Xenophobia (23 page)

Sitting there on the mattress, Bower cradled his head, squeezing the cloths one by one into his mouth. Some of the water dribbled out, but in a reflex reaction he seemed to swallow some of the water as well.

Bower was tired. She wanted to stay awake. She felt a sense of obligation to stay awake and look after Elvis even though she knew there was nothing she could do for him. Try as she may, sleep overtook her and she slumped on the mattress next to him.

Morning broke with birds singing outside the factory.

For a moment, Bower forgot where she was. In the soft light, her eyes deceived her. The air within the ground floor had cooled overnight, providing a pleasant relief from the day before. Already, the heat was starting to build, but for now it was almost a summer’s day in England.

It was the smell that shocked her. Having been in Africa for almost two years, Bower was use to the rancid smell of overpopulated cities, but this smell was different, like the stench of rotten meat burning in a fire.

Beside her, she could hear the soft clatter of insects swarming over each other. She turned, horrified to see Elvis buried alive by a swarm of alien insects. They were crawling all over him, burying him, covering his arms and legs, running through his hair, over his face. Beyond them, the blood-red alien creature stood like a sentinel. Bower was repulsed by the thought they were devouring his body.

“No,” she yelled, scrambling to her feet.

Bower crouched, ready to jump at the creatures and pull him to safety, but there were thousands of them swamping him.

“Don’t eat him. Leave him. Let him go.”

Her movement startled the spiky alien looming over Elvis with its blade-like fronds. The alien flexed, seemingly doubling in size. Its tentacles, previously limp and waving like the branches of a tree, struck out like spears. This was the best view she’d had of the animal. Could it be called an animal? Perhaps not in the terrestrial sense of the word, but it was a living creature.

The spiky alien was on the other side of the mattress, directly opposite her, with Elvis lying beneath the beetles or bugs or whatever they were between them. The central mass of the creature, inside its outer barrier of scarlet tentacles and spikes, was awash with these insects. They swarmed around its body, moving in waves, pulsating like bees within a hive. She could see streams of these tiny creatures scurrying down the alien’s stiff, spiky legs and over towards Elvis.

“No,” she yelled again, losing her fear and stepping forward toward Elvis. “Get off him. Leave him alone.”

Bower began pulling handfuls of insects from his body, sweeping them away, trying to clear them from him. The insects became highly agitated. They hissed and snapped what seemed to be mandibles together, threatening to devour her.

She had to save him. She couldn’t let Elvis die, not like this. And yet, for all she knew, he was already dead.

Bower grabbed at his shoulders, trying to pull him away from the alien creature and the swarm of insects.

Hundreds of the tiny creatures began climbing up her arms, tearing at her trousers and scaling her legs, but she wouldn’t give up on Elvis, even if it meant the death of both of them. Bower staggered backwards as the insects climbed up to her face, forcing her to drop him as she fought desperately to brush them away.

The alien never moved, which surprised her. It seemed content to let these miniature assassins overpower her.

Insects clambered over the mattress.

“No,” she cried again. “Don’t you understand?”

She had Elvis by the collar and was dragging him across the mattress.

“Don’t you know? Life is too important. Life is too precious.”

Elvis was heavy. She couldn’t move him more than a few inches at a time. She was crying, sobbing.

“No. Please, leave him alone.”

The dark insect-like creatures clambered up her hair, crawling across her neck and face. She shook herself, swatting herself, knocking them from her.

With all the energy she could muster, Bower lifted Elvis, pushing off with her legs, using her thighs to drive away from the horde of insects covering the ground. She exposed his upper torso, while the sea of insects spread out around her, encircling her. And it was then she saw his arm.

Whereas before, his left arm had been severed above the elbow, the humerus bone now extended down to a bare joint, connecting to the ulna and radius bones of the forearm. The bones were wrapped in a transparent coating, a membrane of some sort. Blood pumped, lymph fluids surged in response to contracting muscles. Tendons, nerves and veins, they were all there in an anemic form, as though his was the arm of a malnourished child. The tourniquet was gone. The ragged, torn flesh from his upper arm had been knitted back into muscle and sinew. Although his bicep and triceps were thin, they had attached to tendons on the lower humerus.

“No. Please, leave him alone.”

Bower froze.

A chill ran through her.

These were her words, but she hadn’t spoken them.

“Don’t you understand? Life is too important. Life is too precious.”

Those words seemed to come from all around her. Even though she was looking at the large alien creature with its spikes and tentacles, the words repeated back at her came from no particular direction at all.

Bower released her grip on Elvis, allowing him to sink back into the swarm of alien beetles and bugs. As she did so, the creatures climbing over her dropped back to the floor and scurried away.

Stunned, she staggered backwards, tripping on the soft mattress but keeping her footing.

Bower watched as the alien creature emptied of the tiny bugs. To her surprise, there was no central mass. The scarlet spikes extended all the way to the center without forming any central bulge at all. With all the insects crawling over Elvis, the alien creature was stationary, completely still. It was then she realized what she was looking at: an empty frame, a shell. What she and everyone else had assumed was the alien was nothing more than a vehicle, a vessel. In the same way as humans used tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and airplanes for transport and as weapons, the alien was using this organic contraption sitting stationary before her.

Alien or aliens? What she’d thought of as inconsequential worker bees gathering water had actually been at the heart of what she assumed was a single entity. This is what the spiky framework had wanted to protect when she held the gun. And now they were swarming over Elvis, repairing his arm.

As best she understood what she was seeing, these tiny insects were the alien intelligence. And as she watched she understood how vulnerable these creatures were in that moment, they’d committed themselves wholly to rebuilding his arm, leaving their protective weaponry standing idly by.

Bower crouched down, watching carefully. The tiny creatures were consuming the mattress, the springs within the mattress and a nearby wooden crate. Somehow, they were gathering the material they needed or converting these raw materials into what they required for their task.

Bower was speechless. For this to work, they had to be operating at a microscopic level, applying some kind of nanotechnology that allowed them to cultivate cellular growth at a radical pace. She’d been asleep for probably six or seven hours, and the results of their efforts so far were spectacular.

Were they reading his DNA and fabricating his arm in the same way humans would build a car? Or were they accelerating natural processes in some way? They had to be stimulating some kind of pluripotent cells, like stem cells. But how did they control the growth? How were they directing the appropriate response for building arteries in one area, bone in another? Get those mixed up and the results could be fatal.

Bower could see the vague outline of Elvis lying beneath the swarm. Those creatures that sat over his right arm were unusually still, whereas most of the creatures were moving around rapidly, these remained stationary. They had to be using his bilateral symmetry to guide them. Somehow they were sensing the structure of his right arm and mimicking a mirror image on the left. Bower was intrigued. Most people had arms and hands of differing sizes, with the right normally bigger than the left. She wanted to check his new arm once it was fully formed to see if that still applied, or if his new left arm was an exact mirror of the right.

Hunger pangs gnawed at her stomach, but she ignored them.

In the soft light, she left the creatures to go about their work and went to the tap for a drink of water.

On her way, she crept up behind one of the crates near the central pile of mattresses. She sat there for a few minutes listening, hidden from sight beneath the open hole. There was no one on the upper floor. She could hear movement out on the street, but not upstairs.

While getting some water, Bower peered out through the widened gap in the wooden frame. She tried pulling on the splinter of wood, and managed to enlarge her view a little.

Peering down the road, Bower could see steel beams propped up against the outside of the shutters. Adan, it seems, was determined the alien creature would not escape.

The street beside the factory was quiet. Occasionally, she’d see a soldier walking casually down what looked more of a lane-way than a road. The building at the far end seemed to be important, and must have fronted a main road as trucks and bicycles sped by. From what she could tell, they were nowhere near where they had been taken captive. She couldn’t put her finger on why she thought that, other than that the buildings looked somehow different.

After checking on Elvis and seeing him still buried in a swarm of tiny creatures, Bower decided to explore the rest of the lower floor. The spiked alien sat motionless to one side of Elvis, confirming her suspicions that it was a vessel rather than a living, intelligent creature of its own, and that fascinated her.

“I’m just going to look around to see what I can find,” she said, not sure who she was talking to, and certainly not expecting an answer. It just seemed polite. The creatures crawling over Elvis ignored her so she wandered off. Bower was careful not to step on the various thin streams of creatures disappearing into the darkness as they went out across the floor like ants, presumably hunting down more raw materials for the reconstruction of his arm.

The lower floor was almost a hundred yards long by thirty yards wide, reminding her of the dimensions of a football field. There were offices at either end, but these had been boarded up with wood rather than steel plates. She tried to break through one of the doors, but that only worked in Hollywood, and she ended up with a sore shoulder after barging the door a couple of times. There was a kitchenette. The tap worked. There was soap and a couple of sponges, not that she needed them. She found a butter knife and a couple of forks in one of the drawers along with a small plastic jug so she took them. There was no food, which was a bit disheartening, and she went back through the cupboards a couple of times just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

A locked door at the end of the corridor between the sealed offices led to the road outside. As this was at the opposite end to where she’d seen the soldiers entering what looked like their headquarters, she took hope that this door could be a good place to escape.

Bower lay on her stomach and tried to look beneath the door. Using the knife, she lifted the weather strip on the other side of the door and peered out. There was no noise outside. After a few minutes, a car drove past and she could hear people laughing within the vehicle, but other than that the back road seemed deserted. Bower wondered if there was a guard standing watch. Surely, they had someone watching their alien enclosure. They could have been standing to one side of the door and she’d never have known it. Patiently, she waited, realizing the more she could learn the more options they’d have once Elvis was back to full strength.

After an hour, she was satisfied that there wasn’t a guard on the back door. She got up and looked carefully at the door. The hinges were on the inside. She tried lifting one with the dull blade of the knife but couldn’t get it to budge. It might be something Elvis could manage, though. And for the first time she felt as though they were going to get out of this mess alive.

Bower returned to Elvis and sat there watching as the alien insects continued their work. She would have loved to watch the progress in more detail, but had to accept that something remarkable was occurring at a cellular level beneath this swarm of small, intelligent creatures.

Hours passed like years. Bower noted that the black sheen on what appeared to be the outer shell of the alien insects would take on different hues at times, but these were coordinated. In addition to that, the motion of those creatures attending to Elvis seemed to undulate in some kind of rhythm. For her, it confirmed what she suspected, that these creatures were working in unison as though they were one organism. She went and cleaned the knife and forks in running water and collected some water in the jug.

Shortly before sunset, Bower heard someone walking on the upper floor. She crept behind a broken wooden crate, being careful to remain hidden, and watched with interest. Two soldiers appeared, but from the number of voices she could hear, she figured there were more of them standing just out of sight, or it could have been that the others were further around the hole and thus out of her field of vision.

“There’s the gun,” said one of the African rebels.

“But did you see them die? Did you see the monster kill them?”

One of the soldiers shone a light into the darkness.

“Are you serious?” he asked, moving the light across the carnage. “Do you think anyone could survive down there? Look at the insects, look at how they feed on the blood.”

Bower hadn’t noticed, but the rebel soldier was right. A stream of tiny alien creatures fed on the blood, gristle and sinew. They must have been using this in the reconstruction.

“There has been another fight,” said another soldier. “They are dead. There is no way they could have defeated the monster.”

“General Adan wants to be sure.”

“I am sure,” one of the soldiers said from somewhere out of sight above her. “What? Do you want to go in there and check?”

“I’m not going down there.”

“Hah,” replied the first soldier to speak. “There is no way I am going in there with the beast. They are dead. That is all Adan needs to know.”

“But there are no bodies.”

“There are never any bodies.”