by S. A. Lusher
As it did, Greg found himself staring at a fairly unpleasant sight...although it really depended on who, exactly, it was that had blown their brains out. The corpse was sitting in a chair, tilted to the left, hands dangling at its sides. It sat before a large wall of monitors, outlined by their glow. The sight was striking and more than a little ominous. The good news, however, was that this person had killed themselves with a pistol.
Which meant that they had a pistol.
Greg moved forward after clearing the room and crouched by the man’s right side. The pistol was still clutched in a death-grip. After a moment of work, he managed to peel it out of the man’s pale, cold grasp. Once that was done, he pulled the magazine out and checked it over. Ten shots left. Well, it was better than nothing.
“Thanks, pal,” he muttered, then shoved the chair aside. Disturbed now, the body fell from it, hitting the floor like a sack of potatoes. Greg looked over the monitors, hunting for some new piece of information, something relevant.
He spotted two very relevant things immediately.
“Holy fucking shit,” he whispered.
Drake and Eric!
They were each locked up in a cell, Eric pacing around, Drake passed out on the slab. Oh thank fucking god. Greg took the time to do a quick search of the control room, but found nothing else of value, and then he was off and running through the corridors. He practically sprinted the whole way there, surprised at how relieved he was to see the familiar faces. He thought he’d been handling the whole situation pretty well, but now that he knew that two of his friends were nearby, well...suddenly, he almost couldn’t bear to be alone any longer.
He slid the keycard through the reader next to the door that led to the cells and almost ran straight into another Mutant. This one was a former prisoner apparently, someone that Greg didn’t recognize, wearing the exact same colored jumpsuit he’d been wearing not all that long ago. The thing stared at him with maddened, blood-red eyes, filled with a furious, almost malignant kind of intelligence. It reached for him and Greg saw that its fingers now ended in wicked looking claws. Opening its blood-smeared mouth, it issued a shriek of pure rage and managed to take two steps towards him before Greg raised the gun and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet took it in the right eye, detonating the eyeball on impact and bursting out the back of its skull in a spray of dark gore.
The Mutant dropped to the deckplates and became still. And it remained still because Greg put another shot into its chest. This pair of gunshots drew the attention of another one, this particular specimen a former guard. That made Greg a little more hopeful. Maybe this bastard would actually have a spare magazine on him.
Drawing a bead on the shambling horror, he remembered at the last second to aim for the chest, readjusted his aim and squeezed the trigger. Had to be careful, he only had seven shots left now. The bullet punched into its chest and got lodged there, but it did the job. The thing fell to the floor and nothing squirmed out of it. He moved forward, knelt and searched the corpse. This time he was rewarded for getting his hands bloody and enduring the reek, although it wasn’t exactly a big reward: one more magazine for the pistol.
After checking that it had the full twelve bullets, he pocketed it and then looked up and down the long corridor he was in. There were two dozen cell doors, twelve to each side, waiting for him. He moved quickly, swiping the card and opening them up one by one. He found Eric in the tenth cell, the door sliding up to reveal the man.
“Greg!” he cried in pure shock, apparently stopping himself from springing and attacking at the very last second. “It was you who was shooting...what the fuck is going on!?” he cried.
“We’ve been captured,” Greg replied.
“Well I know that,” Eric muttered. “Are you alone? Where are we?”
“I’m in the dark about that, but we’ve got Mutants. Did Enzo ever tell you about those?”
Eric nodded, stepping out of the cell and looking around. He stared at the most recent corpse Greg had produced. “Ugly bastards,” he said quietly.
“Here.” Greg handed him the knife and the leather sheath.
“Thanks...no spare guns?” Eric replied, accepting it and attaching it to his belt.
Greg shook his head. “Not yet. Come on, Drake is nearby.”
“He is?! Fuck, let’s find him!”
They quickly searched the remainder of the cells. Four of them contained corpses and all the rest were empty, save for Drake’s. As they opened the door, Greg could immediately tell that something was wrong with his friend.
“Thank fucking god,” Eric whispered as he hurried into the cell and stood over Drake.
At first glance, Greg thought the man was unconscious, but he wasn’t. He was awake and aware. The fact that he hadn’t jumped up off the bed when they opened the door, or at least when he recognized them, was a red flag. The fact that he was very pale and sweating up a storm was another one. Something was wrong.
“Eric,” Drake muttered quietly. “Good to see you.”
Eric laughed and took his hand. He leaned down and kissed him. “You too...” he frowned, finally noticing the things Greg had already seen. “What’s wrong?”
“Is it safe out there?” Drake asked.
Greg nodded. “For now.”
“Drake, what’s wrong?” Eric pressed.
Drake sighed and sat up slowly, groaning as he did. “I’ve been poisoned,” he said. “They injected me with something.”
“How long ago?” Greg asked. “Do you know what it is?”
“No idea to either. I haven’t exactly been keeping track of time...we should probably compare notes, see who knows what,” Drake replied. “And we should be moving while we do it. Sooner we find an antidote to whatever it is, the better. Help me up.”
Eric, working hard to maintain his calm, quickly knelt and helped Drake to his feet. Greg went first, telling them what he remembered and everything up to right now. Eric went next, although he didn’t remember much either. He’d been out on a mission just like Greg’s, investigating a strange sighting. Someone had hit him with a stun round and he’d woken up in a cell. They’d come back to take all kinds of samples from him periodically.
Drake seemed to know the most. He’d also been out on a similar mission and had been taken down. They’d come by to interrogate him several times and finally they’d poisoned him. Between the two of them, Greg put together enough pieces to assume that at least a day had gone by since they’d been captured, probably two or three.
“I overheard some of the guards talking while they were interrogating me and had my cell door open,” he said. “We’re on a space station called Tempest. It’s divided up into Sectors and this is Sector One, the detention block,” he explained as they came back into the main room that had, as far as Greg knew, the only exit.
“We need information,” Greg said. “It’s a fair bet that if they’ve grabbed us, they’ve grabbed some of the others as well, and I didn’t recognize any of the corpses, so they aren’t here. They might have made it out already, or they might be somewhere else entirely. We need to find a map of this place, locate a command center and crack its database wide open, figure out who these fuckers are, why they’re doing this and where the antidote to Drake’s poison is.”
“If there’s an antidote,” Drake muttered.
“There’ll be one,” Eric said firmly. “We’ll find it.”
“Come on,” Greg said, leading them up the stairwell, towards the exit. “Sooner the better.”
CHAPTER 03
–Power–
The exit to Sector One led them to junction area that seemed to connect them to more Sectors of Tempest Station.
The first thing they made sure to do was clear the area, which Greg did with a sweep of his gaze and his pistol. Once it was obvious there was nothing in the large, square room with them, they turned their attention the single interesting thing in the room with them: a working terminal. Right before they’d left,
Greg had suddenly remembered that he hadn’t actually checked out the control center for the detention block, so he’d led them back there and Eric had looked through it. But the computer system there was a mess and they hadn’t been able to pull any useful or relevant data out of it, so they’d moved on.
“Eric, see what you can do,” Greg said.
He nodded and, once making sure Drake was okay on his own, (he needed to lean against a wall), he moved over to the terminal and booted it up. While he did, Greg checked out what else there was around them. Honestly, there wasn’t much. The transition junction itself was empty, and there were only two other large doors, copies of the one they’d just passed through. One led to Sector Two, the other to Sector Five.
“Well, this sucks,” Eric muttered after a moment. “I don’t know what the hell happened here, but it seems to have had widespread effects on the system as a whole. A lot of the internal network is scrambled and I can’t really pull much information from what’s left.”
“What can you tell us?” Greg replied, glancing at Drake. The man really looked like shit, but he was holding it together pretty well.
“Only that most of the station is on lockdown, honestly,” he replied.
“Well, what about these two Sectors? What are they?”
“Um...okay, Sector Five is power, maintenance, storage and utilities. Sector Two is the living quarters and medical facilities. And-” He cut off abruptly as another power surge tore through the area. The lights flickered madly as the entire area shook and raged. For a second, Greg was genuinely worried that the station was going to come apart. Then, slowly, the tremors subsided and the lights returned to their normal levels. “Okay, hold on, let’s see what the hell that’s about,” Eric muttered, going over the controls again.
Another moment passed. “Aw shit,” he muttered. “Well, bad news. Before we can do anything else, we need to deal with this. Those power surges are a result of the reactor going into overload. We’ve got an hour before this whole station blows the fuck up.”
“Can you fix it if we can get there?” Greg asked, a fresh wave of anxiety rolling swiftly through him. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
“...yes,” Eric said after another moment of studying the screen.
“Then let’s go,” Drake said, pushing himself up off the wall.
Greg almost asked if he was going to be all right, but stopped himself. They didn’t really have a choice at the moment, not being all right wasn’t an option, for any of them. Eric stood close to Drake, who was managing to walk on his own now. The trio moved over to the entrance to Sector Five. Greg stood before the great double doors, staring up at up them. They towered over the three of them, nine foot silver slabs, intimidating and monolithic. Preparing himself for the task ahead as he’d done a thousand times before, Greg hit the access button.
The doors slid opened, disappearing into their recessed niches.
A long corridor was revealed, broad and tall, the kind of corridor that would see a lot of cargo traffic. Unfortunately, he could tell right away that they were going to have trouble. About thirty feet away, an enormous bulkhead sealed off the entire passageway. At least there weren’t any freaking Mutants around.
For now, anyway.
“Can you raise it?” Greg asked as they made their way towards the bulkhead.
“Hold on,” Eric replied, jogging over to the control pad next to the bulkhead. He worked the controls for a moment, then sighed disgustedly. “No. Something’s tripped the emergency seal, a short circuit. It’ll be easier just to go around it. We can cut through a pair of storage bays and that’ll put us closer to the reactor core.”
“Fine,” Greg said, moving over to the left door.
He kept his movements quick and tight. Countdowns sucked, and an hour was hardly any time at all. Although his perception of time tended to get severely distorted in these kinds of situations, mainly because time generally lost meaning, he knew that, objectively, an hour was practically nothing. They had to haul ass.
The door beyond revealed a broad, long storage bay that ran lengthwise, stretching out far to their right. The walls were lined with stacks of crates and huge shelves. Loading vehicles and dollies littered the main floor...as well as a great deal of corpses. Men and women in green jumpsuits, presumably the technicians or maybe some other kind of maintenance personnel, were scattered across the blood-slicked floor in various poses of gruesome death.
And, moving among them, feeding, were…
Dogs. Hounds of some kind. Even as he raised his pistol, Greg watched one of the awful things march up to one of the corpses and lower its head. Some kind of fleshy, tube-like thing rolled out of its huge mouth and stuck straight into the corpse. The dog-thing began to slurp grotesquely. It was huge, built burly, like a bulldog, only a lot bigger than a bulldog. It was hairless and its skin was pale and waxy and hardened. Also, as he watched the hideous thing work, he saw that its stomach, which already looked swollen, was growing.
It was draining the corpse dry.
Greg felt his stomach roll over. He aimed carefully and fired off a shot while the thing was still unaware of his presence. The bullet punched through its skull. The dog-mutant, what Greg remembered Enzo had called a Harvester, twitched violently as it crashed to the deckplates. As it did, its stomach suddenly ruptured and spilled open, loosing a great deal of rotted meat and flesh. All three of them cried out as a solid wave of putrid stench hit them, involuntarily falling back a step. This served marvelously to garner the attention of the others.
There were three more Harvesters spread out along the length of the room.
“Greg...” Eric warned.
“I see ‘em,” Greg muttered, raising the pistol again.
Had to do this carefully. The first one went down just as easily as the original Harvester had. The bullet took in its hideous, deformed face and burst its skull like ripe fruit. The second one required a bit more aiming, as it was moving, swaying from side to side, but he fired again and managed to rupture one of its eyes, dropping it.
The third and final creature was a problem.
It was close enough to make a dive as Greg opened fire and the shot went wild, as he was forced to throw himself out of the way to avoid the huge thing. He really didn’t want to know what those damned jaws felt like. As he spun to finish the job, he saw that Eric was already doing it for him. The man lunged forward and punched his blade down into the Harvester’s head. The dog let out a piercing wail that cut off abruptly and then went limp.
“What the fuck are these things!?” Eric whispered harshly as he stepped away from the corpse.
“They’re called Harvesters. Keep your distance,” Greg replied.
“Yeah, no shit,” Eric muttered.
They took a moment to kill the surviving Slugs that crawled from their now dead hosts by stomping on them.
Then, they hurried across the bay now that it was clear, got to the far door and opened it up. Greg led the way once more, pistol first, and came up short yet again. Something else brand new was waiting for them in the second storage bay. Two more Mutants were standing in the middle of the bay, except they looked fairly different from the other things he’d seen so far. They were taller and their chests were bulkier, although their arms and limbs were thinner. Neither of them appeared to have a neck, either, their heads just solid lumps featuring furious, alien faces.
As he raised the pistol again, Greg managed to put a name to these new horrors as well: Guardians. These had to be the Guardians that Enzo had described. He emptied the magazine, managing to blow most of the head off of one of them and put a shot through the chest of another. Both of them were put down, one had its host body die, while the other had its Slug die. Greg quickly reloaded and then stomped on the Slug that slithered from the corpse.
“Shit,” he whispered as he moved on again. This place was throwing a hell of a lot of him quickly. And now he was just down to one magazine. Twelve shots between him and obliv
ion. As they crossed the second storage bay, Greg spied a dark, fleshy lump against the far wall, hidden mostly in shadow between a pair of crates. For a second, he didn’t know what the hell he was looking at, only that it turned his stomach.
Then it came to him: a Nest. This is where the Slugs came from. Fuck, he was glad he’d listened to Enzo and also read up on the Syberian report. That’s why those Guardians were here, they’d been guarding it. He wanted to kill it, but they didn’t have the tools nor the time to hunt down the tools, so he just left it and hurried out of the bay with the others. Coming back into the central corridor, now on the other side of the emergency bulkhead, they pressed on. Greg took a quick look around the metallic environment as he jogged down the center of the passageway. They were definitely headed into more lethal territory now.
The signs of conflict were more obvious now: gouges and bullet holes in the walls, blood splatters and spent shell casings on the deckplates, sparks shooting from wrecked panels and terminals. A few bodies, most of them in pieces, were scattered around. As he hurried towards the reactor core, he found himself wondering just what the hell they thought they’d been doing. Obviously they’d found another store of those alien slugs, but hadn’t they learned from what happened on Syberia? He supposed that was a stupid question.
Some people never learned.
Madmen bent on power especially.
Well, this was what happened when you fucking played with fire. You, and everyone around you, got torched.
“Whoa...hold up,” Greg said, skidding to a halt as something caught his eye. As they neared the end of the corridor, he saw a door and a window of bulletproof glass off to his right. The layout was familiar and apparently ubiquitous: a security center. He hurried over to the door, opened it up and looked inside.
He was right, it was indeed a security center.
“Watch my back,” he said, moving into the room.
It looked trashed, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was empty. Both men stood guard by the door while he performed a hasty but thorough search of the wrecked room. This time, he was rewarded for his persistence.