Майк Ланкастер - Human.4

They just stood there.

"My god." Kate’s voice was quiet and full of fear. "Look."

She was still on her knees, and she was staring at Doctor Campbell in front of her. I looked over but couldn’t see what she meant.

"His hands !" she said. "Oh god, look at his hands!"

I thought she had lost her mind.

And then I looked at Doctor Campbell’s hands.

And then I thought maybe I had lost mine.

NOTE

Kyle pauses here and creates a silence that lasts almost a whole minute. Sounds of breathing can be discerned, but nothing else.

Bernadette Luce has written much about this pause. In "The Importance of What Isn’t There: Finding Truth in the Gaps" she hypothesises about the reason for this pause, deciding, after a particularly long discourse, that "(T)his is the moment where the power of silence overtakes the weakness of language. Kyle Straker, with his silence, tells us all we need to know about this part of the greater narrative. That it is beyond words, it transcends language, and the gap he leaves as he attempts to find a way to describe what happens next is a silent scream that we hear echoing through the rest of the tape. Gaps always provide a good environment for the manufacture of echoes."

The fact that Kyle then manages to describe what he saw when he looked at Doctor Campbell’s hands seems to be ignored by Luce.

At first I thought it was a trick of the light.

With the sun starting its climb down from its high point in the sky towards a resting place on the horizon, it could have been the result of light and shadow across his skin.

But it was nothing to do with the light, and all to do with the physical appearance of the doctor’s hands. The skin of his hands was shifting, as if moved by ripples across its surface, or currents below. It was like the skin itself had suddenly become capable of moving , and it wasn’t using muscles to do it, it was doing it itself.

As I watched in horrified fascination, a sudden rush of tiny bumps spread across his skin like a rash. It looked a little like gooseflesh, and before long there were thousands of the bumps, covering his skin.

Each bump was crowned with a tiny black dot.

The doctor didn’t seem to notice, he just stood there, utterly still while the rash seemed to harden upon the surface of his skin and then, suddenly, began to disgorge thin, whip-like threads from each of the bumps. Skin-colored and minutely thin, these threads sprayed out of the dot at the center of each bump, like water under pressure, or pink silly string from a can. Each thread, or filament, was ten to fifteen centimeters long, and seemed able to support itself, standing out from his flesh like thin, hard fibers.

The filaments began to stretch, pulling themselves further from the bumps that housed them, adding twenty centimeters to their length with every second that passed.

The bass vibration deepened again in the air around us.

The filaments on the doctor’s left hand were reaching out towards the person next to him.

My dad.

The fibers were moving towards my dad’s hand and I had an urge to swat at them, to keep them away from him, to stop them touching him.

Except I didn’t want them touching me.

And then it was too late.

The filaments seemed to sense their proximity to Dad’s hand and homed straight in on it, flailing at the back of his hand and then sticking to it. Where each filament touched, a bump appeared; identical to the bumps that had spread across the doctor’s own skin.

The pores of the bumps opened to accept the filaments, before sucking them inside and sealing themselves closed.

The doctor’s hand was now linked to my dad’s hand by hundreds of flesh-colored threads.

The bass sound ceased abruptly.

"What are they doing? " Lilly asked, with disgust in her voice.

"They’re mutating," Kate O’Donnell said.

I shook my head.

Things started coming together in my head.

Digital code. Data. Computer code as a means of invasion. Thin flesh-colored threads. Fiber-optic cables.

"Not mutating," I said. "Connecting."

Three simple words.

"Not mutating. Connecting."

The keys that started unlocking the puzzle.

Of course it wasn’t until we reached the barn that it all came together . . . but now I’m doing what I have been avoiding: I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s all starting to blur together, and the pieces are starting to bleed in over other pieces. I have to keep it together.

So you’ll know.

So you’ll understand.

When things start moving, they can really start moving.

We were still reacting to the bizarre sight of the doctor and my dad connecting when suddenly everyone in the crowd was at it.

Filaments began spreading from person to person, to the right, to the left, behind and in front, connecting the crowd into a vast network, bound together by those unnatural fibers.

As a group we stepped back, edging away from the sight before us.

Doctor Campbell was blinking in a definite pattern of blinks—two quick, one slow, three very quick indeed, two slow, then a lot of fluttering blinks, then the whole pattern repeated again— and every member of the crowd did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time. Connected by those terrible fleshy fibers, the crowd was now acting as one.

We turned and walked away from them.

I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t even look back.

No one followed.

We headed out of the village, along the high street. We were driven by an impulse to get as far away from the village green as we could, and it was a few minutes before any of us managed to speak.

So we carried on, along the road that led out to Crowley, and eventually on to Cambridge.

Finally, as pavement faded out into grass verge beneath our feet, Kate O’Donnell managed to speak.

"We’re nothing to them," she said helplessly. "Absolutely nothing."

"Then we’ll get help," Mr Peterson told her. "The police. The army. Someone."

"That’s if there’s anyone left," Lilly said. "What if it’s not just Millgrove? What if it’s Crowley? And Cambridge? And London? Paris? New York? What if it’s everybody? Who’s going to help us then?"

On either side of us spread the countryside, with fields and trees and hedges. It seemed too ordinary, too normal, for anything to be truly wrong.

Birds sang in the trees and swooped across the landscape.

Grasshoppers and crickets leapt from the grass as we passed.

It all looked so peaceful, so tranquil, so safe.

But the road was quieter than I had ever seen it, and that made the stillness seem artificial, sinister. There were no cars driving in from Crowley, or Cambridge, or from anywhere at all. Perhaps the thing we were fleeing was widespread.

But still we walked.

There was nothing else to do.

The sky was reddening on the horizon as the sun sank in the sky, setting the clouds on fire as it went, and we walked towards that horizon.

Twin towers pulled me out of a downward mental spiral.

I saw them silhouetted against the bloodied sky and stopped dead in my tracks. Lots of things suddenly collided inside my head, adding up, making some weird kind of sense.

Old man Naylor’s grain silos.

A couple of hundred meters away.

Lilly stopped next to me and followed my gaze. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face, lined by the red of the setting sun.

"Isn’t that where…?" she asked, trailing off to avoid having to finish the sentence with the science fiction stuff she hated.