“Wow. Seriously?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, sure. OK. Yeah. O-OK,” he replied, not quite believing his luck.
She tugged his shirt out, indicating that he needed to lie down on the soil. He did so obediently.
“So, how do you…want me to—”
“Shh.” She put a finger to her lips. She knelt down in front of him. “You really do want me, don’t you, Dave? Hmm?”
He nodded vigorously. “Yeah! But, uh…come on…if we’re going to do this, we better do it before anyone comes out!” he whispered.
Her hand stole up inside his T-shirt, one finger circling lightly around his navel. “What do you think about this?” With her other hand, she gathered her long, tumbling locks into a bunch and playfully swished it like a pony flicking away buzzing flies with its tail. She tilted her head as if trying to remember something. “You like my hair?”
“Yeah…yeah…really nice…but…”
“Or what about this?” She pulled at the bunched hair, and all of it slid away from her head, leaving a perfectly smooth scalp that glistened like a pearl in the half light.
“What the…?”
She tossed the wig aside, onto the dark soil, then reached into her mouth. Something clattered around inside, and her hand emerged, clutching a set of dentures she dropped in his lap. Her lips spread wide, revealing baby gum ridges.
“What the—”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” she giggled playfully in a singsong voice. “I’m not a real girl.”
He dug at the dirt with his hands, attempting to scramble back from her, but, too late, something hard and sharp suddenly pierced through his navel and sank deep into his gut. He screamed, then grabbed at his belly, trying to pull out whatever had gone into him.
Her smile spread wider, skin sagging and separating like a plastic bag held over a candle, unraveling and spreading across her cheeks, toward her ears.
Dave could feel something razor sharp inside him being wiggled around, carving, lacerating his insides. He coughed a thick globule of blood onto his chin.
“She…hates…you,” she singsonged softly, tilting her head. “She…hates you.”
Her words sounded mangled and were rendered almost unintelligible by the lack of dentures and the melting shreds of her mouth.
She shoved with her hand again sharply, and it felt to him like her whole fist was inside his belly. He tried to pull her hand out, already guessing the damage she’d done fumbling around inside was enough to kill him.
She raised her other hand in front of his face, opened her fist to reveal her palm. But it looked nothing like a hand—it was deformed into the ugly, pale underbelly of some crustacean, skeletal segments flexing and overlapping, surrounding a birdlike mouth in the middle that flexed and opened like a starving cuckoo. The beak opened wide, and a head of knobby bone and cartilage surged up the tunnel of her wrist and out of the beak. It unfolded into a dozen fragile, articulated limbs, each with a fine scalpel tip. They swayed and flexed inches from his face, legs pedaling in the air.
“Please…please…” he gurgled as more blood spilled onto his chin and down his shirt.
She cocked her bald head, curious. Her face was disintegrating rapidly. All that was left now was the bridge of her nose, her eyes, her forehead. Her eyes were still startlingly pretty, glistening and staring intensely at him. Beneath them, either side of the bridge of her nose, the flesh was breaking down: skin, muscle, tendons, and bones wilting, drooping into pliable, swinging ribbons of gelatinous material that was busy deciding what it wanted to become next. Pieces swung free and dropped to the soil.
Dave’s dizzy mind was going into shock—an endorphin-flooded shutdown. The merciful exit reflex of a dying body. His eyes focused blearily on the dozen fragile limbs that were kicking the air impatiently just in front of his face, a spider-leg ballet, each one seemingly eager to get to work on his flesh.
From somewhere far away, he suddenly heard a chorus of screaming voices, the sounds of struggle and panic, chairs being kicked over, smashing glass, and a deep, keening cry like whale song.
“Meg,” or what was left of her, had studied him long enough. She thrust her arm forward, and those flexing legs made contact with him and started to burrow into his cheeks and his eyes. The very last words he heard, slurred and moist, words that sounded as if they’d escaped the grinding mouth at the bottom of a kitchen blender, were…
“You. Burned. Me.”
Chapter 49
She studied his corpse lying across the soil bed. His blood looked as black as ink in the half light, like an oil spill on a beach. His body was already being worked on by the parts of her that had broken away and disassembled into “gatherers”: a dozen or so small, simpleminded creatures with articulated limbs that had begun to snip and cut at his flesh, breaking it down into raw material to be absorbed as fuel.
The rest of the girl, this temporary construction, stood up.
The “intelligence cluster” of cells that were overseeing this particular mobile colony had pieced together the genetic template from a human who had once genuinely been called “Megan,” who had once lived a life in a place called “Thetford.” Who had once been considered “pretty” by every young guy she’d met. Who wanted to be a thing called a “model,” but until circumstances improved had to be satisfied with being a “hairdresser.”
This intelligence cluster was a mature one, several billion cells that had organized themselves into a firm and very permanent core: a structure that was able to process chemical data at a high enough level to think, to strategize, to reason.
In this sprawling new ecology of the virus, of colonies and subcolonies, mature clusters and immature clusters, it was high in the hierarchy. If not yet a king, then it was a king in the making. The cluster had already made great strides in decoding its own DNA, to delve deep and begin to understand itself, to read most of the way down its programmed to-do list, the mission statement with which it had been born.
The primary stages of its mission were now complete: establishing a foothold, consolidating, proliferating, spreading, securing its existence. The secondary stages were now in full flow: piecing together the fragments of the world it had picked apart, like a clumsy houseguest hastily attempting to repair a fragile and expensive broken Ming vase. It was learning so much about the things it had destroyed, how rich and varied the life templates were in this world. For example, how the simple task of locomotion came in so many different forms, how things wiggled, slithered, crawled, climbed, jumped, flapped, hopped, sprinted. So much complexity in this place, so much speciation.
It had learned that one particular species was extraordinarily dominant. A species in many ways very much like itself; a species capable of studying, reasoning, adapting. This particular intelligence cluster had carefully and patiently read this species’ construction manual, its DNA, and attempted many times to make viable reconstructions until it had finally, despite the difficulty of mimicking the dead-tissue structures, the things made from keratin protein, had finally gotten it right.
“Megan” and “Stevie” had been convincing enough to fool these creatures.
What was left to learn about this species was how its own intelligence clusters worked, that solid-state organ comprising billions of cells linked together by pathways that could strengthen and weaken according to necessity. This intelligence cluster had learned how to make a copy of this organ, but now it was very keen to learn how this curious species used the organ.
Among the many fragments of consciousness that had once been human beings, this particular intelligence cluster had a guest staying with it for now. A recent addition to its library, a complete recreation of a consciousness. For the very first time, it had established a direct link with this intelligent species at a chemical level. The language it understood best. Someone from whom it could learn so much. Th
e guest had a veritable treasure trove of data to share: images, sounds, smells, thoughts, feelings, things that this entity called “memories.”
The guest entity also had a name… Grace. Talking to Grace was difficult. She was only just beginning to comprehend this biochemical language.
[…presently experiencing high levels of {>€#€€#^#€€}-substance in your {#%^>€$>€>}-cluster. Explain to us the high presence of chemical. Is this what you refer to as “emotional state”?…]
He burned me. He killed me.
[…“killed,” accessing your definition…]
[…“killed” is “permanent cell deconstruction”?…]
Yes…he killed me.
[…you are no longer in “killed” configuration, Grace…]
[…you are now REMADE…]
Acknowledgments
A big thank-you to my agent, Veronique, and my editor, Venetia. The former for helping me keep my sanity, the latter for rewarding my insanity and encouraging me to dig deep.
The inspiration for Plague Land came in part from a film I saw when I was very young (too young probably). It was a 1950s Japanese B-movie called The H-Man. One image from that movie was permanently burned into my nightmares: the sight of a bundle of clothes spread out on the ground and viscous liquid bubbling from the trouser legs and shirt cuffs. Liquid that used to be a human being. I can’t remember the story… It probably wasn’t great, but that particular image stayed with me.
It just goes to show that nothing in life is wasted. No experience, no smell, no vague, half-recalled memory. We writers are sensual magpies. We hoard what we see, hear, and smell…and from those things, we produce stories like these. I hope, dear reader, that I cause you some sleepless nights…and I hope (for the budding writers out there) that forty years from now you’ll “magpie” a grisly moment from these pages.
About the Author
Alex Scarrow used to be a rock guitarist. After ten years in various unsuccessful bands, he ended up working in the computer games industry as a lead games designer. He now has his own games development company, Grrr Games. He is the author of the bestselling and award-winning TimeRiders series, which has been sold into over thirty foreign territories. He lives in East Anglia and is currently working on the sequel to Plague Land.
Visit his website at alexscarrow.com.
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Alex Scarrow, Plague Land Series, Book 1
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