The Invasive 2: Remnants Page 14

  Bishop had nothing but confidence Angela could do this. She was tougher than both of them.

  “You got this,” he said.

  Angela nodded at Dr. Avery, and the doctor made a superficial cut across her ankle, enough to draw blood.

  “You good?” Bishop asked.

  Angela didn’t even wince. “Best I’ve ever been,” she said.

  Dr. Avery swiped his key card, and the metal door clicked open. Bishop kissed his wife. “See you in a few,” he said. “Love you.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “Tell me you hate me.”

  “Why?” Bishop asked.

  “Because I need to cry.”

  “I’ll never say that,” he said. “But you have put on a couple pounds.”

  “Perfect,” Angela said, as she paused to ratchet up the tears. “Love you too, babe.”

  Angela didn’t look back. Instead, she limped down the hallway. “I’ve been bit, I’ve been bit,” she murmured as she put on a waterworks show.

  Through the glass partition on the side of the door, Bishop watched as the enormous guard in front of the last security scanner left his post and cut Angela off.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “You can’t be up here.”

  “An invasive got me,” Angela pleaded. “Please help. They’re attacking.”

  The guard put his radio to his rugged jaw. “Get medical to Level 3 right away,” he said.

  A moment later, two medical staffers emerged from across the hall, completely secure in yellow hazmat suits. They examined Angela’s leg, then helped her toward a doorway on the far end of the hallway, perhaps as long as fifty yards.

  Bishop wanted to throw up. He was so proud of her, yet felt like such an ass for putting her in that kind of danger.

  “Plan 2,” Bishop said to Dr. Avery. “We approach the guard, and use the bear spray.”

  Dr. Avery nodded. “It’s going to pack a punch for us too,” he said. “Don’t breathe it in.”

  “We got this,” Bishop said. “And then we’re going to get Angela.”

  “Yes, we are,” Dr. Avery said. “As soon as we deploy the ER18.”

  Dr. Avery took a deep breath, then swiped his keycard. The door opened, and Bishop strode into the hall, chest puffed out. He did not make eye contact with the burly guard until he was upon him.

  “Good afternoon,” Bishop said, immediately regretting his choice of words. “We’re here to pick up the lab samples.”

  The guard checked his clipboard. “Name, please.”

  As the guard examined the clipboard contents, Bishop reached into his pants and pulled out the ten-inch can of bear spray.

  “My name is Mr. Pain,” Bishop said.

  The guard checked his clipboard. “I don’t see a—”

  Bishop held his breath, then let loose a stream of the most foul and horrific substance he’d ever known in his life. The guard screamed, forcing the spray deeper into his lungs. He crumpled to his knees while rubbing his eyes and choke-drooling.

  “Shit,” Bishop said.

  Dr. Avery procured a bottle of clear liquid from his pocket, and dabbed it onto a crumpled paper towel he’d been holding.

  “What is that?” Bishop asked.

  “Chloroform,” Dr. Avery said. “Included in the equipment drop over Big J.”

  Unfortunately for them, the bear spray cloud hung in the air. Bishop took in a lung-burning breath, and doubled over. Dr. Avery applied the chloroform, but he was sloppy as the bear spray worked its nefarious charms on him.

  “Shit,” Bishop said, coughing up his lungs.

  The bear-sprayed and chloroformed guard teetered down the hallway, mewling and crying out for his mother as he banged into the walls and collapsed near a drinking fountain.

  And then the door opened to the main Quadrant 6 research lab.

  A figure stood there, covered from head to toe in a yellow hazmat suit. Through his blurry eyes, Bishop recognized the face.

  “Hello,” Dr. Werner said through the plastic, and grinning like a jackal.

  Quadrant 6 (185 BPM)

  To Bishop’s surprise, Dr. Werner ushered him into the facilities, along with Dr. Avery. Then Dr. Werner thumbed a radio and held it to the plastic near his mouth.

  “We have a sick man, Level 3,” he said. “Jim Matteson. Infirmary help requested. We had a minor chemical spill, Jim absorbed most of it. No further security required this evening, unless I radio for it.”

  Dr. Werner thumbed off the radio and smiled.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” he said. “Where’s the wife?”

  Bishop attempted to wipe the bear spray from his eyes. God, they burned like someone had dumped bleach into them. He took a deep, constricted breath, and let the clock on the wall tick down. A few breaths later and the residual effects faded. Had he taken a direct blast, the case would’ve been much different.

  Bishop thought for a moment about the wife comment. He also thought about the weird switch Dr. Werner held in his right hand, a metallic flip switch, mounted to a plastic box with a small antenna.

  Dr. Werner caught Bishop looking, and smiled again.

  “Oh, this little old thing,” he said as he turned to the center console loaded with monitors. Dr. Werner flipped another switch on the console, and Vastus’s pen, and Vastus himself popped up on the screen.

  “The switch I’m holding is the emergency release pen for Vastus. If flipped, he goes free into the Apex National Forest. Oh, he’ll do his thing. And do it to the best of his remarkable abilities.”

  “You’re sick,” Bishop said.

  “I’m just a scientist,” Dr. Werner said. “Nothing more, nothing less.” Dr. Werner grinned again, and unzipped his hazmat hood.

  “There,” he said. “Much better. So stuffy.”

  Dr. Avery coughed out the last of the bear spray in his lungs, and pointed at Dr. Werner. “You’ve been agitating the invasives with your experiments,” he said. “And endangering us all.”

  Dr. Werner shook his head. “It’s been a long time, Aves.”

  Bishop didn’t know if he wanted to strangle Dr. Werner, or Dr. Avery. “Explain,” he said.

  “We went to MIT together,” Dr. Avery said.

  “It’s a small world,” Dr. Werner said, “and a much, much bigger galaxy.”

  Dr. Werner gestured to the yellow hazmat suits on the wall. “All you had to do was ask,” he said. “We go way, way back.”

  Bishop and Dr. Avery stepped into the hazmat suits. If Werner was going to lead them right into the concentration of invasives, who was he to deny him?

  “It’s interesting isn’t it, Aves, after all this time, we meet here, in this wondrous place.”

  Dr. Avery zipped up his suit. “Okay,” he said. “Get to the point.”

  Bishop never cared for tight spaces, and the hazmat suit was no different.

  Dr. Werner waved them into the interior lab, then shut the metal door behind them.

  Bishop couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Eight Plexiglas tubes surrounded a frequency coil, perhaps eight feet wide, and made of copper. A single invasive filled each tube, along with a corresponding flashing red tag. Bishop counted the tags at 185 BPM. A sturdy table held the super-sized frequency coil.

  Across the lab, larger Plexiglas cages held more invasives. A single rod plunged through a small hole in each square cage, which Bishop assumed was an electric cattle prod.

  Most of the invasives in the tubes were the leaf-type, secapods, and the marsupial-type.

  “What, no frequency seals?” Bishop asked Dr. Werner.

  “A little too much trouble, those ones,” Dr. Werner said.

  Dr. Werner flipped a switch on the wall, and backed away from the frequency coil.

  A humming sound filled the room, rising in pitch as amplifiers that Bishop assumed powered the device clicked on with green lights, one by one. The leaves in the tubes reared up and changed colors.

  “I’m so glad you two are here,” Dr. Werner said. “
Especially Aves. And the reason for my enthusiasm is I know both of you are dying to know what happens when we reach 200 BPM. Isn’t that what we’ve all been waiting for?”

  The invasives in the tubes squealed and shimmied as the frequency coil leveled out at full power. Bishop felt a twinge on his pants, as his metal belt buckle twitched from the powerful frequency.

  “Pay attention,” Dr. Werner said.

  Bishop did. And he noticed the invasive’s tags creeping up to 190BPM.

  Dr. Werner grinned. “Do you really think they’ll get the signal off to the species that sent them here millions of years ago? Because I don’t. I think they were here so long, that their master species went extinct.”

  “I’m not willing to make that bet,” Bishop said.

  “I already have,” Dr. Werner said.

  Bishop watched through his plastic mask as the tags reached 195. “Stop now,” he said.

  Dr. Avery reached for Dr. Werner, and Dr. Werner quickly retreated while holding Vastus’s pen switch. “I wouldn’t,” he said.

  The frequency coil revved, and the red tags reached 198 BPM.

  “Come on, Aves,” Dr. Werner said. “We always said, back in the day, we wanted to make history. This is the most significant thing we’ll ever do in our lifetimes.”

  Dr. Avery unzipped his hazmat suit, and handed Bishop a vial. “Aim well,” he said. Then Dr. Avery ran towards the closest tube.

  “200 BPM!” Dr. Werner said as the rotten leaves spasmed and flashed vivid colors across their backs. The secapods eye’s bulged out of their heads as they made eerie screeching sounds and fought violent seizures. “See, nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Bishop wasn’t so sure.

  He looked up through the two sky lights. What had been a partly cloudy day turned much more ominous. The sky not only darkened, but it seemed to blacken like octopus ink had roiled the clouds. The lab rumbled, as computers and wall-mounts shook. The invasives squealed and cried in their tubes and pens.

  The confident look on Dr. Werner’s face faded.

  “They’ve come for us,” Bishop said. “Like we knew all along. Except this time it’s 200 BPM, in order to reach a further relay unit.”

  Dr. Werner held onto a support beam as he stared through the skylights. A deep, black shadow blocked all light, as treetops cracked and blew across the skylights. Lightning eviscerated the sky. The building rumbled and heaved. Four of the Plexiglas tubes toppled, and a pair of secapods and rotten leaves burst free.

  Dr. Avery cracked open a vial of ER18, and hurled it towards the fleeing secapods.

  In all the madness, in all the insanity, the thing that hit Bishop the hardest was that the rotten leaves didn’t flee. Instead, they turned and tried to help their fellow species escape their Plexiglas prisons.

  What have we done? Bishop wondered.

  Bishop tucked his vial back into his pocket, and watched as the secapods coughed and scurried around the lab. The infected invasives passed the square Plexiglas cages, and the baby pigras and secapods within also began to cough.

  “What in the name of science are you doing?” Dr. Werner said. “What is in those vials?”

  “The ending,” Dr. Avery said. “Already their pulse rate is lowering.”

  Bishop was relieved to see the tags at 197 BPM. The black ink that had taken over the sky, and the subsequent storm faded away. The building settled, too. At least for a moment.

  “Remarkable,” Dr. Werner said. “What pathogen is in those vials?”

  “ER18,” Dr. Avery said. “It only infects invasive.”

  Dr. Werner powered off the frequency coil, and Bishop’s belt buckle stopped quivering.

  “Astonishing work,” Dr. Werner said as he set Vastus’s pen switch onto a table.

  “I was wrong,” Dr. Werner said. “The invasives are still very much able to push out a signal when reaching 200 BPM. Whatever that…out there was, I have no doubt it’s a Level III civilization on the Kardashev scale. They have the ability to control energy in ways beyond our means and recognition. Likely a wormhole, thus the near instantaneous response. We’ve made history here today, men.”

  “Great,” Bishop said as he checked his surroundings for the secapods. All of the invasives, including the remaining invasives in the cylindrical tubes, coughed and sputtered. Their tags flashed at 150 BPM.

  The building shook again. Bishop checked the skylights, but the sky was not dark.

  Dr. Werner hurried over to a wall monitor, and turned it on. An image of Vastus’s pen flashed on the screen.

  Just the pen.

  “He’s escaped,” Dr. Werner said, looking flustered for the first time. “I was never going to let him out. I really wasn’t.”

  “How did he get out?” Bishop asked.

  “Could’ve been whatever blocked the sky,” Dr. Avery said. “Most likely the master species.”

  The ground trembled again, and Bishop used the concrete pillar for support. He glanced around for a secapod, but they’d hidden. When he turned his attention to the skylight, an eyeball stared back at him.

  A huge eyeball with triplicate pupils.

  In all his life, Bishop had never seen an eye that big. Vastus was so enormous, Bishop thought he was dreaming. He didn’t feel lucid, as if planted on Mars or a distant moon.

  “We have a code five,” Dr. Werner said into his radio. “I repeat, we have a code—”

  A sick cracking sound came from outside, followed by the sound of strong winds in a tree canopy. Bishop stood slack jawed as fully intact old growth ponderosa pine hurled towards the skylights.

  “Get down!” Bishop shouted. “Holy shit—”

  The pine tree crashed through the ceiling, shooting sparks and dust across the lab. Hovering glass particles shone in the sunlight like falling water. Shredded tree bark and pine needles spun in the air. Sharp branches cracked open the Plexiglas cages and pierced the invasive, while letting others free.

  Dr. Avery screamed from somewhere in the mayhem.

  Bishop tried to breathe, but smoke from a flash fire engulfed him. Fiberglass fireproofing and plaster coated his hair. He choked and gasped, while the free and dying invasive squealed and tried to flee around him. Several of the invasives scurried around the lab on fire.

  Slowly, Bishop’s world faded as his heartbeat slowed.

  He thought of that last image of Colbrick and Yutu, before he and Angela had hiked off on this crazy mission. Maybe it was the last time he’d ever see them. He thought of Angela, back on the night of their fifth anniversary, minutes before the first invasion.

  I’m sorry, Dad, Bishop thought. I let you down.

  And then all was black.

  Quadrant 6 (80 BPM)

  Bishop woke, and coughed. A piercing alarm roiled his mind. He pulled himself from underneath ceiling tile, and stood. The details of what he’d been doing slowly returned to him: the lab, Dr. Avery and the vials, Angela, the uniforms.

  He coughed again, then straightened up once more. The lab had been devastated by a big pine tree, which lay almost completely intact across the lab’s breadth. A fire engulfed the far wall, the flames growing brighter and hanging upside down on what was left of the ceiling. Bishop stripped out of his clunky hazmat suit, and covered his mouth with his shirt collar.

  “Dr. Avery,” Bishop said through his shirt. “Dr. Avery, can you hear me?”

  Bishop approached the lab exit, where the top of the pine lay. There he found Dr. Avery. He’d been punctured by a branch, through his heart.

  “I’m so sorry, my friend,” Bishop said. He wanted to do what he could for Dr. Avery, take his body to safer grounds, but there was no time. If he wasted a minute, he’d end up dead, too.

  Next, he looked for Dr. Werner. He found him on the other side of the pine. He’d been crushed by a steel beam, the upper portion of his skull caved in.

  As an alarm blared inside the lab, gunshots echoed outside the building, and men shouting. Bishop looked to the sky as an enormous bo
ulder screamed through the air and imploded the back half of the lab wall. Burning debris rocketed towards him, and Bishop dropped to his stomach and crawled for the door.

  Once he reached the hallway, he reached up, turned the knob, and collapsed into the hallway with a cloud of smoke chasing him. Bishop stood and raced towards the infirmary, where Angela had been taken. But the beds were empty, along with the room.

  “Angela!” Bishop shouted.

  He searched for her, room by room, as the hallway behind him burned a sick stench of formaldehyde and plastic wafting towards him in blasts of heat.

  “Angela!” he shouted.

  As the flames roared behind him, Bishop had no choice but to vacate the building. He stumbled down the stairs, fighting off toxic air and the heat of a thousand campfires at his back. When he at last stumbled through the outside door, smoke billowing behind him, Angela was there, holding her hands to her face and crying.

  He hugged her, and she cried in his arms.

  “What happened to you?” Bishop asked, so glad to be holding his wife.

  “We don’t have time,” she said.

  The ground rumbled under his feet. Jeeps filled with soldiers roared to a stop in the gravel lot. The soldiers exited the Jeeps, and opened fire towards the forest, at something Bishop couldn’t see.

  As Angela and Bishop ran towards the tent area, more Jeeps arrived, and Bishop heard the radio chatter: We have Target One, a hundred and fifty yards into the western forest perimeter.

  Vastus was that far away? Bishop wondered.

  For a moment, something blocked the sun again.

  “Clear!” one of the soldiers shouted.

  An entire pine tree, from roots to crown, perhaps ninety feet tall, whistled through the air like mocking death and crushed three Jeeps. Gunfire erupted again, uphill and toward a dark patch of forest. The ground shook, as Vastus moaned and lumbered out of sight.

  Another object briefly blocked the sun.