Slimer

Fifteen

Linda was home again. It was Sunday morning and she and Paul were in their small flat in Islington, North London. They had spent the morning having a luxurious lie-in and were now about to go down to the local pub with their next-door-neighbours, a young couple called Greg and Sheila who were good friends of theirs.

It was a hot day and the pub was crowded so they sat in the beer garden at the rear of the building. Linda felt very happy and contented. It was great to be back in familiar surroundings again with familiar faces. It made her feel secure.

She needed that feeling. She couldn’t remember exactly what had happened but she knew it had seemed like a terrible nightmare at the time…

But it was all over now. Gone and forgotten. She caught Paul’s eye and grinned at him. He grinned back and raised his pint of bitter. She picked up her glass too, clinked it with his then took a swallow…

She had to spit it out. It tasted horrible. She stared into the glass but instead of the expected scotch and lemonade it was filled with some kind of black jelly. And it was moving; trying to get out of the glass.

She flung the glass away and leapt to her feet. ‘Paul!’ she screamed.

But he remained motionless in his seat, looking at her with a blank expression. Then he opened his mouth and the same black jelly that had been in the glass began to ooze out of his mouth. She screamed again and turned to Greg and Sheila for help. But they too were undergoing the same horrible transformation. Black slime was dripping from their mouths too and their eyes were black holes leading into a pit where something nameless lurked, waiting… waiting for her.

She tried to run but then she saw that everyone in the beer garden looked the same. And they were moving in on her. She was surrounded. Trapped. And all alone.

She shut her eyes and screamed.

‘Linda!’

She was being shaken by the shoulder. It had her. She screamed louder.

‘LINDA! It’s me, Paul. You were having a nightmare, that’s all!’

She opened her eyes. Paul was leaning over her. She was in a small room lit by a single lamp. Where am I? she wondered. Totally disorientated, she couldn’t remember a thing at first, then it all came flooding back…

She groaned. The nightmare wasn’t over. They were still on the rig.

‘Linda? Are you okay?’

She sat up on the bunk. The movement made the pain in her broken arm worse. ‘I think so. What time is it?’

‘Almost six in the morning. I think we should get moving. I want to check the creature.’,

She remembered the events of a few hours ago. They had found the creature in a comatose state in the bathroom where it had got poor Mark. Paul decided that it had been affected by the heroin that Mark had just taken before he was absorbed by the thing. Excitedly, he told her they might have accidentally discovered an effective way of dealing with it…

‘If it was a simple poison the thing would just evolve the means of neutralising it,’ he had said, ‘but because it doesn’t chemically perceive the heroin as a threat to its existence it’s susceptible to it.’

‘Fine,’ she said impatiently, trying to avoid looking at the horror on the floor but at the same time worried that it might suddenly spring to life, ‘but how does that help us? It’ll just wear off eventually.’

‘Not if we give it a massive overdoseV Paul had cried. ‘Who knows — it might even kill it before it realises what’s happening. At the very least it will knock it out of action for a few days and give us time to get away from here.’

So they then" spent about half-an-hour dissolving the heroin in water and injecting it into the creature. Or rather Paul did all the injecting; she couldn’t bring herself to go near the thing. Just being in the same room as the slimy mass with its ghastly outcrops of human and animal sections was almost too much for her.

They only used two thirds of the drug altogether. Paul decided to keep the rest in reserve. ‘We’ll come back in the morning. If it’s dead — great! If not, we’ll inject the rest of it and then make for the roof.’

‘We’re not going up there now?’ she’d asked.

‘No. I think we can risk grabbing some sleep in one of the cabins. We’re both in need of some rest — you especially.’ ‘Are you sure we can take the chance?’ she asked.

She prayed he would say yes — she couldn’t imagine anything better than to be able to go to bed and sleep, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

‘Yes. I think so. The small amount of junk it got from Mark’s body put it under for quite a time so all this we’ve pumped into it should really drop it in its tracks.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ she’d said, glancing briefly at the thing and looking away with a shiver.

And now, five hours later, she felt just as exhausted and sore as before she’d gone to sleep. And the nightmare echoed in her mind like a nasty after-taste…

Her first try at getting off the bunk wasn’t a success. On top of everything else she was very stiff. She looked at her bare legs and groaned. They were covered with dark bruises and ugly abrasions — a legacy from her encounter with the transformed Alex. And from the feel of her back and shoulder where Alex’s claws had dug into her she was an even bigger mess.

She picked up her jeans with her one good hand and began to struggle into them. As she did so she realised they stank. And so did her shirt. ‘I need a bath,’ she moaned.

‘You need a hospital,’ Paul told her. He was already dressed and was strapping the flame-thrower onto his back. She saw that the few hours sleep hadn’t done him much visible good either. He still looked haggard and there were lines on his face she’d never noticed before. He was only twenty-six but now he looked thirty-six. She guessed that the terrible events of the last couple of days were going to leave indelible marks on both of them.

When she was ready Paul told her to carry the lamp. He was carrying both the flame-thrower and one of the Ml6s. Then they headed back to the bathroom where they’d found the creature. But when they arrived they got a shock.

It was gone.

The floor was bare. All that was left was Mark’s pathetic pile of empty clothing.

‘Oh no,’ groaned Linda. This meant the horror would continue. It was a nightmare. It would go on and on…

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Paul angrily. ‘We injected enough heroin into it to drop a herd of elephants.’

‘It must have adapted to the drug after all. It sensed it was a form of poison and the Phoenix gene devised a protection against it…’

Paul sighed. ‘You’re probably right. The damn thing just can’t be killed.’

‘What do we do now?’ she asked, nervously glancing behind her.

‘We head straight for the roof. Come on.’

The nightmare feeling grew more pronounced as Linda followed him down the black corridor. It seemed they had been running from the creature for years — for an eternity. Would it never end? Or would they suffer the same fate as all the others? Was it simply playing with them? Like a sadistic little boy pulling the wings off a fly?

Then came a bad moment when Paul admitted he was lost. But tg her relief he quickly got his bearings again and sounded confident that they were moving in the right direction again.

‘Not much further now,’ he told her. ‘The airlock leading to the outside door should be in the next corridor.’

‘Good,’ she said. It would be marvellous to breathe fresh air again. Since the power had cut off the atmosphere had become increasingly stale.

They were just turning into the corridor that led to the airlock when a nearby door suddenly opened and a man emerged. He was dressed in some sort of overalls and carrying a flashlight. Linda screamed.

Paul’s reaction was immediate. He spun round to face him, raising the barrel of the M16 at the same time. The man had taken only one step through the doorway when Paul fired.

It was a replay of what had happened when Linda had shot ‘Chris’. The fusillade of bullets at such close range blasted the man backwards off his feet and he disappeared into the darkness beyond the doorway.

Not pausing to check the body Paul cried urgently, ‘Quickly! Get moving before it has time to changc!’

They ran down the corridor and, to Linda’s joy, the light from their lamp revealed the entrance to the airlock. And even better, the glass doors were open.

Then, unbelievably, they were opening the outer door and stepping through onto a catwalk outside. Linda blinked in confusion as her senses were abruptly assaulted by a combination of grey light, cold wind and wet rain. She stared at the heaving sea in fascination, as if she’d never seen it before.

‘The worst of the storm has passed, thank God,’ said Paul, having to shout against the wind. ‘But that swell is pretty bad…’

Linda nodded. The sea was rising up the massive platform leg directly below them until it almost reached the catwalk on which they stood, before dropping away a considerable distance. She guessed it was a difference of some thirty or forty feet between the sea’s peaks and the troughs.

‘We’ve got a long climb to the top," yelled Paul. ‘You think you can manage it now?’

‘Yes,’ she said, turning off the lamp and hooking it onto her belt, ‘Let’s go…’

‘You go first,’ he told her, ‘and be careful. The steps will be as slippery as hell.’

He was right. Climbing up the steep gangways with only one arm to hang on with was difficult and she almost fell several times on the wet metal steps which were as smooth as ice.

Paul had problems too, having to carry both the flame-thrower and the Ml6, but finally they made it to the second level from the top. Linda knew she would never be able to climb the ladder that led to the roof but then Paul discovered another gangway. It went up to the helicopter landing pad directly overhead.

‘We should be able to cross from there onto the roof,’ said Paul. ‘First we’ll get you set up under shelter somewhere then I’ll scout around the life boats and emergency lockers and see what I can find in the way of flares and stuff…’

Linda was wet through and frozen to the bone when she at last emerged onto the helicopter pad. But then all thought of her acute discomfort fled from her mind.

Sitting there on the pad was a large helicopter.

It was painted bright yellow with the Brinkstone insignia on its side.

‘Oh Paul!’ she cried, ‘We’re saved! We’re saved!’

Paul had hauled himself up the last few steps of the gangway and was standing beside her, staring open-mouthed at the aircraft. For a moment he looked profoundly relieved, then his expression turned grim.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, ‘Can’t you see? We’ve been rescued!’ Then, leaving him, she ran across the platform to the big machine and peered in through the large open door in its side. To her disappointment it was empty.

‘No one here,’ she called to Paul as he approached. He was looking even grimmer.

‘I wish I knew how to fly one of these things,’ he said.

She frowned at him. She couldn’t understand why he was reacting so strangely to their being rescued. ‘Why? You don’t have to. The pilot will fly it.’

‘The man down below. That was the pilot, Linda. And I killed him.’