Never Dead- Silent Screams

by Ofelia Negra

  Marcus’s thoughts went back to the recording, stored away in his PDT’s memory. He itched to replay it, but resisted the urge. She’d seemed so sad, and he’d found himself wondering why. She’d also seemed scared. Now, having encountered the horrors on the ship for himself, he could only imagine the terror she’d been in.

  No, more than that… he knew the terror. Even armed as he was, every time he encountered those things he felt the stab of fear through his chest. His guts knotted up, and his mind just ceased to think rationally. Fighting back had just been instinct. Pure, unadulterated, human instinct. But what would it have been for poor, sweet Nikki, who more likely than not, would not have been armed, and whose first instinct was to cower, and to heal, rather than to fight and to hurt?

  “So…” Marcus swallowed down the lump in his throat that stopped his reply dead, and then tried again. “So, where does that leave us? Do we just give up?” he demanded angrily.

  Hamilton hesitated and looked around for a moment. “No. We can still do this. Get me the Captain’s PDT codes and we’ll find Nikki. From the security feeds, it looks like the crew barricaded the door to the emergency wing.”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said ruefully. He didn’t have to scan left too far to see the hulking, makeshift barricade.

  It looked to have been made from steel plates and support girders torn from other places of the ship and welded together in place. The entire structure was ugly, and left no room for the creatures to squeeze past. There was a narrow gap at around chest height, where Marcus could just almost imagine security officers hiding behind and using that gap as a fire point.

  “You’ll have to blow through it to get to the morgue, then,” Hamilton said bitterly. “Which is going to waste more time. Get some thermite from medical storage, and a shock pad from zero-g therapy. Should be down the corridor…”

  A burst of static cut into the communications, slicing across whatever Hamilton was going to say. When he reappeared, he was scowling. “God! Communication is useless in all this static!”

  Another burst of static cut through and Hamilton disappeared again. Marcus waited, waited for him to reappear. After a couple of minutes, he reached to shut off the holo, but then stopped when the static disappeared and was replaced with a schematic layout of the section he was in with several points, including the barricade near him, marked with pulsing red rings.

  “This should give you an idea of where to look. I’ll be… when I can… Goddamned static…” Grunting in frustration, Marcus shut off the audio link and concentrated on the holo.

  ***

  7

  VII

  Marcus chose to visit medical storage first. When he thought about it, he considered that zero-g therapy might be the shorter distance to cover, but with that taken into account, he wondered why he shouldn’t take out the longest path first to get it out of the way.

  So, after grabbing a couple of extra plasma torch charge packs from the storage locker in the security checkpoint, Marcus walked through the large door labeled Medical Wing. Instantly, his revulsion shot up several levels. An uncovered, rotting corpse lay at his feet almost immediately beyond the doors. Blood was pooled around the corpse, but it had congealed and dried long ago. There wasn’t enough of a uniform present beyond the blood and gore to identify which section of the crew the man belonged to.

  Steeling his resolve, Marcus continued past the mangled crewmember and down the sloping hall to its bottom. Another two corpses were there, mangled again and covered in dried pools of blood. One of them, from what little uniform Marcus could see, was a medical technician. Another was an engineer in a dull green-grey jumpsuit.

  It made Marcus wonder.

  Why were there so many bodies here? He’d seen but a few corpses in the flight deck and tram control areas. And those had been scattered, random, distant. So why was it that so far, he’d come across so many here in the medical area?

  It made sense from one point of view, he guessed as he rounded a double corner in the hall and passed three more wrapped corpses against the walls. The medical wards were the most logical places to find so much death and decay. Patients from attacks by these strange creatures would have come straight here for treatment. Corpses would have been brought here for analysis and dissection. But most of these bodies so far were in the halls. There had been near a dozen on the tram platform, not counting the blindfolded woman and her friend, McCain, and another couple in the hall leading the security station. Thinking back on it, Marcus even remembered the stench of death in the security station itself. There’d been no whole bodies in there that he’d seen, though… only shredded pieces of wholes.

  And yet, it made more sense to Marcus that, once the threat had been identified, whatever crew had been left over at that stage would have holed up in a place that was more defensible and practical. The Bridge seemed like a good place, perhaps even Engineering. But Medical was connected to nearly every other section of the ship, even without the tram system. Attacks could have come at them from any angle. If the creatures were even able to coordinate, as Marcus hadn’t seen as yet, attacks could even have come from every angle.

  Then Marcus thought again of Nikki. She was a senior medical technician on this ship. Would she too have been holed up here? Would Marcus find her corpse strew around the deck, mangled, covered in blood-soaked linen? Or would she have had the sense to flee? Would she have seen the dangers of staying there and gone to the safest place she could find?

  A loud clanging ahead tore him from his worries, and he looked up from the blood stained deck to see that the door ahead of him was malfunctioning. He swore. Though it wasn’t as bad as the last one he’d come across, this new door still opened and shut at speeds too fast for any man to merely step through. The saving grace for Marcus was that there appeared to be a pattern.

  Open shut. One, two, three. Open shut. One, two, three. He forced himself to commit the pattern to memory. He wasn’t stupid enough to try and jump through. Not without help. But it would help him in using his magnetic module.

  He hit it dead on and raced through when it was open, keying in the second door’s release and stepping through without a pause.

  He was in a lab of sorts. Or was it medical office space? Ahead of him was a table that came up to his waist. Atop it were some empty vials, some scribbled notes on what looked like real paper, and a plastic model of the major organs of the human body. Each plastic body part was color coded for easy recognition for someone like, say, Marcus. The brain was missing, he noted casually.

  Behind it was a lit panel board, a couple of X-ray charts pinned to it at the top. Marcus knew without a doubt that the subject of those X-rays wasn’t human. He didn’t know much biology but there was no mistaking that the charts were just wrong. Most of the major organs were missing or had shifted to other parts of the body. Its girth was twice that of acceptable standards for most PMC crew, and its arms were long and curved, ending in bladed spikes similar to the standing creatures he’d seen numerous times before. He hadn’t seen this creature before, and he shuddered to think that he might.

  A storage unit against the wall was unlocked, and Marcus opened it, hoping to find something he could use inside. It was empty, so he turned away from it, scanning the room with a cautious frown.

  Several desks on the level he was on had been thrown around haphazardly. Waste bins had been tipped, their contents spilling out over the floor. Broken glass and paneling littered the floor amongst the paper and card of hard copy reports and analyses. Marcus even spotted a data chip near the edge of the platform, just inside the safety rails. There was no blood on the floor, no gore, no corpses. Whatever had torn this room apart had either been human, or it had been chasing humans and caught up to them somewhere else.

  Still, Marcus was careful as he approached the locked door across from the one he’d come in through. He checked to make sure that his plasma torch was charged. Just as he was within arm’s reach of the door, however, a series of loud
clangs alerted him to danger.

  He whirled around quickly, checking the area around him for any sign of what it was. But all he saw were vents being sealed up by emergency shutters. The door he had come through was lit in red, rather than blue; locked. He raced to it anyway and hammered down on the holo-panel projector, trying to get the holo back. His efforts were in vain, and he swore and kicked the door hard.

  He spun again at the sound of a horrid screech. Emergency shutters were still clanging shut over vents around the level he was on. He heard duller clangs as vents in the offices below also closed off. The lights flickered and went off, and the darkness was lit only by strobing yellow lights.

  “Hazardous anomaly detected.” The drone of the ship’s onboard computer was almost drowned out by the wail of quarantine alerts sounding in time to the strobing of the emergency lights. “Quarantine activated.”

  “Oh, that’s just fucking great!”

  Marcus raised the torch just as the nearest vent exploded outward and a blood-and-flesh covered alien thing flung itself through the opening. It landed with a wet thud on the deck, straightened, and turned slowly toward Marcus. Without thinking, he squeezed the trigger on the torch and blasted the head off the thing, following through with two shots at the chest that took off the entire section around the thing’s lest shoulder. He finished with another shot at the leg on the same side and watched it drop heavily to the deck.

  A howl alerted him to a nearby threat. He turned a little to the left to see another one racing… literally racing… across the deck at him. Continuing to act on instinct, Marcus blasted away at it. He watched with no small amount of satisfaction as the first blast hit the thing’s gut and caused it to double over, in pain or reflex he didn’t know. The shot also reversed the creature’s course, and it reacted as though it had been hit with a battering ram. It howled in fury as its arched back hit the deck, but Marcus didn’t give it time to get back up. He aimed a couple of well-placed shots to cut off its arms and one of its legs, and then swung around to look for more.

  Though he could see no more of the creatures on the upper landing, which wrapped around the edge of the vast room, he could hear the unmistakable howls and screeches of more of them nearby. There was no point in denying to himself that he knew they were on the main floor, waiting for him. Just as there was no point in denying that he had to go down there. The only doors up here were both locked… and one of them led back the way he’d come. On top of that, past hours had proven that lockdowns such as the one that had trapped him could only be lifted when the creatures in the area were either dead or gone. If he wanted to access any room beyond this point, he knew he was going to have to eliminate whatever threats waited for him on the lower level.

  Sighing to himself, Marcus trudged along the walkway around the far side of the room and followed it to the riser on the other side to where he’d entered. He stepped onto the riser hesitantly, cautious of malfunctions. Then, rather than hit the control holo which was, somehow, still active, he looked over the rail down to the lower level. Most of the area was obscured from his view presently by the offices to the left and right, as well as work benches and support pillars in the central area.

  But one of the creatures was in sight, though Marcus wasn’t sure if it was even aware of his presence. It just stood there, its arm spikes raised passively, its chest heaving with each shallow, rasping breath. It looked across the space in Marcus’s direction blankly, as if it didn’t even see him at all. He didn’t bother wondering about it before he unloaded a few well placed plasma shots to take it out. It went down after the first one; the following three were just for added measure.

  Sure that it wasn’t going to get back to its feet, and that no others would come running to its rescue, Marcus keyed the descent control on the holo and waited patiently as the riser lowered him to the bottom floor. When it stopped, he stepped off it. The door immediately to his right was locked, ringed in red like the ones upstairs and sealed off with emergency plating. The one straight ahead, across the main space dominated by desks and pillars, was unlocked; one of the windows smashed, its shards littering the floor outside the office.

  He proceeded forward slowly, ever aware that as yet, the lockdown had not lifted. He knew that that meant there were more of those things around. He came around in front of the office that had been to his left. The door there was unlocked too, and he opened it and went inside.

  The office wasn’t in as much of a mess. The table was still upright and the lamp atop it still standing. It cast a dim light over the table in the darkness, showing the strewn papers and report chips. There were more papers and chips on the floor, and they crunched under Marcus’s heavy boots as he walked around. The vent was closed off. The shelving unit behind the desk and chair was bare. Two of the four storage lockers against the wall the desk faced were unlocked. One was open already and empty.

  Marcus opened the other one. There was a small med pack inside, and he grabbed it without hesitating. Aside from the pack, there was nothing else. He clipped the pack to a slot on his belt, and then closed the locker again.

  When he was certain that there were no creatures hiding in the office, Marcus went back to the door and keyed the release.

  He almost screamed in shock. One of those things was on the ground just outside the door, and it was very much alive. It wasn’t one of the ones with the tail, however. Its arms were still long, bony blades that promised death, but everything below the torso was missing. There was tearing at that area that made it look like it had been shorn away previously. Marcus aimed a heavy kick to its head and backpedaled to get a better aim at it.

  It screeched at him then, its dark eyes boring into him and its jaw hanging loose. Marcus fired once, twice, and the thing collapsed to the ground, losing the support of the bladed arms that had held it up. He approached it, lifted his foot, and then brought it down hard on the thing’s head. The skull cracked and splintered under the pressure, and then the entire head just collapsed under the weight, imploding into a squishy mass of blood and flesh and brains.

  Marcus fought the gag reflex that hit him and looked up to see another standing bladed creature approaching him from the hall. He took it out with the last shots of his plasma torch and then ejected the charge pack to insert another.

  All went silent then, and he stood perfectly still, waiting. The lights flickered on, and the emergency lights went dark at the same moment. “Quarantine lifted,” the computer droned.

  Marcus sighed in relief. He wasn’t completely out of the woods yet; he knew that. But at least now, the immediate threat had been dealt with.

  He navigated the mess in the center of the floor and entered the other office. It was in similar condition to the first: upright desk and chair, papers and report chips strewn about haphazardly, desk lamp busted but still more or less upright. The nearby shelves had a couple of plasma charges on them and he grabbed them without a thought, slipping them into his belt for further use. There was another med pack, but he ignored it for now… he already had one. After finding nothing else of use in the room, he left it and went back towards the riser.

  The door near it was now unlocked, the security grill that had blocked it off had lifted. Marcus took advantage of that and went inside. Another desk and chair in that room, with more charts of the overweight-looking alien thing and a few charts of others he had seen so far. Six lockers near the second door, three unlocked, opened, empty.

  He went past them and through the other door into a short corridor. He rounded the bend in the corridor and found himself in a longer extension of it. There were windows at the other end, and through them he could see the pale green glow of growth tanks. He approached slowly at first, until he saw movement through the glass. Then he picked up his speed. There was someone in there!

  A man in a medical-science uniform rushed over to the window when he spotted Marcus and banged on the glass. “Come on! Come on!” he shouted through the glass. It wasn’t soundproof.
Marcus could hear him clearly.

  Something small skittered around on the floor behind him, and that only served to ratchet the man’s panic some more. “Let me out!”

  Marcus heard a spitting sound and something small and sharp punched through the man’s left hand, pinning it to the glass. He screamed in pain, and Marcus, on instinct, took a step backwards.

  And that’s when he saw it rise up. It was small, no bigger than a child. But its skin was a sickly green-yellow, veined and distorted. Its eyes were black orbs in sunken pits. Small proboscis-like tentacles shot out around its head like a mane, and three longer, barb-tipped tentacles extended from a raw and fleshy opening on its back. Those tentacles waved around in the air, the barbs ever pointed in the medical man’s direction as the creature’s jaw opened wide and it howled into the air in triumph. Marcus swore.

  The tentacles flicked forward as one, and their tips thudded into the small of the man’s back. He cried out again in pain and jerked at the strike. But he was still alive, still whimpering, still trying to pry his hand free of the barb that had it pinned to the glass.