The Black Clouds
Steve Matthew Benner
Copyright Steve M. Benner 2014
“Where the hell’re my data?”
“Keep your blouse on. I’m finishing up the final calculations now.”
“It’s about time. I thought we were in a hurry.”
“I gotta make sure it’s right before I give it to you, unless you want crappy data,”
The words shot across the room like stones, hurdled more than spoken. Dr. Snowden and Dr. Weisz might not have been exactly friends, but it wasn’t animosity that tinged their words; it was fear. Dr. Snowden understood the urgency in his colleague’s voice. He understood the importance of what they were doing was weighing on both of them; stress exacerbated by a lack of sleep. Every second that passed was a second that they couldn’t afford to lose. Time, the resource that can’t be recovered or saved, was running out; life was running out.
Dr. Jeff T. Snowden differed from his colleague in a number of ways, especially temperament. At 55 years old, he looked every bit the detached scientist: an intelligent face sporting a graying goatee and a receding hairline and a slender build always cloaked in a white lab coat. He was considered one of the top analytical chemists in the world. His wife had died three years earlier, but his four children and two grandkids were a major part of his life and were constantly on his mind during this crisis. Dr. Carol Weisz was slightly overweight at five feet eight inches tall with close-cropped greyish-brown hair and a round face with striking blue eyes. She had been very attractive when she was young, but she chose a career over a family and had never married. In contrast to Dr. Snowden, Dr. Weisz eschewed normal lab attire, opting more for blue jeans, shirts, and the like. Now 52-years old, she was not nearly as renowned as Dr. Snowden, but she had an ego that made up for any shortcomings in accomplishments. Her degree was in microbiology, and she was an expert in modeling living systems.
“It appears the Cloud is made up of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon with traces of some metals and noble gases. The elements are mostly incorporated into amino acids, aldehydes, and alcohols, and there is a strong presence of organic and inorganic acids, which probably serve as its digestive agents. But there is nothing that would indicate life.” As he spoke, Jeff looked at the glass container in the emergency evacuation chamber. A dark-brown cloud moved from side to side along the bottom of the container, like a tiger pacing in a cage. Snowden wondered, ‘What the hell are we dealing with?’
“Well, let’s see what I can do with your data.” Carol began the process of inputting the compositional data into her model. The simulation was designed to recreate the entity that currently had them trapped in their lab fifty meters underground; an entity destroying all life on Earth. The earlier simulations had failed to reproduce this deadly life form, but then again the compositions were not accurately known. Mike Howard, the mechanical wizard for the lab, had designed a sampling tube that projected out a vent into the air above ground. This had to be strong enough to withstand the chemical corrosive nature of the Cloud and safe enough to not let the Cloud into the sealed lab, a result that would’ve been deadly to them all. He had managed to do both and had drawn a sample of the Cloud into an evacuated glass test chamber of 50K cubic centimeters; the sample Black Cloud’s current home.
When the sample was first drawn, the small cloud seemed agitated, moving rapidly back and forth in the chamber; it appeared to be trying to get back to the main Cloud or angry about being separated or both. The doctors still found it hard to get their minds around the fact that something resembling an exhaust plume from a truck was actually alive.
~
They all referred to it as The Black Cloud or just Cloud, because that was what the press had called it when it first appeared. The present dilemma had started just about three months ago. An extra-terrestrial object like a comet or asteroid had entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a sharp angle. It glowed so brightly that it could be seen by most of North America. Becoming superheated, it had broken up soon after entering the Earth’s atmosphere into at least a dozen major pieces. The pieces hit the Earth in a diagonal line that stretched from Northern Mexico across Southern Europe and into Russia with several landing in the Atlantic Ocean. Though not as bad as it would have been had the object stayed whole, the impacts still did considerable damage, leaving devastated landscapes ranging from two miles to ten miles in radius and deaths in the thousands. But that turned out to be only the harbinger of things to come. It took a day before rescue crews and scientific teams could be assembled and moved into the areas to provide medical assistance and to study the impacts, respectively. As the rescuers got closer to each epicenter, they saw the terrain around the craters go from felled trees and damaged house to burned fields, smoking tree stumps, and blackened flattened houses.
As they approached the impact craters, the devastation was not the only thing that grabbed people’s attention. They began to see that black clouds had risen out of the craters, and that the clouds didn’t resemble smoke in at least six of the impact craters. No clouds were seen at the few that had hit dry land or those that fell into the Atlantic Ocean.
There were many news cameras and reporters at the sites, and they were telecasting the sites activities across the planet. The pattern was the same at every impact site. Almost in response to the presence of people, the Cloud began to move out from its crater, progressing along the ground like a heavy fog pushed by a gentle breeze. Many eyewitnesses claimed that it was moving deliberately toward groups of people gathered nearby. It was slightly transparent, allowing limited visibility inside. The objective of the Cloud’s attention was the news crews, scientists, medical personnel, and the injured still near the crater. At first, these people were frozen in place, not sure what to do, and, as a result, many decided too late to flee; they were quickly engulfed. Almost instantly the news microphones began to record the screams of those caught. The ghastly images of the victims as their skin began to turn brown and dissolve were sent around the globe. It took only a couple minutes to reduce these stricken people to blackened skeletons. Corpses and animals that were in the area were subjected to a similar treatment. It became clear to everyone in the vicinity of the Cloud that the best option to stay alive was to run. As the Cloud dissolved those unlucky enough to be caught, it grew noticeably larger in volume. Increasing by 25% within an hour and continuing to spread out to seek more people and animals, dead or alive; to seek more food.
No one in the world knew how to react to this new threat. Governments called out the military to shoot at the Clouds with automatic weapons, some bombed them, some sent in tanks sealed for biological warfare, but nothing worked. Bullets passed harmlessly through; bombs and shells exploded within the Clouds and succeeded in dispersing them slightly, only to have them quickly recombine. Military equipment was corroded, and, over a few hours, their integrity became compromised. The military inevitably began to talk about hitting them with nuclear warheads carried by missiles or planes, which could still fly over the Clouds, but the countries in which the Clouds were currently located did not want to see large parts of their territory obliterated, and vetoed the nuclear option. As time passed the Clouds grew larger, until the use of nuclear weapons would have required the use of hundreds of missiles and devastated hundreds of square kilometers, so the nuclear option faded.
The Black Clouds spread out from their landing points, consuming anything with proteins, which apparently was their desired nourishment. They did not dissolve cellulose, so many plants seemed to survive longer than animals because of this protection, but it was only a matter of time for them as well. While governments were slow to develop a response; the Clouds were moving fast. Within three weeks the Cloud in Northern Mexico had a diameter of over fif
ty kilometers. Surprisingly it did not spread out, as a gas released into the atmosphere would do, but stayed together as a unit. Even more surprisingly the Clouds moved, in some cases, against the prevailing wind. This puzzled observers and supported the theory that the Clouds were actually living entities, a idea considered ridiculous by most scientists. The Clouds that landed in Northeastern Spain, Romania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Southern Russia were all showing the same behavior.
In addition to the loss of life, scientists began to worry that the arrival of the Clouds at population centers like Mexico City and Phoenix would not only greatly increase the death toll but increase the growth rate of the Clouds, so evacuations of areas anywhere near the Clouds were ordered. But, with such short notice and no planning, most evacuations went badly. Mexico’s resources to evacuate the most populated city in the Western Hemisphere were not in any way sufficient to do the job. There was widespread panic in cities also hampering the evacuation efforts. Similar problems happened across the globe. Governments were being put under tremendous strains and wide spread lawlessness and violence was met with the imposition of martial law.
The Cloud in Northern Mexico was moving north into Arizona and New Mexico. Cities like Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and El Paso were hurriedly evacuated. The Clouds’ movements were monitored from satellites and from planes that continued to fly over the Clouds unharmed. The planes used radar as well as visible and infrared imaging to monitor what was happening on the ground engulfed by the Clouds. As a Cloud left an area, every living thing was destroyed, only certain tough plant species like cacti survived. All animals, including humans, were reduced to blackened bones; even the marrow had been removed. People living in isolated communities that had not gotten the notice to evacuate, those unwilling to leave, and a few people who had stayed to loot deserted homes were the main human casualties. It essentially was leaving a desert in its wake; scorched earth beyond anything done by humans outside of nuclear weapons.
~
The facility in which both doctors were now trapped was located about 200 kilometers south of Albuquerque and fifty meters below ground. It was a state-of-the-art biological warfare/epidemic laboratory completely sealed off from the outside world and capable of analyzing any virus or bacteria down to the DNA and molecular level. The facility was intended as a place where, should an unknown pathogen begin killing people anywhere in the world, the pathogen could be analyzed and a cure or vaccine could be developed free from contamination. The facility was normally staffed with about twenty-five highly specialized individuals working on cures for those diseases currently plaguing mankind. The facility consisted of a large laboratory, referred to as the “lab”; six offices for the top personnel and visiting VIPs; a control room that had the communications links set up; three conference rooms with table top-projectors; a large kitchen complex; men’s and women’s bathrooms, lockers, and shower areas; four small bedrooms for when people had to stay over, and various utility rooms. When it was confirmed that the Cloud would pass directly over the facility’s only exit, Dr. Snowden asked for volunteers to stay and work on ways to destroy the celestial invader from inside the lab. Along with Drs. Snowden and Weisz, Mike Howard, Sheryl Leslie, Dr. Tim McLoeb, and Alan Houston opted to remain behind. Dr. Snowden had insisted that only single men and women could stay behind. Mike was a skilled mechanical engineer known for his tinkering and designing ingenious devices for almost any application. He was 31-years old, tall, and rugged looking, due to his hobby of working on a ranch on his days off. At 24, Sheryl was the youngest member of the team. She was very petite at five feet three and very pretty with long red hair outlining a face with small features. She was not just a pretty face, being top of her class at MIT in computer science. She was also interested in Mike, and, when he volunteered, she did too without giving it much thought. Dr. McLoeb was a skilled medical researcher, having worked at the CDC for 20 years isolating pathogens and working on cures mostly for African diseases. Tim was short and heavyset with the appearance of a friendly uncle that’s always asking kids to sit in his lap. His face was round, clean-shaven, and topped by a full head of uncombed brown hair. The last was Alan, an expert at operating and fixing all types of lab equipment, including electron microscopes, chromatographs, MRIs, and spectrometers. He was 35-years old but had boyish good looks that made him look more like a college student. He was six feet tall, muscular, and very handsome with the face of a male model. He was a devote environmentalist and spent much of his free time attending political rallies for environmental issues. This six-person team had worked together in some capacity over the last few years, so they are knew each other to some extent, though some could best be classified only as acquaintances.
There was one other person in the facility that was not a volunteer; he was not even associated with government. When the Cloud was less than two miles from the facility, Alan announced over the intercom that there was a person on the surface near the entrance building in which the elevator down into the facility was located. He suggested that everyone should join him in the control room. The above ground portion of the facility consisted of a small concrete building with a standard office with chairs, desks, and bookshelves, but hidden behind one of the walls was an elevator door and stairwell. Thirty meters away, a chain link fence surrounded this building. It had only one gate, which sported a large padlock. There were lots of objects sticking out of the roof, including some communications dishes and several cameras; these were linked to the control room where Alan now sat. Soon the other five members joined Alan in the control room to discuss what to do about the man 50 meters above their heads. He looked about 40 years old, medium build, wearing old jeans, golf shirt, and a floppy hat that shaded his features.
Jeff: "We have no choice, we have to bring him into the facility. If we don't, he'll be dead in an hour."
Carol: “It’s against protocol. We’ve sealed the place, and I’m sure he doesn’t have any clearance to be in here.”
Tim: “You’d just let him die out there?”
Carol: “There’s more than one life at stake here.”
Jeff: “It’s not like we’re dealing with an epidemic. He’s not infected with the Cloud.”
Sheryl: “We’ve got plenty of food and room. I think we should bring him in.”
Alan: “Maybe he can help us. He looks a little ragged, but he may have been walking a long way.”
Jeff: “Let’s put it to a vote. All in favor raise your hand.” All except Carol raised their hands. “Alan, go up top and bring him down here. We’ll have to find out what he’s doing way out here in the middle of no where.”
Alan: “Will do, Doc.”
Ten minutes later the elevator doors opened, and Alan walked out with a man about 5 feet ten with jagged features and a three-day growth of beard. He was also covered from head to toes with dust. There was a stunned look on his face as he tried to take into account what was happening.
Alan said, “Everyone, this is Dan Halprin.”
Dr. Snowden made the introductions and said, “Mr. Halprin, how did you come to be out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Please call me ‘Dan’. My car broke down and, since there seemed to be no traffic, I just started walking.”
Carol: “Did you know that there is a killer Cloud just south of here moving our way?”
“Yes, I knew about it. I just thought, if God wanted me to die, there was very little I could do about it.”
Alan said facetiously, “I’d hate to think we’ve upset God’s plan.”
“God works in mysterious way. I wouldn’t underestimate him.”
Jeff: “You probably want to get cleaned up. Alan, could you show him to the bedrooms and the showers? There are some extra lab clothes in the closet off the bedrooms. They aren’t much, but they’re clean. Give him my room; I’ll just sleep in my office. I’ll get my stuff later. Dan, could you please come and see me when you’re clean up?”
The group then split up. Late
r Dr. Snowden filled in Dan on what they were doing in the facility and what they hoped to accomplish. Dan explained that he had worked as a mechanic and would be willing to help wherever he could. Dr. Snowden accepted his offer to become part of the team and sent him to work with Alan.
The lab had been stocked with food and supplies enough to keep them going for at least three months without rationing. The feeling was that the Cloud would pass over the lab and continue moving north, so they should only be trapped for a week or two. However there was a feeling of extreme anxiety in most of the team members as the Cloud reached the outer opening. They were thinking the same thing. ‘Will the seals hold? Will we all die a horrible death?’ It took a few hours for the anxiety to ratchet down to something that would allow normal behavior, but it was different for each person and would never go down to zero. However, there was one exception to this anxious state of mind for this person actually felt exhilaration at the prospect.
~
The Cloud sample was taken the first day, and everyone began working on his or her particular area of expertise. It was Day 2 before Dr. Snowden could provide Dr. Weisz with his test results and that was only because the latter worked through the night. A daily briefing was held at 9 AM in a small conference room. Dr. Snowden brought the team up to speed on his results, which were projected in the air by a projector embedded in the table.
“As you can see, my analysis of the Cloud shows that it is composed of a variety of hydrocarbons, including proteins, and a small amount of inorganic compounds. As to what part each compound plays in the life functions of the Cloud, we don’t know and will have to rely on Dr. Weisz’s analysis.”
Alan: “There is no doubt that it is a living entity?”
Tim: “There is no doubt. It has been shown to react to stimuli and meets all our other criteria for life.”
Sheryl: “Is it sentient?”
Tim: “No, we don’t think so. It’s makeup and behavior is very primitive, almost like an ameba. It just seems to move around looking for food.”