The Devil’s Peak II, page 9
With all the trauma to his system, with the drugs keeping him in an induced coma, Pete Cummins still managed to move at lightning speed.
He lunged at the nurse, swinging his stump arm at her. But the stump wasn’t a blunt end anymore; it now had a foot-long spike of something like dark bone extruding from it.
The spike went through the tough plastic curtain surrounding his bed and also through her hazmat suit, and by the way she doubled over, Finney knew it had penetrated her flesh.
She screamed and went down. Finney hit the alarm button, and called security. He saw the nurse go down onto the ground, and then to his horror he saw two things – the first was the spreading bloom of blood on her suit. The second was Pete rising from his bed and tearing open the plastic canopy.
He grimaced at their stupidity of not tying him down, but then again he had enough sedatives in him to stun a horse. In seconds more the security arrived, but they needed to suit up – this time just free working suits that didn’t need to be connected to a tether that supplied oxygen and power.
They went in, subdued the man and locked Pete down. Then one of them dragged the nurse from the chamber.
Finney spoke again to security telling them to lock down the other members of the family as well. This thing was becoming dangerous and unpredictable. Finney looked back at the monitor and saw Pete back on the bed, his face fully animated now and jaws with needle-like teeth snapping at anything he could get close to.
Finney grimaced at the sight – there was no nose, the ears had become flattened to his skull, and the most bizarre aspect of the physiological change were the emergence of two new limbs branching from his sides.
For now they were tiny stick-like things that ended in claws, but he didn’t doubt for a second that soon they would fill out, and then they too would need to be cuffed.
“What in God’s name is happening?” he asked softly to no one other than himself.
This thing was debilitating, aggressive, and undoubtedly contagious as all Hell.
He suddenly froze at the thought.
Oh no, he spun away realizing that whatever this thing was, with the nurse spiked, she had been inoculated. The plague was now out of containment.
Doctor Albert Finney rushed from the room.
***
The security team exited the sealed chamber after all four of the Cummins family had been moved in together to a specially sealed quarantine room.
Beneath Pete’s bed a small pool of dark liquid formed from where it had been dripping from the end of his stump. It wasn’t blood, or plasma, or any other natural bodily fluid. Instead it was something dark and thick, a lot more like paste or jelly.
After another few minutes the dripping turned into a slow stream and soon there was a plate-sized puddle formed. The dripping stopped and then seemed to coagulate. The puddle gathered itself into a blob, and it stretched and slithered towards the next bed where Pete’s wife Frida lay under her own plastic hypobaric chamber covering.
The blob then became a tendril and slowly climbed the gurney leg and reached in under the plastic sheet to find her. And then joined with her.
But it wasn’t finished; the tendril came out the other side of her bed, and also slithered across to where the small form of Marty lay to his right. And from Frida’s bed the tendril stretched out like a cable to find the teenage Phillip to her side.
In minutes more the beds were slowly dragged together.
***
It was twenty minutes later that Jose Moralles, one of the authorized quarantine nurses, entered the room to check on the family. The portable style decon suit he wore had a small oxygen pack and was not as thick and cumbersome as the standard heavy duty hazmat suits. In addition, it had a large plastic visor that kept slipping sideways, but through it he saw something unexpected.
“Who did this?” He lowered the electronic clipboard when he saw all the four beds had been pushed together to the center of the room. Further, the entire family now seemed to be all on the center one.
The thick plastic hyperbaric sheet was still partially over all of them, but now it was all misted up like there was a wet, humid air inside.
Jose’s first thought was that the oxygen feed had stopped working and that allowed the respiration humidity to climb. And also the combined body heat was causing a rise in temperature.
He glanced at some room monitors and wasn’t surprised to see that the room’s internal temperature was now eighty degrees. It was supposed to be kept cool to slow down whatever infection was raging in their bodies.
“Dammit,” he growled.
It was another complication. He’d have to get the technicians straight onto it. First he needed to do a quick site check on the family members to see if they had suffered any ill effects from their treatment environment being interrupted.
Jose frowned as he walked around the huge lump in the center of the four beds. He thought they were supposed to have been constrained. And from what he could see of the vacated beds, they were stained like they had shit themselves.
Maybe that was why the kids had climbed out of their beds, he surmised.
But even with that benign possible explanation his neck tingled and his primitive brain screamed at him to about face and get the hell out.
But his modern mind and perhaps own bravado told him to stay and do his job, check it out, and then call it in.
Jose went to the canopy. He unclipped and lifted the heavy plastic sheet and then reached forward to the hospital bedsheet covering the Cummins’ bodies.
He paused. The sheet looked damp and putrid. He slowly looked around and saw the tray of instruments on a side bench and quickly crossed to it and grabbed a pair of long forceps.
He then used those to grasp the sodden sheet and pull it back.
Further. Further.
He stopped and stared, his brain not able to process what he was seeing.
There wasn’t a single person there anymore. In fact it was hard to discern if it was any person anymore.
The thing he saw wasn’t a person. Or even persons. Instead it was a huge lump of protoplasmic flesh with patches of hair here and there, glistening muscle on some areas and raw open wound-meat on another. And it wasn’t still, it pulsated and moved with an unnatural and impossible life.
Jose dropped the forceps and backed up as the notepad fell from his hands.
“I need to call…”
He froze, transfixed.
“I need to…”
Part of the raw, wound-looking part of the mass seemed to unzip. It then opened with a sticky sound to become a long wet mouth. At first what he thought were teeth lining the edge were really fingers, big and small, all grasping as though excited at the thought of getting hold of him.
Jose’s body was frozen, all except for his bladder that released a little squirt of pee into the front of his trousers. The shot of warmth in his pants seemed like a slap to his senses as he began to move then.
But so did the mass.
With a clattering of steel bed railings followed by the heavy thump of perhaps five hundred pounds of combined human flesh, the mass went to the floor.
But even as Jose tried to back up, the thing righted itself and came at him pushing beds and tables out of the way like some sort of giant soft shell crab.
Jose turned to run for the exit, but not quick enough as a spear of bone shot forward to impale his thigh, pass right through the meat, and then open like a hook to lock him in place and then reel him in.
He went to the ground and slid across the floor. He screamed so loudly he felt blood well up in his throat.
“Help!” he croaked.
He shot an arm out and grabbed onto a cabinet door handle that stopped his slide.
“Help!” he screamed again, louder this time, but he felt his strength ebbing away with every spurt of blood leaving his body.
He thought he might be gifted some time for rescue to come while he held on and stopped his slide. But instead, the thing rose up, with multiple hands and legs underneath it, and came scuttling towards him.
Fluid dripped from it to spatter the floor, and so close now, Jose saw fragments of hospital smocks peeking from folds in its disgusting merged flesh.
“Help me,” Jose began to cry,
He looked toward the observation window and was shocked to see people there. They watched in absolute horror, but none made a move to enter.
Why would they? he thought.
Maybe they would call the armed security guards, but given they’d need to suit up in quarantine suits, it would be long over for him.
“Madre de Dios,” he screamed.
The abomination stopped.
Jose winced from pain and looked up at the thing now just a few feet from him. He could have sworn the ragged wound of a mouth curved up a fraction at the corners.
Then the words leaked out: No hay Dios ni su madre aquí – No God or his mother here.
Jose wailed as the thing rushed forward to cover him completely.
***
Through the observation room window, Doctor Albert Finney watched through narrowed eyes as if to somehow blank out some of the horror playing out before him.
The others in the room that was crowded only a few minutes ago, now were mostly gone. Many had left in tears, feeling physically ill.
None had any suggestions as to what to do, and all options were thrown at him, from sealing the room up, forever, to going in there with axes and flamethrowers.
The flamethrower option appealed to him, but he needed to know more. He needed to know how a family that had been holidaying in Australia, where he would expect the worst things to happen would be snake or spider bite, or maybe even shark attack, had contracted something so horrible, so unheard of, he couldn’t even begin to describe it.
Finney knew that whatever they were dealing with was one hundred percent contagious as the nurse who had been attacked only hours before was now beginning to show symptoms, as well as one of the guards who had escorted her to her room.
The CDC were on their way, but he doubted they would have experience with this either.
He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them the horror was still there. And now it had consumed, or assimilated, Jose into itself.
He could now see attached to the massive protoplasmic lump was some of Jose’s hair and scraps of his uniform showing from the outside of the thing that now patrolled the room, looking for a way out.
For the first time in Finney’s life he was confused and frightened. Very frightened.
CHAPTER 14
Eastern Chin, Yangzhou’s Hanjiang district – Shaobo Lake
Hun Lee Soung slowly paddled his ancient fishing boat out over the glass smooth water. It was his favorite time, still before dawn, and so he was the first.
The air held a little chill, but was still balmy and the promise of a warm humid day was assured. He inhaled the smells of the lake, the fresh water, the reed beds on the banks, and the odor of his ancient boat smelling of old fish, gum resin for leaks, and flaking wood.
Hun Lee knew a special spot that was a little deeper than the rest, and he knew the big carp hung there in the green depths. He slowed his rowing and glided for a moment.
He smiled at his three beloved fishing cormorants lined up on the side of his small boat. Bo Bo, Mia, and Sun – all three had been hand raised by him, and had cords around the neck. They were used to shallow fish for small sprats, and would dive down, catch a fish and come back to the surface to hand it to him.
He had no children, so to him, his three ‘girls’ were his children.
The first twinge in the depths of his stomach was unexpected. He grimaced as the next was a little sharper and made him wonder about his eating choices the previous night.
It settled into a dull lump in his gut that made him feel miserable. He smelled something odd then and looked up. The still starlit sky had vanished and instead he caught the hint of deep purple clouds circling above like a tornado, unheard of in these parts.
The rain fell then. Huge, heavy drops and he pulled on his large cane hat. His mouth turned down as it pattered onto his boat and shoulders, large oily drops, and he held his lantern closer looking at it – it seemed more like mud than clear summer rain.
His birds sat still as stone and seemed immune to the shower and in seconds more it seemed over, and as the light of dawn was approaching he saw that the clouds had vanished, and something else; the surface of the lake had a brown frothy scum floating on it.
He hoped one of the large factories hadn’t belched out its poisonous clouds toward their little Yanhu village. After all, every household in the village relied on the lake, and if it got polluted, it would be devastating for all of them.
Hun Lee resumed paddling, and he was disgusted to see that the scum on the surface discolored his oar. He stroked another few hundred feet and exhaled with relief as whatever it was, was now sinking below the surface.
He just hoped it wasn’t poisonous and marred the fish’s flesh. His stomach already seemed to be giving him trouble. And not just his stomach as he had a feeling of miserable depression as though something bad and unavoidable was coming and he wasn’t looking forward to it.
He would not let his beloved fishing birds enter the water if he thought it dirty or dangerous. He reached forward and gently stroked each of their heads.
“You three can just watch this time,” he said softly.
He rowed a little further and then slowed, lining up his boat on the marks – the tall reeds with a dead tree poking from them. The mountain peak in the distance, and on the other side of the lake, the small, abandoned hut that had been there since he was a boy and was now falling to ruin.
Hun Lee stopped rowing and after a few seconds his boat drifted to a stop. There was no breeze and no current so he would gently float where he was until he paddled elsewhere.
He baited his hooks with bloodworms, and then hoisted his three bamboo poles out over the sides and back, fastening their butt ends to the boat floor. He then took out an old tobacco pouch and some stiff homemade cigarette papers. He rolled one, lit it, and drew in the thick burning smoke and then let it out slowly through his nostrils.
The hair above his lip was stained an orange-brown from so many decades of smoking. But it was something he had enjoyed since he drew on his first cigarette as a boy.
His mind wandered as he stared at the small decrepit hut on the bank over the lake. He remembered as a boy when he and his brother, Hong Lee, had taken their father’s boat and paddled across.
Inside they found old paintings on the wall and even a photograph of a man and woman in uniform, staring blankly at the camera. He wondered who they were; was it the man, the owner, and his wife from their younger days? He never found out.
He still missed his brother, even after over fifty years. When Hong was just twenty he went to the big city to make his fortune. Every year they waited for him to return, like the parable of the poor boy in rags who returns to his home village dressed in fine silks.
They received some mail from him for a few years, but then it stopped. And then nothing. He just hoped his brother found happiness wherever he was.
The tugging of one of his fishing lines snapped Hun Lee from his reverie, and he picked up the jiggling pole.
The water here was deep compared to the rest of the lake. He reeled the line in, and his brows came together – it didn’t fight like a carp. Instead it felt more like a sullen weight, pulling just enough for him to be sure what he had was something alive as opposed to a clump of weed or sunken log. But not the jerking fight he would expect if he had caught a big head carp that was predominant in the Shaobo.
He slowly reeled in some more – twenty feet, fifteen, ten, five. Hun Lee looked over the side. The sun was still too morning-low for him to make out the fish, and he wondered whether he had caught the grandfather carp, big, old, and only a little fight left in him.
Then there was a swirl of movement on the surface as the fish must have been just under the boat now.
Then there came a thump as something knocked the bottom of the boat, and he glanced at the net he had tucked in against one of the gunwales. He hadn’t needed it in years, but today might demand it.
The thump came again, heavier this time and it shook his boat. Hun’s brows came together as he saw his three girls lift their wings for balance.
Suddenly the thump on the boat became a scrabble beneath the keel, and a shadow appeared just below the surface. And then that shadow lifted itself from the water.
Hun Lee pulled back in horror – the thing had a small pockmarked face with sores on the center of a bulbous flattened head, like someone had stuck a baby’s face on the front of a big fish.
Then beside the grotesque face a tentacle rose up and slapped against the boat. Then another appeared, muddy brown, and this one too covered in ulcers. The creature blinked a few times, and then opened its mouth to wail. The sound grated on his nerves, and he saw inside the rubbery lips there was a ring of small conical teeth.
It began to lift itself higher and its weight began to drag the side of his boat down towards the water line. Just then the other fishing rods began to jerk and jiggle as they too had hooked something.
The glassy fish eyes of the thing fixed on him, and he saw its determination as it was desperate to get at him. The tentacles squirmed into his boat to pile in the bottom to coil and stretch like giant worms.
By then Hong had seen enough.
Hun Lee flicked the other rods over the side, and picked up the paddle, not to begin stroking away just yet, but to bring it down with a smack on top of the abomination’s head.
More tentacles came over the front of his boat, and the others from the side behind him. They were all around him, and the boat was being pulled lower.
Hun Lee smacked at them, smacked at the grotesque things invading his boat, but it was like hitting a sack of flour and did not dissuade them at all. He called out then, his voice carrying over the still silent water.
