The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller (29 page)

“Tell him,” said Straub, low and serious, “do it. How did it go? Do it for him. Do it now.”

And then, when my brain heard the question, a funny thing happened.

Straub’s request produced several simultaneous questions of my own in my head, each one answering itself and leading onto another question. As they did so, I caught glimpses of a bigger truth in each thought. If I’d asked myself those questions in a different order, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it; I don’t know. But as it was, the story told itself, a chain of answers that led to a startling and terrifying conclusion.

I knew, right then, what the Stone Man was here for.

How could I reproduce the rhythm? I don’t know how it went.

So how did the rhythm go? It was familiar, I know that.

Wasn’t it too fast for you to reproduce anyway? You couldn’t do that.

I felt something roll over in my stomach, and I whirled away from Straub and the others to look out through the plastic screen. She was shouting something at me, but in my horror she became totally irrelevant.

But you’ve heard it reproduced before, haven’t you? What is it?

I saw the Stone Man draw near the start of the line of soldiers, and then, for the first time in two days, it stopped walking. My mouth was dry, and when I tried to speak, nothing would come out.

It was a constant, rapid beat, wasn’t it? BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM

The Stone Man raised its head, straightened, and then began to turn on the spot.

GCCAATTGAATTTGGCCCGTTAACTCGCCAATAATCCCGTTAACTCAGGCATG

Something terrible clicked, and I finally realised that the three letters that had been there all along, ever since the guy in the green vest had said them, telling me what the Stone Man wanted. I desperately wished I didn’t know; what could I do anyway? It had to happen. It had to end.

Not
Morse
code.

Its turn complete, the Stone Man paused again momentarily, and then began walking towards Patrick.

I found my voice.

“It’s
genetic
code,” I whispered, unable to tear my eyes away from the scene about to occur in front of me.

“It’s what?” whispered Paul, not hearing me, lost in the scene before him. My mouth dry, I looked at Straub as she stared intensely ahead, in control, giving orders into her walkie-talkie. I realised that she had expected this all along. She had to have. The scientific minds at her disposal would have made the connection nearly instantly, unlike myself, who merely thought of a chain of Gs, Cs and Ts, and felt like it was a vaguely familiar reminder of something that I should know, and then dismissed it. The scientists surely worked with that stuff every day. I was just someone who’d seen genetic code a few times, in science fiction films and on the news. How could I have been expected to know?

“
You knew
,” I whispered, wide eyes on Straub and feeling the heavy fall of the Stone Man’s feet vibrate through the concrete as it advanced upon Patrick. Straub’s eyes darted to mine briefly, but even though she didn’t stop talking into her handset, it was enough to tell me that my suspicions were correct.

“It’s going for him,” said Paul, grabbing at my sleeve as his eyes remained glued to the street. “It’s not going to stop, it’s going for
him!
’ With that, he actually started to hop lightly from one foot to the other, helpless in his panic and fear for the helpless, unaware man standing in the road. It was such an effeminate action for a man of Paul’s size that it would have been funny in any other situation, but it wasn’t that day because I knew that he was right; the Stone Man wasn’t going to stop, looming larger and larger before us and bearing down on Patrick as if to crush him. It was here for Patrick, for something from his genes.

The soldiers holding Patrick clearly realised it as well, speaking frantically over the airwaves and stepping back, still holding on to Patrick’s arms.

“Hold your position until further instruction,” replied Straub, firm and intense, but I noticed the two soldiers exchange a glance, suggesting that doing otherwise might be an option. Who could blame them? There was an unstoppable, unthinkable stone monster bearing down upon them, come to claim the man they were holding, and its pounding, inexorable footfalls now sounded like a judgement.

The soldier said something again, more frantic now, and Straub repeated the command. On the Stone Man came, crunching pavement as it did so, and I could see both of the soldiers arguing with each other over Patrick’s head.

“Hold your position!” yelled Straub, and for one of the men, those words broke the spell; her words had the opposite effect. He let go of Patrick’s shoulder and began to back to slowly away, holding his assault rifle across his chest. The other man screamed at him, then looked at the advancing Stone Man—now only a few feet from its goal—and seemed to visibly shrink slightly. He hesitated, and then also let go of Patrick, pointlessly aiming his rifle at the Stone Man’s head as he backed away.

Incredibly, Patrick stayed upright, swaying gently on the spot. I realised that his mouth had stopped moving completely, his jaw now hanging limply open. His eyes still stared blankly ahead, seeming to look straight through the enormous stone figure that would have filled his vision, for it was now upon him.

And yet it wasn’t. The Stone Man passed straight by Patrick’s right shoulder, causing Paul to temporarily loosen his grip on my shirt.

“It’s left him, it’s left him, look, it’s left him, it’s left him!” he cried breathlessly, freezing halfway through his foot-to-foot motion. And indeed it had, already several feet behind Patrick and seeming to head towards the retreating soldiers. There was an enormous bang, followed by a shattering sound, and it took a second for me to realise that the second soldier, the one aiming his rifle, had pulled the trigger, the shot ricocheting off the Stone Man’s head and passing through the window of a nearby parked car. The Stone Man, of course, didn’t respond, and instead suddenly began to turn, bringing itself in line with Patrick’s back. Paul’s hand clamped down on my arm once more, and he reassumed his frantic dance.

“Look, look! Why aren’t they doing anything? Why aren’t they
doing
anything?” said Paul, babbling to himself. He already knew why, of course, but knowing it and seeing it were two different things. Patrick was the sacrifice. There wasn’t any other choice. They had to do it. If the decision had been mine, I would have made the same one. Even Paul would, I think.

“They don’t want to stop it,” I whispered, shaking my head. “They knew it wanted him, and they want it to take him. They need it to happen so it can end.” My breathing was fast and shallow now, horrified yet—to my disgust—excited. Of course it was exciting. Don’t judge me for that. All the other stuff, fine, but don’t judge me for being excited. You would be exactly the same. I was there. Even if you don’t think you would be, you would be. I know.

The Stone Man walked up right behind Patrick … and stopped. As Paul and I held our breath, I realised that the tent around us was almost silent. Everyone, from the science teams to the radar operators to the medical staff to the commanding officers, knew that this was the moment of wait-and-see. And don’t think there was anyone there that wasn’t excited, either. I could feel it, the air hot and heavy with breathless anticipation. The pause continued, almost for a full minute. No one spoke. All you could hear was the movement of air, from hushed human breathing to the mechanically pushed kind coming from the workstation CPU fans. The silence then broke as a cry went up from one of the workstations.

“
Temperature drop!
” they yelled, meaningless to Paul but not to me. I’d felt a severe drop in temperature around the Stone Man before; it had been just before the Stone Man started walking for the first time.

“Unit one, stand by,” said Straub into her walkie, referring presumably to the line of soldiers by the house. I could no longer see Patrick’s guards, who had retreated out of my sight line. I never found out what happened to them. I’d like to think that they were treated leniently. How could they be trained for that? As I was straining to see their retreat, the cold hit us suddenly, washing into the tent and making nearly everyone gasp either in surprise at the incredible change or as a physical response to the sharp drop in temperature. This time, it was even colder than it had been in Millennium Place; it was like walking out of the sun into a meat cellar. Something new was about to happen. Patrick, meanwhile, was still oblivious to everything, but still miraculously upright.

The Stone Man lowered its arms to its sides and stood still. Its head then lowered slightly, as if it was inspecting Patrick’s neck, but even when lowered its head was still clearly visible high above the top of Patrick’s. This was due to a combination of the Stone Man’s imposing height, and Patrick’s short stature. Patrick looked like a child, dwarfed by his abuser. It lent the whole scene even more of an air of impending doom; the giant, literally stone-faced hunter, poised behind its helpless and vulnerable prey. The air around us continued to drop, and yet I didn’t think that the goose bumps breaking out on my skin were entirely due to the temperature.

Then even the deafening rattle of the low-flying choppers was drowned out by the most awful, cacophonous drone. It was so loud that it hurt, and everyone around me, even Straub, clapped their hands to their ears. I could see the mouths of the people inside the tent open wide in pain, their eyes screwed tight as they attempted fruitlessly to shut out the noise. It was like the sound of a rusty iron gate being wrenched open, but at a much lower pitch; it was like the roar of a tiger with a torn throat, turned all the way up to eleven. And it continued, getting louder.

Yet still I watched through squinting eyes, having to see, yet not wanting to at the same time. Of course, the sound was coming from the Stone Man, but then we began to see why. It was changing. Its chest was slowly beginning to protrude, but not all of it. In fact, as I watched, I realised that it was just two small sections in the centre line of its chest, side by side, and they were perfectly straight, symmetrical sections at that. The farther they extended, the louder the sound became. It was almost unbearable, yet the shapes extending out of the Stone Man’s chest continued to grow. They were rectangular, upright like monoliths, about five inches wide and at a combined length that covered the distance between roughly where the Stone Man’s collarbone would be and the top of its ‘stomach’. Their front surfaces were perfectly flat. As these strange segments of the Stone Man’s chest continued outwards—exactly matching the rest of it in colour and texture, free of any join lines and so seamless as they appeared that you could believe that they had always been there—they merged together, meeting into middle of its chest and forming one wider rectangle, free now of any line to suggest that they had ever been anything but one piece. Those of us who were still able to watch could see that the top of this new rectangle was at the same height as the base of Patrick’s skull, and covered an area that followed all the way down to in between his shoulder blades.

I could see Straub yelling something pointlessly into her walkie, the words drowned out by the roar of the Stone Man as the extension touched the back of Patrick’s neck. I expected his head to be slowly forced forward, but after a few seconds, I realised that it wasn’t, even though it was clear—from the continuing movement of the texture that covered the Stone Man’s surface—that the chest piece was still moving forward. How was that happening? The answer soon became clear.

To my horror, I realised that this extending part of the Stone Man’s chest was burrowing into Patrick’s neck and upper back. As it did, Patrick’s now-lazy verbalisation of his genetic makeup instantly stopped. His eyes flew open, his body jerked upright as if electrocuted, and Patrick began to scream.

To this day, I desperately, desperately hope that it was a reflex action, some kind of automatic defence mechanism perhaps, and that he remained as consciously unaware as he’d appeared to have been all along. I don’t want him to have known what was happening. But I still hear those screams sometimes; at night, when I lie alone in the dark, and I find it hard to convince myself that Patrick didn’t somehow come back to himself in his final moments, snapped out of his catatonia by unbearable pain. We could only just hear his cries through the deafening wall of sound from the Stone Man. Somehow, they managed to pierce through the noise and into my soul. The screams were high pitched and desperate, like those of a broken dog.