0.4 by Mike Lancaster Page B

shadow across his skin.
    But it was nothing to do with the light, and all to do with the physical appearance of the doctor’s hands. The skin of his hands was shifting, as if moved by ripples across its surface, or currents below. It was like the skin itself had suddenly become
capable of moving
, and it wasn’t using muscles to do it, it was doing it itself.
    As I watched in horrified fascination, a sudden rush of tiny bumps spread across his skin like a rash. It looked a little like gooseflesh, and before long there were thousands of the bumps, covering his skin.
    Each bump was crowned with a tiny black dot.
    The doctor didn’t seem to notice, he just stood there,utterly still while the rash seemed to harden upon the surface of his skin and then, suddenly, began to disgorge thin, whip-like threads from each of the bumps. Skin-coloured and minutely thin, these threads sprayed out of the dot at the centre of each bump, like water under pressure, or pink silly string from a can. Each thread, or filament, was ten to fifteen centimetres long, and seemed able to support itself, standing out from his flesh like thin, hard fibres.
    The filaments began to stretch, pulling themselves further from the bumps that housed them, adding twenty centimetres to their length with every second that passed.
    The bass vibration deepened again in the air around us.
    The filaments on the doctor’s left hand were reaching out towards the person next to him.
    My dad.
    The fibres were moving towards my dad’s hand and I had an urge to swat at them, to keep them away from him, to stop them touching him.
    Except I didn’t want them touching me.
    And then it was too late.
    The filaments seemed to sense their proximity to Dad’shand and homed straight in on it, flailing at the back of his hand and then sticking to it. Where each filament touched, a bump appeared; identical to the bumps that had spread across the doctor’s own skin.
    The pores of the bumps opened to accept the filaments, before sucking them inside and sealing themselves closed.
    The doctor’s hand was now linked to my dad’s hand by hundreds of flesh-coloured threads.
    The bass sound ceased abruptly.
    ‘What are they
doing?
’ Lilly asked, with disgust in her voice.
    ‘They’re mutating,’ Kate O’Donnell said.
    I shook my head.
    Things started coming together in my head.
    Digital code. Data. Computer code as a means of invasion. Thin flesh-coloured threads. Fibre-optic cables.
    ‘Not mutating,’ I said. ‘Connecting.’

27
    Three simple words.
    ‘Not mutating. Connecting.’
    The keys that started unlocking the puzzle.
    Of course it wasn’t until we reached the barn that it all came together . . . but now I’m doing what I have been avoiding: I’m getting ahead of myself.
    It’s all starting to blur together, and the pieces are starting to bleed in over other pieces. I have to keep it together.
    So you’ll know.
    So you’ll understand.

28
    When things start moving, they can
really
start moving.
    We were still reacting to the bizarre sight of the doctor and my dad connecting when suddenly everyone in the crowd was at it.
    Filaments began spreading from person to person, to the right, to the left, behind and in front, connecting the crowd into a vast network, bound together by those unnatural fibres.
    As a group we stepped back, edging away from the sight before us.
    Doctor Campbell was blinking in a definite pattern of blinks – two quick, one slow, three very quick indeed, two slow, then a lot of fluttering blinks, then the whole pattern repeated again –
and every member of the crowd did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time.
Connected by those terrible fleshy fibres, the crowd was now acting as one.
    We turned and walked away from them.
    I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t even look back.
    No one followed.
    We headed out of the village, along the high street. We were driven by an impulse to get as far away from the village green as we