The room was empty. The entirety of ten forward, full of people what felt like minutes ago, was now devoid of human life. The captain walked forward quietly, his ears straining to hear anything, only to be met with nothing. Silence ruled in the room usually so full of sound. Picard turned to Worf, their eyes meeting. "Where could everyone have gone? I could understand one group leaving, but everyone?" Worf looked down at the captain, before shifting his eyes to the door. "It is certainly… peculiar. There are no signs of a struggle, and I cant believe every member would follow Troi." Guinan shook her head as she walked over to the bar. "I've served aboard this ship for many years Picard. I can't explain any of the happenings, even this is beyond my imagination. How does a room full of people simply disappear?" Before any response was given, a faint roar could be heard in the distance, and Worf visibly stepped back. "I don't have an answer for the missing people captain, but we need to move. A beast has been tracking me and the security team for some time, it cannot be stopped by conventional means and appears to have found us." As he finished speaking, other screams could be heard, screams of the living and of the dead.
Beverly crusher was running, fleeing nightmares of flesh and bone and a mob of very angry cultists. How could they not see that The Marker was the cause of the issue, not the solution or a gift? A whole starship was now dead because of some object of worship. They did not want to hear it however, and now Beverly ran from the mob. As she turned a corner, that was when she heard the screaming begin. While the infection was light in the upper decks, only a handful of the slashers, a single surprise attack could wipe out any number of unarmed civilians and crewmembers. "Beverly" she heard faintly, a voice she recognized from long ago. She continued to run, further and further, ducking into jefferies tubes and descending further and further, her desire to destroy the cause of the suffering, and apparent loss of her son driving her on and on. The headache she hid from the captain worsened, as her sense of location and time grew hazier and hazier. "Beverly" She heard again, that voice from long ago. She slowed to a stop, and looked around, noticing the symbol above a nearby door. She stood in front of the open door of the medical ward, somehow having run all the way here, descending decks without any thought, her headache worsening. The only sound coming from within was the dripping of some form of liquid, and the light blue floor now a deep shade of crimson. She stepped through the open door and into the broken room, beds turned over, blood splattering the walls covered in rents where blades sunk in. "Hear me Beverly" she heard the voice, coming nor from nowhere but instead the closed door to her office, locked from the inside. Her desire to destroy The Marker forgotten, she moved forward mechanically. All the fear she felt fell away, as the door dissolved and standing there was a man she would never forget. "I'm so proud of you Beverly" said Jack Crusher, her dead husband. He was exactly as she remembered, except for his eyes. His eyes, usually so kind seemed to glow with a glow coming from within. "We need to be made whole once more. Make us whole, Beverly." She took a step forward, tears flowing down her cheeks. "Yes my love, we will be made who-" She coughed, and looked down. Where her chest usually was, now nothing. A hole the size of a fist had been taken out, severing her spine and splitting her lungs. The scent of cooked meat reached her nose, the smell of a phaser wound. She fell to the ground, her mind falling into darkness as footsteps echoed away.
Worf felt fear once more. It was a relatively unknown emotion to him before, but in the past day he felt as if he was almost comfortable feeling it. The roar echoed again, the sound of the brute getting closer and closer as the group of officers fled through the deck. The screaming had stopped, only to be replaced by the sound of more bestial calls as they rose once more in pursuit of the group. "How do they move from deck to deck so fast?" Guinan asked in fear tinged with annoyance. "It's only been a few hours and yet it feels as if the whole ship has been overrun!" Data turned his head to face her, his pace not letting up as his blueprints of the decks moved him swiftly with the others. "I believe it is due to two reasons. One is the layout of the ship, with turbolifts giving access to every deck, and as it has been seen the Necromorphs can climb." He ran, turning back to face forward to walk around a door that had been torn from the wall and now lay in the hallway. "The second is a mere hypothesis, but I believe that there is a sort of, "Infector" form that travels with the other forms to reanimate the bodies at an incredible speed." Worf nodded, his old habits of battle strategy overcoming the adrenaline of the chase for a brief moment. "It makes sense, and when the fear tactics are taken into account, a whole boarding party could take the ship in the matter of hours. The only reason we live is that the infection took time to start somewhere." With that sobering fact, the group ran once more in silence, surrounded by the screams of the damned.
The monster was floating. Its upper reasoning had long been taken away, replaced only with a bestial hunger. It twitched, its right blade clinking against glass. Its pale eyes opened, and saw its reflection. It was skinless, arms extending out of its shoulder blades and ending fully in blades, rather than sticking out of hands like other slashers. It was bulky, and tall. In place of a lower jaw hung tentacles, quivering slightly as the creature began to move. Off to the side a woman came into the creature's view, a small asian woman wearing a bloodied blue outfit. The creature began to shift as the woman opened and closed her mouth, moving her lips to form shapes. The creature began to thrash slightly, hitting the glass with more and more force. It heard nothing,the liquid it floated in turned brown as the decayed tissue mixed with it. Finally the grass cracked, and in a flash its arms tore through the container and into the woman. She screamed as its blade entered her stomach, blood coming out of her mouth as her lungs filled with blood. It raised its arm, woman struggling as it stabs her with the other arm, and pulled. The woman fell apart, her legs and torso falling away from each other as her organs dropped to the floor with a wet splat. It lifted its head, and air moved past what could pass as olfactory senses, sensing living moving down from decks up above. Three beings of flesh and blood, one of metal and electricity. It moved to the door, and began to make its way towards these beings, slicing through a door and stepping over a headless body with a hole in its chest. It never noticed the blinking name above its birth tank, the word Hunter blinking slowly, before fading into darkness.
