Go For Stories

The smell of wet leather was the first thing to hit him. The beast’s tattered wings opened out, revealing an elongated, snarling face; somewhere between a wolf and something shiftier, like an ermine or a weasel. It released its taloned grip from the ceiling and dropped silently to its feet before him, the scorpion’s tail dancing behind its back, waiting for the chance to strike. It licked its lips with a long, purple tongue and an excited heat emanated from its entire body.

“Food,” it said with a raspy voice and an evil glint in its eye.

“Nigel, go!” Julia Astley yelled at him.

The beast spun towards the sound, its tail making a wild stab at Nigel as it swung past him. He ducked under it and, with one last look at Julia, he dashed towards the door. Grabbing the handle, he yanked hard and it opened out to the lab. Milly and Bec turned towards him, surprise etched on their features. He surged out of the room waving his arms.

“GO. RUN!”

They stayed where they were, looking at him and then at the door behind him.

“What are you doing? Get out!”

“What on Earth happened to you?” asked Bec.

“What? I, you, just …” The beast should have been on them by now. It should have skewered them with its venomous tail or chewed off their faces with its razor-sharp teeth. Nigel stopped and turned ever so slowly towards the bathroom door. He didn’t want to look, he didn’t want to face his death just yet, but he needed to see. He could still feel the unnatural heat coming from the beast as he turned to see…

An open door leading to an empty bathroom.

He hung his head. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Not again.

“Nigel,” Reynolds’ taunting voice danced over to him, “are you going crazy again?”

He returned his gaze to Reynolds. To tell her what he had seen would be to open an emotional door to her, a door he was not yet prepared to open.

“Yes,” he said, “I think I must be.”

“What happened to your head?” asked Milly, crossing to him. “Were you attacked?”

“No, I mean, sort of.” His response did not appease Milly’s need for explanation. “It’s complicated.”

“Well, I’m going to have to look at it. Come over here.”

She attempted to guide him to a bed further into the room. That was when his gaze fell on the corpse lying on the table. However long he had been in the bathroom was long enough for Reynolds to finish her autopsy. The creature’s chest was splayed open, the skin peeled back and hanging either side of its torso, revealing a mess of purple organs. All four of its arms hung limp off the table and its legs were spread. Nigel turned his eyes from its bare genitals splayed out in front of him and gave Milly a gentle brush aside.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“We’ll tell you if you sit still so I can look at your head,” said Milly, effecting her best mother voice. “I’ll get a chair.”

He nodded, unable to take his eyes from the stark contrast between its white flesh and it dark organs. He stepped closer, tentative, like closing in on a car crash on the side of the road. The smell hit him first. It wasn’t the normal smell of death. There was no cloying, meaty smell here. The smell bit him in the back of the throat, making him swallow out of reflex. It wafted through the air, attacking the most vulnerable parts and leaving the rest unaffected. There was no eye watering or gagging, just disquiet and dread.

Nigel’s knees collapsed and he fell onto the chair that Milly had pushed under him. Before he had a chance to argue, she clamped a hand on his chest and began to clean his forehead with a gauze pad soaked in antiseptic fluid. She tutted as she revealed the wound.

“It’s going to need stitches. I wish you’d tell me what happened.”

“I tripped. Hit it on the door.”

She stood back and folded her arms in front of her chest. She studied him with a frown.

“Really?”

He withered beneath her gaze.

“Yes?”

“Ugh, whatever. If you don’t want to tell me, forget it.”

He did. He really did want to tell her, but the time wasn’t right. With Jacob and Bec here, not to mention Anne’s transformed corpse open in front of him, he didn’t feel that now was the best time for dropping emotional personal bombs on her. For now, she would have to mad at him. She went to get the bits necessary for stitching him up.

“So,” said Bec with a laugh behind her voice, “now that you two have finished bickering, did you want to know what I’ve found?”

“Yes.”

She postured up in front of them. Not one to shy away from the spotlight, she recognised what could be her most important moment and was playing up to it.

“This,” she gestured to the white and purple mass before her, “is not human.”

“For goodness sake, Reynolds.”

She held up her hands. “No, you don’t understand. This is no longer human. Everything in it is different. There’s no heart, for a start. I hope the cleaner’s have been doing their job, because we’ve all seen where that ended up. But it’s not just that.” She scooped up a scalpel from the trolley beside her and pointed inside the chest cavity. “The entire cardiovascular system is up the shit.”

Nigel leaned in to see where she was pointing and put his hand down on something flat and wet. Something that had ridges running over it. Something that felt an awful lot like a section of ribcage.

“Did you, did you have to put that there?” he asked Reynolds.

“Whoops, I forgot about that. Here.”

She grabbed the ribcage and threw it onto the trolley beside her. It clattered on the tools and Nigel did his best to ignore it. Milly returned and pushed Nigel back onto the seat.

“Hey, I was looking.”

“Well, you can look from here.” She put one hand on his forehead and leaned in with a small gun of some sort. “This will pinch a little.”

She squeezed the trigger and he winced as a staple crunched into his skin.

“I’m sorry, did you want me to numb it first?”

Nigel couldn’t tell if she was being serious.

“No, I’m fine.” He turned to Reynolds. “Go on.”

“Right.” She jabbed the scalpel inside the body cavity. “So, this is where the heart was. Have a look at how the arteries and the aorta have knotted together. Just a big ol’ lump. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the bloodstream being a full circuit. There’s nowhere for the blood to go once it gets here.”

He leaned forward just enough to see. The arteries had fused together in the space where Anne’s heart used to be. They looked like a mass of partially molten metal that had been sloughed off into a bucket.

“That’s odd.”

“Thanks for the commentary, Captain Obvious” she said. “Anyway, if you look at the lungs, you can see that they are much bigger than they should be. I cut a chunk off for you to look at. Here you go.”

She lobbed a hunk of lung at him and he threw his hands out. It bounced out of his grip and he fumbled for it. Catching it just before it fell to the floor.

“Can you not, Reynolds? This used to be our friend.”

She had the decency to look ashamed. “Sorry,” she said, hanging her head.

Nigel looked down at the section of lung in his hand. “Why is it so spongy?”

“Exactly. Look how open the bronchus is. And the alveoli. These lungs have effectively hollowed out. I figure they aren’t so much for oxygenating the bloodstream anymore, seeing as there isn’t one. So what? Why are they even there?”

“That scream,” he said in a low voice. He shuddered just thinking about the unearthly scream, the one that stopped them in their tracks. He twitched as Milly shot another staple into his forehead.

“That scream is right,” said Bec, taking the lung segment from him and dropping it on the table beside the body. “Obviously there’s still some oxygen getting into the blood, but I think these lungs are being used more for storage than anything else.”

“So how do they survive?”

“Remember how we killed her?”

Nigel looked at the fierce white face. Even in death, this thing was intimidating.

“No. She just died,” he said. “Ow.” Milly shot him with one last staple and wiped a cloth over his face.

“All done,” she said with a smile before wandering off with the staple gun.

“She didn’t just die,” said Bec. “We stopped her heart.”

Nigel shook his head. None of this made sense. “But she doesn’t have a heart.”

“Wrong. She is her heart.”

“Nope. You’ve lost me.” No matter which way he looked at it, she was speaking complete gibberish.

“I gave up too, mate,” said Jacob as he planted a hand on Nigel’s shoulder.

“Where have you been?”

“Having a nap. Where have you been?”

“Nevermind. Is sleeping all you do?” he asked in an attempt to deflect the question. The last thing he wanted to do right now was explain about his past.

“Anyway,” said Bec, her voice straining from impatience. “The reason she died when we pinned her down and the reason she expelled her heart when she changed are one and the same … Her body, her entire body became her cardiovascular system.”

“See?” Jacob scratched his head. “This is what I was saying. What does that actually mean?”

“Her bloodstream, their bloodstream, works on kinetic action. Their constant movement squeezes the blood and accumulated oxygen throughout the body under pressure, keeping them alive.”

“But what’s the point?” asked Jacob.

“It’s actually really very cool,” said Bec, her eyes lighting up. “It completely removes the heart, a major vulnerability, from their body. Yes, they need to keep moving, but when you are as strong and quick as one of these things, that’s not a huge issue. We got lucky with this one. By pinning her down, we stopped her ability to pulse and cut off her oxygen supply. We effectively suffocated her.”

Nigel felt a pang of regret at this. It was hard enough to see her lying naked in front of them – it felt like a debasement of her person – let alone having carved her up like a slab of meat. The look in her eyes before she died was her accepting her own mortality. Knowing where the creatures came from only made it more depressing. This was her second chance at life and they pinned her down and watched her die all over again.

“But,” Bec continued, “that isn’t the only cool thing about all this. Have a look at the bone.” She gripped the cross section of rib that lay exposed in her chest. “If I crush it between my fingers, it’s hard as a rock, harder in fact. But if I pull it…” She squeezed the bones and pulled on them. As she did, they stretched and deformed. She pulled until they almost covered the hole in the chest.

“Wow!” said Jacob.

“Yeah, wow.” Bec let go of the ribs and they snapped back, like letting go of a rubber band. “The bone has these weird fibres running through them. Curled around each other like DNA. It gives the bones immense strength, but allows them to move around each other. In theory, they could squeeze through the space between my hands if they wanted.” She held her hands up, facing each other. They were so close that only a sliver of light made its way through.

“So, what you’re saying,” Milly said from behind Nigel, “is that they are basically impossible to kill? Unless we can get to them one at a time.”

Bec tilted her head and furrowed her brow. “I think, yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

Nigel surged to his feet.

“You know what?” he said, almost shouting. “I don’t care. I don’t care how stupidly awe-inspiring they are. I don’t care how marvellous their anatomy is. If we don’t stop them, they’re going to get out. We can’t afford that. Humanity can’t afford that. And they aren’t the worst of it either.”

“What do you mean, Nigel?” asked Milly.

“There something worse coming. Something that could mean the end of everything and everyone on this planet. I can’t really explain, but you have to trust me.”

“What do you propose we do, then?” asked Bec, looking down at the perfect corpse before her.

“I say we kill them all.”