copies

He was a mess. Blood everywhere. A name tag hung askew from his lab coat.

M. ERSKINE

The scientist in charge of this project. From close up I could see that his skin was as gray-white and mottled as the penguin’s feathers had been. Like the skin of a mushroom.

Erskine looked up at the ceiling with dead eyes and a slack mouth. And then he spoke again. “We are always what you need.”

We all jumped.

“He’s alive!” yelped Bunny.

“No, he ain’t,” growled Top.

I jabbed my fingers back against his carotid and got the same nothing as before. Top tried, too.

He jerked his hand back.

“We have waited for you since the lands split,” said the dead man.

We scrambled back.

“What the fuck?” yelped Bunny.

“I know, I know,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest.

“No,” insisted Bunny, and he held his BAMS unit in front of my face. The comforting little green light was glowing bright red.


We scrambled back from the dead man.

“Reads as unknown biological agent,” Bunny said.

“Yeah,” growled Top, “but what kind? Bacteria? Nerve gas? A virus? Are we hallucinating this shit?”

Bunny shook his head. “I don’t know … it paused on viruses for like half a second and then went to unknown particles.”

Top looked at his while I covered everyone. “Mine says bacteria … no, I’m wrong. It’s reading unknown, too.”

I glanced at mine just as the reading changed from virus to unknown.

We stared at each other, then at the units, then at the dead man.

We backed away from Erskine and tried to get readings from different parts of the airflow. Every few seconds the BAMS units would shift. Virus. Fungal spores. Bacteria. Mycotoxins. And even plant pollen. But each time the meter flicked back to the display for UNKNOWN PARTICLES.

“Something must be interfering with the sensors,” said Bunny.

“Can’t,” said Top. “They’re self-contained and they have ruggedized cases.”

The red lights flickered at us like rats’ eyes.

On the floor the dead man spoke again, and once more his words and his mouth didn’t match. His body trembled as with the onset of convulsions, but the tone was normal. No, “normal” isn’t a word I can use here. Normal wasn’t in that place with us. His tone sounded casual, like he was having a calm conversation with someone. The tone and words were well modulated. It sounded for all the world like a tape playback of something this man might have said at another time and under incredibly different circumstances, but somehow repeated now despite his condition.

What he said was, “There’s nothing to worry about. This is a clean facility.”

I could feel the shakes starting. They started deep, in my bones, in my muscles, and then shuddered outward through my skin.

“Cap’n,” whispered Top, “this motherfucker is dead.”

“I know.”

Bunny said, “What?”

“No pulse. He’s dead.”

“We defeat time because it interferes with service,” said Erskine. Or, at least, that’s what the voice said. His mouth formed different words. Even dead. I made myself look at the shapes his lips formed. And as I read those words I could feel—actually feel—my blood turn to ice. The words his dead mouth formed were, “I’m sorry. God forgive us. We should never have opened the gate. I can see the sleeping things. God forgive us.”

Over and over again. His dead, cold lips pleaded for mercy while the cooling meat of his body spoke to us in this vast and impossible place.

Bunny held his BAMS unit in one hand and had his M4A1 carbine pointed at the man’s head.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” repeated the voice. “This is a clean facility.”

Suddenly all of the red lights in the BAMS unit turned green.

I stared at my unit. The display read NO DETECTABLE PARTICLES.

I’ll buy one malfunctioning unit. Maybe two at an absurd stretch. Not three. And not three malfunctioning in the same way at exactly the same moment.

Then the dead man on the floor sat up.

He didn’t struggle to get up; he sat up as if he’d been doing ab crunches five times a day for twenty years. With his legs straight out in front of him, Erskine’s upper body folded forward until he sat erect. He turned his head very slowly toward me. His eyes were no longer totally vacant. There was a strange new light in them, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that says someone’s home. It wasn’t that at all.

Bunny actually shrieked. It was the only thing you could call that sound. I was so close to doing the same thing that I had to clench my jaws shut.

Erskine said, “All doors can be opened.”

Top said, “What?”

“Any open door allows ingress and egress,” Erskine said in that same reasonable tone. “This is a fundamental truth of all dimensions.”

Blood, thick as molasses, dribbled from the corners of his mouth and ran down over his chin.

Dead things don’t bleed.

But that blood didn’t look like normal blood. It was so dark, almost like oil.

“The question of controlling ingress is solved at the quantum level.” The dead man looked at Bunny, then at Top, and then at me.

He smiled. With black blood oozing from his mouth, he smiled.

It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. In a life spent fighting every kind of human monster, every twisted aspect of natural evil, here was a smile that shook me, stabbed me through the heart, froze my soul.

Behind us we heard a voice say, “Tekeli-li!”

I whirled and saw a shape, pale as one of the penguins, and I fired at it without pause, without thinking, breaking all protocols and training. The bullets tore into the flesh of a naked man. Holes opened in his flesh and black blood poured from it.

The man I shot was Dr. Erskine.

I froze, finger still on the trigger, smoke drifting from the barrel.

Behind Dr. Erskine was another man.

Another Dr. Erskine.

Other figures emerged from the shadows. More Erskines.

Then other people. Some in bloody clothes, others naked and pallid as mushrooms. The lights on the BAMS unit flared red again.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” they said.

Then behind me, the first Erskine said, “Function is a by-product of need.”

There was a rattle of gunfire as Bunny emptied half a magazine into him.

Then the man said, “Tekeli-li!”

More and more figures stepped from the shadows. Dozens of individual people. More than a hundred. Some of them were dressed in the bloody shreds of lab coats. Some were in military uniforms or engineers’ coveralls. Some were American. Some wore the uniforms of Chinese or Russian military. Beyond, amid, and around them were hundreds of others. Copies of each. Hundreds of copies of each.

“Tekeli-li,” they said. “Tekeli-li!”

Though they each spoke with their own mouths, it was all said with a single voice. One voice that spoke in perfect harmony.

One voice.

...

Neither Top nor Bunny saw him, and a second later the image of him was crowded out by something else. Something that was so wrong. So totally wrong.

It was huge and mostly hidden in the darkness, but for all its mass the thing moved with a fluid bulk. It was as if a body of viscous liquid was somehow moving without the need of containment. There was an oily iridescence about it and a stink of pollution worse than anything I’d ever experienced. And there were things coming from it. Not arms. Nothing like that. No, I swear to God that this thing had tentacles, as if it was some kind of obscene octopus. But it wasn’t that. Maybe there’s no word for what it is.

I saw it, though.

We all saw it. And in that moment of awful clarity I saw the machine outside of the ancient city. I saw the gateway opening and this thing came out. This tentacled abomination. It reached out of its world and into ours. I saw it. We all saw it.

“No,” breathed Bunny. His eyes were wide and unblinking and he seemed like he was tottering on the edge of total panic.

Then all of the Erskines came charging at us. Some of them were bare-handed. Many of them held guns, knives, chunks of rock. Anything they could grab. We saw Russian and Chinese soldiers mixed in, guns in their hands, eyes empty of sanity but filled with madness. Something had taken hold of all of them and had turned this entire group of people—at least a hundred men and women—into a mindless swarm of killers.

They surged toward us, screaming their weird chant, hurling stones, firing wildly.

“God almighty,” breathed Top in a terrified whisper. “If this is real … if this gets out … Jesus Christ…”

The swarm came howling toward us. I said nothing. I opened fire. It was a target-rich environment. We filled the chamber with thunder. We fired every bullet. We threw every grenade. We hurled every satchel charge.

Then we turned and ran.

We screamed the whole time as the collective voice screamed back at us.

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

-Kill Switch pg. 80-85, Kindle Edition.