Slimer (8 page)

    'But so far everything we have tried has failed. It appears to be invulnerable, thanks to us. Fire, bullets, electricity, poison, acid, all have proved futile. We were too successful. We have created the ultimate survivor - and the ultimate destroyer. What was supposed to have been a boon to mankind has become a terrible threat. Possibly the most terrible threat it has ever faced. We must overcome it.'

    Then the screen went blank.

    Paul and Mark looked at each other. 'What do you make of that?' asked Mark.

    Paul said slowly, 'I think we can forget about bugs designed to eat oil-slicks. Whatever they made here was in a different league altogether.' He thumped his fist on the console top. 'If only he'd said what it was!'

    'Run the tape on further. There might be something else.'

    There was. Shelley reappeared on the screen. He seemed to have aged a great deal during the intervening period. His face was drawn and haggard and there was a bruise over his right eye. He now looked very different to the man they'd seen in the lab last night, which made Paul wonder again just how much time had elapsed since the events Shelley was describing had taken place.

    Shelley's voice was weaker too. 'This may be the last chance I get to use this machine. There are only a few of us left now. Dr Soames, Durkins, a couple of the guards, and it can only be a matter of time before it achieves complete victory. Durkins was right. We should have tried to send out a warning before it was too late but the transmitter has been destroyed. It is much more intelligent now but that's not surprising under the circumstances…'

    He stopped suddenly and looked away from the camera towards, presumably, the door. He had obviously heard something. As he turned they got a brief glimpse of a pistol he was holding.

    After a while he relaxed and faced the camera again. 'I'm determined it won't take me alive. I'll use this on myself first.. He brandished the gun at the camera. 'But even so I fear that being dead may not be protection against… against…' He swallowed noisily and didn't finish the sen-tence. For a few moments his self-control deserted him and they saw the face of a man who was profoundly terrified. Paul felt a wave of unease sweep over him as he stared at Shelley's face. What could it be that could scare a man so badly? That scared him even more than dying?

    Shelley regained control of himself with a visible effort. 'My only hope is that someone finds these records before it's too late. I'll have to hide them somewhere so that it can't get them and yet where they'll be found by whoever comes here next. But where?'

    There was a noise off screen and Shelley spun round again. The door had apparently opened. They saw him raise the gun then heard him say, still facing away from the camera 'Oh, it's you, thank God… for a moment I thought it was…'

    The screen went blank again.

    Paul kept the tape running but there was nothing else on it. Shelley didn't reappear.

    'Think there's any chance of repairing one of those boats?' asked Mark quietly.

    'Take it easy. We saw Shelley last night so he obviously survived. And he certainly looked in better shape then than he did on that tape. Whatever it was, or is, must have been overcome by Shelley and his pals.'

    'You want to make a bet on that?' said Mark. 'And what was all that stuff about being dead not a protection. Protection against what, that's what I want to know.'

    Paul gestured at the racks of tape. 'The answer has to be there somewhere. We keep searching.'

    'Hey!' Mark was staring at one of the monitors. 'Look!'

    Paul looked and saw the figure of a woman walking down a corridor with her back to the camera. He glanced immediately at the screen showing the view of the recreation room and saw that all three girls were still playing cards. His pulse quickened. So there was someone else on the rig apart from Shelley.

    'Which level is that picture coming from?' he asked excitedly. 'Can you tell?'

    Mark shook his head. 'They all look alike to me.'

    The woman, who was walking with a fast, purposeful stride, reached the end of the corridor and disappeared from view. Paul swore and started pressing buttons on the camera controls, hoping to pick her up on another screen. Finally he succeeded, but again she had her back to them and was rapidly moving away from the camera. This time, however, they could make out a sign on a nearby wall. It read 'Level Two'.

    'She's on this floor,' cried Paul, leaping up. 'I'm going to find her. You try and keep track of her with the cameras in case I lose her.'

    Paul hurried out of the room. Mark opened his mouth to call after him but realised he had no idea what he wanted to say. All he knew was that he didn't care for suddenly being on his own…

    He scanned the bank of monitors for the woman. There was no sign of her so he started punching buttons at random, cutting to new cameras. Then he spotted her again. This time she was walking towards the camera. She was wearing a white lab coat and had short blonde hair but he couldn't make out her face.

    Mark frowned as he stared hard at the screen. The woman was getting closer now but her face remained indistinct. Blurred even. Was there something wrong with the camera? A smear on the lens perhaps?

    The woman continued to approach the camera. Then she was directly under it…

    Mark screamed.

    As the woman had walked by the camera she had looked briefly up at it. There had been no way for Mark to avoid the horrible truth…

    She had no face.

    She had eyes. The round, staring eyes of a fish. Eyes straight out of a nightmare. But that was all. The rest of her face was completely smooth.

    

    

    Paul caught a glimpse of her ahead of him as she turned a corner. 'Hey!' he called and started walking faster. He hurried round the corner and saw that she was now only ten yards or so in front of him. He called out again but she didn't give any indication of hearing him. She continued on at her same fast pace.

    Paul broke into a run and caught up with her just before she reached the next corner. 'Hey, I want to speak to you,' he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her around.

    Then he gave a gasp of surprise.

    

    

    Mark groaned. Someone was shaking him roughly by the shoulder and he wished they wouldn't. Reluctantly he opened his eyes. Where was he? Oh yes, on the floor of the video room. But why? What had happened?

    He focused his eyes and saw Paul bending over him with a concerned expression. Behind him there was someone else. A woman in a white coat. With short blonde hair…

    Then he remembered. He screamed again. Frantically he tried to scramble to his feet. He had to get away from her - the Woman With No Face. The Woman With The Round Eyes…

    'Mark!'

    Paul's yell coincided with a stinging slap on the side of Mark's face. He stopped screaming and slumped back to the floor. He could see the woman plainly now. She had attractive green eyes, snub nose and wide, sensual mouth. She was very beautiful. He stared at her in amazement.

    'Mark, what's wrong? What happened?' cried Paul.

    Mark couldn't speak. He continued to stare dumbly at the woman. She was looking down at him with concern in her eyes.

    She spoke. 'He's suffering from shock. I've seen it before. He needs to be kept warm.'

    Mark finally managed to say something. 'Who's she…?'

    'This is Dr Carol Soames. She's who we saw on the TV screen. She's going to help us. But what happened to you? What's wrong?' asked Paul.

    Mark shook his head dazedly. 'I saw… I saw something. It must have been another hallucination. I'm okay now. Help me up.'

    As Paul did so he said, 'What was it this time? More black slime?'

    'No, no… I can't describe it. Don't ask me to.' He glanced at the girl and shuddered.

    'It must have been bad if it made you pass out,' said Paul worriedly, then he turned to the girl. 'You said you'd explain everything if we agreed to help you to get away from this place. As spokesman for the group I guarantee no one's going to object to your coming with us so give - tell us what the hell is happening out here.'

    She gave the door a nervous look then sighed and sat down on one of the room's three swivel chairs. 'We don't have much time so I'm going to have to make this brief. The sooner we get going the better. Charlie is under temporary control at the moment but there's no guarantee for how long…'

    'Who is Charlie?' demanded Paul.

    'Charlie is a nickname we gave to… but I'll explain from the beginning. I gather you've heard of Lloyd J. Brinkstone?'

    Paul frowned. 'No. But I know this platform is owned by the Brinkstone Company.'

    'Lloyd J. Brinkstone is the Brinkstone Company. He's enormously wealthy - a dollar billionaire. A few years ago he reached the age where he decided he had to use some of his money to do something for the human race. In fact, he decided to save the human race. Being a Texan he doesn't think small…' She smiled briefly and Mark saw that his first impression of her had been correct - she was very beautiful - but then he had a mental flashback to the image on the screen and nausea began to build up in his throat. It had been so real…

    'For years Mr Brinkstone had been obsessed by the fear that the human race would be wiped out by a nuclear war,' she continued, 'so finally he got a group of microbiologists together - I was one of them - and told us to see if there was any way the human body could be protected against hard radiation by means of genetic engineering. Money was to be no object. We could have whatever we wanted in terms of resources, equipment and so on. The result was this place…' She gestured around her. 'It cost millions of dollars to convert this disused rig into a secret laboratory complex. It had to be secret because we would be using genetic engineering techniques currently proscribed by most countries. The advantage of using the platform was that we could easily quarantine the labs if anything went wrong.'

    'And something did go wrong,' said Paul.

    'I'm coming to that. The project was designated
The Phoenix Project
and from the beginning things went well. We made some marvellous breakthroughs and soon realised that we might actually be able to achieve what Brinkstone wanted. To be honest, most of us scientists were just humouring him at the start and looked upon the project as an opportunity to carry out experiments we couldn't do anywhere else.

    'What we came up with was an artificial gene - a genetically engineered, all-purpose package of DNA capable of overriding the genetic code of the host body and enabling it to adapt suddenly to drastic changes in the environment. We called it the
Phoenix
unit. Basically you could describe it as a genetic repair kit. The idea was that people carrying
Phoenix
within their cells would survive a lethal dose of radiation because the unit would alter their metabolism accordingly. In a sense it would provide instant evolution…'

    'And you actually made this new gene?' asked Mark.

    'Yes. In fact, that was the easy part. The difficult bit was in finding a way of incorporating it into a host body. The plan was for it to spread through a body from cell to cell like a virus but, of course, there was the problem of rejection. Like any virus the
Phoenix
unit set off the host organism's immune system. Somehow we had to build into
Phoenix
an adaptable set of antigens which would keep changing and not allow the host's antibodies to bind onto
Phoenix
and destroy it.

    'This shouldn't have been an insurmountable problem as some viruses possess this ability naturally but it began to seem as if we would never solve it. We made countless versions of
Phoenix
and tested it on different species of animal and in every case
Phoenix
was either rejected or provoked the host's auto-immune system into such a violent reaction it died before
Phoenix
could complete its attachment to the nucleus of each cell…

    'It began to look as if the project was going to be a failure but then, unexpectedly, we found a species where everything worked as planned.
Phoenix
was able to overcome the creature's simple immune system and incorporate itself into the chromosomes. This meant we would be able to study
Phoenix
in action and move onto the next stage, which was to devise a version suitable for use in humans. But then… then…'

    A shadow passed across her face and her voice died away. Mark was reminded of the way Shelley had looked the previous night.

    'Something went wrong?' prompted Paul.

   'Wrong?' she repeated dazedly. 'Yes. Wrong. Very wrong.'

    'This creature, the one that accepted
Phoenix.
What was it?'

    She didn't answer. Instead she turned and stared fearfully at the door. 'It's coming,' she whispered.

    Both men automatically looked at the door. Mark couldn't hear anything but the tone of her voice made his skin crawl with atavistic fear.

    'What's coming?' asked Paul urgently.

    She stood up quickly. 'I've got to get away. You stay here. You'll be safe here. It's me it's after…' She began to hurry towards the door. Paul leapt to his feet, snatched up the M16 and followed her.

    'Wait, don't go!' he cried, making a grab for her arm. What happened next was totally unexpected. The girl spun round, grabbed the M16 out of Paul's hand and then gave him a shove in the chest. It didn't look a very hard shove to Mark but to his amazement Paul literally flew backwards through the air. He landed on the rack of video tapes which tipped over and hit the floor with a loud noise. Fearing the worst Mark rushed to him but was relieved to see that Paul was still alive. Obviously winded by the impact he was gasping for breath. As Mark helped him to sit up he choked, 'The girl… stop her...'