Dark Nexus Fiction
Presents
QUARANTINE
–a novella of sci-fi horror–
written by
–S. A. Lusher–
cover by
–M. Knepper–
editing by
–Sarah Lusher–
Table of Contents
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
About the Author
Chapter 01
–Before the Storm–
It was coming for him.
Him, and him alone.
Allan stalked through the midnight deserts of Lindholm, nothing in his hands but a modified pistol. His hands trembled. He told himself it was the nighttime chill of the desert but he knew the truth: he was afraid. No, more than that. Not just afraid, terrified. But it was cold. Freezing, even. Something was wrong. The world seemed to come to him in broken fragments. The constant howling of the wind. The twinkling of the stars, impossibly distant. The earthy scent of sun-baked, packed dirt. Goosebumps on his skin from being so damned cold.
But something was very wrong.
Allan stopped and looked around. Where was he again? His thoughts were slow and muddled, mired in a fog of confusion and fear. Why was he here? In almost every direction, there was nothing to see but the endless dark wastelands. In the far distances, dozens of miles away, the dark, angular shapes of mountain ranges occasionally blotted out the stars. There was just one direction, though, that he could see something else.
Dead ahead, lights, a settlement.
But it seemed so far away.
Allan kept walking. Just put one foot in front of the other. He remembered that, at least. How important it was to just keep going, even when it seemed impossible, even when he was alone and drowning in a sea of failure. The only real option was to go on. Because giving up just wasn't in him. Allan knew that now, he could see it clearly, like a glow coming from inside his chest. He couldn't give up, he just couldn't.
So he kept walking, holding onto the pistol, trembling.
Because if he stopped walking...well, he would get him.
Time seemed to shift forward. An era of walking slipped by in what might have been a few seconds. He was there, at the settlement. Allan felt relief sweep through him, but something was still wrong, very wrong. A noise that he had become aware of, a dull, steady thumping sound, was louder now, louder than before.
He was closer.
But that wasn't what was wrong. Not truly wrong. No, it was something else, something that, for whatever reason, he couldn't discern. It was almost like a blind spot one received when looking at a bright light for too long. It was maddening, an itch he couldn't scratch. He walked in between a pair of old, time-warped prefabricated structures. The lights were on, but he could hear nothing save for the ghostly whispering of the desert winds and the constant, dull thuds of an eight foot nightmare wrapped in black armor, getting closer.
Coming out from between the buildings, Allan stepped into a city square. Alone. He was utterly, totally alone. A thought struck him then, a thought that sent mindless terror hammering into his very soul. He was alone not just in the city, but on the planet, a planet he killed. But not just the planet, either. The totality of his solitude was nigh perfect...
He was the only human being left in the entirety of existence.
There was just him and...
...the killer.
Allan stopped moving. Cold. He was so cold. How? He was wearing his armor and it had built in heating elements and-
Allan felt a new terror seize him. He looked down. His armor was missing. All he had on was a tattered blue uniform. His armor was gone. The thought filled his mind like a tidal wave that reared up and swallowed the horizon. How? Where? Did it matter? All that mattered was that he was naked to the world, without his armor.
Surely, it was around here somewhere. All he had to do was find it. Allan began to take a step towards the nearest building when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder. He cried out as he was forcefully spun around. Allan closed his eyes, preparing himself for the worst, knowing what he would see if he opened his eyes. The killer. An eight foot tall killing machine wrapped in black armor, an unstoppable horror from beyond the stars...
He opened his eyes.
What he saw wasn't the killer. It was his own armor, the faceplate opaque. Before he could react, both gauntlets wrapped around his throat and began slowly choking the life out of him. Allan beat his fists against the cold metal, but already black waves were lapping at the edges of his vision, he was going to die here...
* * * * *
Allan's eyes snapped open and he sat straight up.
The first and immediate thought that entered his mind was the fact that he had his armor on. His breath was coming rapidly, his heart thundering in his chest, blood pounding through his head. Allan raised his gloved hands. They were trembling. He clenched them into fists, closed his eyes and waited for the mind-numbing terror to pass.
It had been like this ever since they finished rescuing Dr. Matheson two weeks ago. The shakes, the freezing terror, the feeling like he needed to run like hell, the way it broke and scattered his thoughts like dust in the wind, the tunnel vision...It usually happened right after he awoke from a particularly bad nightmare, but just lately it had been happening totally at random. He'd see something that made him think of Lindholm, of the killer, and the attack would come. They were controllable enough that he could get away if he was near someone, hide himself away in a closet or, if he was lucky, his quarters aboard the Atonement, until they had passed.
Like it was doing now. Allan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He told himself he could do it, he could control himself, he just needed a little bit to collect his thoughts. Allan tried to calm himself by thinking of how well things had gone over the past fourteen days. He'd managed to get into contact with his parents, who were extremely glad to hear from him when they heard the news about Lindholm. It was being called an 'anomalous event'. He didn't know what to think of that, so he focused on making up a story about how he happened to be offworld, taking a vacation at the time. It was bullshit, but his parents bought it.
He'd told them a half-truth about his current situation. It was that he'd been scouted by some government officials for the Spec Ops program and, because of his exceptional performance, had been offered a position. His dad was blown away and proud, his mother was worried, and proud. He told them that part of the deal was to get a signing bonus of five hundred thousand credits, which he had sent to them.
They'd both wanted to argue, but he'd hadn't had to lie at all when he broke down and told them how thankful he was for the sacrifices they'd made in raising him, that he wanted them to be happy, he wanted them to be safe, he wanted them to be doing what they loved and living in a place they wanted to live. It was a testament to how tired of their life situation his parents were when they stopped arguing after that and accepted the money.
As far as he knew, they were moving to a little settlement a hundred miles from the big city. There weren't too many of those anymore, not on Frontier, but there were enough. So that had come out all right. Unfortunately, his 'career' in Special Operations had been a bit boring. For the moment, Hawkins had elected to officially bring them all into Spec Ops. They had all been given the rank of Specialist, which basically meant they were government spooks. Allan wasn't sure how he felt about
that, but so far he hadn't had to actually deal with it.
He'd been on two missions so far. They'd both been busts. Both times he, Callie and a mixed bag of other subordinates had been shipped out to old Rogue Ops bases. Dark Ops was on the tail end of running down the list of all the old contacts, locations, bases and installation that Rogue Ops might have left some clues in. They were currently working on sorting through the data recovered with Matheson, but they wanted to cover all their bases. Allan didn't blame Hawkins, and besides, he always looked forward to a little danger.
He also kind of looked forward to spending time with Callie. There was something there, he was positive now, but neither of them were willing to make a move of any kind. Allan knew that it'd be a bad idea to start any kind of relationship, because his head was completely fucked up and that wasn't fair to the other person. Especially a person as honest, hardworking and kind as Callie. So he just kept his distance, politely.
Matheson and the artifact turned out to be a bit of a dud. No one knew what the artifact did yet, and Matheson's knowledge had been very compartmentalized. He was a genius, and was doing everything he could to keep his ass out of prison for the next seventy years, but Allan could tell that Hawkins was still operating largely in the dark.
He rarely saw any of the others anymore. Trent, Drake, Enzo and Greg were often away on other missions, either checking out former Rogue Ops bases or investigating possible Rogue Ops sightings. But it seemed that none of the missions had turned anything up yet. Or, if they had, no one had told him about it.
With a sigh, Allan decided he was as calm as he was going to get. Now he had to do something he really, really didn't want to. Take a shower. That meant taking off his armor. He'd been putting it off for too long now. It had been days, almost a week, actually. There were methods of taking the smell away inside his armor, namely a high-tech, expensive atmospheric filtration system built into the suit that would, if activated, spray some deodorant along the length of his body. It was what he'd been doing for the past week.
Allan sat up, swung his armored feet over the side of the bed and stood. He called for lights, the strips overhead snapping into existence. Stumbling across his living quarters, he stepped into the bathroom and reached up to take off his helmet. He would just take off his armor, shower, shave, put on a fresh uniform and then put his armor back on. It'd be about half an hour altogether. He could handle that. It'd just be a little uncomfortable.
He finished reaching up and placed his hands on his helmet, preparing to unlatch it, but froze. Allan felt pure terror ripple through him. He forced his fingers to find the first latch, gripped it...and couldn't unlatch it. Taking a deep breath, he pressed himself as hard as he could. But nothing happened. Allan released his breath in an explosive, angry sigh. A sudden wave of anger took him and he lashed out blindly, making a fist and punching the mirror, shattering it, before he was even aware of what he'd done. Allan stared at his broken reflection.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
His shoulders slumping in resignation, he grabbed a plastic-wrapped square of deodorant, freed it from its packaging and fed it into the proper distribution slot on his armor. The square of deodorant would slowly be broken down over the next twenty four hours and filtered into his suit and out of it, so that a reek of sweat and despair wouldn't be constantly leaking from the open vents along his suit that he only kept closed when he was either underwater (he'd never been underwater during a mission in his life), or in space.
Stepping out of the bathroom, back into his quarters, his stomach suddenly rumbled. Sighing, he was at least happy that he could deal with that without freaking out too much. Allan crossed the room, coming to his mini-fridge and opened it up. He pulled out one of the protein paste packs without looking, (they were all the same), and unscrewed the cap. It looked like a tube of toothpaste. It was a military ration packed with all the appropriate minerals, nutrients, vitamins and whatever the hell else a human needed.
They were meant to replace actual meals if you just didn't have the time to eat regular food. Allan lifted his visor and spent the two minutes it took to get the stuff down and washed it down with a can of Vex Starburst, a tropical fruit blend offshoot of the main soda, (he still needed some joy in his life), and then snapped the visor back down. His pulse had only shot up a couple of dozen beats per minute. He considered it a success.
Allan took several deep breaths, calming himself down, then ran a suit-check to make sure that everything was still up to snuff. He stood there for the sixty seconds it took the suit to investigate all of its varied systems, and then glanced over the results. There was a bit of maintenance he should preform, and he would, if he had to go on a mission, and today was the day he'd have to replace the three power cells that ran it.
They were running a little low.
Feeling about as ready as he was going to, Allan made his way over to the exit and reached out to hit the access button. He hesitated, his finger lingering over the button, and he made himself push it. The door slid open. He stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him. The first thing he needed to do was go check with Hawkins and see if anything else had come up. He needed missions, needed to keep busy, to keep from going absolutely insane. If not, he'd have to go back to working out, which was difficult to do in a suit of armor.
Allan made his way down the brilliantly-lit corridor of the dorms wing aboard the Atonement. Part of him wanted to make friends with his new teammates. They seemed extremely capable and competent, unlikely to die despite the odds being stacked against them. That they had survived the events on the unnamed planet rescuing Matheson was something like a miracle. They'd made efforts to include him in their recreational activities, Trent and Drake were always offering to take him drinking, Greg asked after what he called Allan and Callie's 'budding relationship' and Enzo...surprisingly, he'd spoken the most with Enzo.
They'd both seen their own brands of hell, and, unlike the others, they seemed more damaged by what they had endured. But Enzo was...difficult. He was rarely in a talking mood. When he wasn't sleeping or getting high, it seemed like he was systematically working his way through the female population of the ship. It seemed like a different woman was coming out of his quarters every day. Allan expected to be jealous of the man, it had been a while since he'd gotten lucky, but it didn't come. He didn't know if that was because of his budding insanity or his budding relationship with Callie. He hoped it was the second one.
Thoughts of his newfound friends reminded him of how they were gone. Trent and Drake had just finished a mission and, after asking him to join them, had taken off to a pleasure planet. Callie had gone to lead a squad of Spec Ops troops to investigate the final known Rogue Ops hideout on the list. Allan had hoped hard that it didn't turn out like the last time she did something like that. He wasn't sure where Genevieve was, or Enzo. He thought that Duncan, Greg and Colin were still onboard, but as it was, he was bad with keeping track of people nowadays.
As Allan stepped out of the dorms wing and into one of the primary access corridors, he nearly crashed into Hawkins.
“Allan! Just the man I was looking to see,” he said.
“Sir?” Allan replied.
“Something's come up, I'm assembling a team and I want you to lead them,” Hawkins replied, turning around and walking away, motioning for Allan to follow. He did, feeling a wave of cold dread sweep through him.
“Me, lead? Are you sure?” he replied, trying to keep his voice neutral.
“Yes. Everyone else is busy and this is really short notice. We caught a lucky break here,” Hawkins replied briskly, taking a quick turn.
Allan hurried to keep up. “Uh...yes, sir,” he replied.
“I have confidence in you, Allan. You can do this. You did well on Lindholm and with Matheson, this should be cake by comparison,” Hawkins said.
They stepped through a door and into a briefing room. Already, five of the seats were filled, only two of them by people Al
lan was familiar with. He felt the terror begin to slip away at such a familiar environment. How many times had he sat at a briefing table with his team? Dozens? A hundred? Maybe as many as two hundred times during his career. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he and Hawkins took their respective seats.
“Let's do some quick introductions,” Hawkins said.
He went around the table. Allan already knew Duncan and Colin. Duncan had a goofy grin and Colin looked as sour as ever.
The first of the three new warriors was a frowning man named Smitty. He'd pulled twenty years in the spaceborne Search & Rescue division as a medic before applying for Spec Ops. Apparently, this was to be his first mission under the vaunted branch of Special Operations. He was a bald, squat man that seemed to be made out of bulky muscle. He had a dour expression that seemed to have been carved into his face.
The second was a very tall, well-muscled black woman with straight, shoulder-length silver hair named, quite appropriately, Hunter. She had an easy smile, very white teeth and a relaxed composure that spoke of quick death. She had started out as a bounty hunter at fifteen. She stayed one for thirty years, before catching the eye of a Spec Ops Commander that decided she had to have Hunter on her team. After pushing her through a hardcore, nine month training program, Hunter came out the other side a grunt in the Spec Ops army. She'd spent ten years working her way up to a Commander rank and running her own team. She'd since passed her team onto another Commander and had taken on the job of dealing with projects deemed impossible.
The final person was a sullen, pale woman who fidgeted a lot. Her name was Fletcher. Her muscles, packed onto her skinny frame, seemed manufactured. She had short, black hair and grim blue eyes that she liked to shift around a lot. What spiked Allan's curiosity and apprehension was the fact that she was a former Rogue Ops computer tech who wanted out. She'd come to Hawkins, asking for amnesty, and he told her she could have it if she survived this upcoming mission and didn't betray them. Allan thought it was a risk.
Quarantine (The Shadow Wars Book 7.5) Page 1
