Crawlers

1 Some people are not meant to be in this world very long. They know it, too, in the back of their minds. Maybe they're uncertain, shaky in the way they live life. Maybe they're fragile. Others are the opposite extreme, too reckless. Some, like Ray Burgess Who was only twenty-seven years old, that night, in a remote Nevada lab Some are just prone to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Death seems to know who's going to be the antelope that strays too far from the herd. Right now, Burgess was crouched behind an overturned metal table in the break room, the table's stainless steel legs projecting away from him toward the door. The lights of the lab were still burning, out there, but here he huddled in the dark next to a soft-drink machine that made him twitch every time it hummed and clicked inside itself. A little light came from the slightly opened door and from the softly suggestive glow of the vending machine. His right-hand thumb was clamped between his teeth, and every time he heard any kind of metallic noise or the sound of something moving, from the next room, he bit down hard to keep from yelling. It was crumpled and torn, that thumbnail. Pretty soon blood would be seeping out. He tried to see the luminous face of his watch, but he had his glasses on, thick glasses for his severe nearsightedness, and they made it harder to see things very close. He didn't want to move enough to lift his glasses. He was afraid if he moved, he might bump the table, might make some kind of sharp noise. Did the watch say 9:10? If it was 9:10 p.m., then he'd been crouching there for more than two hours. He wondered if Ahmed had bled to death, in that time. Chances were, Ahmed was pasted to the floor by a sticky puddle of his own blood by now. He pictured a skin on the pool of Ahmed's blood, like on cooled cocoa. He had always liked Ahmed; the little guy had a sense of humor that was balanced by a kind of trusting optimism. He might still be alive. If I could get out, get someone to take care of Ahmed. Probably not going to happen. The damn things had of course cut the phone lines, right out of the box. They might even have incorporated the phone linesfused them with tissue, somehow. He'd never make it to the phone down the hall. And thanks to the Dazzling Geniuses, as Ahmed called them, in Security, they weren't allowed to have cell phones in Lab 23. It had never made sense, and now not being allowed to have cell phones made it more likely, it seemed to him, that he and Ahmed were going to die. Optimistic Ahmed. Ahmed is going to bleed to death, if he isn't dead already, and I . . . Ahmed's death might be merciful, really, considering the way Kyu Kim had died. The things had picked Kyu because he was the one who opened the Development Box. He was the one who'd discovered that they had disengaged the lab's safety circuits. The breakouts had divided Kyu's body into five parts, to use as many muscle groups as they could commandeer. Which meant Kyu's legs had begun to thrash and work themselves free from his torso, like snakes being born from eggs. And then his limbs had started moving around the room on their own. The torso, with the head still attached, went humping off in another direction. And Ahmed had fallen in front of Kyu's reorganized body, and Kyu's new jaws started that snap-snap-snapping like electric lawn clippers and ripped into Ahmed's sidebefore Ahmed had pulled the sterilizer down, onto Kyu's head . . . and smashed it. Smashed Kyu's head broken and bloody. But Kyu's body wasn't dead. Burgess could still hearShirley, John is the author of 'Crawlers', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345446527 and ISBN 0345446526.