Kraken Mare

by Jason Cordova

  I have my ways, you have yours.

  I caught a blur of motion out of the corner of my eye. Before I could even blink, something heavy slammed against my left and I was tossed aside like a ragdoll. The submachine gun flew from my grip as I landed heavily onto the corridor floor. I slid a few more feet before coming to a stop near the stairwell door. My neck and shoulder ached from the impact, but the adrenaline was pumping and fear fueled me. I was back on my feet with one of my myriad of handguns up and pointed at my attacker’s head in moments.

  Someone was standing in the shadows, waiting. I couldn’t quite make out who it was, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Back off, convict,” I growled. I was going to remain under the assumption that it was one of our escaped prisoners until proof showed otherwise.

  “Manning…oh, I hoped it’d be you,” a frightening voice came from the darkness.

  Shit. I recognized that voice. It belonged to Charles Gentry, one of our most problematic prisoners. He was a sick and twisted individual who loved to play mental games with the scientists and guards alike. Why he had ever been allowed to participate in this scientific study was something all of us guards had debated over. My theory was that he had some senator bent over a barrel somewhere and had also knocked up his daughter. Nobody else bought that theory, but it seemed solid to me.

  “Gentry, hands behind your head and face the wall,” I demanded. I really didn’t want to shoot him, not just yet. If I killed him out here and one of the others were around, I’d never be able to set the trap properly. Digging out escaped convicts from within the confines of this station, each of whom were dangerous as hell, was not something I could afford to do. We simply didn’t have the manpower for it, not any longer. It had to be one shot to get them all.

  “Let me come into the light, Manning,” Gentry hissed.

  “What the hell…” I whispered as the tall, lanky ex-soldier moved out of the shadows and into the dim light fully for the first time.

  I’d gotten my love for classic movies from my mother. I’d seen just about every movie that she considered a “classic” multiple times. Granted, what she termed a classic, I would later discover, most “real” critics of classical film considered to be campy at best, all the way to downright horrible. So I’d seen movies that most of my friends had never considered, which included hundreds of horror movies. Horror movies which depicted aliens, zombies, and everything else that used to scare the crap out of kids.

  That movie list also included Nosferatu.

  Apparently, Gentry had seen that one as well. If he hadn’t, then it was one hell of a coincidence that he looked just like Max Schreck.

  His skin had turned a pasty white, which was a stark contrast to the darkness behind him. He had hair, once, but now it appeared to have disappeared, along with his wide chest and muscular arms. His arms were elongated and his elbows just looked wrong somehow. His ears were pointed slightly and his eyes appeared to be sunken deep within his skull. His mouth was twisted and broken, and there was a strange glint in his eyes. I was used to his crazy, but this was just too much.

  He had changed himself into a freaking vampire. What a cliché. A terrifying, nightmarish cliché. My throat tightened for a moment as the fear took hold. I couldn’t speak, could barely even breathe.

  No. Not this time.

  I swallowed and the tension eased. I would not be cowed by this wannabe. I would not be petrified by this convict. Besides, Max Schreck had been far scarier than this ass clown.

  “Gentry! Turn around, get down on your knees and put your hands on your head!” I demanded, my voice thundering in the sterile metal corridor.

  “Or what? You'll shoot me?” Gentry's mocking laugh sent chills up and down my spine. My fingers tightened on the pistol grip. The prisoner took another step forward, his eyes locked onto mine. “I'd like to see you—”

  I fired four times in the span of a single second. Every shot struck the creature that had once been Gentry solidly in the chest, the .45 caliber rounds erupting in small geysers of blood behind him. Spent shell casings landed on the floor. The creature looked down at the wounds clustered in a two-inch area right where his heart was. He scowled and shot me an irritated glare.

  “Ow… Nice grouping, though,” Gentry said in a voice which somehow managed to convey both annoyance and envy. His jaw, reminding me of a snake, unhinged, while his teeth… Jesus, his teeth!

  Now pointed and sharp, they fit well within his newly formed mouth. I took a small step back, keeping the pistol level, unable to stop watching his continued transformation.

  Gentry’s fingers began to elongate, tips sharpening into claws. Snapping my attention back to his eyes, I watched as the pupils narrowed into slits and began to lighten. The color progressed from dark brown, to yellow, finally settling on a deep shade of crimson. He ripped his bloodied white smock off his body, exposing his chest. I watched in awe as the gunshot wounds closed, leaving only a slight blemish on his now alabaster skin. A very disturbing look for a man who appeared emaciated.

  “Fine, tough guy. You want to play?” Gentry ran a finger through the still wet blood before raising it to his lips. He sucked the blood off noisily. “Then let's play.”

  As the Things would say, my original plan was borked. It was time to improvise.

  Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but grenades are definitely a Marine’s. I grabbed two off of my belt and tossed them at Gentry. He darted to the side and out of the way as they bounced along the floor. I moved as well, though not in the anticipated direction. I charged forward, following the grenades as they rolled down the corridor.

  The secured doors to the hangar was ten feet away. It would take me two seconds reach the doors, two more to enter my master code, two for the doors to open and then about one and a half for it to close behind me. The timer on the grenades was roughly six seconds. There was no way I would make it to safely before the grenades went off.

  Of course, I wasn’t exactly planning on making it to safety in time.

  One.

  I made it past the grenades, my bag of goodies slamming painfully into my spine as I sprinted down the corridor. Apparently, everything inside had shifted around and what had once been neat and orderly was now chaos. It didn’t matter. Pain could be ignored temporarily.

  Two.

  I skid to a stop at the door and began to punch in the master override code. I could have used Gerry’s keycard but that actually took longer, since the computer had to verify the card and double-check to ensure that the card had clearance for the area. The master override skipped all those procedures and simply opened the door.

  Three.

  I hated that I was a slow typist. Why the hell did anyone use actual keypads anymore, anyways? Holographic keypads had been out and on the market for the last fifty years. Who decided to save a few hundred dollars on a multi-trillion dollar super-secret military research station anyway? Fucking bean counters.

  Four.

  The code was accepted. The door unlocked and the pressurized chamber blasted air past my face as a crack appeared in the middle. A whiff of metallic and oil hit my senses. The door began to slide apart.

  Five.

  I heard a loud pop! as one of the grenades went early. I winced and mentally swore as blue smoke began to fill the corridor. I heard Gentry grunt in surprise somewhere on the other side of the smoke.

  “What the hell?”

  Six.

  I stepped inside the hangar and pushed the button for the doors to close. The second grenade popped then, spewing orange-colored smoke into the hallway. No fragments peppering the hallway, no concussive explosion. Just boring old colored smoke.

  Surprised? Gentry sure was. The AN-M2 Smoke Grenade had been used by the Marine Corps for centuries as a marker for deployed troops, concealment, and signals for aircraft pilots. Different colors signified different things and were coded thusly. I had assumed that Gentry was as mistrusting as he was psychotic and used th
at against him, tossing the smoke grenades instead of the real things. Sure, the smoke grenades were hot to the touch, and the smoke they generated could potentially suffocate someone in an enclosed area, but dangerous? Hardly.

  I’d basically given Gentry the proverbial middle finger by popping smoke and avoiding conflict on his terms.

  I had a plan, and I was sticking to it, damn it.

  “Manning!” I heard Gentry scream through the orange-and-blue colored smoke. “You dirty, sneaky motherfu—”

  The doors slammed shut, cutting him off. I panted as I typed in a new code to change the master override, just in case he’d seen what I had typed in. The keypad beeped twice and turned green. I locked the controls out as well, to be absolute certain. For what I was about to do, I needed time, and I needed the convicts to break into the hangar to kill me when I was ready for them.

  I now had time. Not a lot, but enough. I commed Central.

  “How we looking?” I asked.

  “Good so far,” Poole (I think) answered as Gentry began to pound on the secured doors. I could faintly hear him screaming at me, though I couldn’t make out precisely what he was saying. Probably things about goats and his desire for them to consent to his sexual needs and desires, undoubtedly.

  “Ready with the secured PA announcement?” I checked as I dumped my bag of goodies onto the hangar floor. Inert C-4 tumbled out, as well as the carefully packaged blasting caps and their respective detonators. I had a while and I wanted to make certain I did this correctly. Practice makes perfect, and I was way out of practice.

  “Ready to give the word as soon as you tell us.”

  I began to set charges all across the hangar, making certain that each explosive was near something highly flammable. I wanted one hell of a fire, and also to take a few of the bastards out at the same time.

  I wanted a chain of explosions in a descending order, but other than rigging a charge and blowing it up, I knew next to nothing about sequenced explosions. My best bet was to convince them that the explosions had failed and I was trapped. If they thought I was trapped, they would grow cocky. It was almost guaranteed.

  “Start the broadcast,” I said ten minutes later. I strung the last detonator to my master line and walked it back to the shuttle nearest the door. They would definitely see me in the cockpit, looking panicky and frightened. They would undoubtedly swarm the shuttle, eager to kill, ready to murder all survivors and make their way off of the station.

  Yes, one must chum the water to bring about the sharks. It just sucked that I had to be the chum.

  I waited patiently with one ear on the supposedly secured broadcast to the Observation Deck as I readied the detonator. I left the main door to the shuttle open but ready to be closed at a moment’s notice. I needed to maintain the illusion of being helpless and ready to bolt, even if it meant that I would possibly get screwed hard if something went wrong.

  Minutes passed. Nothing. I began to sweat profusely in the stifling heat. The one place where it was constantly warm in the station was the hangar, since it contained two pressure-sealed locks which led to the dangerous environments of Titan. Since the methane outside was so cold that it could freeze anything, the locks cycled in warmer air and pumped out the methane whenever the outer locks were opened. Since the warm air rose naturally from the generators near the bottom of the station anyway, it was all dumped into the hangar.

  Which basically meant I was waiting for my possible death in an oven. Go me.

  I finally heard shouting outside of the door where I had made it past Gentry. It sounded loud, angry and not very human. I almost whooped aloud in glee. There were more than two voices out there, and they all sounded like they wanted to get inside and murder me. This was getting better and better.

  After much struggling and shouting, the escapees managed to pry the doors to the hangar open and step inside. I counted them off as they entered. Wohl, Jones, Aviotti, Flynn, Dupay, and coming up in the rear was Gentry. They all wore little to no clothing, and their bodies seemed as malformed and changed as Gentry’s had. Jou had been subtle compared to these guys. Aviotti looked like he was going for the demonic look, while Wohl reminded me of a scarecrow. Dupay had grown hair all over his body and fangs. The convicts were scary and crazy, and I told myself that I was doing the universe a favor by killing them all. They had been men before, hiding their bestial natures behind a mask of humanity. Now though? They’d dropped their masks. It made what I was about to do all the easier.

  I counted them off again and frowned. Baptiste was missing. Damn. I’d hope to nail all of them in one fell swoop.

  Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. I would make do with what I had.

  They began to holler and shout at me as they ran towards the shuttle. I quickly activated the automatic doors and sealed the ship. They skidded to a stop as a whole and eyed me suspiciously. That was a good idea, given as to what I was about to do to them, but it was already too late.

  “Come on out, Manning,” Gentry shouted from the rear of the pack. The others were grinning hungrily. “We just want to…talk things over.”

  Right. Space Pope, et cetera, et cetera.

  “Screw you!” I shouted back after I flipped on the ship’s external comms. Eloquent, no?

  “Manning, if you don’t open this shuttle and let all the scientists off, we’re going to kill everyone slowly,” Gentry promised with a hideous and ghastly smile. The dude was beginning to both piss me off and creep me out. I readjusted my mental ranking of Nosferatu and moved Gentry up the list of Things That Creep Me Out. Still not at the top, but he was closing in quickly.

  Gentry continued to shout obscenities at me as well as threats but I had had enough. They say that the best sex oftentimes is surprise morning sex. Unless you’re a convict in prison, that is.

  “Surprise buttsex, motherfuckers!” I screamed and clacked the detonator in my hand. Yes, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m extremely screwed-up individual.

  My C-4 charges exploded, creating a wall of fire and heat which slammed into most of the convicts. A few were killed outright from the blast, though most appeared to have suffered only minor burns and some broken bones from the explosion. Fire began to rage as a few oil cans which had been haphazardly strewn about were lit. My strategically placed. My strategically places charges had done the trick, though. It had dazed and disoriented the surviving convicts for long enough that when they recovered, those that survived wouldn’t guess that the force of the explosions had missed on purpose.

  “Come on,” I hissed as I watched the fires burn. The convicts began to get back up onto their feet. Murderous looks were being sent my direction in the shuttle. If looks could kill…well, let’s just say that the phrase “glaring daggers” would have been the gentlest of ways they would have killed me. “Come on…”

  Suddenly, a loud siren went off in the hangar. The convicts looked around in confusion as yellow lights began to flash, slowly at first but increasing their pace with each passing second. Everyone on the station who was not a prisoner knew precisely what that meant. Thirty seconds. That was all they had to get out of the hangar as fast as humanly possible. Unfortunately for the escaped prisoners, they never received that safety briefing.

  It was an oversight I’m sure would be rectified in a few years, give or take a millennia.

  All of the doors in the hangar slammed shut. The lights continued to flash but the sirens stopped their howling. I looked at the escapees with merciless eyes. Their thirty seconds were up.

  “Enjoy Hell, you sons of bitches.”

  Halon-3303 was a nasty piece of work that had been created by some mad scientist on Earth thirty years before. It worked as both a fire suppressant and a fuel elimination system, which was handy for some of those fires which could kill an entire ship in the depths of space. The suppressant system worked as a traditional extinguishing system, smothering the fire with a cold foam and eliminating oxygen from the area, which removed two of the three bas
ic needs of a sustained fire. However, older suppressants oftentimes ran the risk of the fire reappearing, especially when the fire had a fuel source. Something like cloth, wood, or anything else that was biodegradable. Fires that had been thought extinguished would rekindle, placing the ship in danger anew.

  Enter the aforementioned mad scientist, who decided to imbue the suppression system with a nanite which would eliminate anything biodegradable trapped within the foam itself. This would ensure that all three elements of the “fire triangle” would be eliminated, making certain that the chance of a fire reappearing would be absolutely nil. Many ships and stations had been saved thanks to the new Halon-3303 system. Best part of all? The nanites eliminated themselves and the foam once there was nothing else biodegradable within the foam. Cleanup was a snap for maintenance crews.

  Unfortunately for the prisoners who were out in the hangar, they did not know what Halon-3303 was about to do to them. The human body, after all, is biodegradable.

  The Halon foam exploded from the rafters of the hangar, the thick, grey stuff landing on every piece of exposed equipment. It stuck to everything, including the escaped convicts. They looked around at one another, their faces masks of grey goop and foam. I could almost feel the palpable confusion in the room.

  I looked away for the next part. I knew what was to come would be gruesome. I had enough nightmares already; I didn’t see any need to add to them.

  The convicts all began to scream simultaneously as the nanites within the foam began feasting on their exposed skin, clothing, and hair. Everything that could possibly be biological was eliminated in rapid order. The screams ended as abruptly as they began as the nanites chewed through bone and vital organs. All of the prisoners were the walking dead, even if their minds didn’t quite know it yet.

  I never did look. I mean, I could imagine what it had looked like, but I didn’t actually see what happened. All I know is that when the all-clear siren sounded, the only evidence that there had been people in the hangar moments before was a few pieces of plastic and their slippers—that was odd—that all of them had been required to wear when walking to and from their cells.