The Creeping Kelp (4 page)

Shit. I feel like the sheriff in Jaws.

When the questioning was finally over they were let out into a glimmering dawn. Pale sunlight shimmered in Weymouth harbour and the terrors were already beginning to fade, taking on the semblance of a nightmare.

“What can we do now?” Suzie said. “We’ve got to warn
somebody.
”

That’s all we ever do,
Noble thought.
Warn people. People who don’t want to listen
.

He didn’t say anything. He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Over the past four years he’d come to know when to speak and when not to.

He’d signed up with
Earth Rescue,
initially, not from any great planet-saving idealism but for a need for
adventure
—a life at sea far from any constraints of office or train timetable. Suzie had taught him, slowly, the importance of their work and he’d seen for himself the damage that was being blithely done to the seas. Western civilization liked to bury its rubbish in shame, and the sea had, until recently, been a watery grave for all of society’s ills. Now it was disinterring itself. Suzie and Noble spent much of their time trying to convince politicians, reporters,...anybody, to listen that there was an imminent problem. And like the past night, they only heard what they wanted to hear, afraid to shatter their cosy idea of a world where garbage just went
away
with no consequences.

“We’ve
got
to warn somebody,” Suzie said again.  

Noble almost laughed.

“Warn them about what? You heard them—they’ve had choppers out looking for wreckage. All they found was sea.”

Suzie started striding away.

“Well, that’s not enough.”

He walked after her, having to lengthen his stride to catch up.

“Where are you going?” he asked as he reached her side.

“To the lab. We need to prove them wrong.”

What Noble
really
wanted was breakfast, then a drink—a
big
drink. But Suzie Jukes was not a woman to be ignored lightly—not if you still wanted her talking to you afterwards.  He followed her down the path, having to hurry again to keep up.

“So, what’s the plan?” he asked when he got beside her for a second time.

She hooked an arm in his and gave him a smile, his reward for paying attention.

“There will be something in the documentation... somewhere,” she said “And if there is, I’ll find it, before this morning is out.”

In the end, it took longer than she’d imagined. Noble was kept busy making endless cups of coffee and sandwiches for them both in the small cupboard in the
Earth Rescue
office that passed for their lab’s kitchen, and by the time early afternoon came around he felt like he was running on fumes. Suzie’s yelp of triumph jerked him from the beginnings of slumber.

“I knew it. I bloody well knew it.”

He almost fell as he stood, his legs initially refusing his commands, having gone to sleep while he sat in the chair. He groaned theatrically and sat back down in a slump.

“Wake me again when it’s over,” he said.

“Stay there,” she said laughing. “I’ll read it to you. The bastards have known about it all along.”

He did as he was told and stayed in the chair. Suzie brought them both a fresh coffee and sat opposite him.

“I found this on an MOD server,” she said. “It came up on a search for
Pabodie
.”

Noble raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. MOD servers were most definitely off-limits to
Earth Rescue
personnel, but he knew already that no computer system was safe when she was around. He sipped the coffee and let her talk. She started to read and he was soon completely engrossed in Scotland, during a dark period in the country’s history.

I did not know what to expect. They called me out of a lecture on the ecology of the Firth of Clyde shoreline just as I was getting warmed up and told me I was needed for the war effort. I tried to enquire as to the nature of the need, but they refused to be drawn. All they had said was that it was a matter of National Security. Just what the RNAD wanted with a fifty-year-old doctor of Botany with a gammy leg and a drink problem, I was not told. I was given a train ticket and a contact name and was immediately sent off to Helensburgh, having been barely given enough time to pack a bag.

Once there, I was met outside the station by a Sergeant and a truck—both of who seemed well past their best. He took a succession of cigarettes from me and talked freely enough, but he knew as little about why I had been summoned as I did, myself.

“We don’t ask and they don’t tell,” was all he said, leaving me to wonder who he was talking about. We rattled along an unlit road for what seemed like hours, coming to a sudden halt at a manned checkpoint alongside a long, moonlit loch. An attendant waved a torch and a gun in my face, I showed him my paperwork and we were allowed through. The Sergeant drove up to a Nissen Hut and I was informed this was the end of the line.

“Remember,” he said to me as we parted and he took two cigarettes from my packet. “We don’t ask and they don’t tell.”

A Corporal met me at the door to the hut. I was shown inside to a bed and given an order to see the Colonel in the morning. I sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes, unsure of my next move. It felt too cold, too quiet, and I was already missing the comfortable clutter and noise of my University apartments back in Glasgow. I went outside and studied the lay of the land. There was a loch and a lot of huts. Beyond that, there was little to see but the moon on the water. It was very pretty, if a bit chilly. I watched it for a while as I tried to get used to my new situation. It took three slow cigarettes before I even felt like settling. When I finally went back inside and lay down, I soon found that my allocated bed was little more than a few sheets thrown over a stiff board.

I slept badly.

Things did not get much better when the morning started on a wrong note. I am afraid the Colonel, a stiff little man with a stiffer little moustache, did not take to me. From what I understood of my short briefing, I was to be seconded to this unit for the duration, to “do my bit against the Jerries”. But by the time he led me via a warren of corridors through and between a maze of Nissen Huts and showed me into the lab, I was still none the wiser. It was only when I was introduced to the head of the team that I began to have some inkling as to why I had been brought to this place.

I knew Professor Rankin by his reputation of being an iconoclast, a visionary, and as mad as a bag of badgers. The last thing I had heard was that he had gone over to the Yanks for a huge stipend at one of the West Coast think tanks. I never expected to meet him in a Nissen Hut on a Scottish loch-side.

His unruly mop of white hair shook as he grasped my hand. He was as thin as a rake, but his grip was as hard as cold steel.

“Ballantine. And not a minute too soon. Come over here, man. You need to see this.”

He dragged me over to a microscope.

“Look at it,” he said. “Just look.”

I looked. I had no idea what it was. It looked almost like the internal structure of an amoeba.

“What is this?” I asked.

Rankin looked down at the desk. He’d obviously prepared the microscope slide from something in a Petri dish at the side. It looked like nothing more than a pool of thick oil.

“It cost an arm and a leg to get it, but we finally managed to persuade the Yanks to give us some of the material from the Pabodie Expedition. We need it for experimentation.”

He lifted the Petri dish, studying the contents.

“It is something new,” he whispered. “Something no one has ever seen before.”

At least that was something I could agree with.

“Okay,” I said softly. “You have certainly got something here. But what has it to do with me?”

He smiled.

“This material was obviously manufactured. It bonds with other living tissue and builds.”

“Builds what?”

He laughed loudly.

“Anything we want it to. Do you not see, Ballantine? You and I are going to change war forever. We are going to make the ultimate defensive weapon.”

The protoplasm in the Petri dish suddenly surged against the glass, with such force that the dish jumped out of Rankin’s hand and shattered as it hit the ground. The tarry substance started to make its way across the floor, scuttling like a manic spider.

Rankin nonchalantly stepped forward and poured some of the contents of a glass jar on it. Steam rose. A vinegar-like tang caught at the back of my throat and forced me to close my eyes. When I looked again, there was nothing left but a smoking pool of oily goop on the floor.

“Molar Hydrochloric Acid,” Rankin said, holding up a half-empty jar and almost smiling. “It seems to do the trick.”

Suzie looked over at Noble.

“Sound familiar?”

A cold chill had crept up Dave Noble’s spine.

“It sounds
all too
familiar. Is there more?”

She nodded.

“I haven’t read it all myself yet... but there’re pages and pages of stuff. I...”

The phone rang, interrupting her. He knew from her face as she listened that the news wasn’t good. She had gone white by the time she put the phone down.

“They believe us now,” she said quietly. “We’re wanted at the Nothe Fort. They’re setting up a Command Post there to monitor the
situation
.
”

“What situation?”

But she refused to be drawn further as she hurried him out of the lab and through the streets to Weymouth Harbour. He noticed that she had stuffed the rest of the document she’d been reading into a briefcase and carried it with her.

The outside of the fort looked like it would on any other day, with groups of tourists in small huddles, taking pictures and laughing loudly. Inside, the mood was much more sombre. They were shown to a conference room deep inside the fort. Noble knew several of the people already there by sight. He counted a local councillor, the police chief, and the Captain of the coastguard. All three looked grim and two women sitting around a long table had clearly been crying. Noble didn’t want to think what might have happened.

But if they’ve called for Suzie and me, then there’s only one thing it can be.

Suzie took his hand and they sat down silently when motioned forward by the coastguard Captain. The man wasted no time getting down to business.

“Some of you have already heard,” he said. “But I’ll recap, for the newcomers.”

He used a remote control to dim the lights. A screen lit up behind him.

“We got a confused call from a member of the public at one o’clock this afternoon. He had just arrived in the car park at Kimmeridge Bay. There were many other cars in the slots... but no people on the shore—no one alive, at any rate.

“I sent a team. Two of the men I sent are now doped to the eyeballs, trying to handle the shock. One of the others had enough presence of mind to search the beach for evidence.

“He found a video camera. This is what we found on playing it back.”

The screen behind him came into focus. The picture showed a group of men standing out in the sea. They seemed to be searching for something and there was a general air of frantic panic.

“Can you see him?” someone shouted. “Can you see any of them?”

A black bulge seemed to raise the water into a dome. Suzie squeezed Noble’s hand tight as the black sheet fell on the men, then kept coming straight at the camera, like a mini-tsunami.  The viewpoint changed as the camera fell to the sand. People ran past, visible only from the knees down, trying to get away from the sea. A black shadow crept along the sand.

The screen went dark.

The coastguard Captain turned up the lights.

“Is that what you warned us about?”

Noble realized the question was directed at him and Suzie. He nodded.

“It looks like it. Do you believe us now?”

Nobody spoke. There was a long silence. It was the councillor that finally spoke.

“There were twenty cars in that car park Mr. Noble. We estimate that at least fifty people are missing, presumed dead. It’s too late now for any recriminations. We’ve brought you here because you’re the closest thing we have to experts. I’ve informed the MOD and they’re sending a team down.”

The coastguard Captain interrupted him.

“But in the meantime... I’d like to get ahead of the game. I’d like to get a sample of.... whatever this stuff is.”

Noble was about to say just how stupid an idea that would be when Suzie squeezed his hand again.

“My thoughts exactly, Captain,” she said. “When can we leave?”

July 22nd - In the Air

Ten minutes later they were in a chopper. Suzie sat beside him, still holding his hand, a fact that seemed to amuse the coastguard Captain.

“Just hold on tight,” he shouted. “We’re heading back out to where we picked you up yesterday to see what we can see. It’ll take the best part of an hour, so get as comfortable as you can.”

They were left to their own devices. At first, Noble tried to make conversation with Suzie, but the noise inside the chopper was deafening, like being inside a tumble-dryer full of ball bearings.  After five minutes of shouting at each other, yet still failing to understand more than half of what was said, they gave up. Suzie started reading more of the papers from her briefcase, while Noble closed his eyes and tried to rest.

His mind raced. It felt like he’d taken a lurch into the
Twilight Zone
, ever since his first encounter with the black tar on the blades of the Zodiac propeller. Now he was at the centre of an emergency that had something to do with an Antarctic Expedition long before he was born. And how that was connected to a polluted stretch of ocean was still a mystery to him. But Suzie was on the case. He know from long experience that once she got her teeth into something she would never let go until she was good and ready.