Dead Effect: Call of the Eldritch
Author's Note
I acknowledge that I do not own the rights to "Mass Effect" nor "Dead Space" and that they are the works of Bioware Corp and Visceral, both published by Electronic Arts. This story contains AU (Alternate Universe) properties, disturbing imagery, sexual content, and graphic scenes of intense violence. Readers discretion is advised.
The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the great and glorious day of the Lord shall come. -The Holy Bible, The Book of Acts 2:20
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die. -The Necronomicon
I see the Bad Moon arising,
I see trouble on the way,
I see earthquakes and lightning,
I see bad times today,
Don't go around tonight,
Cause its bound to take your life,
There's a Bad Moon on the rise -Bad Moon Rising
Chapter I: Jane
She bounded down corridors strange and labyrinthine that winded like the guts of some industrialized beast, passing thresholds that held a cloying blackness that threatened to engulf her being entire. She did not stop to behold what they held for she already knew what horrors lay beyond. Her unit was dead along with the rest of the marine squadron, prey to twisted abominations or to the strange madness that had now taken root in what remained of her fractured mind.
Jane…
Jane…
Whispers. They plagued her now. The voices of the restless dead reaching out from the beyond. Never rude, always cordial. The only thing they ever asked of her was to join them. She heard Corporal Toombs' shy murmur and imagined his copper eyes, longish face, and hook nose. She heard the impish voice of her brother, little Johnny, the twin that came squalling out of the womb two minutes after her; eyes of bright emerald and locks of cherry fire same as her own. There was the rich timbre of James Shepard, her father, and there in her minds' eye was his stern, stormy eyed visage. Then there was her mother, Hannah Shepard, who's celtic features were the blue print for her brother and her both, eyes glittering jade and hair a flowing wave of red, her whisperings sweet and mournful and terrifying. There was all the rest of her unit and all the rest of her colony and they all spoke with one voice.
Hear us
Join us
Make Us Whole
They are not there, they are not real. You saw them all die, she told herself. Saw them torched and shot and ripped apart; but their voices would not stop and their whispering chorus rose. Her run turned into a sprint and in her attempt to flee the sonorous dead all sense of surroundings left her and something snagged her foot and she went down hard on metal grating, her vision swimming.
Let us take you
Let us consume you
Make Us Whole
It had her ankle in a fleshy vice. The corrupted body of a dead man shorn in half at the hips, gibbering with alien delight, bereft of nose and lips and any human feature, its sightless eyes sunken in the hollow sockets of its pale skull. Lower jaw hanging from a thin strip of flesh to make way for the animate innards that licked and tasted the rank air. Its arms were elongated and twisted and protruding from its palms were blades of bone that slashed at the floor it floundered upon. Its intestines wriggled like snakes in its flayed torso and she saw that a foot of it had lashed out and grabbed her. The thing dragged itself towards her.
Become one with us
Become a Martyr for us
Make Us Whole
Jane yelled out and slammed a foot into the dead man's face, braced, and fired the weapon in her hand point blank into it. What blood remained in the thing sprayed out in brownish coagulated spurts. Flesh and bone were pulped into gristle and the dead man made a sound like an asphyxiated child that tapered off into a glottal hiss but it did not go back into death and it did not stop. It stabbed a calcified spur into the meat of Jane's right thigh, piercing through muscle and bone, and swiped at her face with its other bladed arm while her blood drained through the slatted floor.
The jolts of agony that shot through her made her arm jerk and sent her weapon flying out of her hand but she bulled through the pain and grabbed the bladed arm slashing at her, pulling at it with her foot still braced into the dead thing's face. Flesh ripped, muscle tore, and the corpse's right arm was yanked free of its socket in an arterial spray of dead blood and yellow puss. It let out a gurgling rasp and twisted the spur still in her thigh, sending fresh waves of hurt up and down her leg and she screamed and lashed out with the bladed arm as if it were a sword, shearing the dead thing's remaining arm clean from its torso.
The dead man howled and writhed and she cursed and kicked and in their struggle the grate floor went out from under them, both tumbling into the dark to splash into black waters. The dead thing's animate intestines were still coiled around her leg, threatening to keep her under, but she stomped, slashed, hacked, and cut until its grip went lax then she shot to the surface and gulped air pungent with the stench of sewage and carrion.
One mind
One body
Make Us Whole
Behind her she could feel the gaze of dead eyes and she looked back and beheld the mangled alien corpses of all she ever loved. They gurgled like the drowned swept up in a flood, lurching forward on legs bent like the limbs of animals. Bladed arms slashed the air, alien fluids drooled from mouths crammed with to many teeth. There was Toombs, her brother, her father, her mother, and all the rest; slavering with an unending hunger for her.
We love you Jane
We love you Jane
Make Us Whole
She knelt in the filth, bleeding out, staring at their approach. "I love you too," she whispered.
They surrounded her. They raised their blades of bone. They brought them down. She screamed.
Then she woke.