The burned Thing

The portable surgical table gleamed in the middle of the infirmary. Macready and Copper went to a corner and lifted a heavy-duty plastic sack between them. The contents were dumped unceremoniously onto the table.

"Besides the papers, the videotapes, and the cassettes, we also found this," Copper told them.

The mess on the table had once been a man. It was badly charred and broken, but that wasn't what drew the instant attention of the onlookers. What remained of the trousers and shoes were ripped lengthwise and split into long shreds, as though the legs and feet they normally concealed had suddenly grown five sizes too large for them and had burst the seams from within. The upper torso was an almost unrecognizable gnarly mass of indistinctly formed protoplasmic mush.

There were no visible arms; just lumps of dark goo and flesh flanking the chest region. The head was oddly disfigured and looked larger than normal. Its location was far more disconcerting than its appearance. It seemed to be growing out of the stomach. There was nothing atop the shoulders, or where the shoulders ought to have been.

Peculiar appendages that resembled loose tendons were wrapped around the carcass like white rope. The ends stuck out to the sides at odd angles, stiff and hard as plastic. They'd reminded Copper of vines climbing the
walls of a hothouse, save for their color. One circled repeatedly around the body's left leg like the striping on a barber pole. Another was wrapped securely around the misplaced skull. Scattered colorfully amid the goo-like morass of the chest area were torn fragments of a shirt, like feathers protruding from tar.

Fuchs turned away for a moment, but no one threw up. None of them, not even the usually unflappable Garry, was unaffected by the viscous grotesquerie, but the corpse was too far removed from humankind to affect them intimately. It was a specimen, like Norris's rock samples or Blair's tubes full of aerial bacteria. It was too bizarre, too distorted to connect with any of the grinning, beer-guzzling figures they'd seen in the salvaged photographs from the Norweigian camp.

"I know it's pretty badly burned," Copper finally muttered into the aghast silence, "but could a fire have done all this? At high temperatures human bodies burn. They don't . . . melt."

Sickened but fascinated, Blair poked at the tendonlike growths and the asphaltic goo. Some of the liquid came away on his fingers and he hastily wiped it off on his pants leg.