Felina was close to the front of the group, but still separated by Palmer and Djevojka. Loudon at her right, Baez on her left, and the others accordingly behind them.
A carrier’s sleek yet incomplete arm-claw lunged out of the darkness composing the open doorway. It impaled Skugs’ right shoulder blade, spitting out a mist of blood that caught Connell in the face. He was temporarily blinded by it, nonetheless screaming for Skugs and reaching out to grab his hands as he was jerked like a ragdoll. Blood spewed from his lips and his eyelids fluttered; the TG-24 clattered at his feet, which briefly lifted off the floor. The carrier remained partially unseen, coarsely veiled by shadow.
And then Connell’s Seighty-mounted flashlight clicked on and slashed an erratic beam across the creature’s flesh. It was almost completely matured, enough so to have the strength of a healthy Xeno. As it began to retract its arm, albeit still with Skugs impaled, the Remora bellowed and somehow managed to fling his body forward, sliding off the carrier’s claw. He hit the floor hard, but broke the fall with finger-spread palms and firm wrists.
In this same instant, Connell had a clear line of fire.
Half-blinded, he hipped his Seighty and squeezed the trigger. The carrier was riddled with bullets at lightning speed, screeching as it flailed and eventually was thrown back into the room. Sounds of its motion, or vocalizations, had ceased.
Unfortunately, sounds of its revenge rose.
More crashing sounds, which Felina pictured to be the maintenance room’s ceiling giving way to the creatures’ passage. Whether carrier or one of the remaining Xeno carnem specimens from MALBO, nobody could be certain.
Both seemed to pose an equal threat by now.
Skugs struggled to get up, Connell helping him with his left arm while his right cradled the Seighty and kept its light focused on the room.
“Connell, dammit!” Cassel suddenly exclaimed, her voice scratching. Felina’s attention swapped from the maintenance room’s entrance to the corner up ahead, and the crest-chinned phallic-skulled heads peering around it. More than one; more than three. Half a dozen?
Within five long seconds, seven carriers and a single healthy Xeno carnem specimen had navigated the corner up ahead. The lone Xeno was easy to spot due to its slight size difference—taller, but leaner—and utterly effortless movement. It was far more serpentine in motion that the lumbering carriers, although several used the walls to their advantage—never traversing them, nor the ceiling as of yet, but able to avoid their hindrance.
“Palmer, get Skugs!” Connell barked. “Djevojka, on Cassel! Go!”
Nobody objected.
Everyone else was forced to remain, and watch.
“Connell!” Wincott shouted from the back of the group. “Coming to you!”
“Negative!” Connell replied, voice loud. “Stay put, all of you, just in case they flank!”
It was obvious that Wincott wanted to disobey just to join his comrade in the fight, and Ochoa seemed to feel the same way—nonetheless, they held as told. Meanwhile Landham just stood like a cathedral gargoyle, poised to protect, ready for the unexpected.
Djevojka arrived at Cassel’s left side, who had started firing shots off at the creatures ahead of them. They advanced toward the group of men and women at a steady, disturbingly patient pace. Cassel’s Spitfire took out a carrier with two well-placed headshots, searing through the creature’s flesh with ease. The thing fell in a heap, crumbling and folding inward like a dead arachnid, but its cohorts simply passed over it without concern. Djevojka took a knee, shouldering the long-barreled Tenor. She took care in aiming, and upon firing the Tenor it held true to its name; the report was especially strident in the enclosed corridor, making Felina’s ears ring tenfold that of the Spitfire or Seighty. The single .355 LV cartridge nailed a carrier in what would be its snout, inches above the dagger teeth of its upper jaw. The creature fell swiftly, without an ounce of resistance.
Smooth execution.
The Tenor’s six-shot cylinder revolved with a click and Djevojka took out another. By this time the creatures began using the walls to proceed down the corridor, and urgency fueled their progress. Her aim suffered because of these factors, and she began missing their heads, often dismembering at the shoulder if she got lucky hitting any flesh at all.
Cassel reloaded the Spitfire and, without turning her head, called Connell’s name.
He had encroached the maintenance room doorway, spitting bursts of gunfire from the Seighty into the shadows. They sputtered from the flashlight and muzzle flashes, drawing sporadic screeches from wounded creatures. Within seconds their sounds ended, even as Connell exhausted an entire magazine into the room.
“I’m good,” Skugs grunted, panting in pain. “I’m good! Just…get me my damn weapon.”
Palmer didn’t object. He scooped up the fallen TG-24 and handed it to Skugs, who cradled it between his healthy left arm and side. His right arm dangled, blood pulsing from the entrance and exit wounds relentlessly. Palmer had disengaged from him as per Skugs’ insistence.
“Reloading!” Djevojka called out.
Felina heard, amidst the cacophony, a box magazine hit the floor. She assumed from a Seighty, which meant—
Gunfire caused her ears to ring, the chaos of the debacle reaching new heights of disorientation.
“Incoming!” Landham’s voice boomed out. “We’re tracking three hostiles, maybe more. Watch your heads!”
“What does that mean?” Baxter asked, cockeyed.
Felina’s attention bolted up. She saw the ceiling LED panels down the corridor behind them rattling. One fell and crashed with a shrill shatter. Then another, and a third. Then a carrier plummeted through the ceiling, crashing into the floor and rolling up to gnash its fangs at Landham. He put a quick burst from the Seighty into its face, but the creature was cosmically stubborn. And then Felina heard a thunderclap followed by a spray of flesh, not just cratering but completely obliterating the carrier’s entire head. Ochoa wielded his TG-24 proudly, giving Landham a mutual nod before using his massive booted foot to kick the corpse over. It toppled with a wet thump, by which time two more carriers had fallen through the ceiling, but landed with more grace.
Meanwhile, Wincott fired sustained bursts of three-to-four rounds at the encroaching wave of creatures behind the group.
A rattling sound that seemed distant thanks to the echoing gunfire alarmed Felina. She looked up again, and saw that directly above them two LED panels flickered off before loosening from their fixtures.
“Head’s up!” Felina shouted. She backpedaled, bumping into Loudon who reached out to snag the shoulder of a particularly flabbergasted Hudson Palmer.
Two creatures descended upon them, one a premature carrier and the other a healthy Xeno carnem. The latter was fatally agile in its landing, immediately slinking between documenters and attacking without pause. Felina wanted to shoot but the panic was thick with bodies; she didn’t want to risk hitting another documenter. And then she glimpsed blood mist the air as the pallid creature lunged for Wisniewski. In its path it left behind Baxter, clutching at a gaping neck wound. Her eyes turned up, ghostly white marbles replacing the once stunning irises contained therein. Her voice squawked and blood curtained down her lower lip.
Rachel Baxter’s gun hit the floor, and soon she did too.
Godunov caught the creature in its right rib cage with a close-quarters shot from the TG-24. A bit sensitive on the trigger, as it shrieked he pumped two more shells of buckshot into its torso. It tumbled, cartwheeling past Wisniewski, but not before an extended claw sliced open his left Achilles’ tendon. He howled out in a great pain, crumpling, hands feebly raking down a bulkhead. Godunov seemed out of breath but trained to realign his aim and shoot after the creature, missing instead, buckshot pelting the wall to his right.
The Xeno, somehow still alive, rolled into Landham from behind, toppling him. They hit the floor in a terrible quarrel that resultantly lost Felina’s attention as more dire matters
unfolded in the immediate area.
The premature carrier that had fallen with the Xeno earlier was attacking and being pelted with Deci gunfire all at once. Then it turned to face Felina, slashing out at her, an arm that left the human limb from elbow to fingertip still intact, but protruding from its lower bicep was a jagged claw of flesh and bone. Felina shrieked as if she had seen not only a ghost, but the embodiment of such an apparition, and of someone she had known.
Did know. Still.
Imam Ikabu stared back through a nightmarish visage that defied reality. It was engaged in less of a struggle to breathe and attack them than the first carrier she, Loudon, and the others had faced down in MALBO. What remained of Ikabu was a raggedly-clothed, decaying postmortem abomination. The Xeno carnem strain had not only taken a thorough grip of his being but also overridden his mind; she could discern no morsel of soul in his vacant eye. Singular. The other was missing entirely, leaving an empty socket that had already begun to close in on itself, while the back of his skull was engaged in a painfully slow conical transformation. He salivated from horrific jaws of jagged teeth, both Xeno reminiscent and humanoid, without tongue and—as Felina had established—without identity.
A few others had already established this, and perhaps they didn’t even recognize him.
But in this passing heartbeat, not only did Felina but Loudon and Palmer as well. They had turned to stand behind her, but all transpired so quickly. The Ikabu carrier howled inhumanly, a bloodcurdling sound torn between man and banshee, lashing out at Felina again. A two-round burst from Schuman’s Deci caught it in the back of the head, throwing it off-balance. It hissed and evaded Felina’s shot, then Loudon’s, before being hit by Godunov’s TG-24. Its back right leg was blown off and slid across the floor in a mess of gore that stank fouler than anything they had ever smelt.
Felina saw then that Zometa had taken a leg wound and limped, supported by Calloway. Ngo was on the ground between where they stood and where Ikabu had just been; Ngo’s head, however, was lost amid the scuffling feet. The jagged crimson stump of his neck was all that remained of that end, making Felina’s insides twirl and her head spin.
The Ikabu carrier was on its last thread when it sprang up to attack Wisniewski. Another carrier fell through the ceiling then, narrowly missing Ikabu only to fall directly onto Godunov, who was being hectically spoken to by a frantic Cassel, requiring support ahead of them. The wave encroached and dwindled far too slowly for their liking.
Djevojka had abandoned her Tenor, still kneeling, to shoot her Spitfire. Connell had seemingly cleared the maintenance room and was presently joining the others to hold the front. Palmer turned away from Loudon and Felina to join him, while they were left to help the others fend off the two carriers, Ikabu included. But Ikabu was quickly obstructed by the other carrier, which had seemingly crushed Godunov, who groaned and bled from the mouth, as well as a nasty compound fracture in his left knee. Cassel had fallen back, firing her pistol at the creature but its back was to her. In one terrible motion too fast for anyone else to defend, its jaws closed around Godunov’s throat, then its head jerked back, taking with it a massive chunk of the man’s jugular. Blood geysered through the air in a nightmarish arc that misted Baez’s uniform and caused her to slip in it. As she fell, the creature flung the chunk of Godunov flesh at Wisniewski, whose shoulder blades were replaced by the talons of the Ikabu carrier, the right side of his face taken by its deformed jaws.
The bloodbath would’ve caused several of the witnessing documenters to vomit had they been capable, but empty stomachs and heavier emotions kept them together.
Together, yet falling apart.
Loudon suddenly pushed past Felina to fire her gun at the carrier which had slain Lorenzo Godunov. The Spitfire’s .38 IHP rounds put searing bullet holes through the creature’s flesh, aggravating it most at first before eventually killing it; she focused fire on its oblong skull, scorching the pallid skin. Suddenly the skull ruptured like a watermelon, sending chunks of blazing bone and flesh every which way. Felina covered her face, Baez yelped, and Cassel screamed. She then popped up and attended to the encroaching wave of hostiles ahead of them, which had just about reached the group but by now was severely dwindling.
Palmer started barking like a rabid dog.
His words became unintelligible after the first few irate bursts from his Seighty.
“You like that, you like that!?” He began. He put down two carriers with better aim than Connell could have ever expected, especially considering his demeanor. He then took a couple of steps forward, past Cassel and Connell, the latter of whom yelled after him.
Meanwhile Djevojka stepped forward too, her Spitfire acquiring better precision than Cassel’s.
“Oh, you want a lil’ more!?” Palmer cackled maniacally, furor in his veins. His eyes bulged with greater rage than excitement, but by now the adrenaline was a mixed bag. “C’mon, motherfuckers! C’mon!”
“Palmer, fall back, dammit!” Connell yelled after him, pausing to reload.
Palmer might as well have been deaf.
The encroaching wave of creatures was thinned out. Maybe four carriers remained, but they were a constant shift of formation that discerning one from the other became a kaleidoscope challenge.
Suddenly Palmer’s Seighty clicked empty.
A carrier was upon him, rising and hissing, savoring the moment of overwhelming the man.
“I don’t think so, darlin’,” he growled under his breath. Instead of retreating or surrendering to shake hands with Death, Palmer pumped the Seighty’s stock and utilized the integrated ammunition reserve. He hosed out half of the forty-two rounds faster than one could perceive, kicking back simultaneously. The carrier shrieked out in fury and pain as its chest was ravaged by 6.8mm bullets. Its left arm lashed out, dragging a talon down Palmer’s left shoulder; his vest strap cleaved, the whole thing flung open, and its claw dug a shallow trough through his bicep. He yelled out, and lost his balance.
As Palmer fell backwards, his trigger finger didn’t loosen. One of the two previously bandaged bicep wounds had just been exacerbated by another, but this didn’t incapacitate him. The carrier that reeled much like he did, though far more wounded, took a rising arc of bullets through its lower jaw. Its curved chin crest was obliterated before half of its mouth was ripped away, followed by the meeting of its frontal lobe with the ceiling.
The carrier landed messily, causing another to actually trip over the corpse. It screeched loudly, but didn’t experience an awkward fall before its head ruptured from Spitfire rounds. The incendiary bullets dealt from both Djevojka and Cassel’s guns delivered the desired effect.
“All clear!” Landham yelled from behind the group, his voice like thunder.
Felina heard no response from the front end, nor did she care to speculate any longer. All that had transpired with Palmer occurred in a matter of ten seconds. What remained of the Ikabu carrier was a walking carcass; how it remained alive was both brutally disturbing and impressive.
It started to howl like one of the defects from MALBO, which welled Felina’s eyes with tears. Whether or not Imam Ikabu remained in that creature, a doubt she clung to wholeheartedly, she couldn’t help but be moved by its horrendous voice.
Ochoa stepped out in front of Wincott, his TG-24 in a single hand while his right drew the Spitfire like a gunslinger. In just as swift a motion, the muzzle was placed inches from the Ikabu carrier’s left temple. With a squeeze of the trigger and a perpetually blank stare, Ochoa ended the thing’s life. The entirety of its deformed skull was destroyed, embers replacing its brain matter. What remained of Ikabu’s humanoid features were now but singed relics of a man once admired and respected.
“Goodbye, sir,” Ochoa muttered, his eyes glazed.
He holstered the Spitfire, cradled the TG-24, and nodded at the two Remoras before proceeding up the middle of their group. He passed by documenters whose faces were frozen in shock, while he wore the disposition of cold
ice. Behind him followed Wincott, although Landham remained, adamant to uphold the security of the group’s rear.
Wincott tried to maintain his calm. In comparison to Ochoa, he struggled immensely. His face was a breeding ground for tics that he couldn’t shake, and his pace was erratic. He either bounced nervously or dragged his feet without noticing. And then he strode right into a pool of blood that had gushed from Ngo’s decapitation. Wincott’s boots squeaked loudly, he slipped, nearly falling backwards. Somehow he regained his balance and continued walking, about as smoothly and unfazed as he could possibly muster.
Felina raised her brow at him as he passed her and noticed him palpably sigh out of embarrassment.
Mortification aside, coarser matters were at hand.
Their significant progress from the security center to the bridge had been mutilated, and so close to their destination supposedly.
As Wincott arrived behind Ochoa to join the others at the head of the group—Loudon arriving at Felina’s left side, Baez on her right, all three facing forward—the last of the creatures was being executed.
Skugs’ right boot was planted on a healthy—well, not anymore—Xeno that had gotten too close for comfort. They were nearest a bulkhead on the right side of the corridor, unobstructed from view. Skugs had lost a lot of blood, his right arm still dangling futilely, but his grip on the Tenor—TG-24 on the floor behind him—was unfailing. Despite its length and awkwardness to wield singlehandedly, Skugs did so as if he was meant to.
The Xeno wasn’t entirely dead yet. It writhed helplessly beneath Skugs’ weight, his boot firm in a shoulder wound. The creature’s entire right arm had been severed there, probably by his shotgun, Felina imagined. Its teeth gnashed, spewing saliva and bile that pooled past its mandibles and onto its chest, then down into its own wound encircling Skugs’ boot.
“Savage,” Skugs muttered, teeth gritting, “by design.”
The Tenor barked shrilly and the Xeno carnem’s skull split open with a gruesome splash.
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