Exlusive Free Short Story Part 2 of 3 - "Contamination"

“Contamination” Written by Michael Clark

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing on the scanners?” George asked.

“Holy shit,” Conrad replied. “There’s life on this rock! There’s life other than us on this rock, unbelievable!” He was breathing fast.

George whistled from the inside of his air-tight helmet. “The bucketheads are gonna wanna study this. No initial scans picked up life, but those were surface scans. We’re deep inside this planet now.”

Conrad rested his mining laser against his shoulder. The life signs their scanners picked up were microscopic. It looked just like other bland and colorless sediment they had mined before. George had scanned the area looking for a soft spot in the minerals to break them apart and extract the raw materials they wanted when his scanners picked up the anomaly. Now they were wondering if they could make credits off their discovery. It was possible they could make a great deal.

George activated his comlink. “Hey, it’s George Riley here, does anyone copy?” After a full moment, there was no reply or answer. He looked towards his partner.

“Mine’s not working either. This cave must be interfering with our signal. Let's clear out and return. Just don’t forget where it is!” Conrad said.

“Yeah, I know. Setting a marker now.” The duo began to climb out of the cave, when it started shaking violently. “What the hell was that?” George asked. He had worked on Medusa VII since it’s initial habitation, and it never had quakes before.

“Someone must be mining with explosives nearby,” Conrad said casually. But when things started shaking again, and closer to them this time, the fear crept in. “Alright, let's get out of here quickly!”

They both heard a loud explosion, and rocks of all sizes came tumbling down the path they were climbing. Some stalagmites fell from the ceiling. One hit George Riley in the face and sent him rolling backwards towards their discovery.

“GEORGE!” Conrad called out. He instinctively turned his suit’s beacon on like they were trained to do in an emergency, and then he went down after George. Another pile of rocks fell from the ceiling and landed directly on him as he tried to get back up. They ranged from the size of a balled up fist, to a human head. They battered him back to the ground violently.

“My suit’s breached,” he told Conrad who knelt beside him and began brushing the rocks off of his suit.

“Nothing fatal. I set my beacon. Help will arrive shortly.” To Conrad’s credit, help did arrive soon, but the breech was fatal in it’s own type of way. Conrad heard George’s suit hiss as he lifted him up and carried him. He tried his best to climb out of the cave that way. When help arrived, he was only several meters from the mouth of the cave.

The last thing George heard before he passed out was the evac team shouting into the public comms, “Who was using unauthorized explosives? Repeat, who was using unauthorized explosives?”

*

George awoke in the colony’s only Medbay. He felt lightheaded. In fact, he felt downright sick. His mining suit was off and dangling from a hanger on the wall. He looked around and was sad that Conrad wasn’t there. He wanted to thank him for saving his life. He was gonna ask the doctor if he could send a message to his wife, when he began convulsing violently. It was the first seizure of many. His eyes slammed shut, teeth dug into his tongue and then he passed out to the sound of blaring beeps from his medical equipment.

Two days later, when the primary doctor was beginning to wonder if George Riley would be the first man to die on Medusa VII, George made a sudden and drastic full recovery. He went from an inability to properly communicate, to as good as new in the course of six hours.

George passed all of the exams and was cleared to go. The Doctor thought his behaviour odd, but he chalked it up to shock. George insisted on working the very next day, and he was sent back out with Conrad.

Conrad claimed that he was waiting for George’s recovery before talking about their discovery. He told George he neglected to mention the suit breach to avoid a lengthy quarantine process. They went back to their secret spot where they had discovered the microscopic life as soon as they could.

It was there that George murdered Conrad.

First he shot him in the back with the mining laser, and then he used the weapon to bash Conrad’s body into broken pieces while he screamed in surprised horror.

George picked up all of the rocks and minerals that had evidence of the alien life on it, and put it in his mining cart. Next, he dumped Conrad’s corpse in a separate mining cart and returned to the colony with the first cart in tow.

He would use the rock to bash in two people’s faces that night. The man formerly known as George, then put the blood-soaked rocks in the main ventilation shafts that supplied the colony with oxygen.

By the end of that night, the colonists had been driven to madness. There was total chaos. Men savagely attacked their co-workers and families. One mother bashed her child’s head into a wall. Another colonist used his heavy duty machinery to drop a two-ton boulder on his partner. The stench of insanity was pumped through vents and air conditioners throughout the colony.

The security forces saw this unfold almost instantaneously. The colonists began murdering one another left and right, with seemingly no motive or connections to link the killings to each other. The security chief ordered all of his men to go to City Hall. They shot anyone that approached them on the way.

Within those first twelve hours, the colony’s population was cut in half. The survivors holed themselves up in City Hall. They tried to send a transmission for help, but they found galactic communications were completely offline. This was the doing of the once kind miner, George Riley. Now he was something quite different.

The first two colonists George had brained were now back on their feet and attacking whoever they saw on sight. His contamination had worked. They attacked in a different manner than the crazed humans. They swung their arms like bats and scratched and bit. They dragged their feet and tackled, and took fleshy bites out of anyone unlucky enough to come across them. They hungered.

Soon, the ones they had killed, were reanimated as well, and then they joined the fray.

The survivors who weren’t crazy were coincidentally helmeted or protected. They narrowly avoided the stench of insanity. The Governor was not helmeted, and thus, not so lucky. He soon grew violent, and one of the security personnel beheaded him with a fire ax.

When the thing once known as George Riley saw the headlights of an incoming ship, it retreated to the mines. Many of the colonists that were transformed into bloodthirsty vessels followed their unspoken leader.  

He or it had cognitive abilities, but the others were primitive drones. Using the synapses in the human brain, the alien controlling George could send out telepathic signals or commands to these lesser forms via the microscopic parasites inside of them. They followed him obediently.

The other humans exposed to the alien’s fumes, had simply went crazy without even coming into direct contact with the alien lifeform.

The parasite controlling George had encountered other intelligent life before. It knew exactly what to do. It had all of the infection forms retreat to the mines.

George watched through black eyes and red pupils, as the human reinforcements split into two teams. It searched through George’s brain until it found more information about the weapons they were carrying. It planned carefully.

When the commandos designated ‘Beta Squad’ arrived in the mines, George was lying face down and moaning in pain.

He couldn’t hear their secure comm channel where they informed their Sergeant of the wounded civvie, but, he did hear them when they switched to outside speakers.

“Are you wounded?” the voice asked. George answered with a louder moan. It was not hard to imitate a human in pain.

“Clear this mine and bring back any other survivors. Hunter, get to work on this man. Stat.”

The two commandos went forward deeper into the mines, looking left and right with their flashlights. Their MC Auto-fire Assault Rifles were loaded and ready to shoot at a moment’s notice.

“What happened here?” the Sergeant asked. Then the squad medic turned George over. He nearly fell backwards when he saw the color of his eyes, and the black veins that spider webbed across the blackish-grey skin.

It was then, that George’s partner Conrad tipped over the mining cart he was hiding in. The Sergeant aimed his weapon at Conrad and ordered him to stop. George reached out and broke the medic’s neck with inhuman strength. The sergeant didn’t hear over the sudden sounds of gunfire from his other two comrades deeper in the cave.

Another of the reanimated humans came out of the shadows stumbling towards the sergeant, and this time he fired without a warning. The colonist was flung back by the rapid fire. George took a combat knife from the medic’s gear and slit the sergeant’s throat from behind.  

George Riley took off the mining suit’s glove, and a sharp knife-like object protruded from his palm. He inserted it into the neck of both of the commandos. In mere moments, their bodies stood back up. The medic once known as hunter stood up with his neck still broken.

Next he stuck the hand-stinger into the sergeant’s brain to gather more information. As he did so, the other two commandos from Beta Squad returned, but they were no longer alive by any conventional meaning of the word.

*

When Beta Squad didn’t respond to their hailing frequency, Alpha Squad pulled out with the surviving colonists, of whom they had placed under arrest. Their numbers were considered too small to take aggressive action such as hunting for the other squad. No. Not when their last known location could be filled with dangerous insurgents waiting to ambush them.

George’s body watched as the small scout ship that brought the commandos here lifted off and disappeared into the very thin atmosphere. George then sent all of the living corpses under his command to secure the colony. He didn’t want any survivors. If any survivors were found they would be exterminated and added to his forces.

After his mindless minions were certain the planet was clear, he began penetrating the skulls of the undead with his hand-stinger. He was searching for someone that had knowledge of piloting ships. The ones that didn’t just walked out of the way with coagulated blood dripping lazily from the holes in their foreheads.

Finally, a freighter pilot and his crew were found. George Riley absorbed this knowledge through the sharp hand-spike.

Time was of no consequence, but it didn’t take long for George to prep the freighter, and fill it with all of the undead colonists. Beta Squad also joined them. The ship was more than a little cramped, but the zombies weren’t complaining. They stood in a type of stasis, where the parasites inside of them repaired any bone, ligament or muscle damage and kept their bodies functioning.

The ship filled with nearly a hundred colonists set a course for the place with the largest population in the nearby systems. The Harbinger.

*

“Identify yourself and your purpose here. You are trespassing in UNSF space. If you do not comply, you will be gunned down.”

The Sergeant of Beta Squad walked into the cockpit and crouched down next to George Riley. His stinger penetrated the man’s skull, adding another gaping hole to his cranium. “This is Sergeant Mack Zimmerman, Sergeant of the UNSF squad designated Beta of the 1st Marine Recon Force. My team is here to drop off prisoners from an insurrection on the colony designated Medusa VII.” The voice wasn’t one that belonged to George Riley, but the voice of the dead Sergeant. They waited a moment.

“Copy that sir. Your credentials and voice scan check out. Another squad from your battalion just dropped off prisoners from the same world. They left yesterday but their prisoners are currently getting booked and prepped for trials. Shall we alert them of your arrival?”

“Won’t be necessary, we’ll hail them when we’re done.”

“Understood. Land in Docking Bay PT-2 for drop off.”

“Copy,” the strange voice replied. When the Harbinger cut comms, George Riley retracted his stinger from the sergeant’s skull. It dripped a mix of red, yellow, and whitish-pink.

“Kinda odd that those commandos are using a public freighter. Don’t you think?”

“Who knows with those types. They probably commandeered it so they could fit all of their prisoners. Oh. Shit.”

“What?” the other CO asked. “What is it?”

“I forgot to ask them how many prisoners they were bringing,” the younger CO replied with frank embarrassment.

“It’s okay, we’ll just tell our guys to bring as many restraints as they can carry. It’s not like this place can’t afford to house them. Last I heard, we still got room for two-thousand more.” He scoffed at the idea of being surrounded by any more petty murderers.

“Did you hear about the new planet?” the younger man asked. His eyes shined. A new planet was almost as exciting as a prison riot, and even those were more than scarce on Harbinger.

“I did. I think a science outpost was set up there last week or something. It’s supposed to be the most beautiful planet they’ve ever seen. And right under our noses, this stupid station is monitoring its moon!”

“You think they’ll start letting us take our breaks down there under the sun? Maybe a vacation or something? Earth’s a long way from here.”

“Well,” the older correctional officer said. “We are on the ass end of the galaxy after all. Anything’s possible.”
As they were casually chatting, a freighter with an undead crew was preparing to dock on their station. The crew of that freighter was hungry. Not just for flesh, but for power too. For annihilation. For revenge. And they weren’t going to stop until their race had transmuted every other living being in the galaxy into one of them.

  

The thrilling conclusion arrives next week!