Detective Murphy paces around the room reading a report by one of the other officers. The report is on Dr. Zephen and her employers. The report says that Dr. Zephen was seen leaving her lab at around 4 PM. She was later seen walking across the highway; her car is still in the parking lot. The report also notes that she was one of the three researchers that were working on the area where the sphere had been found. Dr. Roberts and his associate Jake Crovos, the other two researchers were so far unreachable.
Murphy walks over to another cop who is on the phone. He waits for him to finish and hang up the phone. "Have you gotten in contact with Dr. Roberts or Crovos yet?"
"No, Dr. Roberts apparently left his office around 4. Crovos had a day off today and no one has seen him yet."
"Well, this is going really smooth. Don't tell me the FBI is coming too?"
"Not yet sir, we've only vaguely told them about what's been happening down here."
"Good. Do we still have men posted outside looking for Roberts and Crovos?"
"As far as I know sir.
"Good, could you let me-"
The officer's radio comes to life, "We have spotted Dr. Roberts� but� he seems to be� uh� injured, over."
Murphy takes the cop's radio, holds it to his mouth and presses the send button, "Excuse me? What do you mean �injured'? Over."
"Well, it looks as if he was in a car crash. He has a massive wound on his stomach, and his leg is� kind of� well, detached�over."
"What do you mean �detached'? Over."
"It's still connected to his body, sort of, but every time he steps down on the leg the lower half kind of pops over to the side and he falls and lands on his knee joint. Over."
"Are you serious? Over."
"Yes sir. We've got some doctors down here trying to sedate him as we speak but the drugs don't seem to be working. He just keeps coming. And bleeding. He's bleeding all over the place. Uh, over."
"We need to stop him some how, or he'll probably end up dead. Do whatever you can. Over."
"Yes sir. Over and out."
The other officer looks at Detective Murphy with a pale face and begins to say something but Murphy cuts in. "You'd better get out there too."
The officer blinks several times, clears his throat, and heads down the stairs to the front door. Detective Murphy looks over at the janitor and Dr. Zephen, and the pools of dried blood underneath them. He's seen lots of blood in his days, but this time it was different. These people were alive, and he can't help wondering why the blood doesn't smell.
Murphy hears a commotion near the bottom of the stairs and decides to investigate. When he gets to the top of the stairs he sees a fairly familiar scene. He sees half-a-dozen cops trying to prevent Dr. Roberts from continuing, and several other doctors trying to sedate him. But Dr. Roberts just keeps on coming forward, with his right hand stretched out in front of him.
Dr. Roberts is in a horrible shape, he has cuts and bruises all over his entire body. His stomach is severely lacerated and Detective Murphy thinks he can see some of his intestines hanging out. Robert's left leg is the worst of all. It seems to be attached with thread. A few veins dangling from the top of his knee to the bottom, holding the rest of his leg together. The bone is severely sticking out, the femur bone. It looks white, as if it had been cleaned. Then Dr. Roberts tries to step forward with his left leg, but finding only half a leg to walk with he falls to the floor. His femur bone smashing into the tile floor and making a horrible, horrible noise. And yet, he continues to move forward.
There seems to be little that the policemen can do except slow him down a little. He keeps inching forward, closer and closer to where ever he is going. He eventually reaches the staircase when one of the doctors accidentally steps on his leg. Roberts pulls forward and the nearly severed limb pops free and rests softly on the floor. The doctor looks down at the leg and promptly passes out.
Dr. Roberts keeps going. Step, clack, step. Step, clack, step. He's heading up the stairs now, unaware of the small task force desperately trying to stop him. Murphy looks closer at the man's blood- shot eyes. The eyes don't appear to be looking at anything, or even moving. They just stare. And no blinking either. Murphy keeps watching the crippled doctor, and not once do his eyes blink.
Murphy looks down to the floor and says aloud, "My God, there's nothing we can do to stop these people�"
Detective Murphy is sitting on a stool hunched over and very still. He appears to be asleep. One of the other officers walks over to him. He tries to tell whether the detective is awake or not.
"Detective Murphy?" No response. "Detective Murphy?" Still, there is no response so the officer taps him on the shoulder. "Er, excuse me, detective Murphy?"
"Eh? Wha? What is it?"
"Dr. Roberts' office just called. Another researcher called them looking for Dr. Roberts. He said that he had information regarding the sphere."
"Really? Where is this man?"
"Well, his name is Joseph Siralev, and he is being flown over here as we speak. He should be arriving within the hour."
"Thank you officer." The police officer nods to the detective and walks off to where ever it was that he came from. Murphy looks down at the notepad in his lap. It is a preliminary forensics report on the three people sedated on the sphere. It is relatively brief because the three people are still alive and only a few tests can be done legally on their bodies.
The report talks about saliva and blood tests of the bodies, the wounds on their hands and some other things. A few things in the report seem to be quite strange. The wounds on their hands are incredibly large and caused a lot of blood flow but the blood never clotted. It simply stopped running out after a while, leaving a large hole in the hand. The saliva and blood tests were all normal except that they seemed to contain large amounts of bacteria. This in and of itself isn't all that strange, the blood was extracted from the floor and the saliva from their open mouths. The strange thing about the bacteria was that it seemed to be organizing itself, along with the blood and other cells. The bacteria would push around the other cells until everything was all in rows and columns. The bacteria also appeared to be pushing around the macrophages, cells that normally ingest any foreign substances that it finds.
All of this information is useless to detective Murphy. He has no idea what it means, so he takes several aspirin from a bottle in his pocket and heads for the nearest bathroom.
Joseph Siralev is walking up the stairs escorted by a police officer. They reach the top of the stairs and the officer brings Joseph over to the new African exhibit. The officer calls over to detective Murphy who walks over to question Siralev.
"Hi, I'm Detective Murphy, what can you-"
Joseph cuts the detective off, "Where is the sphere?"
"Uh, it's right over here."
Joseph Siralev walks over to where the sphere is. "Three? There's already three people here?". He examines the sphere closely, practically oblivious of the people with their hands pierced on it. "Amazing� Simply amazing�"
Murphy walks over near Mr. Siralev, "Can you tell us anything about this sphere?" "Huh? Oh, yeah. Well, before now I've only just heard ancient stories about it. Me and several of my colleagues were traveling in Africa and we came across a fairly hospitable tribe."
"What was the name of that tribe?"
"I don't know, it was unpronounceable. One evening one of the tribe elders told a story about their gods. I had someone transcribe the story so it could be properly translated later. The elder described the gods as mystical beings who created all life on earth many eons ago. He also said that the gods had control over all of nature, and that this control was the very thing that kept the world in balance. The elder continued to talk about how several young tribes-men broke into one of the god's palaces and stole a strange artifact. He described the artifact exactly as the one here. The artifact was brought back to the tribe and they were eventually able to decipher the inscriptions on the sphere. The device was apparently some sort of species control �switch'. The elder said that it could be used to disconnect a species from the gods and therefore allowing that species to flourish and tip the balance against all of the other species. The device also warned that once disconnected, if the device was ever touched again by the same species, that species would be destroyed. The tribe was able to determine that 4 people would have to be sacrificed in order to activate the device. They also decided that it would be wise to hide the artifact, so they went to a cave many miles from their tribe-land and sealed the sphere and the 4 men inside. The elder then said that they were forever disconnected from the gods and that humanity could gain control over the earth."
"So� What happens when a fourth person gets to the sphere?"
"Happens? I have no idea. But we're all gonna die."
Murphy is lying on a bench in the museum away from the room with the sphere in it. A light, buzzing noise starts to emanate from somewhere on his waist and he begins to wake up. He sits up on the bench and removes his beeper from his pants. He looks at the message and his eyelids raise several millimeters for a brief moment.
He takes a cell-phone from his pocket and dials the number on his beeper, "Well, what have you got for me?"
A hurried, excited voice comes from the phone, "We've found the other guy, Crovos. He appears to be headed straight for the museum. We've aligned a truck in front of him to walk into. He's almost there now."
"What are you going to do to him once he gets in there?"
"Well, we're not really sure, I think the docs are gonna sedate him somehow."
"We tried that here, nothing worked. Are they going to use something different this time?"
"Yeah, I think so. Some of the doctors are from the army and they've got some new sedatives that I think are classified or something."
"The army?!? What the hell are they doing here? This is still our jurisdiction! Who notified them?"
"I don't know. Hey! Here he comes! Wow, he's walking straight into the truck, no problem!" A loud rumbling starts to come from the phone.
"What's going on over there? Hello?"
"J-J-Jesus! It's a-a Friggin' earthqu-qu-quake!! Ho- ly crap!" The sound of a large explosion can be heard through the phone. For a moment there is complete and total silence. Then there is static.
"Hello? Hello? God damn it!" Murphy slams the small phone to the ground and the little plastic antenna breaks off as he walks out of the room.
Murphy's face is a slightly deeper shade of red and some of the veins are beginning to protrude from his neck. "I want to know what happened to those people! Why doesn't anyone know anything?!?"
"I'm sorry sir, there was a major earthquake in that area. That section of the city has been closed off, only small reports are coming in from rescue teams. Most of the people being found are dead."
"Fucking earthquake! This is Boston! We don't have earthquakes in BOSTON!!"
"Well we did today sir."
The detective glares at the young man until he scuttles away like a flicked beetle. Murphy goes back to pacing back and forth across the room, racking his blunt but strong mind for explanations for all the things he's seen, with none coming forth.
He stops at a window to look at a pigeon in a tree outside. He looks at the bird and the bird looks back at him. Not back at the building, or back at the window, but right at him. He blinks a few times and shakes his head. He looks back at where the bird was and he sees now two birds. He looks around and sees more birds. They're everywhere. On the trees, on the ground, pecking at benches. Literally hundreds of them, all staring at him. The detective swallows loudly, reaches his hand up and pulls down the shade.
Around 2 AM most people are asleep. There are only two guards at the front of the museum guarding the entrance. There are several more people sleeping inside, including detective Murphy. The detective stays at the museum mainly because he really doesn't have much to look forward to at home.
The two guards at the entrance are underpaid and also fairly tired. They don't notice the man walking towards them at two in the morning. They don't notice the man's missing arm. They don't notice the way he stares forward without blinking. It's dark out, and they don't even see him until he's 10 feet away.
The first thing they do notice is the smell, a smell that is completely unique, unlike any others. They can't quite tell what the smell is, but they do know it smells very odd. It is the smell of the dead, before they die. A smell reeking of death, with a hint of life that only reminds you of despair. A smell rarely smelled, nevertheless recognized.
One of the guards waves around his flashlight in the direction of the smell. The yellow- white beam stops on the face of Jake Crovos. His pupils don't dilate; they actually appear to grow slightly larger. The guard fumbles around in his mind and eventually gets his thoughts together, "Excuse me sir, the museum is closed. You'll have to come back some other time."
The man continues to walk forward.
"Sir? No, I'm sorry, you can't come in here." The guard notices the ripped flesh protruding from the torn stub of an arm on the man. "Whoa! Are you OK sir? Hello?"
He continues to move forward.
"I'm going to have to stop you sir, please go home or to wherever you came from." The guard walks in front of the man and unbuttons his baton. The man continues to walk forward and pushes into the guard. The guard takes out his baton, moves his left foot back, and presses the baton into the upper chest of Mr. Crovos. The man continues to walk forward.
The guard gestures to his partner, "Hey! Can you give me a little help here?"
His partner, a little plump from the numerous guarding jobs requiring mostly just sitting around, slowly gets to his feet and approaches the other two. He also takes his baton out.
Crovos continues to move forward and the guard's baton slips forward and smacks against his throat. Small crunching noises can be heard and blood dumps from the man's mouth. The guard pulls away his baton in surprise, "Holy crap! I think I broke his throat or something!"
The other guard takes his radio from his belt and holds it to his mouth, "Is anyone awake up there? I think we've found Crovos, he's trying to get inside. Hello?" He pushes the beep button several times but there is still no response.
Upstairs in the museum, detective Murphy is having a very odd dream. Everyone in his dream keeps opening their mouths but nothing but beeping noises are coming out. He begins to stir in his sleep, a portion of his brain realizing that the beeps are coming from the real world, the conscious world. He gets up and looks around the room drearily.
An echoing voice comes from somewhere down the stairs, "Hello? Is anyone awake up there? We can't hold this guy off! We need some help down here!"
Murphy yells back to the darkness, "I'm coming!" He starts to run, and in the darkness he trips on a display rope; the sound of his knee hitting the floor tells him to turn on the lights. The lights flicker for a moment and the room is wafted in a fake, white light. The detective runs to the staircase and sees a semi-armless man being held by two guards halfway up the stairs.
The detective reaches into his coat and being unable to find his cell phone, grabs his gun instead. He yells down to the two guards, "We have to do everything we can to stop this man! No exceptions!" He disables the safety on his gun, cocks it, and raises it towards the three men on the stairs. "Move!"
The two men look at the detective surprisingly and jump to either side of Crovos. Murphy aims his gun at Crovos' left leg and fires. The bullet hits Crovos two inches below his knee, splintering his tibia into small shards. The bullet ricochets off of the rest of the bone and slams into a nearby wall. Crovos continues to walk up the stairs. A fresh stream of blood begins to ooze out of his leg.
"Damn it." Murphy aims for Crovos' lower quadriceps and pulls the trigger on his gun. The gun jams. "Son of a bitch�" Murphy drops the gun and takes out his extra one, cocks it and raises it towards Crovos. The barrel, at arms length, is only 2 inches from Crovos' head. A thousand neurons fire in an instant inside Murphy's head. Instincts and training meshing with profound shock. His hand flinches and the gun fires.
The bullet clears a path through Crovos' head. Skull fragments and a fine mist of blood leave the back of his skull revealing his pinkish brain. The power of the shot pushes Crovos' head back and stops him for a moment. He blinks once and almost appears to be looking directly at detective Murphy. Blood begins to run from the entry wound and he starts walking again, pushing into the detective. Murphy moves to the side, little droplets of blood on his shocked face. He lowers his gun and his head to the ground and prays for the fate of the world.
Crovos stops moving when his palm is resting against the sphere. He stands there still; frozen in place like the others.
Murphy sits on another bench in the museum. He is thinking about his beliefs, his religion, his god, and his people. He wonders what is going to happen now. He wonders whether it is all his fault. He wonders if there was ever anything anyone ever could have done. He also wonders what is going to happen next.
Joseph Siralev paces back in forth only a few feet in front of Murphy. His hair is greasy and messy, he keeps mumbling to himself, and keeps clenching and unclenching his hands. One can only wonder as to what his thoughts are roaming to.
Murphy looks up at Siralev and appears to look very annoyed. He stands up and walks over to the frantic, pacing man. He grabs Siralev by the shirt collar and pulls him close to his face and talks in a low, deep voice, "What� is� going� to happen� now?"
Siralev looks back at the detective like a cornered mad-man, "Goddamn it!! I don't know! How could I? How could anyone! And what the hell difference does it make now?"
Some of the other officers in the room glance towards Murphy and Siralev. They have no real idea of what is going on. All they know is that there are four people with spikes through their hands and that something is very, very wrong.
Murphy grabs Siralev with his other hand and begins to lift him up, "What do we do!?"
"I told you! It's too late! They're all here now! It's over! Now let go of-"
At that moment the clock strikes four once again. One by one the spikes protruding from the sphere all clack back inside. Then the upper half of the sphere rotates about 2 inches and raises up revealing 4 square holes above the little mettle triangles, just above the victim's hands. Slowly, and all at once, 4 red maggots with black heads start to squirm out of the holes. They wriggle their way to the front of each person's hand and crawl inside the wound. They can be seen crawling through the arms and into somewhere in the bodies.
Murphy lets go of Siralev and he drops to the floor with his mouth wide open. Murphy takes several steps towards the sphere and speaks aloud, "What the fuck?"
And so it begins. Nothing noticeable can be seen, but something in the four bodies change. They begin to smell. They reek. They smell like the rotting corpses that they should be. The people in the room have to hold their hands over their noses and mouths to escape the smell. Some of them stagger and fall down, a few even vomit.
They can't hear it at first, the smell is too strong. It keeps getting louder, and louder. A tapping, a smacking almost. It's coming from the windows. Murphy looks up at one of them but only sees a few black splotches on it. And then more splotches. More and more, louder and louder. They're flies, hurling themselves at the windows by the millions. The smacking sound becomes incredibly intense, almost a constant noise. It's like the strongest rain storm you could ever imagine.
Murphy holds his head to try and reduce his headache from the noise. He looks down and sees Siralev passed out on the floor. He hears a different sound now. A peculiar sound, but nevertheless recognizable. It's a cracking sound, the sound of the window panes losing their structural composition. He looks and sees the cracks growing larger and larger, spreading across the panes like ivy.
With a mighty crash the windows shatter, all of them at once. Massive streams of flies pour into the museum room, so thick they look like floating rivers of oil. They swarm and start to spin around the room hurling themselves into anything in the way. People are running and screaming and throwing themselves onto the floor. Murphy just stands their with a grimace on his face and stares at the sphere.
The flies begin to collect on the four bodies, covering them from head to toe. They look like crawling masses of shiny, black jelly. After a few moments the flies begin to fall off. Millions of them plopping to the ground in massive heaps. In their place are millions and millions of maggots. White and shiny and squirmy.
The maggots begin to consume the bodies, faster than any time-lapse nature documentary. They burrow and ingest the outer flesh of the four people and begin to move inward. As they get to the joints appendages begin to drop off. Eventually the torsos fall to the floor still standing up. Murphy can still see one of the people, he does not know which one. He can see into their eye sockets; he does not see eyes but only writhing maggots burrowing deeper and deeper.
By now Murphy is the only one left in the room. Slowly but hard he falls to his knees, catching himself with one hand. He looks back up to the bodies in time to see their rotted skulls fall to the floor and roll several inches. He can see the rib bones of the torsos now, white and strong. He can only guess as to what has happened to the organs inside those rib cages.
Then the maggots seem to finish. They stop their squirming and start to shrivel up. They turn brown and then black. They start to crumble off of the torsos like dried mud. The vertebras of the torsos collapse and the fall over, breaking open the rib cages and revealing large pink cocoon-like masses.
The masses seem to pulsate, almost as if they were still working lungs. They have purple and red veins running on them, twitching and pulsing in synch. The cocoons start to grow a little bit, but not much as most of their food has already been consumed.
The cocoon nearest Murphy begins to break open. Something inside is pushing its way out. It splits open and a creature begins to slide out. It pulls itself out with its long, sharp, silver legs. Strands of goo dangling from it. It pulls its head out and looks at Murphy, looks at him with yellow-red eyes. It blinks sideways and clicks its razor sharp, beetle-like jaws. It begins to bob its head in the air and two long antenna fold out from its back. They twitch up and down like seismograph needles.
Murphy stares unblinking at this monster. Sweat pouring from every crevice in his body. He stares intently at this thing and does not notice the three other creatures emerging from their cocoons. The creature spreads it pincer-like claws and opens its mouth. It makes a noise so horrible it makes Murphy urinate in his pants. His heart pumps once and blood leaves his aorta, before it can pump again he is dead. His limbs twitch in the air and only blackness can be seen.
The End.
"All beginnings come from ends, and all ends come from beginnings."
