by Mike Kraus
Lurching toward Marcus, the man twisted his mouth open in pain, struggling to speak as he moved.
“Kill me. Quickly. Please.”
Marcus’s finger wavered over the trigger as he tried to comprehend the abomination before him. Neither fully man nor fully mutated, the figure still had some semblance of humanity left, making Marcus hesitant to fire upon him. Marcus saw the pain in the man’s eyes, feeling a connection to the last remnants of the man locked inside the horrific shell that pulled him ever closer to Marcus. The man’s mouth opened again, repeating his plea as he brought up his arms to strike Marcus down.
Still hesitant to pull the trigger, Marcus winced as shots rang out to his right, three of them in a row. Standing just behind him, Rachel performed a Mozambique Drill, sending two shots into the twisted metal torso of the figure, followed by a third shot between the man’s eyes. Marcus closed his eyes as bits of metal from the creature’s torso splintered and fragmented, shooting back into his face.
When Marcus opened his eyes, he saw the figure still standing on its feet, swaying gently as its arms and legs struggled to maintain its balance. Finally, overwhelmed by the damage inflicted by such a close range attack, it toppled over, landing in front of Marcus in a crumpled heap. Marcus slowly lowered his rifle as his breathing rate increased, followed by a tingling sensation in the back of his head. Dizziness followed shortly thereafter and he felt himself collapsing to the ground, throwing his gun to the side and shielding his face with his arms as he fell.
The dizziness and nausea lasted for only a few moments before Marcus was back on his feet, taking Rachel’s hand as he pushed himself up. “I’m sorry… I don’t know what came over me.”
Rachel nodded in response, giving him a look up and down to make sure he was all right. Once she was confident that he hadn’t been hurt by the fall, she moved forward and knelt next to the figure. The blue glow was all but gone and Rachel switched on her flashlight, prodding the figure with the barrel of her rifle. His head and chest had sustained intense damage from Rachel’s shots and she grimaced as she glanced at the back of his head, examining it and the chest cavity closely.
Standing several feet back from her, Marcus swallowed hard, fighting against the nausea rising in his throat. He had killed the mutated creatures before without feeling any emotions except anger and he didn’t understand why this time was any different. In his heart, though, he began to suspect why it was affecting him so strongly. The beast in the cave and the ones who had attacked at the police station were fully transformed, no longer human in any sense of the word. This one, though… something had gone wrong. His body had been taken over, but his mind, or some part of it at least, was still there, fully aware of what was happening, perhaps up until death.
What Rachel had done, he reasoned, was what the tiny bit of man inside the creature had asked for. Such a flimsy justification did nothing to assuage his guilt, though, and he tried not to look at the body on the floor, diverting his eyes to the walls and ceiling instead.
“Marcus, get over here and look at this.” Rachel whispered at him, beckoning him over.
So much for keeping my distance, he thought, walking slowly toward Rachel as he continued to avert his eyes from the body.
“Look, Rachel, I’m not—”
“Just shut up and look at this. It’s important.”
The concern in Rachel’s voice forced Marcus to look down to where she was pointing, inside the exit wound left in the man’s head. Brain matter and blood mixed with bone and bits of hair both inside and outside the wound, slowly congealing in the low temperature of the hallway.
“What… what am I looking at, besides the remnants of this poor bastard’s head?”
“It’s not what you’re looking at. It’s what you’re not. Look inside. See any metal? Any silver, any blue? Any sign of anything foreign in there?”
Marcus squinted his eyes, trying to look at only the smallest part of the scene laid out in front of him. As he thought about what Rachel had said, he became more clinical in his examination and his nausea lessened. Tilting his head, he examined the exit wound, muttering to himself along the way.
“I don’t see anything. His body though, that’s covered with metal.”
Rachel nodded, then pointed to the hole in the man’s chest. “Exactly. Look there. Well, you don’t have to, but this is the first time I’ve gotten a chance to see a dead mutie up close. The intricacies of it are astounding, even if it is just a poor copy.”
“Wait, what?”
Rachel stood up and looked at Marcus, gesturing to the form on the floor as she spoke. “The blue glow? Whoever this used to be, he was obviously infected by a swarm of Doe’s nanobots. The only problem was that Doe clearly doesn’t have his swarm programmed properly, so the infection didn’t get as far as it does in anyone else.”
Marcus nodded slowly, recognizing the obvious signs he had missed earlier in the heat of the moment. “So he was still able to think for himself, control himself to some limited degree.”
Rachel’s expression grew sad and she nodded, turning away from the body on the floor as she walked back into the stairwell. “Based on the fact that his brain had no traces of the nanobots in it, he was most likely one hundred percent aware of what’s been going on ever since he was infected.” Rachel paused, clenching the door handle so tightly that Marcus could swear it was going to break.
“And if Doe infected this one, there’s bound to be more.”
Nancy Sims
8:37 PM, April 11, 2038
Nancy watched outside at the commotion going on in the field amidst the storm. A dozen people surrounded the guard, with more coming each passing moment. They crowded around him, making it impossible for Nancy to tell what was going on. Conflicted in her emotions, she turned away from the window and sat down on a cot, staring at the wall.
Although Nancy was upset and angered by her and Leonard’s kidnapping, she still felt some amount of sorrow for the guard’s death. She didn’t want to have sympathy for any of the village members, but seeing him lying on the ground with a post the width of a telephone pole stuck in his chest caused her to feel badly regardless. As Nancy sat and stared, wrestling with her emotions, she didn’t notice the sound of a door opening over the howl of the storm.
A sudden chill came over Nancy as she sat in the darkened room and the hairs on the back of her neck and arms began to rise. A terrible fear lumped in her stomach, traveling up to her throat until she felt as though she couldn’t breathe. Swiveling slowly on the cot, she turned to see the source of her extreme discomfort standing before her.
A figure clothed almost fully in black stood just beyond the entrance to the room, framed by the doorway and highlighted by the flashes of lightning outside. Nancy held her hand to her mouth, stifling a scream as the figure shuffled forward. His maniacal smile became visible, though the rest of his face was still obscured in the darkness. A thick padding surrounded the upper portion of the man’s head and his body twitched as he walked, his head moving back and forth like electricity was coursing through his bones.
Before the man uttered a sound, Nancy instinctively knew who he was. His smell, the way he held his body and his unspoken mannerisms all screamed his name at her, pushing her body into panic mode. She instinctively pushed backward, falling off of the cot in her effort to move back from the ever-advancing figure, but her panic merely incited him to move faster and smile wider.
A single bloodshot eye came into view with a flash of lightning. A twisted and bandaged nose came next, followed by the thick dressings that surrounded the man’s head and right eye. His breathing came faster as he closed in on Nancy, who clawed at the floor, pushing herself up against the wall. Nancy didn’t notice the wall was even there as she kept trying to slide back. She shook her head as her lips opened and closed noiselessly, mouthing the word “no” over and over again.
Throwing back the coat that was slung loosely over his shoulders, the man finally stopped j
ust a few feet from Nancy. He knelt down on the floor and stared at her, his head and body still twitching as his single eye stared at her. When he finally spoke, it was haltingly, the words catching in his throat as he struggled to push them out.
“Hello. Nancy.”
A single tear ran down Nancy’s face as she tried to scream. Her voice finally began to work, though it was instantly muffled by a dirty, bloodied hand as the man clamped down on her face, keeping her from being heard by anyone nearby. Even though the storm outside rendered it nearly impossible to hear anything that wasn’t more than a few feet away, the man was taking no chances on being discovered. Moving quickly, he pulled a rag from his pocket and wrapped it around Nancy’s head, jamming it into her mouth as a makeshift gag. Nancy’s eyes closed as her mind began to fade, traveling away to another place under the trauma of the reemergence of the man she had hoped was dead.
Pulling Nancy to her feet, Richard threw her across the room. Nancy barely stayed on her feet as she slammed into the far wall, groping at the nearby window frame for support. Richard stalked slowly toward her as he pulled a short knife from an unseen pocket, rolling it over slowly in his hand. Nancy lashed out at Richard, catching him on the side of his face with a fist, but he shrugged it off, landing a similar blow to her head that knocked her to the floor.
Richard stared at Nancy on the floor, contemplating the knife in his hand before slipping the blade back into a pocket. He whispered as his one good eye twitched. “Too easy. Joshua’s dead. I lost an eye. No easy way out for you.”
Pulling Nancy roughly to her feet in front of the window, Richard put his hands around her neck, slowly tightening his grip. Nancy’s eyes widened in shock and she struggled, kicking and hitting at Richard who simply ignored her, focusing his rage and anger on choking the life out of her. Lightning flashed through the window and Nancy saw the hatred in Richard’s eye, realizing that she was, indeed, going to die by his hand.
Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden
8:17 PM, April 11, 2038
“Slow down for a second.” Marcus panted as he hurried to keep up with Rachel. Since leaving the hall with the infected man behind, she hadn’t bothered with stealth. She ran ahead of Marcus and Sam, leaping down stairs and barreling around corners, pausing only long enough to peek through an occasional doorway. She looked back at Marcus and slowed her pace to a brisk walk, giving him time to catch up with her.
“What is it?”
“How did Doe know how to infect people with nanobots? I mean, if the AI for the swarms came up with this thing all on their own, how’d Doe find out about it?”
Rachel slowed down even further, finally coming to a stop. She leaned against a wall and took a sip of water. “Well, he was eavesdropping on our radio transmissions. I’m sure he’s got plenty more resources that we don’t know about. All he’d need is a satellite and he could study what the swarms are doing, like David’s been keeping an eye on us.”
“Okay, then how about this. Why doesn’t he just infect us with the nanobots? Why go through the trouble of infecting other people and sending them down here. It seems like an awfully roundabout way to go after us.”
This same thought had been troubling Rachel ever since she had seen the infected man. If Mr. Doe was mimicking the behavior of the nanobots swarms in the wild, she figured that he would have tried to infect them directly. Whether the reason was because he was being more cautious after his last failure or had some other scheme in mind, Rachel wasn’t certain. The fact did remain, though, that it was certainly a viable option, especially if Mr. Doe noticed and removed the DNA whitelisting portion of the base nanobot AI.
“I don’t know. But he certainly could. That’s why we have to hurry. We need to get to David, in case Doe tries to attack us. We’ll be safe if David can activate Bertha, but until then, we’re sitting ducks.”
Rachel turned to continue forward, but stopped when Marcus sat down on a step, staring at the floor in front of him.
“Rachel?” Marcus’s voice was distant and quiet, and he spoke like he was a thousand miles away. He stared at his pistol, touching the barrel as it sat in its holster. “If that happens to us, we can’t let ourselves be taken.”
Marcus looked up at Rachel, meeting her gaze. She nodded slowly, in full agreement with him. “It won’t come to that. But if it does….” Rachel nodded for a final time, not bothering to finish her sentence.
Marcus stood and patted Rachel’s arm, a grim but determined expression on his face. “Let’s get going, then. We don’t want to keep David waiting.”
Rachel and Marcus continued down through the complex, faster than they had before. Sam struggled to keep up with them from time to time, his paws slipping on the concrete stairs. After nearly a half hour’s descent, Rachel peeked through a doorway and held up her hand, motioning for Marcus to look through it as well.
“Jackpot!”
Through the hallway, white walls intersected with large windows, and faint shadows of scientific equipment were cast by Marcus and Rachel’s flashlights. It resembled many of the other hallways that Marcus had seen before, but Rachel recognized something different about it. She pulled open the door, moving down the hallway and peering into the large rooms on either side. Smiling, she whispered happily to Marcus.
“This is it; the top floor of our laboratories.”
Marcus looked around, confused. “How can you tell? It looks the same as any of the other hallways.”
Rachel shook her head, still smiling. “And how can you tell one ad campaign from another? They all look the same to me.”
Marcus snorted, accepting Rachel’s somewhat forced comparison. “Fair enough. So where do we go from here?”
Rachel pointed down the hall. The corridor was so long that the light from their flashlights didn’t reach the other end, but Rachel assured Marcus that it was the right path. “Down that way is the elevator we used to get into our labs. There’s an emergency staircase next to it that we can use to get directly down into David’s lab.”
Marcus arched an eyebrow. “So, this is it? We’re here?”
Rachel nodded and started to walk down the corridor. “Almost. Another ten, maybe fifteen minutes tops and we’ll be at the lab.”
Marcus looked around him as he followed Rachel, suddenly nervous about the fact that they had almost reached their destination. Running into the solitary infected man had set him on edge, as had Rachel’s warning that there were certainly more of the same to be found elsewhere in the complex. Doe knows were heading for David’s lab. If I were him, I’d set up an ambush at the last second; lull us into a false sense of security and then hit us right before we get there.
“Rachel, slow down.” The nervousness tickling at Marcus’s brain had exploded into full-blown paranoia. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end, and every echo and creak from the building was turning into an imminent attack from a creature.
“No time, Marcus. We need to—”
One of the laboratory doors blew off of its hinges, smashing into Rachel’s side and knocking her into the opposite wall. From the room where the door was knocked outward, a glowing figure emerged, charging forward and following through with a blow to Rachel’s chest. Positioned as he was, Marcus didn’t have a clear shot at the figure without risking injury to Rachel. Without bothering to take a second glance at the blue figure, he ran toward it, followed closely by Sam who barked ferociously.
After sliding several feet down the hall, Rachel’s body was motionless and shadowed in the dark, her gun and flashlight having fallen away in the assault. The figure that had ambushed her was pushing itself off of the corridor’s floor, having stumbled to its knees after slamming into Rachel. Taking advantage of its momentary weakness, Marcus leapt into the air when he drew close to the figure, slamming down onto its back with the butt of his rifle, followed by his knees.
The figure collapsed onto the floor, rolling to one side as Marcus rolled forward, quickly regaining his footing.
Though he too had lost his flashlight, the figure’s blue glow was bright enough for Marcus to acquire his target and let loose with several shots. Mere feet away while shooting, Marcus’s bullets ripped into the figure, tearing it apart and causing it to go limp on the floor. Hurriedly, Marcus stood up and approached the body of the creature, checking to make sure it was dead.
Before he could do much more than verify that he had actually shot the figure, a snarl from the door at the end of the hallway caught his attention. Two more creatures, both in blue, were standing just inside the doorway leading from the stairwell into the corridor. Unlike the first figure that Marcus and Rachel had encountered, these were fully infected by the nanobots as evidenced by the silver patterns that spotted their faces and heads.
Keeping his rifle up, Marcus edged backward, with Sam behind him, growling at the approaching creatures. While these blue-tinged creatures didn’t immediately charge in for the kill, they were moving toward Marcus at a frighteningly steady pace. Marcus’s foot bumped into something on the ground and he glanced down to see Rachel. She shook her head and blinked several times as she tried to regain her senses.