Serial Sunday: The Galton Horror III

By Charles E.P. Murphy.

This time Gunnar didn’t get permission to leave for ‘trainspotting’, he just pretended to go to bed early and them snuck out the back door. He got a twinge of guilt about being ‘bad’ but ignored it. What did being ‘bad’ matter in the face of whatever was going on at the spaceport?

Amy had been waiting for him down the road, tense and coiled. They didn’t speak because there was nothing to say. They were committed.

They hid in the dark and at ten, the bus came. This time they were close enough that they could zoom in on their phone cameras and see through the window. They could see some of the passengers and they could see matted hair, beards, thin skin stretched on bone, confusion, fear.

“That’s homeless people,” said Amy. “Where are they even getting them from, how far have they been driving?”

“People nobody’s going to care are missing,” he said out loud as the thought occurred.

“You can’t think they’re sending them to space. That’s stupid.”

“Obviously!” He suspected that had been her first thought. “Maybe they’re experimenting on them.”

“Why’d they need this many for that?”

And then she breathed in sharply as she realised the answer.

“But it can’t be that,” said Gunnar.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s too much. It can’t be that.”

He let Amy think he’d meant because nobody could do something that monstrous. He’d actually meant: because that wouldn’t explain what happened to Year 11. People who did that could do anything.

“Okay.” Amy started to breathe heavily, rubbing her right fist into her left hand. “Okay. Now!”

And while the security guard was waving the bus through, the kids ran down the road and into the Spaceport.

That had been Amy’s big plan: “Guards get fat and lazy because nobody does anything, nobody will expect some kids to run in,” she’d said, and she’d said it so aggressively that Gunnar assumed it made sense. Amy was a bad girl after all, right?

He was running through the gate when it struck him that this was an utterly stupid idea and he was forgetting again that Amy’s great ‘bad’ acts were usually smoking round the bike sheds. But it was too late by then.

He was ten seconds inside when he realised the guard hadn’t shouted or made any movement at all.

And fifteen seconds inside when he saw the man in the spacesuit walk out of one of the buildings.

Gunnar thought it was a spacesuit, anyway, and it was near enough to a walk, and what could it be other than a man?

The astronaut moved in a loping slouch, like a drunk with sore feet. His suit bulged in the limbs and belly like it had taken on water, and the sleek helmet was a bit too big and not quite the right shape. Nothing was visible behind the helmet screen. The suit was a sickly green and whatever material it was made of gleamed like watery vomit.

There were too many fingers on its gloves.

That was all glimpsed in the split-second before Amy screamed that the bus was going into one of the old aircraft hangers. And that meant going there to see why.

You stupid git! His brain screamed at him. You’re not one of the Hardy Boys, this isn’t the Demon Headmaster, this is real, and you don’t know what you’re doing!!

But it was too late to go back. He was running to the hanger, he was looking inside, his phone was in his hand, he was taking photos – and then he realised what he was taking photos of.

The bus could only have let people off twenty seconds ago. The operation must be well practiced to have achieved everything so fast. The Spaceport workers—and he could recognise some of them from town, some of them were his classmate’s parents—showed no concern and only professionalism as their overalls were stained red.

Gunnar threw up all over his shoes and he could hear Amy doing the same.

When they looked again, the workers were taking tangles of spiked cables from sealed containers, and those tangles moved like they were breathing. A strange smell was coming off them, this odd acrid scent that made his muscles tense to run, strong enough to reach him but ignored by the workers. And Gunnar’s insides clenched and tried to find more bile as he saw the coils placed, and then…

And then something he couldn’t see properly, and the homeless were fixed as if nothing had happened. Walking on, slowly and carefully, to who knew where.

And the workers were onto the next men.

“God,” whimpered Amy. “God!”

They tried to run as best they could with their legs hollowed out but the man in the spacesuit was behind them. He’d been watching the whole thing.

“Please,” Gunnar said to him, unsure what he was even pleading for.

The spacesuit lashed out and everything went black.

***

Unconsciousness didn’t last more than a few seconds, but it was enough to take the fight of Gunnar. As he tried to get back up, he sensed the spacesuit watching. And ahead, driving all other thought from his mind, the workers hadn’t paused in their grisly work at all.

Amy had paled and was trembling. The fight had gone out of her too. He’d have never thought to have seen the like. It was like watching St Paul’s come down.

Finally, a perturbed Dr Barrington arrived. He turned to the spacesuit and a noise came out of his throat like gargling vomit. The suit made the same noise back.

He sighed. “We hadn’t expected someone to just run in. Good initiative. Though how did you intend to get back out again?”

Gunnar didn’t respond. How could he respond?

“Police,” said Amy suddenly, which could not have been her plan.

“They wouldn’t have helped you. The visitors got to them already.” Barrington sighed. “Well, as you are here, would you like to hear what happens next?”

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Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.