She didn't hear me; thank God or the Devil or Buddha or Allah, she didn't hear me.
His head just popped, like a cherry. Bile threatened to surface in the arid pit of my throat, and I look away.
Another one crawled out of the wall, taking off in an awkward gait like a giant spider across the ceiling. Red-hot hooks glowed in its mutated hands. The bloody little girl in the blue and white dress pointed to the wall and yelled to her growling bodyguard.
"Unzip him, Daddy! UNZIP HIM!"
The wall-walker dropped from the ceiling and landed lightly on his feet in a crouched fighting stance, clearly under the misconception that he could take on this humongous, lumbering scuba-bastard.
I watched in surreal slow-motion as the roaring conical drill of the beast's right arm exploded through his chest. The splicer's mouth dropped open, blood bubbling out from both gaping holes in a gushing maroon torrent; it was still spinning,... so much blood,... ohmygodsomuchblood... it was still spinning in his chest cavity...
An agonizing wail split the air - that final, familiar cry of the dying I've heard so many times now.
Then,
silence.
Its footsteps were mostly muted now, far and away like a bad dream, so I finally allowed myself to breathe. I had almost forgotten how.
Peering out from the black chasm of my hiding spot, the entire room before me was stained a deep crimson with fresh blood; chunks of human meat and slaughtered bodies littered the floor like just another night in Rapture,... as if the dead were nothing more than decor.
I want to say it disgusts me, and I feel that muffled revulsion stretch across my innards - but slowly, surely, I become desensitized. With each passing hour, I blend further into this mindless mausoleum - this new, fantastical, grotesque reality. Violence has somehow become peace, and its absence leaves me more terrified than its wake.
I creep along the furthest wall, a parasite in anxious thigmotaxis (as Andrew Ryan would have certainly surmised) and glanced nervously down a damp, winding corridor. Glass windows on all sides of me reveal the majesty of the inner city. The constantly shifting glow of Rapture's downtown district bending to the whim of the sea's relentless tempo gave little indication of its utter failure.
In these rare moments of calm, fleeing from one decaying corner of the city to another, I often find myself gazing lovingly along its proud skyline, thinking of all that could have been.
I fumbled furiously with the faulty wiring of a vending machine, my hands sweaty and trembling. If I overloaded the system, I'd only walk away with one bright hell of a shock and an instantly-activated alarm, triggering a cloud of flying turret bots with mounted automatics and angry, all-seeing eyes. Surely I would be no match with just my wits about me and a crude plumber's tool.
"Shit, shit, SHIT," I stammered breathlessly as wave after wave of heat crashed upon my skin. More sweat beaded, then ran freely, trickling into every crevice of my body like rainwater finding rivulets in narrow, barren places.
A soft click, the pleasant, crunching grind of rusted gears and a brief electric pulse were just the signs I needed to know that I had successfully hacked the machine. With a WOOSH of relief I lowered my head, rejoicing quietly to myself.
To my dispair, I had only $64 to my name - all looted from the tragic leftovers of former neighbors and friends - so I had no choice but to stock up on the few First Aid Kits I could afford.
As I stood to leave and resume my eternal crawl, I took notice of an old-fashioned machine gun resting against the lifeless hand of its former owner. I bent down to see if any ammo was left, careful to avoid the veritable organic stew of blood and guts around me.
The clip was half full, so I gleefully pocketed the wrench and held the tommy gun in my hands, almost as if to ensure it was real. A tear unexpectedly slipped from the corner of my left eye. Maybe I could, in fact, make it out of here alive. In past weeks I had vainly tried to come to humble terms with my fate: sealed in the most beautiful undersea tomb, dying alongside my demented family. What I had found in the aftermath of massacre was a trace inkling of hope.
The muzzle's cold steel winked at me in the reflection of the flickering lights of Olympus Heights.
Fear had been my shadow; violence would be my only salvation.