Slimer

More and more of the tongue forced itself into his mouth. It was like a giant worm burrowing its way down his throat. He could feel it going down his oesophagus, slimy and cold. So cold..

And as all this happened Rochelle’s eyes stared into his with a dark, insane glee. '

Mark could have been taken for dead the way he looked and Chris kept laying her head on his chest to listen to his heart. She expected it to be beating faintly and slowly but it was skittering like a startled rabbit.

Her eyes were sore from crying and tiredness. Why hadn’t she been more forceful with him over his habit right from the beginning? Now it was too late. She knew that now. She had not really noticed the physical change in him until recently when she’d come across a photograph of them together taken a year ago. The difference from the way he looked now had come as a shock.

Perhaps she should go and tell Mark’s father what was going on when they got back to England. But it would be a drastic step. Mark might never forgive her. And how would Mark’s father react to the news that his only son was a junkie? He might reject him completely or even turn him over to the police — he was such a conservative, up-tight character.

But no, she decided, that was unlikely. He had had high hopes for Mark and they had still not quite gone. And he still indulged him in all sorts of ways even though Mark never showed him any gratitude. If Mark actually went to him and asked for his help she was sure the old man would be so pleased he’d do anything to help him. The problem was that Mark would never do that, no matter how bad things got.

She sighed. All that was in the future anyway. Right now Mark needed a fix badly. Alex had turned him down and she knew why even though Mark hadn’t said so. Alex wanted her again. She’d do anything for Mark but the thought of letting Alex touch her again made her want to vomit. She couldn’t even think of the things he’d made her do the previous night…

Yet sooner or later Mark was going to get so desperate for a fix he’d beg her to accommodate Alex. And what was she going to do then?

There was a knock at the door and she jumped. She was about to reach for the gun lying beside the bed when she heard Paul say, ‘Mark, Chris, you okay?’

She relaxed and went to the door. But when she opened it and saw the looks on Paul and Linda’s faces she began to feel anxious again. ‘What’s wrong? Has that thing come back?’

‘No,’ said Paul as he and Linda hurried inside. ‘But we’ve found out the answer to all that’s been happening and I’m afraid it’s not good.’

Mark was awake now and sitting up. He looked dreadful — his eyes two dark shadows and his face haggard and covered in sweat. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked as he watched Paul go up to the cabin’s small ventilator grill and peer into it with the aid of a torch. ‘Find something to block this up with,’ he instructed Linda.

Mystified, Chris said, ‘Are you feeling okay?’

Paul began to explain what they’d learned from Shelley’s video tapes. When he finished Chris’s first reaction was to laugh. ‘It’s fantastic. I can’t believe it. You’re saying this creature absorbs people… and then can duplicate them.?’ She shook her head helplessly.

Paul said, ‘I know it’s all pretty wild but we’ve seen it happen for ourselves. Buckley turning into that creature. And when we followed that thing that tried to break into our cabin on the first night and only found Shelley, that's the reason why. It had turned into Shelley.’

‘Shelley was this creature too?’ asked Chris.

‘And the beautiful Dr Soames. They’re all one and the same. The way it seems to me is that this thing is like a genetic thief that goes around stealing human blue-prints. They’re all mixed up together but every now and then one of the victims manages to come out on top, perhaps by sheer willpower, I don’t know. And when that happens their original body reforms, but not for long…’

‘Because the dominant power is this “Charlie” thing?’ asked Mark.

‘Yes. Charlie. Short for Carcharodon. A great white shark. Its DNA and the Phoenix genes that those stupid scientists created have formed a winning combination. And when it comes out on top it either manifests itself in a physical form based on what it used to be — that creature that replaced Buckley — or as some kind of liquid that can move around by itself.’

‘The slime I saw in the crane,’ breathed Mark, ‘the black stuff that ran up the wall into the…’ He glanced up at the ventilator grill that Linda was blocking with a torn up pillow case. ‘Now I know I wasn’t hallucinating. But how come it didn’t attack meT ‘I don’t know,’ Paul confessed, ‘but we do know what happened to all those people, and why all those clothes were lying around.’

‘But how come some of the clothes were all torn and bloody and the rest were unmarked?’ asked Chris.

‘Well,’ said Paul slowly, ‘Shelley’s guess was that the thing has two kinds of hunger. When it’s in its physical form the shark instincts take over and it wants to eat in the normal way — it wants to fill its belly — but when it’s in the liquid shape it’s hungry in a different way. The individual cells are hungry, not for food but new genetic material, new DNA/RNA or whatever it’s called…’

Chris remembered all those locked cabins with the piles of empty clothes inside. She automatically looked down at the gap beneath the door, half-expecting to see some sort of black slime oozing its way inside. ‘There’s no defence against it, is there?’ She asked in a toneless voice. ‘When it decides to get us it will, won’t it?’

‘Don’t talk that way,’ said Paul sharply. ‘We can beat it. We will beat it.’

‘Those scientists didn’t.’

‘They were taken by surprise,’ he said quickly, ‘by the time they knew what they were up against it was too late. All we have to do is set ourselves up in a way that will make it impossible for that thing to get to us. And then we wait…’

‘Wait for what?’ asked Mark.

‘Help. It should arrive soon. Someone in the Brinkstone organisation must be wondering why they haven’t received any word from the platform recently. It must be about two weeks by now. Or there might be a regular supply drop soon.’

‘Or there might not be,’ said Chris.

‘Look, you don’t leave over 200 people stuck out here in the North Sea without some kind of regular contact.’ ‘Officially these labs don’t even exist,’ said Mark. ‘They probably go long periods between flights to and from the rig to avoid arousing suspicion.’

‘Well, I don’t think so,’ said Paul, becoming irritated, ‘but if anyone else has any suggestions on what we should do I’d love to hear them.’

No one did. Paul gave a resigned nod. ‘Okay then, first we go and fill the others in on all this, then we get organised. And from now on keep alert for anything that moves, no matter how small.’

There was no response when Paul banged on Alex and Rochelle’s door and he began to fear the worst. But then finally the door opened. To his surprise it was Rochelle, and she was naked. Then Paul got another surprise when he realized she was alone. ‘Ro, where the hell is Alex?’ he demanded as he entered the cabin, closely followed by the others. ‘Why has he left you alone?’

She looked dazed. ‘Alex?’ she said, frowning. ‘I don’t know. He went out. He didn’t come back.’

Linda was staring at her in astonishment. ‘Ro, why on earth aren’t you wearing anything? It’s freezing in here. I told you to stay as warm as possible.’

‘Warm?’ Rochelle looked at her blankly.

Linda began picking up her clothes from the floor. ‘Come on, I’ll help you. Then you’re going back to bed.’

Paul was already at work blocking the ventilator grill. ‘That’s just great,’ he muttered. ‘Alex is wandering