Дэниел Смит - Below Zero

But the Spiders were closing in. A few more seconds, and they would have her.

Sofia pushed harder than she had ever pushed before. She forced herself to keep moving. She drew on every last reserve of energy, calling on every muscle to work harder. Reaching the stairs, she grabbed the handrail to haul herself up. At the top, she ripped open the panel beside the door and yanked hard on the emergency lever. The door clunked, hissed and slid open. Sofia lunged inside as the first Spider reached the bottom step. Its legs clattered, metal against metal. She spun around, slamming her fist hard against the lock, glimpsing the Spider trying to climb the stairs as the door slid shut.

‘And stay out!’ She flicked the lock, sealing the door.

Sofia shook the blood back into her numb hand and, in the darkness of The Hub, fumbled her way towards the door at the back of the room. She checked the walkway was clear, and headed across as fast as she could. When she reached Refuge, she went into the office and dropped into the chair in front of the desk. It was the same chair robotics engineer Dr Adam Reeves would pull out to access ViBac less than a day later.

Sofia was out of breath when she directed the camera at herself and started recording. Her cheeks were red raw from the cold. Pushing back her hood and lifting the goggles on to her forehead, she stared into the lens.

‘Somebody will find this,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who; but someone will, and I’m hoping it’ll help. Everything I know is here. Somehow the Spiders have… come to life. Sounds crazy saying it out loud but it’s like they have a life of their own. There’s those things on the back of everyone’s necks, and… something in Papa’s nose. Something grey, like the thing Doc Blair found in the ice core. I reckon the others will have them too, but I didn’t have time to check, we just had to get out of there, me and Prof Peters…’ Sofia looked away from the camera and wiped her nose. ‘Yeah. Prof Peters is probably one of them now.’ She closed her eyes and banged her closed fist against her forehead a couple of times before turning to stare at the camera. ‘It’s got to be something to do with those guys from BioMesa. They brought something up from The Chasm. This has to be something to do with them. It has to and…’ Sofia shook her head. ‘And I brought it back here. This is my fault. I did this. I’m so sorry, I…’ She stopped. ‘I’m going to fix this. I’ll… I don’t know how… I’ll try to get the comms working, get a message out, then I’ll see if I can get my head round what’s going on here. Power’s off and it’s getting colder, I can’t sit here doing nothing. Improvise, adapt and overcome. That’s the way forward. That’s what I’ll do; head out to where they were bringing up the ice cores. There must be something there to explain all this. Maybe…’ She looked down as something occurred to her. ‘OK. I’m going to upload this video to ViBac, and then I’m going to try comms and see what I can find out. Wish me luck.’

When the screen froze, Zak and the others stared at the fuzzy picture of Sofia Diaz. Zak had about twenty-five billion thoughts in his head, but the one that floated to the surface was about her. She was tough, resourceful, confident – everything he wished he could be – and even though he’d never met her, he knew he liked her. But they hadn’t seen any sign of her since arriving at Outpost Zero.

Because they got her , Zak thought. She didn’t escape.

She wasn’t in Refuge, so those bug things must have got her and she was in Storage, right now, standing like a zombie with the others. She probably had one of those disgusting things inside her.

‘They were like the things we saw in the lab,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ May asked.

‘Those bugs coming out of his clothes. And the thing in his nose. They’re like what we saw in the lab. And when the Spider attacked me before, I saw stuff underneath it like… like something was growing there. And it looked the same as that grey thing.’

‘Growing?’ May pulled a face. ‘On the Spider?’

‘Yeah.’ And the more Zak thought about it, the more positive he was that those sinews hadn’t been growing into the main body, they had been growing out of it.

‘How could something be growing on it?’ Mum asked. ‘What could be growing on it?’

‘It’s those insect things,’ Zak said. ‘The things they brought out of the ice.’

‘Zak…’ Mum gave him one of those sympathetic looks, but there was something else beneath the expression. Her mouth tightened and the zigzag scar under her nose had gone white. It looked to Zak a lot like fear. ‘There has to be a rational explanation for this.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘There has to be.’

‘It’s those things; I know you can see that. You don’t have to pretend you’re not scared. You saw them coming out of his clothes. One of them was inside him, we all saw it. Those people are being controlled and it’s got something to do with those insects. And if they can control a person, why not everything else? The whole base. The communications and—’

‘Insects controlling people?’ Dad took off his glasses. ‘That’s… no, this has to be something else.’

But as he said it, they heard a sound from out on the walkway.

Tick-tack-tick-tack.

They froze.

Tick-tack-tick-tack.

When it stopped, all they could hear was the faint bluster of the dying storm.

‘I think they’ve come for us,’ Zak said.

‘No.’ May pushed back against the desk. ‘It’s the girl from the video. Or the others have woken up and now they’re all right.’

‘Sh.’ Dad pushed in front of them. He engaged the lock and put his face close to the window in the office door.

‘D’you see anything?’ Zak asked.

‘Sh.’ Dad raised a finger to his lips.

‘I don’t want to be like them. Like the people on the video.’ May spoke quickly and quietly. ‘I don’t want those things on me.’

‘You won’t get anything on you,’ Mum said. ‘Dad and I won’t let that happen.’ She moved to stand in front of her.

May peered at Zak through strands of black hair. ‘I won’t be like them.’ A cold strength settled in her expression. ‘I won’t .’

Zak’s mind was a jumble of all the crazy things that had happened over the last few hours. He felt like he had slipped out of his body and was watching from somewhere far away.

‘And I won’t let them get you either,’ May said. ‘I promise.’ She clamped her jaw tight, and Zak saw a determination in her eyes he had never seen before, and for some weird reason it actually made him feel more secure.

‘It’s all right,’ Dad whispered. ‘The door’s locked. That thing’s not getting in here.’

‘Thing?’ Mum asked. ‘What thing ?’

One by one, Zak and Mum and May crept towards the door and peered out. What Zak saw filled his veins with ice.

A smaller, cruder version of the Spiders was standing in the doorway to Refuge. About the size of a large, heavy dog, the main bulk of its dark metal body was raised a few centimetres off the ground; its legs poised either side. What could only have been a CCTV camera was mounted at the front, watching them. It didn’t come into the corridor, but waited, each of its six legs tapping the ground in turn.

Tick. Tack. Tick. Tack.