Exo Extract 1: Day Zero

Exo cover by Michel Vrana

DAY ZERO

Seven minutes into the experiment, a slow-motion explosion rips through the lab.

Empty space unfolds and five staff—four scientists and the comms officer—are instantly lost. She’s lucky, crawling out on hand and knees. Her left hand presses her left eye, holding in the blinding pain, covering that stippled void.

Behind her, twisting metal groans, concrete percussively cracks, and walls stop being walls. Dimensions uncoil. Space burps and foams. She can’t see it, but she feels a shuddering deep in her bones. Registering the cries of the left behind—the three whose disappeared limbs prevented them running with the others who got out ahead of her—she resists any urge to glance back. This is the point of no return.

In the corridor, orange lights flash, indicating a breach. An alarm is ringing. Mercifully, drowning out the screams.

She walks her hands up a wall and rises to her feet.

The lab is between her and the only safe exit, into the compound out the back.

She has no option but to follow the others into the monitoring bay and down the ramp. The survivors are gathered at the huge storm doors as they slide apart. Someone has obviously overridden the security protocols. Out there, certain dissolution. In here, imminent obliteration. Make your choice.

Light spills through the gap. The familiar pebble slope. The haunting grey.

Yawning death.

Red lights flash on the wall. Signs snatch at the gaze of her uncovered eye:

WARNING:

EXPOSURE TO CAUL.

DO NOT PROCEED
WITHOUT AUTHORISATION.

TETHER AND BUDDY
SYSTEM MANDATORY.

Every second of her existence is tormented by the grey waves. They call. They threaten. They cajole. Up and down the shore, colleagues have succumbed. Friends. Rivals. Even lovers. Lost to it, time and again. Count the years. Count the decades. Add up the long centuries before her arrival. Lives uncountable.

The waves batter the beach with a rhythmic thumping that always sounds to her ears like a hungry giant knocking at a door. One day the door will open. This day?

By the signs, two large reels hold coiled rope tethers. Weekly safety drills have instilled in them an overwhelming need to obey the signs. Death is out there. Sweat prickles the skin of her forehead. But the idea of stopping, of pausing to attach a harness and a sprung rope to help her resist the lure, is for the birds.

The unfolding destruction behind is a more clear and present danger. She can hear it devouring more walls, more building. This bunker, this fortress, this prison. Designed to keep them safe inside. To protect them from what is outside. The threat was never supposed to come from within. (She has always known it lies within.)

The others ahead of her—who also made it out of the lab alive—stumble down the pebbled slope. A hundred metres away the waves roll up the beach. High tide.

Instantly, she feels it. A tingling in her legs. The need swelling inside her.

She forces her feet to slow. They resist, wanting her to let go, to freely run down the slope. To run until there is no more running left. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

The grey—insidious, murderous, ravenous—is singing. I have been waiting.

With a lurch in her heart, she sees that the others aren’t slowing.

She knows what happens next. Has seen the cam footage too many times. So many lives lost. Fury overrides her legs’ urging. Stones scatter as she halts. She calls their names. One after the other. They don’t hear, or they hear her too well.

Her feet tremble. A dangerous St. Vitus’s dance. One step. Two steps. Getting closer. The rolling grey waves are all she sees. Their roar is all she hears. The grey is all there is. She covers both eyes—the good and the bad—as the rolling and pounding lulls her. She’s immediately drifting, almost floating. Caught on an infinite tide. For a moment, she is captured by this immense stillness.

In her left eye the void flickers.

She takes away her hands. She is ten metres further down the beach. The four ahead of her are now three. One is on his knees just metres from the grey. One is up to her ankles in the shallows, and one is sprinting the last few metres.

No more calling, she thinks. It is too late for names.

The one in the shallows has her back to the waves. Tears on her cheeks. She takes several steps backwards, up to her waist and then, just as the sprinter rushes past, she vanishes in an instant. The sprinter turns back, a wild look on his eager, young face. He gives her a crazed grin: triumph and delight. He’s made it! He scoops the grey in his cupped hands, throws hands up so the grey splashes down around him. Then, and it is always nauseating to recall later, he seems to shrink, like he falls away in several directions at once. There one second, gone the next.

Her sore eye stings. The stippled void flickers. Shadows in the emptiness. Three of them. I’m seeing double, she thinks. Feels repelled. Not more ghosts.

She shakes her head to dismiss them. When she looks again the one on his knees is swaying drunkenly. He will be staring into some far-off place. He has already gone. Nothing else matters. Family. Colleagues. Comrades. Their mission. She calls out anyway.

Suddenly, he lurches to his feet. A moment later, her bad eye glimpses another shadow. Ghosts everywhere she turns. What’s one more?

Dazed, she steps forward.

A hand falls heavily on her shoulder. Holding her back.

She turns. The doc. He’s made it out. His smile is pained.

“Buddy system,” he growls. “Mandatory.”

The spell broken, she takes the offered hand. Comfort in the firm grip.

Slowly, one careful step at a time, the two of them turn from the grey and its ghosts. They keep their backs to the building that for so long has been an outpost and a shelter, a research station into which so many hopes have been invested, and which is now tumbling into a vortex that in days will begin drawing down the sky.

And, silently, she wonders: has it worked?

This extract from the opening of Exo is (c) copyright Colin Brush. Read the next part, Day One, here and the final part, Year One, here. Find out more about Exo here.