A/N: Sorry about the wait :) Things get a little creepy from here on. Also, thanks to those who reviewed, I'm glad you're enjoying it so far! Updates will come more frequently ;)

CHAPTER 4:

LIGHTS OUT

The airlock door gave a loud hiss-CLUNK and swung open. Kryten stepped in with an armful of weapons and placed them on the floor. "Good morning sirs," he said chirpily.

Lister looked over the pile of guns appreciatively. "Nice going, Kryts. Where'd you find all this stuff?"

"Weapons storage. Miss Miranda showed me where it was. We should have enough guns and ammo here to hold off an army of those creatures."

Miranda stepped in behind him, carrying a large box, and she placed this next to the guns. "Ammo," she said.

Lister took a deep breath. "Ok. Here's the plan." He frowned. "Where's Rimmer?"

Kryten shuffled uncomfortably. "He's sleeping off a hangover in one of the equipment lockers I believe, sir."

"Great. A lot of use he'll be," Lister said, shaking his head.

Miranda chewed her lip and gave him a guilty glance. "Sorry. It was my fault."

Lister pulled his fur and leather deerstalker forward on his head and scratched it, thinking. "Alright. I had a lot of time to think last night and... I came up with something. It's not brilliant, but it's the best plan I've got. Miranda, the only way we can bring you with us is if we turn you off, take your holo-disk on board Red Dwarf and wait until we find some way of bringing you back. Maybe... I dunno... if we found another ship... one that could take you on board..."

She nodded and looked at the ground.

"Look, I know it's not the greatest plan ever. And it means you'll be turned off for a long time. But we'll work something out," he said gently. "Some way to bring you back. I promise. But you'll have to agree to let us switch you off."

Slowly she raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were wide and sad. "Do it."

Lister nodded, took another deep breath and glanced at Kryten and then the Cat. "Ok. First we better load up and get to the Hologram Projection Unit. Then, we're outta here. We make a run for Starbug. Don't stop for nothin'. You with me?"

They all nodded. Lister grimaced and remembered Rimmer. "Kryt, you better go get Rimmer. Is he gonna be ok to handle a gun?"

Kryten, shuffling out the door, nodded and said, "I think he'll sober up fairly quickly when he hears your plan, sir."

Lister bent over and started sorting through the weapons.

"One rock-blasting gun, four bazookoids, one laser rifle, two pulse cannons, one shotgun, and three handguns."

"Is that gonna be enough?" The Cat asked.

"It'll have to be. JMC mining ships generally aren't stocked to the gills with weaponry," Lister said dryly.

"Which one would you say does the most damage?" Rimmer asked hastily. He looked like he hadn't slept much and swayed occasionally, but apart from that, seemd to have sobered as quickly as Lister had predicted.

"Probably the rock-blasting gun."

"I'll have that."

"Fine with me, if you can carry it," Lister said, lifting the gun and handing it to Rimmer, who winced and almost dropped it.

"Yeah, I want the laser thinggama-doohickey," The Cat said. He picked it up and held it against his suit, seeing if the colour matched the weave.

"And I'll take the pulse cannons," Lister said with a grin, strapping one to each shoulder. He also had a handgun tucked into his belt, and a bazookoid on his back, as did Rimmer and the Cat. Kryten had secured the rest of the weapons to his back and shoulders. Miranda held a bazookoid. There was a long silence as they all looked at each other expectantly.

"Ready, Kryt?" Lister said.

Kryten nodded. They stepped out of the airlock.

They proceeded down the corridor in single file: Kryten first, because he had the light. Then Lister, then the Cat, Miranda, and Rimmer. Their footsteps made hollow clanging sounds on the steel staircase as they descended to the lower levels.

Behind him, Lister could hear the harsh scraping of each person's breath in their throats. The only other sound was their footsteps and a low, very faint rushing noise, which he assumed was the wind, singing through the empty corridor where it came in through the cargo bay door.

Rimmer tried to look in every direction at once. When he was facing forward, he felt that his back was vulnerable, but when he looked behind him he kept bumping into Miranda, who would utter a little squeal everytime. She seemed to be on the verge of panic now that she was leaving the refuge of the ship.

"Guys, keep it down," Lister hissed through his teeth. He was holding the gun so tightly his arm ached.

Just as he finished speaking he heard a noise. It was so unexpected and so utterly weird that all the muscles in his legs suddenly froze and he found he couldn't move anymore. His breath died in his throat.

"Did you hear that?" He said.

Then it came again. A long, high screech, like a very rusty door being opened slowly. He heard Miranda gasp.

"Everybody... just... keep... moving," Lister said.

"Oh smeg," Rimmer groaned.

"Kryten, you see anything?"

"No, you'd know if I did sir, believe me," Kryten said, sounding shaken.

They shuffled slowly forward. Then, when they had moved no more than twenty paces, there came three loud bangs in quick succession, each one louder than the last.

Bang.

Bang.

BANG.

Kryten jerked his head up so fast his neck joints creaked, and shouted, "It's above us!" He pointed his gun at the ceiling. They all stared at the metal grating above their heads. A long minute passed. Nothing happened.

"What the smeg was that?" Lister panted, flicking sweat from his brow with two fingers.

Kryten reached up and prodded the ceiling with the barrel of his gun. "There's nothing there. I'm still not getting any life readings."

They began to move forward slowly again. "What do these things look like, anyway? I mean, what exactly are we dealing with?" Lister asked, looking at the girl.

Miranda edged along behind him, looking nervous. "I... I don't really know. I've never actually seen one properly."

They all stopped in mid-shuffle. All heads turned to stare at Miranda, an identical expression of disbelief on their faces.

"You've never seen one?" Kryten asked, wide-eyed.

"I thought you were with your brother when he was... killed," Rimmer said carefully.

"No. I wasn't there. I didn't see." Her voice cracked. "I only heard him screaming. And when I got there... all I found was..."

"Was what?" Lister prodded.

"His leg."

Rimmer turned a new shade of white, and Lister looked mortified. "Smeggin' 'ell," he breathed.

"You said you hadn't seen one properly," Kryten questioned, returning to the point. "What did you see?"

Miranda blinked and stared at the floor. "Eyes," she aid quietly. "That's all. And teeth."

Rimmer gulped audibly, and began to wish he hadn't finished off the last of the whisky last night. "Oh good. So we know they have teeth, they can smell blood and they like to chow on humans, sans legs."

"Ok let's just keep movin'," Lister said in a strained voice. "I don't know what that sound was, but I'm sure it wasn't good."

They continued forward, into the black.

As they moved along through the ship, Rimmer somehow ended up at the back of the group again. This wasn't his favourite position, safety-wise, and he constantly whirled around and walked backwards a few steps, his gun trained on the formless shadows, squinting into them, trying to spot any possible sign of movement. This carried on so frequently that he began to trail behind, so intent was he on watching his rear that he forgot about staying close to the group in front of him. No-one turned around. They were all too busy watching out for their own necks.

The group rounded a corner and Rimmer, walking backwards, struggled to catch up. For a long blood-chilling moment he was alone in the corridor. Then he reached the end of it and was about to turn and sprint to catch up, when he heard a noise.

The noise was accompanied by a flicker of movement at the far end of the corridor he was just leaving.

The movement was accompanied by a soft "fuuuhhh-"as Rimmer tried to utter an expletive but all the air vacated his lungs at once, drowning it out.

At the end of the corridor, a tall, shadowy figure stepped into view. The only light was from Kryten's chest-mounted torch beam, and that was quickly fading away out of sight. Very soon he would be alone in a corridor with something shaped like a man, and it would be pitch black.

Rimmer managed to stumble one step backwards, and there he found himself pressed up against solid wall, and couldn't go any further. The thing in the shadows started to shuffle towards him.

As it did Rimmer could hear the grunt of its breath, and the sound made his hologrammatic flesh crawl with revulsion. There was also something wrong about the way it moved. It didn't walk so much as lumbered, arms swinging stiffly by its side, and it appeared not to bend able to bend its knees...

In fact it didn't look so much alive anymore.

It looked a little bit on the deadish side to Rimmer.

He was totally unable to move. His fingers clawed at the cold metal wall, his mouth was opened in a grimace wich might have been a scream if he could summon any voice from his useless vocal cords. The light was still fading rapidly. Rimmer was just about to summon every last ounce of his strength to tear himself away from the wall, and he could have done it, too, if that last bit of light had faded just a few seconds earlier, obscuring the horror that now shambled into the light.

It was his father. Well, not so much his father as Rimmer remembered him. He now looked as if he had been dead and lying in his grave for several months. His face was still horribly recognizable, but the skin had turned a sickening yellowish-white colour, and was peeling off or simply nonexistent in some places. His eyes bored out at Rimmer from their sunken, rotten sockets, the flesh discoloured and black around them. He could see a glint of bone on his father's right jaw. His mouth was the worst. His lips had shrunk back and rotted, leaving a gash filled with brown teeth like a leer, and the tendons in his cheeks looked like pieces of thin string.

As he stumbled towards him, Rimmer realized, just before his sanity packed its bags and went on a holiday, that his father was wearing the neatly tailored brown suit he had last seen him in. That was the final madness.

Then his mind gave in and he started to scream. He wasn't even aware that he was screaming, because all sound seemed to have gone out of the world, except for the liquidy curses that were now pouring out of his father's dead mouth.

"I never loved you, you whining, snivelling little creep. You were a mistake. You should never have been allowed to crawl across the face of this world. You're a piece of putrid, stinking, worthless scum. Your mother hated you. John, Howard and Frank hated you. You've never been loved by anyone and you never will be!"

His father was now only metres away from him, and he could smell stale, ancient tobacco on his father's fetid breath, could smell dirt and mud and some other, unnamable stink that was coming from beneath his dirt-streaked suit.

"Why don't you shove a gun in your mouth and do the world a favour, by blowing your pathetic brains out!" Suddenly his father's voice became a mocking falsetto. "'Just once, I wanted him to be proud of me! Just once, I wanted him to say well done!'"

Rimmer was pressed so hard against the wall he would have sunk into it if he could. There was a funny, high-pitched wooshy sound in his head, which he thought might have been the sound of the air blowing through his empty brain.

His father was now only inches away from him, and he could see... could see his own reflection in his eyes! The Rimmer/zombie thing reached out its hands and the grin widened on its face, and Rimmer, Arnold J., heard the tendons creaking and the wet rustle of his tongue. It sounded like a small animal wriggling among a pile of damp leaves. His father grinned, and leaned in to bite off his head.

And then his head exploded.

Rimmer twisted his face away, expecting, in the dim part of his mind that was still tuned in to Sanity FM, to be splattered with brains and shards of bone. But all he felt was a soft rush of air, and something like a feather dragging across his cheek, and that was all. He looked back and his father was gone.

There was a black, wispy kind of mist floating around the place where he had been, but it was fragmented and slowly evaporated into nothingness. Rimmer groaned and slowly slid down the wall, and darkness overcame him.

"Rimmer!"

He floated back into consciousness. With consciousness came the memory of what had happened, and his stomach gave a violent lurch. He groaned.

"Rimmer!" Someone kept shouting at him. It was Lister. "Rimmer, are you alright?"

"Let me try something," he heard the Cat say, and a few seconds later a sharp pain exploded across the left side of his face.

"Smeg off!" Rimmer shouted, and the Cat grinned and stepped back.

"Hey, he's back! You ok, Buddy?"

Rimmer opened his eyes slowly. Lister was crouched in front of him, looking worried. The Cat, Kryten and Miranda stood by, also looking worried. His eyes searched the corridor, but there was no-one else.

"I saw... I saw my fa-..." he croaked, unable to complete the word.

"It wasn't real, Mr Rimmer. It was one of those creatures pretending to be your father. We heard you scream, and then we all saw some kind of black shape standing over you..." Kryten explained.

"And then I blew its head off," Lister finished matter-of-factly.

Rimmer's breath began to slow down. "So it wasn't real..."

"No, sir."

"It looked just like him. Well... apart from the fact that he was dead. But his eyes... and his voice..." Rimmer shuddered. "How could it possibly know what my father looked like? Or what he thought of me?"

"It spoke to you?" Lister asked, standing up.

Rimmer nodded.

"What did it say?"

"I don't want to repeat it. It was horrible." He swallowed and tried to stand up. He was alarmed to see that his hands were shaking uncontrollably. "I just want to get the smeg out of here."

"That makes two of us," Lister said, and handed Rimmer back his gun, which he had dropped. "Let's go."

Rimmer looked at the ground. "You said you blew its head off. But where's its body?"

Lister exchanged an uneasy glance with Kryten. "Dunno. It just kind of... vanished after I shot it. Anyway, its history now, let's keep moving."

Rimmer nodded and shakily followed them.