The Anomaly(69)

From the files of Nolan Moore:





PETROGLYPH FROM THE THREE RIVERS AREA, NEW MEXICO





Chapter

41



I’m kind of dumb sometimes and notoriously slow on the uptake, but I generally get there in the end. You may think you would have been faster but it’s different when you’re lost in the middle of it and far more aware of spilled blood and broken intestines and the danger of starvation than you are of abstract ideas. I was waiting for my back brain to nudge me—knowing, somehow, that it finally had something to bring to my attention—when Pierre spoke.

“What the hell just happened?”

He was looking to me for an answer rather than Ken, but I wasn’t there yet. He could tell I was thinking, and he waited patiently rather than repeating the question. I was long done with considering Pierre annoying.

Meanwhile Molly rounded on Ken. “Where did you go?”

“Hmm?” Ken sounded as if wheels were turning in his mind, too.

“I asked where you’d been. You said ‘just looking.’”

“Yeah, well, that’s what it was.”

“Really?”

Ken looked at me. I nodded. “All right,” he said. “Just before…before what just happened happened, Nolan and I saw something.”

“Something?”

“Kind of, well, a creature.”

“In here?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

“Not sure,” I said. “I didn’t see it clearly. I doubt Ken did, either.” Ken shook his head. “But it was big. With teeth. When it realized we’d seen it, it disappeared.”

Molly was staring at me now, horrified, her eyes wide. “Disappeared?”

“Not, like, vanished. It backed off into the dark. We went looking for it. When we heard you shouting, we thought it must have gotten around us and come back here.”

“So…so what the fuck?”

“We don’t know, Moll,” Ken said.

“But how did it get in here?”

“I don’t think it did,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“This morning,” I said slowly, as the idea laboriously translated itself into words. This morning seemed like a long time ago. It was back when Gemma was alive. Before she’d become that object lying on the ground between us. “This morning. There was a mosquito, right? I slapped at it.”

“So?”

“And Pierre—you saw a bug in the night. And maybe there’s a whole restricted little ecosystem in here and bugs are no big deal, but it’s kind of strange that we didn’t see any in the hours after we first arrived. And then this morning…Gemma felt something brush against her leg. But the way she described it made it sound like it wasn’t big. Domestic cat-sized, or a small dog. Right? Then something came up to me in the dark after I’d been talking to Feather. I didn’t see it and so I can’t swear to it, but I’m sure it was larger than that. But not as big as the thing Ken and I just saw.”

“So Gemma got it wrong,” Pierre said. “It was dark. She was already getting sick.”

“True. Or…maybe they’re all different things.”

“Nolan, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“Come with me,” I said. “All of you. From now on, unless there’s a very good reason, we stick close together at all times. Okay?”

Pierre and Molly mumbled assent. I grabbed the light and led them to the corridor over on the left side.



Ken and I stood a foot back from the ledge over the pool where twenty-four hours previously the two of us—and a woman who was now very dead—had taken a swim. Molly and Pierre were behind us. I held the light up so everyone could see.

The surface of the pool was now entirely covered with the greenish-black algae, or whatever it was. It was thicker, too, at least an inch in parts.

The room was much hotter than it had been before. A mist overhung the water. It smelled…It didn’t smell like water. There was an organic, meaty undertone.

Ken was nodding. “It’s got to be, hasn’t it?”

“I think so,” I said.

“For God’s sake,” Molly said. “What?”

“The spheres,” I said. “The ones that were on pedestals but are now all in the water. You saw what they looked like.”

“Yes, so?”

“The largest was at the back. Much bigger than the others. Dark gray, a matte surface. I’m thinking that was carbon. And we saw another that looked like copper. And iron. There will have been potassium and magnesium, and calcium and others. Some of those spheres were pretty small, remember. Trace elements.”

“What about oxygen and hydrogen?” Ken asked. “Those are the big guys, right?”

“From water in the pool. Plus that plant stuff could now be breaking down carbon dioxide.”

“Nitrogen?”

“The atmosphere. And for all we know one of those balls could have contained a stock of it under pressure.”

“Sodium, and chlorine?”

“A ball of salt. Bromine and some others are probably bound into compounds, too.”