Adam Baker - Terminus

‘Cloke. My God, that’s Cloke’s voice. Mother Mary, he’s alive.’

Cloke died, time and again.

His chest was ripped open, his body bled dry. His empty heart had fluttered to a standstill. Yet some kind of fusion was taking place. He was melding with Galloway. Their cardiovascular systems were knitted together. Veins and capillaries entwined. Fresh blood filled Cloke’s flaccid heart and set it pumping. He jerked back to consciousness.

‘Please, I just want it to stop.’

He reached out and scrabbled at the crumbling brickwork, hoping to find a shard he could drive through his eye into his brain.

He gnawed his wrist. He ground his teeth, tried to break skin and tear open an artery. His jaws, his will, were too weak.

He lay on his back. He convulsed as Galloway burrowed beneath his ribs. He lifted his head and slammed it down, tried to knock himself insensible.

‘Stop. Please. Just stop.’

The bodies lay conjoined in the tunnel shadows as Galloway pushed deep into Cloke’s chest cavity.

‘Get out,’ whispered Cloke. He fought to regain control of his hands as they began to clench and unclench under alien volition. ‘Get the hell out of my mind.’

Galloway shouldered his way into the man’s thorax. Ribs peeled back and snapped like twigs. He buried his face deep in gelatinous viscera, opened his mouth wide and inhaled blood and lymph.

He no longer had eyes. Optic nerves swelled and extended from empty sockets like questing tendrils, branching and spreading through muscles and membranes. He assimilated body tissue, drank Cloke dry like a voracious carcinoma. Snaking ganglions punctured Cloke’s spinal tract, wormed between vertebrae, fused with his nervous system.

Galloway’s mouth was forced jaw-breaking wide as he vomited a knotted root system of metallic fibres. Tumour-strings roped from his nostrils, ears and throat as the relentless colonisation of Cloke’s body continued.

Light pierced the darkness. Blurred colours. Muffled sound. A tentative trickle of sense-data.

A collision of memories. First time Cloke kissed a girl. First time Galloway kissed a guy. A fusion of minds.

The Galloway/Cloke hybrid saw through new eyes.

Donahue and Tombes pulled boxes aside. Donahue snapped open her knife and cut plastic pull-ties holding the grille in place. They stared into the darkness of the conduit mouth.

‘Just for the record, I think this is a retarded idea,’ said Lupe.

‘I got to find the guy,’ said Tombes.

‘He’s infected. He’s beyond help.’

‘What if it were you? Want to be left to turn? Dead but not dead? Crawling around the pipes for God knows how long, flesh rotting off your bones?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to die on my behalf.’

Tombes shrugged off his coat and unzipped his sweatshirt.

He stuffed a couple of paint tins into a backpack. He tucked a clutch of detonators into his waistband. He clipped a radio to his belt.

Lupe hefted the oxygen cylinder lashed with ammonium nitrate.

‘You want the bomb?’

‘The building is too unstable. Might bring the whole thing down on our heads.’ He turned to Donahue. ‘Got that rope?’

She threw him a coil of rope. He tied one end round his waist.

‘If anything happens, pull me clear. Don’t let that ghoul gnaw my bones.’

He wriggled on gloves, gripped the lip of the tunnel, hauled himself up and inside.

‘Take this.’

Lupe passed him an iron roof pike.

He switched on his flashlight. He picked his way through broken glass on hands and knees. Rope played out behind him.

He crawled through narrow darkness. Gloves, boots and canvas bunker pants scuffed against rough brickwork.

‘I’m at the junction.’

‘Anything?’

‘Few drops of blood.’

‘Which way you headed?’

‘The right hand passage leads to the office. Think I’ll head left. See what I can find. Hold on. I can hear something.’

‘Hear what?’

‘Just wait.’

Tombes squirmed along the pipe. An insistent beep. Something winking on the tunnel floor.

Cloke’s wristwatch. A black G-Shock with a broken strap. The cracked, blood-spattered countdown flashed 00:00. Time for the team to take their meds.

Tombes shut off the alarm.

‘Something up ahead. I got to check it out.’

‘What can you see?’

‘Some sort of chamber. There’s a wide-bore pipe running floor to ceiling. Some kind of water main, at a guess. Give me more slack.’

Tombes lowered himself into the chamber. He shone his flashlight round the concrete space.

The back wall was caked with blood and matted hair. Bones embedded in a rippled metallic mess. Ribs. Skulls. Femurs, clavicles and vertebrae.

‘Mother of God.’

He touched the crucifix round his neck.

‘What have you found?’

‘I think Galloway has been building himself some kind of nest.’

‘Out of what?’

‘People.’

‘Bail. Get out of there.’

‘I think you’re right.’

Tombes shrugged off his backpack. He pulled out a tin of paint and shucked the lid with his knife. He splashed crimson enamel across the wall like he was slopping gasoline.

He pulled a detonator from his waistband. Red tag. Sixty second fuse. He bit the tube and triggered the countdown. He tossed the detonator. It landed at the foot of the wall.

He hauled himself up into the conduit mouth and crawled thirty yards back down the brick pipe. He stopped and looked over his shoulder.

Crack. Thud of ignition. The chamber filled with rippling fire. It was like staring into the open door of a furnace. Flames spat down the tunnel towards Tombes, a fierce plume of dragon breath. Hot air washed over him.

‘Take up the rope. I’m heading back.’

He reached the junction. The plant room up ahead. He began to crawl towards the distant disc of light.

A low growl.

Tombes twisted round and shone his flashlight behind him.

Something grotesquely naked blocking the pipe. A distended body, as if two people were trying to occupy the same skin.

‘Cloke?’

A bulge at Cloke’s shoulder as if a second skull were attempting to force its way up through his neck and wear his face.

The creature hissed.

Tombes bolted down the conduit, scrambled and squirmed towards the plant room.

Urgent drag and scuffle behind him. Cloke on his tail.

‘Hey,’ shouted Tombes. ‘Lupe. Serious fucking problem.’

‘I hear it,’ shouted Lupe, from the tunnel mouth. ‘Keep moving.’

Tombes pulled himself over broken glass. It sliced his gloves, sliced his palms.

‘Right behind me,’ he shouted, as he threw himself from the conduit mouth into the plant room.

His iron pike clattered to the floor. Lupe snatched it up.

Something monstrous scuttling down the brick conduit to meet her. She braced her legs, raised the pike like a harpoon and stabbed.

Shriek and howl. The creature two yards from the tunnel mouth, spike embedded in its breast bone, face animated by insect hunger.

Lupe and Donahue struggled to hold the monstrous thing at bay. The creature pushed forwards, impaling itself further on the iron spike. Skin stretched and broke as the barbed tip emerged from its back.

Tombes climbed to his feet. He pulled gloves from his hands with his teeth. He pulled a detonator from his waistband, fumbled with blood-slick fingers. He bit down, triggered the sixty-second burn, and threw the timer into the conduit.

He grabbed a tin from a wall-stack and hurled it into the tunnel mouth. The lid popped and white paint splashed the tunnel walls. It dripped from the ceiling. It dripped from Cloke’s misshapen body and face. Stink of turpentine.