveled, drawn into a pugilistic formation, Merritt noticed; he distantly remembered that as a sign of neurological damage: The fungus was aggressive—moving from the exposed viscera of her guts and over her chest by fractions of inches in just a few minutes.

  “It chased us… into the city… then… Captain Roland slipped. That… that was him.” She motioned with her head to a blackened knot of dehydrated shapes; even the bones had been dissolved by the fungus; the only thing remotely humanoid was its general size and form, and possibly a lump that resembled the jawless head of a lamprey. The ground rocked slightly, followed by a low rumble, not unlike thunder in the distance: a very minor quake. “Dr. Crowe tried to save him… but… it got him too.”

  “There were three of you?” Merritt asked, face softly illuminated by the surreal glow of the predatory fruiting bodies, as eerie and distressing as a corpse candle. Merritt suddenly understood why there were no other animals here: The area was overrun by the creeping fungi—dimly glowing all around as the daylight extinguished. The other patches were smaller; less recently fed he suspected, and the whole place was littered with similar black masses to the erstwhile Capt. Roland.

  Other animals! Jesus, it’s like this whole island is alive.

  “My God…” Adams had made the same mental connection just then: “We have to leave, sir! It’s trying to lure us in!”

  “No!” Julia screamed. “Save me!” At that instant, her mouth exploded outward with slimy black mold, the lower portion of her face collapsing like a deflated mask, the eyeballs falling into the pulsating, radiant mass of mushrooms and bloody tissue.

  Merritt screamed. He jumped backward in abject horror and panic as the fungus consumed the girl.

  Too late.

  XIV.

  Thus ends his run—

  “I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

  XV.

  On the Higgins, McConnell was frustrated.

  He had not been able to raise anyone for hours, and now the party was stranded on the island for the night. Even though they had been lucky with the weather most of the day—no way that could hold much longer—the seismic readings had spiked recently. He felt a certain amount of dread that a major event was likely in the immediate future. Something about the whole scenario deeply disturbed him, but he was hard-pressed to articulate exactly what it was; the sooner they abandoned this godforsaken place, the better he would feel. It reminded him of when he was working on the blowout after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, not far from his hometown of New Orleans. The name of the well prospect had been Macondo, just like the fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez in his books. McConnell recalled that those had been nightmarish times, almost as surreal as the events in some of Márquez’s works, as though the Earth was finally rebelling against the insult of humans overreaching their assumed dominion. BP, Transocean, and Halliburton covered up a lot, but there were things he had seen that still sickened him: trapped sea turtles burned alive; birds drowning because they were too heavy to fly away due to the thick crude slicking their bodies; massive, undocumented beachings as animals tried to escape the toxic sludge of oil, methane, and chemical dispersant. There had been other things; rumors of something else that had been discovered in the blowout, barely held in check by the final cap of the well. Some said it could never be capped permanently, and it was a matter of time before the fissures on the seafloor created by the disaster fractured to a point that whatever was there would become active again.

  Adding to this anxiety, McConnell was exhausted; the strange dreams had been intensifying during the past two days the Higgins had been anchored near the uncharted atoll.

  “Commander Merritt, Ensign Adams, come in. Over.” Static, a little radio interference. All freqs.

  McConnell was homesick too. They were scheduled for some leave after this last deployment researching low-frequency sonar, and he was glad to be done with it; the heartbreaking damage to the whales and their hearing was obvious when the dead ones floated to the surface. Who knew what else it did to the fragile marine environment, but they had documented some things, from devastating ecosystems to destabilizing underwater superstructures. Where did it all end? Not with massive underwater blowouts, apparently, or man-made earthquakes in the Midwest caused by hydraulic fracking, or the murder of animals caused by human intervention in their environments… He felt it was all so destructive, unnatural, evil. />
  “This is McConnell. Do you read, Adams? Over.”

  XVI.

  Faust led the way out of the ruins; along with Commander Merritt, the horrific fungus had claimed two other men. Finally, on the beach, as faintly bioluminescent waves lapped the windswept shore, hissing into the dark sand, Adams could see the lights of the Higgins off in the frigid distance. His walkie-talkie was useless; luckily their flashlights still worked for the time being. The ground shook again, adding to the tension on the beach.

  “Great! We’re trapped here on this insane fucking rock until morning…” Adams lamented, looking from the silent Faust to the other man, his breath trailing into the void. The man was a young enlisted that he vaguely recognized, but could not place by name. “And you are?”

  “Seaman Recruit Anderson, sir.” The man was visibly upset, but also seemed relieved to be on the strand, even in the extreme cold of the pre-dawn. “Never seen nothing like that back home in North Carolina, sir. Whatever had that girl… It was bad. Something real bad.”

  Adams nodded in a feeble attempt at reassurance, turning to face the Higgins out at sea, mentally struggling to figure out what to do next. “Yes, it sure—”

  Abruptly, Faust tackled Adams from the rear, slamming him to the ground. The two thrashed on the damp earth while the stunned Anderson looked on, his light starkly flaring over the men writhing on the black sand. As they fought, Faust gained the upper hand, biting into Adams’s cheek and savagely tearing a meaty chunk of flesh from the ensign’s face, laying bare teeth, gums, bone. Adams was too panicked to think or feel—he reacted by unsheathing his machete and swinging wildly, yelling into the cold, dry night air…

  The heavy blade found its mark, and cleanly separated Faust’s arm from his body: He never screamed or made a sound, but in the cool LED illumination of Anderson’s flashlight, a strange, acrid black smoke poured forcefully from both ends of the bloodless stump. Faust’s mouth twisted in a silent mockery of pain; already the severed arm was crawling away in the surf, the end bulging with new growth, as the stump on his body began to display the withered approximation of a regenerated appendage, covered in mucus and red gore. Overcome by the bizarre tableau, Anderson and Adams screamed in unified revulsion.

  Faust, bloodied and determined, came at them, his half-formed arm quickly developing into a grisly, formidably hooked caricature of a human limb. Then his mouth opened, splitting past the natural hinge of his jaw as a great beaked face—its knobby flesh translucent all the way to an eyeless skull tufted by a delicate lattice of pinfeathers matted with opalescent slime—erupted from the gaping, bloody maw that had been Christopher Faust, but was no longer. The same vaporous black smoke spewed from his destroyed facial orifices, obscuring the flashlight beam.

  As the creature closed the distance between the stunned sailors, the entire island unexpectedly shifted… half-sinking into the deep, flooding the beach and creating an enormous wave as the morning sun seeped redly above the horizon.

  It was beginning.

  XVII.

  “I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

  A pause—

  A revelation—

  A comprehension—

  “The other shape,

  If shape it might be call’d that shape had none

  Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;

  Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,

  For each seem’d either—black it stood as night,

  Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,

  And shook a dreadful dart. What seem’d his head

  The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”

  XVIII.

  “Shit!”

  McConnell felt the shockwave on the Higgins just as he was about to drift off to sleep. It rolled past the ship, causing it to lurch sideways in the water. Looking from his porthole, he could see the breaking dawn just clear the horizon, touching the clouds with fire. Where are the islands? Then he saw… it, and had to rub his bleary eyes in disbelief.

  It started as a soft rolling on the water; then an object more than a mile across thrust up from the sea, perhaps a couple of hundred feet from the USS Higgins. The shape dwarfing the destroyer was vast; it seemed to sparkle from within as though some swallowed, ancient-future galaxy shone through its ebon, sea-drenched skin. In another eternal instant, the great being—dripping with kelp and seawater, glimmering in the vivid dawn like some unearthly, newborn titan—reared up to its full, multi-storied height.

  McConnell’s bladder voided unconsciously when he realized it was alive, and many thoughts crossed his mind: Was this Satan? Or maybe an angel… Mother said that angels were fearsome creatures, not these little winged babies… Perhaps this was God itself?

  Gripping the window, his knuckles taut as he stared at the dreadful leviathan, McConnell’s mind began to disengage. Somewhere, far away, it seemed, the sound of his ragged screams deafened him, as his overwhelmed consciousness tried to understand this being, to grasp the purpose of its hideous beauty. On the misty horizon, he noticed another giant rising up; this one was slightly different, but just as enormous… distantly, there was yet another on the skyline… and then another… They seemed to pull the very light from the firmament, gradually enrobed by wispy fringes of nightfall—as though their presence created a void in the fabric of life itself. As he watched, a great vortex began swirling in the ocean around the behemoth, slowly opening up and swallowing the destroyer… It was at that moment he realized something had changed in the world, and before the icy sting of Antarctic saltwater filled his nose and mouth, McConnell realized how lucky he was—indeed everyone aboard the doomed Higgins was—to be spared the horrors yet to come.

  The great thing howled and his brain jellied, his ears bled, but the last thing McConnell saw before his consciousness was snuffed by the incomprehensible and his corneas stiffened from the freezing cold of the sea rushing in to fill him—to crush him, to wipe him from the memory of humankind—was the baleful sun blotted out by the extension of terrible, massive wings.

  RESISTANT

  Tori Eldridge

  Kallie ignored the grasping hands and contorted faces as she hurried down the corridor, grateful for the level-three biosafety gear that insulated her from their misery. To them, she was another hooded white suit with goggles and mask. To her, they were overwhelming.

  She focused her gaze straight ahead, trying to ignore the pleas for outlawed drugs. Everyone claimed to understand the prohibitions until it applied to them.

  And these days, Kallie thought, it always applied to them.

  A hand grabbed her arm and yanked her back to a gurney.

  “Please, help me. Can’t you see?”

  She did. The welting rash and lesions had disfigured what might have been a handsome face. Syphilis. Such an easy disease to cure in her grandparents' day now delivered a death sentence. She shook her head and pried his swollen fingers from the sleeve of her coverall.

  Her attending physician had warned the first-year residents about succumbing to pity and the repercussions of breaking the law. Not only would they lose their medical license, they’d serve a minimum of ten years in prison and get fined three times the amount of their school loans, which in her case, would indenture her parents to the government for the rest of their lives. And these punishments didn’t even begin to address the ramifications to humanity. So while Kallie’s heart ached for this doomed man, she would leave him for the hospital orderlies. No antibiotic Hail Mary to stave off the inevitable; just a curtained slot in the Palliative Care Ward where he would live out the rest of his miserable existence.

  Or until he requested physician-assisted suicide and signed the release for a lethal dose of secobarbital.

  “Someone will come for you soon.” She hurried away before he could ask any more from her. “Damn,” she muttered, sniffing and wishing for the hundredth time she could touch her face without the risk
of spreading deadly pathogens. “Save the ones you can, Kallie. Save the ones you can.”

  No more distractions. Grandpa’s forgetfulness had delayed the family carpool by twenty minutes and Kallie had been making up time ever since she entered the suit room of the hospital. She ran her hand up the front of her neck, checking for the umpteenth time that she had zipped the coverall to the chin and properly secured the cup-shaped N100 particulate mask over her nose and mouth.

  The respiratory mask was designed to filter 99.97 percent of any germs she might encounter in the ER triage. Not a hundred percent, but then neither was the PAPR hood she was required to wear in the ER’s airborne transmission wing. While many of her colleagues wore the level-four security hood even in the lower risk wings of the ER, Kallie preferred the comfort, visibility, and humanity she gained by wearing only the required mask and goggles: Suffering patients needed to see a caring physician, not a hazmat worker. Besides, the protection was almost identical.

  Provided the mask fit.

  Kallie sighed, steaming the lower half of her face. Just last week, a triage nurse with an improperly fitted mask had died after a child with influenza coughed in her face. The deadly strain killed the nurse in thirty hours. Kallie shook her head with regret. The paramedics should have recognized the extreme hazard and wheeled the girl directly to the airborne transmission wing. Instead they brought her to triage. Now a compassionate nurse with an ill-fitted mask was dead.