Adam Baker - Terminus

‘You have to save me, David. You have to save yourself.’

Galloway scrambled through tight passageways, mapped the warren of pipes.

A network of conduits built in the nineteen twenties, long before the smooth aluminium ducting and monitored flow control of modern ventilation systems. Giant plenum blades in the plant room circulated air through the pipes. Negative pressure drew off stagnant tunnel fumes, replaced fetid vapour with clean air drawn from street vents.

Galloway still had sensation. His hand and feet delivered the texture of brick and abrasive mortar. Yet he was impervious to pain. Rotted skin hung from his arms in strips, exposing muscle threaded with metallic veins.

He knelt, gripped his bicep and ripped away ribbons of loose skin. He felt no pain. He could feel his flesh stretch, peel and tear as if he were shredding paper.

Sometimes he was Galloway. Sometimes he wasn’t.

Consciousness came and went like an intermittent radio signal, but his body kept moving. He would sit, staring into darkness. Next moment, he would find himself crouched in an entirely different section of tunnel, exploring a fissure in the brickwork, probing it with his finger. No idea how much time had passed. No idea what instinct had piloted his body during the blackout. Clearly he had moved through the tunnels with deliberation and purpose. But what entity had looked out from behind his eyes? What alien intelligence had displaced his thoughts and memories?

He squatted in the darkness. He could still see. There was no light, but the tunnel around him seemed to dance with a weird bioluminescence as if it were lit from within. He perceived the bark-ripple texture of each brick, and the granular crust of mortar, with the heightened clarity of dreams.

He explored new sensations, a torrential inrush of sense data.

He was not alone.

He could feel something else deep in the tunnel network. A cold intellect, watching, appraising. It sang in the darkness. His body began to respond.

‘Who are you?’ he murmured, addressing the thing in his head. ‘What do you want?’

As if in response, his left arm began to rise. He fought the motion, battled the hijacked limb. He tried to bar the grasping hand with his mutilated right arm and force it down. It was like fighting a hydraulic ram.

He tried to ball his fist, but his fingers overcame the command, reached for his face and began to claw skin. Nails dug into his forehead and tore decayed flesh like it was the putrid, semi-liquefied pulp of a rotten fruit.

He screamed.

Stretch and tear. Epidermis slowly peeled back. He shook his head and blinked away blood as it trickled down the bridge of his nose into his eyes.

A wide strip of skin slowly ripped from his brow, eye socket, cheek and jaw. The glistening musculature of his face fully revealed. Metal-fused bone.

Galloway emitted a guttural howl of revulsion and despair. He spat blood and drool. He tried to pull his head away as the hand clawed his face and gouged skin.

Fingers gripped the back of his neck and peeled off his scalp like a ski mask, exposing the white dome of his skull. The discarded flesh-cap hit the tunnel floor with a slap.

Each ear lobe twisted free, dripping strings of pale cartilage.

A wide slab of tissue torn from his chest, exposing ribs and knitted sinew.

A sleeve of flesh ripped from his arm.

Galloway had lost the battle for ascendancy. He was a passenger in his own head. He watched, helpless, as the methodical excavation continued. Fingers raked and clawed, sloughed dead tissue from his bones as something lean and lethal fought to emerge.

Cloke threw the notebook aside.

‘No luck?’ asked Lupe. ‘Thought you could decipher the thing.’

‘The key doesn’t work. I’ve transposed letters. But look. More gibberish.’

He held up a scrap of note paper.

‘Hovering on the edge of coherence. There must be something I missed. Some additional step.’

‘Anagrams?’

‘The whole book? Hope not.’

‘Ekks is foreign, right?’ asked Lupe. ‘Naturalised?’

‘East European. Ukrainian, I think.’

‘No reason the code should be in English.’

‘How much water do we have left?’ asked Cloke.

‘About a pint.’

Lupe passed the nearly empty bottle of mineral water.

Cloke took an appreciative swig and sluiced the water around his mouth. He gestured to the plant room door.

‘Prowlers. Do you think they communicate? Their actions seem to be crudely coordinated.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Think about it. This disease has no use for higher brain function. Once the virus burrows deep into a person’s cerebral cortex, their memories, their personality, are wiped away. But what takes their place? Even the most advanced case, skin rotting from the bone, is animated by a crude insect cunning. Whimsical thought, but what if the virus can communicate on some basic level?’

‘Say it could talk. What would you ask?’

‘Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?’

‘Speak to Ekks when he wakes. He stared into the heart of darkness. Maybe he’ll tell you what he saw.’

Cloke nodded.

He reached inside the data bag, pulled out a fresh sheet of handwritten paper, and began to read.

Sergeant Donovan

101st Airborne

Monday September 23 rd

Our third suicide.

Rosa Tracy. A nurse. Pleasant disposition. Liked by all.

She was found hanging in the plant room this morning. She had unclipped the nylon shoulder strap of a holdall and used it as a ligature. Stood on a box and lashed the strap to an overhead pipe. She looped the nylon round her throat, then kicked away the box.

I cut her down. She had been dead for hours. Purple, swollen face. Limbs locked rigid.

I searched her pockets. No note. No explanation.

I wish we had a priest. It seems callous to dump her body in the tunnels without formally commemorating her life. She is not a piece of refuse. She deserves a proper grave.

A madness has gripped the team.

The two remaining doctors openly inject themselves with opiates and sit in a blissed stupor as if they expect, sooner or later, to be ripped apart and intend to be drugged insensible when it occurs.

Janice, the sole remaining female among our group, seems to have surrendered to a nihilistic sensuality. I am reluctant to be more specific. Her behaviour, and the free availability of narcotics, has destroyed camp discipline.

Ekks could restore order with a glance, a single word. Yet, since the death of Knox, he has been curiously reluctant to establish control. He has spent the past few days alone in his carriage, cross-legged on his cot, transcribing the results of his research.

I visited him yesterday. Knocked on the slide door and entered his carriage.

It was dark. The windows were curtained with garbage bags. I let my vision adjust. Ekks lay on his bunk. His eyes were closed. There was a radio next to the bed hissing static. He wafted his hand back and forth like he was directing music only he could hear.

I stood in the carriage doorway. I told him the camp was going to hell. Food for a couple more days, then we would starve. We needed to get off the island. We needed leadership, some kind of plan.

He didn’t move, didn’t say a word.

Tuesday September 24th

Ivanek, our young communications officer, heard a brief announcement on the EMS waveband a few hours ago. He has been sat next to the RT for days, listening to a looped broadcast of prayers and hymns. He was half asleep when he heard a woman’s voice cut into the transmission. She said the president would address the nation at midnight.