Juggernaut

He fired the hypodermic through the bicep of the Hassim’s bio-suit.

Hassim pulled himself away. He clutched his arm.

‘What did you do?’ he asked, looking at the spent injector gun in Ignatiev’s hand.

He stumbled and fell to his knees.

‘You bastard.’

He toppled face forward onto the polythene floor and passed out.

Ignatiev pulled off the technician’s hood and checked his pupils for dilation.

‘Let’s get him in quarantine. Get him out of this suit. Rig some restraints. I want multiple cameras. Regular biopsies. Minute-by-minute analysis.’

‘He’s got some kind of infection?’ I asked. ‘We have antibiotics. Antivirals. We should set up an intravenous drip.’

‘Koell showed you pictures of the installation drifting in deep space?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is breaking up. Piece by piece. Spektr isn’t the first chunk of debris to fall to Earth. The station is locked in a slow-decaying polar orbit. Fragments have re-entered the atmosphere over Mongolia, Latvia, Greenland. I visited a crash site myself. China, near the border with Kyrgyzstan. A four-day journey. I made the last sixty miles on horseback. The villagers showed me pictures. A spherical object, big as a van, burned black by the heat of re-entry. It fell one night like a shooting star. Dug a fifty-foot crater in a rice paddy. The crash was quickly followed by the outbreak of a strange and terrible disease. By the time I arrived at the impact site with my team, there was nothing left to see. The local militia had incinerated the infected bodies. They had pushed the module down the shaft of an abandoned coal mine and used dynamite to bury it beneath a cascade of rubble.

‘But now we have Spektr. This is our chance to observe the pathology of this illness first-hand.’

‘Will Hassim die? Can he be saved?’

‘There is nothing I can do for him.’

‘He’s my friend. He’s a good man.’

‘The virus is already replicating in his bloodstream, attacking sheath-fibres in his brain and spinal column. The process is irreversible.’

‘Dear God.’

‘I’m sorry. But he’s not your friend any more. He is Test Subject Number One.’

Battalion

Huang wandered through the temple precincts, gun in hand, looking for a good place to die.

The moon was eclipsed by cloud. The night wind brought a rising sandstorm. He took a Maglite from his pocket and switched full-beam.

Movement up ahead. One of Jabril’s undead legion sliding along a temple wall. Spines and tumours erupting from rotting flesh. The mutant creature ignored Huang and kept walking.

I’m not a target, thought Huang. They know I’m infected. They know I’m one of them. Must be the smell. They sniff out fresh meat. I have taken on their signature stench of disease and death.

He found shelter. Some kind of subsidiary chapel built against the high perimeter wall. The little chamber was intact. The walls and roof had withstood squalling desert cyclones for countless aeons.

His flashlight lit a small dais with a scorpion chiselled on the front. An altar dedicated to a minor god.

He reclined on the step. He switched off his torch and sat in darkness. He listened to the mournful whisper of the breeze outside.

Huang always knew he would die young. A gut conviction, ever since he was a kid. He carried a tarot deck in his backpack. Each time he shuffled, he drew the death card.

He always pictured a soldier’s homecoming. Sent back to Greenville, Michigan, in a coffin. Unloaded from a C-17 Globemaster, folded flag and dress-blue photograph on the lid. White-gloved reservists firing a blank fusillade as his casket got lowered into the ground.

He held the Glock. He stroked the rough polymer grip with his thumb. His whole life — boyhood, adolescence, college and army years — concluding in this godforsaken necropolis, miles from home. His body would not be discovered for decades, possibly centuries. Nothing but a pile of dried bones picked over by men from some science-fiction future, so augmented by cybernetics and gene manipulation they were no longer homo-sapien. They would see rotted teeth plugged with amalgam, an old break in his leg crudely pinned with titanium screws. They would think him impossibly primitive, some kind of troglodyte.

Or maybe his body would never be discovered. His bones would crumble to dust. He would merge with the desert. Meld with an ocean of silica.

He arched his back. Sudden indescribable pain as if his spine were white-hot metal. The disease, the strange parasite boring into his central nervous system.

He crouched on all fours in the dark. He ran his hands over the flagstones, trying to find his flashlight, trying to find his gun. He sobbed. He wept blood. He shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts.

‘My name is… My name is…’

He couldn’t remember his name. Mind slipping away.

A last, random memory:

The sweet smell of cut grass.