She wiped her cheeks. Then she nodded softly, frowning with closed eyelids. Turning to Randy, who lay on the floor moaning incoherently, she wished he would stand up and be the man she had been growing fond of. She was impressed and comforted by Sam’s words, but Randy’s presence and effort would have been even more meaningful to her. What had happened to him?
They rode on the elevator for several minutes, passing a number of levels leading to different buildings and hallways suspended in air. Sam wished he could have found a way to brighten their spirits more, but couldn’t think of anything else to say that SNTNL had not already told them. Each of them felt exhaustion to their very hearts, and it took all the strength they possessed to remain awake, knowing if they slept now, it might be their last.
The elevator came to an abrupt stop. They looked around, but there was no door. Instead, attached to the cylindrical walls above, they saw a number of organic-looking, purplish-black, moist sacks about a human’s size. The skin of the sacks looked slightly translucent, and in the light of the elevator the crewmates could easily see that strange figures were stored within them. The sacks were attached to the wall with an edge of lighter-colored, harder looking material, and there were lines of liquid running down underneath them.
“What is happening?” Terri asked as she scrambled to her feet, her voice just short of shrieking.
All of their voices seemed to fall atop one another in the confusion, and they moved closer together.
“What the hell are those things?”
“Damn it!”
“Get back!”
Their eyes whirled around in an unconscious effort to count how many sacks there were along the walls. All around the elevator, there wasn’t a space of wall more than five square feet that wasn’t touched by one of the sacks. All told, there had to be over thirty of them, hanging there like unsightly boils.
“These are Seclurm creatures! Only they’re in the process of evolving,” SNTNL shouted. “I’m lowering the elevator. Do not touch their cocoons, or they may burst. We need to stop at the nearest floor and get out before they emerge fully evolved.” Urgency punched from its words.
The elevator started moving back downward, and each of them stood frozen, staring at the cocoons silently as if any sudden sound or movement might pop them open.
“What’s our pathway look like now?” Sam asked, wiping sweat from his face.
The elevator came to a stop by a metal door that slid open in two parts, each one at a slant. Through the doorway, a walkway stretched onward into a very large room overlooking a dark floor flooded with black liquid.
“Getting out of here as quickly as possible,” answered SNTNL.
15
Rosalyn started to become aware that her eyes were shut.
She could feel a rumbling sensation, but she hung onto her dream anyway. She was back home—something she dreamed about all the time, only she never cared for those dreams until now. Her old boyfriend, John Traynor, had stopped by, but it was as if he had forgotten they’d ever cared for one another. She invited him to take a seat with her, but he barely looked at her as he remarked that he was only here to ask for directions. He said nothing explicit, but somehow Rosalyn knew that every word he spoke was drenched with subdued disdain for her—related to his longtime criticism of her lack of passion for anything but work. She gave him the directions to the place he wanted to go and didn’t bother saying goodbye. Before long, she forgot he had even visited.
Her father walked past her without recognizing her. In the dream, Rosalyn could not remember that he was dead and had been for nearly six years. She stood up from the chair and called after him and he turned, but still didn’t recognize her.
“It’s me, Dad,” she said, gesturing. “It’s Roz.” A girlish grin split her face.
“I don’t remember you being an astronaut,” he said to her. His eyes were a bit sunken, his face and hands heavily wrinkled by an accelerated aging process brought upon by drug use. His clothes were shabby and he had one hand up near his ear holding a heavy satchel bag. He didn’t look as she once remembered him. That he was her father and yet seemed unfamiliar disturbed her, stifling her smile.
But Rosalyn pushed all of that aside. “I always told you and Mom that I would be. You never believed me. But I am. See?”
He shook his head. “You’re not gonna be a spacewoman forever. I don’t believe it.”
“Why should I not?” she said slowly, feeling defensive. “Why can’t you let me be who I think I should be?” Surprising herself, she felt a tear forming in her eye.
The dream started fading away, but she held onto it as best she could.
Her father frowned as he sized her up. “Because it’s dangerous, Roz. I don’t want you to die, like I died. But…you’re dead already, aren’t you?”
He gestured up and down her body with a finger on the hand that carried the heavy satchel before he turned, with a look on his face that said he felt her choices were a simple shame, and walked away. He approached the door of their home and exited without looking back.
Rosalyn looked down and saw bandage-covered shrapnel impaled within her shoulder, chest, and leg, true to her father’s word.
And she realized that she had opened her eyes.
♦♦♦
Until that moment, neither Sam, Randy, nor Terri had been able to really notice the smell of Seclurm. Now, jogging over an entire flowing, roiling river of the stuff, they knew they would never forget its scent as long as they lived. Oily and electric it seemed to them, tainted with some strange, old reek, overpowering in such large quantities.
They moved quickly, but not quite at a dash—they each knew without it needing to be said that they would need to save their strength for when there was something around that was truly worth running from. Randy felt his strength draining beyond anything he had felt before. His chest was heaving, and his body surged with activity. Terri forgot her shivering and terrible hunger and thirst. And the pain of Sam’s burnt fingers faded into the background as they worked their way across the gigantic room.
The chaotic, echoing noise of liquid Seclurm crashing down the low floor of the chamber was ever-present some twenty feet below them, the room almost too dark to tell it was there by sight save for some sharp reflections of scattered light. They ran across a long, wide metal catwalk with tall handrails until they reached the other side of the room and a widened area beyond that they stopped to take in. Past some metal contraptions with large angular claws and drills on the ends of what looked like huge robotic arms, they came to and beheld a large and very tall rectangular room extending both downward and upward with so many large boilers, catwalks, small enclosures, and different levels all throughout that they could not even begin to tell which way would be productive—or safe—to go. They struggled to take it all in from where they stood by the long side of the rectangular room, panting and leaning against the railing.
SNTNL spoke with lowered volume so as to not attract attention. “This is the factory. It’s one of the most convoluted areas I’ve seen in these ruins. I’m not detecting any activity in this room quite yet, so you can slow down if you’re tired. Best to save your strength.”
They became aware of a strange feeling of pervasive warmth. It felt so strange on their bodies after so long dealing with uncomfortable cold. Terri gradually felt sweat forming on her body.
“So many directions to go,” she whispered in between deep breaths, “and so many levels… Do we just try to head upward?”
“There should be another elevator several levels up and across the far end of the room on your right side. Head that direction. I’m afraid that’s about all I can tell you about this place.
“There is one other thing…out on the other side of this room, just opposite and below where you stand, is the shaft leading to the main reactor core of this entire city. You probably can feel its heat, and that’s because it’s been heating up steadily more and more for nearly a day. We don’t want
to be anywhere near it, mainly because it is drawing in all the aliens in the entire city.”
Sam turned his head down to his pocketed smart device with wide eyes. “H-how many are there?”
“I don’t know for certain. Best we don’t discover that. You will need to move quickly and quietly here. Head upwards and be extremely careful.”
Each of them looked at each other. Randy shook his head with a weathered look on his face, his eyes shut as if he hadn’t the strength to hold them open. Now that they knew what to listen for, they could hear the dull hum of the distant reactor.
“This reactor—is it going to overheat? Will it explode?” Sam asked quietly.
“We will all be long gone from here before it does,” SNTNL answered.
The reactor exploding was a frightening prospect, but SNTNL was right. Their only goal was to get out of this place alive. Once they reached this reparation room, as SNTNL had called it, and hopefully gotten some help for their wounds—as well as made sure each of them was clean from Seclurm contamination—they would be able to head to the outside. But then again, how were they going to make it even if they did? None of them had spacesuits to wear anymore. Sam repeated his question to the A.I., puzzled as to what kind of plan it was putting together and wondering whether he ought to trust it.
“There will be a way, I promise! I cannot explain now, but once you’re there, you will see.”
Sam grit his teeth. “That’s not good enough, SNTNL—if we’re heading that direction, I’ve got to know that it will be worth it!” Sam was starting to overcome his fascination with SNTNL’s revival. How did he know that it was really doing what was best for their safety?
“It is the clearest way to the outside, I can promise you. If you run into another terminal, I will gladly show you some footage to ease your worries. But for now, considering every alien in the city will have to move through or near this place to reach the reactor core below you, your only option is to head onward and upward.”
Biting his lip, Sam continued forward, nodding to the others but secretly feeling uneasy about his lack of other options besides trusting SNTNL. He thought A.I.s were useful, but he didn’t trust their judgment over his any further than he could toss their circuits.
Randy was leaning against the railing and wheezing—poor guy—but he stood up with some effort and followed behind Sam and Terri. Sam made his way along the edge of the large, rectangular room until he reached a stairwell in the wall.
“This looks promising,” he said.
Almost exactly when he said it, they heard distant noises beyond the dull hum of the reactor: paddings of far-away footsteps and accompanying breathy sounds. With silenced throats the crewmates each hurried up the flight of stairs, pace quickened.
They went up as far as the stairwell brought them, about six flights by Sam’s count, and found themselves walking through a raised hallway made entirely of glass. Even the floor was glass.
“Ugh! This place just gets worse and worse,” Randy grumbled, sounding almost half-asleep.
They stepped across it speedily only because of the threatening noises they had heard. Each looked out at the factory around them and thought they spotted shapes in distant shadows, each moving downward. They felt goosebumps on their skin as the cold deepened the further upward they reached.
“What do you think is happening down there, SNTNL?” asked Terri.
“They’re drawn to the heat. The reactor should be too strong for them to do anything about it. If we’re lucky, they’ll all go there and stay there while we leave this place. If you stay moving upward and keep quiet, you should be alright. They are concentrated in rooms down below.”
The glass hallway continued for a while, with turns right and then left and right again, winding around seemingly aimlessly. Not able to help looking down, Terri and Sam could see, through all the machinery and catwalks and conveyor belts, strange creatures moving and crawling downwards far below them. Terri swore softly and tore her gaze away, pinning her eyes forward.
A door almost took them by surprise as they turned a left corner. This door was well intact, with a sign printed in that alien script they had seen before. It was heavily weathered, with its bluish color cracked and faded. It didn’t open by itself, so Sam grabbed a handle and pulled it outward. Beyond it they discovered a room laden with—their eyes didn’t believe it as first—lush greenery.
Their shoes touched a layer of thick soil, with a slight path winding through it. Bushes both leafy and mossy were everywhere, and some of the leafy ones were tall enough to qualify as trees. The air became very suddenly moist and warmed.
“How are these things still alive?” said Sam. His eye was drawn to a couple of bushes that looked eaten through as if by caterpillars. He breathed in the strangely earthy air.
“I…I did not know this was here. This is impressive—but considering that we already knew there were creatures living in these ruins, it isn’t too surprising. They had to be subsisting on something. My only guess as to how it remained alive is that there were some systems in these ruins that were kept running for all these years or centuries…possibly with geothermal power or something like that.”
Beautiful, the three of them thought, to see something green after so long having nothing but some fake plants in their bedrooms or images of earthly plants from movies or photographs. Terri found herself contemplating for the first time on what a loss it really was that they never would get to truly explore this place and discover the reasons all of these things were. There were wondrous things here, incredible things beyond the horror of those Seclurm creatures doing who-knows-what far below. She half wished that FAER could get here to learn more, but knew that was a bad idea. This place was, sadly, diseased. It should not be entered again.
The other end of this room, this arboretum, had another manual door in the corner which Sam led them through. Here was darkness, total darkness.
“You two don’t happen to have flashlights, do you?” Sam asked.
They shook their heads. Sam pulled out his smart device and used the flashlight on that. The beam illuminated a number of Seclurm cocoons, dark and wet and dripping, plastered all over the floor in this corridor. Each of them jumped back, nearly shrieking.
“Turn back!” SNTNL said, or ordered in a quiet but firm voice. It wasn’t messing around with their survival.
Sam shut the door, barely remembering to do so gently so as to not attract any noise. Terri led the way now—Randy was so tired and sluggish that he brought up their rear again—and they hustled back through the arboretum and into the glass hallway.
They turned corner after corner until Terri stopped with a gasp.
There was a gaping hole here now.
From floor to walls to ceiling, it was as if a gigantic bite had been taken out of the middle of the hallway, leaving an empty space.
“Where the hell do we go now?” Terri whined frantically. Her eyes were watering, mirroring the others’.
A sound from behind them stopped all chatter, and they turned around to see a dark shape edging its way across the glass roof of the hallway. It was sprawled flat, moving its muscles only slightly, nearly gliding. In some dim light from above they beheld a drooping, translucent body, a full skeletal structure visible within it. It left a trail of a thick layer of steaming, purplish liquid. Acid. It curled the roof down, melting it bit by bit. They heard the creature emit a supremely inhuman sound of sharp and guttural breathing. Its head turned down to them.
Sam frantically searched below them and spotted a motionless, wide conveyor belt not ten feet down from the edge of the missing hallway section. It would be a bit of a leap to make sure they landed on it, but it was their only option.
“Jump!” he said with some volume to his voice. He took two long steps and hurled his body out into the air, flailing his arms. He felt his knees buckle and made an effort to tumble forward onto the belt. Pain coursed through him for a moment, but he looked up and saw he was alive an
d well. He called out to the others.
They looked paralyzed. Terri turned around to look at Sam, her face fully deprived of any sense of her former humanity. Now she was only a frightened animal running from a predator. She got a quick running start and leaped as best as she could, making it without difficulty, but not managing the landing very well. She rolled on her side and grunted loudly, holding her shin with her hand and trying not to cry out too loud.
“Randy, jump!” Sam said, eyes bulging.
Randy was staring at the creature, which was getting dangerously close. The ceiling of the hallway all behind the Seclurm was falling inward until finally there wasn’t enough ceiling left to hold up the creature and it plummeted down into the hallway with Randy, rattling the entire structure with its weight. It raised up to full height—about even with Randy’s—standing on its four thick, translucent legs. All that Randy could make out with clarity before turning and leaping away were two dead-looking, black eyes at the end of long antennae folded up on themselves in two rings, actually attached to the face, which, like the rest of it, was dripping with purplish acid.
Bleary-eyed Randy seemed to stumble in his jump, and he didn’t make it all the way to the conveyor belt. Sam and Terri watched him barely miss and plummet to the roof of some form of large and boxy machine on the next level down. Though it was sloped, he managed to cling to it, life still in him.
“I’m fine!” he blurted out after a moment, sounding anything but. “Run!”
Terri and Sam did not wait, though not so much for respect of Randy’s wishes as an overwhelming drive to get away from the powerful, horrid-looking Seclurm alien that stood there ready to chase after them. It was all chaos now. How far would they be able to go before the game was finally up?
Dashing along the motionless conveyor belt, they saw a catwalk ahead just above the belt, not too high for them to climb up to. They held nothing back now, dashing with all the speed they could summon. Sam felt virtually none of the awful pain in his burned hands as he jumped upon the catwalk and clambered to steady footing. Climbing up just after him, Terri spared a glance back down the conveyor belt both to see if they were followed by the alien and how Randy was doing. The alien had not followed, in fact, which made her feel all the worse, knowing it could be anywhere.
Seclurm: Devolution Page 24