Physics of the Crowbar

Death of a Laboratory

The scientist initiated the retinal scanner but didn't seem interested in accompanying him. He stepped through, and leapt back from the electrical arc walking its way across the control panel. The door imploded into a crumpled heap of metal and glass. The arc cut and he ran, and felt it snap back behind him in the hair on his neck.

So much for a localized disaster.

The hall beyond was a flickering labyrinth of overturned equipment and blood. He almost ran into an unaligned laser and watched in horrified fascination as it superheated the wet innards of a dead guard. It tracked a smoldering line of melted black polymer floor tile back across the hall. He stepped over the guard, conscious of the blood now tracking behind him, and picked up the crowbar the guard had been using on the security door.
The cold steel felt reassuringly solid in his hands. He smashed the glass and slid through the opening, careful not to tear the suit. The elevator was just beyond. Upstairs, someone would have order. Someone would know how far the disaster had spread and what, exactly, was going on. He hit the button, heard a scream, and glimpsed the falling, flailing white-coated men- and felt the crash resonate up through the shaft.

No one upstairs was going to help.

The ladder went up four floors, and he appreciated every moment he'd spent keeping himself in shape in some personal vendetta against the image of the weak-backed intellectual. He stepped out onto the landing and a bullet whizzed past his head. He dove for wall's meager cover, but the shooter was another security guard, white-faced with panic but already aiming for another shot- not at Freeman, but at the-
-the thing. The staggering, bulbous, clawed... thing. White coat. Pants. Shoes.

Talons. Blood. No face.

Alien. He stated it in his head, firmly, in ink.

Then he saw the name badge. Dr. Herkimer.

Dr. Herkimer was an annoying microbiologist of forty-five, who thought he could grow a handlebar mustache but couldn't and was inappropriately enthusiastic about his saxophone. He was not an alien. He had not been an alien at lunch yesterday, when Freeman had overheard him regaling three poor cornered interning post-docs about the virtues of his sax single.

The faceless head screamed.

The security guard shot it dead.

"What the hell..." The man voiced Freeman's thoughts, but Freeman was three steps ahead of him.

The small creature in the tank. Grasping claws. Extending mouth. Co-opting a victim's nervous system through the brain and spinal cord, puppeting a body for increased mobility. Vicious claws and teeth, a crude but effective means of acquiring nutrients.

I am not a biologist! he screamed into his notebook. He did not want to understand the parasite's traits and methods. He did not want to recognize the lab coat and clothing, or know the face under the dying alien membrane. The body beneath was dead, had been the moment the thing took hold. He could see that now from how it came half-detached, exposing bone and brain tissue. But there were no numbers to hide in, no theories of gravitational anomalies produced by resonance with internal crystal planes. There was only blood, bodies, and the crowbar in his hand, as a second parasitized scientist stalked down the hall. Its screaming was eerie and grating, too aggressive to be pitiful, and the claws left no space for mercy.

Maybe killing it was a mercy to the former human underneath.

The guard's shots flew wide, so he slammed the crowbar's notched end down its throat and wrenched up, dislodging the parasite enough to slow it. Then he smashed in the bulbous head. Oily yellow pus and red blood splattered back at him, but it went down in a wet limp heap. He stood panting over the corpse. The guard was watching him with the same mix of horror and relief he felt. It was one thing to kill from behind a gun, at distance, and another thing to feel the twitch and thrash of death in your own hands.

The crowbar was warm and sticky, but he gripped it tighter. I am not a killer, he thought, but I will not die down here. He nodded to the guard and set off down the hall, a fresh blank page in his mind's eye. Alien lifeforms hostile, parasitic. Original form small, probably vulnerable. Aggressive. Uses human host as organic tool, weapon and vehicle. Not fast. Probably not sentient. I hope.

Three more parasites between him and the tram. Three more wet, bleeding once-humans, once-coworkers. He made himself look away, not wanting to know who they'd been and if he knew them. He watched Dr. Kenmyer die at the tram platform, his screams echoing a long moment after his impact. There would be no escape that way.

He crawled through a weakened section of wall and into his own laboratory, now thick with fumes from melted electrical components. Multi-million dollar resonance analysis equipment, gone in minutes. His coworkers dead. His own carefully triplicated stack of laboratory notes gone, lost, destroyed, irrelevant. For three long, gasping breaths he surveyed the damage. The lab was finished. Nothing could be salvaged, not from a disaster like this. The equipment was too delicate, too finely calibrated. There would be no coming back here.

A parasite sprang from the rubble and he smashed it down viciously. The crowbar pinned it to the floor, its innards leaking even as it scrabbled for escape. The thing whined and screeched and died, fighting every second.

So I will fight too, he thought.  I am a physicist, and I will live.