* * *
Doug absolutely did not want to be in the cave.
At first it had been an honor to have been picked for Gregory Sayid’s team and exciting to think of the missions he would be a part of. But the reality had proven to be terrifying, and far riskier than he had expected.
He was about to pick up something that looked like a cross between a cat and a hermit crab when his partner’s voice came through the speaker in his helmet.
“Doug.”
“What?” he asked, annoyed. He wanted nothing more than to leave this place and get back to the comfort of the lab and his electron microscope.
He turned when his question was met with silence. Tyler knelt before the burned mass of the organism, his back to Doug.
“What is it?” Doug asked again, and again his partner remained silent.
Annoyance turned to anger as Doug headed toward Tyler. The man was a jerk, fancying himself a practical joker. But there was a time and a place for things like that, and this was certainly not one of them.
“What the hell do you want?” Doug asked, reaching out and grabbing Tyler’s shoulder with his yellow-gloved hand.
Tyler fell backward, allowing Doug to see a thick, vein-covered tentacle reaching through his partner’s faceplate.
“Oh shit” was all Doug could manage as he pulled his hand back.
The tentacle violently retracted, and Tyler’s body slumped limply to the cave floor. For a moment Doug watched in fascinated terror as the tendril reared up, cobralike, a thin, needlelike tip made of something like bone extending . . . retracting.
Slowly Doug backed up, but the cumbersome decontamination suit made it difficult for him to move, the rustle of the heavy vinyl fabric sounding exceedingly loud in the silence of the cave.
The tendril stopped swaying, and its sharp tip seemed to be pointed directly at him.
He continued to step away, his hand fumbling through the pouch at his side for the short-bladed knife he knew was in there somewhere. Damn these vinyl gloves.
Suddenly the appendage shot out at him, and Doug dove to the side as its tip missed him by merely an inch. The muscular tendril twisted and shot toward him again, but Doug had found his knife and slashed at it.
There came a horrible, ear-rending keening from somewhere close by as the tentacle retracted, spewing a dark liquid. The scientist glanced at the ground to see the tentacle’s severed tip, the needlelike protrusion still pulsing in and out of its fleshy housing. Then he turned his gaze back to the burned mass of the alien creature. The blackened flesh twitched and cracked as something moved beneath it.
Doug forced himself to his feet and lumbered toward the ladder that had been placed against the wall to allow them to come down, desperate to get out, not even remotely curious as to what was moving beneath the burned flesh of the alien organism.
He was halfway up the ladder when something wrapped around his ankle. “Yaaaahh!” he screamed, almost losing his hold on the rungs as he twisted around. Another, smaller alien had emerged from beneath the ashes of the first, its skin moist and translucent, shimmering in the beams of the spotlights. Frantically Doug sank his knife into the rubbery flesh of the tendril around his ankle and began to saw. Again the monster wailed, before the tentacle whipped back and away.
Doug scrambled to the top of the ladder and over the ledge, breathlessly crawling into the tunnel passage. The cries of the nightmare creature increased, and he chanced a quick look over his shoulder, only to glimpse multiple, flailing tentacles. He got to his feet and ran, cursing the bulky bio-protection suit as he struggled through the passage leading up to the surface.
He was breathing heavily, growing light-headed within the confines of the helmet, even as the heat of his struggle clouded the faceplate. He stumbled, falling to his knees, and, feeling as though he just might suffocate, he threw protocol to the wind and removed the headgear, greedily sucking in the musty salt air wafting down from the cave’s entrance.
He listened for the sounds of pursuit behind him but heard nothing. Taking a deep breath, he pushed himself to his feet, using the jagged stone wall for support as he forced himself to continue his climb toward freedom.
The passage angled toward the left, and he quickened his pace, the muscles in his legs painfully burning as the smell of the ocean grew stronger. He rounded the bend to find the entrance no more than twenty feet away.
And froze.
His eyes moved over the gathering that blocked the opening—dogs, raccoons, cats, and a fox or two. Even the ground around their feet writhed with insect life.
He watched them as they watched him. The right eye of every single animal he could see was obscured by a strange, silver coating.
Doug took a tentative step toward them, hoping, praying that it would frighten them and give him his chance to escape.
But they just watched him, their silvery eyes strangely mesmerizing.
He knew it would be foolhardy to try to get past them, even with his knife. But what choice did he have? He didn’t dare return to the cave and the thing that awaited him there.
Doug clenched the knife in his gloved hand and, taking a deep breath, was ready to rush the pack keeping him from his freedom when he sensed something behind him.
Turning quickly, he cried out, startled by the sight of his colleague, his slack, pale face peering out through the broken faceplate of his helmet.
“Tyler,” Doug exclaimed, feeling a rush of relief. “I thought you were dead!”
But relief quickly turned to horror as Tyler’s hands shot out, wrapping tightly about Doug’s throat, cutting him off from that sweet, salty air and forcing him violently backward to the floor.
The last thing he saw was Tyler’s right eye, glinting silvery in the weak light from the mouth of the cave.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The military transport plane was huge.
“We’ll get this show on the road as soon as you’re all buckled in,” Langridge said, watching as they each took their seats.
“Is there a movie on this flight?” Rich asked, wiggling his butt, trying to find a comfortable position. “They’re really scrimping in first class these days,” he said, reaching for his seat belt.
Cody just shook his head, barely able to crack a smile at his friend’s attempt to lighten the mood. He took an empty seat away from the rest of the group.
Sidney watched him as he buckled himself in and turned to look out at Benediction Airport.
“The airfield isn’t used to stuff this big,” Cody said. “Remember a few years back when Air Force One landed for the president’s vacation? They had to repair the runway after it left.”
“I remember that,” Sidney said, feeling a certain lightness at the memory of a time before things had gone to hell. She wished briefly that she was back there, when her father had been healthy—when he had still been alive.
When the island had not tried to kill them.
“She’s gonna need to be strapped in,” said a voice, breaking Sidney’s reverie.
Sidney looked up to see Langridge standing before her, pointing at the dog nearly sitting on her feet.
“Sure,” Sidney said, catching Snowy’s attention and patting the seat next to her.
The German shepherd hopped up and sat awkwardly in the seat.
“There ya go,” Sidney said, kissing her head as she reached around her for the buckle and snapped the belt in place. Snowy looked at her questioningly.
“It’s all right,” Sidney told her, patting her chest. “It’s for your safety.”
The shepherd began to pant but didn’t move.
“That’s a good girl,” Sidney said, strapping herself in.
Karol and Fitzy silently took seats off to the right, and Sidney caught the grim looks on their faces.
She wondered how many times they’d done this already, how many times they’d had to witness something like the devastation that Benediction had experienced last night.
Sayid retu
rned from the cockpit, where he had been speaking with the pilot, Bob.
“Ready?” Langridge asked him.
“Just about,” Sayid said, taking his own seat. “Everything okay back here?”
Everyone glanced in his general direction, although no one said a word.
“Bob said we shouldn’t be in the air for much more than forty minutes,” he continued. “Maybe an hour depending on how bad the storm screws with our approach to Logan.” He took a deep breath and looked around at everybody. “Okay then,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”
As if on cue the engines whined to life, filling the compartment with the loud hum of the four propellers, two on either side, spinning so fast that they became nearly invisible.
“Here goes,” Rich said, gripping the arms of his seat.
Sidney found herself doing the same, looking to see if Snowy was okay. She seemed nervous, so Sidney reached over and placed a comforting hand upon her broad chest, scratching her thick, white fur.
“That’s a good girl,” she said, her words nearly drowned out by the deafening din of the plane’s engines, but it didn’t matter to her Snowy girl, her world was silent anyway.
The transport shuddered and began to move.
This is it, Sidney thought, feeling her heart begin to race. And then it was there in her head again—that wriggling sensation just inside the front of her skull. A wave of nausea flowed over her, and she bent forward in her seat.
“Sid?” she heard Cody yell.
“Stay in your seat,” Langridge commanded.
“I’m good,” Sidney said. “Little headache is all.”
She managed to sit up and offer a reassuring smile to the group. I’m fine, she mouthed toward Cody and Rich, who stared hard at her, concern on their faces.
The transport rolled slowly toward the runway.
Sidney tried to keep a good face, or at least one that didn’t look as though she was about to throw up. But something was wrong; something had riled up whatever was inside her head, and she wished that it would stop.
She could feel Sayid’s eyes on her and ignored them. Instead, she reached out to Snowy, hoping that petting her would be enough to distract her from the nauseating sensation, as she imagined a fistful of maggots squirming around at the front of her skull.
The engines became even louder as the transport picked up speed, rolling down the runway toward the sea.
Sidney leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, feeling the vibrations of the plane through the headrest. And suddenly it was as if someone had stabbed her in the center of her forehead. She let out a pained squeak and sat up with a gasp.
“Jesus,” she heard Langridge say, just as the plane left the ground—
And the attack began.
The plane started to tremble and shake as it climbed.
It sounded as if the craft was being pelted by rocks.
Langridge looked to Sayid.
“What now?” she bellowed over the engines that had started to sound strained.
Rich had just angled himself in his seat to look out the window when something smashed against it, leaving a bloody smear. “Oh shit,” he exclaimed.
Cody had unbuckled himself and was standing up to get a better look out the window.
“Return to your seat!” Langridge screamed, even though she and Sayid had both freed themselves.
“Birds,” Sidney heard Cody say. He looked away from the window to stare at them. “We’re being attacked by birds.”
The plane lurched and fell. Sidney let out a scream as her stomach shot up into her throat. She watched as Cody was thrown up into the air, and then fell awkwardly back into his seat.
“They’re going after the propellers,” Rich screamed.
Sayid, who had fallen to the floor, was struggling to make his way up the aisle toward the cockpit.
The plane was making a horrible sound now.
Sidney glanced over at Karol and Fitzy, who remained belted into their seats, and saw that they were holding hands. She leaned over and wrapped her arms around Snowy, trying to calm the panicked animal, as well as herself. They were going down—she knew it.
The sound of birds pummeling the aircraft was unlike anything she had ever heard before. She was expecting their feathered bodies to fill the cabin as they punched through the sides of the plane.
Langridge had managed to get back into her seat, but Sayid was still trying to get to the cockpit. “Hold on!” he screamed as he was suddenly flung up toward the ceiling of the craft as if by a great invisible hand, before dropping back down to the floor.
Then the engines quit; the smell of something burning filled the suddenly silent cabin.
And they began to fall.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There wasn’t much Doc Martin could do at the camp; all of Benediction’s animals had gone missing when the storm—and whatever had come with it—took control.
As she walked through the camp, she saw familiar faces among the survivors: the Hennesseys, who had two cats, a Pomeranian, and a cockatiel named Pretty . . . Bob McDowell, who had to put his chocolate Labrador, Sugar, down last June . . . Veronica Preston and her daughter, Lizzy, who had gotten a kitten less than two weeks before.
She acknowledged them as she passed, the looks in their eyes and the injuries to their bodies telling her everything she needed to know.
Doc Martin was tempted to go to them, to say that she was sorry—to explain that it wasn’t their pets’ fault at all, that something inhuman had been controlling the animals.
But she doubted they would want to hear it. The fear was still there, the anger and the physical hurt.
She was down to her last two smokes but fished one out of the crumpled pack anyway. As she lit up, she realized that she was angry too, although she really didn’t understand at what.
Something had affected the brains of the animals on Benediction. After listening to all the talk from the scientists who had saved them, she knew it had happened in other places and that it wasn’t any kind of accident, no environmental disaster.
No, it was much worse than that. This had been intentional; something not of this world had turned pets into weapons.
There was the source of her rage. That somebody—some . . . thing—could take a poor, innocent creature and twist it into something that could commit the most murderous of acts was enough to make her want to commit murder herself.
Or at least deliver a substantial beat down.
She puffed on her smoke, gazing about the encampment and wondering how many more casualties there were from yesterday’s event. She was sure there had to be more folks holed up in their homes, afraid that it wasn’t yet over, afraid to venture back outside.
She remembered the things she’d experienced back at her clinic and shuddered, just as she noticed a little boy approaching her. She didn’t remember his name but knew that his family had a greyhound/shepherd mix named Seamus.
“Hey,” she said, putting her cigarette down by her side so as not to get smoke in his face. She noticed that he was filthy, and one of his hands was bandaged.
He stood before her and stared with large, brown eyes.
“You doing okay?” she asked him, gesturing to his injured hand.
He looked at the dirty bandage as if noticing it for the first time. “Seamus bit me,” he said, looking it over carefully. “He’s . . .” The boy hesitated. “He was my dog.”
“Yeah, I remember him,” Doc Martin said, bringing her cigarette up and taking a quick puff.
The boy tried to bend his bandaged hand and made a pained face.
“My dad killed him.”
Doc Martin wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but the boy went on.
“After he bit me, he was gonna bite me some more so my dad . . .”
Tears started streaming down the boy’s face, cutting clean tracks through the dirt that covered his cheeks.
“Yeah,” Doc Martin said. “I get it. I think a
lot of people here had to do the same thing.”
“Why did Seamus hate us?” the little boy asked her, his lips quivering as the tears continued to run from his eyes. “We didn’t do nuthin’ to him. . . . We loved him.”
And Doc Martin felt the anger again, anger at the alien force that had been responsible for the horrors that had befallen her island home and could very well be turning its attention to Boston and God knew where else. She wasn’t generally an emotional person, but she just couldn’t help herself. She reached out and took the boy into her arms, hugging him close.
“Yeah, he knew you loved him,” she told the child, whose body was now racked with sobs. “But something really bad got into him . . . and it changed him.”
“But . . . but we killed him,” the boy cried, now holding her as well.
“Yeah, I know,” she told him. “And it was terrible, but you guys did what had to be done . . . He wasn’t Seamus anymore. And if you hadn’t stopped him the way you did, he might’ve hurt some other people too.”
The boy slowly pulled away from her.
“Did the bad thing . . . the thing that changed Seamus,” he asked her, “did it get into the other animals too?”
She nodded slowly. “It did.”
The boy seemed to think about that for a moment, and then examined his hand once more. “Is it gone now?”
Doc Martin thought of Sidney and the government scientists on their way to Boston. “I hope so,” she said, trying to be reassuring as she reached out to give the boy’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. She looked up over his head and saw his parents looking at them. They waved at her, and she waved back.
“Think your folks are looking for you,” she said, pointing them out.
“Yeah, they probably are,” he said, starting in their direction. “Thanks for talking with me and stuff,” he said as he walked away.
“Yeah, nice to talk with you, too.”
She watched him go, suddenly feeling more concerned for Sidney’s safety, and the safety of the world, but there was nothing she could do.
The sound of screaming drifted on the air, stopping people as they walked and turning them in the direction of the horrible sound. Almost immediately Doc Martin recognized it as coming from Isaac, the boy with a developmental disability.