Slimer

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? W'hat 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 nick name we gave to… but I’ll explain from the beginning. I gather you’ve heard of Lloyd J. Brink-stone?’

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 few 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.

But it was too late. Even as Mark turned he saw the door closing and heard a distinct click. He ran over to it and found, as he expected, it was locked. ‘Shit!’ he cried, ‘she’s locked us in!’

Still gasping, Paul staggered to his feet and lurched to the door. ‘We’ve got to get out of here… if that thing, Charlie or whatever it’s called… is on the loose again we’ve… got to warn the girls…’

Mark kicked at the door but it was solidly built and he knew it would be impossible to break it down. ‘It’s no use,’ he said disgustedly, ‘we’re trapped in here.’

‘Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Barbara Ann; Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Barbara Ann.!’

Linda felt for the handle of the small calibre revolver that she’d thrust into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back. The situation was looking bad. Alex was getting drunker by the minute and she knew it would