Case Of The Stalk Forest Research Group

Marion: Frantic pounding on my hotel room door broke my peaceful slumber. The clock said 2 AM. I took up a foot-long piece of galvanized pipe that I carry expressly for the purpose of silencing unwelcome visitors.

     "Open the door! It's Albert! Come on! Get yer lazy ass out of bed!" shouted the muffled voice.

     "Jesus, what's the problem," I snapped, opening the door.

     Albert rushed in, his normal pleasant and cheerful demeanor mutated into pallid terror. "Johnson and Cindy---the whole team's infected. Went right through their level 2 gear."

     "Infected?" I muttered only to suddenly realize..."You told me the site was safe! You idiot!" I swung the pipe at him. Albert expertly dodged to one side. I let the momentum of my swing carry me around and then back-kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. He landed between the wall and bed, his legs sticking straight up.

     "You trying to kill me?" he shouted.

     "Goddamn it, you took me into a contaminated area! You've probably killed me already!" I raised the pipe and aimed for his nose.

     "Don't you think if we were exposed that I'd be sealed off with the others right now and you'd be dead? What ever infected them was inside the ship, not out where we were watching the monitors."

     I threw the pipe at the pillow. "You fucking jerk!" I shouted. "You stupid fucking jerk!"

     Albert climbed up to sit on the bed. Since there would be no sleep for rest of the night, I got dressed. Albert explained what happened.

     "I saw Johnson briefly through the isolation room glass window. It was spreading down his leg like how ink billows when a squid shoots it into water. He said Cindy got it first. Right after dinner when they left the restaurant---a large wine-colored stain on her forearm. It spread rapidly. By the time they got her to the hospital, she was unconscious. Just as well, though; her whole arm had necrotized and the skin was sloughing off. I doubt she'll keep the arm---if she lives. It hit West, then Johnson, and then Nigel in the waiting room. The staff doc fainted when Johnson said they had been exposed to a hazardous biologic and they needed the CDC."

     "Sounds like you're going to get me killed afterall," I sneered.

     He nodded, "The CDC brought in the Army---and that testosterone-addled Ostwinkle's in command."

     We rushed out to the car and had driven a block down the road from the hotel when a pair of State Police cars came flying by with lights and sirens and pulled into the hotel lot. I could well imagine them screeching to a stop right in front of my room; the officers quickly and smoothly taking up positions on either side of the door, weapons drawn. Then one dramatically kicking in the door only to find the room empty; the signs of my tussle with Albert apparent. They soon put it together with the car they passed on the way in. I didn't need to figure any further and hammered the peddle to floor.

     The site on the Lanier Farm lay about five miles out of Ely. At the end of a rutted lane we came to the Lanier house. I turned off the engine and let the car roll past it to the path leading down to the dig site. I figured the Laniers would fare better in the long run if they were kept in the dark and nothing disturbed their sleep.

     Albert's silver-skinned Airstream trailer gleamed in the feeble moonlight a few yards away from the black abyss of the day's digging. Parking next to the trailer, we crept out of the car and up to its door. Albert nervously guided his fingers over the lock and the edge of the door making sure it hadn't been forced open, then he unlocked the door and we entered. As soon as he turned on the lights, Albert began checking a tall metal shelf full of computer monitors and printed readouts. I started unpacking two of the Level 4 suits from their sealed plastic bags, careful to draw the window blinds around the trailer first. I knew trouble was on it's way and half expected to hear a bull horn telling us to come out at any second. Suddenly, Albert's shout startled me so that I rammed my head into the bottom of the shelf overhead and knocked over the rest of the HAZMAT suits.

     "Shit," he hissed loudly, throwing aside a handful of print outs to clatter away on one of the keyboards. "This doesn't make sense!"

     "What!?" I snapped, scuttling to his side.

     He nodded at the computer screen. On one side of the screen was column displaying sensor readings: atmosphere, humidity, air pressure, radiation. On the other was a snowy live video shot of a section of inside the space ship. Something was moving in the background.

     "What's that?" I pointed to an dark oblong shape writhing along some sort of twist-incised bulkhead thing in the back. "A rat?"

     "Not the way it's moving. Look at the atmosphere sensor; I don't think anything in there could breathe, " he answered. "Nitric acid vapor's been building for several hours; even the camera's going bad."

     The picture fuzzed and flickered as Albert panned the camera one way and then another, trying to keep it focused on the shadow moving in the background. Suddenly he stopped it, and stared at the screen.

     "That's incredible," he muttered. I stared in amazement. The monitor showed what had been a shattered section of conduit we had seen earlier in the day while the team documenting the wreck; orange resinous fluid leaked from the ruptured 2 inch tubing. Now, though the conduit had completely rebuilt itself.

     Suddenly, the camera went dead...

     The thick blue rubber suits creaked and squealed as we half-waddled down a the incline of loose dirt into the dark pit. The rubber face mask tugged irritatingly on my unshaved jaw and the ear piece seemed perched precariously so that it tickled my ear. I could hear Albert breaths grow more rapid when his flashlight shown on the sides of unearthed ship. A ragged hole in its dull silver hull had been covered with a temporary airlock made of aluminum studs and heavy plastic early this morning. As we entered, yellowish-brown vapor wafted out of the hole, the plastic covering it had already decayed into a fine black powder.

     We checked each other's oxygen equipment and suits one last time, then crawled through the other corroding plastic curtain into the ship.

     The team had set up lights with a couple of car batteries. Albert clicked a switch but instead of the bright halogen light we'd seen earlier, the interior of the ship glowed a dull rust orange. I spotted three of the four batteries were also decomposing, their plastic casings sloughing off into more black ash.

     The video I saw earlier that day prepared me but little for this marvelous experience: inside a legendary alien spacecraft. There seemed little in the way of visible controls---no knobs or buttons as such---just flat panels with indentations shaped like a spayed pig's trotter. Two middle fingers and two opposable thumbs. Suddenly, the image sickened me---this was the shape of their hands!

     Albert's voice crackled in my ear to come to him at once. I turned and made my way through a pair of bulk-heads to find Albert examining some sort of junction or node where several different dark chitinous conduits came together in a dodecahedron about 18 inches across made of the same dark, hard material. Before my very eyes, a few flakes shed from the side of the node, revealing a whitish-pink jelly beneath. I was about to touch it with a my gloved hand when something slurped noisily from the darker recesses inside. A translucent dripping tube emerged and slowly yet steadily snaked its winding way into the hole in the node. Upon sealing, the tube filled with squirting orange resinous stuff. And in a minute, the tube darkened and hardened over so that it looked like the other conduits plugged into the node. The whole process took less than a minute.

     "The ship's regenerating?" I sputtered.

     Albert shook his head, "Not possible. It's been buried for over a hundred years."

     "Something the team did when they entered triggered it. Lights, movement, a change in temperature, brain wave activity---damn, it could be anything!"

     "Yeah, but how do we stop it?" he replied.

     "What?"

     "You don't want Ostwinkle getting hold of this kind of technology!" Albert blurted with anger so sudden that I had to reach back to keep my balance. "He'll make it vanish so deep into the Pentagon's belly that even GAO Inspectors coated in Vaseline would never find it. I've seen him do it; at S-4, at Wright-Patterson and Aerodyne. But we can't let the military swallow this up, too! We gotta disseminate this technology to everyone in the world or destroy it right here and now!"

     As we looked for controls that might give us a clue, Albert's tone showed he knew the General too well. His emotions offered an angle I would be all too comfortable taking advantage of, but that also required us to get out of the ship in good health---and at our own liberty.

     After finding nothing but a group of four disgusting hand-print panels, a noise came from the back of ship. I moved carefully, passing into a large misty chamber deeper in the ship. There I discovered one of three large bulkheads had been pushed over onto the floor. Above, a torrent of thick orange fluid dripped onto the dust covered floor. The room's lone halogen lamp dully lit the chamber so I was obliged to aim my flashlight into the ceiling. There, a cluster of huge power nodes, each the size of a basket ball loomed overhead. It looked like they had burst out from behind a panel directly above the bulkhead, knocking it to the floor. As I watched, they grew another inch in diameter, each one sprouting numerous smaller nodes as translucent tubes erupted out from their sides and grew down to the floor.

     Albert skittered in next to me shouting only to look up and mutter in awe, "Shit."

     "Something's going very wrong," I offered. Suddenly, one of the tubes snaked down and sprayed me with the orange goo right in my plexiglas face mask. An instant later, the mask cracked!

     I gasped with horror what I thought to be my last breath, staring as the orange fluid eat carve cracks into plexiglas mask. Albert shouted at me, shaking my shoulders. I finally sputtered I was okay. The goo had not penetrated through the face mask and as I was wearing a breathing mask beneath, I was still well protected.

     "C'mon!" Albert shouted, grabbing my arm and yanking me aside. Just then two fat tubes struck for the place where I was sitting. We froze. They hung there like cobras, turning disgustingly back and forth sampling the air for the scent of prey. They soon found me and leaped for my mask.

     I fell backwards to avoid them but they homed in easily on the orange goo on my cracked face mask. They attached themselves to the plexiglas with savage little hooked teeth and tried at once to spit more orange fluid. The plexiglas held amazingly enough and I guess since I wasn't a node, the two tubes didn't harden. With a little effort, I tore them away and took to my heels.

     My blue rubber suit squealed between my running thighs like a frightened pig. Albert was no where in sight. Between shouting loud long curses into my mike, I puffed hard. Running in the suit was difficult and exhausting. I had trouble navigating the corridor because of the cracked mask. No word came from him, and I promised myself to punch him in the nose when I found him. Suddenly, I stumbled over an intricate web of chitinous tubing running across the floor. Orange resin stuff dripped over everything from the ceiling. As I flailed about, screaming my head off, the ceiling burst apart over me and two swollen nodes tumbled down; each as large as steroid-crazed weather balloons. They jerked to a stop scarcely a yard above my head, hung by thick knot of dark tubes. Suddenly both nodes shed their shells revealing a vast pinkish-white clog of writhing maggotty things. As the fragments of hard casing dropped onto me, I heard a high-pitch buzzing which quickly grew louder and more painful. Suddenly, I realized the orange stuff coating my shattered face mask had broken through and the little sprouting tubules were wriggling towards my face!

     Panicking, I got to my feet and slipped and slid the last twenty feet out of the ship. Little was left of the airlock having been corroded by the ship's noxious fumes. I clambered a few yards up the side of the pit and quickly shed my gear, throwing the hood and broken face mask with its little tentacled occupants at the ship. Fighting back the shudders, I rushed up the side of the pit and headed for the trailer.

     Inside, broken glass crackled under my feet. Everywhere I looked, computers and printers had been smashed apart. I smelled gasoline. At once, Albert appeared at my elbow.

     "Bastard!" I shouted, throwing a right jab at his nose. He ducked and my hand smashed painfully into the Airstream's wall.

     Albert pushed me out the door onto the ground. "So I panicked! It sure looked to me there wasn't anything I could do." he shouted back.

     "It's alive!" I raged. "The damn ship's alive!"

     "And fortunately not for much longer judging from what I saw in my microscope." He pointed at the jouncing beams of vehicle headlights pass by the Lanier house on the hill heading towards us. "Head off across the meadow. Follow the old railroad bed, you'll get to Ely in fifteen minutes. Someone from your office will pick you up. Better see a doctor you trust---just in case."

     "In case what? Goddamn it, don't tell me I'm infected!"

     "Get going, you idiot!" he shouted, running off into the dark. "If we get away, Ostwinkle won't get a thing out of this."

     "I'm gonna kill you!" I shouted before dashing into the meadow.

     Suddenly, a sharp bang bowled me over onto the ground. The Airstream was burning furiously, a pillar of fire spiraling into the night sky.

     The last thing I saw before reaching the railroad bed were the Army HumVees lurching to a stop. By the light of the fire, a robust martial figure stepped forward and angrily crossed his arms.