I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

  I'm not sure what stress induced delusion I was under. Maybe it was because I was all primed to fear death on six legs that I thought a commando that should be trying to kill me instead waving at me was not dangerous. My first thought was Oh, it's safe! and I began to walk forward to talk to the man.

  Mikkel grabbed my shoulder and then shook his head.

  Of course I was being an idiot. Any doubts were expelled when the commando opened his mouth and said, "C-c-coooooommmmmmmmmmmme heeeeeeeeerreeeee." We could see a long piece of drool drip from his paralyzed lips as he held his mouth open to utter that long phrase.

  Yes, he was a Spider puppet and I had been a dumbass. A dead dumbass, if not for Mikkel's hand.

  Suddenly, from each of the side corridors, Spiders spilled out, running along the floor and walls. They had been waiting to ambush us and somehow they showed a surprising amount of intelligence. Instinctively they knew when their trap had failed. Now they sought to stop us with sheer numbers.

  Mikkel started firing immediately, dead Spiders falling from one of the walls. I was a little slower. I lifted my gun and started firing. You know how everyone had been making fun of me for being a terrible shot? Well, that was true. I also didn't know my way around automatic weapons at all. I had fired a gun a few times, but never anything that would keep firing if I held down the trigger. I thought being able to just hold down the trigger would be great for my current situation.

  Do you see the potential problem here? In hindsight I do. But the first time with an assault rifle in an enclosed area in a situation of sheer panic, I did not. Adrenaline coursing through my veins and fear in my heart, I jammed down the trigger as hard as I could. Bullets erupted from my weapon, which seemed good... for a moment. For an initial second, Spiders exploded into a wet mess of guts and legs under my fiery swath of doom. Then the rifle kicked hard and I felt like I was wrestling with an octopus that had super powers. Somehow I didn't think to let go over the trigger as I found myself fighting against a gun that lurched up, down, left and right in my arms. My bullets sprayed over the corridor and I stumbled, trying to get control of it.

  "Jesus, Szandor, let go of the trigger!" yelled Mikkel, letting up on his own fire so as not to kill me.

  I finally got the message and let go... too much. Oh, I let go of the trigger and the gun stopped firing. But through some reflex, I also let go of my hold on the gun, so it tumbled to the ground, firing off a few petulant rounds as it hit the ground before finally stopping for good. Have I mentioned how me and guns are not well suited for each other?

  Mikkel began firing again, trying to make up for the few seconds he had stopped as the little bastards scrambled across the walls and floor toward us. Spider corpses were falling all around me, but I knew he alone couldn't stop the tide of Spiders. I looked down at the assault rifle and decided I wasn't picking that up again. In desperation I tried a new strategy. I began running toward the Spiders.

  "What the fuck are you doing?" yelled Mikkel from behind me, his voice barely audible over the roar of his rifle.

  It was suicidal, it was ill-timed, it was unlikely. But I was strangely confident. I had a dumb idea - but really, let's be honest, dumb ideas are the only ideas I ever have. Stepping through a sea of broken Spider corpses and possibly squashing one or two live ones, I ran to the puppet commando who was still slurring out a Come Hither command even while Mikkel was firing away around me.

  I hoped that this would work and that I wasn't just running to my death. Just as I reached the commando, I felt a weight clamp down on my back. In horror I realized there was a Spider on my back. I thrashed my shoulders, trying to keep the Spider from getting a stable enough position to bite. Meanwhile, I grabbed at the commando's bandolier. He didn't have a full complement of canisters, but he had a few.

  The canister I grabbed at didn't come off immediately. I wasn't sure how it was clipped on and the soldier's gear wasn't meant to just fall off. I was yanking on it with no luck when a second Spider dropped onto me. I suddenly felt weighted down. Two Spiders were causing me to fight against falling to the floor.

  I felt a sharp pain as the first Spider bit me. Panic set in. I knew I had just a few seconds before I started feeling numb and slow. I grabbed at the canister in desperation, pulling its tab as it was still connected to his belt. In a moment of triumph, the tab pulled free of the canister. There was a hiss and red smoke erupted from the commando, practically in my face. It billowed around the commando who immediately fell to the ground. The Spider venom coursing through my veins, I fell onto the soldier, the red smoke jetting around me.

  The mist billowed out like a fog, filling the intersection and stretching down the hallway in either direction. Mikkel was still firing as he saw the fog. He would have stopped and ran, but Spiders had nearly reached him and he later told me he wasn't convinced the mist would stun them before they grabbed him. So he kept firing until the mist over took him.

  The red mist filled his lungs and he started coughing. The rifle fell from his hands and he tried to take a few stumbling steps out of the mist before he fell to the ground.

  This could have been it for Mikkel. Luckily I was not as dumb as was feared. My limbs cold and my gait stumbling, I emerged from the mist wearing the gas mask of the puppet commando. Grabbing Mikkel, I helped him to his feet.

  I was poisoned, a paralytic oozing through my bloodstream, and Mikkel was both coughing and blind, so we stumbled through the mist. I was lucky that it took a few Spider bites to be fully paralyzed. As it was, we stumbled and hit the walls a few times. I knew none of this was helping Mikkel's lungs. I struggled to get us out of the mist.

  With the corridor thick with red mist and my own mind muddled from the venom, I couldn't see much around me or get my bearings. I was looking for any exit from the mist. There should have been clear air a few steps from the spot where Mikkel fell, but somehow I got turned around. I'm not sure how long we wandered in that mist, every second worrying about our likelihood of surviving. After an agonizingly long time, the mist thinned and then disappeared. I took a quick glance to see that there were no Spiders around, then I dropped Mikkel, propping him up against the wall. His chest was heaving, gasping to take in the clear air as I sat down next to him, my numb body slumping against the wall. While he coughed and began to breathe again, I opened and closed my hands in a pumping motion, trying to quicken my pulse and work some of the venom out of my body. My limbs felt numb and cold.

  Mikkel finally stopped coughing and his lungs slowed, but each breath was still shuddering and labored. The numbness in my arms and legs had been replaced with an ugly pins-and-needle sensation that made me not want to move until it passed.

  "I'm not even sure what to say about that," said Mikkel, his voice a froggy grumble.

  "We're not dead," I suggested. I realized after I heard myself that my mouth was still somewhat numb.

  "We are indeed not dead," said Mikkel, pausing to breathe again. "And that was pure Szandor reckless luck."

  "It's what I'm good at," I said.

  Mikkel first nodded and then turned that into a headshake. "I'm waiting for the day when you're older and wiser."

  "I hope I live that long," I said, starting to feel the pins and needles slowing down.

  "Me too," said Mikkel. He began standing up, coughing the entire time. "Now where the hell are we?"

  We were no longer in the main hallway that lead through the heart of the med center. I had expected in our confused wandering that we might have been back near the ghoul cells. I had hoped that we had actually gained ground; I hoped we had stumbled through the mist to the area beyond the Spider pens. Instead we seemed to be on a side corridor that wasn't quite as wide. In one direction, the one we had come, was the red mist. Without a second gas mask, going back into the mist really wasn't a worthwhile option.

  "Only one way to go," I said, awkwardly standing up. Putting weight on my feet had uncomfortable tingling sensations running up my legs. I took a step forward and
my leg gave out. Mikkel grabbed me and kept me standing.

  "Whoa there," he said. He pulled my arm over his shoulder and helped me step forward.

  "It's wearing off, I should be fine soon," I said defensively.

  "Until then, let me help," said Mikkel. "You just carried me out of a gassed hallway. You don't have to be weird about this."

  I nodded. Maybe I felt a little weird about needing help walking. I did know that if anyone or anything wanted to kill us, they would have an easy time right now.

  Our steps slow, we walked down the corridor. There was a small intersection, but neither turn looked better than the hall we were on. I wish we knew where we were on the map... not that we had actually brought a map with us. I had memorized the directions we needed. I guess maybe having something on my phone to refer back to would have been useful.

  As we kept walking, we noticed an impressive looking door in front of us. It was marked with P-0 FULL QUARANTINE PROCEDURES. The door was a huge hunk of metal that was a cross between a scifi airlock and a vault door. There were cameras all around it, a blank video screen, and a badge scanner.

  "This wasn't on the map," I said.

  "What do you mean?" said Mikkel.

  "When Paulie was showing us the schematics and I was memorizing the route, I got a general feel for the med center. One side had all the holding areas, the other the labs, quarantine, office stuff, and actual medical things. In the holding area, all the cells and general population were in the middle. There was no maximum security door off to one side."

  "Maybe it's so maximum security that it wasn't on the maps," said Mikkel. "Or, alternately, remember where the info came from. Maybe Ezra didn't want us knowing about this."

  "I'm beginning to realize there was a lot he didn't want us to know about," I said. I pulled away from Mikkel. "I think I'm okay now." I still had some uncomfortable tingling, but it was manageable and my legs seemed to work how they should.

  I fished around in my pocket. "Where's the badge from that dead commando?"

  "You think he'll have access to this?" said Mikkel, gesturing to the heavy door.

  "He looked like a leader," I said. "Wouldn't hurt to try before we backtrack. This could be some sort of super secret exit."

  "Or it could be something even worse," said Mikkel. "And since it's your idea, that seems even more likely."

  "Ha ha, very funny," I said sarcastically. I finally found the badge. I looked again at the face of Alan Kellum, Biomedical Security Team Lead. "He sounds like he might have access."

  I swiped the badge. Surprisingly, there was a positive-sounding tone and a green light went on next to the door. I heard mechanical things beginning to move beyond the door.

  "See, it works!" I said.

  The video screen popped on. For a moment it had the stylized Minerva Technics logo, Big M, little T. Then a second later I saw a guy at a desk dressed business casual with a badge on a lanyard around his neck. Not Nelson Bradley, but perhaps his brother from another mother. The man looked surprised.

  "Hey, who are you guys?" said the man. His voice came from a speaker near the video screen. I guess not all cameras were shut off.

  "We're... uh -" I started.

  "We're maintenance," said Mikkel smoothly. "All shit's breaking loose down here so our number got called up. Crazy, right?"

  "That doesn't even make any sense," said the man. "I don't know who the fuck you are but you're not supposed to be there."

  "Cut us a little slack, people are getting killed down here," said Mikkel.

  The man on the screen looked at us like we were crazy and shook his head. He was reaching for a phone when the video screen winked off, returning to the MT logo.

  "Okay, so they may be sending a security team down here," said Mikkel.

  "You think?" I said. "At least they're not getting here easily. If this isn't some super secret exit, then they have to get through all the same crap as us. Spiders, ghouls, everything. They're welcome to try to stop us."

  The door had finally started sliding back after all the mechanical noises and unlocking sounds while we talked to the man on the video screen. A second door behind that began sliding back as well. As soon as there was a crack in it, a blast of icy air escaped the door with a hiss. The room behind it was not lit by either white lights or red sirens. Currently, it was lit only by the light of LED screens that filled the walls of the room.

  The room before us was large and round. In the center was a piece of machinery that had a rat's nest of wires, tubes, and valves leading into it. My basic knowledge of technology made me think that we were looking at the back of the machine. Around the machine began a raised platform which ringed the room, with railings that allowed someone to walk close to the machine. As we walked in, I looked from one LED to another. They were filled with all sorts of always updating readouts - medical displays, number crunching, graphs, and atomic structures. This was clearly their wall of data for whatever they worked on in that room.

  "What's this place?" said Mikkel, looking at all the medical readouts and seeing a ton of information that meant nothing to us at the moment. We were walking around the curve in the room, him on the right side, myself on the left.

  "It's -" I began and stopped.

  From where I stood, I could now see the front of the machine. I took a few more steps to see it better. The front of the machine was some sort of glass or plastic chamber. It was filled with some fluid and had its own readouts. Within the chamber lay an unconscious or dead humanoid form. But that's not what shocked me. It was what the figure looked like.

  "What?" said Mikkel in confusion. He walked a few steps more around and saw the glass chamber. "Oh."

  "This is bullshit," I said. "This is some sort of big joke. A hoax or something."

  "This is some god-tier level pranking if it is," said Mikkel. "We're not even supposed to be here."

  "I just don't believe it," I said.

  "Ezra had suggested it," said Mikkel. He looked at one of the screens. "They are calling this Patient Zero."

  "I still don't believe it," I said. "I don't."

  The occupant of the chamber was what had sparked my confused ire. It was taller than most depictions. The skin wasn't quite the same gray, but the eyes were stranger than most people describe. Its long limbs ended in hands with three long fingers. Its head was longer than a human being's. Though it had all these differences than the popular imagination, these differences were small. It still looked close enough that I'm not sure what else someone could call it. And yet I still didn't believe it.

  There was an alien in that glass chamber. A gray alien.

  "Look, I'm not saying alien," said Mikkel, "But... it's an alien. What the hell else would it be?"

  "Nope, not an alien," I said. "It's a hoax. Like, maybe they somehow altered someone, like surgically or something, so they looked like an alien. Or!" I said, suddenly excited. "What if that's just an altered ghoul! See, look at it. It's clearly a ghoul."

  "That looks nothing like a ghoul."

  "It's been altered," I said. "It only looks like an alien. That's what they want you to think."

  "Now you sound like Paulie," he said.

  "Fuck you."

  "No, seriously. An alien does seem farfetched but it's the obvious answer. I know you don't want to believe it, but the only alternative you can think of is something so confusingly elaborate that we can't even think why someone would do it. It's an alien. Just admit it."

  I looked at the creature in the case for a long moment and then shook my head. "Nope. Nope. Can't do it. I'm not sure what that is, but it's clearly not an alien."

  "If you don't know what it is, how do you know it's not alien?"

  "Shut up."

  "I have no idea why the concept of it being an alien is such a hard thing to accept? It's an alien," said Mikkel.

  "It just isn't," I said.

  "It actually is, Mr. Nowak," said a new voice.

  We turned and saw that a group
of commandos were entering the room, cutting off our escape. But the one who had spoken was not a soldier. I knew him by his suit, his blonde hair, and his punchably smug facial expression. He was none other than Blake Sutton, aka Suitguy.

  "I admit when I first encountered it I had a similar skepticism," said Sutton as the soldiers tightened a circle on us, rifles leveled at us. "But according to every research team that has examined it, the conclusion is the same. The scientific data seems to bear it out: a non-terrestrial being. A real live alien! Isn't it so exciting? We live in such an amazing day and age. Of course, Minerva will be the first to announce the finding to the world, reaping all the publicity and goodwill. Eventually, of course. I'm sure there's plenty more we can learn from the extraterrestrial and its DNA offshoots in the meantime."

  "I told you," said Mikkel.

  "When the alarm went off," said Sutton, pacing around his heavily armed commandos, "I couldn't believe that someone was actually trying to break in here. Imagine my luck when I saw the video footage from the door discovered it was you two! We weren't far at all, so it was easy to just swing by and collect you two while confirming that Patient Zero was secure. I could kill two birds with one stone. That'd be a rare success in an otherwise dismal evening. But I digress. I did not come here to gloat, as much as I am enjoying it. I believe we have some unfinished business. Where is Ezra?"

  "We don't know where he is," I said in exasperation. "We keep telling you that!"

  Sutton rolled his eyes and then gestured to his troops. The commandos moved in tighter. We backed up warily. Mikkel and I were forced back to back, standing in front of the glass chamber. We had left our guns back in the red mist, so we had no weapons. We were barely recovered from that Spider encounter. Our resistance would be in name only, but the soldiers didn't know that yet.