IV
JT piled into his living quarters, his breath catching in his convulsing throat and his heart pounding against the inside of his ribcage. Dropping to the floor by his low bed, he pushed aside the discarded clothing that lay scattered around and dragged out a heavy-set metal chest with a numeric lock on the top. He stabbed in the combination for the lock and heaved the hinged lid back, hastily grabbing the leather holster coiled up in the case and wrapping it around his waist and leg, then snapped up the heavy pistol and slipped it into the cradle for the weapon. He pocketed the three clips of ammunition before spinning around and bolting out his room, not bothering to stop and seal up the room behind him.
His room had been on the way to the medical bay, more or less, but there was still close to a mile and a half of corridors to negotiate before he would arrive at his target, and he hoped he wasn't going to be too late.
Too late for what, he wasn't exactly sure, but he knew something was wrong. Evelyn wasn't the type of girl to loose her head and freak out at nothing.
Only she wasn't a girl now, she was a woman.
JT had spent more than ten years hanging with Peter Monroe before he had decided to join the Marines. While JT excelled in mathematics and astronavigation during his college years, Pete had been a more physical person, and it was obvious that the two men were going to branch out in different directions when it came to careers. With the two being so different, they often helped one another out to strengthen their weak spots, and while JT passed on a modicum of his knowledge of figures, Pete had taken some time out to show him the finer points of firing a weapon.
It was a bright, sunny day on the plains behind the city where they'd gathered the day before Pete shipped out to boot camp, and he'd brought his younger sister, Evelyn, to their homemade target range to practice. Pete had complained about bringing her with him, but JT didn't mind: though there was a five year age gap, by the time JT had reached the age of twenty three, Evelyn had matured from the annoying eight year old girl that used to annoy this living shit out of him, into a beautiful young woman that he admired from afar: after all, he couldn't hit on his best friend's sister, or someone who he considered to be one of his closest friends.
"Okay, I'm shipping out tomorrow," Pete said, slamming a heavy green case onto the ground at the feet of the three people. "Which mean's ol' Smelly Pete ain't always going to be around to drag your ass out of trouble, Johnny, or keep the lowlifes away from you, Evie."
Evelyn smiled as he used the nickname she'd been calling him since she was eight, a grin that seemed to warm JT as he watched, and he had to look away, feeling his skin flush as a number of inappropriate thoughts flashed through his mind, and not for the first time in the past couple of months.
"So, I've got a few presents for you. Call it a leaving present, if you will. Evie, you know I love you, but you always seem to attract the wrong type of guys: what Mom would've called uncouth, what I'd call fuckheads, though not in the presence of ladies, of course. Think of this as a form of birth control; I'm too young to be an uncle."
He opened the box and pulled out a compact pistol, a metallic black in colour with white engraved handles. Pete beamed with pride as he presented it to his little sister. She took it and felt the weight, bouncing it carefully with one hand.
"Now I know you're training to be a doctor and you're all about saving lives, but shit can get rough, and when it does, you know you need to be able to take care of yourself. You know how to use it?"
"I quess that's why we're here."
"Damn right," said Pete, hauling out a larger handgun and passing it over to JT. "You need to be able to take care of yourself in this world."
Hours passed as the trio worked on their gun skills, practicing on a variety of targets placed at strategic places around their improvised range, As the sun lowered over the mountain ranges to the west, Evelyn lowered her weapon and handed it back to her brother.
"I got classes early in the morning, I need to go. Bye Pete," she murmured, kissing him on the cheek, then doing the same to JT. "Bye Johnny."
"Keep the gun, it's for you."
With a smile and nod she left, tucking the weapon and what ammunition was left into her holdall before clambering aboard her pushbike and riding off into the nearby town.
"That's my little sister," Pete said, nodding towards her. "She's all I've got in the way of family, 'cept you. Make me a promise, Johnny. Look after her."
"I'll try," JT nodded.
"And keep your hands off her."
The memory of that day faded away as JT found himself at the entrance to the sick bay he knew Evelyn would be working in, though was distressed to see that there wasn't any lights on inside: nor were there any guards stationed by the door. What if Naki had been right, and the psycho who had assaulted the engineer had come to finish the job? Since knowing him, Naki had never been right, at least that JT could remember, but he was sure there was a first time for everything. With his hand resting on the butt of the weapon that lay heavily against his thigh, JT carefully tapped the cycle button for the door open and stepped inside,
His initial assessment of the room, from the outside, had been incorrect. While none of the main lights were on, a few dim blue tubes running the length of the walls still cast their sickly pale light across the chaotic disarray of the room. Tools and trays littered the floor, scattered like the pieces of a jigsaw that didn't make any sense. A handful of gurneys had been cast to one side, making the maze of discarded equipment even harder to navigate as he picked his way towards the only other figure that seemed to occupy the room: a body lying prone on the furthest table, a sheet draped over it. He stepped closer, wincing as his foot hooked on the handle of a blood-spattered bone saw and skidded across the floor, the sound of the blade scraping against the metallic deck plates and the crash of the metal as it slammed into the wall a startling contrast to the deathly silence than loomed ominously in the air. He clenched his teeth and half-closed his eyes, hissing softly to himself and wishing that hadn't happened.
The figure on the table hadn't moved, hadn't flinched at the sudden sound.
JT stepped cautiously forwards, tentatively reached out and took hold of one of the corners of the sheet draped over the person, then yanked it off in one swift movement.
The stench of fresh blood, faecal matter and raw meat assailed his nostrils as the cloth swept back, revealing the carcass of a man lying on his back, the ribcage torn open in a misshapen hole in the centre of his torso, revealing a dark and gory chasm filled with tepid blood and organs that had been pushed aside. The expression on the man was that of sheer terror and agony, a rictus gape permanently fixed on his face through the tightened muscles of rigor mortis. JT felt his gorge raise in the back of his throat, swallowed hard to press back the thick, half-digested acidic food, then quickly drew the heavy pistol, cupping it in both hands and keeping the muzzle of the weapon pointed towards the ceiling, slowly circling and searching every corner of the dark room for a hint as to what had happened, who had done this, and whether they were still in the room.
Something made a noise from within a large storage cupboard by the doorway, and it suddenly occurred to JT that someone emptying the contents of a cupboard could have made the mess on the floor in order to clean out a suitable hiding space. Levelling off his weapon on the large doors of the cupboard and gently touching the trigger so a glowing, pale blue laser dot appeared on the door, he cleared his throat and steeled himself for confrontation.
"C… come out!" he demanded. The noise came again by way of an answer, and the door rattled slightly: the sound of a lock being unfastened before the doors burst open and a figure shrouded in darkness burst out the cupboard, an unholy scream tearing through the still of the room as the creature stumbled across the rubbish-strewn floor and dived onto JT, sending his weapon skittering across the floor.
0
Naki found himself standing outside the locker room he'd previously been watching, the door shut tight and a piece of metal piping he'd managed to grab on the way gripped tight in his sweating palm. Licking his lips and nervously adjusting his clothing, he reached out to the controls for the door, hesitating before reluctantly keying the lock for the door. It didn't respond, and he tried again using an override code he knew worked on most doors.
With no joy, he pressed the flat, tapered end of the pipe he held into the seal between the door, twisted it, then worked his fingers into the crack and peeled the door open, his arms quivering and shaking as he fought the resisting motors for the doors. With a final hiss, the restraints gave way and Naki stumbled into the room, gagging at the stench of warm meat on the verge of decay and the cloying humidity that seemed to press in around him as he entered the room. Lockers stood on either side of him, curving off to the left where they continued towards the showers, and the place he knew the body of the woman would be.
Carefully rolling each footstep to make as little noise as possible, he crept through the locker room, finally peering around the corner and finding the carcass of the woman, with almost the entire length of the body covered in bites or stripped of flesh entirely. Bone gleamed dully from beneath matted clumps of hair and tattered muscle tissue, entrails smeared across the floor and up the sides of the surrounding lockers, and a thick, slimy trail of blood and pieces of discarded organs coated the floor between the body and the showers. Thick bellowing clouds of steam drifted out from the obscured alcove the showers resided in, the constant drumming of the water the only sound he could hear, and Naki carefully navigated around the body and hammered the control panel embedded on the wall, hitting the cut-off for the water pipes and killing the shower. The constant torrent of water instantly died into nothing more than a rhythmic drip, and Naki lowered his weight onto one of the wooden benches, staring grimly at the dismembered corpse.
He clearly hadn't thought this through, but then, Naki had a reputation for acting on impulse without weighing up the consequences: the string of one-night stands and affairs he'd had were a testament to that. He'd tried to warn the security forces and they hadn't been interested, and now how was he going to explain finding a half-eaten woman in the female locker room, on the other side of the ship from where he was supposed to be on duty?
"You're a fucking genius, Redhorn," he scorned himself, turning his gaze from the body to the corner of the room where the camera sat, and the opened air vent above it. The grille looked like a chemical had burnt it through, the edges still seemed to smoulder a little, and a caustic yellow haze lingered around the opening. The camera seemed to be suffering from damage by the same compound, as it too looked to have received a spray of acidic chemicals, and the red power light was dead.
"Snake did this?" he wondered, slowly making his way over to the damaged corner of the room and grabbing a handful of pens from his pocket: he flicked through them, making sure he wasn't about to sacrifice one of his porno-pens, and prodded the damaged metal. The plastic tube came away smouldering with the same gaseous discharge the grille had, and he dropped it to the ground, not wanting to get any of the corrosive material on him while the pen slowly dissolved before his eyes.
"Some kind of man-eating acid-spraying snake," he murmured, eyeing the communication headset the woman had been using moments before the attack. He scooped it up and slipped it over his ear, wiping the traces of blood he'd picked up on his trousers. He tried to tune the unit into a communication channel, but they all seemed unavailable.
"Hell of a time to be engaged," he rumbled, slipping the unit into his pocket. He still hadn't decided what to do next, but the sound of something clicking against the tiles in the shower grabbed his attention. Had the killer snake been coiled in the shower, lulled into a sleep by the warm, steamy atmosphere? If that had been the case, Naki turning off the showers had could have pulled it out of it's hibernation.
Ain't no way I'm going to wind up as snake bait, he thought to himself, prying open the closest locker and rummaging through the contents: though there was nothing that looked like a weapon, a large pressurised tin of deodorant would serve his purposes if he combined it with his lighter. After all, all wild animals feared fire… right?
With the spray in one hand and his flickering lighter in the other, Naki slowly approached the entrance to the showers and rolled around the corner. He had expected to see the snake, coiled up and ready to strike: he was more than surprised.
The creature he was looking at may have once been the snake, but now it seemed to be in the middle of some kind of transformation. He knew caterpillars changed into butterflies, and tadpoles into frogs, but he didn't think snakes went through the same types of change into anything else.
A darker shade of the sickly orange it had previously been, the small needle-like teeth were growing into larger versions as he watched, a grinning maw filled with incisors and fangs, an impossible number of perfect ivory blades dripping with thick, viscous saliva. A head was slowly forming, an elongated skull rising up from expanding shoulders, and stubby, malformed arms slowly stretching out from the distended torso bristling with rapidly expanding ribs. Its tail, covered with ridges and tipped with a fine blade-like protrusion made from cartilage, uncoiled from around its girth and lazily flicked out across the deck. Upon seeing him, or at least sensing him, for there were no visible eyes, ears or nostrils on the beast, the cavernous maw opened with an almost silent hiss, clearly a warning to Naki, and a warning he was more than willing to take heed of. Dropping the aerosol and lighter with a clatter, he spun on his heels and lurched out the showers, rushing back into the main locker room and losing his balance as he slipped on a pool of blood.
He tumbled to the ground, throwing his hands out to keep his balance and grimacing in disgust as one hand sunk into the opened cavity of the dead woman, bony links snapping and cracking as his weight proved too much and sunk into the fetid interior of the corpse. In a fit of panic, he rolled over and tried to haul himself to his feet. His hands and feet slipped as they tried to find some form of purchase in the gore-streaked room. He couldn't hear the deformed hybrid following him, though he couldn't think what it was hybridised between: it was unlike any animal he'd ever seen before. With his head swimming and his limbs numb, he hauled himself up onto one of the benches and pressed his body back against the closed lockers, his eyes fixed on the opening he'd just escaped from. He hauled himself to his feet and made a desperate, last-ditch attempt to lurch over to the exit, but his legs were like jelly and he toppled to the floor once more, landing heavily on the floor and knocking the wind from him. As he struggled to draw breath, he felt his head swimming as he teetered on the brink of unconsciousness and sensed a presence looming over him. Something wet and cold, like raw meat, pressed against his face and nipped at his lips, a cold liquid oozing into his throat…
Then the darkness consumed him.
