The Creeping Kelp - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора William Meikle (July 22nd

July 22nd - Weymouth

Noble woke to a grey haze that took long seconds to clear. He soon wished it hadn’t, as a dull throb from his leg reminded him of what had happened.

He looked around, realising that he was in some kind of medical facility…. not a hospital, it was too basic for that, but the fact that he was hooked up to several monitors and machines that went ping gave the game away, somewhat.

He called out, but no one came. He made to swing a leg out of bed and realised he was tied up tight. His left leg was bandaged from foot to knee and suspended from the ceiling by what, at first glance, looked like a medieval torture rack. He leaned forward, intent on freeing himself, but a wave of nausea washed through him. He was forced to sit back and keep still until his body returned to an even keel and no longer felt like floating towards the ceiling.

He called out again.

“Anybody there?”

His voice echoed, as if there was a larger, empty area outside the room where he was lying. He waited. Still, no one responded. He looked around, hoping to find a bell or buzzer he could use to attract attention. Instead, he found a pile of papers on the bedside table. He recognised them straight away—it was the material Suzie had been reading on the chopper. There was a note on the top.

“There’s a bit of a flap on. I’ll be back when I can. In the meantime, you need to read the rest of this. I think we’re in trouble.”

Noble laughed, but with little humour.

Tell me something I don’t know.

But it seemed he had nothing better to be getting on with. He picked up the papers and once more lost himself in the words of Ballantine, in a Nissen Hut, on the shores of Loch Long.

On the night before his big demonstration, Rankin sought me out in the mess. At first, I did not even know he had entered. I was intent on getting as much ale inside me as possible, in a search for oblivion—but I wasn’t to be allowed that small comfort. The mess fell quiet as he entered.

“Come with me, Ballantine,” he said. “You are the only one who will understand the import.”

I put my beer down, reluctantly. I was on my fifth and already looking forward to the sixth. But I could not refuse him. Technically, he was my Commanding Officer. And, despite my civilian status, I had, in effect, been drafted and as such, I was not exempt from military justice. With a heavy heart I followed him down to the lab.

The place had changed since my last visit. The heavy glass tank had been removed. But the network of piping was still in place overhead and the metal box still sat in the middle of the floor, its walls etched and pitted by the acid.

He saw me looking.

“I have another small demonstration for you, Ballantine,” he said. “And I hope this one will finally convince you of the import of our experiments.”

“If you’re going to be slaughtering some poor animal, I want nothing to do with it,” I said.

He smiled grimly.

“Not this time. Come. You need to see this.”

He led me to the long trestle. A thick forest of kelp and tentacles completely filled a glass jar some three feet high and over a foot in diameter. The whole column vibrated as the thing inside thrashed angrily.

“For pity’s sake, Rankin… how much of this thing did you make?” I asked.

“Enough,” he whispered. “But that is not why I brought you here. Watch.”

He walked away to our left. The kelp seemed to follow him, the thrashing fronds and tentacles now concentrated on that side of the glass. Rankin turned and came back towards me. The kelp tracked his movement, the thrashing becoming ever more insistent as Rankin got ever closer to the glass jar.

“For pity’s sake, Rankin—what kind of thing is this?”

“It knows me,” Rankin whispered in reply. “And I think I’ve made it angry.”

“That’s not possible,” I started.

“Neither is this,” he said and walked forward until his nose was almost pressed against the glass. The kelp thrashed, slapping moist tentacles against the surface, leaving streaks of yellow viscous fluid behind.

“Be careful, man,” I said. I had seen what those tentacles had done to a pony—I had no wish to see what they could do to a man.

Rankin waved at me to be quiet. He stared at the kelp and spoke in a loud voice, as if ordering a disobedient dog to heel.

“Quiet!”

The kelp stilled and the big jar stopped vibrating. Now it just looked like a glass filled with regular seaweed. Rankin motioned me forward. He had to do it twice before my legs would obey my order to move and even then, I sidled up to the trestle cautiously, ready to flee at any sign of trouble.

“Come closer,” Rankin said. “This is what I brought you to see.”

“I can see all I need to from here,” I replied, maintaining a distance of three feet between me and the thin sheet of glass that separated me from the kelp.

“Just look,” he said. There was wonder and awe in his voice. I saw why, seconds later.

I looked at the kelp.

And the kelp looked back. A single, lidless eye, pale green and milky, stared out from the fronds. Even as I watched, it changed, being sucked back into a new fold. A wet gash opened, like a thin-lipped mouth. It stretched wide and a high ululation filled the Nissen Hut, like a seagull on a storm wind.

Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.

“What the hell is this shite?” I said softly.

Rankin laughed. The kelp squirmed, almost as if it was enjoying the experience.

“It knows me,” he said again. “It is as if our minds have become attuned.”

“Our minds? You are crediting this…thing, with intelligence? With rational thought?”

“Why not?” Rankin said. “After all, if it looks like a duck…”

It was my turn to laugh. When I did so, the kelp stayed still.

“Okay,” I said. “So, now that you’ve made it, would you care to tell me exactly what it is we have done here?”

Rankin dragged me away. Three new-formed eyes watched us intently.

“In all truth, I have no idea,” he said. “But I have sent a sample back to the Yanks. They’ve got more sophisticated equipment than we have. Maybe they can make something of it, where I cannot. But I do know something… I know that the top Brass will not be able to ignore me. Not this time.”

From inside the glass, the noise grew louder.

Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.

The field test was scheduled for noon the next day. I spent most of the morning trying to convince the Colonel to postpone it, but a combination of the smell of beer on my breath and a fear of disappointing his superiors, led him to dismiss me out of hand. I watched the preparations in the harbour with a terrible, sinking feeling in my gut that had nothing to do with the booze from the night before.

Rankin was back into his full-blown show-off strut, with no sign of the confusion he had shown earlier in the laboratory. He marched around the harbour barking orders, a conductor marshalling his orchestra. By the time the Brass arrived at quarter to the hour, everything was in place. A fine drizzle started to fall and a chill settled in my spine. Suddenly, I wanted to be somewhere else—for I knew one thing for sure. This was not going to end well.

But it was too late. Everything was ready, and Rankin’s demonstration was imminent.

We stood in a rough semi-circle just above the shoreline. Several yards beneath us sat the now-familiar metal box. From where I stood, I could hear the thing thrash against the inside walls, like a manic drummer in some free-form jazz band.

A chain led from the top of the box along the shingle to lie at Rankin’s feet. The harbour wall stretched away to our left and ahead of us in the water, a small flotilla of boats made another rough semi-circle encasing a drift-net full of mackerel bought just that morning from some very grateful fishermen down in Helensburgh.

The fish was our bait. Rankin had wanted to use a couple of convicted murderers from Barlinnie, but even the Colonel had drawn the line at that. Rankin had also suggested using sheep, but those of us who had seen the test on the pony balked at that. I wasn’t the only one who did not need to see that depravity again.

The men on the boats were equipped with flame units and each boat contained several bottles filled with acid. I hoped it would be enough.

Rankin stood, centre-stage, and waited for the Brass to move into their place along the harbour wall looking down on the metal box. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice honed by many years of addressing large lecture theatres. His words carried, loud and strong, in the still air.

“I have called you here to witness the future of naval warfare. With this new weapon, German harbours will be rendered unusable for years, maybe even decades, and all at minimal cost. You previously complained that energetic seaweed wasn’t good enough, wasn’t flamboyant enough.” He paused for effect before continuing. “You wanted flamboyance? Here it is.”

He dragged on the chain. The lid of the metal box started to open, slowly at first.

Then things went bad very quickly.

A handful of tentacles found the edges of the box and tore at it, ripping it like so much tissue paper. A chunk of metal flew like a discus, passing less than three feet over the head of the Secretary of State on the harbour wall. The kelp came out of the box like a greyhound from a trap, expanding as it came in a roiling mass eight feet wide and near again as thick. It completely ignored the net full of fish. Instead, it threw out a writhing forest of tentacles… straight towards Rankin.

He had to step back sharply and even then the leading tentacle caught him around the left foot and tugged, hard. He fell, slightly off balance, and a second tendril reached for him. He just had time to kick off his shoe and scuttle, crab-like back up the shingle beach. The tentacle dragged the shoe back to a maw in the kelp where it disappeared with a moist suck. The moving carpet of fronds came up out of the water, still focussed on Rankin, who was still trying to get to his feet on the loose shingle.

The air was full of the high ululation.

Tekeli Li.

A gull flew down, attracted by the noise. Two tentacles plucked it out of the air. A new maw opened and took it as fast as a blink. The body of kelp did not slow. It came up the beach, shingle rattling like gunfire beneath it.

It was then that I saw the fatal flaw in Rankin’s planning. All of the men with the flame units and acid had been placed out on the boats in expectation that the fish would be the target. They were now frantically trying to reach shore, to get at the creeping creature, but they were still too far out to be of any help.

Up on the harbour wall, security guards ushered the Brass to safety, but down on the shore, we were in disarray. A fresh-faced young squaddie stepped between Rankin and the creature. He raised a rifle and took aim, pumping three quick shots into the main body. The bullets had no effect. The tendrils wrapped themselves around the lad and dragged him off his feet. He scrambled, screaming amid the shingle, as he was pulled backwards. Three more soldiers started to fire shots into the thrashing fronds, but to no effect. The young squaddie’s screams turned frantic. The carpet of kelp surged and fell on him like a wet blanket. His screams cut off mercifully quickly, but the kelp continued to buck and thrash around his body, giving it a grotesque semblance of life long after it was obvious that he was gone.

All along the back of the kelp, moist mouths opened and squealed, the sound keening and echoing around the rapidly emptying harbour.

Tekeli Li. Tekeli Li.

Those of us who had not yet fled turned and ran.

The kelp followed us up the jetty, gaining with every second. We ran, a ragged, disorganised mob, into the warren of Nissen Huts. Several men tried to set up a rear-guard action, blocking one of the alleys between the huts with volleys of gunfire. The kelp swarmed over them without a pause. Man-shaped forms squirmed and writhed within the kelp, then went still.

I ran faster.

When I turned to look again, the kelp had more than doubled in size.

I saw Rankin’s white mop of hair among the people just ahead of me. The kelp saw him too. Tentacles raised in the air, thrashing wildly and the keening squeal rose to a frenzied howl.

“Rankin,” I called. “It’s only angry at you. Nobody else has to get hurt here.”

I wasn’t sure that he’d heard me until I saw him duck inside the lab. Soldiers ran past the open door, heading for the road out of the Base and I was sorely tempted to go with them. But despite his faults, Rankin had believed in me, and I owed him for that. I threw myself towards the lab, just ahead of a nest of tentacles. Behind it, I could see that the soldiers with the acid tanks and flame-throwers were only now making their way onto the jetty—too far behind to be of any help.

Rankin stood near the door, staring at a point over my shoulder.

“Get into the corner,” he shouted at me. “Pull the left hand chain.”

That was all he had time for. The kelp flowed through the doorway, blocking all escape. I pushed myself as far into the corner as I could and grabbed at the chain.

“Not yet!” Rankin shouted. He danced aside, avoiding thrashing tentacles, until he stood on the spot where the metal cage had sat during the earlier experiment. “Wait until it is all inside.”

He swerved again, just avoiding a long tentacle. But that only served to put him inside the reach of several more.

“Rankin!” I called out. “Look out!”

But I was too late with my warning. The first tentacle took him around the waist. He screamed as it started to tug at him, but he held his ground, forcing the main body of the kelp to come to him. More tentacles struck at his chest and his ankles. He struggled to stay upright. By now, most of the kelp was inside the room.

Once more, I reached for the chain.

“Not yet!” Rankin screamed. “None of it can escape.”

The kelp rolled over the lab floor. It opened out like a huge umbrella towering over Rankin, then fell on him, his white hair being the last thing to disappear from view.

“None of it can escape,” he called at the end.“Do you understand?”

I understood, all too well.

“Goodbye, Rankin,” I whispered and pulled the chain. I turned away, unable to watch as the screams, both from the kelp and the dying man, filled the lab. But the acid rain did its job. In five minutes, all that was left of Rankin and his creation was a pool of oily goop on the lab floor.

It was only later, as I downed the first of many drinks I have had since that day, that I remembered his words.

“I have sent a sample back to the Yanks.”

I spent weeks after that checking. I found the shipping order and the name of the boat, the Haven Home. Records show it was sunk by a U-Boat somewhere off the Scilly Isles. In my dreams I see a glass container, lying in a flooded cargo hold. Inside, the creeping kelp sits, dormant, waiting.

And I worry.

I worry about breakages.

I think we’re in trouble.

That’s what Suzie had said. After reading the papers, Noble had to agree. He’d been lost in the story, but now that he was finished, he became all too aware of the aches and pains that racked his body.

But it could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse.

He put the papers down on the small table beside the bed and lay back, staring at the ceiling. He was aware that, as yet, no one had come to check on him, despite the fact that he had been awake for at least an hour now. He considered calling out, but there was something about the deep silence that made it seem like sacrilege to break it.

Besides, I shouldn’t complain about getting some rest.

His thoughts kept returning to the last phrase in Ballantine’s journal. Suzie had it underlined in thick black pencil strokes. I worry about breakages. There was no doubt in Noble’s mind that the things that had overrun the Earth Rescue were indeed the self-same creatures that Ballantine described so vividly.

It seems he was right to worry.

He lay there for a while trying to sleep but his brain refused to slow. Eventually he gave into the inevitable and picked up Ballantine’s journal again. He was half way through his second read when someone finally came to check on him.

The male nurse who entered looked just as tired as Noble felt.

“So what’s the story?” Noble asked. “What’s such a big deal that I get left here to rot for hours?”

The nurse smiled.

“I looked in less than two hours ago and you were fast asleep.”

“That’s not the point,” Noble replied. “Come on, spill it. I know there’s something going on and I need to know what it is.”

“What you need to do is rest,” the nurse replied.

He refused to be drawn into conversation as he slowly and methodically freed Noble’s leg from the tackle that constrained it.

“Okay. If you won’t tell me what’s going on, can you at least tell me where I am?” Noble asked.

“That’s classified, sir,” the man said and kept at his task.

Noble laughed.

“Who am I going to tell?”

But the nurse wouldn’t be drawn. He only spoke again as he left.

“Stay off your feet for a while,” he said. “There’s nothing broken and you didn’t need stitches, but the surface abrasions are pretty bad and you’ll be stiff for a while.”

“Thanks,” Noble said. “But I knew that already.” He was talking to an empty room. The nurse had already gone.

Stay off your feet? My arse.

This time when he swung his feet out of bed he didn’t feel like throwing up. He took that as a good sign and was about to head from the door when he realised he was only wearing a hospital gown, with nothing underneath. Another quick look around showed him his clothes in a small pile on a chair at the other side of the room. He headed that way, but soon realised the futility of the attempt—the floor bucked and swayed like a boat in a heavy sea and his wounded leg felt like a lump of cold wood grafted at his knee. He fell back in the bed, a cold sweat at his brow and a pounding heart in his chest. The room started to spin and once more, in his mind he was back, dangling at the end of a tether, the black tendrils reaching for him. He screamed, loud and long until his throat was raw and sore.

No one came.

Finally, he lay back exhausted and fell into a feverish sleep.

Once again he came to his senses slowly. He was sitting up in the bed and a warm body was pressed up against his good side. He turned and looked into Suzie’s concerned face.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. She had been crying again, but he knew better than to draw attention to it.

“I’ve been better,” he said. “How long have I been out?”

“Just a few hours,” she said.

He saw in her eyes there was more to be said.

“But?” he asked.

It came out of her in a rush, as if she’d been keeping it bottled up. He sat in stunned silence as she told him of the attack on Lyme Regis. He hadn’t seen the video footage that she had sat through, but her voice carried the whole horror of it and his own experiences filled in the blanks.

“How many dead?” he whispered during a pause.

“Over a hundred. But it’s hard to be sure yet, as the town is being evacuated and many fled by car and by foot during the attack itself. The army has cordoned off the whole seafront—I’ve told them it’s near impossible to police the coastline, but you know how these guys think.”

Noble nodded.

“They’ll find that this enemy doesn’t follow any rules of engagement. It’s working on some primal instinct. I doubt it has a plan.”

Suzie suddenly had a far away look in her eyes.

“I’m not too sure of that… I’ve been running some tests on the sample. I believe there’s something more than just instinct at work.”

He remembered something from the journal.

“Didn’t Rankin think the same thing? He postulated some rudimentary intelligence, didn’t he?”

He saw fear in Suzie’s eyes.

“I think it’s more than rudimentary,” she said. “I think it has problem solving and cognitive skills. I’m been running some tests and…”

Noble started to sit up.

“Don’t tell me. Show me,” he said.

She tried to push him back.

“You need to rest.”

“No,” he said. “I need to work. Fetch my clothes, would you?”

While Suzie got the clothes Noble gingerly swung his legs out of bed and put some weight on the bad ankle. It felt better than before, the pain having deadened to a dull ache.

And the floor isn’t moving, so that’s a result right there.

He wasn’t going to be running anytime soon, but he felt he could at least manage a slow walk, as long as he didn’t have to go too far.

He made Suzie turn her back as he dressed, which amused her greatly.

“Who do you think undressed you in the first place?” she asked, smiling as she turned away.

“I like to be awake when I’m getting molested,” Noble replied.

She was still laughing at that as she led him out of the room.

Once he got out into the corridor and looked around, he knew immediately that he was somewhere in the depths of the fort—nowhere else he’d ever been had that distinctive paint job on the walls.

“This place has become the centre of operations for the outbreak. That’s what they’re calling it, for want of a better term. The whole upstairs is crawling with soldiers, but they gave me a quiet room down here to set up a temporary lab and I had some stuff brought over.”

She looked Noble in the eye and obviously saw something she didn’t like.

“You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

She made to turn him back to the room and the bed, but he stood his ground.

“No. I’ve been lying down long enough. And it sounds like you think you’re on to something. Show me.”

They walked through empty corridors, the only sound, Noble’s increasingly heavy breathing. By the time they reached the office where Suzie had her makeshift lab set up, he was leaning heavily on her shoulder and the cold sweat was back.

He slumped into a chair beside her laptop.

“I told you to stay in bed,” she said. The concerned look was back, but he waved her away.

“I’ll be fine after a coffee… you do have coffee, don’t you?”

She moved to a trestle and showed him a glass jar perched on a Bunsen burner.

“It’ll be a lab special… and instant.”

“It’ll do,” he said, but his gaze had already been caught by a taller jar on the edge of the trestle. It was nearly a foot tall, solidly sealed at the top… and completely full of thrashing, wriggling kelp.

“Did you get a new sample?” he asked.

She saw where he was looking.

“Nope. This is the one that you collected.”

I only collected a fraction of this thing.

“What have you been feeding it… rats?”

She came over and handed him a steaming mug of coffee. He took to it like a drowning man to a life belt.

“Not rats… plastic.”

As he drank and let the warmth creep through him, she told him about what else had been found in Lyme Regis, about the total lack of plastic anywhere the kelp had passed and of eye-witness accounts of Perspex sheets being carried away over the horizon. Something stirred in the back of Noble’s mind, something he should be remembering, but it wouldn’t come—the memory was too raw, too tender to yet be touched. And he was too tired to attempt to bring it forward. Instead, he reminded Suzie why they had come to the lab.

“You said it showed something more than instinct?”

She nodded.

“I was re-reading Ballantine’s journal, about when they were shouting at the lab specimen.”

Noble laughed softly.

“You’ve been shouting at it?”

Suzie blushed.

“Just a little,” she said. She went over to the specimen jar to cover her embarrassment. As she walked, the kelp seemed to track her movement, sidling across inside the jar.

“It knows you,” Noble whispered.

Suzie nodded.

“And watch this.”

She walked up to the jar, so close her nose touched the glass.

“Be careful,” Noble shouted.

She took no heed. She shouted at the kelp.

“Down, boy.”

It retreated across the jar, pressing against the far side from her and didn’t move until she stood away.

“That’s all we need,” Noble said sarcastically. “A new household pet.”

“I haven’t tried being nice to it yet,” Suzie said. She was still blushing. “It didn’t feel right.”

The thought was so incongruous, Noble couldn’t help but laugh again. Suzie looked at him as if he were mad.

I might well be.

He went back to the coffee. He finished the cup and put it down on the desk beside him. At the same moment, the kelp inside the jar went into a frenzy of thrashing, so violent that the jar started to walk across the table.

Suzie stood back, a hand at her mouth.

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “I think something’s happening.”

A second later, an alarm went off and an accompanying blast of gunfire echoed around Nothe Fort.