Earth Man (5 page)

             
His eyes flickered open and he saw his own blood pooling around him. Danny heard voices coming down the stairs but he could not call out.

“
That you again Norbert? You know you can’t sleep down here. If you’re sleeping in here we’re turning you over to the cops this time.”

ITSY BITSY SPIDER, EARTH MAN..
             

Danny recognized the voice right away; it was the voice from the forest. The sou
nd came from somewhere inside him and jolted him awake. He thought he’d heard it before but he ignored it, but now it was loud and clear. This time the voice would not be ignored and Danny no longer had the strength to fight it.

ARANEAE. IXODIDA. HOME SAPI
ENS. ALL IS ONE.

Danny
’s skin began to ooze a thick clear liquid. The fluid filled in his wounds and tried to cover his mouth but he wiped his face with his good arm.

A second voice chimed in, deeper than the first.

“I don’t know why you keep giving this guy another chance, let’s just toss the bum out into the trash and be done with HOLY SHIT!”

Danny couldn
’t see them; his vision was fading in and out fast. He tried to call out to them but he couldn’t find his voice. They seemed to radiate a glow like a 3-D image. They were wasting valuable time inspecting the freakish corpse they’d discovered and by the time they’d notice Danny lying at the other end of the room they had already lost valuable seconds. His life was fading and Danny knew it, each beat of his heart sent his life’s blood pumping out onto the floor. The glaze of sweat continued to ooze from his pours and at it touched his wounds the bleeding began to slow.

The security guards were out of their element and they quickly ran upstairs, yelling into
their radios for police and paramedics. Danny couldn’t help but be amused by the fact he was dying on the floor of a hospital. Finally the song of the darkness overtook him and he closed his eyes. He could feel the moulting fluid covering him up and he had no more energy to fight.

OLIGOCHAETA.HUMAN. ALL IS ONE.

Suddenly Danny understood what the voice was saying. Araneae was spiders, Ixodida were also known as ticks. Oligochaeta.

“
Oligochaeta.” Danny whispered to himself.

A common earthworm. What did the
y mean though? Why was it important? Danny opened his eyes and looked at his wounded arm. The bone had already grown back and he watched in amazement as the meat and skin re-grew over top of his skeleton. The moulting fluid worked as a healing agent, covering his wounds and regenerating them quickly. Danny had no idea if anything in nature could even heal that fast. It was like watching some kind of magical plant bloom before his eyes except he could feel the nerves and the sensations flooding through the new flesh. The paramedics and police burst into the room, waving flashlights in his face. As he held up his hand to block the light, the last pieces of his new hand knitted themselves together. The new bones cracked for the first time and the paramedics put Danny on a stretcher. All he could do is stare at his new arm, the skin pink and fresh. As they put him on the elevator they placed a breathing mask over his face. He moved the fingers on the newly regrown hand, marvelling as the muscles flexed for the first time. Danny held both arms up side by side and while they were mirror images of each other, there was clearly a difference in age between the two limbs. Then the shock set in and Danny fell back unconscious.

When the hospital finally cleared Danny to leave it was Phil who came to pick him up. After what happened in the basement Danny and Helen both agreed that it wasn’t safe for the kids to come back to the hospital. They’d barely spoken about it and Danny had no way to explain it. People around the hospital started whispering about the guy with all the bad luck. Helen had missed too much work already and with Danny now unemployed, Phil volunteered to get him so Helen could keep her client happy. It seemed ridiculous to be building an oak wardrobe while her husband was in the hospital but her real estate clients wanted the houses ready in time for their potential buyers. It was a Wednesday anyway and the kids were off at school, whereas Phil’s son was off at college in Los Angeles.

There had been a lot of questions about what had happened and what exactly th
e creature was they’d found downstairs. But with all Danny had been through and his general lack of cooperation, the police decided he was simply an unlucky guy who’d happened upon a very sick individual. The Center for Disease Control had been called in to remove the body and they could find nothing that could pose a risk to anyone else. The corpse was long gone before Phil showed up and the hospital wanted to put it behind them as quickly and quietly as possible. They even went so far as to wave Danny’s single room costs, wiping it off the bill entirely. Danny said nothing as he got dressed, this time with a plain white t-shirt; his jeans had survived the encounter with the Third in one piece. Phil waited patiently for him to sign himself out and they walked side by side to the car. Phil opened the passenger door for his old friend who he’d known since high school. Although Danny gave him a strange look, still Phil said nothing.

             
Inside the old Volkswagen that smelled like a dirty hockey bag, Phil took off his hat and tossed it in the back. Putting his seatbelt on, Danny watched Phil rub his balding, short cut afro. It looked as if Phil was going to say something, but instead he turned the key to start the engine. Then Phil turned to him, scratching his stubbly beard as the words came tumbling out.

“
Look are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on or not, man?”

Dan
ny was taken aback for a moment. “What are you talking about, exactly?”

“
Look I’m not your wife or that dumb-ass doctor. I was there, Danny. I saw things, heard things. I saw your face, when I found you. It was messed up. I didn’t come to the hospital sooner? Because I didn’t want to talk about it. But they just pulled a monster out of there, didn’t they? So rather than spend the next few days of my life trying to figure it out I’m going right to the source, right now. Whatever is happening is happening to you, Danny. So either you trust me and let me in, now, or I hit the road. I am not going to end up getting killed because you have communication problems.”

“
Killed? What are you talking about? Why would you get killed?” Danny asked wryly.

“
I’ve seen more than enough movies and TV shows to know how this is going to go down, I’ve even read a few books. You know what every science fiction and horror story has in common? The victims. Aliens land on Earth and half the town is dead before the guy who suspected they were aliens says anything. Dude sees a vampire eat his neighbour and he doesn’t call the cops until it’s his turn. Ninety nine percent of all movie plots could be shut down right away if the person who is the lead character just shared what the hell he knew with everyone else.”

Danny burst out laughing but Phil kept on, deadly serious.

“Why am I the main character here? Maybe YOU are!” Danny said.

“
No. You’re the white guy, you’re the hero. More power to you man. I don’t want all this shit following me around. I don’t want all that responsibility and commitment. I just want to keep my head down and get out of this alive.”

“
I think you’re over-reacting a bit Phil.”

“
I mean it, you tell me what is going on, to the best of your ability, so I can make an informed decision about which path I take. Otherwise I am just walking blindly into the jaws of death.”

Danny continued to chuckle until he realized that Phil was truly afraid. Whatever that voice was in the woods, whatever
was happening, Phil was a part of it. Danny didn’t even know where to begin with all the odd and terrible things he’d seen. There was no way to put into words what he was experiencing but he owed it to his friend to try. After the monster he’d faced in the morgue he couldn’t ignore the danger all around him. If he was going to protect his friends and family, he’d have to start by telling them the truth. Phil was right in that regard; the more people knew the better prepared they would be. Something big was happening that much Danny was sure of. It was as if something was picking at the edges of the world, trying to peel back a loose piece of reality and climb through.

“
Can we at least get some beer first?” Danny asked.

Phil smiled and started the car engin
e.

             
After picking up a twelve pack at the Beer Store, Danny and Phil headed for their favourite drinking spot; the curb at the base of Knox Mountain Drive. They parked the car on the dirt shoulder on the opposite site of the intersection and with their beer between their feet they sat on the gray stone curb.

“
You heard the voice too?” Danny asked.

Phil nodded as he cracke
d his beer bottle open.

“
Yeah it sounded like T-Pain. I thought there was a car parked somewhere nearby but I didn’t see anything,” Phil replied.

“
I did. I saw a light. A red beam, flashing somewhere in the forest.”

“
What was it?”

“
I don’t know. I never saw anything. I followed it and I found the dead deer we’d shot and,” Phil cut him off quickly.

“
When I found you there was no deer.”

“
What? Really?”

“
Yeah man. Just you and your face, all messed up in fear and shock.”

Phil stretched open his mouth and e
yes, hiding his teeth, to show Danny how he’d looked when Phil had found him. Danny just shook his head.

“
Is that what I looked like? Really? I don’t remember anything other than the deer. The voice didn’t sound like T-Pain either.”

“
Well not like T-Pain, exactly, but it was definitely auto tune.”

“
It didn’t sound like that to me at all. If anything, it was more child-like, higher pitch. More alien.”

Phil finished his beer and walked over to the garbage can and threw it out. 

“You mean like those little bug-eyed things?” Phil asked.

“
Yeah, the ass-probers.”

“
Did you get probed?”

“
Hell no.”

“
Well there’s some good news right there. So what happened in the hospital?”

“
Did you see it? The thing, the creature?”

“
No, but I overheard the nurses talking about it. Some kind of burn victim, or deformed freak or something.”

“
It was a man; at least it was at first. I could see it happening, the change, like right in front of me. From a man into something else, something horrible. It tried to kill me. It chopped off my arm.”

“
What??”

Phil grabbed the arm as Danny held it up. Unable to pull Danny closer from a sitting position, Phil stood up, took off his hat and tossed it on the curb and took Danny
’s arm in both his hands.

Taking the thumb, Phil moved it around, rubbing the skin.

“Where’s the scar?” Phil asked, turning the hand back and forth.

“
I told you it re-grew, I lost the whole hand, man!”

“
This is totally and completely crazy. It’s impossible.”

Phil sat back do
wn, put his hat back on and opened another beer. Danny stood up while Phil tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. Regeneration. That was more serious than just hearing voices; this was a serious breach of the rules of the universe. People just did not grow limbs back. People did not get attacked by monsters either, but the exact nature of this monster was still up in the air. A mutated human was not that far outside Phil’s realm of possibility, after all people were born with defects all the time. A new hand meant something else; it meant that things were changing in the world and that the rules were being remade.

The missing injury on Danny
’s old hand was caused by a violent football accident. As the quarterback Danny was hit hard by a strong offensive rush. Phil had been one of the linebackers and had slipped in the mud, letting his man slip past. The horrible weather caused his whole defensive line to crumble and Danny had been mobbed by multiple members of the opposing team. Even with his teammates helping, he was buried beneath a mass of bodies. One of the players had stepped on his thumb, bending it back and snapping the bone. The skin had stretched back and torn open and the surgery to repair the muscle tissue and regain use of the thumb had left a scar as well. There had been no permanent injuries but it had taken months before his hand recuperated. The scar was there long after their football careers, and their career aspirations had moved on. To see that scar, that childhood reminder of the boys they were, wiped away by some strange supernatural force, really hurt Phil in a way he could not explain. It was a piece of their shared history that was now gone forever.