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Inferno - Chapter 2: Atrophic
Posted By: Skul<skulkrusha2000@hotmail.com>
Date: 18 May 2006, 7:24 pm
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1345 hours, June 12, 2553 (Military Calendar) / Fire Base Alpha Tango Omega, Planet Earth
Lieutenant Pratt was questioning a marine about Private Taylor when he heard shouting from further down the corridor. Two marines seemed to be grappling with each other. The Lieutenant ran towards the two grapplers, but when he got closer, he stood stock-still when he saw whom one of the combatants was. There was no mistaking the caved in skull of the deceased Private Gerry Taylor. At least, he was supposed to be deceased.
"Get this fucker off me!" cried Sergeant Joseph Black, who was losing to Taylor's superior strength. Despite Taylor being much shorter and skinnier, he had gained unnatural power.
"Ghet th's f'ck'r off meee…" echoed Taylor, as if he were an infant learning to speak by copying what he heard.
"Taylor!" cried Pratt, but the Private simply repeated his name in his slow, lazy voice and continued trying to bite the neck of Sergeant Black.
Pratt strode forward and put his hand on Taylor's shoulder. The pale-skinned corpse immediately pushed Sergeant Black away, whirled and grabbed Pratt's hand.
"Shit!" cried the Lieutenant.
"SSShhh't…" repeated Taylor and then bit into the hand he was grasping.
Pratt yelled in agony as the blunt teeth cut into his flesh. Just before the teeth broke his finger bones, a single shot rang out, blowing a large hole in the side of Taylor's head and he staggered to his right, allowing Pratt to stumble away from him, clutching his bleeding hand. The Lieutenant looked up from his hand to see Grey standing with an M7A pistol. Grimacing, the Corporal squeezed another powerful shot into Taylor's already ruined skull.
Taylor continued standing, a little unsteadily, but standing nevertheless. The first shot alone should have been enough to stop him. A target remaining standing, much less living, after two direct headshots with the M7A was unheard of. Grey released a third and then a fourth round, but the shattered body just came closer, snarling like a wild beast and Grey backed up, keeping his gun pointed at Taylor.
The shambling body's movements became more and more sluggish until it stood swaying before crumpling like paper to the ground.
As the three assembled men waited to see if there would be any more movement from the body, four more marines came running to the scene, their attention attracted by the gunshots.
"What the hell happened?" asked James Sear, a red-haired Private, as he reached the small group. Wordlessly, Corporal Grey stepped back, allowing Private Sear and the three who had followed him to see the body with its half-destroyed head.
"It's Private Taylor. He… died, but…" Corporal Grey struggled to explain what had just taken place.
"But he bit me!" said Lieutenant Pratt through gritted teeth, still clutching his bloody hand.
"He was dead?" asked one of the other newcomers, Corporal Larry Stein, a small-framed marine.
"Yeah, we found him in his bunk, this morning," explained Grey, putting his sidearm in its holster.
"So how was he walking around?" asked Stein.
"Well, how the fuck should I know?" asked Grey, incredulously.
"Wait, Doctor Richards was performing an autopsy, wasn't he?" asked Pratt.
"Yeah…" said Grey. Then he had a thought, "Oh, crap!"
He began running to the autopsy room, which was a little ways down the hall. He stopped just outside the room, took his sidearm back out of its holster and opened the door. He stepped back when he saw the room was pitch black, apart from the small rectangle of light pouring in from the hallway.
Listening, Grey heard a strange noise coming from within the darkness – a slimy, organic sound. He flicked on the M7A's attached flashlight and checked as much of the inside of the room as he could from his position. Seeing nothing, he edged slowly closer, moving to the right-hand side of the doorway. His flashlight shone on the DNA Sequencer and he gasped. There was a black, slimy substance oozing out from it. Grey slowly lowered his flashlight and saw the ooze covering the floor tiles.
Searching the floor, the Corporal spotted Doctor Richard's body lying facedown just outside the ray of light coming from the hallway. The ooze appeared to be entering a wound in his neck, but Grey couldn't be sure if that was the case, or if it was just the way the light was bouncing off of the slow-moving slime as it flowed around the corpse.
The Corporal looked down at his feet and saw the black ooze flowing towards him. He scurried backwards, eyeing it warily. There was something about it that didn't feel right. There seemed to be a sort of malice about it, an evil breath whispering words of fear and pain. As the substance flowed out into the corridor, the feeling of a presence grew.
There was a long moan and Doctor Richards stumbled out, the slime hanging off of him like a living shroud, all of it meeting inside the large wound in his neck.
"Doctor Richards?" asked Pratt.
"Dohker Rissshhher'sss…?" repeated the doctor in the slow, monotonous voice that Taylor had used. Clumsily, Richards lumbered forward, his arms outstretched towards Grey, as if seeking help from him, but his face told a different tale.
The Corporal had always respected Doctor Richards, but he realised that, just like Taylor, the man in front of him was now a hostile target.
Rather than fire at the doctor, Grey landed a roundhouse kick to the side of the slavering head. Richards cried out and went spinning to the floor. He lay on the ground for a few moments, moaning softly, before getting up to attack, again.
Grey looked around and saw a fire extinguisher, its surface gleaming bright red in the harsh ceiling lights. He wrenched it off the wall and turned to face the doctor, who seemed oblivious to the new weapon in the Corporal's hands, since he did not even glance at it.
Judging the distance, Grey waited until the cadaver came closer. He brought the heavy cylinder over his right shoulder, hesitated, and then swung it, mightily. There was a sickening crack and the body flew a short distance from the force of the blow before landing facedown on the cold floor, unmoving.
Not taking any chances, the Corporal dropped the fire extinguisher, unholstered his sidearm and, taking a deep breath, fired two shots into the back of the doctor's head. The body twitched and bone splintered under the forceful impacts of the bullets.
Grey staggered back against the cool, metal wall, feeling ill. He had just killed two of his own kind, two men he knew. But he wasn't sure he had actually killed them – weren't they already dead?
He tried to shut it out, to stop the word from appearing, but it forced its way in, announcing its arrival smugly.
Zombies…
That couldn't be right. It wasn't right. Zombies existed only in movies, books and video games. The only things close to zombies were the Flood, but the two dead men didn't look like virulent, bloated nightmares to Grey. They were just men. Men who he had killed. He had done it because he needed to, because he was trained to, but training didn't help when you had to kill your own colleagues because they suddenly started attacking you.
Zombies…
That word, again. No matter how much he denied it, Grey knew that it was the best description, but it didn't seem logical.
He needed to rest. He didn't have any energy left. The Corporal slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, knees pointing up toward the ceiling where circular lights hummed quietly. He crossed his arms on his knees and bowed his head.
He felt like a traitor – he wasn't supposed to kill other humans. Repeating 'they attacked me, they were dangerous' in his head didn't help. Guilt washed over him. Curiously, the feeling of dread seeped into him, too.
"Grey, get up! Move!" shouted Stein.
The Corporal looked up, quickly. He saw the black substance oozing towards him. He scrambled to his feet and ran to the left, towards his colleagues and away from the substance's invisible fingers of fear.
"What the hell is that stuff?" asked Pratt, his bleeding hand staunched by a piece of fabric he had torn off of his uniform's left sleeve.
"Hell if I know," said Stein, shaking his head, "but we'd better do something about it."
Half an hour later, the ooze was still flowing slowly through the corridors. Everything that the marines tried to stop or slow it didn't work; high-pressure water jets were simply ignored. Anti-bacterial chemicals had no effect. Two marines wielding M7057 Flamethrowers tried to burn the ooze away, but the flames seemed to feed the strange substance, so they quickly stopped. Makeshift barricades were set up, but the ooze just climbed over them and continued taking over, slowly moving, creeping along floors, walls and ceilings. There was no choice but to evacuate the base.
"All personnel evacuate the base. This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill. Evacuate immediately."
The calm male voice from the speaker system crackled as alarms brayed harshly through the corridors, providing a strange contrast of chaos and order.
The men and women of Fire Base Alpha Tango Omega cleared the rooms and corridors. Those who found their way blocked by the black substance right outside their doors smashed open windows and clambered out through them.
All one-hundred-and-sixty-eight marines assembled in the open-air parking lot.
"Everyone here?" called out Captain David Washington, a man who commanded respect just by walking into a room.
The Captain's brown-eyed gaze swept the crowd as they barked out "Sir yes sir!" in eerily perfect unison. He waited in case someone noticed a missing member. Everyone – apart from those who had needed to be eliminated – appeared to be present. Good.
Then, eyes began widening and jaws dropped. Frowning, Washington turned to look back at the building and his own expression changed to mimic those behind him.
The black substance had begun to flow out of the open doors and windows, but instead of pooling on the ground, it seemed to climb the walls as if to cover the building. The marines stood, transfixed, as the ooze devoured the structure. Within five minutes, the whole place was covered in a black shroud. Unheard evil voices whispered to the marines standing only a few feet away, painting horrifying images of torture and pain and death.
They turned and fled.
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