Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  No, she thought with a clenching feeling of guilt, it went for Randy instead of us! She couldn’t believe how easily she had just run from him. There was nothing I could do! she thought, defending herself miserably against no one.

  Randy had barely moved from where he clung to the tall machine. His face was resigned and dull, as if fear had lost its potency within him.

  Sam did not look back, too concerned with what direction to go to get away. He was so disoriented, it took him several seconds to pin down where to run. He looked to one end of the catwalk and saw it led to solid ground—a wide room with other doors and hallways that appeared empty from where he stood. That was a good place to start. Terri followed him with shifty eyes.

  Randy’s side hurt like hell. He felt like he could lie down and die right then, but he did not want to get separated from his friends, his last connection to the world that was real and good rather than an unending nightmare. Almost immediately since he had been down here in the pit of this planetoid that should have been barren and lifeless and full of nothing but good minerals to collect, he could not even remember what he loved about space travel, or returning home, or living on Earth. His family and his girlfriend had turned to muddy puddles in his mind. He, himself was too, although he did not admit that.

  With a heavy grimace he slid down the side of the machine along a pipe that was searingly hot. Halfway down, although he was sliding very quickly, his body decided that it would rather risk broken legs than burnt hands, and he fell the rest of the way. He ended up on his back with throbbing legs, his bones feeling shattered, although he knew that from that distance they must have been fine.

  He stood up. His feet clattered on metal. He was still along the side of a large machine, standing on a walkway apparently meant for climbing up to operate it. He hadn’t a sliver of a guess as to what the machine was, and cared about that least of anything in the universe. He saw a metal ladder and made his way down it with hands that burned and feet that throbbed, and a head that was full of terrifying things, filling with confusion and change. He had never felt like this in his entire life. In a way that disturbed him greatly, he almost felt more alive than ever before. The fact that he almost wanted to smile because of it made him feel so sick, he wanted to vomit.

  Each minute that passed, he felt less and less like himself. He wanted nothing. Only to exist.

  Before long he was dashing with as much speed as he could gather along a walkway leading to where he could see Terri and Sam going, although he was on a level below them.

  He thought he saw a stairwell ahead of him. It turned out to be a broken room full of barrels and dusty shelves. Cursing, he ran down the next hallway that he guessed would connect with the others. He turned his head over his shoulder and beheld the translucent alien running after him. It moved with less speed than the Seclurm-evolved alien on the Novara had, he thought, but still would catch up to him with ease.

  It was a bizarre sight, simultaneously having fat, shambling, droopy flesh and a powerful structure and poise to its movements and posture. Its feet were simple-looking slabs with claws, and it had no tail. He could not see its mouth.

  Terri and Sam finally found a solid place to stand. Along the edge of the rectangular factory room they passed into a wide, rusty-colored, hall-shaped room with many colossal boilers set along the walls. They slowed down and caught their breath for a moment, seeing nothing around them. It was somewhat dark. Sam pulled out his smart device again.

  He spoke between heavy breaths. “SNTNL, any help? You’ve been pretty quiet.”

  There was no response.

  “SNTNL? Where are you?”

  He tried to turn the device on and was greeted by a black screen.

  It was dead.

  He felt as if he had taken a punch to the gut. Terri felt like she’d taken a knife. They shared a terrible look.

  From above them fell drips of purple acid, barely missing both of their craniums. A catwalk above rattled from a number of heavy footsteps. A number of them.

  Terri ran first, and Sam found his second wind immediately after. Aliens dropped from the ceiling. First two, then three, then seven, then somewhere close to double that.

  “THERE!” It was the only word that Terri could get out, screaming hysterically and pointing toward a boiler-like structure that had an open door and was larger than the other boilers. A silo. She and Sam turned and quickened their pace. They felt the hair on the backs of their necks standing up as a cacophony of horrible growls and scraping and roaring trailed them.

  The creatures were close behind, but not so close that Sam and Terri had no chance of making it to refuge.

  At that moment, they saw Randy running from a catwalk above and to their right, close to the ceiling corner. He must have found a stairway that went just above their floor. He had aliens on his tail as well, and they looked near to the kill. That catwalk led directly into another door to the large silo, only that one was shut. He reached the door and slammed into it, looking as if he could drop dead from exhaustion alone. He slumped down to his backside and turned to look at the alien coming to a stop just in front of him, trailing a row of three. It opened a slimy mouth full of at least three rows of thin, sharp, colorless teeth and bellowed a growl.

  Randy felt his heart seem to burst. His chest heaved up and down and he couldn’t move a muscle. He looked at the creature, its muscles trembling as it neared him. It moved its head—an enormous head—close to his face for a few moments, almost drooling acid onto him. Somehow, however, Randy could feel fear leaving him.

  The aliens suddenly leapt down off the catwalk away from Randy.

  Sam and Terri could just barely catch a glimpse of that out of the corner of their eyes before the two of them burst through the thick doorway to safety. Screaming, they slammed the thick, metal door shut and found a large wheel like that of a bank safe attached to this side of it. They turned it anxiously and found it locking the door tightly. After a moment, bodies slammed against the metal repeatedly, and terrible scratching and growling began.

  The oddity of the aliens losing their killing appetite for Randy was swallowed up in the racing of horrendous fear that shivered through them like an electric shock. Adrenaline slowly wound down in their bodies and they cast themselves on the floor, feeling their hearts clenching with thunderous beats.

  Inside this relatively safe space there was a second floor, although apparently inaccessible from where they stood. It was a perforated metal floor about twenty feet up in the silo, probably where the outside catwalk led to. They could only hope that the aliens would not get in from that way.

  Outside, Randy was mentally pushing away what had just happened. He saw a veritable hive of monsters raging just below him against the thick wall of the boiler, so far to no avail. Perhaps the metal this silo was constructed from was resistant to their acid. He got up on his two feet, opened the upper door, and slipped in with eyes pinned on the horde before shutting and locking it quickly behind him. He was so sweaty, his clothes were drenched.

  “Randy?” Terri called from below.

  He started and peered down through thin, perforated metal at his two friends below, both exhausted and hopeless. Hopeless, but safe.

  “I’m…here…Lilah…” he said, but he didn’t feel present at all. In fact, Lilah was the name of his last girlfriend, and he vaguely remembered after saying it that she wasn’t around. His head was feeling more and more like it was full of oil. He sat down and ruminated on how they got where he now was and who he was speaking to.

  “How the hell are you alive?” Sam asked with total shock in his voice.

  Randy did not respond. Just as he had not responded—not truthfully, at least—an hour earlier when Terri had asked him if any of the black liquid had gotten inside his spacesuit. He had not known how to say it then nor when he was asked again by Sam because the words just left his mind as if he wasn’t allowed to say them, lost in a strange haze.

  “Randy? Randy?”r />
  He did not even know who was saying his name. He slumped down on his back, his arms and legs sprawled out at first. He felt sweat oozing out of his body like a rainfall, and pain began gripping him. The taste of that bitter, horrible Seclurm liquid was lodged in his mind, and a final clarity came to him as he began to dim: a catastrophic realization that his brain had been overtaken by Seclurm before anything at all could be done to stop it.

  Sam and Terri stood up, horrified and hysterical at what they were watching. They didn’t stop calling his name or shouting expletives or questions to God or to anyone else who was not with them. They could see only a shadow of sorts through the holes in the rusty metal floor and see drops of Randy’s sweat falling down and dribbling down near their feet. Randy curled up in a fetal position, and before long he was covered in a liquid composed partly of his own sweat and partly of something else oozing from his pores that covered his skin in a coalescing mesh of dark, purplish flesh. In minutes he was completely encased within it. It continued to expand, filling with an embryonic liquid. Like glue the cocoon attached itself firmly to the floor, and Randy White’s last flashes of human thought were drowned away amidst the terrified screams of his friends.

  16

  The first thing Rosalyn noticed waking up from sleep was that she was in incredible pain. The next thing she noticed was the incredibly cold feeling all around her, her body reacting in a wave of prickly goosebumps.

  She was laying in the open cryo-cell.

  She slapped her hands against the edges of the cell, breathing deeply of the frigid air, barely able to move. Vague flashes came into her mind of facing off against an alien. She couldn’t remember much of anything else. Somehow she had escaped death. She was alive, and in pain. Her vision was blurry; she wore no glasses; in fact, she only wore a bra and ruffled black pants. She pined for her leather coat as she sat up. She could barely move, her limbs frigid and lethargic from the effects of the cryo-cell. Very slowly she was able to move her legs over the side of the cell until she touched her toes to the icy cold metal floor, trembling and feeling blood begin to seep out of her padded wounds ever so slowly.

  Who put me here? she wondered angrily. And…why is it open again?

  With a sudden burst of shock she realized what must have happened. She had been found! Was she on Earth again, or just collected into someone’s spaceship? Wherever she was, Sam must have been the one who sent her homeward in the cryo-pod. Which meant he must have killed the alien, or at least warded it off.

  Rosalyn looked ahead and saw through blurred vision and drooping locks of unkempt hair that the door of the pod was open, so she stumbled towards it.

  “HELP!” she cried weakly, her body barely functioning. Her voice sounded weak and limp. If she was back on earth, where was everyone? Unless someone had swiftly found the pod drifting in space, it must have been decades since the incident. That horrified her, though she had no time to think with blood running down her body.

  But if she was back on Earth now, that still must have meant she’d been found by someone, or the cryo-cell never would have opened! So where were the surgeons to save her life, to safely remove the shrapnel that was lodged lethally in her chest?

  She exited the pod. It had touched down lightly near the edge of an extended and wide-mouthed cavern. One end of the cavern, just beyond the pod, was covered in a shifting, see-through material like a sheet of falling dust. Beyond it she could see the blurred, grayish-white landscape of a weathered place she recognized, even with bad vision, as 730-X Zacuali.

  Her heart sank and she almost felt her knees buckle. No, she was not home at all. But where in the world was she? Was she…inside the mountain? If that was so, how was she breathing without a spacesuit?

  With the pain in her chest growing sharper and sharper by the second, she knew she had to discover answers quickly. Arms clutching her half-naked, bandage-wrapped chest became soaked with her own blood. She wandered out of the medium-sized room, stumbling forward on astronaut shoes through an open door. There she found herself in a tall, dark corridor with a bright light coming from a room at the end of the hall about thirty feet down on the right. She stumbled over to it.

  From the bizarre, rippled patterns everywhere, she recognized this place as the alien ruins. She heard what sounded like footsteps in that bright room and began stumbling faster. On the chance that the owner of those feet was a friend, she might survive.

  If it was a foe, well—she was dying anyway.

  She was starting to feel her blurry vision fade to fatal darkness as she entered the room. It was empty of people, yet it was as lively as could be. Spherical objects colored a grungy yellow hovered in the air everywhere, swimming around like they were underwater. Each of the spheres, all of varying sizes, was actually composed of a thick liquid, she marveled upon closer inspection. And they weren’t shifting around in the air randomly; each one moved upwards or downwards in a column with the others above and below it. She moved between the columns with a wide-eyed awe and delicate caution. The walls were lined with buttons and screens that were lit up, each one using a sort of semi-holographic display that boggled Rosalyn’s mind to behold and made her wish she had her glasses still.

  The aching pain finally became too much for her to stand. Her head banged against the floor and her eyes refused to remain open.

  She heard whirring noises increasing in volume, and a light came on from above like a spotlight upon her.

  Her mind became hazier by the second. Death was imminent.

  Some of the liquid spheres broke free from their column and attached themselves to her in various parts of her body—her chest, her shoulder, her legs, her hands, and her face. They pulled her up from the floor and held her suspended in the air. She was rooted to the spheres completely, fear shocking her, yet probably helping keep her alive.

  For several terrifying moments she could not move as if the liquid spheres were completely glued both to her flesh and the very air. Then without warning they released her and she fell backwards. She was caught by more of the spheres, their forms conforming to the shape of her body, and held up five feet in the air by them, as stuck now as she was half a second prior. Another set of lights shone, and Rosalyn thought she heard footsteps again, but some of the liquid came close to her face and obscured her vision.

  She felt so strange in this room. Her body was rapidly changing to normal temperature. Her fear felt almost paper-thin, as if she somehow knew that it was misplaced. And her senses felt like they were dulled to a great degree. The fact that what was happening was so terrifying and yet could not actually terrify her only made her all the more perplexed.

  Someone was standing next to her—she could feel it. Though her vision was mostly blocked, light came in from the edges of her vision and she knew there was a figure beside her. Another odd sensation came to her chest, and before long she could no longer feel the pads and bandages nor the pieces of bloody shrapnel there. Soon after that, other wounds that had been too small for her to notice over the pain of the chest wound, like those in her shoulder and shin, felt painless as well.

  Consciousness began to slip from her.

  When she awoke, she was set gently on the soft floor, the spotlight was no longer shining on her, and she was alone again in the midst of the moving columns of grungy, yellow spheres.

  She sat up with ease, shocked at her own abundance of energy. She felt keenly the soft floor and the cool, clean air. For the first time in days she felt so energized she thought she could go and do anything.

  Another shock came to her and she screamed suddenly, putting a palm over her mouth. She could see.

  Feeling at her face, she wore no glasses, and yet her naked vision was as clear as day for the first time in decades, when she was a young girl.

  Scrambling to her feet, she felt at her chest. Then her arms, her legs, and her feet. There were no wounds or any blood on her flesh anywhere. It was as if she was completely whole with no scars at all. She looked
at the wall and found a strange mirror-like holographic screen projecting a perfectly-reflected, three-dimensional, full-color image of herself. After stepping to it and examining herself closely (not trusting what the alien technology might have done to her), she saw that even some scars she had remembered from her youth—like the long one on the back of her ring finger earned from a knife mishap on the first camping trip she had any memory of—had vanished without a trace. Even her dark hair seemed brighter and healthier.

  She breathed in and out heavily, unable to comprehend the oddity of what she had just experienced. It was so starkly opposite from what had happened to Shauna when she had an encounter with a different alien liquid.

  And who the hell was that person who was in here next to me just a minute ago? What’s happened to me?

  She looked to the floor on her left and saw something she had missed before: a jet-black coat. It had no discernible markings on it, yet it looked somewhat familiar. She couldn’t imagine it being made by aliens, and yet somehow that mystery wasn’t one she was prepared to spend any energy wondering about. Was it…was it a FAER uniform? That didn’t sound possible. But lacking any shirt, she donned the jacket and zipped it up gratefully.

  Clarity came to her mind then. The last thing she remembered before waking up, she now recalled fully, was collapsing to the floor in her damaged spacesuit as Sam stabbed the alien with the makeshift spear. He must have killed it, or she wouldn’t be here now. But why in the world would he put her in the cryo-pod only to launch her into the ruins?

  Perhaps there had been some sort of misfire… No. No misfire would send the cryo-pod perfectly landed into a hangar in the ruins. …Someone had to have put me here on purpose. And someone had to have opened it.