C (22:08)
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The organs were mostly present but displaced, some partially merged with adjacent tissues. The circulatory system had been supplemented with additional channels, but the brain revealed the true horror. While structurally whole, it showed selective devastation. The cerebral regions governing movement remained intact, while those responsible for language, personality and self awareness had withered. Whatever force had reshaped him had preserved his body's ability to move while methodically erasing everything that made him human. Was he conscious through any of it? Hargrove didn't know. She said the restructuring appeared gradual, days at minimum, possibly the two full weeks. Whether There was a point when the dock worker was still in there while his body was being rewritten around him. She couldn't say. I'd seen murder and death in just about every possible way during my time on the force and then with the Bureau. I'd never seen a body rearranged from the inside while still occupied. Caldwell asked what we were all thinking. How many these are walking around? Three other missing people. An island full of potentially contaminated water infrastructure. No understanding of how exposure worked or how fast the process moved. I'd say the chances that the answer was none pretty much didn't exist. By morning, none of us had slept. I mapped what we knew against what we didn't, the way I would have run a squadroom briefing and any standard mission. The confirmed list was short. The unknown list wasn't. Looking closer at the island's plans, something stood out. The cannery underlevel, there was a massive adjointment of pipes, the same area we'd marked as suspicious the day before. Whatever was down there, the densest concentration of the organism, possibly more victims. The center of whatever was happening. The evidence pointed there. Whatever decisions we had to make, they all led under the cannery. The quicker we wrapped this up, the quicker I could get off this island. Which, if I'm being honest, is the only thing I wanted. We geared up and headed down the cannery. Under level was a network of pump rooms and drainage corridors connecting the old processing infrastructure to the harbor seawall at water level, built decades ago and seemingly never maintained. Caldwell led with the brightest flashlight I'd ever seen, mounted to his shotgun. Hargrove carried her kit. I carried my sidearm and the bag of everything dangerous the Bureau had allowed us to take. The humidity hit first. The air thickened into something you didn't breathe so much as swallow. The walls were wet with a biological film everywhere now, sheeting the concrete in a living skin that glistened in our lights and contracted faintly when the beams hit it. The stranding material from the upper pump room had thickened into ropes and curtains of translucent tissue, connecting every surface to every other surface. The deeper we went, the less the space looked like infrastructure. The concrete was still there. You could see it in patches, but it was being buried under layers of biological material. The floor was soft in places where the accumulation was thick enough to compress under our boots, and it gave back in an unmistakably organic way. Then the tunnel opened and we found what the island had been hiding. A mass filled the lowest junction where three drainage corridors met the Seawall foundation at the waterline. It was enormous, a glistening, pulsating mountain of flesh that had stretched from floor to ceiling in the center, its edges spreading outward along each corridor above tendrils of pink gray tissue draped from pipes overhead. There was no design or purposeful shape to was accumulation. Pure, brainless, biological accumulation. Blubbery tissue fused with stringy muscle, fused with iridescent scales and downy bird feathers and sleek skin and material I couldn't identify. Mottled patches of yellow green matter that oozed clear liquid. When the mass shifted, all of it was restructured and merged into a single, continuous living mass. The surface moved in slow, rhythmic contractions, the respiration of a colony performing gas exchange across a surface area the size of a room. Bubbles formed and popped in the membrane where it met the damp concrete walls. The sound it made was wet and deep and steady, a thick, guttural gurgling punctuated by occasional soft pops and squelches as pockets of gas escaped from deeper within. Bodies protruded from the mass with no logic to their placement. A human torso emerging from the surface at a 45 degree angle. Arms gone, the stumps fused seamlessly into the surrounding tissue. A leg bent at the knee, foot still wearing a work boot, jutted from the mass near the ceiling where the accumulation had climbed the wall. A pair of arms reaching out from the same section of surface, almost touching at the base. Fingers still moving in slow, rhythmic flex, hands opening and closing on nothing. A face visible beneath a translucent membrane of colonial tissue. Features softened and spread, mouth open, eyes open with an expression of nothing. The missing teen was there. I found him by his jacket, the same one his mother had showed us in a picture. His torso was exposed from the chest up, tilted back, his head partially submerged in the mass behind him, his eyes open but empty like the others. His mouth was open and something was growing in it, the colonial tissue filling his throat, pushing out between his lips and a thin, continuous sheet. I stood there, trying to wrap my head around. What sequence of events could have created a horror such as this? Then the mass screamed. It came from everywhere at once. Not one voice or species. A sound built from every vocal structure the colony had absorbed. Animal sounds layered with things that had no earthly source. And underneath it, through it, woven into the texture of the sound, were human screams. Different pitches, different timbers, overlapping, merging and separating. Mouths that were buried in the mass were opening. Throats that had been fused into the tissue were vibrating in a high, broken wail that was not language or communication. The sound was the Worst thing I had ever heard. I have heard people dying. I have heard the bereaved. I have heard sounds the human body makes when it's past the point of rescue. This was something else entirely. The mass moved in sections. Portions of the surface lurched toward us in a heavy, crude motion, pulling itself along the corridor walls with whatever limbs it had absorbed, arms reaching from the surface and gripping concrete, dragging the mass forward. The torso that protruded from the upper section twisted toward the light, toward us, with a grinding, wet sound of connective tissue straining against itself. Something deep in the mass was pushing outward. A shape, a bulk, an attempt at movement that was too large and too entangled to succeed, but was trying anyway. Caldwell was already setting charges. He didn't ask permission. He didn't consult. He pulled the incendiary packages from the kit and placed them with the same efficiency he did. Everything except that his hands were shaking. I had never seen Caldwell's hands shake. Hargrove grabbed what she could. Samples, photographs, recordings. The mass kept coming, slowly pulling, and the screaming didn't stop. New voices joined as deeper sections activated, likely triggered by our presence and the movement. The sound filled the corridor and bounced off the concrete and became a physical pressure in the chest. We ran through the tunnels, trying to get ourselves a safe distance away, but the charges detonated on their own. The explosion in that enclosed space was concussive and wet. It blew the mass apart. Biological material, thick, warm, and reeking, sprayed through the corridor in a wave that coated everything. I felt it on my neck, my hands soaking through my jacket. The individual pieces of it were contracting in the ground around us as we ran. Fire bloomed in the junction behind us, and the sounds the mass made as it burned were deep, wet, tearing sounds of biological material resisting flame. The pop of sealed cavities bursting, the hiss of moisture boiling out of tissue. We came out of the cannery covered in it. Biological residue on every surface and our hair on our skin soaked into the fabric of our clothes. The air outside tasted like salvation for about 10 seconds before the smoke started pouring from the access points. The smell became something that would saturate the north end of the island and wouldn't let go. The cannery burned. We hadn't planned on destroying the whole structure, but the underlevel fire found fuel in the old infrastructure and spread. Boone watched with us. He didn't ask what was down there. He had heard the screaming from outside. It's a sound you could never stop hearing. The harbormaster's office was up in flames as well as several other buildings. The fire had jumped through the old drainage connections and taken our base, our long range communications equipment, and our link to Bureau command. We had short range radios and no one to reach with them, no way to call for extraction, no way to tell anyone what we had found or what we had destroyed or what might still be in the water. We had the boat and we had what we still carried. Caldwell prepped it and we loaded up in the dark. The harbor water was black and all I could smell was the still billowing smoke. Boone stood on the dock, watching us wordlessly. I told them someone would come. I told them to keep people away from the water. He looked at me like I was full of, and nodded. Soon enough the fog swallowed the island whole once again, and all we could see was the boat tearing through the surface of the flat, dark water. Nobody spoke. I noticed things because that's what I do, what years of training instilled in me, and I couldn't turn it off even when I wanted to. Hargrove kept touching her neck, running her fingers along her jaw, down to her collarbone, pressing gently as if checking for something. She did this every few minutes. She didn't seem aware she was doing it. Caldwell's breathing had changed too, slower, deeper in. Hold out. In, hold out. Whether or not this was his stress relief technique, I didn't know. I just noticed my hands were stiff. I told myself it was cold, adrenaline crash, gripping the weapon too hard in the tunnels. But when I looked down at them, resting on my knees, my fingers were twitching. I watched my fingers open and closed, and I did not remember telling them to do that. The mainland lights were ahead of us. We would report. We would debrief. We would be examined, treated, and quarantined. We would be fine.
