by S. A. Lusher
Sighing softly, bracing himself to do what needed to be done, Drake reached forward and began to pull the first bolt out. It was tough work but his suit gave him a great grip and enhanced strength. He'd had to mercy kill more than his fair share of fellow mercs, but only as a last resort and even then it haunted him each time he had to do it. He wasn't sure if it would be the murder in this instance that would haunt him, but what had led up to it. He finally yanked the bolt free and the man's arm fell limp to its side.
That's when the screaming man seemed to become aware, really aware, of Drake, for the first time since he'd entered the room.
And he stopped screaming. He stared full on into Drake's visor and his hand snapped out with an impossible speed and strength. He curled his fingers around Drake's neck and began to squeeze. Drake felt panic ignite in him. Although the stuff he was wearing around his neck was fairly stern, it was flexible and his airway was cut off.
He brought his fist down on the man's wrist. The man let out a howl of fury and then threw him back several feet. Drake stumbled back and fell flat on his ass.
“What the fuck!?” he gasped, getting his breath back. Eric helped him to his feet. The screaming man seemed to be focused wholly on them now, staring at them with his one good eye left, which was half clouded over with blood.
They watched in horror as he reached down and grabbed one of the bolts through his his ankle. He ripped it out. Then he ripped the next one out.
“How is he doing that?” Parker whispered. “He shouldn't have the strength to do it...”
“What do we do?” Drake heard himself asking. He was stymied, because he was seeing something that should have been impossible. This naked, pale man with his guts and one eye hanging out was ripping bolts out of himself that Drake himself could only tear out with a suit of armor. The man reached up and tore out of the last bolt that he was hanging from and he dropped to the floor. Then, just as quickly, he shot to his feet.
“Stop!” Drake shouted, trying to regain control of himself.
The screaming man paid him no heed. He began coming for them, his shrieking, ragged voice echoing off the mess hall walls.
Drake raised his rifle. “Stop! Now! Or I'll be forced to shoot!”
His threat did nothing to slow the man down.
Drake growled, aimed lower and put a round through his leg. The man jerked to a halt, then kept coming. Shifting aim, Drake shot him again in the stomach. The round punched clean through and this time the man only stopped because of the force of the bullet, then he kept coming. Well why the fuck not? Drake thought frantically. Guy's got his fucking guts and eyeball hanging out and it doesn't seem to bother him enough to stop.
So he raised his gun again and went in for the kill.
He shot the man through his forehead. The man stumbled backwards, then straightened back up, his mad screaming renewed. Drake felt his whole body go cold. “What the fu...” He aimed and fired again, this time firing an armor-piercing round into the man's mouth. It exploded out the back of his head in a spray of flesh.
But still the man came for him, gagging and retching more than screaming now.
“What the fuck is happening!?” Drake screamed.
He fired twice more, one round going through the man's ruined eye and the other catching him in the forehead again.
Still the man would not relent.
“HOW IS HE STILL ALIVE!?” Eric screamed.
All at once a rolling, broken wave of screaming, shrieking and howling seemed to emanate from everywhere. The man with the ruined head, his guts dragging on the floor now, getting caught underfoot, was still coming for them.
“Run!” Drake screamed.
And they ran.
* * * * *
They tried to retreat, but Eric recoiled in horror as a trio of shambling figures appeared in the doorway. They all wore ripped, bloodied, burned uniforms and were all horrifically mangled. Two of them clearly had broken arms and one of them was missing his left arm completely. They all had nasty, jagged stab or bullet wounds marring their pale flesh. Eric realized they were all so pale because, like the screaming man before, they had bled out. But how could they still be alive with no blood? How could they still be not only alive but functional, looking like this? Was he missing something, he wondered frantically.
Eric raised his rifle and opened fire, squeezing out round after round as the three mangled figures began charging for him, their eyes full of furious, insane hatred. He watched his bullets punch holes in the strange, twisted people and saw that the bullets staggered them...but they didn't stop. Not even when he put rounds through their heads. He was backing up now, unable to fully comprehend that his armor-piercing rounds were going directly through their brains and it didn't stop them. He felt panic rising, felt insanity looming.
And then...
Something seemed to click at the center of his brain and it was like he was a different person. He felt cool, calm and on it.
“The command center!” he screamed. Drake and Parker were opening fire on new enemies that had appeared from other doorways. “Follow me!”
That seemed to get their attention. Eric had studied the schematics of the base. In his head, a holographic blueprint snapped into focus and he knew where they were and where they needed to go. The command center was safe...should be safe, if they could just get there and lock themselves inside. It wasn't a long-term solution, but it would give them time to think.
With what might well have been demons snapping at their heels, shrieking their sanity away, Eric led Parker and Drake out of the mess hall and into a nameless corridor. The trio tore down it, running full tilt. Eric almost hit the back wall as he came to the end of the corridor, which terminated in a T junction. He broke right and kept running.
From the sounds they heard, it seemed as if the mangled men and women were keeping pace.
He continued following the map in his head, taking another turn, then another, the battered, bloodied metal walls of the base blurring by. All at once, they were there, standing before the huge security doors of the command center. They were open but he didn't see anyone inside. Eric raced in and as soon as Parker and Drake cleared the door, he smashed his fist on the close button. The door snapped shut, sealing itself against the living wave of madness. For a second, just a second, he began to relax, to come back to himself, but then he remembered that there were two other entrances into this room and he scurried along the perimeter of the room until he was sure that they were both closed, locked and sealed as well.
Finally, he seemed to lose some of his focus, to come back to himself. All was still and silent in the command room.
“What the fuck are we going to do now?” Drake asked.
“Call for help,” Parker said. “We need to find a way to get into touch with the others. Then we need to evac. This is...too much. We can't handle this.”
Eric felt himself nodding. All at once, it sounded like the best idea he'd ever heard in his whole life. He began thinking of Theseus Station, of the madly grinning creatures...at the time, they'd seemed like the worst thing he could ever imagine going up against. But this was worse. Much worse. At least they could be killed.
“Eric, you're the tech, how can we boost our signal?” Drake asked. His face looked extremely pale inside of his visor.
“Um...” He looked around the command room. It was a split-level room, the back half ringed with workstations and terminals with two large, rectangular mainframes taking up the center of the room, creating a kind of alcove. Towards the front half was a raised area with more terminals and a central workstation, no doubt where the commanding officer would lord over the area from. He began to make for it.
“Give me a minute,” he muttered.
He realized he was sweating furiously in his suit and cranked up the A/C a bit, trying to control himself, to calm down. But this was madness. What other way was there to react? Eric shook his head slightly as he settled into the command console. No, he'd seen m
adness before, different brands of it. The appropriate reaction was always the same: keep your damn head, stayed focused and get the job done.
Or you'd end up just another corpse.
It didn't take long to realize that although they weren't well and truly fucked, (probably), they were definitely in a bind.
“Fuck!” Eric snapped, sitting back from the console.
“What is it?” Drake asked.
“Comms are down but I should be able to fix it...provided I can actually get there.” He frowned, closing his eyes, concentrating deeply. A plan assembled in his head. “Okay, Parker. Come here.” He had her sit down at the primary workstation. “This is where we're going,” he said, calling up a view from a security camera. It showed a desolate corridor that was, for the moment, empty. There was just one door in view and it was closed. “You're going to be our eyes. Tell us if anything tries to go in that room, or comes out of it, I guess.”
He turned to face Drake. “We're going to crawl to the comms relay room. There's vents and maintenance crawl-ways beneath the floor,” he said, marching across the room. He hunted around for a moment, found a hatch, crouched and opened it up. “Good?” he asked.
“Yeah, let's go,” Drake replied. He seemed to have regained his focus as well.
“Hurry back,” Parker said.
Eric stared down into the crawlspace he'd opened up. It was at least well-lit with grim yellow lighting. He didn't give himself time to think, instead dropping down into the crawlspace and getting on his hands and knees. He started moving forward, keeping a map of where he needed to go firmly in mind. Behind him, Drake dropped in.
“You sure you can fix the comms?” he asked.
“I'm pretty confident,” Eric replied, focusing on going as fast as he could. “The problem is, I'm not completely sure it will make a difference. Comms have obviously been screwy on this planet from the start. But right now, fixing the radio and plugging into the base's comms array and trying to coordinate with the others is our best bet.”
“You think we should pull out?” Drake asked.
“Yes. This is...too much,” Eric replied.
“Yeah, it is.”
They kept crawling. Overhead, occasionally, they would hear the pounding of running footfalls and the echoes of insane screaming. Eric felt his mind begin to slide over the mystery that they now found themselves in, investigating its various curves and dimensions. But he recoiled as he realized it was simply too big, too vast, too unknown. The shape all the clues made in his mind hurt his head if he tried to grasp it.
Whatever hell had come to Ash, it was, for the moment at least, an enigma beyond comprehension. And he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to comprehend it.
Somehow, they managed to crawl through the duct-works until they reached the room that had the malfunctioning relay without incident.
“Get ready,” Eric said.
“Ready,” Drake replied.
Eric opened up the hatch and hauled himself up and out of it, scanning the room as quickly as he could. Luckily, no one awaited them in the enclosed space. The room was dark and close quarters, and something sparked on the far wall.
“Watch the door,” Eric said, crossing the room and letting his rifle hang by its sling. He grabbed his toolkit, unclipping it from his belt and set to work on the relay. A quick assessment of the relay told him that he could have at least a temporary fix done in five minutes. He got to it, working as quickly and efficiently as he could. Thoughts kept trying to crowd him, questions and concerns, but he pushed through them, knowing that none of it would matter if he didn't get this comms array working. He honed his focus.
Behind him, he could hear Drake pacing. And at first that's all he heard. Then, suddenly, Parker came onto the radio. “You've got a hostile incoming!”
Almost as soon as she said it the single door in the room opened up and a shrieking, undying maniac raced in. Drake opened fire and Eric whirled around, raising his own weapon. Drake put two rounds through the crazed man's chest before he crossed the distance between them and hit Drake in the shoulder. Except, Eric realized as Drake screamed, he hadn't hit Drake, he'd stabbed him. He saw the hilt of a blade sticking out of the man's armor. How strong were these things!? Letting out another yell, Drake threw himself against the man, sticking the barrel of his rifle into his stomach, flipping it to full auto and squeezing the trigger.
Staccato flashes of muffled muzzle flare lit the room in stark, single-frame images. Eric watched as the man was physically forced back by the force of the gunfire, out of the door and back into the hallway from which he'd originated from. Drake slammed his fist on the close button, then locked it. “Shoulda fuckin' done that to begin with,” he muttered to himself as he grabbed the hilt of the blade, which was protruding from his armored shoulder. He took in a breath and drew it out, letting out a scream of pain.
“Don't let me distract you,” he said through gritted teeth as he noticed Eric's staring gaze.
Eric nodded, coming back to himself and turned back around. He finished the work over the next few minutes, listening to Drake make pained sounds as he tended to his wound. By the time he'd finished up and got the array working, Drake had poured some coagulant and antiseptics into his wound.
“You done?” he asked, still sounding in great pain.
“Yeah, we can head back now,” Eric replied.
“Good, sooner the better.”
They got back into the crawl-way and made their way back to the command room as quickly as possible. Once they got back, Parker immediately set to work on Drake's shoulder.
“What happened?” she asked as she got part of his armor off.
“Bastard stabbed me, straight through the armor,” Drake muttered. “Hurts like fuck.”
“I'm going to give you some local anesthetic and get healing agents in there,” Parker replied quietly, frowning in concentration. Eric left them to it, sitting back down at the primary workstation and booting up the comms relay. After a few minutes of screwing with the settings, including having to shunt power through two different areas to communications to help boost the signal, he heard Drake hiss and Parker speak again, this time sounding concerned.
“You can still feel that?” she asked.
Eric turned around.
“Yes...hurts like fuck,” Drake repeated.
“That's...not right. Hold on.”
She abandoned her medical kit and grabbed Drake's, pulling out more of the local anesthetic. She injected him a few more times. “This should numb you up immediately...”
“It's not working,” Drake replied.
Eric felt a cold stone settle firmly into his gut and send ice shooting through his veins as he suddenly got a clear picture of what this meant.
“Painkillers have no effect...” he said quietly.
Parker and Drake both turned to look at him.
“What if...whatever is happening here is affecting us?” he asked slowly.
“You mean I'm fucking stuck like this?” Drake asked. “Give me some morphine, base of my spine,” he said suddenly. “I remember Enzo doing that.”
“That's really risky,” Parker replied, but she was getting another syringe out.
Eric watched as Drake took off more of his armor. Once he had his back exposed, Parker gave him the shot very carefully. He winced as the needle went in. She finished up, pulled it out and stood back, waiting. Thirty seconds went by, then a minute.
“Nothing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he confirmed, still gritting his teeth. “Christ that hurts...help me get my armor back on. Eric's right. Whatever's happening here is affecting us. Painkillers are no longer an option.”
“Jesus,” Eric whispered. He turned back to the workstation and quickly called up the team's frequency. “This is Eric to Greg, Jennifer, Keron or Martel, is anyone out there?”
The response was almost immediate.
“This is Martel, where the fuck have you guys been?”
It w
as followed shortly by, “Greg here. Where are you? What's the situation?” He sounded harried and afraid.
“We're at the military base. We've encounter human hostiles that cannot die. I repeat, human hostiles that can not die, do you understand?”
“I copy that, we've encountered the same thing,” Greg replied, his voice shaky.
“What!?” Martel snapped.
“Another thing we've discovered: painkillers do not work. I repeat, painkillers have no effect. Avoid injury at all cost.”
“Fucking hell,” Greg muttered. “All right, we're at the colony and intact. We've holed up in the comms center. We're going to pull out. Martel, have the ship waiting and-”
But Martel cut him off. “I'm afraid I've got some bad news. This ship isn't going anywhere. Engines are dead. I've got basic power, but nothing more, no matter what I do.”
Silence reigned over the frequency.
“Then we're stuck here,” Drake said, both he and Parker standing next to Eric now.
“I guess so,” Greg said quietly.
“What do we do?” Eric muttered miserably.
“We keep pushing to the research facility,” Greg said, his voice suddenly firm and resolute. “Whatever's going on, if we're going to put a stop to it, it's got to be there.”
“Affirmative,” Drake said. “We'll meet you there. Out.”
“Understood. Out.”
Eric sat back in his chair, feeling like he was in shock.
“Come on,” Drake said. “I'd really rather get this over with sooner rather than later.”
That jolted Eric out of his shocked state. The man was in pain, awful pain, and nothing could be done about it.
They had to hurry.
CHAPTER 09
–Into Hell–
They had their answer.
Greg felt cold all over. He tried to remember the last time he felt this bad, this terrified, this helpless. Standing there in a ransacked communications center, he thought that perhaps he felt this way when he had learned that the local star was going to go supernova back when he was dealing with his first undead outbreak. Or maybe when he'd heard Williams' voice over the radio, cheerfully informing him that he was fucked.