Instinct (47 page)

“I’ve logged you in as a guest, but you should be able to view your photos,” Hampton said.
 

They all crowded around a rugged laptop that Hampton set on the edge of the table.

“Will this automatically preview the pictures?” Tim asked. “Because if it does, we have to turn that off.”

“No need,” Robby said. He took control of the laptop and plugged in Tim’s USB drive. Before he opened the folder, he turned to address the group. “Everyone cover one eye. Like this.” He demonstrated, holding one hand up in front of his left eye. “You all have use of both eyes, correct?”

“Yes,” they all answered eventually.

“Good. Then you just need to cover one eye to be safe.”

Robby opened the images. He flipped through a couple. Tim had taken pictures of the sides of buildings, rock walls, hallways, and even one parking lot as seen from above. The one thing they all had in common was the symbols. Most were dark maroon, or red, like they’d been written in blood. Some images also contained a corpse lying nearby. In one, an eviscerated deer was visible in the corner.

Amy Lynne gasped and Jackson helped her limp away from the laptop.
 

Cedric wouldn’t look at the screen. He curled up under the table.

“Why can we look at them if we cover one eye?” Tim asked.

“I don’t know,” Robby said. He turned to Hampton. “We’re going to need a printer.”

Robby worked for an hour, sending the images out to the printer in the little room. It smelled slightly of ammonia and other chemicals that Robby couldn’t identify. The printer sucked in giant paper, three-feet wide, from a thick spool and the output piled on the floor. Tim came in for the next piece. Like everyone, he had a piece of tape over one eye. He bumped into a table on his way to the printer and cursed under his breath.
 

“How many more?” Tim asked.

“Maybe a dozen. How does it look?” Robby asked.

“I think we’re almost done.”

Robby helped Tim collect the rest of the posters and they walked them out to the main room. Ty could reach the ceiling without the ladder, so he was taping up the images to the top of the wall. Hampton was working on a couple near the center.

Amy Lynne, Jackson, and Cedric were still up above. The girl and the dog couldn’t handle the ladder, and Jackson stayed with them in case there was trouble.

Tim consulted the laptop. “It looks pretty good, I think.”

Robby handed his latest printouts to Hampton and then he returned to the center of the room. The printouts of the symbols were pasted on the walls of the big room. A couple of the symbols were too small. He directed Ty to rotate one of the symbols near the ceiling. It was only off by a few degrees, but it was enough for Robby to notice.

“We’re missing a couple over here,” Robby said. He pointed to a spot beside one of the machines. “It was just beyond the corner of one of your pictures.”

“Sorry,” Tim said.

Robby shrugged. “I saw it too. It was at the edge of a mural I saw in a basement near my house. I could only memorize so much, so I missed that one piece. Bad coincidence that we missed the same thing.”

Hampton finished his work and came towards the center of the room. “Is that it? Did we recreate your vision?” he asked Robby.

Robby had been the first to see it, but everyone had agreed quickly—the symbols shown in Tim’s photos formed a chain. If you lined up the edges, they were like little snapshots of the inside of a cylinder. Arranged properly, they would form a circle. Now that they’d printed them all out, Robby stood at the center of that circle.

Ty finished his adjustment and he joined the others at the laptop. Tim flipped through the images. He rubbed his taped-up eye and used his other eye to compare the images on the screen to what they’d hung. Everyone looked between the laptop and the walls and nodded their agreement.

“If just one of these images put me out for several minutes, what’s the whole bunch of them going to do to a person?” Ty asked.

“We’ll see,” Robby said. “But I have an idea that it will be okay.”

“How can you say that?” Tim asked with a little laugh. “I avoid looking at those things like the plague, at least until you showed us the one-eye trick. I’m with Ty—I’m kinda nervous just being in the room with all these things.”

“We should be cautious,” Robby said. “You guys leave the room and I’ll look. If I don’t come out in five minutes, then come in after me. But be careful.”

“Why?” Ty asked.

“Who knows what the sight will do to me,” Robby said.

“This man outweighs you by about a buck-fifty, Robby. I think we’ll be okay,” Tim said.

Robby didn’t get a chance to respond.

“You’re not looking at it alone,” Hampton said. “I’m going to look too. You guys get out of here and give us a minute, will you?”

Tim and Ty glanced at each other and then looked back to Hampton and Robby. After a second, they acquiesced and turned for the door. When they were safely in the side room, Hampton turned to Robby.

“I’m taking your word that these symbols do anything at all. They only reason I even half believe you is that you mentioned them before these guys showed up, and then they had the same story.”

Robby shrugged.

“I recommend you close both eyes, take the tape off, and then open them both to let it hit you all at once,” Robby said. Robby already had the tape off his eye and his eyes firmly shut as he finished his instructions. With his head pointed down and his eyes shut, he climbed up onto the chair and stood, putting his arms out to his sides for balance.

Robby opened his eyes and took in the mural.

He saw nothing but the symbols. He’d printed them in red, just in case it made a difference. It wasn’t the dark maroon of the originals—that color seemed hard for the massive printer to reproduce. This red was brighter, like a barn instead of dried blood. The images surrounded him, so less than half were in his field of view. Still, it felt like he could sense the symbols behind him. The whole thing, the entire three-sixty mural of symbols, was like a hologram, forming a giant picture for him.
 

The hologram formed a living history that was too big to fit inside his head. He felt like he’d been dropped into a giant tank of water, and he was trying to drink his way to the bottom. The information filled him. Like Romie, he saw back to one of the early arrivals when the world was filled with enormous reptiles. Like in the cellar of Irwin Dyer, he saw a vision of an egg, filled with light. He hadn’t told anyone about that vision, but it came back to him in a flood of sensation.

He saw the lifecycle of the alien that had impregnated the Earth. First, it cleared away its nest. Next, it set a snare to collect its deutoplasm, the food it would use to sustain early development. Then, the temperature would be regulated for the incoming embryo. Robby saw it all, including the mistakes he had made when he had hauled the corpses north through the snow.
 

Robby lost his balance and tumbled from the chair. He realized when he broke his eyes away from the mural that he had been spinning. As he fell he was facing the opposite side of the room. Hampton landed on his knees next to him.

A big smile spread over Hampton’s face.

“What are you so happy about?” Robby asked.

“We were right,” Hampton said.

The lights went dim and a klaxon sounded.
 

“What’s happening?” Tim yelled from the doorway.

“It’s beginning,” Hampton said.

CHAPTER 38: BOX

J
UDY
RUBBED
HER
WRISTS
. The red mark from the cuffs was almost gone. She lifted a hand and pressed it against the thick glass. The flowers were beautiful. The purple almost seemed to glow. She suspected that it was one of those flowers that showed up really well in a spectrum that the human eye couldn’t quite see. The center of the blossom didn’t contain the little pollen-delivering structures of a normal flower. There was a bundle of red and blue veins there.
 

Everything was so still on the other side of the glass. It could have been a painting. Then, all at once, the vines shifted and swam. She almost lost her balance looking at them. Judy smiled. She couldn’t hear it, but she could feel the thunk as they called to her with their strange, hypnotic song.

“I saw two vines only half that big tear a man into several discrete pieces,” one of the bearded men said over her shoulder. At one time, she had thought that all the bearded men were the same. The difference were so obvious. Ones like Frank, who had simply joined up because they’d fallen under the spell of a charismatic leader, were soft and reasonable. The man behind her barely had a beard at all. The hair on his face was sparse and patchy. But, despite the patchy facial hair, this man was hard. She could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.
 

“I think they’re pretty,” Judy said.

“It takes three generators to supply enough power to keep those things out of this box. If any one of those generators goes down, you’re going to find out how dangerous those vines are.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“A researcher in Guatemala found fossilized specimens of those vines. They were coiled so tight around skeletons that they were fused to the bones. Their thorns had pierced into the marrow.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Judy asked.

“I thought you should understand what you’ve chosen to align yourself with.”

“Why do you people have to turn everything into a war? I’m not out fighting on the side of these vines,” she said, gesturing towards the window. “I’ve simply chosen not to fight the inevitable. All our history lives in that thing. Did you realize that? Every good memory you’ve ever had is waiting for you. The time in your life that you felt the most secure—you could be right back in that moment. I’ve seen it.”

“It’s an illusion,” the man said. “It feeds on our consciousness. What you saw was the digested remains of your memories. I prefer not to be food for some alien.”

Judy laughed. “You really have no idea what you’re talking about. Who came up with that? It’s just absurd. You can’t trust an organization which favors loyalty over critical thinking.”

“I know one thing for sure—in the history of life on this planet, one threat keeps returning. It’s a ruthless, emotionless, monster that doesn’t even comprehend that we are living, sentient beings. This thing is so big and so powerful that it can stomp us from existence without even breaking a sweat. The fight is so important, that the instructions on how to defeat it are encoded in our very DNA. We know ninety-nine percent of what we need to do here, Judy. We will win. You’ve experienced something that very few people survive. You may have knowledge that will help us finalize that final one percent. If you accept our victory as inevitable, and share what you know, you might help us win this battle with a little less loss of life.”

Judy turned away from the man and pressed her hand against the window again. “You talk about this thing like it’s evil.”

“It is.”

“What’s more evil—to simply want to live and grow, or to sacrifice your own friends in order to fight some imagined battle?”

“This thing has no regard for us.”

“That’s right. It’s like a tree that’s growing in the center of a termite hill. If you hadn’t noticed, the termites were poisoning the soil anyway. Maybe the tree will have better luck.”

He didn’t reply. He walked through the door and disappeared for several minutes. When he came back, he was even less friendly.

“You’re going to be part of the solution, one way or another,” he said.

The man hit a button on the wall next to the door. The door slid up and out of sight. Judy heard the gentle hiss coming from speakers and felt hot air float through the door. The man stepped out and gestured to someone Judy couldn’t see. A second later, two more bearded men came through the door and motioned for her to step out. Judy rubbed her wrists again. She learned her lesson earlier—when she didn’t comply, they got rough. Judy walked between the men.

They led her outside. The sun was up over the trees. The walkway was made of metal and felt warm under her shoes. The vines were piled on either side of the walk, but they didn’t trespass on the metal. Judy didn’t see where the other man had gone. She could run, but where would she go? The walkway was the only place safe from the vines and the two men walked directly behind her. The walkway took a left and led towards a cluster of buildings. She could just see the brick walls under the carpet of vines draped over the structures. The vines were everywhere.

The walkway ended at a circular pad. It was just big enough for Judy to stand on alone. She turned back to her escorts.

“Stand on the pad,” one man said.

“What if I refuse?” Judy asked.

“Then we’ll pitch you into the vines. They don’t discriminate.”

Judy sighed. When she stepped onto the pad and turned around, she saw where the other man had gone. On top of the metal box where she had spoken with him, there was another room. He must have climbed up there after leaving her. She saw his face through a window.