Fall
The First Shelter had been the largest on Earth. With more then twenty cubic miles of living space, it was a massive diagonal spike deep into the Earth's strata. Powered by a geothermal tap and several N2 power plants, the first of five Nipponese shelters was the envy of the world in it's time.
Shinji Ikari had lived in the First Shelter for most of his life. His father and mother had been important scientists, and warranted being among the first evacuated to the shelter. They lived and worked there for several years, until business had called them away. They had to go to America, and after Second Impact the skies and oceans were no longer safe… so they had soared through the heavens on wings of steel, as Shinji's aunt had been so fond of saying. One of the last orbital flights.
Not wanting to endanger their child by traveling by uncertain means, Shinji had been left in the care of his uncle. He was three. Shinji would not recall until much later in life how both his parents had silently cried as they kissed him and then slid away in their pressure suits. Shinji himself had cried and cried.
Several years after the First Shelter's establishment, plans were drafted to put a number of scavenged, defunct mag-lev trains into use. Around the world N2 mines were detonated in tight shafts of light tens of miles long. The resulting tunnels between shelters were reinforced with segmented concrete supports, and then put into service as the primary transportation system, conditions aboveground becoming having become even more undesirable.
The First Shelter was one of the last to create such a system.
Shinji had been there along with everyone else, a bored thirteen year old absently holding a Nipponese flag that had no real meaning to him. He waited on a field of Astroturf, halogen lights high above him. That is the one memory of that day that really stayed with him; being surrounded by plain artificiality, right before something brutal and unnatural came and tore it all away.
Seventy-five miles away, the charge was placed, carefully adjusted, triple-checked, and detonated. The result was an oblong tunnel 20 yards at its widest point, connecting the first shelter mankind had built to the rest of the world.
The First Shelter had been stocked to the brim with medical supplies. A bare minimum was left aboveground. The other Nipponese shelters had hardly any. They would have been using leeches if not for UN transferred specialists. This tunnel meant salvation for many people. Therefore, what followed the creation of the tunnel killed many people, directly and indirectly.
The other shelter was supposed to be sending a car down the tunnel after it had cooled. It should have taken two and a half hours for the car to arrive. It failed to appear. After three hours, people began to show concern. Then the demolitions team, who still had a seismograph set up, determined that the other end of the tunnel had been blown close with conventional explosives.
This relieved and confused people at the same time. It at least explained why the car hadn't come, but why blast the tunnel shut?
The tunnel was just below the park area, the main entrance a gaping hole in the center, accessible by stairwell. People lounged on the grass above it, beneath the hot halogens, waiting for news.
-
Domen Kurosawa had been a dentist before Second Impact. Now he was a fungal farmer, assistant seismologist, and general-purpose medic. He sat before rows of delicate equipment, monitoring the subtle vibrations of the earth resettling after the N2 blast. 'Boss' was down replacing the balancing mechanism in one of the thump pads, which had been damaged during the detonation.
"Hey Kurosawa!" Boss called up, "Adjust the range to minimal, I'm calibrating."
Domen flipped a switch, twisted a dial, and then tapped his earphones. Normal sounds of rock setting, corresponding with the readout.
But what was that…? A regular rhythmic beat in the rock, and the readout matched. Almost like a… heart-beat? Domen rubbed sleep from his eyes. He'd been on watch since the N2 blast, it was starting to screw with his head.
The motion in the rock continued, and then was joined by another sound, soft at first, but steadily growing. Checking the computer, Domen concluded from its weight and impact pattern that it was the car from the other shelter.
"Hey Boss! It's the car! It's about 100 yards out."
"I know that you idiot, you can hear it from here!"
Domen took off his earphones and felt very foolish. The tunnel reverberated with the hum of an approaching diesel engine. As he got off the seismology platform a JSSDF hummer erupted from the tunnel, going far too fast.
People jumped out of the way as the car slammed through lines of vehicles and equipment. Domen was still behind the seismology platform when the car slammed into the delicate sensing apparatus below it. Boss threw himself clear, and Domen tried to do the same, but the car still clipped his legs, spinning him around and slamming him into a support pole.
He laid where he had fallen, legs broken and bleeding. The rest of his life was spent watching a massacre begin.
The car slammed into the wall, buckled. But by some miracle, the gas tank did not rupture. SDF personal quickly descended on the car, ignoring the pained sounds Domen was making. Above him, the seismology platform, some supports and all of it's sensing equipment destroyed, began to lean…
One of the SDF men was calling for a crowbar, the door was jammed shut. The windows looked as though they had been painted black. Someone started slamming the window with his elbow. That was when the door exploded.
Domen thought for sure he was dreaming. The door was blown clear off its hinges, and a sticky black something shot after it. As the door fell to earth, the black thing began to dissipate like a mist. Men were running around senselessly, some drawing their weapons, some trying to spray the thing with fire extinguishers.
When the black mist and white foam cleared, a man was revealed. Standing next to the car, his skin pallid, uniform immaculate for the largely ceremonial function driving to the other end of the tunnel was supposed to be. That was the last thing Domen would remember clearly, sanely.
The man, a high ranking officer, judging by his uniform, grabbed a medic that hurried up to attend to him. There was an audible crack as that medic's windpipe was crushed, his neck snapped, and before anyone else could move, the pale soldier tore off the other's head.
Domen could only stare as the man stood up and started at the remaining soldiers SDF, black ooze dripping from his mouth. The SDF men warned the man… the thing, twice before opening fire.
The thing skreeched as it's body was torn apart in the gunfire. Domen was screaming too. He was a dentist. He had autopsied corpses before, in med school, but this was something on an entirely different level. He screamed until the mist began to rise from the broken door, and more ex-officers of the SDF climbed out, eyes black, hands wrenched into claws.
Domen screamed as those creatures were cut down in a rain of bullets. The red goo that erupted from their wounds was covering everything. It was on his face. It burned! Then someone tossed a grenade underneath the hummer. The resulting explosion catapulted the car into the air. Domen was still screaming, his eyes pinpoints, his mind long gone, when the car fell down on top of him.
His was one of the cleanest deaths.
-
They came in many forms. Almost immediately after the hummer went up in flames, those personal splattered with red residue turned their weapons on one another, insane smiles on their faces.
The lights failed as the geothermal tap petered out and the N2 generators overloaded and slagged. The large fans whose sole purpose was to re-circulate air ground to a halt.
And in the darkness, in the confusion, the enemy came in its true form. No longer constrained to Trojan horses or puppets, the Deep Ones surged out of the hole that had meant salvation for so many of the Nipponese. Slimy green flesh caught in the faint light of emergency torches made their eruption look like the flowering of a gangrenous wound. Along with them, across their bodies and backs, a terrible blackness flowed.
Born by many means, but with the same formless body, the Shoggoths roamed among the throngs of panicked humanity. A slight twitch of their massive, undulating bulk was enough to crushed a leg, a pelvis… nothing serious enough to kill, for the Shoggoths ate terror and pain as their more corporeal brothers ate human flesh. They surged under locked doors and erupted out of toilets and sinks. They stirred their sticky fingers through living human brain, and grawffed their terrible laughter as the bodies twitched and made small mewing noises.
-
In the train, between the shelters, Shinji remembers these things and doesn't. His mind has been irreparably scarred, and he finds himself recalling some of the events with terrifying clarity as a man's corpse collapses in front of him, and the tentacle of a shoggoth reaches out to claim him. Just like before.
Just like before.
Shinji doesn't remember how he escaped the First Shelter. He had simply slipped into being one day. Found himself wandering the lower workings of the shelter from which the excavation N2 blast had come. After three days of hard interrogation he was put on standard work detail, his appearance marked up as divine intervention.
He had been put to work making sushi in a refactory. He had gotten pretty damn good at it too. His life at the new shelter hadn't been all that bad, but for the dreams that haunted him. When awake he couldn't really acknowledge the sense of lose he had for his uncle and aunt, for what had been his world for so long. When asleep every shadow threatened to tear him apart, and that symphony of screams and pain and strange, animal lust filled his mind.
But even so, Shinji Ikari slept with the lights off.
He charged the monster.