CHAPTER TEN: SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
"Commander. Commander."
Carter awakes to Etienne's urgent voice in his ear. He blinks and tries to work out where he is. The uncomfortable shape of the couch in DaSilva's office digs into his back. The brace about his wrist has obviously been digging into his chest as there is a dull pain there. His head is throbbing inexplicably hard.
"Commander!"
Etienne bends into his eye-line. He immediately knows something is wrong. The younger agent is pale, throat bobbing frantically as he struggles to speak. There is a thin line of sweat on his forehead.
"Agent Etienne, what the hell is it?"
"It's out, commander. The thing...it's out."
"What?" The rest of Carter's sleep-fog clears. He scrambles to his feet and grabs the only weapon he has with him since locking down the creature - a single revolver which he knows won't do a damn thing. He hurries to the door, chest tensing even more. "What the hell happened? It was sealed in. I sealed it in."
"I don't know," Etienne says. "But it's gone. The guards watching over it were out cold. There was no other struggle."
Carter hurriedly tries to process this. It feels like some cruel, fucked-up joke. Only hours before, he had closed the doors on that creature and left it in the hands of Dresner and his boys. Just how long has he been asleep? Surely not long enough for this chaos to happen. "There was a code," he says, speaking as he thinks. "Whoever let it out knew it, or got it out of someone who did."
Etienne follows him out of the office and into the corridor. The comms team have vanished from the office across from his, and mission control has mostly emptied out. "When did it escape?" he asks.
"I don't know, sir. It was a while before anyone could get access to the labs."
"Shit." That is an understatement. Carter tries to swallow his anger, though it is impossible. He has risked his own life, and the lives of his men, countless times to trap this creature, and now they are finally successful, some bastard has thrown them back to the lions. He regrets taking Faulke's suggestion to rest. He remembers their last conversation; how dismissive he had been of him.
No. That is a dangerous way to think.
But then, these are dangerous times.
"Where is the Director? Where is Dresner?" he asks Etienne.
"They've holed themselves in the Director's office. The whole place is locking down again, but now they're trying to keep the rogue out, not in."
"Shit. Shit, shit... Shit!" Carter suddenly stops. Down the hall, he hears the all-too-familiar sound of the ceiling giving. Something wet and heavy drops to the floor. He can't see it yet, but he can feel it - that creeping, crawling sensation itching all over his skin, the pressure in his head. "Back, back," he hisses at Etienne, retreating down the corridor towards his office. The few remaining operators at mission control hang around dumbly. "Get down," he orders. "Find somewhere to hide and don't fucking move."
They obey without question. Carter bundles Etienne into the office. Etienne has a plasma pistol in his hand. It is a start, but if he fires it and it doesn't affect that creature, they are screwed. "Down," he says. "Down."
Etienne stares at him mutely. Carter drops to his knees and crawls behind his desk, bringing his useless weapon with him. Etienne tries to join him. Carter waves him away towards the niches lined up beneath the partially shuttered windows. He can feel the pulses of the alien getting closer, spreading through him like a second heartbeat. Like I have a connection with it, he had told Faulke.
Etienne ducks down just in time. Outside, through the sliver of the windows, the black leathery shape appears. The heavy step of its feet reverberates through the walls, accompanied by the rasping wetness of its breathing. It moves slowly, deliberately. Every now and then, its tail will flick and tap against the glass. Etienne flinches as it knocks a few inches above the niche he is curled into. His gasps match its animal panting. "Ssh," Carter mimes across at him, and he nods.
Claws rake down the window. The sound sets Carter's teeth on edge. If the thing decides to put pressure on the glass, it will shatter without any resistance. He looks away, pressing his back further against the desk. He clutches the revolver and wonders where will be the best place to shoot that son of a bitch, even it means he will go down seconds afterwards.
But the alien does not push. It retreats from the window and Carter hears its ponderous steps again. It circles like a vulture, down the length of the office, and then...shit, it is coming back again. It knows. It knows there are bodies in here just waiting to be picked clean.
Carter stares at the chalkboard just ahead of him. Statistics and snippets of radio chatter are scrawled over it. He focuses on them as the creature patrols up and down. The words and numbers suddenly don't make any sense to him. It is like reading a foreign language. The thought scares him. The only thing that he can understand is the slow crawl of the alien behind him, getting closer and closer to the door.
He digs his back into the edge of the table and grips the revolver as hard as he can, if just to feel something real. His mind is drifting, being taken away on some other existence separate from his body. With every heaving breath of the creature, it seems to be sucking out his soul. What the hell is wrong with him?
Puppet strings reach across the room, lashing to his arms and the back of his neck. They pull tighter and tighter. It is a jarring and terrible pain, but nothing physical. If it was physical, he could fight it. He has suffered enough wounds in the past. None were like this. This is reaching below bone, below muscle, below organs, into the place he has stashed his grief for his family, the place where that fire still burns.
He turns. The alien's footsteps have fallen silent outside. Instead, there is another rhythmic pumping. It takes him a while to realise it is the thumping of his own heart. Sweat gathers on his brow. Fight it, fight it. This bizarre, unsettling connection reaches out for him, transcending his defiance. All he wants is to move out of his hiding place and reach the alien, stop this searing pain inside of him. It is insane. He clings to the one remaining sensible part in his head. But it is hard to resist when you don't know what you're resisting.
The alien is at the window again. Carter can see the dark shape of it through the drawn blinds, but it seems to be pulsating and glowing with a blueish light. A long limb reaches up and rests against the window. Six fingers splay out. The claws are like nails scraping down a blackboard. Beneath the shadow, Etienne curls in on himself. He is gripping the laser pistol so hard that his knuckles have turned white. Carter feels his voice rise in his throat, as though it is another organism swelling within. Put it down, he wants to say. Put it down.
Let it in.
No.
Carter pulls back against the urge. The invisible strings go taut around his body, jamming him in place. Let me go, he thinks. Let me go.
Let me in. Let me speak.
The other voice comes out of nowhere. It is his own tone and his own accent, Oklahoma-born. But it is not him. He feels as though he is sitting in another body, or worse yet, watching his own and being unable to control it. The beginning and end of his own mind become blurred, fuzzy, merging into... something else.
He fights it. But like a hallucination, the creature is pressing against the glass, trying to get in. As it comes closer, the thing inside of Carter only gets stronger. The seesaw between them bounces and plunges, each side gaining the upper hand then losing it.
He can't resist it. The boxes he has pushed the memories and trauma of his family are unravelling, spilling out all the pain and more. This dark control is cascading out with it. And he is edging from his hiding place. His knees scrape on the floor. The Venn brace throbs on his wrist. The sensation belongs to something else. He is being dragged along like a fish caught in the net, and the current is too strong.
The alien leans against the window. The glass creaks. The long line of its tail arcs upward.
"Commander."
Another voice. No. It can't be another one, there are too many stuffed inside of him already.
"Commander."
He knows it. He blinks and sees a face across the room. Etienne. The young agent is staring at him. He is deathly white. But his eyes are alive and boring into him, right past all the trauma, right past the puppet strings, right past the urge to run into the creature's waiting claws.
"Commander," he says again. "No."
Carter clings to the sight before him. It is earthly. It is real. Etienne needs him. The rest of his men need him. There are still ties remaining to this world. Not everything has been burned away.
He forces himself to retreat. He backs away again, sliding behind the desk. The pull of the alien ebbs. He is beginning to hear himself once more. The shadow retreats, losing its luminous sheen. Carter feels his mind become clearer.
He has to think of a way out of here. He focuses on that solely, trying not to let anything else in.
But in the end, he doesn't have to try.
A blaring alarm suddenly cuts through the room. Etienne jumps, knocks something on the desk above and grabs at it before it can fall. Outside, the alien whips around and emits a wailing cry. It hurries off and out of sight. The puppet-string pull immediately shatters. Carter breathes a sigh of relief.
It quickly turns into anger.
"Someone let that thing out. That door was locked and secure. Doc, you told us that you could maintain 24/7 surveillance of it. What the hell happened?"
"I don't know, Carter. I don't know."
"That's not good enough. I risked my life and the lives of my men to lock that son of a bitch up, and now the fucking thing is gone!"
"Carter! That's enough! That's - enough." Faulke has risen from his desk, palms pressed onto the wood. Now, he sinks back down again, exhaustion laying heavily on his shoulders. Carter finds it hard to feel any sympathy.
"William, please, let's act rationally," Dresner tries instead. He still seems remarkably calm, sitting in one of the leather chairs, long fingers steepled under his chin. Carter rounds on him, desperate to relieve some of the tension throbbing in his chest.
"You swore that no one else had access to those labs. It was you, Faulke and I. We even changed the regular access code so your workers didn't know it. You said there were no other escape routes - nowhere for that thing to get out through. But I wake up to find it stalking through the base like nothing even happened."
"We don't know what happened, Carter," Faulke offers.
"The surveillance footage is scrambled," Dresner says. "The operators still haven't come around. Someone deliberately incapacitated them to get what they wanted."
"Did you let it out, doc?" Carter knows there is no use in keeping his suspicions to himself. If he has thought it, so have the others. Faulke slams his hands to the desk again.
"Carter, for the love of God."
Dresner waves off Faulke's irritation. "Why would I do that, William?"
"You wanted to study it. You were very enthusiastic about bringing it in. I've seen your other little experiments."
Dresner is unshaken. "Yes, precisely. I wanted to study it. Why would I release it out of a controlled environment?"
"To see just how far it would go, just how much destruction it could cause."
"That's enough, Carter!" Faulke shouts again. "Until the footage comes back online and we have a clearer idea of this mess, you will not throw blame around like this. Unless you want to ask me the same question."
"Did you?"
"No. Did you?"
"Don't be ridiculous. I was resting, just as you ordered me."
"Then -" Faulke takes off his spectacles and gives them a firm wipe. Carter knows he wishes he could solve all the other problems just as easily. Including him. "It's no use trying to trap it, if it keeps escaping like this, or someone keeps letting the damn thing out. We need to eliminate it once and for all."
"And then return to New York and wipe the rest of the bastards out," Carter adds.
"Yes. Maybe. But right now -"
"Right now, we need to kill this thing -" Carter starts, only to be cut off by Faulke's sharp voice.
"Right now, we need to ensure that the Avenger is safe."
Carter falls quiet. In all the mess, he has barely given a thought to the Avenger. It is still sitting in the massive hangar, guarded by its engineers. The huge ship had been designed before alien contact, the first nuts and bolts assembled before they even knew what an Outsider looked like. Now, the kind of UFO fantasy that Roswell conspiracists obsessed over is getting closer and closer to becoming operational. It is the vehicle they will eventually take out against the invaders, if all doesn't fail before that.
"The alarm has been set off in the hangar," Faulke continues, and lets the implication hang.
Though the danger lurks outside, Carter relishes the opportunity to leave the room. He goes to the door, ready to round up Etienne for another trip into death's jaws. Faulke stops him before he can turn the handle. "Stay alert, Carter," he says, as though Carter hasn't been doing that from the beginning. "If you can sense where that thing is, then it can sense where you are. Be careful."
Carter hangs on those words, as if they mean something different deep down inside of him, or are a key to understanding what the hell is going on. He has had a horrible feeling that it isn't just one-way link. This is no unrequited attraction, no mismatched magnets. "I think it's a bit late for that," he says instead.
He eases the door open. The corridor is deserted. For the first time, the base is deathly silent, as if the entire place is holding its breath. He feels as though the roles have suddenly been swapped, and they are the prisoners in a cage, while the alien is free to watch them, and do whatever it pleases.
a/n: so, sorry this took a while to update (and with a shorter chapter than usual) but I have been running around like crazy with work and driving lessons and uni stuff, and a whole bunch of other stories ~ I keep coming back to this one with affection though haha