Adam Baker - Impact

No movement. No signs of life.

A large, geodesic tent. He stepped through the arched doorway. He looked up. He could see stars through tears in the vinyl dome.

Three dissection tables. Zinc slabs with drain holes.

A metal chair equipped with leather arm and leg restraints. A tripod video camera and a couple of mikes positioned in front of the chair ready for some kind of interrogation.

Bloody surgical instruments scattered on the polythene floor. He bent and picked up a pair of rongeurs. He scissored the blades. Crusted blood and tufts of hair.

A voice behind him.

‘Hands. Hands where I can see them.’

Noble froze. He held out his pistol and let it drop to the floor. He tossed the bone cutters aside.

He raised his hands and slowly turned around.

Trenchman. Dust-matted clothes. Couple of days of stubble. The guy looked sunburned and exhausted.

He lowered his side arm.

‘Shit. Noble. Noble, right? Liberty Bell .’

‘What the hell are you doing out here?’

‘Looking for you guys,’ said Trenchman. ‘Anyone else make it?’

‘Two survivors, back at the plane.’

Noble bent and scooped up his Beretta. They both holstered their weapons.

‘We should get out of here,’ said Trenchman. ‘The lights, the music. Might as well ring the dinner bell.’

They scrambled up the mountain slope.

Trenchman led Noble to a high ledge. A sleeping bag, bottled water, canned food.

‘This where you’ve been camping out?’

‘Managed to elude the fuckers so far.’

Trenchman pointed to the floodlit compound beneath them.

‘There. See that? Next to the truck.’

‘Can’t see a damned thing. No, wait. Yeah. I got him. Deep shadow.’

‘They come out at night. Might be dumb, but they got enough sense to stay out of the noonday sun.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t know. A bunch.’

‘Reckon we’ll be okay up here?’

‘They’ve left me alone the past couple of nights. They don’t climb so well. A couple of them try to make it up that scree slope down there. Guess they wanted to take a bite out of my ass. They got a little ways, then brought a bunch of rocks down on themselves.’

Twisted bodies at the bottom of the gradient. Red jumpsuits, snapped limbs, part-buried beneath stones. One of the revenants was pinned under a boulder. Skeletal hands feebly slapped the massive stone, tried to roll it aside.

Noble sat a while and contemplated the compound.

He gestured to the wrecked buildings.

‘So what is this place? Evidently some pretty dark shit going down, some army docs getting in touch with their inner Mengele, but is it truly worth a nuclear weapon?’

‘Wait till sunrise,’ said Trenchman. ‘I’ll give you the full tour.’

The lower cabin.

Hancock pulled the barricade aside as quietly as he could and leant through the fissure in the fuselage wall. The desert night. Deep darkness. He shone his flashlight left and right. Undisturbed sand.

‘Frost?’

He reluctantly stepped from the plane, torch in one hand, Beretta in the other.

‘Frost? You still there?’

He approached the extinct signal fire. Anxious three-sixty scan of surrounding dunes.

Frost still knelt with a leash round her neck, arms locked cruciform.

‘You okay?’

She looked up. She didn’t speak. Haunted, terrified eyes.

He held the flashlight under his armpit, took a knife from his pocket and flicked it open. He cut the leash.

‘Let’s get inside.’

Hancock rebuilt the barricade.

He cut Frost free of the crutch. She sank to the floor, still set cruciform. She slowly flexed her shoulders, winced as she tried to bend her elbows and lower her arms. Sensation gradually returned to numb limbs.

Hancock kept the gun trained on her head.

‘Climb the ladder.’

Frost pulled herself upright. She gripped the ladder for support.

‘Take a long, hard look at yourself,’ said Hancock. ‘Dead on your feet. Planning to throw some kung fu my way? Best think again.’

She gripped the ladder rungs. She tried to climb. She gnashed her teeth and snorted in pain as her injured leg refused to hold her weight.

Hancock pushed her ass, forced her up onto the flight deck.

She fell on her hands and knees.

He climbed the ladder. He stood over her, pistol trained at her head.

He took wire from his pocket and bound her hands to a wall stanchion.

‘Stay there. Don’t fuck around.’

He set his flashlight on top of the avionics console.

An eerie stillness. They could hear a rising night wind whistling through the broken cockpit windows, fluttering the nuclear blast curtains. They could hear the tick and creak of the plane’s superstructure contracting in the evening cool.

The flashlight beam flickered and dimmed. A dying battery. They stared at it, like they were contemplating a guttering candle flame.

‘We need more light,’ said Hancock. He checked lockers.

‘Why did you change your mind?’ asked Frost. ‘Why bring me inside?’

‘I got lonesome.’

He found a large 3xD cell Maglite. He tested the beam.

‘You were out there, in the dark, for a full hour,’ he said. ‘See anything? Hear anything?’

‘I heard them walking around. They paced the site like they were checking it out.’

‘They didn’t come near you?’

‘One of them stood behind me,’ said Frost. ‘I didn’t dare move. He stood there a long while. Stank to high heaven. Then he moved off.’

‘Why did he leave you alone?’

‘No idea.’

He sat in the pilot seat, lifted one of the blast screens and peered into the dark.

‘Anything?’ asked Frost.

‘No. But I reckon they’re out there, circling like sharks. Wish I could make sense of it. Fucking mind games. It’s as if they’re trying to drive us nuts.’

‘Doing a pretty good job,’ muttered Frost.

‘It’s a virus. Nothing more than a strain of flu. Hard to credit any kind of smarts. Maybe it’s studying us. Testing our resolve, trying to find a common breaking point. Sort of thing a general might do in wartime, right? Send out a raiding party. Use provocation to draw the enemy out, gauge the strength of its forces.’

Frost shook her head.

‘It’s already got the measure of us.’

‘Well, in that case, maybe it’s just having fun.’

Hancock bent and peered through a vacant cockpit window.

‘I can see one of them. About fifty yards, dead ahead. Just standing there, in the moonlight.’

‘Who? Pinback?’

‘Can’t tell.’

Hancock continued to squint into the darkness.

‘What’s it doing?’ asked Frost.

‘Nothing. Just standing there, looking at us.’

‘Looks like we got a straight choice. Hide in here all night and hope they don’t attack or suit up and take the fight to them. I vote we head outside and push for a stand-up fight. Fuckers aren’t supernatural. They’re flesh and blood, just like us. A well-placed bullet will put them down for good.’

‘You shot Guthrie in the head. Didn’t slow him down much.’

‘Then let me finish the job. Put a round in his medulla. That’ll stop his clock.’

Hancock thought it over.

‘Time to decide,’ said Frost. ‘You wanted to be AC. You wanted to be the boss. So how do you intend to play it? Do we cower in here all night, or head outside and seize the initiative?’

Hancock sipped from his canteen.

Frost watched him drink, listened to liquid slosh in the metal flask. She was tempted to lick parched lips, but didn’t want to betray any signs of weakness.