by S. A. Lusher
Something huge was waiting for them at the other end of the hallway, in the chamber beyond. Something easily eight feet tall. In the poor lighting, Jennifer couldn't make out many details, but she could see enough to be absolutely terrified. There was no one onboard that tall. Hell, there was probably no one anywhere that tall or enormous. Which meant one thing: the zombies were getting bigger. They were changing, somehow. If there could be a giant one like the shadowy thing down the hall and an invisible one...
Then what else could there be?
They both took aim. That was when the beast really seemed to notice them. It loosed a roar that froze their marrow and shook the frame of the ship around them, then it charged straight for them, the juggernaut moving at an incredible speed given its size. It barreled towards them down the corridor, like a bullet shot from a rifle. Both of them screamed and opened fire. Jennifer kept her aim steady despite the horror bearing down on her and emptied half the rounds left in her pistol before she ran out of room to fire.
Three of the shots connected. One slapped into its broad, flat chest and seemed to do no damage. Another one clipped its neck in a spray of black blood and a third winged its skull. Not enough to do serious damage, though.
Ernesto hadn't faired much better, either.
Then the thing was upon them. They each dove away from it instinctively. Unfortunately, Ernesto didn't move fast enough. The thing swung at him with one of its immense, beefy, tree-trunk arms and the force of the blow picked him and threw him into a nearby wall. Jennifer heard both a loud scream and a sharp crack.
Then there was no time to think as the beast whirled around to face her and snatched her up in one of its immense hands. Its fingers wrapped around her neck and lifted her a good two feet off the floor. She knew she didn't have long, seconds at most, and made that tiny increment of time count. She put the barrel of her pistol up against its big forehead and began squeezing the trigger over and over again. She emptied the pistol into its hideous, misshapen head and sprayed its brains all over the wall and ceiling around it.
The pressure dropped away as the fingers let go of her and she hit the deckplates with a pained cry. As soon as she did, she backed away from the creature, which was toppling over like a felled tree. She narrowly rolled out from beneath it to avoid the hundreds of pounds of now dead flesh, coughing violently, trying to get her breath back.
“Ernesto,” she wheezed, struggling to get to her feet.
He was lying across from her, back down the hallway they'd been making their way up not but thirty seconds ago.
He wasn't moving.
Jennifer hurried over to his still form, taking another look around for security's sake, then dropped to her knees. He was lying on his side, facing away from her, not moving at all. Slowly, she reached out and tried to find his pulse.
There was none.
She rolled him over onto his back and groaned softly. His neck had been broken, either by the initial blow or the sudden stop. It didn't matter. He was dead. She could see it in the glassy, empty stare of his eyes.
“I'm sorry,” she murmured, then she started patting him down. His pistol had been thrown from his grasp but he still had two magazines on him. Nothing else, though. She pocketed the magazines, taking the time to reload her own pistol, as she'd expended all the bullets in it taking down the behemoth, then she tracked down Ernesto's pistol and then stopped back once more at his body to recover his hip holster, affixing it to her other hip and holstering his pistol there. With leaden heels, she approached the newest monstrosity.
Several thoughts were whirling through her skull right then, but they all seemed curiously distant and mute. She knew, vaguely, that she was in shock. She'd been in shock enough times before to recognize it. It would pass, given a little bit of time, and the sooner the better. It wasn't a good way to be when danger lurked around every corner. Jennifer took a moment to study the huge zombie. Yeah, it was definitely at least eight feet tall, and it was built like a bodybuilder on steroids. Massive slabs of solid muscle covered it. Its skin was dead pale, like snow, and lines of midnight crawled beneath the surface of its flesh.
Creepiest of all, perhaps, were its eyes. They were pitch black, like raw, pitiless pools of liquid obsidian. Utterly inhuman, utterly without mercy. Its teeth and claws were intimidating as hell. Slowly, she stood up. She could see the armory from where she was standing, though not very well in the poor lighting.
Jennifer activated her radio. “I need one of you to come help me carry the guns back,” she said.
“Why?” Hideo asked.
“Because Ernesto didn't make it.”
There was a long pause. “Megan is willing to come. It'd be helpful if you could provide an escort since we're both unarmed.”
“On the way,” Jennifer replied.
She wondered how Mark was doing.
CHAPTER 05
–Darker Days–
Mark stared at the screen before him, frowning in concentration, studying the information that he'd called up. Things were actually continuing to go fairly smoothly so far. He wondered how long that would last. The terminal he'd discovered not far from the stairwell that had deposited him down onto the engineering deck showed him exactly what he was looking for: everything wrong with the engines. And everything else that had gone wrong down here. There were about a hundred different little and big problems.
Right now, he was narrowing it down to what he could fix by himself that would save the engines from shutting the hell down and killing them all. After a few more minutes of navigating the seemingly endless menus and sub-menus, he finally had what he was looking for. There were three repairs he needed to make to prevent total engine failure. It would definitely be a bit of a patch job and not at all meant for a long-term solution, but it would give them at least a day or so to figure out what to do from there. He hoped.
Quickly memorizing the route from here to the first repair job, then to the next one and the final one, Mark activated his radio.
“Frost, this is Mark Collins, are you on the engineering deck yet?”
He paused, waited, heard nothing. Frowning even deeper, Mark checked over his earpiece comms unit, ensuring that it was functional, then tried his message once more. Still nothing. Dead silence mocked him.
He sighed and called the others. “Jennifer, I can't get in touch with Frost.”
“I'm busy right now,” Jennifer replied, sounding a bit terse. “Talk to Ishi.”
“Okay...” Mark replied, wondering what was happening up there. He called Ishi. “Hideo, can you help me?” he asked.
“Yes, Mark. What is the problem?” he asked, enormously polite, though Mark could hear a bit of fear leaking through.
“I can't get ahold of Frost. Do you know where he is?”
“Hmm...no. Hold on.” A pause. Mark looked around the short corridor he was in. At least there were only two ways to go, ahead or back. Both ways remained clear and the lighting was decent here, no flickering, no dimming. Good in the sense that he could see, bad in the sense that he could see all the gruesome aftermath of the conflict that must have boiled through the Cimmerian. He tried to imagine all the bloodshed and carnage and couldn't.
“I can't seem to locate him,” Ishi replied. “I can't get in touch with him, either. By now, he should be down there in engineering with you, but he could have run into any number of troubles on the way down. How are you progressing?”
“I know where the damage is and what repairs I need to make. I can make them,” Mark replied.
“Well, unfortunately, I'm afraid I must suggest moving on without him for the moment. We don't exactly have a lot of time.”
Yeah, Mark thought, a little bitterly, easy for you to say, tucked away up in that infirmary. He suppressed the thought. It wasn't Hideo's fault Frost wasn't here and it wasn't his fault, presumably, that they were in this situation. And he had a point.
“Okay, I'll get right on it.”
“Thank you, Mark.”
He signed off, checked over the holographic map once more, then set out. No way to do it but to do it. As his dad used to sometimes say: the only way out was through. The first location he had to hit on his trek to save the engines, (and thus the ship), wasn't all that far away. Just a few corridors over, actually.
Mark walked to the end of the corridor he was in and paused, first looking left, then right, finding nothing and no one awaiting him, and made a left-hand turn. He tried to keep his mind clear, but it was difficult, it seemed that thoughts kept trying to worm their way inside. He could feel the fear of the zombies, the fear of the unknown, the thoughts of how he was going to make the repairs, the layout of the vessel, his terror at the fact that another one of those invisible fuckers could be creeping up on him right this very second...
Mark turned another corner and froze.
Up ahead, not a zombie, but something silver glinted in the light, along the floor. An artifact of battles previous, lost or won, (probably lost). He hurried forward, too quickly for cautions' sake, as he tried to verify that what he was seeing was true. It just came fully into sight and he knew that yes, it was, in fact, a shotgun, when he heard a warning grunt come from his right. Stupid, he thought as he hastily spun, trying to get his pistol up, too fast. Came up here too fast. It was stupid! And he was right, it was stupid.
A zombie, a big one, a large man in a bloodied security uniform, loomed over him, coming out out a shadowy, recessed niche in the corridor. For a split second, Mark thought it was Frost. Jennifer had described him over the radio, which, at the time seemed like a waste of breath, given that there shouldn't be too many (as in, none) humans wandering around down here, but now he realized how useful it was. This man was indeed big, but he was neither black nor had a shaved head. Mark let out a yelp of surprise and fired off two quick shots, neither of them connecting. Then the big zombie had him.
Its hands were icy and he could feel the coldness radiating off of it through his uniform. The thing grabbed his wrists and jerked him forward, trying to take a bite out of his neck. Mark screamed and in a burst of adrenaline-fueled strength, broke free of the zombie's grasp. He went stumbling forwards, towards the shotgun, his pistol flying free of his hands. He couldn't see where it had landed, could only hear the heavy metallic sounds of it connecting with the deckplates and bouncing once or twice before coming to a halt.
He scrambled for the shotgun.
It was his only hope for now.
Behind him, the zombie growled and came for him, heavy footfalls sounding as it stumbled forward, grasping, reaching, groaning. Mark kept scrambling forward on his hands and knees. He wrapped his fingers around the barrel of the shotgun, snatched it up, rolled over onto his back and hoped it was loaded.
The zombie bore down on him.
Mark aimed and squeezed the trigger.
A tremendous explosion ruptured the air and blew the thing's head off its shoulders, utterly vaporizing it in a plume of black gore. Mark let out a little shout as the thing toppled towards him, and he rolled out of the way, barely in time. He scrambled to his feet and looked hastily around, seeing if his little skirmish had called new bad guys to the area, but he remained alone. He took a moment to check over the shotgun, his hands shaking. He knew how to work it, too. They'd given him basic training on the pistol, the shotgun and the rifles they'd kept onboard. There were just three more shells in the gun.
The good news, however, was that he saw several more shells lying scattered across the corridor floor. He spent a few minutes tracking them down, finding them all over the place. When he was done, he had enough to load the shotgun fully (it could hold eight altogether), with an additional five in reserve, which he pocketed.
After recovering and holstering his pistol, Mark set off once again, feeling a lot better about his predicament. Well, maybe not a lot better, but definitely better. He came to the end of the corridor he was in, turned and found the door he was looking for. The engineering deck was a bit cramped and close quarters, but at least he knew his way around it. He'd spent enough time down here during his two-month tenure aboard the vessel. The first repair he needed to make was to reactivate a heat sync that had been damaged.
That was part of the reason the engines were prepping to shutdown, they were getting a bit overloaded. Mark stepped into the room, cleared it with a sweep of his shotgun, found it empty and then closed and locked the door behind him. He should be safe in here for the moment. The only way in was the door. He set the shotgun down, got out his toolkit and began assessing the damage to the variety of instrumentation panels that lined the walls. Someone had gone on a shooting spree in here and done quite a bit of damage, but Mark already saw a few reroutes and workarounds he could make. It wouldn't take him too long.
Five minutes passed in relative silence, the only sound occasionally interrupting the background white noise was Mark muttering to himself. Five minutes became ten, and then, finally, he had the final reroute in place.
There was no visible change, but a quick check of the heat sync via its primary console informed him that his repairs were successful and would hold for the time being. Grinning, Mark recovered his shotgun, feeling good.
That was when the lights died, plunging him into blackness.
* * * * *
It had been a good haul.
Jennifer and Megan came back to what she began thinking of as the 'outpost' hauling a pair of duffel bags between them, each one packed with guns and ammo. It hadn't been quite as much as she'd hoped for, but it was still good. Both Megan and Ishi would have vests now, (lot of good that would do against zombies looking to take a chomp out of any exposed flesh), she had found a rifle and Megan had a shotgun and a pistol on her hip. Ishi opened the door for them, quickly closing it and locking it behind them as they came, and he moved to join them.
“I take it the haul was successful,” he said.
“We're down one survivor, up some guns, you do the math,” Megan snapped.
“He's dead,” Jennifer said, “nothing we can do about it. I got a call from Mark while we were raiding the armory, what happened?” she asked as she began pulling out all the magazines and pistols they'd gathered.
“The last I heard, he was on the engineering deck, but could not contact Frost. I cannot raise him either,” Ishi replied.
Jennifer sighed and spent a moment counting out all the magazines she'd found. An even dozen for the pistols, four for her rifle, which she pocketed right away since no one else could use them and about two dozen shotgun shells, which she gave to Megan.
“Here,” she said, passing a pistol, a holster and two spare magazines to Ishi. He took it awkwardly, then began to place the holster on his belt. Between the two of them, she and Megan now had a pair of pistols, one on each hip, and their primary weapons. They split the remainder of the pistol ammo between them.
“Okay,” Jennifer said, activating her comms unit. “Mark, come in. I need an update.” Nothing. “Mark, you there?” Still nothing. “Fuck,” she hissed, then tried the same thing with Frost, who also failed to report back.
“What's wrong?” Megan asked.
“Neither Frost nor Mark are responding,” she replied. “I should go down there.”
“No,” Ishi said. She turned to him, surprised. There was definitely a certain authority in his voice, a certain firmness, that somehow told you no, yet didn't make it sound like he was necessarily giving you an order or talking down to you. “It's too dangerous,” he said. “Time is a factor. We must trust in Mark and Frost. Communications are spotty. What we need to do right now is to get onto the bridge. The answer to all of our problems lies there.”
Megan remained silent and Jennifer considered it for a moment. She supposed he had a point. They had to get to the bridge.
“Fine,” she said. “But you're coming with me. Both of you.”
She looked at the two of them for a moment, expecting one or both of them to argue in one way or another, but neither did.
/>
“Very well,” Ishi said.
“I'm ready,” Megan said.
“Good. Now, the shortest way up to the next level, the bridge, is a stairwell not too far from here. I've taken the route a few times. Follow me, keep quiet, keep up. The quicker we get there, the better, got it?” she asked.
Again, they both responded positively.
“Good. Let's go.”
She made sure that they had their weapons and a field medical kit, since they were both medics and knew what the hell they were doing in that regard, then, once more, left their little outpost of safety behind. Jennifer didn't like doing it. There was a part of her, a small but unhappily powerful part, that just wanted to rest for a few minutes in that safe haven. But she knew it wouldn't be just a few minutes. A few minutes would become ten minutes, ten would become an hour, and the more time she spent there, the harder it would be to work up the nerve to go back out again. No, she needed to keep the ball rolling, keep making progress.
With this in mind, she led the pair of medics down the corridor outside of the infirmary, hooked a right and kept going. They entered one of the four mess halls in the area, which were really less like mess halls and more like cafés, meant to put their residents in mind of a luxury cruiser rather than a military vessel, which made sense, given that they weren't military. That made Jennifer think, as she led them through the mostly abandoned territory. She'd never gone into the military. She'd grown up on a colony world called Rise and when she'd turned eighteen, she'd decided to go into Security-Investigations.
She'd landed a job and stayed there for five years on the Security side. She liked it, but it had gotten boring somewhere near the end of year three. She'd considered signing up for the military, but corporate security appealed to her a bit more. Mainly because the pay was better. So she'd signed up for a little mining corporation that was looking for people to guard their transport vessels that hauled raw material from the outer worlds. She'd done that for a year. It had been fun and had started her on the path that had led her here.