by Ricky Cooper
He desperately wanted to let loose and spill all he knew. He wanted to scream out that the plague ravaging the cargo ship, Stalin's Wrath was Russia's fault. He wanted to bellow out that his team had been tasked with the security and at the very last second told to move out and stand down.
That “The Facility” as it was known, had been set up to test pathogens and virus variants and one they had been testing was this unknown strain of goodness-knows-what.
It had somehow gotten loose and was the reason that, as far as Fadei knew, all his men now lay dead in the hallways of the cavernous buildings.
His men who had been ripped limb from limb by the carnivorous twisted psychotic beings now inhabiting the halls of the once bustling facility. The further they delved into the stagnant and dying building, the worse the nightmare became. A soft rippling drip echoed through the corridor drawing Fadei and Baker through the cavernous room and down another descent into an all consuming madness.
Baker's boots squeaked and slid as he fought for a footing amongst the blood and viscous goo that coated the slowly descending ramp way. Baker went rigid as he felt his feet aqua planning on the slick mire beneath him, then the world inverted as he left the horizontal plane and slammed down on his shoulders, his momentum lent a charge to his landing as the ceiling hurtled by.
The lights in the ceiling reflected the amber glow of his barrel mounted torch, the light arcing and flashing off the casements like a star bursting in the inky blackness of night, the lenses of his mask dulling the repetitive strobe like flash only slightly as he sped by.
A deep echoing thump began to take hold as his vision pin-holed slightly. The rhythmic thump driving his senses into overload as he hurtled towards the bottom, the flashing reflection of his torch beam slowly slipped into sync with the thumping in his head. His only escape from the mental torture was the sickening soup like sensation of the clotted blood and bodily excrement as it slid across his uniform. The cold wet sensation smeared itself along his bare skin, as the wet slime plastered his clothing to him. The thickening goo smeared over his skin as he slid through the viscous soup that was the only remnants of the last few uninfected inhabitants.
He tried in vain to quell the revulsion as the bile began to rise through his gullet, stinging his throat and nasal passages as it sought desperately for a way to be free of its oesophagus prison.
Bile and vomit filled the inside of Bakers mask as he lost the battle against his own body. With a bone jarring jolt, he crashed into the thick, clinging gravy of blood and excrement as it flowed from the passage above. Ripping the mask from his head, he heaved, spilling forth a rancid bile green mixture, as his body forced itself to evacuate his stomach's mediocre contents.
Tearing off his glove, his gas mask tossed carelessly aside Baker clawed at his face, peeling the lumps of stale food and mucus from across his eyes. The acid stung his tear ducts as his eyes streamed trying in vain to rid themselves of the acidic slime that had adhered to them.
The cloying vapour rose slowly up through his nostrils as he tried to clear his throat only causing his gagging to resume tenfold as he involuntarily wretched again spilling more of the mixture to the waiting floor below.
Fadei's hand slowly appeared in Baker's vision as the behemoth stoically suppressed the smirk that wanted to twist its way across his features. Baker looked up at the proffered hand and the heavy aluminium bottle it contained. 'It is a mixture of water and anti-contaminants that was issued to my unit. It should help to cleanse your skin of any residual infection, although judging by the bodies we passed at the top you will not find any amongst this mess.'
Baker took the one litre-bottle and emptied the contents over his head and back using his free hand to wipe away the collected muck as best as he could. 'Thanks.' Baker grunted as he pulled the freshly cleansed mask over his head, his words half muffled by the sudden invasion of the heavy rubberised lining of the S-10 mask. The echoing clang of the aluminium bottle made them both start slightly as Baker glanced down at his feet. The lattice worked walkway beneath his feet puzzled him. Shining the torch beam around him his eyes widened in utter surprise as he took in what was before him.
'Fuck me,' the two men said in complete unison as they both gazed out at the area before them. Chrome steel and glass tubes hung for as far as the two soldiers could see, a seemingly haphazard spaghetti like array of clear plastic and steel shod tubing snaking its way to and fro, lacing the containers together.
'Don't tell me these all contain virus strains.'
Fadei took a tentative step forwards, his feet shifting with uncertainty as he tested the lattice works strength. They both tensed and latched onto the railing in front of them as the walkway shifted, a heavy hissing issuing from beneath them. A white shroud of compressed air issued up from under them as they began to slowly descend deeper into the area below.
'Why would they have this down here?'
Baker looked at Fadei quizzically, the Russian's question mimicking his own unspoken words.'You mean you had no idea; no idea at all that this place was down here?'
Fadei shook his head, confirming Baker's sardonically voiced query. 'None at all, me and my men were never stationed further than the upper corridors, whenever we tried to enter the lower level as we are now our micro id tags shut and sealed the containment doors before we could get through.'
Baker's eyes widened slightly as something tickled his senses. 'Fadei?'
The man mountain looked at Baker questions dancing behind his eyes.
'Why didn't it do it this time then?'
Fadei glanced behind him at the two foot thick titanium blast door slowly fading to nothing behind them.
'Because I shut off the security system.' Fadei and Baker spun, weapons snapping up to their shoulders as they zeroed in on the lone voice before them.
Baker's finger tightened around the trigger slowly edging closer to the five pounds of pressure needed to send a five point five six millimetre projectile into the cranium of what stood before them. Baker's weapon was suddenly jerked down by its muzzle as Fadei stepped rapidly forward, sweeping the silhouette before them into a bone crushing display of happiness.
'I thought you were dead like the others.'
The silhouette clapped Fadei on the shoulder, a flash of yellow catching Baker's attention.
'Who are you?' Baker called to the figure before him drawing a curious gaze from Fadei also at the sudden intrusion.
'Forgive me Baker, this Svoloch of a Chyort's my second-in-command and friend since,' Fadei paused, searching out the correct translation falling back on his Americanised English when he failed to find it. 'Boot camp is Andrey Gervasii. Andrey, this is Derek Baker, team leader of SAU Broadhead.' The man nodded curtly, his rake thin form lending him a serpentine appearance. This gave Baker an instant distrust of the man; something about him did not sit right, although at that moment he was damned if he could figure out what it was that set him against the man so readily. All Baker knew right then was that he would not be letting Andrey Gervasii out of his sight any time soon.
'Pleasure to meet you,' Baker said dryly. The cold stare of Gervasii's eyes set the hair on Derek's neck on end as he gazed into the dead black orbs in front of him.
'Likewise.'
Baker lifted his rifle up across his chest as he stepped off the wall mounted elevator. The decking beneath him clanked as he stepped down heavily forcing his weight forward, posturing like a preening peacock in search of a mate. He scanned the room around him; it stood in stark comparison to what lay above them. The chrome and steel of the pipe work reflected even the small light source, leaving the place in a ghostly sheen of almost perpetual light. Lifting his hand to his throat Baker pressed down on the receiver, and began speaking rapidly.
'Don't bother.'
Derek's eyes swivelled on to Gervasii almost instantly.
'Why?'
The snake-like man motioned about him, the loose and ill fitting hazard suit flapping about him like loo
se skin. 'This whole area is sealed, no signals in or out of here. Even the Tannoy systems are on a separate feed to the rest of the facility, it's a total black hole. Once workers came in, they left only once finished, and God only knew when that would have been.'
Fadei cast a surprised gaze at his boot camp buddy, his mind virtually stumbling over itself to find a plausible reason for his second-in-command to know as much as he did. 'Calm down my friend, I know what you're thinking.'
Baker smirked behind his gas mask, a single solitary thought dancing through his head.
'Bet he would love to know what I am thinking right now.'
Gervasii smiled tightly at Baker, sending a chill through the latter's spine. The look in Gervasii's eyes saying infinitely more than anything else just then. The only thing that those eyes held for him was the confirmation that he knew exactly what Baker thought then and at whom it was directed.
Gervasii returned his scrutinizing gaze to Fadei as the man's mind continued to melt inside his cranium. 'You want to know how I know all this. Well it's quite simple, I didn't just sit here and wait for something to try and eat my face; I holed myself up in the area manager's office and whilst in there I passed the time with idle file surfing and the occasional game of solitaire.'
Fadei's face split into a wide grin as he looked at his friend.
'Baker, I owe you my condolences. I saw what happened to your friend on the monitors. Unfortunately for me, they are the one thing not on their own circuit. Just let me tell you that he went down fighting. It was a good death.'
Baker spun and walked away from the smiling eyes of Gervasii tossing his reply over his shoulder as he moved away. 'No death is ever a good one.' The smile in Gervasii's eyes deepened as he heard the discarded statement.
9
The cameras blank dead stare looked back at Kingsley with all the indifference of a bored house cat.
The bulbous lobe of the motion tracking sensor locked onto his every movement as he toyed with it.
'King sit the fuck down, you're being an annoying prick.'
Kingsley laughed at Bolton's whining tone as he continued to comically dance about in front of the constantly whirring camera. 'Just keeping the levity going, Oh Two; just keeping the levity going.'
Rawlings sighed as he sat against the wall of the office they were in. 'King, seriously, pack it in mate. Who knows how long we're going to be in here and we don't need Bolton bitching us into the grave.' A mischievous glint hung in Kingsley's eye as he glanced back at Rawlings.
'Don't even think about cracking that one out,' Bolton's warning tones were undercut buy the sharp slapping of skin on skin as Rawlings smacked the ball of his hand into his forehead struggling to stifle the rising groan of annoyance.
'Cheap racism jokes, that's how low in the barrel you've gotten, sit the fuck down before I do their job for them.' Rawlings growled as he waved at the reinforced security glass that made up the office's door.
The cold pallid faces of the Infected pressed against the glass as they futilely beat against the six inch thick Perspex door. The slightly more self-aware paced back and forth like angry lions, searching with a calculating gaze that set Rawlings' teeth on edge. Rawlings winced sharply as one of them hurled themselves against the office widow, the pane of Perspex wobbling in its frame with a hollow thunk. The room's florescent lights cast dancing lines of reflected yellow light over the warping surface.
'Fucking arse holes!' Rawlings screamed as he watched another slam it's body into the window. 'Do we know how long that is going to last?'
Kingsley shrugged. 'It's a high grade security glass so it could be hours. It could be months, or it could shatter in the next fifty seconds depends on what it's rated to withstand really.'
A steel framed chair bounced off the outside of the wall length window as one of the infected threw it in a desperate attempt to break through. Light scratches covered its surface from the cutting disks that now lay buried deep in the chests of their wielders.
His bellowed, raging tantrum awarded him little more than a light scuff mark alongside the other marks adorning the otherwise pristine outer surface. 'Guess that answers that question.'
Rawlings pulled his side arm from its holster on his thigh and began to disassemble the firearm, methodically laying each component out as he removed it. A deep sigh rolled up from within him as he resigned himself to a very long wait.
****
Baker stared at the monitors, the tracker ball in front of him glinting teasingly as he watched his men through the camera lens a floor away, he curled his fist smashing it against the melamine covered surface. He felt impotent, less than useless as he stared at the knot of men that may as well have been on the other side of the world.
'Is there any way we can contact them from here?'
Baker's questioning gaze fell on Gervasii as the man oozed over, slipping in next to Baker like a greased python. 'None, otherwise your friend would be alive and they,' jabbed one skeletal finger at the monitor before them, 'would not be locked away in the security office.' Baker had to concede defeat on that issue as he idly spun his palm over the tracker ball.
****
Rawlings eyes screwed up in frustration as he heard the whirring of camera's electric motor.
'Kingsley you bloody jungle bunny pack it the fuck in!' Kingsley's gaze settled on Rawlings, the man's face bent down as he hunched himself over his partially assembled pistol.
Picking up one of the nine millimetre rounds stacked in front of him Kingsley hurled the steel and copper projectile at Rawlings' head, a smile blooming when the satisfying crack of metal on Kevlar echoed through the room.
'What the hell? Okay I get it. I'm sorry for the jungle bunny remark but stop pissing about with the damned camera!' Kingsley sighed as he hurled another bullet at Rawlings.
'I ain't, you dumb white prick, look.' Rawlings glanced up as the second round rolled away from him, his searching eyes landing upon Kingsley's sprawled frame as he lazily fed a freshly loaded magazine into his pistol. 'Told you.'
Rawlings nodded as he gazed up at the still moving camera. 'What the bloody hell?'
Bolton, drawn in by the raised voices turned his attention to the source of the confusion.
'Ain't picking up them out there is it?'
Rawlings shook his head, his eyes locked on the rapidly moving camera. 'No, mate. The sensor is focused into the room. I can only guess it's there to keep an eye on the worker ants up here. So what the hell is moving it, if it ain't us, or the Infected?'
Something tingled in the back of Bolton's head as he watched and listened to the camera's spasmodic dance; pulling a small note pad and pencil from the map pocket of his trousers, he began to drag the pencil over the paper. Slowly a series of lines and dots appeared as he studied the camera's movements. 'It's the boss!'
Rawlings looked round at Bolton, the man’s voice dripping with a level of concentration that left his speech a dull monotone shadow of its normal lilting self.
'What?'
He jabbed his now slightly blunted pencil at the still moving camera. 'It's the boss.'
Rawlings glanced from the paper to the camera, his eyes growing ever wider as he did so. 'Pack me up and ship me to China, so it is.'
Snatching the pad from Bolton's hands, he quickly decoded the message.
'Sneaky git is using it as a telegraph. The jerking isn't the sensor, it's bloody Morse code. Clever bastard must be in the control room.' All three men stared at the message before them, a vicious grin blossoming uniformly across them as they looked up at the screaming, shambling violent mass of Infected humans mere feet away.
Lifting his reassembled pistol, Rawlings sighted down it as he slowly mimed shooting the one before him. 'Bang, bang you're dead.'
'See, Fadei? That,' Baker cast a prideful grin over his shoulder at the still heavily sceptical Russian, 'is why my boys are always going to be better than anyone else's' Fadei snorted, a mild level of disgust bubbling up, his eyes
watched the screens intently. The monitor flickered as it danced like a strobe light, Fadei still gazing intently at the grainy coloured image dancing back and forth.
He watched as the three man team stacked up on the door, weapons readied and levelled.
'They won't make it out of that corridor in one piece.'
Baker grinned. 'Watch them.' With a thump of his balled up fist, he drove in the door release button and then watched as the three men leapt into action. Snatching up his rifle, Baker booted open the control centre door and sprinted along the walkway. Leaping forward, he slid his hand through the rung of the emergency ladder and hared up it like a caffeine drunk gecko.
Andrey screamed after him Baker's feet thudding against the rungs as he powered his way up the ladder. 'You won't get there in time. If you do, you won't find them in one piece.'
Baker gritted his teeth as he pushed up and over the top of the ladder, sprinting deeper into the access tunnel. A single sentence echoed back from the tunnel mouth, rolling through the room as Andrey cursed loudly.
'Watch me.'
Flames burned deep within Andrey watching the flickering dance of Baker's torch as he sprinted through the tunnel. Cussing harshly, Andrey snatched up his AS VAL and sprinted after Baker. Leaping from the walkway he heaved himself up and into the tunnel's mouth. Fadei smirked as he watched Andrey's retreating form. Clutching his weapon to his chest Fadei moved deeper into the snaking maze of tubes and cylinders.
The soft clicking of a keyboard drew Fadei forwards, his hackles leapt up as a deep sense of trepidation filled him, a chaste clink of metal-on-metal drifted up as he slowly lifted his rifle to his shoulder. Steam hung in thick clouds over the walkway as the valves began to vent the excess water vapour from the heating system.
The swirling mass of white enveloped the hulking man mountain as he trudged forwards, his feet moving almost of their own volition, as he kept a watchful eye on the writhing tunnel of white. A valve hissed, making Fadei jump slightly as it vented over his head. the boiling water dripping down with an echoing splat. Fat balls of water like shimmering glass rolled along the pipe work as it snaked through the patch work of grating and stanchions coalescing in bulbous, bug like droplets as they fell with all the grace of an airborne hippopotamus; pattering against his helmet covered head.
