by Jason Hutt
“Max,” Nick yelled above the din, “Time to go!”
Max lifted his head up and blinked his eyes. He stared for a moment, trying to figure out if this was real or some strange torture-induced hallucination. Finally, his mind pieced together where he was, who he was looking at, and what was happening. His first reaction was pure relief.
“Oh, thank God,” Max said and began to slowly get off the floor. Nick walked over to him and extended a hand, which Max gladly took. Max got up off the floor with a groan and a pop as a couple of joints protested his time sitting on the floor. “I was beginning to think I would never get out of this room. Nick, you picked a helluva time to grow some balls. What the hell are you doing in here anyway?”
“Now’s not the best time, Max,” Nick yelled, “We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
Max clutched at a sore spot on his back and hunched over slightly.
“What are you talking about? I’ve been sitting on this floor for the last six hours. Where the hell is Captain-“
Max’s jaw dropped in disbelief and his eyes bulged.
“Holy shit.”
Nick spun around to see what caught Max’s eye and the world seemed to move in slow motion. Paige was still standing in the doorway, watching Nick and Max, when Max’s faced turned into a white sheet. Before Paige could turn to look, she heard an inhuman screech behind her. One of the creatures was there, looming over her. Its wings flared; its beak opened in a terrifying call to attack.
Its head tilted quickly to the side and bobbed slightly on its elongated, scrawny neck. Green and red indicator lights blinked on the silver cap that covered the back half of its head. Its arms, which seemed unnaturally long now that Nick saw it standing upright, were tensed and ready to strike. A second later, it did with deadly results.
Paige had just turned to face it and was bringing her hand up to her jacket pocket when the three claws of its right hand swung with frightening speed. The creature’s backhanded slash easily ripped through her clothes and the flesh beneath. Wounds quickly opened diagonally from the right side of her chest up through the left side of her face. She fell backwards from the blow and a quickly expanding pool of blood blossomed beneath her.
“No!” Nick screamed. He lunged in her direction. Max reacted without shifting his gaze and quickly and firmly grabbed Nick’s shoulder, preventing him from moving any closer. Despite her gruesome wound, Paige was still trying to valiantly reach for the weapon in her pocket. The creature took a sudden step forward and embedded its claws in her chest. Within seconds, she stopped moving.
Max quickly assessed the situation. When the hideous creature once again roared and flared its wings, Max charged forward and grabbed the metal chair in the center of the room. Max screamed with deadly intent as he swung the chair with all his strength.
He swung low, attempting to knock the creature from its off-balance perch. The blow connected with the thing’s legs. It fell backward and its claw was violently removed from Paige’s chest, spattering blood across the wall. The thing landed on its back with a jarring thud, but it reacted to the attack with blinding quickness. It launched its right leg out striking Max right on the sternum. He staggered back, the wind knocked from him and searing pain filling his chest.
Max felt blood pooling on the front of his shirt. He had no chance to look down and check the wound as he desperately tried to dodge a swipe from the now recovered creature. Max lost his balance and fell backward next to the small table in the room. The creature suddenly leaped onto the top of the table and screeched again. His claw flared and Max rolled for the underside of the table. The blow caught his calf and ripped open a long gash.
Max screamed in pain.
Nick could do nothing but gape for a moment. When the creature jumped on the table and pressed the attack on Max, he finally found the sense to move. He remembered the gun in Paige’s pocket and dove toward her. Nick scrambled while the creature’s attention was focused on Max. Nick reached into the blood-soaked pocket with a grimace and found the slim, gray stun gun. His hands trembled mightily as he brought it to bear.
The creature grabbed Max’s wounded calf, dug its claws in slightly, and forcibly pulled him out from under the table. It held him up in the air with one hand; its right arm reared back to deliver the killing blow. Nick pulled the trigger, but his hands were shaking so badly the shot missed high and to the right. He quickly fired again and this time the tiny dart hit the creature square in the back. The creature jerked its head towards Nick, then a second later its hold on Max weakened and both the creature and Max tumbled to the floor.
Max curled his head up just enough so that he took the impact on his shoulders and wound up flat on his back. He gasped at the pain and gritted his teeth. Nick watched as the older man fought through the pain and hobbled over to the now-broken chair he had used to club the creature down.
Max didn’t sit down; instead he picked it up again and walked over to the creature.
“What are you doing?” Nick yelled.
Without responding, Max swung the chair with all his might so that the back legs of the chair made contact with the creature’s neck. He swung again and again until the brute force of each swing started to tear through the skin and muscle of its neck. Finally, its head flew off, leaving a ragged bloody stump behind. Nick paled as he watched Max brutally decapitate the creature. When Max was finished, he threw the chair down and collapsed onto both knees, breathing heavily.
As both men sat on the floor staring at each other, dazed from the encounter, the alarm mercifully ended and the room was silent. Nick sat there with a look of utter revulsion on his face. With the room silent, the dead body of Paige right in front of him, gore from her and the creature spattered around the room, and the bloody stump of the creature’s neck pointed straight at him, Nick had to focus on not becoming unhinged. His head bobbed as a wave of nausea passed over him. His stomach wouldn’t hold; he turned his head and threw up all over the floor.
“Sorry, kid,” Max said, “I didn’t know how long that stun dart was going to keep it out. Didn’t want to take the chance that it was going to get up in thirty seconds and do to us what it did to her.”
Nick wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He wiped away the tears that welled in his eyes from his upheaving stomach.
“No argument from me,” he said, “What is that thing?”
“I was hoping you knew.”
“No,” Nick said, shaking his head and wiping vomit from his lips, “But I know where it came from.”
“Where?” Max asked through ragged breaths.
“We brought it here,” Nick said, “They were in the delivery from Sinclair.”
Max looked at the young man skeptically. “You sure about that?”
“That sound, Max,” Nick said, looking the older man in the eyes, “That screech. It was the same sound I heard in the hills on Dust. That’s what killed Winters. And now Sinclair has unleashed his pet on all of us.”
“You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions there, kid,” Max said shaking his head, “I can’t believe that Sinclair would do this. He’s not that kind of man.”
“How do you know? How can you say that? Just because the guy did some nice things for the colony doesn’t mean he couldn’t do this.”
“I just can’t believe he would do it,” Max said.
“Just like I couldn’t believe my father would cause the death of thousands.”
“Yeah, let’s talk about that later,” Max said as he tried to scoot closer to Nick. He grimaced and clutched his thigh as he tried to move. Ragged chunks of flesh dangled from the wounds on his calf. Blood stained the entire lower portion of his pant leg. Nick winced at the sight of the wound.
“Looks bad,” Nick said.
“It’ll be all right soon as I can pop some regen pills,” Max said.
“Max, we need to get out of here,” Nick said, “Get someplace safe.”
Max nodded his head as he looked around the room. �
��What’s it like out there?”
“There are bodies all over the place in the hallway,” Nick said, “There’s one more of those things right down the hall, dead though. We didn’t see anybody else.”
Max exhaled slowly. “Depending on how many of them there are, this could get real ugly.”
“Max, we brought them,” Nick said, “If there was one in each container on our ships, there are hundreds of them here. I don’t get it. Why did he do this?”
“Nick, I just can’t accept that Sinclair would do this, not without proof.”
Nick shook his head in disappointment as he got to his feet. “You need to open your eyes on this one.”
Max immediately shook his head. “Sinclair’s eccentric, but he’s not a monster, nor does he make them.”
“What was in those containers, Max? How do we know it wasn’t those things?”
“I just can’t believe it, kid. That’s just not him. Sure he doesn’t have a lot of warm feelings for the Conglomerate or for the Republic, but he’s not a murderer.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Nick said.
Max wiped sweat from his brow with his sleeve, leaving a streak of blood across his face.
“Thanks for coming after me,” Max said, “Now help me up and let’s get the hell out of here. We can sort out all this crap once we’re safely back at the ship.”
Nick legs were shaking a bit; he took a deep breath to calm himself. He realized he was still holding the small stun gun in his hand and jammed it in his back pocket. He reached a hand toward Max and the older man clasped his forearm. Max groaned as he tried to get to his feet. His leg buckled slightly as he tried to stand on it.
“Can’t put much weight on it,” Max said. Nick quickly moved in to support him and Max wrapped an arm around his shoulder.
“Well, I don’t think we’re going to win any races,” Nick said.
“Let’s just hope we don’t come across any more of those things,” Max said.
They started down the hallway, both taking a long look at the creature that lay dead at the turn in the corridor.
***
The hallways of the security station were littered with the bodies of fallen officers, support staff, and other detained civilians who were unlucky enough to be caught in the rampage of the monstrous creatures. Blood was spattered across the walls and pooled on the floor; dismembered body parts were found in random corners. With each grisly discovery, Nick’s stomach threatened to upheave again, but each time he found the focus to control that impulse.
Throughout the rest of their journey through the security station, they only saw the body of one more of the creatures. They cautiously walked past it only after finding a few heavy office knick knacks to throw at it and ensure it wasn’t about to jump up and grab them. Neither of them dared to breathe while they crept passed it.
Soon after, they found a pressed and folded officer’s shirt, never worn, sitting on the corner of a desk. Max took it and tied it around his bloody calf, turning it into a makeshift compress. It was in that office that Nick finally saw a chink in Max’s emotional armor. Just behind the desk, lay the body of a small boy in an unnatural, broken position.
“Christ,” Max said.
Nick had to look away, focus on something else.
“Kid was probably just lost,” Max said, “Looking for his parents.”
Max knelt next to the boy, gently crossed the boy’s arms across his chest in a more natural position, and closed the boy’s eyes. When Max got up, Nick could see him fighting back tears.
Max hobbled over to another fallen officer, the nameplate on her shirt read Garcia, and accessed a floor plan of the police station on her wrist computer. He looked up and gestured over to Nick, who helped him back to his feet.
“There’s a surveillance room just down the hall,” Max said, “Let’s get a look at what’s going on out there.”
Nick nodded. They found the room within moments. Walls on both sides of the room were filled with a variety of camera feeds from throughout Nexus Station. The images on the feeds were terrifying.
The creatures had spread across multiple levels. Fifty or so were sweeping across the concourses that connected to the hangars, another couple dozen were just getting off lifts into the residential districts, while another image showed them sweeping through the engineering sections. In all the images, people, security officers and civilians alike, were fighting back. Most were ill equipped to confront these creatures, who had clearly been bred for slaughter. The results were gruesome.
Nick struggled to watch. He looked away from the scenes of people valiantly defending themselves and an image on the far left of the array caught his eye.
“Look,” Nick said, pointing.
The image showed the inside of a large storage vault. There, scattered throughout the facility, were hundreds of open containers of the same size and shape that Max and Nick delivered yesterday. But there was something else going on; something else was crawling out of the containers. Small, gray robots, just over half the size of an adult, were emerging from the containers and assembling in the chamber. They were waiting for something.
“Do you believe me now?” Nick asked with anger in his voice.
Max pursed his lips; he was at a loss to explain what was going on. The kid was right though. They had brought these things here.
“Yes,” Max said softly, “I believe you. Now, we need to get the hell out of here.”
“Go where? The ship? Let’s just wait it out here,” Nick said.
Max shook his head and said, “No, we need to get out of here, get off this station.”
“That’s crazy,” Nick said. He gestured at the monitors, “You want to go out in the middle of that fight?”
“Not really, kid,” Max said, “But if we’re right and we delivered those things here, do you really think anyone will believe us when we say we didn’t know what we were carrying? Do you really think they won’t hold us responsible for this?”
Nick hesitated. “But we need to tell them the truth. They need to know who’s behind this.”
“Which they’ll do when they forcibly yank the memories out of our minds, turning us into walking vegetables,” Max said, “Maybe your family will help buy your way out of this, Nick, but I need to get out. You’re welcome to join me.”
Max started to hobble toward the exit. Nick watched him struggle to make progress, but he knew better than to question Max’s resolve. Nick knew that Max was right. Max would be held responsible for this. Nick might too, depending on how he resolved things with his father. Max had made it out the door of the room and into the hallway when Nick rushed to his side.
“We’re not done with this conversation,” Nick said, taking some of Max’s weight, “But we can continue it on the ship.”
“Sounds good to me.”
***
Some part of Nick’s brain expected them to enter the main concourse of Nexus Station and see life as it should be, with a chaotic throng venturing to and fro on business known only to them. He expected normalcy. Instead, as they passed through the main entrance of the police station, Nick and Max were greeted with a display of carnage and devastation the scale of which neither man had ever experienced nor conceived.
There was no throng; there were no shoppers, no tourists, no bureaucrats, no lost children or wandering pets, no young lovers, no concerned parents, no discrete rendezvous, and no backdoor business dealings. There was only death and destruction. It was clear that when the evacuation alarm sounded, there wasn’t enough time for people to flee this section of the station. The marauding creatures had swept through the crowd mercilessly, indiscriminately killing anyone or anything in their path.
For as far as they could see, the corridor was filled with the remains of the dead, walls coated in viscera and blood as if it were a hastily applied paint job. At odd intervals they saw the black forms of one of the creatures sticking out from the sea of torn flesh and blood.
&n
bsp; Max’s good leg buckled and Nick winced as he tried to stay upright and support the heavier man’s body weight. They slammed into the bulkhead next to them and Nick’s right foot wound up in a pool of blood. He recoiled and paled, looking like he was going to lose his lunch again.
“Come on, buddy,” Max said softly, whispering for no reason other than to respect the dead.
Nick reached out and grabbed hold of the wall with a white knuckled grip. His stomach let go again with a tortured wretch that echoed throughout the mostly silent corridor. When his stomach finally stopped heaving he looked up at Max, who seemed almost on the brink of tears. The corridor was silent as Nick tried to recompose himself. It was then that he heard the faint echoes of weapons fire and the screams of battle. There was still fighting going on up ahead, somewhere beyond the curve of the corridor.
The thought of taking even one step through the remains of these unfortunate victims was almost too much for Nick.
“What now?” Nick asked through clenched teeth.
Max just shook his head as they looked around. After a few moments, he pointed to a door on the other side of the corridor.
“Over there, kid,” Max said, “Maybe there’s something in there.”
Nick sure hoped so. Because with each careful step, desperately trying to avoid stepping on the remains of the dead, Nick was becoming more convinced that there was no way through this. It took a few moments to make their way across the hall, but they were rewarded with an unlocked door. As the door slid open, the light inside came on.
The room was small and gray, lined with plastic shelving and stocked with cleaning supplies, tools, and spare parts. Most importantly, a small sled, designed for carting a maintenance tech, some tools, and spare parts, sat in the middle of the closet. Max grinned. He eagerly limped over and pressed his thumb to the ignition pad. The sled started to hover about a foot above the floor.
“Thank God for small miracles,” Nick said.
“You ever drive one of these before?” Max asked.
