by S. A. Lusher
Something was off here, very off.
Looking at the architecture, Enzo didn't feel like he was on a ship. Or, at the very least, he didn't feel like he was on the same ship. Recalling the industrial yellow, rust orange and dull, weathered gray of the prison transport did not match up with the brushed silver of stainless steel he was currently seeing all around him.
He passed several more storage bays, a pair of maintenance rooms and a bathroom along the way. Enzo took the opportunity to stop in the bathroom. He needed to take a piss. He stepped in, flicking the lights on. They hummed weakly to life, illuminating a row of stalls and urinals, and a handful of sinks. The mirrors above the sink were sleek, clean and framed in bright chrome. Enzo moved swiftly through the room, checking all the stalls.
He was utterly alone.
After taking a moment to piss in one of the urinals, he moved to the nearest sink and washed his hands. After studying the water for a moment, he took a lengthy drink from it. The quality of the water surprised him as well. It was very pure, almost enough to be entirely tasteless, not like the awful crap on the prison transport that had left a bad taste in his mouth. He finished, dried his hands and headed back out into the corridor.
This one was a dead end as well, so Enzo returned to the crossroads one more time and headed forward. Logic dictated that this would have to lead somewhere. If it didn't, he'd soon find himself crawling up through the vents. Something he'd had experiences with, and something that was never very pleasant.
So if he wasn't on the prison transport anymore, then where was he? Where could he have possibly gone that he'd ended up in a furnace? He supposed it was possible someone, mercs or raiders, had come across the vessel and opted to kill everyone onboard, steal it, toss the bodies down their own furnace...but that didn't quite scan. It'd be easier to just space them...unless they were in an area where you couldn't get away with that.
So why not throw them down the prison ship's own burn units? Way easier...unless they didn't have one, or it was broken...Enzo sighed, frustrated. Too many unknowns. Either way, he had to get up and out and see the lay of the land. The final corridor ended in a large brushed silver door. Enzo moved over to the control panel and hit it, ducking along the side of the passageway, fingers on the handle of his scalpel.
The door slip open with relative ease and noise. After a moment of tense silence, Enzo peered around the doorway that fringed the corridor and stared down an empty length of metal walls. Nothing waited for him. He stood, stepped beyond the doorway...and paused. Something like a shiver rattled through him and made him draw his scalpel. Visibly, absolutely nothing had changed in the corridor. No noise had been made.
But his combat instincts, something that had been honed and sharpened to a fine point over the decades, were whispering to him.
He was not alone.
Perhaps it was the smell. In the incineration unit, he could smell the harsh reek of death and burnt meat. He'd been too distracted to really smell much of anything until now. And here, in this next section, the smell of death was more powerful. Decay and spilled blood. It was a reek he'd become particularly familiar with in his line of work. Enzo licked his lips, the machine adrenaline coming back, preparing him for war.
He set off down the corridor. After a dozen meters, the walls tattooed occasionally with more storage bays, the hallway terminated into a huge, open room like a cavern. The walls extended away from him, the roof high overhead, lost in the darkness. On either side of him, just barely in his field of vision, he saw ranked rows of huge metal cylinders. Vats of some kind, storage containers for liquid. He'd seem them before, all ships, stations and colonies had them in one form or another. They were almost always meant for storing sewage and waste.
These, too, were brushed clean, neat and new. Each sported a terminal at its base that gave off a faint glow in the gloom. Enzo moved over to the nearest one, keeping a watch eye out for whoever might be down here with him, and activated it. Maybe he could get some hints about his new locale. Or maybe not. After a moment, he saw that it was just a waste unit, meant to hold what appeared to be regular runoff that all human settlements produced. Enzo turned away from the unit, abandoning it in favor of a path down the center of the room.
It offered the most cover, as it was furthest from the light.
Moving down the room, he finally came to another large door, set in the exact center of the immense wall. It was shut firmly and, when he tried to activate it, he discovered it was also locked. Enzo spent a moment at the control panel before realizing that he wasn't getting the door open, at least not without some kind of security clearance or a lot of luck. He'd never been particularly good at hacking these things.
He sighed heavily and considered his options. There hadn't appeared to be any other doors in the room, as all the containers were side-by-side, pressed up against each other, no room for anything else. However...he saw that the routine glow of the ranked control panels was broken on this end of the room. In the far corners, there didn't appear to be any containers. So maybe there were doors. Enzo went right at random.
He froze as some distant noise came to him.
Dropping into a crouch, the scalpel seemed to flash into his hand. Not in the room with him, well, probably not, but somewhere nearby. The sound was too distant, too indistinct to pick up, but it seemed intentional, not artificial or machine. He continued along his path, as silent as possible now, scalpel ready for action. As he drew closer, he saw that his instincts were correct: there was a doorway over here. It was open.
He passed through it and bristled as the stench of decay became more powerful. The corridor was a carbon copy of the ones he'd explored not ten minutes ago. More doorways stamped into the walls, and...Enzo glanced down as he spied something on the plate metal floor. Some dark liquid among the endless fields of silver.
Blood.
Enzo felt a chill of anticipation. The blood led away in a trail. He began to follow it, opening himself up to the world via his senses more so than before, letting it all come to him. After a second, he heard something shift up ahead. He stuck to the left wall, moving in the shadows, trying to force his eyes to adjust further to the low light level, knowing it was a fruitless effort. For the moment, the pain in his shoulder fell away.
This was wonderfully distracting, and he managed to put his whole mind behind the effort. The trail of blood, little more than a scant handful of drips, led him to an open door. One of the storage bays. Enzo slid up to the door, scalpel gripped tightly, and peered into the room beyond. It was a standard sized storage bay, a little larger than an average apartment bedroom. The walls were lined with shelving units and stacked crates, leaving a broad, open space in the middle. The blood trail led to the center of the room.
Someone stood with his back to Enzo.
It was a man and he wore the ragged remains of a blue jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest. Security, then. He was very bloody, and it looked like his arm had caught on fire at some point. He was muttering to himself. The sound sent Enzo's instincts on edge. There was something inherently inhuman about the muttering. Something other. The figure took a few listless steps forward, swaying slightly, as though drunk.
Enzo hesitated. It wasn't just this man's (security guard's?) battered appearance, there was something more subtly disquieting. Perhaps it was the way he was standing, or the awkward movements that switched between sluggish lethargy and awkward twitches. And the sounds, definitely. Enzo decided he was going to take this one very carefully.
He stepped into the doorway, scalpel still palmed but out of sight.
“Hey,” he said.
The muttering stopped. The man slowly began to turn.
“Hey, are you all right?” Enzo asked, figuring it was a good a thing to say as any. He prepared himself for the worst, held out a grim hope for the best.
The figure turned around. Enzo knew, right away, that something was very, deeply wrong. Crimson lines, not veins, as they were too thin, but so
mething else entirely, ran across the man's face and exposed skin. They seemed to radiate some kind of malignant sickness. And his eyes...they still held some kind of awful intelligence. Originally they had been a sharp green, and one of them glowed faintly with artificial light, signifying that the man had implants. But now they were bloodshot to the point of caricature.
A feral hunger, something primal and predatory, now stared out at Enzo. The thing made a noise, some horrible sound of triumph and anger, and took a few lumbering steps towards him. Enzo backed up instinctively, terror flooding his veins...but already his combat-ready mind was reacting, planning, hunting for weak spots.
He scanned the thing lumbering towards him as he backed up further into the corridor. The skin looked waxy and somehow tough, almost like an animal hide. Scrawling red lines against pallid flesh. And those reaching hands...all the fingers ended in long, jagged claws. Definitely not standard fare for the average human. Enzo had just about decided to go for the neck or the eyes, whichever one presented itself a better target, when he noticed something. The chest was slightly bulged. Something clicked on in his brain.
This was a weak spot.
Unfortunately, the thing had on a bulletproof vest. Enzo sighed and went for the neck as it came within arm's length, reaching for him, making awkward, eerie noises. The tip of the scalpel punched into the flesh and Enzo realized his instincts had been correct: it didn't have the soft, yielding give that regular skin did. He still got through though, and a gout of thick, bright red blood sprayed across his wrist. The creature let out a shriek as he grabbed the scalpel with both hands and brought it across the thing's neck, effectively cutting its throat.
More blood sprayed. The beast reached up and grabbed his artificial arm. He registered pressure, but no pain as the claws dug into the fake flesh, tearing it. Enzo tore the scalpel free, threw off the thing's hands and jabbed the tip into its right eye, where it stuck fast. Instead of trying to retrieve it, he forced it deeper with the palm of his hand. The entire scalpel nearly disappeared into the thing's eye, a scant few centimeters of metal protruding.
Here the former human let out a long wail, twitching spasmodically, and crashed to the ground. Enzo stepped back as it thrashed for a bit, then became still. He frowned, studying it for a long moment, waiting to see if it was playing dead. When he finally decided it wasn't, he stepped forward and crouched cautiously by it.
In the dim light of the corridor, the thing before him, the...his mind wanted to give it a name. He took in the awful features. It didn't so much seem decayed as it did changed. Its skin was stronger, and those red lines...he noticed they were receding, slowly, almost visibly. And the eyes, not empty, still intelligent, still there, but different...
Mutated.
That was it. The name stuck. This was a Mutant. Some kind of awful changeling. What had caused this? In the dim light, it looked hideous, perhaps because there was still something human lingering about the wrecked ruin of its face. He began to grab his scalpel, but noticed that the Mutant had come equipped with some supplies. He began by undoing the bulletproof vest. Enzo lamented the thought of walking around with the godawful stench of this thing, but armor was armor. It was still basically functional, so he pulled it on.
As he patted down the pockets, he found a few treasures. No gun, but a combat knife with a sheath that could be attached to a belt. He did just that, clipping the sheath to his own belt and checking out the knife. It was a right nice combat knife, eight inches of unbreakable steel, one smooth edge with a sure grip. No serration so that it wouldn't get stuck in someone's gut. He abandoned his scalpel in favor of the knife and sheathed it.
His final piece of salvage was a radio. It was a little black earpiece wraparound, obviously not being utilized by the creature. Enzo found it in one of the pockets, brought it out and activated it. He slipped it into his ear.
He spent a moment listening on the dead air, hoping to pick up some radio chatter, but there was utterly nothing. Checking the radio, he found that it worked appropriately. It was just that no one was talking. He consider his options.
Finally, he opened his mouth. “Is anyone there?”
There was a length pause, then, hesitantly, a female voice came back.
“Who is this?”
Chapter 03
–All Question, No Answer–
Enzo considered the situation. He had no idea who was on the other end, who they represented. There was a good chance it was an operater for whoever the fuck was running this freak show. Between waking up naked on a bed corpses in a furnace and having to do battle with...his eyes shifted to the corpse he'd made...whatever the fuck this Mutant thing was, he was really having a difficult time trying to suss the situation out.
“It's not important who I am. What the fuck is going on here?” Enzo replied.
There was a long pause. “Listen...I need to know, did you wake up in a furnace?” Enzo said nothing, waiting, not feeling good about this. The woman sighed. “Look, the situation is fucked, okay? We're going to have to trust each other. I'm the one that put you there.”
Enzo snorted. “That is not a ringing endorsement for trust.”
“What? I saved you!”
“By putting me in a fucking furnace naked?!”
“Yes! It was the only way to free you from your holding tube.”
He opened his mouth to respond angrily, to ask what the fuck he was doing in a holding tube, but then a memory came to him. It was faded and fogged, less of a memory and more of a half-recalled nightmare from the distant past. And yet...he felt like it was a memory, and a recent one. Enzo could remember waking up, beating his hands against glass...something covering his face, keeping him breathing...being submerged in liquid.
“Where the fuck am I?” he asked.
“You're in the bowels of Syberia Installation. Listen, I freed you, it was my only shot. There's so few of us left and I need someone down there to activate the auxiliary generator before we lose the whole fucking grid. Now where are you?”
“I...” Enzo could hear the raw need, the desperation, in her voice. He'd gotten good at sniffing out bullshit down the years and prided himself on being able to figure out when someone was lying to him, even people that were really good at it. “I'm not sure,” he said, deciding that whoever this was, they were genuine.
For the moment, at least. He'd also found that people could love one second and the next fuck you over easy as can be.
“There's four sections down there. The first is disposal, which is where you would have woken up. The next is containment. That's going to have a lot of big containers in its main room,” the woman advised him.
“That's where I am. In one of the offshoot corridors. I'm trying to find my way out. The only door, as far as I can tell, is locked down,” Enzo replied.
“I was afraid of that...hold on...” A long pause left him drenched in gloomy isolation. He jumped as the body shifted slightly. He took a step back, knife out, staring at it.
“Any day now...” he muttered.
“Hold on,” the woman replied irritably.
Enzo stared at the corpse. He'd only heard it move, not seen it, and the sound had been very slight. As he continued watching the body, he began to wonder if it was just his imagination playing tricks on him. In a gritty, industrial place like this, apparently buried underground, it was easy for that to happen. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
“Fuck!” the woman snapped, making him jump. “Okay, that door isn't opening, and it's the only conventional way out. Which means you'll have to get unconventional. I need you to go back into the main room, find Container Seventeen. It should be empty. Open it, crawl inside. It'll lead you to a maintenance hatch that will give you access to the maintenance areas. Move through that area. You'll have to proceed through the next section, which is the refinery, to get to the auxiliary generator. I need you to turn it on, the procedure is very simple.”
“Before I do anything, I want you to t
ell me where I am, who you are and what the fuck you people have been doing down here, because I just had to kill something that was most definitely not human!” Enzo snapped.
“We don't have time! Look, if you don't turn on that auxiliary generator in the next twenty five minutes, we're all dead, do you fucking understand me!?”
Enzo frowned. It didn't seem like she was exaggerating. Overreacting, perhaps. But Enzo was still just on the side of wanting to remain alive, at least to find out what the hell was going on. He took a moment to center himself.
“All right, fine, but after I do that, you give me fucking answers, got it?”
“Yes. Fine. Now, please go, I can guide you and...oh shit. Hold on. Gotta go dark.”
Abruptly, the connection was cut. Enzo frowned. “Hello?” Nothing. Dead air mocked him. “Hello!? Where the hell did you go?”
He was alone again.
Enzo sighed. Well, he'd better get moving. He took a step, then froze as the body shifted. This time he did see it. He stepped back, eyes wide, studying this new development as the corpse twitched and moved. For a second, he thought it was somehow coming back to life. Only no...it wasn't still alive, he realized, but something inside of it.
Trying to get out.
The chest bulged and shifted, partially exposed now that the vest was gone. Thoughts of contamination or infection had briefly rattled through Enzo's mind, as obviously something had taken this human and twisted it, but now he thought it was something entirely different. And his thoughts were confirmed as, through the slit he'd made when he'd cut the thing's throat, some kind of horrible creature emerged.
It was covered in blood and, after a moment's inspection, Enzo decided that it looked like a big slug. It slithered sluggishly from the corpse, about a foot long. The creature was coming towards him. What made it most like a slug were the two stubby eye-stalks that emerged from one end. As it came within a few feet of him, it reared up suddenly and a tiny mouth opened to emit a high-pitched shriek. Enzo leaped forward and stomped on it.
