It all started with the explosion in the containment facility at Area 51. Nobody knows exactly what caused the accident, but there were a hell of a lot of casualties. Not only that, but the base’s hospital was inundated with dozens of wounded soldiers. As a nurse, that meant our quiet little military hospital was suddenly full of bleeding bodies and yelling voices. Blood was on the floors and doctors screaming for assistance could be heard ringing throughout the cramped, close-quarters medical unit.
My patient case load had increased from the regular one or two sick soldiers, to ten or more. And they were all in rough shape.
Worst of all was Peter. I felt bad for him immediately. Despite his horrifying injuries, he slept constantly, looking almost peaceful, aside from the occasional twitch or grimace.
Nobody really knew what was wrong with him. He was in the cold storage section of the facility when the explosion happened, according to the reports I’d read. His left eye was blinded and the entire left side of his body was burnt badly. His arm was amputated after the doctors decided it wasn’t salvageable.
The odd part was - his flesh had begun to turn a purple colour on the affected side. It reminded me of internal bleeding, that violet shade spreading insidiously from beneath the surface, indicating something much worse and much darker happening underneath.
Strangely, there were no signs that he was actually bleeding internally. His hemoglobin was stable - in fact, it was rising faster than most blood-loss victims. They were feeding him intravenous medication constantly - a cocktail of drugs with long, complicated names that I had never heard of before. When I asked the doctors about the meds, they told me they were top secret, experimental, and not to ask any more questions about them.
Bright green, almost fluorescent bags of medication which glowed in the darkness pumped into him constantly, and I could almost see his skin beginning to glow faintly green in the night as well, his body emitting a thrumming sound like electricity.
We had him sedated, to keep his agony to a minimum. You can’t feel pain while you’re asleep. So it seemed like the most humane thing. But there are risks when you sedate someone. If you take it too far their breathing will slow down, their heart rate will too. And when that happens you have to bring them back.
It was during my shift when that happened. His respiratory rate dropped down below ten, then eight. He began to take long pauses between breaths. I was at the bedside, so I pulled out my stethoscope to listen to his chest.
Something immediately caught my attention - a slithering, wet sound like an eel was moving around inside of him. But then it was silent and still again. Surely just my imagination, I thought, refocusing.
His pulse had slowed considerably. It was close to forty beats per minute, and dropping fast.
I went over to the infusion pump and paused it. After a few moments the machine began to wail, like a hungry infant left unattended.
WAAAHP WAAAHP WAAAHP
Pulling out my cell phone, I quickly called the doctor. Luckily he wasn’t far, and was in the room with me a minute later, standing over the patient.
“I counted eight resps per minute. And his heart rate is down to forty. No adventitious breath sounds…”
“How are his sats?”
“I put him on a non-rebreather, but he’s still in the low eighties,” I said, checking the patient’s oxygen levels on the monitor.
Doctor Balm was holding his stethoscope to Peter’s chest, listening closely.
“I wanted to check with you first before we give the reversal agent. What do you think?”
“Give him a few more minutes. Let’s see if his sats come up.”
“Sir? Are you sure?”
I knew from my experience that if his oxygen levels stayed below ninety percent for long, it would cause irreversible brain damage. We needed to administer Narcan immediately. This seemed to be going against the doctor’s code of “Do No Harm.”
“Restart the infusion,” the doctor said, his face grim. “Keep him under. Keep an eye on his pressure. Let me know if his sats drop any lower.”
Before I could say another word, he was gone.
“What the hell?…” I muttered to myself in disbelief.
He wanted me to keep the infusion going? But that meant the patient would continue to deteriorate…
My fingers hovered over the “restart” button on the infusion pump. But I couldn’t do it. Something about the whole thing felt wrong. And I didn’t want to risk my license or, more importantly, the patient’s life.
Instead of following the doctor’s instructions, I went out of the room to get a second opinion. There had to be another physician around somewhere, and they would surely recognize the need for a reversal agent. Without it, the patient would die.
Unfortunately, when I got out in the hallway, I saw everyone was so busy there was no chance of flagging down a doctor. The only other physician I could see had both hands pressed firmly into someone’s sternum, blood pouring out around the sides. They were screaming for gauze and a crash cart, but no one was coming.
My instincts took over and I left my patient for a minute to assist the doctor, knowing the situation was dire and they needed help. I fetched the crash cart and called a code blue, hitting a nearby button on the wall which sounded an alarm. I hooked up oxygen tubing and cranked the liters per minute to 20 - as high as it would go.
Once the oxygen mask was on the patient I had a moment to look down. The patient was turning blue around the lips. I pushed hard on both sides of the balloon attached to the mask, forcing air into his lungs, causing his chest to rise and fall. I did this again and again, watching the monitor as his O2 levels began to increase.
Finally, after several long minutes, some help arrived, and I was able to leave them to their work. I went back to my patient, terrified of what I might find when I entered the room.
But I never would have guessed what I saw when I walked in. Never in my wildest dreams.
Peter was lying on the bed, thrashing about and making muffled screaming noises. Something was covering his mouth - something plantlike and purple with branching vines. Whatever the growth was, it was coming from the stump of Peter’s amputated left arm. It was spreading rapidly, moving outwards in all directions.
The purple vines were growing as if in a time-lapse video, with each passing second covering more of Peter’s face and the surfaces around him. The squirming, constantly shifting vines were crawling up the IV pole which was still bleating.
With sudden, incredible force, the vines grabbed the IV pole and picked it up effortlessly. Then it was thrown violently through the window at the far side of the room, shattering it to pieces.
“What the hell was that!?” I heard someone shout from outside the room.
“HELP!” I managed to yell, my voice finally working after several attempts to scream.
Peter’s eyes shot open, the whites of them no longer white - but instead a swirling purple. The vines propelled him upwards until he was hovering suspended in the center of the room, then he locked eyes with me.
Vines shot out from the wriggling mass, leaping at me like cobras. They wrapped around my neck and arms, squeezing hard until I could see my limbs beginning to turn purple from lack of oxygen. My fingers began to tingle as if falling asleep, the sensation turning into pins and needles, and then nothing at all. My hands were a dark, violent shade of purple now, reminding me of how Peter had looked before all of this. That seemed like a hundred years ago now, but it had only been a few minutes.
Just as I felt myself losing consciousness, the door burst open behind me. I managed to turn my head enough to see the vines were all over the room now, making it look like the inside of some enormous creature which had swallowed us whole.
“What the hell?” a doctor said from the doorway, before screaming loudly.
“LOCK IT DOWN! We’ve got a grower!”
He turned around and began to run, but it was too late. A vine shot through his skull like a blade and I watched him fall lifelessly to the ground a second later. The vines began to wrap him up and envelope him, growing and spreading down his throat and into his ears.
A klaxon began to howl, drowning out the sounds of my struggles. The room turned red with the light of a hazard beacon on the ceiling, and I felt the vines around my neck loosening.
I looked at Peter and saw his attention had shifted to the breeze coming from the open window. He clearly wanted to escape, and that was outweighing any desire he had to murder me.
After a few long seconds he finally dropped me and I fell to the floor, gasping for air.
To my horror, I looked up and saw Peter climbing out the window. The vines grasped the window’s edges like extra limbs and he was outside a second later, the slithering mass of viney tentacles following after him.
The desert wind rushed in and a blast of sand hit my face, blinding me. Then the door burst open again and screams of horror could be heard from the security personnel in the hallway. Luckily, they had missed the worst of it, and managed to contain and kill the remaining lifeforms in the room using a freezing agent like a massive fire extinguisher.
Afterwards I exited the room, coughing up white dust, but thankful to be alive.
*
Scars across my neck and wrists serve as evidence of what I’ve been through, despite the government’s denials. I’ve been trying to spread the word since all of this happened, even though it meant a dishonorable discharge from the military. Some have even accused me of treason.
But it doesn’t matter. They can lock me up in their secret prison beneath the desert for all I care. It only matters that this gets out to the public.
People need to know. They need to be ready.
Something escaped from Area 51. And it won’t stop until we’ve all been assimilated.