Biohazard

16

Janie shook me out of it and I was thankful for that because I don’t know if I would ever have come out of it on my own. My eyes opened and I saw that creeping shadow closing in on the valley. I saw the faithful cheer and heard them scream with delight or terror and perhaps both. The Medusa spread across the earth like a fire storm destroying everything in its path.

I had felt it in my mind and I had seen it in my dreams and now I saw its physical reality as everyone in the valley did.

A spreading gray shadow that was blank and formless, as far as the eye could see: lifeless, hollow, a vapor of dead alien plains. Then…fragmenting, swelling and bursting, slitting open like some immense birth canal in an undulant mass of white and worming tendrils that reached for miles, reached right up to stars themselves as the world became carrion threaded by a million-billion hungry corpse worms. The tendrils split apart into more webbing tendrils and filaments and snaking ropes of slime that were viscidly alive.

And beyond it, rising like the cold marble graveyard face of the moon was The Medusa itself: an elongated, mutating, ever-changing firmament of gaseous malevolence. An elongated face like a dead-white moldering corpuscle, flaking and fragmenting in the hot cemetery wind of plague breath and swirling bone dust. A living pestilence of viral matter with a mind of gnawing starvation and immense black tunnels for eyes that reflected the tenebrous glare of shadowy sterile worlds and the dripping voids between the stars.

The faithful began to scream.

They had waited for her, dreamed of her in their bacterial delirium and she had come. Now they sat at her table not as guests but as food and she looked down upon her gathered offerings with a sawtoothed, contorted, cadaverous grin of plague pits, her eyes pulsating with evil color, verminous yellow wastes kissed by cold flames of fever.

Shrouds kissed by stillborn winds, rustling like graveyard rats in subterranean tombs, she unraveled herself, taking what was offered, taking her sacrificial lambs.

I watched them scream as she settled over them, one by one popping like overripe pumpkins and rotten gourds, their blood and tissue and disease meat vaporized and sucked up into the chaotic maelstrom that was The Medusa. She left nothing but smoldering bones in her wake as she moved across the valley taking what was hers and hers alone.

Janie screamed as we felt that hot wind blow up at us like a breath from a crematory oven. She screamed. She fought in my grip. She went absolutely hysterical as I held onto her feeling numb and emptied by the sight of this haunter of the dark.

She grabbed my face. She kissed it again and again. “If you love me,” she cried. “Don’t let her take me! For the love of our unborn child and the love I have for you, don’t let it end this way! Call it! Nash…call The Shape…”

Revelation.

This is what made it push us here, prod us ever westward. Yes, it wanted to keep me and mine out of the path of The Medusa. But that was only part of it. The Shape did not love us. It was not some caring, compassionate father figure protecting its children. It did not know love. It did not understand loyalty or devotion or even the need to protect life itself: it knew only hunger and here was the ultimate feast that it had known was coming all the time. This table had been set a long time ago and now it was filled with food just as The Medusa herself was a banquet of life force.

I kissed Janie as that wind grew hotter and held her beautiful face in my hands one last time, then I called up The Shape. I peered into that sphere of darkness, that zone of blackness which was a conduit to it and maybe its own black little beating heart.

I summoned it.

And it came.

Something shifted around us, the air was filled with a thrumming energetic vitality. It went heavy, crackled with static electricity. There was a sudden thrumming sound and an overpowering stink of ozone.

The Shape rose up out of the ether, a whirlwind of shrieking matter, black and buzzing, angry and spinning. A writhing, energized cloud of radioactive dust and debris and force. An elemental field of sentient electrons, wrath and destruction and appetite and I could feel the raw force coming off of it. A stink blew off of it like fused wiring and melting steel, cordite and the breath from foundry ovens.

The Medusa was a relentless, unstoppable machine of death, but The Shape was a sentient, living thermonuclear furnace.

It rose up high as two story building.

It paused there, sparkling with flecks of luminosity and arcs of electricity. Two leering red eyes looked out from that storm of atomic refuse. The noise it created…like screeching metal and hurricane winds and bubbling cauldrons…was so loud you had to shout over the top of it.

“Take them! Take them all! Take everything that’s yours!” I screamed at it.

When it moved, that buzzing sound rose and its body envelope began to spin faster. It was doing that now as it came in my direction. At the last moment, I could feel the blazing, cremating heat of the thing and it was like standing too near a smelter full of molten steel. The Shape was still thirty feet from me at the bottom of the hill, but close enough to bake my skin and singe my eyebrows. I collapsed at that very moment. But at least I knew something…I knew what it had been like for those others, I knew the horror they must have felt as they were scalded and incinerated, kissed to ash and embers by that abomination.

The Shape did not want me, of course. It went right for the men in orange suits. They were vacuumed into that living kiln, that living nuclear reactor.

When The Shape takes them, it takes them fast.

They were sucked in, absorbed and leeched and disintegrated, dissolved and vomited out the other side. When they were pulled in, The Shape lit up like phosphorus, like blazing witch-light. You couldn’t see much when they were assimilated by the thing, but if you didn’t look away, you could catch a few glimpses. Sometimes they flew apart like meat in a vacuum chamber and you saw blood and tissue, limbs and organs and I don’t know what spinning into that seething radioactive tornado. I think it actually took them apart at the subatomic level, particulated them, consuming their electromagnetic fields and the very bonds that held their molecules together. When it had what it wanted-and, believe me, this took about ten seconds-it reassembled them, integrated them, and spewed them out the other side…but never the way they went in. Just smoking, blackened heaps that were often anatomically altered. I’d seen arms growing out of backs and heads jutting from bellies, bodied reversed and rearranged from molecular dispersal and realignment. And sometimes, when The Shape took two or more at once, they came out like what we were seeing: a steaming and sparking clot of melted wax with bones thrusting out in every which direction. The figures in the space suits had had their atoms mixed like the fly and the scientist in that old movie. The mass they had been reduced to cooled fairly rapidly and we could see that they had all been fused into one, like plastic army men heated and squished into a whole.

It was sickening and repulsive.

Then The Shape took the faithful that The Medusa had not yet reached.

They were pulled in and disassembled, changed and slapped back together, spit out into a fused and burning mass.

Janie stood up and watched it. I stood by her. We held each other as The Shape moved at The Medusa. I never loved her more than I did at that moment. I loved her so much it squeezed tears from eyes knowing that I had betrayed her in so many ways.

In my ear she said, “Our child can never be born, Rick. You know what it would become. What they all are.”

Then she kissed me and ran off down the hill.

I went after her, but not fast enough.

She dove right into that whirlwind of devastation, that thing born of breeder reactors and atomic cremators, that living chain reaction of thermonuclear waste.

I screamed when she came out the other end…smoking and sizzling and mutilated.

There was nothing I could do but dive in myself, but The Shape was moving too fast now, gaining speed for its collision with The Medusa. I scrambled back up the hill and ran as fast as I could, rolling down the other side and into a leaf-filled ditch.

I didn’t see The Shape collide with The Medusa, but I heard the explosion. The detonation of two fields of energy colliding. The world went up like an exploding sun, a blinding blue-white flash of light that blinded me and a thundering eruption that shook the earth, leveled the hill and nearly buried me alive in soil, rocks, and debris.

That was it.

When I dug myself free finally, there was no one and there was nothing. The world was a void of steam and smoke and gradually diminishing heat. As it cleared I saw the valley had become part of a greater pit that stretched for miles, blackened and smoldering. Every tree as far as I could see had been blasted to a stump. Hillsides were flattened. Like I said, a void.

I looked into my mind for that sphere of darkness but it was gone. Just gone.

I was alone.

Absolutely alone.