The first thing Saya Reesman noticed upon waking was the blinding white light hanging above her. The second was the searing cold against the exposed skin of her arms. She reached her fingers out to try and find something to gain her bearings, but she failed to grab a hold of anything. After a moment of fumbling, she found the side of the bed, and Saya tried to pull herself up.
She was abruptly stopped by a sharp pain in her lower back. The pinprick of heat seemed to course through her body, and she dropped back down. Panting, she opened her eyes, trying to look past the light. Reaching her hands out, she saw that she could make out the black outlines of them. After a moment, she slowly sat up enough to slip her hand to the small of her back where the pain had originated.
She gritted her teeth at the flash of pain, but she managed to keep still while she felt the area gently. Her fingertips brushed against the bump of a bandage, and just even the act of examining the site caused her agony. She took her hand away and gripped the side of the bed. This time, she brought herself to a sitting position.
The room was bare, she noticed, Spartan in its minimalism. The walls were a dull grey, and the only other thing in the room besides her bed and the lamp above it was a small tray next to the bed. On further inspection, she noted the stethoscope, hammer, and other small doctor's trinkets lying in a row on the tray. Saya pulled herself to the side of the bed slowly, turning her gaze to the door on the opposite side of the room.
She expected someone to come now that she had awoken. As she waited, she tried to remember why exactly she was here. She was wearing a medical gown, so she must have been sick, but as hard as she thought, Saya couldn't remember being ill. In fact, she couldn't remember anything about this place at all. She squinted. The last thing she did recall was examining the colony's mine with her fellow engineers, although she couldn't think of the reason why. Suddenly, she heard a voice. It sounded male, but at the same time, its enunciation sounded too rough and distorted to be normal. She froze in her chair and stared at the door, but no one came through. Saya slipped her feet over the side of the bed, and almost recoiled at the cold floor as she stood. All she wanted to do right now was go to sleep, but something wasn't right. Someone should have been here to check up on her. Even the room itself was odd. It wasn't like other medical rooms she remembered – it took on a degree of clinical objectivity that was unnerving.
She swallowed nervously and began for the door. Her footsteps were the only sound aside from the low, constant hum of the ventilation system, and her stomach clenched slightly as she approached. When she reached the door, she extended her hand and knocked lightly on the metal surface.
"Hello?" Her voice was hoarse, she noticed. After a moment of waiting, she rapped on the door again, "Hello? Is anyone there?"
Again, there was silence. She cleared her throat and reached for the door handle. It opened with no resistance, which was surprising. Saya thought it would have been locked, considering she was in a medical facility. Regardless, she stepped out into the hallway and looked down each side. Aside from a couple of carts with paperwork on them, nothing notable was out in the open. A quick glance to the left side revealed that the hallway ended, so she began the other way.
She shuffled around the corner and looked down the hall, which was also empty. She paced down the corridor, but the sensation of dread in her stomach continued to grow. She almost didn't notice the door that was propped open, but the sudden, strong smell coming from the room made Saya pause. Her stomach twisted in anxiety, but if anything could shed some light on her current situation, it would be worth it. With trembling fingers, she reached out and pushed the door inward. She had felt something wasn't right, but there had been no way of knowing the extent of what actually happened until she saw the inside of the room.
The room was empty like hers had been with one exception: the walls were copiously splattered with blood. The acrid stench came over her and forced her to stumble back as she brought her hand to her mouth in shock. There was no body, but the air vent in the room had been broken, and a trail of blood led into it. Saya ran down the hall, not even glancing back at the room. All that mattered now was finding someone else.
When she came to the corner, she took a cautious look. There was no one, for better or worse, but in the middle of the next hall, a small desk was set in a central position. Her heart leapt – if there was a communications unit there, maybe she could get in contact with someone. Saya was all too aware of the sounds her bare feet made on the floor as she approached. It seemed now that at any second, she would hear another pair approaching.
Once at the desk, she fumbled around the mess looking for anything that could help her. She pushed aside stacks of paperwork until a small metal object caught her eye – a small on-ear device. Grabbing it quickly, Saya opened it to all frequencies, put it to her ears, and exclaimed breathlessly, "Hello? Is anyone there?"
The silence of the radio frightened her more than any possible response could. She was about to examine it to make sure it wasn't broken when a voice came through.
"Hello? This is Sergeant Cohen speaking. Who are you and what's your location?" The voice was male and authoritative.
"Saya Reesman, and…I'm in a medical station, sir," she answered, her eyes scanning the corridor for anyone or anything. The sergeant was silent for a moment before answering, and this time, his tone was confused.
"I'm registering your location on the opposite side of the base as the medical station. Are you sure?"
"I don't know. There's medical equipment everywhere, and I'm in a hospital gown, but I don't recognize this place at all," she replied, trying to make things as clear as possible for him. It was difficult, though, when she hardly knew anything herself.
"Look…I can't get a good reading like this. You don't have your RIG on, do you?"
"No. I just woke up in the gown."
"Where's everyone else? It's not safe be alone."
"I don't know. All the rooms are empty and I haven't seen anyone else yet."
"Alright. Just keep that com device with you, and get yourself a suit. From there, I can lead you over here. Oh, and find a weapon."
"Will I need one?" she asked. Her fears were confirmed, and there was so much she wanted to know. The longer she just stood here, the more she felt as if something unwelcome was going to round the corner.
"I don't know if things there are as bad as they are here, but there's been an infection of some kind. When they died, people just began to change into these…things. No one knows what they are, but that doesn't stop them from killing you and making you into one of them."
"I saw a bloodstain earlier, but there was no body," she stated, more to see what his reaction would be than anything else.
"Shit…You gotta get a suit and find the rest of us. There's an evac shuttle coming soon, so there's no time to mess around."
"I'll look," she said, stepping away from the desk, "But I want to know what happened."
"I'll tell you everything you want to know when you get here. First thing first, though. Get the RIG so I can get a lock on your position. I'll be in touch if you need me."
Saya frowned as the sergeant went silent. His voice was comforting, even though he wasn't in a position to give her much help. It wasn't his absence that made her anxious, though. His news of an infection was troubling, to say the least. Almost unconsciously, she shot a glance at the hallway from where she had come, but like before, it was empty. She stepped away from the desk and looked around, wondering where her things were stored.
Then suddenly, an idea struck her. She went back to the desks and began fishing in the papers. If this was a secretary's station, they would have to give directions. And that meant that more than likely, there was a map. Rifling through the drawers, she quickly found what she was looking for. The floor plan was minimal in its presentation, but it would be sufficient.
Gripping it with one hand, the other went to her back to very gently massage the area where the bandage was while she read the map. By now, the pain had faded into an intense soreness. Saya quickly located her position on the map and searched around for anything that denoted a storage area. She noted what seemed like an unusual amount of laboratories, but as an engineer, her experience with a typical hospital was limited. Finally, she settled on a room marked "Patient Processing", deciding that was the place most likely to have her things. She folded the paper up and began to follow the directions.
Although she was half-expecting to be ambushed the entire time, Saya eventually found her way to a small waiting room that seemed to connect with a larger lobby. On one side of the room was a door marked "Storage", and with renewed hope she quickly walked towards it. She was about to turn the handle when she heard a thump from the other side. She froze, jumped back, and put her hands up in a brief approximation of a boxer's stance. If she was going to die, she wasn't going to go out quietly.
The door remained still, as did Saya, the image of the open air duct persisting in her mind. Time seemed to drag, and seconds felt like hours before she stepped forward carefully. She had to get in the storage room. If she was smart about it, maybe she could trick whatever was inside into coming outside. Once that was accomplished, she could quickly run into the room, and with any luck, lock it out. She pushed the lock display on the side, and with a hiss, the door opened.
It wasn't a monster, but a corpse that came crashing down. She jumped back from the body as it fell, remembering the sergeant's warnings about infection. Adrenaline drove her heart to beat faster until she noticed the bullet wound to the side of the head and the pistol still clutched in its limp hand.
A quick glance to the inside of the room confirmed her suspicions – the splatter on this wall was from the suicide of whoever this was. One shot to the man's head and it had all been over. She suddenly felt herself wondering what he must have experienced. He must have thought that there had been absolutely no hope for him, that no one was coming.
She suddenly saw the wound with renewed clarity, and Saya's stomach finally gave in. She turned and heaved, coughing at the floor. Tears stung at her eyes, but she knew the suit was inside. She forced herself not to look at the dead man, and stepped inside the storage room. The door hissed behind her as it shut, and that made her feel a little better as long as she didn't look at the gore-stained wall.
Instead, she went to the back where the lockers were. The series of tall, metal containers were each marked with tags displaying numbers and names. There had to be at least a dozen, and she would have passed one of them had her name not caught her eye.
"Subject 7; Reesman, Saya," the tag read. In addition, there were numbers she assumed were also identification of some sort, but none of them seemed familiar to her. She hesitantly extended her hand, unsure if the container would open at her touch or not, but the metal door slid open with one button push. Apparently whoever made this room trusted that no one unauthorized would enter.
The first thing she discerned inside was her RIG suit. The sight of it made her sigh in relief as she grabbed it. The armored suit had saved her life more than once while on the job. This meant she had also just completed her first step to figuring out the current situation. She set it aside for the moment as she grabbed the plasma cutter that had been lying next to it. A miner and engineer's tool, she was familiar with it. If it was powerful enough to cut through rock, she decided, it could also make for a decent weapon.
After placing the plasma cutter back where she had found it, she grabbed the RIG again, went to the station in the corner, and put it on. There was a brief moment of discomfort as her back adjusted to the firmness of the suit, but as she closed the helmet and began checking the system, Saya began to feel more secure than she had since she had since waking up. She holstered the cutter to the belt on her hip and began calibrating the suit's internal communication system to match the frequency on the device she picked up.
"Hello?" she asked quickly, hoping that the sergeant was still there.
The other end was silent for a moment, then a burst of static, and the sergeant's voice again, "Saya? Is that you?"
"I've just got my RIG hooked up. I'm ready to go when you are, sir."
She could hear a sigh before he replied, "Oh, thank god. I was beginning to wonder if you had been…well, you know." He paused, "It doesn't matter now. You need to come find us. The evac shuttle's on its' way right now. If you give me a second, I can get a proper reading now."
Saya didn't say anything. Instead she nervously examined her plasma cutter until she heard her suit emit a high pitched beep.
"Did you figure out where I am?" The question sounded odd when she voiced it out loud, but the urgency of the situation was more important than her embarrassment.
"Yeah, I actually have a lock now, but it's interesting. I mean, there's good news and bad news."
"What do you mean?"
"The good is that you're not really that far away from us. The first reading must've been faulty. Which brings me to the bad news, actually. Wherever you are, you're at least half a mile below the surface of the ground." He paused, then continued, "But as far as I know, only the mine goes that deep, and you're in town, not there."
"What?" she exclaimed. He was right - the only facility on Polis IV that she knew was that far underground was the mine, and she knew for a fact she wasn't there.
"…your guess is as good as mine. How can you not remember going all the way down there?" His voice was tinted with suspicion and unease.
"I really don't. I…the last thing I recall was being in the mine with my team, sir," she tried to explain. "We were…I don't remember what we were doing." Up until now, Saya thought she had been keeping fairly calm, but her inability to recall anything about what had transpired to a certain point was frustrating her to the point of tears.
Where had she been? She took a deep breath and attempted to focus. Her eyebrows furrowed in intense concentration, but the lingering image of her crew in the dimly lit mine shaft was the only thing she could remember clearly.
The sergeant was silent for a moment, and then she could hear him sigh again before he answered, "I guess it really doesn't matter, does it? This whole day's been filled with shit I didn't think I'd ever see. From here, I can put our location as a waypoint on your RIG, but it'll be up to you to get here. Did you find a weapon?"
"I think so," she answered, her hand going to the tool on her belt, "I've had plenty of practice with my plasma cutter."
"Good, that's good, actually. I hope you don't have to use it, and if you've got any brains, you would too, but if you do run into one of those creatures, you can't just shoot it in the head and expect it to drop. You gotta get it in the limbs - shoot off their legs and arms."
"What? Why?"
"If you don't, they'll just keep coming at ya. It took us too long and too many good men and women to figure it out, but those creatures don't seem to feel pain. You have to make sure they can't move, and even then, it's just better to run the hell away then stay and fight."
"I'll try to keep that in mind," she said in what she hoped was a neutral voice. But the sergeant's words, along with the vision of the dead man, stirred the fear in her stomach even more.
"Okay, like I said, all you have to do now is follow the directions on your suit and get your ass over here. I'll wait as long as I can, but I'm not going to delay getting the others on the shuttle for any one person. So hurry. I have my com unit open if you need anything"
"I'll be there as soon as I can, sir," she stated firmly, repressing a nervous swallow.
"Just call me Cohen," he responded gruffly, "And good luck."
"See you soon," Saya said softly, but the signal of a lost connection interrupted her words. She looked at the door. Involuntarily, her eyes shifted to the bloodstain. Once she left this room, there was nothing ensuring her safety. But if she stayed in here, she would definitely get left behind. And judging from everything she had seen and heard so far, being stuck in the small town with whatever had caused all this apparent havoc would be worse than anything she could risk by leaving.
She took the plasma cutter from her belt and gripped it tightly in one hand. She stepped forward, and with the other, Saya pushed a button, unlocked, and opened the door.
