Дэвид Уоллес - Island of Fog and Death

“Past tense,” he observed, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Peri. When did you lose them?”

“‘Lose them?’” she echoed. “Like I put them down somewhere and can’t remember where? Sod off, Steve. I didn’t ‘lose them’, they died in a road accident. I was ten years old at the time.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“They died happy. They were stoned out of their minds.”

“I didn’t mean to pry…”

“Well you did, so now I’m going to make you really, really sorry you did. Something like I feel about it, in fact. My parents were the last of the hippies on the hippy trail in south east Asia. They lived a ludicrous lifestyle of drugs, booze, sex, lots of hair, fewer baths, didn’t have a care in the world. They liked to tell everyone that I was a miracle baby. Conceived on the altar of an abandoned temple in Laos, so the gods were smiling on them. Born in a Buddhist commune in Vietnam. Registered with a ridiculous name at a consulate in Goa, where the honourable consul was a worse head-case than my father. A truck took both parents out, just like that, in Ratnapura. The authorities in Sri Lanka stepped in, took me into care and got the embassy to ship me over to Britain to a horrified grandmother. I held onto my name because it’s the only thing I have that was theirs.”

“That must have been tough…”

“Life with my parents was wonderful. I only realised it was very strange much later. When I found myself going to school for the very first time at age eleven, fluent in five languages but unable to read, write or speak English, with a name that made all the other kids take the piss. I mean, literally take the piss – after all, my initials were pee-pee. Now, that was tough, and it forced me to become tough to get through it. Happy you pried?”

“I did apologise,” he mumbled.

“Sod off,” she repeated, and they reached the ferry in silence.

After a few minutes, the other troops started to board. Steve greeted many of them, and the air was filled with lewd insults, manly back-slaps, ribaldry and general frivolity. Peri noticed that the officer – Mike – had stayed in the command tent. Gus entered the ferry’s cabin to man the controls and Amanda leaned against the cabin door looking as if she was not sure she wanted to be here. Peri moved over to the ferry’s blunt bow and climbed on the railing to get some height.

“Heads up, everybody,” she called out. “Your attention please.”

She rapidly became the centre of attention.

“While we cross over, I want to brief you, and I want to make sure we all know what we’re doing. I’m Peri, and I’m in overall charge of this operation. I’m going to run quickly through three topics. First, what are we all up against over there. Second, what parts we each have to play in delivering a successful outcome here today. And third, the overall plan.

“First, then, what we’re facing. You all know this is a buckthorn operation and you all have the clearance to know that means dealing with a hostile extra-terrestrial biological entity. In other words, we’re here to kick ET right up the arse.”

Most of the men chuckled.

“The threat is in several parts. The island is infested with creatures that resemble the bastard offspring of a chain saw and a disembodied phallus, two or three feet long. If any of you in fact have a phallus two or three feet long, then I suggest you keep your flies firmly zipped to avoid accidents, and come see me afterwards if you survive this experience, er, intact and fully functional.”

This was greeted with raucous laughter.

“For want of an official code word, I’m calling this first type of threat, ‘Fucking Ugly Chain Snakes’. Maybe we can abbreviate that, you know, for brevity in reporting? Does anyone have any suggestions?”

There was a chorus of “FUCS!” and more laughter.

“Okay, some good suggestions, thank you for restoring my faith in the ingenuity of the male gender, so from here on in, we’ll call them ‘Snakes’. It’s all fine bandying around a little humour, but the snakes are nasty fuckers. They can jump some feet off the ground, they are covered in spines, and they are ambush predators. They also have another wicked trick for us. They can act as parasites. They bite, they can tunnel into your abdomen, they can sneak in through any natural orifice, and they can take over the body they have just infected. We have seen animals so infected, and we have no reason to believe that humans are immune. We have seen them erupt out of a carcass and launch several feet onto another body to infect it. Think about that. When not wandering around in control of your body, they’re eating you from the inside.”

She looked around the deck and slowly, with emphasis, she said “Do. Not. Get. Bitten by one of these.”

After a pause for effect, Peri carried on. “The snakes apparently were extruded by the main organism, and they seem to act like remote control drones. I believe there is only one ET out there, but given the number of snakes we’ve seen and heard, it must be one really big fucker of an ET. For now, we’ll refer to it with code name ‘Fat Bastard’.”

She paused, and there were some nervous chuckles.

“Now this is where I’m speculating a bit, and simplifying a bit. The fat bastard is a native of a parallel dimension that forced its way into our dimension roughly two thousand years ago. The Roman Army tackled it then, but couldn’t kill it. They trapped it underground. I honestly don’t know if we can kill it, or if we have to trap it too. But you can be sure of this. The fat bastard will be well and truly pissed off, and really, really hungry.”

She paused to let that sink in.

“Next, what are we doing. Most of us – or rather most of you – will be concentrating on finding and evacuating any civilians left alive over there. As we go, we will be taking every opportunity for attrition against the snakes and any infested mammals we find. That will create a safe environment for destroying the snakes without risk to people. There are twenty-seven residents, according to census data. There may be visitors, there may be absentees. So every building needs to be checked for civilians, alive or dead. We need to get them to the mainland, and we have medical and biohazard teams standing by to deal with them.

“While you are doing that, my team and I will be advancing up the centre of the island. Our specific objective is to locate an archaeological team who may have stumbled into a big, big problem. I said the fat bastard had been trapped underground by the Romans, two thousand years ago. Well, the archaeologists are all set to dig it up. We are going to find them, get them to safety, and assess how we can deal with El Cabron Gordo, hopefully with extreme and permanent prejudice.”

She looked around the deck at the assembled men. “Questions?”

Someone called out, “The only question we need to ask is how do we kill these things?”

Steve stepped up. “I found it quite effective to shoot them at the head end until they stop wriggling then stomp on the bastards. They’re pretty squishy. It’s a bit more complicated if they’re infesting animals. You’ll need to take down the animal first.”

Heads were nodding. Peri could see they were almost across and she needed to wrap up.

“The overall plan should be obvious. Get the civvies out, wear down the snakes, assess the situation, and come back with big guns to kick ET’s arse. Now I could start rabbiting on about we band of brothers, and Saint Crispin’s day, and shit like that. But I can’t do stirring speeches. So, I’ll keep it simple, and I’ll just say this: get out there and save the world!”