Dark Rising

TWO

Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska – US Military Space Command

‘What the fu-’ Corporal Marcs scooted his office chair across the floor of his horseshoe-shaped booth to replay what he had just seen on one of his screens. ‘Holy shit. Major, you gotta see this! VELA just picked up a whale of a radiation spike from the Middle East.’

Offutt Air Force Base was one of the most strategically placed and defensible military bases in the world, home to the Strategic Air Command, the 55th Wing and also the primary hub of the United States military network-centric space command. Its role was to manage the constellation of military hardware orbiting the planet and oversee the billions of bits of information received from their flock of extremely attentive high-orbit birds. Normally the command centre was a place of professional calm. Today all hell was about to break loose.

‘What the hell are they doing?’ Marcs went on. ‘This is strong gamma – just gamma – where’s the rest of the radiation package? Is this a detonation?’

Major Gerry Harris was instantly at the corporal’s shoulder. A brilliant military specialist, Harris had been heading up the space command centre for the past eighteen months. His background in physics and information technology were the perfect credentials needed to understand and manage the complex information received by the satellites and translated by the sophisticated computer applications. But these signatures defied logic; they refused to make sense even to his analytical mind. The advanced VELA satellites used radiofrequency sensors to detect electromagnetic pulse prints and could measure the strength of high-intensity ionising radiation even from high orbit. If there was a higher than naturally occurring radiation signature across the X-ray, alpha or beta particle, neutron or gamma-ray spectrum, a VELA would see and taste it. But these pulses? Their sudden appearance and strength made them seem almost non-terrestrial.

‘Can’t be a detonation,’ Harris said. ‘These guys shouldn’t even have fission capability yet. And if it’s some sort of sub-surface nuclear test, why aren’t there any seismic signatures – and why are we seeing this single particle in such concentrations?’

Harris paced for a moment, then started yelling commands across the floor to his technicians. ‘I need all our birds with digital, thermal and ground-penetrating imaging capabilities looking at these coordinates now!’

Then he reached for the phone on Corporal Marcs’ desk. ‘Get me General Chilton,’ he said. ‘ASAP.’

Frank and Lorraine Beckett had been driving in stony silence for the past hour. They had left the Interstate at the Limon hub after sharing soggy, coffee-flavoured peanut butter sandwiches and disintegrating donuts – apparently Lorraine had left the top loose on the goddamn thermos, yet again.

Both in their mid-fifties and comfortably stout after years of double-portion dinners and chocolate candy in front of the TV, the Becketts were making a once-in-a-lifetime road trip, weaving all the way from their home in Knoxville to Santa Barbara on the West Coast. It was a joint gift to each other to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but what had seemed like a magical and exciting idea when they planned it was turning out to be days on end of featureless highways, frightening-looking hitchhikers and roadside motels with orange and brown decor that should have been put out of its misery in the mid-seventies. To really ice the cake, Lorraine’s stomach was acting up again and Frank was threatening that if she let loose one more fart in the car he was going to leave her at the next bus stop.

Praise the Lord, he thought. Just one more hour on Highway 24 and they’d be in Colorado Springs – which meant warm showers, a nap before dinner and maybe even some plain, home-style food that would help slay the dragon making war in the pit of that damn woman’s stomach.

The flat purple-grey highway cut through the dry and scrubby landscape like a new zipper down an old canvas sheet. Frank was starting to get his good mood back, and was about to break the silence by telling his wife a bad joke when the car died. Everything just stopped at once. Frank coasted the car to a halt, frantically pushing buttons and stamping on pedals.

‘Did you see that, Frank?’ Lorraine said, pointing through the front windscreen. ‘The sky seemed to shimmer slightly, like we were driving through a curtain of oil.’ She touched her fingers to her face and they came away slick and bright red. ‘Frank, I’m bleeding.’

Frank noticed that his nose was streaming blood too. ‘Outta the freakin’ car!’ he said. He didn’t want them soiling the beautiful leather seats with bloodstains. There would be a nasty amount to fork out on the insurance if there was even minor interior damage.

The dry prairie air assaulted their senses and made them grimace after the Suburban’s air conditioning. Lorraine staggered and her face looked slick and waxy with shock.

As Frank went round to swing the car hood open, he spotted something lying on the road ahead. ‘What the hell’s that? That weren’t there before.’

‘Is it a deer?’ burbled Lorraine through a handful of bloodstained tissues.

The clouds were moving rapidly across the flat land all around, and as they slowly approached the mass, a long shaft of yellow sunshine illuminated the lump on the road. It looked meaty and slightly moist. Frank had to will himself to take a step forward; his animal instincts were screaming at him to get the hell out of there.

Lorraine held Frank’s arm and remained slightly behind his left shoulder as they neared the strange organic mess. ‘Oh my god, Frank, what is that?’ she whispered.

Slight tics and squeaks emanated from the lump, and as they got closer they realised that the sounds were caused by the mass thawing in the sun – a sparkling coat of frost dripped, twinkling, onto the road surface. Frank knitted his brows; the thing seemed to be sprouting up from the hard black tarmac. Not pushing up through it exactly, just… stuck.

‘This can’t be real,’ he said. ‘It’s some kind of sick joke.’

Half of the mass looked like a man wearing a white laboratory coat, but the other half was stretched out like elongated taffy. It looked like plastic that had been heated and then frozen solid again. The face was wet-raw, like the skin under a blister, and where the eyes should have been were just hollow, ragged sockets. The mouth was intact, and above it a blond toothbrush moustache twinkled with ice crystals. But what really made Frank’s stomach lurch was the pink organic matter that protruded between the bared teeth like a veined, deflated bag. It had to be the guy’s lungs – pulled or blown out.

Lorraine staggered to the side of the road and vomited. ‘Frank, I’m bleeding inside!’ she screamed. The mess of digested bread and donuts was streaked with blood.

Frank went to her, blinking rapidly to clear his stinging eyes. But it wasn’t tears running down his cheeks, it was blood. When Lorraine saw him, she started to cry.

Frank sat down heavily next to his wife. ‘I don’t feel well, Lainey.’

He looked over at the creature again and noticed something he hadn’t seen when he was standing above it. On the pocket of the lab coat was a small badge that was pulsing with a soft blue light.