William Meikle - The Creeping Kelp

No one came.

Finally, he lay back exhausted and fell into a feverish sleep.

Once again he came to his senses slowly. He was sitting up in the bed and a warm body was pressed up against his good side. He turned and looked into Suzie’s concerned face.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. She had been crying again, but he knew better than to draw attention to it.

“I’ve been better,” he said. “How long have I been out?”

“Just a few hours,” she said.

He saw in her eyes there was more to be said.

“But?” he asked.

It came out of her in a rush, as if she’d been keeping it bottled up. He sat in stunned silence as she told him of the attack on Lyme Regis. He hadn’t seen the video footage that she had sat through, but her voice carried the whole horror of it and his own experiences filled in the blanks.

“How many dead?” he whispered during a pause.

“Over a hundred. But it’s hard to be sure yet, as the town is being evacuated and many fled by car and by foot during the attack itself. The army has cordoned off the whole seafront—I’ve told them it’s near impossible to police the coastline, but you know how these guys think.”

Noble nodded.

“They’ll find that this enemy doesn’t follow any rules of engagement. It’s working on some primal instinct. I doubt it has a plan.”

Suzie suddenly had a far away look in her eyes.

“I’m not too sure of that… I’ve been running some tests on the sample. I believe there’s something more than just instinct at work.”

He remembered something from the journal.

“Didn’t Rankin think the same thing? He postulated some rudimentary intelligence, didn’t he?”

He saw fear in Suzie’s eyes.

“I think it’s more than rudimentary,” she said. “I think it has problem solving and cognitive skills. I’m been running some tests and…”

Noble started to sit up.

“Don’t tell me. Show me,” he said.

She tried to push him back.

“You need to rest.”

“No,” he said. “I need to work. Fetch my clothes, would you?”

While Suzie got the clothes Noble gingerly swung his legs out of bed and put some weight on the bad ankle. It felt better than before, the pain having deadened to a dull ache.

And the floor isn’t moving, so that’s a result right there.

He wasn’t going to be running anytime soon, but he felt he could at least manage a slow walk, as long as he didn’t have to go too far.

He made Suzie turn her back as he dressed, which amused her greatly.

“Who do you think undressed you in the first place?” she asked, smiling as she turned away.

“I like to be awake when I’m getting molested,” Noble replied.

She was still laughing at that as she led him out of the room.

Once he got out into the corridor and looked around, he knew immediately that he was somewhere in the depths of the fort—nowhere else he’d ever been had that distinctive paint job on the walls.

“This place has become the centre of operations for the outbreak . That’s what they’re calling it, for want of a better term. The whole upstairs is crawling with soldiers, but they gave me a quiet room down here to set up a temporary lab and I had some stuff brought over.”

She looked Noble in the eye and obviously saw something she didn’t like.

“You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

She made to turn him back to the room and the bed, but he stood his ground.

“No. I’ve been lying down long enough. And it sounds like you think you’re on to something. Show me.”

They walked through empty corridors, the only sound, Noble’s increasingly heavy breathing. By the time they reached the office where Suzie had her makeshift lab set up, he was leaning heavily on her shoulder and the cold sweat was back.

He slumped into a chair beside her laptop.

“I told you to stay in bed,” she said. The concerned look was back, but he waved her away.

“I’ll be fine after a coffee… you do have coffee, don’t you?”

She moved to a trestle and showed him a glass jar perched on a Bunsen burner.

“It’ll be a lab special… and instant.”

“It’ll do,” he said, but his gaze had already been caught by a taller jar on the edge of the trestle. It was nearly a foot tall, solidly sealed at the top… and completely full of thrashing, wriggling kelp.

“Did you get a new sample?” he asked.

She saw where he was looking.

“Nope. This is the one that you collected.”

I only collected a fraction of this thing.

“What have you been feeding it… rats?”

She came over and handed him a steaming mug of coffee. He took to it like a drowning man to a life belt.

“Not rats… plastic.”

As he drank and let the warmth creep through him, she told him about what else had been found in Lyme Regis, about the total lack of plastic anywhere the kelp had passed and of eye-witness accounts of Perspex sheets being carried away over the horizon. Something stirred in the back of Noble’s mind, something he should be remembering, but it wouldn’t come—the memory was too raw, too tender to yet be touched. And he was too tired to attempt to bring it forward. Instead, he reminded Suzie why they had come to the lab.

“You said it showed something more than instinct?”

She nodded.

“I was re-reading Ballantine’s journal, about when they were shouting at the lab specimen.”

Noble laughed softly.

“You’ve been shouting at it?”

Suzie blushed.

“Just a little,” she said. She went over to the specimen jar to cover her embarrassment. As she walked, the kelp seemed to track her movement, sidling across inside the jar.

“It knows you,” Noble whispered.

Suzie nodded.

“And watch this.”

She walked up to the jar, so close her nose touched the glass.

“Be careful,” Noble shouted.

She took no heed. She shouted at the kelp.

“Down, boy.”

It retreated across the jar, pressing against the far side from her and didn’t move until she stood away.

“That’s all we need,” Noble said sarcastically. “A new household pet.”

“I haven’t tried being nice to it yet,” Suzie said. She was still blushing. “It didn’t feel right.”

The thought was so incongruous, Noble couldn’t help but laugh again. Suzie looked at him as if he were mad.

I might well be.

He went back to the coffee. He finished the cup and put it down on the desk beside him. At the same moment, the kelp inside the jar went into a frenzy of thrashing, so violent that the jar started to walk across the table.

Suzie stood back, a hand at her mouth.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “I think something’s happening.”

A second later, an alarm went off and an accompanying blast of gunfire echoed around Nothe Fort.

Derek Gelwyn revved his souped-up Escort, pumping the pedal for all he was worth. Not that he could hear the effect much—that was drowned out by the stereo system. It was turned up to ten and if there had been an eleven, it would be turned up to that. Parallel parked beside him, Jake Brown put the pedal to the metal in his Nova. They smiled like sharks at each other through the open windows.

You’re going down, Brown.

It was near midnight and the drag contest on Weymouth promenade was reaching its climax. Both lads knew that they’d made enough noise in the past ten minutes to wake up half the town and that the police would be here any minute now. But there was time for one last race—the one that would assign bragging rights, for this week at least.