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The Others |
| Written by Tim Dudenhoefer | |
| Wednesday, 16 July 2008 | |
Lee Pemberton read aloud from a small journal he was holding, "The bad news is- they don't kill you outright, and the good news? Well, there is none." He looked around the room for a second, to see if we were all paying attention. The cover of the journal was a pastel pink, clearly not something he would own. It had belonged to the woman they had found in the hotel room. He fidgeted with a page and continued, "They get into you and take over and feed, but do not kill you. They keep you alive; believe me, you wish you were dead. You wish they would just finish the job, but they won't. They get in your head just enough to control your body, but they won't destroy your mind. They easily could, but that would give you release. So, your body is no longer yours, and you are a stranger inside it, your mind is alive. Your body becomes a gnawed-out husk that they feed on, but your brain is alive. Your soul is trapped and you do their bidding, helping them spread." Lee looked up over his glasses at the agents in the briefing room.
Clearing his throat, he continued. "Sometimes they leave you alone for a bit and you try to think and figure it out-try to find a way to stop them, or at least kill yourself. That is when I write in this diary. I don't know why they let me keep it. They could easily make me leave it behind. And they always get control again before I can try anything. That's how I know they are toying with me. They make me keep their secrets; they want to hide until the time is right. Only they know when that time is. Once I got infected, I figured out there is no cure, there is no help, and I came to believe there is no God. I believe only believe in Them, and wonder how many others like me are out there."
Pemberton glanced up over the diary; he had finished reading the excerpt. "It ends there," he said. "It was only by a stroke of luck that we found this document and... and the remains at all. A level-five Biohazard team retrieved the, um... body once the CDC figured out it was still alive." He clicked the remote in his hand, changing the slide in the presentation deck. On-screen an image of the victim appeared; her driver's license. Her name was Linda Norry. She had once been a heavy-set blonde girl of about twenty-two. Her file indicated she had had some smarts and some education, but the trauma of a bad childhood turned her to booze and drugs.
She had taken the usual route from poverty to skid row. She had gone from an abusive home to an abusive pimp before age sixteen. Her run-ins with the law were minor, except for a possession charge at seventeen when she was just under the wire to be tried as an adult. That seemed to scare her straight. She had kept her nose clean after that, and she had remained low-level on police radar.
She had even managed to escape her pimp, street life, and had gone back to school for a while. It was small-time, a community college, but all indications are she was doing well and she had even applied to transfer to the University of Pittsburgh-and been accepted. She was a local girl, grew up in a small town called New Kensington, Pennsylvania, a few miles northeast of Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River.
Pemberton shrugged, "It seemed she was setting herself right. Then she just disappeared off the face of the earth until she was found in the shabby motel room in Montana, wasted away, nearly to death. She has no friends or family anywhere in Montana; there is no logical reason for her to be there." The screen was showing slides of the motel room. Empty fast food bags littered the floor and disordered furniture, a damp sheen covered the walls to about half their height. The dank room looked depressing and squalid in better circumstances, now it was a horror. The worst part was the misshapen figure laid out squalidly on the bed. The arms were drawn to the body, the hands claw-like. The legs seemed shriveled and shrunken, but stuck straight out at awkward angles. Her belly was swollen, indicating malnourishment. Her eyes were either filmed over, or rolled back in her head, it was difficult to tell from the angle the slide had been taken.
The woman's skin was mottled, wrinkled in spots; thick ridges grew rope-like under the skin in some areas. In other areas were odd lumps that seemed to be randomly distributed all over her torso. The notes in the file said that the strange lumps were numerous, small things crawling under the skin.
The scene had so terrified the cleaning woman who had found the body that she had become unhinged. She created such a disturbance, that the motel manager had gotten off his scrawny ass and come running to the room. It was the manager that had called the police. The maid was inconsolable, crying, ‘Madre de Dios,' this and, ‘Diablos' that.
Pemberton continued flatly now, "The police brought in the coroner, on seeing this scene she immediately called the CDC. When the CDC figured out that this was even beyond them, they called us."
Vic Wesson asked, "Where is it being held?"
"She," Pemberton barked, "never forget, Wesson, this is a human woman. Regardless of whatever the things are that have hijacked her body, regardless of what she looks like." He growled, "Still human, don't forget that." Pemberton flicked the remote; a live camera feed now appeared on the screen. The room was a clean suite in the Maximum Containment Unit. The girl was strapped to a table, various tubes and wires running to and from her body. Robotic arms were used to manipulate items in the MCU. The infestation was deemed so dangerous, that the suite was sealed and no human was permitted to tend to the girl. From the expression on her face it was clear how miserable she was.
Pemberton spoke again, "We do not know what else to do for her. We have inserted feeding and waste-removal tubes by the manipulator arms. We have tried taking samples, even tried to destroy her and the invaders, but they always repair the damage. We have not yet been able to remove a live one. The results of our attempt were...surprising." He flicked the remote again, and a video began to play on-screen.
In the video the girl was on the bed in the MCU. A robotic manipulator held a stainless steel ring tight against her skin about where an appendectomy incision would be made. An oblong lump showed one of the squirming things was trapped under the metal ring. A second manipulator hand hovered near the lump, robotic fingers at the ready. A third manipulator-holding a scalpel-sliced her open. Before the robot fingers could snatch up and remove one of the creatures, the wound sealed itself. That area of her skin then changed color subtly and took on a pebbled appearance. The robot made a second pass with the scalpel; the blade snapped in two without even scratching her skin. Whatever the things were, they were resilient. They repaired the damage almost instantly and seemed to improve upon the current design. And yet, for all the evidence of regenerative capability she had been found in the motel room, nearly dead. There were limits to what the creatures could do, or at least limits to how long they could do it.
Something strange had attacked and debilitated her; we had no idea what it was, but there were hints that there were constraints to its powers. The theory was that after suffering with the invaders inside her for an unknown period of time, the girl's body just collapsed. This meant that there was a limit to how long a human could serve as a host.
We had not named the things yet. There was of course, the usual dark reference to them as "Others" but that was convenience more than an attempt at mystery. We did not even know what they were. We did not know if they came from off-world, or if they were terrestrial in origin. It was possible they were some sort of long-hidden creature or a recent mutation. Some suspected that the current natural warming cycle of the Earth had unleashed a long-forgotten creature. Global warming had long been discarded as being man-made when solar probes indicated the output of the sun had increased-warming all the planets. Some feared they were from off-world, perhaps from another star system. How they got here, how far they yet would take the woman's tortured body, and what they wanted were unknown.
None of that was important anyhow.
Not a bit of it mattered at all.
What was crucial, urgent, and utmost was this one thing; how to weaponize the creatures against our enemies. Copyright 2008 Tim Dudenhoefer |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 16 July 2008 ) |
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