Night of the Living Trekkies

by Kevin David Anderson
and Sam Stall

ATTENTION ALL STARFLEET PERSONNEL

The following text is an original work of fiction/horror/parody.
Night of the Living Trekkies
is not sponsored by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the owners of the
Star Trek
® brand. Any personnel claiming otherwise will be sentenced to one year of hard labor in the penal colony of Rura Penthe.

“It isn’t all over; everything has not been invented; the human adventure is just beginning.”
—Gene Roddenberry
“Horror is the genre that never dies.”
—George A. Romero

“Space, the final frontier . . .”

“Shut up.”

“These are the voyages of the starship
Enterprise
. . .”

“I said, shut up.”

“Its five-year mission: to explore strange worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations . . .”

“You’re pissing me off.”

“To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

“Quit rubbing it in, okay?”

First Lieutenant Mallory Kaplan, U.S. Air Force Medical Service flight nurse, finished her recital and smiled triumphantly.

“Actually, that last bit doesn’t quite capture the current situation,” she said. “Plenty of men—and women—have already gone where I’m going. But I’ll be the first person
currently in this room
to make the trip.”

The room of which she spoke was an underground bunker. She and her senior watch officer, U.S. Air Force Captain Les Marple, spent four eight-hour shifts inside it each week, studying images and readouts on computer monitors. During the long, boring stretches when nothing inside the almost completely automated facility required their attention, they passed the time by harassing each other.

“You’re being unprofessional,” Marple said. “I’m your superior officer. Show some respect.”

“Can’t help it,” Kaplan said. “I’m so excited about my uniform.”

“You’re dressing up?”

“Of course. That’s half the fun of attending a Star Trek convention. I’m portraying one of the greatest captains ever to command the
Enterprise
.”

“You mean Kirk?”

“Kirk’s a man.”

“I know, but I think you could pull it off.”

Kaplan smacked him lightly on the head with her clipboard.

“I’m going as Captain Rachel Garrett,” she said.

Marple shot Kaplan a puzzled look.

“Who the hell is that?” he said.

“The captain of the
Enterprise
-C, which served a couple of decades before the
Enterprise
-D from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. A temporal rift brought it forward in time, changing future history. In order to repair the damage, it had to go back to its own era, even though . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Marple said. “Seen it, bought the Blu-ray. What’s the point of going as someone so obscure? No one will recognize you.”

Kaplan’s sly smile let him know that he’d walked into a trap.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said with mock concern. “You’ve never
been
to GulfCon. You don’t know that the convention attendees like to go as incredibly obscure Trek characters. It’s a joke that started at the first one, five years ago. If you make it through the entire weekend without anyone guessing your identity, you win a hundred bucks.”

“Screw that,” Marple said. “I’d go as Picard. He’s what inspired me to join the Air Force. I kept thinking that one day I’d be exploring space and commanding my own ship.”

“Me, too,” Kaplan said wistfully. “How’s that working out for you?”

Marple surveyed his surroundings. The bunker in which the two of them sat was located on the grounds of the Johnson Space-flight Center, just outside Houston, Texas. Not that the general public—or, for that matter, most of the center’s staff—knew that. Their duty station, secured behind a steel door that opened only to those who passed a retinal scan, was a dimly lit, concrete-floored room with a single long desk, upon which sat two massive computer monitors—monitors that formed the centers of their professional lives.

“Not exactly like I’d hoped,” Marple said.

“At least you’re bald, like Picard,” Kaplan said.

“I’d rather have no hair than Janeway hair.
First season
Janeway hair.”

“You’d also make a great Orion. Since you’re already green with envy.”

Marple was about to tell Kaplan to stick her high-horse attitude straight up her Jefferies tube when a single
ding
emanated from the monitors parked in front of them.

“Box Seventeen,” Kaplan said, suddenly all business.

Marple’s fingers flew across his keyboard. A grainy black-and-white shot of a steel-walled enclosure popped up on both their screens. Inside, a small four-legged animal paced back and forth twice. Then, with its head pointed squarely into a corner, it stopped.

“Haven’t seen this one before,” Kaplan said. “It looks like it’s been partially skinned.”

“Back in the day, when they were still working on these things, some genius decided to vivisect it,” Marple said. “Or maybe
dissect
is the correct word. It didn’t go according to plan. The guy who tried it is in Box Thirty-two.”

Kaplan dutifully noted the incident in her log. Not that it was necessary. Everything—absolutely
everything—
that happened in the facility was closely monitored at an off-site command center. There was no need to send reports. The Brass watched it all in real time.

“We’re getting dinged a lot today,” she said. “It’s like they’re restless or something.”

Marple laughed.

“They’re not restless,” he said. “They’re not anything. They go in one direction until they hit a wall, then go in another until they hit another wall.”

“Still,” Kaplan said, “four dings is a lot.”

Marple knew she was right. Often entire shifts passed without movement. The four incidents they’d logged so far were noteworthy. Especially since they’d all occurred in the last two hours. Each came from a different specimen, two of which had gone months without so much as a twitch. Yet today they got up and walked. Or staggered. Or crawled.

It was unprecedented. Kaplan and Marple hated it when the unprecedented happened, because there was always the chance that it could quickly morph into something horrible. Something that could never, ever be allowed to see the light of day. Like the guy in Box Thirty-two.

“Sometimes I wish I was still back in a silo, serving on a Minuteman missile crew,” Marple said. “It was less stressful.”

“Isn’t that why they picked you for this?” Kaplan said.

“Yeah. My psych profile was exactly what they wanted. Someone who wouldn’t mind spending a lot of time underground staring at the end of the world.”

His monitor emitted a muted alarm.

“What?” Kaplan said. “What is it?”

Marple studied the readouts on his screen. His eyes grew wide.

“There’s a problem with the security system,” he said. “Big-time malfunction.”

“What kind?” Kaplan said.

Marple looked at the screen for a few seconds more.

“We’ve lost containment on boxes Nine and Twelve.”

“Does that mean . . .?”

“Give me a visual on Twelve,” Marple said. “Maybe it’s a false reading.”

Another black-and-white image of a steel-lined cell appeared on their monitors. It was empty.

“Switch to exterior,” Marple said.

The view showed Twelve’s door. A door that hadn’t been un-sealed, so far as they knew, in more than two years.

Now it was wide open.

“We’re screwed,” Kaplan said. “We’re totally screwed.”

“Keep it together,” Marple said, sweat beads dotting his forehead as he typed. “A computer glitch sprung them. But we’re safe in here. Nothing can get through a two-inch steel door.”

“Dammit,” Kaplan said. “More of them are opening! Lost containment on Thirty, Twenty-Five, Eight . . .”

“Stop. I get it. Check Box One.”

Kaplan switched to the enclosure just in time for them to see the door open, revealing a rectangle of impenetrable blackness.

The two watched the doorway in terrified fascination. The room’s interior camera had malfunctioned months earlier. Since no one was allowed into the room under any circumstances, the creature lurking in Box One remained a mystery.

“Maybe it’s dead,” Kaplan whispered as they both watched their screens. “I mean,
really
dead.”

Almost before she got the words out, something shambled out of the darkness. The thing was naked, but it was impossible to tell its sex. Its desiccated skin was drawn tightly over its skeleton. Its hair was gone, its eyes had shrunk into their sockets, and its lips were drawn back over its teeth in a permanent grin.

Yet it walked.

“That’s twenty feet down the hall,” Kaplan said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“No,” Marple said. “Something’s opening every computer-controlled door in the place. We step out there and we’re dead. Worse than dead.”

“
Every
computer-controlled door?” she asked.

Marple caught her meaning. They turned together and gazed at the back of the room. Just in time to see the door to their duty station glide open.

Outside in the darkness, something moaned.

Kaplan reached out and grabbed Marple’s hand.

“I’m sorry I said you were bald,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry I said you had Janeway hair,” he replied.

Marple looked up at the ceiling-mounted video camera perched directly in front of them, dispassionately transmitting everything to the off-site command center.

“What are you waiting for?” he shouted at it. “For God’s sake, just do it!”

Five hundred miles away, a two-star general leaned over the shoulder of a technician, watching the nurse and the former missile commander’s last moments. The general rubbed the back of his neck, surveyed the frightened faces of the half-dozen officers surrounding him, and then spoke.

“That’s it,” he said. “Detonate the fail-safe weapon. Deploy the cover story.”

It was late winter of 2009 and Jim Pike was in Afghanistan.

He’d arrived there a few weeks earlier with the rest of his U.S. Army unit, the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team. It was windy and cold, and the mountainous terrain looked like another world. A world composed almost entirely of steep slopes and thousand-foot drops.

He was twenty-three years old and in full battle dress, leading a squad of soldiers through an outlying neighborhood of Asadabad, the capital of Kunar province. Kunar was a flyspeck of land wedged hard against the Pakistani border. In good times it sheltered smugglers moving everything from illegally harvested lumber to drugs. In bad times—and these were very, very bad times—it harbored guerillas of every stripe, from al Qaeda to the Taliban to mujahideen.

Asadabad, a maze of narrow streets and walled compounds sheltering roughly half the province’s thirty thousand people, was their unofficial capital. The troops called it A-Bad.

Jim watched his six-member squad, the lead element in a three-platoon-strong raiding party supported by Stryker combat vehicles and Apache helicopter gunships, move down a dusty, crooked street. They kept an eye out for snipers and covered one another as they advanced. An old man sitting on the curb, his ragged, mud-colored
chapan
pulled tight against the cold, barely acknowledged their passing.

They stopped near the door of a weather-worn house. They were pretty sure, based on drone images presented during the pre-raid briefing, that it harbored a cache of contraband weapons. The boxes stacked in the building’s dusty courtyard, plainly visible in the photos, were the right shape and size.

The soldier on point tried the door. It was locked.

Jim was about to order an entry. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the old man in the chapan stand up and disappear down an alley. In Afghanistan it was never a good sign when people vanished like that. It meant they knew something was about to happen. And that they didn’t want to be around when it did.