The Sergeant left two men, Parrott and Seabreeze, in the car park to keep watch and look after the horses. Then he led the rest of his men into the building while telling the experts to wait in the reception area. A few minutes later the soldiers returned to tell them that the building was clear.

"Found a few corpses in the upstairs dormitory," the Sergeant told them. "Same condition as the others. Four of them, all in the same room."

"Interns," said Duffy sadly. "I probably met some of them, at some time. They may even have been my students once. I suppose they had no family in town. The only people they knew here were each other so they decided to take comfort from each other as they died."

"I'd like to go examine them," said Gruber.

"Me too," said Summers. "We can do a full autopsy, now that we've got the time. This building also did some medical research. There'll be tools and equipment in the biology labs."

The Sergeant agreed and detailed Parkin and Dustu to go with them. The rest of them then set off to look for the basement.

Jeffcott had been there before and knew the layout of the building, but that had been before the Furnace had been built. He knew the best places to look, though, and in just a couple of minutes he'd found a staircase that led down into gloomy darkness. Once again the soldiers went first, breaking some chemical glowsticks for light, while the experts waited above. There were some chairs in the corridor and, their legs tired after the long walk, they sat down in them.

"How are we going to get the generator down there to fire up the Furnace?" asked Bright.

"The basement will have a service entrance for taking big items of equipment in and out," Robinson told her. "I helped look after the generator at Ashdown for extra credits, back when I was an intern.

Jeffcott laughed. "I'm imagining you all covered in grease and soot," he said. "I bet it made you look hot as hell."

Robinson ignored the comment. "They had their own linear accelerator back then," she added. "They need a lot of power, as you know. I became quite familiar with the power delivery systems. If this place is laid out the same way as Ashdown I reckon I'll be able to get power to the Furnace."

Duffy began to say something, but froze as the sound of a collapsing building came from outside. "What was that?" he said, jumping out of his chair. He went into one of the adjoining rooms that had windows looking out in the direction from which the sound had come. The others followed him, and on the horizon that saw a huge cloud of dust rising into the clear, blue sky.

"God!" whispered Jeffcott. "A building collapsed."

"Something that got most of its strength from steel reinforcement," said Duffy. "Probably several storeys tall. This building's only two storeys tall."

"But made of glass," said Bright, her eyes wide with fear.

"But it doesn't get its strength from glass. It gets it from concrete."

"Reinforced with steel," the linguist pointed out.

"In a two-story building the concrete is probably strong enough all by itself. It doesn't need the steel."

"So you're an expert in architecture now?"

"Is it possible that the concrete could be weakened like steel and glass?" asked Rahul Bhatt.

"You know as much as I do," Duffy replied. The plaster covering the wall was cracked in a couple of places, though, and the physicist chipped away at it with his spear until a large section fell away to reveal bare concrete beneath. He tapped it gently with the point of his spear and it made a reassuring tinging sound. "Sounds like it's still solid," he said.

"I'm reassured by that rigorous scientific test," said Bright, her eyes fixed hard on his as if demanding the truth.

"If you're scared to be in here, maybe you should wait outside with Parrott and Seabreeze," Duffy suggested.

Bright stared at him in naked hostility, but then she shook her head and took a step back. "Sorry," she said. "For a moment there I was absolutely certain you were lying to us. Trying to lead us into a trap or something. One of those anomaly affect things doing something to my mind."

"No worries," Duffy replied with a smile. "It's happening to all of us."

They heard the soldiers coming back up the stairs and went back out into the corridor to meet them. "No monsters down there?" asked Jeffcott jokingly, but the humour went out of him in an instant when he saw the expression on their faces. "What is it?" he asked.

"Simpler to just show you," the Sergeant replied. He gestured towards the stairs. "Go take a look."

The three physicists glanced at each other in puzzlement. Then they looked at Costanzo, the last soldier, who was still emerging from the stairwell. The man's face was pale with fear, they saw, but his body wasn't tensed up ready for violence as it would have been if they'd found a physical threat. It was more as if he'd seen something he just didn't understand, Jeffcott thought. Something that challenged his simple soldier's view of the universe.

"Can't you just tell us?" demanded Bright, her eyes darting from one of the soldiers to another.

"I wouldn't be able to find the words," the Sergeant added. "If you go look, perhaps you can tell us what the hell's going on down there."

The civilians stared at each other again as if looking for answers in the faces of their fellow experts. Then Jeffcott turned towards the stairs, his spear gripped tightly in his hand.

☆☆☆

As the two doctors searched the biology labs for tools they could use to dissect a corpse, Mark Summers felt the movement in his stomach again. The feeling that there was something alive wriggling around in there.

Just my imagination, he told himself. My anxiety being given form by the anomaly. None of the hospitalised victims back at the command post had shown symptoms this quickly after exposure, and he'd been exposed for less than a minute. Almost certainly too little time for it to have done him any harm. The feeling persisted, but he made himself ignore it. Just an anomaly hallucination, he told himself.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

During their walk through the city he'd seen corpses turning their heads to look at him as they'd gone past. He'd had the sensation that there'd been someone walking close behind him. Someone who hadn't been there when he'd turned his head to look, and he'd repeatedly had the sensation that some serious comment one of the others had made had been hilariously funny. One assault on his sense of reality after another. This was just another. To survive here, he thought, we have to remain constantly alert. Constantly aware that anything we experience might not be real.

And how do we do that? he asked himself. Well, anything that doesn't make logical sense is probably false. Corpses did not turn their heads to watch passers by, and less than a minute's exposure to the enomaly is not going to cause a person's cells to revert to an embryonic state.

Except, no-one knew how long you had to be exposed in order for it to be dangerous.

Okay, he told himself. If I'm affected, I'm affected. Worrying about it isn't going to help, so concentrate on learning as much as you can to help the next expedition that comes in to investigate this place.

"Bingo," said Gruber, pulling shiny metal surgical tools from one of the drawers he'd been opening. "Not quite what we need. Looks like what they used to dissect rabbits, but it's close enough. Good enough to open someone up and see what's going on."

"Good," said Summers. He looked around for something to carry them in and found a towel. The two men carefully wrapped up the scalpels and tweezers, tied the towel and carried it by the knot.

In another drawer they found boxes of blue latex gloves. They grabbed one each, and then the two soldiers who'd wandered off into another room came hurrying back, looking excited. "A building just collapsed!" said Parkin, his eyes wide with wonder. "Somewhere close to the city centre."

"They said that might happen," said Gruber. "The steel's going rotten. Come on, let's get to work before these tools lose their edge."

They found the four corpses right where the soldiers had found them. Four people, in their twenties to judge from their clothing. Two pairs, holding onto each other for comfort as they felt their bodies changing inside them. The same sensation that Summers kept imagining, but real and a thousand times worse. It was a deeply emotional sight, but Summers forced himself to maintain a cold, clinical detachment. What was going on here would be solved by clear heads, not by empathising with people who were beyond pity and mercy.

They chose a skinny man with spectacles, simply because he was the closest. He might have been considered rather ordinary once, but now he had the same leathery skin and yellow eyes as the corpses they'd seen by the roadblock at the edge of town. With the help of the two soldiers they untangled him from the young woman he'd had wrapped in his arms and then carried him into the next room where they laid him out on the table and undressed him. The body was limp, Summers noted. No trace of rigor mortis. As if he'd died just moments before. And he was warm. Why was he warm? For some reason that disturbed him more than anything else they'd experienced since entering the anomaly.

"i can feel movement under the skin," said Gruber, looking disconcerted. "Living tumours."

"Not possible," said Summers. "Not after this long."

"Feel for yourself," the other doctor told him. "Right there." He indicated the armpits, where he'd carried him.

Summers pressed his fingers against the brown, leathery skin. "I can't feel anything..." Then he jerked in alarm and pulled his hand back. "You put the suggestion in my head," he said to Gruber accusingly. "Made me experience the same hallucination."

"What if it wasn't a hallucination?"

"One way to find out," said Summers. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then unwrapped the towel and took out a scalpel. He held it up to his eye to examine the blade. It looked solid and sharp. He took the handle in both hands and applied a little pressure. It felt strong, no different from the hundreds of other scalpels he'd held in the course of his career. He put it to the corpse's abdomen, applied pressure and made a long, deep incision down the stomach.

Ordinarily the elastic skin would pull back as he cut, the opening widening of its own accord, but the cut he'd made remained closed. As Gruber leaned forward to watch, Summers took hold of the edges, pulled them open and then staggered back in alarm at what he saw.

"I'm suffering a hallucination," he said as a long tentacle, glistening damply, rose from the incision like a cobra from a snake charmer's basket. The end opened like a flower to reveal six petals, each with a human-looking eye in the centre. Disbelieve it, he commanded himself. It's not real. Except that Gruber had jumped back in alarm and the two soldiers were also crying out in shock. They saw me react, he told himself, and it triggered them to have hallucinations too. The power of suggestion.

"Describe what you're seeing," said Gruber, staring at the thing rising from the corpse.

"A tentacle with a flower on the end," Summers replied.

"Oh God!" cried Parkin. "That's what I'm seeing."

"Me too," said Dustu.

"Is that what you saw right from the start," asked Summers, "or did it become a flower when I described it? Was it something else before that?"

"We're all seeing the same thing," said Gruber, his eyes fixed on it in horror.

"But maybe you're only seeing a flower because I said flower. Maybe you were seeing something else before..."

"It's real, Summers!" Gruber insisted. He'd grabbed his spear and was aiming it at the creature. "It's bloody real."

The flower, or whatever it was, turned on the end of its tentacular stalk to look at each of them in turn. Then it made a sound. A high pitched, chalk-on-a-blackboard sound that set their teeth on edge. At the same time it lunged upwards, a wide, gelatinous mass that forced its way out of the incision in the corpse's stomach with a horrid sucking sound. No, not one mass, Summers realised. Many smaller masses, white and sticky, looking like a pile of fish eggs. Some kind of colony creature, the doctor thought. One creature formed from many.

Many of the creature's colony elements had been up the corpse's arms and legs, they saw, and the skin deflated as it pulled itself out. The two soldiers brandished their spears at it and Summers frantically waved them back. "Don't hurt it," he said. "It may not be hostile..."

The creature pulled the rest of itself free from the corpse, and then the creature was free, sitting on the corpse's empty skin which was now supported only by the bones left inside. The colony elements on its underside had bundles of stubby tubular legs, they saw, while those higher up sprouted long filaments, some of which flicked to and fro like the tongue of a snake. It raised itself up into a more columnar shape and the flower-head turned this way and that to watch them. The four humans formed a ring around it, all aiming their spears at it as they stared in horror and disbelief.

It was still making the chalk-on-a-blackboard noise, almost like an alarm call, and from the room in which they'd left the other three corpses came a thud as something was knocked to the floor. Parkin ran to see what it was and returned a moment later, his face as white as a sheet. "There's three more of those things cutting their way out of the other three dead kids," he said.

"We must have woken them up," said Summers, backing towards the door. His heart was hammering with an almost primal fear that made him want to run in panic with no thought for the men he'd be leaving behind. He still had his spear pointed at the first creature, which seemed to have its attention fixed on him in particular. "They were dormant. Asleep."

"And when we woke this one up, it alerted the others," Gruber agreed.

"Everyone out in the corridor," said Dustu. "We must not be caught between them."

They backed through the door and Summers glanced into the bedroom where he saw another of the creatures cutting its way out of a female corpse with a body element that had a claw on the end of a long tendril. All three had pushed their flower-heads out and were watching the humans as they gathered in a group by the stairs. They started making the same chalk-on-a-blackboard noise. An alarm call, Summers was almost certain. To summon more of their kind.

The first creature, meanwhile, had followed them out of the room, seeming to flow like a blob of mercury on its myriad tube feet. As its skin dried out, tiny hairs were becoming visible on its globular body elements. They made shimmering colours that flowed across its skin as they rippled iridescently. Summers couldn't decide if it was the most hideous or the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

"Doctor Summers," said Dustu. "You will remain here with us, to guard the stairs. They must not be allowed to get past us. Doctor Gruber, go and tell the Sergeant that our position is compromised."

Gruber nodded and fled down the stairs while Summers gripped his spear tightly as he stood between the two soldiers. In front of him, all four of the creatures were emerging into the corridor where they formed a small group, their flower-heads swaying gently to and fro as they watched them. They were waiting, Summers somehow knew. Waiting for reinforcements, and they probably wouldn't have to wait for long...