“I don’t know,” Tetsami answered Flynn. She inched along the ditch on her stomach, away from both the crater and the guards. The guards, at least, were paying her no attention. Their focus was divided between dragging away their fallen comrade, and keeping an eye on the black-filled crater.
The black began rolling out of the crater. The liquid spread out, over the lip, in a strangely geometric webwork.
The guards ran, pulling the welt-covered guy to his feet so he could stumble along after them. Tetsami pushed herself to her feet, but she felt a thundering panic in her gut that wasn’t wholly her own.
“Damn it, Flynn, that’s what I’m doing. Let me drive!”
However, Tetsami hadn’t done quite enough to accommodate Flynn’s emotions. She felt him desperately grasping for control as she tried to run up out of the ditch. Their nervous system spasmed from two sets of conflicting motor instructions, and both of them took a running face-first tumble into the ground. Gravel dug into Flynn’s face and tore the meat of his left arm though his shirt.
He barely realized that Tetsami had completely withdrawn as he tried to get on his feet. When he did, pain shot through his ankle all the way up his leg, intense enough that his leg collapsed when he put weight on it.
He fell on the ground again and looked behind him at the advancing black spiderweb. It was as if the personification of the Abyss was reaching for him. The strange order of the tendrils reached the first of the prefab buildings, and it crawled up the walls of the building as if it was some non-Euclidian vine.
Flynn flipped on his back and started pushing away from the advancing web with his good foot. The advancing web held to some strange geometry and, as it closed, he saw that within the holes formed by the black tendrils, the regular web pattern was repeated by thinner tendrils. Even closer, and he saw that inside the smaller webs, there was even a thinner pattern repeating.
The ground changed under the fractal net. Irregularities smoothed out, and the muddy surface turned uniform and smooth. Flynn only managed to keep ahead of the web because its advance slowed. The web enveloped two large prefab buildings. Flynn glanced and saw a dozen people running for the perimeter fence.
It seemed like a good idea, if he could get to his feet.
Now that the web’s advance seemed complete, he tried to push himself upright. But his ankle collapsed under him with a blinding flare of pain.
Flynn crawled, putting distance between himself and the web as fast as he could manage. It didn’t feel nearly fast enough.
He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the enveloped buildings moving, folding in on themselves. He stopped and stared, because they weren’t collapsing. Instead the walls fragmented and each piece slowly turned on an impossible axis, as if each building was a puzzle box being manipulated by an unseen giant. Also, like the web itself, the motion seemed to replicate itself on smaller scales, each rotating fragment itself formed by dozens of smaller rotating fragments. The material of the buildings changed character from dull utilitarian metal into something lighter and more reflective.
Someone had decided that two outbuildings turning into rolling cloudbanks constituted a threat. Shots came from the direction of the perimeter fence, some striking too close for comfort.
“Don’t those idiots realize how well that worked the first time?”
Flynn pushed himself to try and put at least one building between him and the shooters.As he did, he saw something streak through the air toward the closest alien building/cloudbank.
