A sign saying "Danger" might actually mean what it says...
~~~
The two homeless men, Bill Champ and Ace Gumbo, paused at the breach in the ancient wire fence and examined the sign hanging on it. Bill — tall, wiry, with a long, sober face and dark green eyes — read the faded words slowly. “Danger,” he whispered. “Do not enter.”
“But the encampment we’re looking for is just ahead, on the property next to the big blue house,” complained Ace, groaning and lowering the heavy bag from his shoulder to the ground.
“All right,” replied Bill stepping through the breach in the fence. “I guess we’ll just have to take our chances too, then.”
“That’s the ticket,” said Ace, a cheerful smile spreading across his round face. Eagerly hoisting the big black bag back onto his shoulder, the stout man followed.
“Ace Gumbo’s the best cook in the west,” crowed Bill to the dejected-looking group of ill-clad men, women, and children sitting around the circle of dirty, tattered tents. “And we have plenty of food in the bag. Start up the campfire, and we’ll cook up something everyone can enjoy.”
Ace and Bill shook several hands, then began prepping the veggies for the stew. As they diced and chopped, their eyes were drawn inexorably toward the house and the tall square tower rearing up next to it. The big blue building resembled one of the old-style transformer houses that once inhabited residential neighbourhoods, minus the simple transformers and switch gear. A thin beacon that protruded from its roof toward the tall square tower was surmounted by a metallic ball periodically emitting bursts of brilliant green sparks.
“Anyone know what those buildings are for?” asked Bill, pointing to the two structures.
The people in the encampment grinned and shrugged. “No one knows,” said Ace.
“Wonder why they never bothered busting into the buildings to find out,” said Bill, handing out the bowls of Mulligan-style stew.
“I’m curious, too,” replied Ace. “But it’s too dark now for a look-see.”
“We’ll check them out tomorrow, then,” said Bill. “Nice of the folks to lend us a tent for the night, though, eh?”
“One good turn deserves another,” replied Ace, evincing a wry smile as he scraped the bottom of the community cooking pot with a large wooden spoon.
****
A pall of hot, stifling air hung over the camp in the morning, like a suffocating blanket. Ace and Bill rose early and downed a light breakfast before heading over to the blue house. The first thing they discovered was that the building had no doors or windows of any kind. Lacking an obvious means of ingress, they ran their hands over the walls to see if there was a hidden entrance. To their surprise, the surface of the external wall was smooth and slick, as if covered with an invisible coating of oil. Climbing to the high roof without a ladder was impossible, so they dropped the idea of investigating the strange beacon. Baffled by the enigmatic blue house, they turned to its neighbour, the tall square tower.
Again, there were no doors or windows. But there was a plaque mounted at eye level on one of the small blocks the tower was constructed of, which read: The Peabody Advanced Storage Tower AD 2246.
“It’s late summer, 2346,” mumbled Ace. “I ask you, what would you store in a tower for a hundred years?”
“Beats me!” exclaimed Bill, stepping back to look up at the top of the structure. “I’m guessing it’s at least fifty feet tall,” he declared. “I saw a couple of long ropes back in the camp. Tie them together, Ace, and bring them back. I think I can climb this thing.”
Reaching up, Bill inserted the tips of his fingers into the deep bed joint between the blocks of the tower. Pulling himself up by the fingertips while hugging the wall, he edged his shoes into the bed joint below, gaining a secure toehold. “I can do it,” he said under his breath, letting go and dropping lightly to the ground. When Ace returned, Bill took the spliced rope and secured it around his waist, then began to climb slowly up the tower, free solo like a rock climber.
As he ascended, he thought of the reason they had come to this far-off encampment; of the buildings and structures in the abandoned cities they’d explored, and all the artifacts and things left behind by the Earth’s population when they had migrated en masse to the deep-space worlds, taking their treasure and wealth with them, impoverishing the Earth.
Being homeless didn’t stop them from wanting to see the relics of the Deep Space Age abandoned on Old Earth. They fancied themselves modern versions of the urban explorers of the past, who had once scoured the wrecks of dead malls and railway stations. The stories they’d heard of the blue house and its tower had brought them to the ancient Peabody Advanced Storage Tower, laden with food to ingratiate themselves with the squatters.
Arriving at the roof, Bill took hold of the thick bollard-like post mounted at the corner of the tower and pulled himself in. Turning about, he secured the rope to the post. Leaning over the edge, he called out to Ace and lowered the free end of the rope. Then he walked over to the large skylight in the centre of the roof. Peering through the semi-opaque aluminum window, he studied the shadowy interior of the tower.
He detected a small movement in the darkness near the bottom, something emerging from the pool of shadows: a massive, sentient, tubular worm-like creature. The unearthly thing came floating up through the dust and darkness toward the dim light emanating from the semi-opaque window. Drawing close to the source of light from the roof, it paused, drifting back down the core of the tower to the stygian pool from which it had risen.
Bill shook his head in disbelief. “Take a look at what’s been stored in the tower for the last hundred years,” he shouted to Ace as he clambered up onto the roof with a small pack on his back. Speechless, they stood together, peering wide-eyed through the skylight at the living shadow in the tower.
“And that’s not all we’ve learned,” declared Ace, pointing off to the north.
In the distance, Bill could see the large circular trace of an ancient spacecraft pad, profusely overgrown with weeds and trees, its service buildings destroyed or lost over the long years. “That explains a lot,” replied Bill. “Now we know how the creature got here.”
“Sure ’nuff,” said Ace. “But we don’t know what the creature is or why it’s locked up in the tower.”
“Well, I know one thing for sure,” exclaimed Bill, wiping his sweaty brow. “This heat is killing me.”
“I’ve got some water and two sun hoodies in my pack,” declared Ace.
“Good,” said Bill. “We can stay up here for a while and keep an eye on our new friend.”
The urban explorers smiled. Donning their protective clothing, they sat down next to the rooftop window in the sweltering heat and watched. Soon, their heads began to nod...
****
A violent gust of wind swept across the roof, rousing Bill and Ace from their heat-induced slumber. Looking up into the stormy black sky, they saw a squall line’s roiling white shelf cloud advancing rapidly toward them. Grabbing hold of the nearest bollard, they hung on. Dense curtains of rain tumbled out of the clouds, interspersed with bolts of lightning, one of them striking the beacon on the blue house — shorting the station’s power and extinguishing its emissions of tiny green sparks.
Hunkering on the roof, the two men didn’t see the outline of the large oval door forming below them on the lower half of the tower. Above the roar of the thunder and storm wind, a shrill alarm blared from the centre of the blue house, warning of imminent danger. The door on the tower solidified, then opened.
The creature peered cautiously from the open doorway at the fleeting lightning flashes illuminating the low-light environment of the storm. The tempest was passing, and the night was coming. Sensing it would remain dark outside its prison, it leapt free. The black worm-like entity twisted and turned like a corkscrew, rolling over the wet ground toward the frail tents of the homeless encampment. Flopping down heavily upon an elderly man, it crushed him beneath its quivering mass, and began to absorb his compressed body through its skin.
Shrieking and screaming, the squatters scattered, the strongest and healthiest of them running as far and as fast as they could. The older and weaker members sought a place to conceal themselves in the hope that the darkness of night would aid them in hiding. Little did they imagine that the prisoner of the tower was an apex predator from an ultra-low-light world, and that the darkness of the storm and the night favoured its rapacious proclivities.
Bill and Ace were preparing to climb down from the roof when they heard a scream. Leaning over the edge of the roof, their mouths fell open at the discovery of the open portal.
“I think we’d be smart to stay up here,” suggested Ace, quietly.
The two men fell silent and listened. They heard a pitiful cry of despair from somewhere in the darkness, then another scream.
“Sounds like our friend in the tower’s having its way out there,” observed Bill, grimly.
“Ya,” mumbled Ace. “But maybe not for long.”
A pair of bright lights were approaching high above the ground. Two air-cars circled the tower, then dropped low, scouring the ground. They soon found the grub-like entity pursuing a pair of terrified children near the fenceline of the property. Bathing it in their intense lights, it froze in its tracks. Rearing up, the creature struck out at the brilliant objects in the air, but to no avail. Unable to stop the pain, it turned and raced pell-mell back to the only source of darkness it knew: the tower.
Leaping through the portal, it squeezed its wiggling mass up the tall structure and hid beneath the skylight on the roof. One of the golden air-cars fired a laser beam at the blue house, activating a switch, whereupon a shower of green sparks issued from the end of the beacon on the roof. The door on the tower closed; its outlines faded, then it disappeared from sight.
One of the golden air-cars embossed with a Peabody Corporation logo drew near the roof, a dignified looking man in a dark suit leaning out its window.
“You two men are trespassing,” he said. “We won’t press charges if you vacate the property immediately.”
“Several people were killed here!” shouted Bill, angrily. “Don’t you care?”
“Of course we care,” replied the man in the dark suit. “That’s why we installed a fence and posted signs warning of the risks to trespassers. It’s been more than fifty years since the station’s power last failed.”
“The least you can do is tell us what the creature in the tower is,” demanded Ace.
The man in the air-car smiled and nodded. “A hundred years ago, one of our deep-space probes returned to the corporate pad nearby with an unknown creature attached to its surface. The hitchhiker from the low-light world had survived in space by converting its organic matter into inert chemical compounds, like a virus. Once on Earth, it came back to life. Peabody’s solution was to imprison the remora* in the low light environment of a storage tower.”
The hovering air-cars waited for Bill and Ace to slide down the rope and walk to the breach in the fence. Extending a hand outside of the craft’s window, the man in the black suit dropped a large survival sack. Reaching into the bag, Bill and Ace passed out the money, food, and clothes to the frightened cluster of survivors huddling outside the fence.
Turning, they waved to the men in the air cars and headed off toward the abandoned city in the distance. In the sky, the stars were fading as the soft colors of dawn illuminated the air.
*Remora - Oxford Languages: A slender marine fish which attaches itself to large fish by means of a sucker on the top of the head. It generally feeds on the host’s external parasites.
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