“The open mouth—” Wolf said slowly, his boots scraping against the tile.
“And bugs flying out.” Aiden nodded.
Wolf tilted his head, staring through the glass. “You believe it has your dead friend’s memories? That it recreated that scene in the movie with nanobot wasps instead of flies?”
“I don’t know. Just find it interesting, that’s all.” Aiden ran his fingers through his hair, all the while staring through the glass.
He was afraid to take his eyes off the room, off the creatures occupying it. Afraid they’d somehow force their way through the forcefield and then the window. He knew how to fight terrorists, cultists, soldiers, but how the fuck did he unalive the already dead?
“One big problem with that theory.” O’Neill broke the tense silence and stepped up to the glass, shoulder to shoulder with Aiden. “It wasn’t just your buddy who released the wasps. They all did. And the rest of these reanimated squids wouldn’t have your buddy’s memories. Or his...appreciation...for that movie.”
“True.” Wolf’s voice was thoughtful. He glanced toward Aiden, then back to the window.
“And there’s one other thing.” O’Neill’s voice was thoughtful. “Did either of you notice how Squirrel was the first one off the table and to the window? He was also the first to open his mouth.” He squinted, his gaze shifting between the fivethingslined up behind the window. “But the rest of these dead squids...” He frowned and shook his head. “Not only did they head to the window later, they did it in unison, all at the exact same time.”
“Also true,” Wolf said, his voice and face neutral. “We would do well to figure out what that means.”
“Sure. I’ll hop right on that.” Aiden forced sarcasm in his voice, as his gaze lingered on Squirrel’s broken face.
Amid the gaping eye sockets, thin filaments of white were visible. Barely, but they were there. Some kind of spiderwebbing or cottony fibers. Not human tissue, but something other. Something creepy. Something fucking weird.
Another horrifying detail, acerbating this morning from hell.
Chapter three
Day 24
Shadow Mountain Base, Alaska
After a momentary hesitation, O’Neill finally asked the question that was on all their minds. “What the hell are we looking at? Zombies?”
He cringed as the question hit the air. Zombies forHee-nessake. But what else were they supposed to call the damn things? An entire science fiction industry had already identified what undead humans were supposed to be called.
“Perhaps.” Wolf frowned and quietly added. “They cannot be alive.”
“No shit Sherlock,” Aiden muttered, his gaze skipping from zombified squid to zombified squid.
O’Neill took a deep breath and focused on slowing his heart rate. For a while there, the damn thing had tried to thump its way out of his chest and make a run for it. He was just happy he hadn’t shit himself when those fucking wasps had disappeared into the glass.
“They do not breathe,” Wolf observed, as though explaining histhey cannot be alivecomment.
“They’re standing...moving...maybe we need to reexamine what alive means.” O’Neill studied the creatures across from him and suppressed a shutter.
“I believe the definition of alive includes breathing and a pulse.” Aiden took a step back from the glass, then paused to roll his shoulders and crack his neck. “Neither of which these things have.”
“We vented the oxygen from the room,” Wolf continued, apparently still stuck on their lack of breathing.
It seemed like an odd thing to focus on. The fucking things were dead. Of course they wouldn’t be breathing.
“Lack of oxygen doesn’t seem to affect them.” O’Neill watched the five former squids simultaneously tilt their heads to the left, like they were fucking birds or something. O’Neill took a long step back. That simultaneous head tilt was strange as hell.
He forced himself to focus past his instinctive sense of wrongness. The way they tilted their heads reminded him of the raptors from Jurassic Park. Not that the dinosaurs in the movie had been real…but then neither were zombies. Yet here they were, five of the undead staring at him through the glass.
Unreal.
“You boys notice how they move in unison? Like they’re synchronized or some shit?” O’Neill’s frown intensified.
“Not Squirrel.” Aiden glanced over, his gaze dark and narrow. And spooked. So fucking spooked. “Squirrel came over first. Opened his mouth first too.”
