THE DAY DEFORE

 

No-one heard the mermaid screaming.  No-one saw the trawler burning; no-one who would survive that is.  No human at any rate.  The Mermaid was a converted fishing boat.  It was one hundred miles off the Portuguese coast, becalmed in the open Atlantic.  The ship was fifty-five metres in length, though any observer would be hard-pressed to perceive this due to the fog and the fire.  And the other things.  Due to an impenetrable sea mist, the burning boat was invisible even to night flights at 30,000 feet.  Enveloped in its deep shroud of dense fog, The Mermaid burned like a Christian at Nero’s banquet, howling in the night.

A frightened, middle-aged man stood on the blazing deck, beset on all sides by the conflagration.  He was covered from head to foot in wet weather gear.  He wore thick leather gloves on his hands and sturdy hiking boots on his feet.  The balaclava covering his head revealed only his terrified eyes.  On top of his heavy clothes he was wearing an orange life preserver. In spite of the surrounding fire, he removed a glove, pulled a phone from a pocket and with shaking hands commenced texting, frantically.  Tears mingled with sweat and soaked into the wool of the balaclava as his trembling fingers tapped on the phone.

Daddy won’t be coming home.  I love you all more than words can say. X

He hit ‘send’ and quickly replaced his glove before the blaze blistered his skin.  Under the pressure of the inferno he retreated to the guardrail running around the edge of the deck. A message pinged on his phone.  He looked at it.

Unable to send

‘Shit!’

Then he heard her.

‘Gerry!’

She emerged from the flames like a ghost.  He had thought she was dead.  Like all the rest.  She staggered toward him.  What remained of her jeans and t-shirt were charred rags.  She had sustained serious burns.

‘Sophia!’

She fell into his arms.  The flames were upon them.  They were pinned against the guardrail.  He could see she was barely conscious.

‘We’ve got to jump,’ he said.

‘No,’ she murmured.

‘Sophia.  We stay.  We die.’

‘Too far,’ she said.

A gust of wind lashed the flames against Gerry’s sleeve and it caught.  He beat it out.

‘We can’t stay!’

‘Suicide.’

The blaze was engulfing them.  His clothes were starting to burn.  There was no more time for debate.

‘Then I’ll see you on the other side,’ said Gerry.  He let her go and climbed on top of the guardrail.

‘Last chance,’ he said.

‘I can’t.’

Gerry had nothing more to say.  He knew she had only minutes to live, as would he if he stayed.  He saw her curling in on herself as the blaze blow-torched her skin.  The searing heat was boiling his eyes.  It was now or never.  He jumped into the dark.  He could hear Sophia’s tortured voice screaming.

‘Gerry… !’

*

Sophia was curled into a tight ball by the guardrail.  She could feel cool air coming off the sea at her back.  In front of her the fierce heat of the blaze was tearing the air from her lungs.  She understood why Gerry had made his decision but it was a decision she could not make.   She could not decide to die.  If she must die, and now she knew she must, then it would not be a matter of her own choice.  It would be something that happened to her.  Action or inaction, the outcome would be the same.  Sophia chose inaction.

She was beset with regret.  Regret that her files would be lost.  There were no copies.  Hans had ordered that all evidence be destroyed.  No-one would ever see the warning she had recorded.  When The Mermaid went down so would the last hope of containing … them.  Or it, as she knew it was more properly described.  Ultimately it was a single organism.  She had identified the error in the gene sequence; the thing that had caused the runaway replication.  She knew how to prevent it happening again, but more importantly, she knew how to kill it.  Not that the knowledge would help her now.  Anyone trying to replicate her work would need a sample and would have to start from first principles. By the time they had worked through the problem, always assuming they could collect a sample, the catastrophic consequences for the world could only be guessed at. 

What had they done? 

The flames pushed Sophia against the guardrail.  She couldn’t stay where she was.  She hauled herself to her feet and pressed her spine against the bar.  The blaze was burning her face.  She turned away from the fire and looked out into the blackness of the open ocean.  She could feel what was left of her shirt catch and burn on her back.  She was being roasted alive.  Involuntarily her feet mounted the guardrail.  There were no handholds.  She balanced on the penultimate rail with her shins pressed against the top bar.  Why hadn’t she jumped with Gerry? She looked down at the still water twenty feet below her. 

That’s when she saw it. 

A black shape was moving against the hull at the waterline.  Twice the size of a man, its outline was impossible to discern in the fog, but it was moving, Sophia knew that much.  She couldn’t go back.  The fire was pushing her off the boat.  She was seized by indecision.  She knew that to jump would be to deliver herself to her doom.  In that moment of hesitation the shape moved.  It moved impossibly quickly.  In a heartbeat it was before Sophia, rising above her in a great oozing mass. 

‘Oh,’ she said.

In the firelight Sophia could make out a monstrous, shapeless but animate corpus of writhing slime.  It was the stuff of nightmares; Hell spawn come to claim her soul. But she knew it wasn’t spawned in Hell.  It was spawned of science, in their lab, and she was one of the team who had created it.  The karmic consequence was terribly, mortally apparent.  In that moment her rigorous scientific mind turned to spiritual thoughts.  When all the evils of the world had escaped from Pandora’s Box, the only thing left was hope.  Now Sophia hoped the God of mercy world be kind to her in the afterlife.  A strange, disconnected question entered her head.  What was hope doing in Pandora’s Box, accompanied by all the evils of the world?  Surely it was in the wrong box.  What was it doing there?  While mulling these thoughts Sophia gazed, transfixed, at the massive organism.  She fancied that somehow the seething entity approximated to a vaguely human shape.  She knew she had met her moment of death.  She was resigned.  She was happy never to have been blessed with children.  That would have been too cruel.  She thought of her friends, Ellie’s wedding came to mind, and the men she had known.  There had been a few.  Not many.  Jed was special.  He had made her happy for a while.  She was grateful for that.  The flames were searing through her flesh.  The thing moved.  She didn’t scream.  She was beyond that.