There wasn’t much Doc Martin could do at the camp; all of Benediction’s animals had gone missing when the storm—and whatever had come with it—took control.
As she walked through the camp, she saw familiar faces among the survivors: the Hennesseys, who had two cats, a Pomeranian, and a cockatiel named Pretty . . . Bob McDowell, who had to put his chocolate Labrador, Sugar, down last June . . . Veronica Preston and her daughter, Lizzy, who had gotten a kitten less than two weeks before.
She acknowledged them as she passed, the looks in their eyes and the injuries to their bodies telling her everything she needed to know.
Doc Martin was tempted to go to them, to say that she was sorry—to explain that it wasn’t their pets’ fault at all, that something inhuman had been controlling the animals.
But she doubted they would want to hear it. The fear was still there, the anger and the physical hurt.
She was down to her last two smokes but fished one out of the crumpled pack anyway. As she lit up, she realized that she was angry too, although she really didn’t understand at what.
Something had affected the brains of the animals on Benediction. After listening to all the talk from the scientists who had saved them, she knew it had happened in other places and that it wasn’t any kind of accident, no environmental disaster.
No, it was much worse than that. This had been intentional; something not of this world had turned pets into weapons.
There was the source of her rage. That somebody—some . . . thing—could take a poor, innocent creature and twist it into something that could commit the most murderous of acts was enough to make her want to commit murder herself.
Or at least deliver a substantial beat down.
She puffed on her smoke, gazing about the encampment and wondering how many more casualties there were from yesterday’s event. She was sure there had to be more folks holed up in their homes, afraid that it wasn’t yet over, afraid to venture back outside.
She remembered the things she’d experienced back at her clinic and shuddered, just as she noticed a little boy approaching her. She didn’t remember his name but knew that his family had a greyhound/shepherd mix named Seamus.
“Hey,” she said, putting her cigarette down by her side so as not to get smoke in his face. She noticed that he was filthy, and one of his hands was bandaged.
He stood before her and stared with large, brown eyes.
“You doing okay?” she asked him, gesturing to his injured hand.
He looked at the dirty bandage as if noticing it for the first time. “Seamus bit me,” he said, looking it over carefully. “He’s . . .” The boy hesitated. “He was my dog.”
“Yeah, I remember him,” Doc Martin said, bringing her cigarette up and taking a quick puff.
The boy tried to bend his bandaged hand and made a pained face.
“My dad killed him.”
Doc Martin wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but the boy went on.
“After he bit me, he was gonna bite me some more so my dad . . .”
Tears started streaming down the boy’s face, cutting clean tracks through the dirt that covered his cheeks.
“Yeah,” Doc Martin said. “I get it. I think a lot of people here had to do the same thing.”
“Why did Seamus hate us?” the little boy asked her, his lips quivering as the tears continued to run from his eyes. “We didn’t do nuthin’ to him. . . . We loved him.”
And Doc Martin felt the anger again, anger at the alien force that had been responsible for the horrors that had befallen her island home and could very well be turning its attention to Boston and God knew where else. She wasn’t generally an emotional person, but she just couldn’t help herself. She reached out and took the boy into her arms, hugging him close.
“Yeah, he knew you loved him,” she told the child, whose body was now racked with sobs. “But something really bad got into him . . . and it changed him.”
“But . . . but we killed him,” the boy cried, now holding her as well.
“Yeah, I know,” she told him. “And it was terrible, but you guys did what had to be done . . . He wasn’t Seamus anymore. And if you hadn’t stopped him the way you did, he might’ve hurt some other people too.”
The boy slowly pulled away from her.
“Did the bad thing . . . the thing that changed Seamus,” he asked her, “did it get into the other animals too?”
She nodded slowly. “It did.”
The boy seemed to think about that for a moment, and then examined his hand once more. “Is it gone now?”
Doc Martin thought of Sidney and the government scientists on their way to Boston. “I hope so,” she said, trying to be reassuring as she reached out to give the boy’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. She looked up over his head and saw his parents looking at them. They waved at her, and she waved back.
“Think your folks are looking for you,” she said, pointing them out.
“Yeah, they probably are,” he said, starting in their direction. “Thanks for talking with me and stuff,” he said as he walked away.
“Yeah, nice to talk with you, too.”
She watched him go, suddenly feeling more concerned for Sidney’s safety, and the safety of the world, but there was nothing she could do.
The sound of screaming drifted on the air, stopping people as they walked and turning them in the direction of the horrible sound. Almost immediately Doc Martin recognized it as coming from Isaac, the boy with a developmental disability.
“Isaac?” she called out, starting toward the tent where he had been resting. “Hey, Isaac, you okay in there?”
She passed through the entryway and at first believed the tent to be empty, but then she heard the pathetic moans coming from somewhere in the area of the cot—
Under the cot.
She found Isaac curled tightly into a trembling ball, wedged beneath his sleeping place.
“Hey, Isaac,” she said as calmly as she was able, not wanting to startle him. “What’s wrong, buddy?”
He shook even more, and he tried to push himself farther under the cot. He was moaning now, a horribly sad and disturbing sound.
“Isaac, what’s wrong?” Doc Martin asked more firmly.
“The bad radio,” he gasped between pained moans and groans. “The bad radio is still here!”
Doc Martin felt a sudden jolt of fear. The bad radio is what Isaac had called the transmission that had turned the animals into killers. He seemed to be able to somehow pick it up.
“Naw, buddy,” she said, approaching the cot and lowering herself carefully to her knees beside it. She knew she would regret it later, but she had to reach the boy. “The bad radio is gone,” she said. “The army guys burned it up in the cave, remember?”
She leaned forward to peer under the cot.
“Burned it up in the cave?” he repeated.
“Yeah, you remember that. Why don’t you come out from there, and we’ll talk about it, okay?”
“The bad radio was burned up in the cave,” he said again.
“C’mon,” she said, reaching a hand toward him.
Tentatively he took it, and she helped him the best she could to squirm out from his hiding place.
“There ya go, buddy,” she said, watching him as he climbed easily to his feet.
“The bad radio was burned up in the cave,” he said as if reviewing the information again.
“Yep, it was.” She tried to stand but found herself in an awkward situation, her knees having locked. “Hey, Isaac, think you could give me a hand getting up?” She reached up to him.
Isaac just stared at first, but the idea eventually permeated, and he took her hands, helping the older woman to struggle up from the floor of the tent.
“Thanks,” she said, grunting as she stood, her knees making muffled popping sounds. “Oh, man . . . getting old.”
“Yes,” Isaac said to her. “You’re very old.”
She resisted the urge to crack him one, telling herself that he had issues. And besides, he was right. She was getting old.
“The bad radio was burned up in the cave,” he told her again.
“That’s right,” she assured him. “The army guys went into the caves and found you, Sidney, and the others, and then they burned it to a crisp.”
“Sidney went to Boston,” he told her. “With Cody, Rich, Snowy, Dr. Sayid, and Brenda Langridge.” He waited for her response, rocking from side to side.
“Yes she did,” Doc Martin said. “She had special business there.” She reached over and took his arm. “Why don’t we go outside and get some fresh air, and maybe a bottle of water.”
Isaac resisted, pulling back his arm.
“There’s a bad radio in Boston, too,” he told her.
“Yeah, there probably is,” she agreed. “But Sidney and the others are going to try to stop that one too.”
He seemed to think about that for a moment, his hand hovering around his left ear. “The bad radio is in Boston, too,” he said.
“Yeah,” she told him again. “Let’s go get a bottle of water.”
“It’s here, too,” he said firmly, not moving.
“No,” she said. “We talked about it, the one here—”
“There’s more,” he told her, rocking more quickly from side to side. “There’s more . . . there’s more . . . there’s more . . .”
Doc Martin was moving to comfort him when she heard the first gunshot and then the people outside the tent began screaming.
The organism was able to control the two higher life-forms after neutralizing their neural functions.
The first one had been simple—piercing the subject’s skull and shutting down most of the brain’s higher capabilities. The second had required some effort, and the organism had had to use the first as a vessel to chase the other down and render him . . .
Less complicated.
It was proving a little more difficult to control these two than it had been to control the many lower life-forms during the training exercise; however, the organism managed to move the pair down from the caves, through the woods, and toward the open area where the interlopers had set up a makeshift camp.
The two vessels entered the encampment side by side.
“Hey, where the hell have you two been?” came a sudden, harsh voice.
The organism turned the two toward the sound. A human male stood there.
“Where’s the jeep?” he asked. “Don’t tell me it broke down.”
The vessels did not respond.
“And what the hell is wrong with your eye?” the human asked, pointing with one of his appendages.
The organism allowed one of the vessels to drive its fist into the face of the man, knocking him to the ground.
“Hey! What the hell’d you do that for?” the human screamed, lying in the dirt. The blow had drawn blood.
The second vessel stepped forward and kicked the downed human in the chin, then fell upon the stunned man, wrapping its hands about the man’s throat and squeezing.
“What’s going on over here?” the organism heard from behind and turned the first vessel to see another human quickly approaching. This one was clothed differently, and in his arms he carried something that the organism recognized from the information it had pulled from the folds of the vessels’ gray matter.
An automatic weapon.
The organism propelled the first vessel toward the man.
“Explain yourself, Tyler,” the human ordered.
The words were nonsense—inconsequential to the mission—and the vessel struck with absolute fury, hitting the man savagely, stunning him, and ripping the gun from his grasp.
The organism in its inhumanity felt something akin to excitement as it raised the weapon and took aim.
Doc Martin rushed from Isaac’s tent as the thunder of the gunshot receded in the air, a roar of disturbing noise before a return to eerie silence.
The events of the previous night had left nothing to make any noise—no birds chirping, no insects buzzing, no dogs barking off in the distance. The island was silent now.
One of the soldiers, a heavily built guy with a buzz cut had fired his weapon, bringing another from Sayid’s team to his knees. This one was wearing one of those heavy decontamination suits, its stark white now stained red with blood.
A crowd had gathered and was watching fearfully as Buzz Cut approached the figure on the ground. Doc Martin pushed through the bystanders for a closer look and caught sight of a rifle on the ground beside the man from Sayid’s team. Another man in a decontamination suit struggled to break free as more soldiers held him down on the ground.
What the hell is going on around here?
She wasn’t sure if the guy on the ground was alive or dead until she saw him twitch on the grass. And wasn’t it awfully strange that no one seemed to be getting him any medical attention?
She wanted a cigarette, but she only had one left. Instead she strode forward. “What the hell is going on here?” she asked.
Buzz Cut didn’t even turn around, continuing to stand over the man he had shot. “Ma’am, if you would be so kind as to step back—”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Doc Martin interrupted as she continued forward.
Two more security officers appeared to either side of her and took her arms.
“Are you shitting me?” she exclaimed. “Since when did this become a police state?”
Buzz Cut finally looked at her, and she didn’t like what she saw in his face. The guy was clearly worried.
No, afraid.
“You’re the vet, right?” he asked, recognizing her. She remembered him now, one of the guys who had saved her in the parking lot of the animal hospital.
“Yeah, what the hell is going on?” she asked again.
Buzz Cut nodded at the two soldiers who held her arms, and they quickly let her go, receding toward the crowd.
“Look at his eye,” Buzz Cut said. “Look at his right eye.”
The words turned her insides to ice. She didn’t want to look, but what choice did she have?
The man was still wearing the headgear of his suit, but she could see that the faceplate had been shattered. His forehead was stained with blood. And then she saw it.
“Shit,” the old veterinarian muttered. Just as it had been on the eyes of the dogs and cats that had gone murderously insane at the animal hospital, shiny and metallic and encompassing the entire eye.
“Yeah,” Buzz Cut said. “That one too.” He pointed to the other member of the science team being held down by four soldiers.
“But I thought it had been taken care of,” Doc Martin said aloud, the worry filling her voice.
There was a murmuring commotion behind her, and she saw Buzz Cut begin to raise his weapon. She turned to see Isaac forcing his way toward them, wild-eyed. Quickly she stepped between the young man and the soldier, holding her hands out to slow his approach.
“Slow it down, buddy,” she told him, placing her hands flat against his chest as he reached her.
“Is he all right?” Buzz Cut asked, the paranoia already starting to seep into his tone.
“Yeah, he’s fine,” she said, although she wasn’t at all sure that he was. Isaac had stopped and was looking past her, toward the figure lying prone and bleeding upon the ground.
“The bad radio,” he said, and lifted a hand to point. “The bad radio was here.”
She followed the young man’s finger and saw the body on the ground go suddenly rigid, twitch slightly, and then become completely still.
“What happened?” she asked, following Buzz Cut for a closer look.
He didn’t answer, but as they leaned down toward the body, Doc Martin noticed that the silvery coating over the man’s eye seemed to be decomposing, melting away and running down his face.
“Mr. Burwell?” Another soldier called out to Buzz Cut, and Doc Martin looked up to see that the other man in the decontamination suit had also gone still. She brusquely hipped Burwell aside and knelt beside the body, feeling that cracking sensation in both knees as she did so. She reached down and removed his helmet.
“Careful with that!” Burwell ordered, moving to stop her, but she shrugged him off.
She placed her fingertips on the man’s neck, looking for a pulse. There wasn’t any.
“He’s dead,” she said.
“Crap,” Burwell said.
“He was probably close to being that way before all this,” she said as she moved her finger up to touch the silvery slime running down his cheek. “I’m guessing the other one is dead too.”
Burwell turned around. “Is he alive?” he called to his men.
Tentatively the soldiers felt for a pulse. “No pulse,” confirmed one.
“What do you think?” Burwell asked Doc Martin as he turned his attention back to her.
“I think that whatever was in control of them has gone,” she answered. “Where were these two before here?”
“Velazquez?” Burwell called out.
A short woman with thick horn-rimmed glasses appeared, pushing through the crowd. “Yes, sir?” she said.
“Where were these two supposed to be?”
She pulled a small tablet from the waist of her pants and tapped it. “They were supposed to be collecting specimens from the cave.”
“So there you have it,” Burwell said. He reached down to grab Doc Martin’s elbow as she struggled to her feet.
“Thanks,” she said.
“So I guess that thing we burned to a crisp in the cave isn’t really dead,” he said to her.
“I’m guessing you’re probably right, unless there’s another one, of course. What are you gonna do now?”
The security officer thought for a moment. “Shit,” he said. “Looks like I’m gonna get my flamethrower and head back up into that cave.”
Someone laughed behind them, and they turned to find Isaac still standing there, rocking back and forth, one hand up near his bad ear, fingers twitching.
“Isaac, what’s wrong?” Doc Martin asked him.
“The bad radio . . . ,” he began in a creepy, singsong voice. “The bad radio isn’t there anymore. . . .”
“What’s he saying?” Burwell asked.
“What do you mean, Isaac? The bad radio isn’t there anymore?”
He nodded as he rocked, staring out across the field in the direction of the cliff, as well as the cave.
“No reason to go. It isn’t there . . . it left.”
Isaac looked at them, and there were tears in his eyes.
“The bad radio isn’t in the caves anymore.”