As I started to walk back down the stairs to the ground level of the mall, something went wrong.
At first I thought the faint thumping noise was the spike, but that was quickly ruled out as I confirmed the weapon was still in its standby mode of humming. A few more seconds standing there like a deer in the headlights made it clear I was hearing an approaching helicopter. Assuming the worst, I made a snap decision to try and hide underground.
If it was here to do a sweep for anything left alive, I guessed it would have thermal imaging and the mall had a partially intact glass ceiling over the open center I was in. I had no clue how well such things could see through walls, but I wanted as much material between me and the helicopter as possible.
A quick survey revealed a maintenance door under the stairs, whose lock easily opened to a quick bit of raking. In the time I had to set the spike down on the ground, it had tuned itself to the floor and reduced a foot-wide circle of the tiles into powder. After picking it up I really wished it would turn off- and to my surprise, at that focused thought, the humming stopped.
With the noise of the rotors now much louder, I just took that in stride and slipped through the doorway, locking it behind me and flipping on my headlamp to see. The door had granted me access to a small maintenance room for some of the building’s infrastructure, although there wasn’t anything actually underground.
As I waited for the helicopter to pass, my stomach dropped when the noise stopped directly overhead. After a terrifying few seconds, all noise suddenly stopped. Surprised, I let out a gasp which sounded to me like a gunshot in the still, confined space. Through the thin walls, I could faintly make out a conversation between at least two voices.
“Couldn’t you have done that sooner?”
“It is exhausting.”
“Whatever. We’ll drop you off here then drop the others to grab their stuff. The chopper will land outside town, so get moving after you’re done and we might get back in time to not completely mess up my sleep schedule.”
“Good luck, take some please take pics of the dargon!”
A few seconds after the last comment, I felt more than heard the impact of something hitting the ground. The items on the shelves around me vibrated as the ground shook. At this point, I was only taking tiny sips of breaths as I crouched hidden on top of a shelving unit around the corner from the door, regretting my decision to come here. For sneakiness reasons, I had left my phone in the hotel room so I couldn’t even send the “I love you” messages to my parents I was starting to dread might be necessary.
Since I was situated under the stairs, my straining ears picked up the heavy footsteps trudging up them right above me. My heart felt like it was trying to break my rib cage and run, but my breathing stayed steady and small.
As the person who had just been dropped off presumably found the same massive demon I had, I heard their mutterings cut through the building’s structure like it wasn’t there. “Big bastard, look as good as when I killed you.”
The clarity at which I could hear them made my try to quiet my breathing and heart even further out of fear the weird properties of sounds in the area would go both ways.
“Now, where is the spike…” the person continued to mutter. After a few seconds, they hummed, “should be here. And there is more wounds. Did fucking scavs get here already? No, no. It must have slipped. They wouldn’t dare.”
A humming like when the spike had been sitting idle started to resonate throughout the building- eliciting a response from the object in question. Before even a concerning-quick heartbeat could pulse, I had focused on stifling the emerging vibrations. Unlike before, my wishes met resistance, so I had to maintain my concentration to prevent the spike from vibrating. Despite being entirely a mental exercise, I felt like I was in a tug-of-war contest.
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Not getting a response, the person above me started to hum more. Not really louder, but more intently.
I could feel my control slipping, but grit my teeth and pushed through. My body locked up as all my brain power turned to the spike. Somewhere deep in my unconscious mind, the feeling of curious eyes intently watching me registered and was ignored.
The power ramped up again, and I stopped breathing, needing even the minuscule amount of awareness my body used to control that in order to hold my ground. The pressure mounted and I stopped seeing and hearing as switches I didn’t know existed turned off to dedicate more power to keeping the spike still.
The humming intensified and my heart stopped.
Another increase and a conceptual numbness started to spread from my core.
Another notch up and I wasn’t even aware of the spike anymore but still held on desperately.
Then as if it had never existed, the pressure shut off.
“Overlooked candidate? What does that mean?” The voice demanded, shocking me back to consciousness. I could feel my heart stutter a few times before leveling out again, just in time for me to start falling. In the struggle of wills, I had lost my balance and as bodily functions came back I overcorrected off the shelf.
I landed on my back with a painful thud and let out an involuntary gasp of pain. I had instinctually protected my head, so I avoided a concussion, but I was apparently bleeding profusely from my nose anyway. To my dismay, the impact hadn’t gone unnoticed and the voice suddenly shut up. Footsteps started descending the stairs.
“Can’t wait… Fucking scavs. And no one will check for days.”
Understanding the threat, my brain immediately switched into fight, flight, or freeze. I never locked up under stress and there was only one exit- so pretty quickly I settled on fighting despite the disadvantage. Heart rate slowed, breathing smoothed, and mind sharpened like twice before- although this time I would be face to face with my victim. The best option was an ambush, either at the door or around the corner. The space was pretty tight and there was nothing to hide behind near the door, so the corner it was.
Moving with cold control and precision, I set up my headlamp on the outside shelf just around the corner pointed at it. It painted an obvious light onto the wall and would hopefully attract attention for the split second I needed to strike as my target came round. Like before, I climbed to the top of the inside shelving unit and perched with the spike in hand. No one ever looked up as a first reaction to knowing something was wrong.
As the footsteps reached the maintenance door, I heard a chuckle. “When you make it so obvious I almost feel like letting you go. Shut up about uninfluenced observation time! Find someone else- this one is the bottom of the barrel.”
There was a screech as the door was ripped off the hinges, but I didn’t react.
“Ha ha, trying to blind me for a shot? Stupid. But try anyway, for my entertainment.”
The footsteps echoed through the small room, stopping just before reaching the corner. I still held perfectly still. With a sigh, my target stepped around the corner, arms to the side and chest puffed in a show of confidence. Like I expected, they glanced at the light shining into their face, but I held steady since they were too far to reach. A fraction of a second later, they relaxed, trying to look into the darkness. With an angry huff, they took a single stride forwards and I struck.
The ceiling wasn’t much taller than my target, so I was only a head above them, braced in a tight crouch against the edge of the shelves and a lip in the ceiling. Minute movements let me drop right behind them. In a blink they wheeled, but I was already trusting up, urging the spike to hum again.
There was an infinitesimal moment of hesitation as the tip touched their outfit before it was spontaneously ripped apart and the spike was driven into my target’s stomach. Like with the dragon, I felt no resistance.
By the time I had finished my stab, my hand was inside their ribs like a grotesque puppet. Melted intestines and muscles dripped down my arm and off my elbow as the corpse’s weight draped itself farther down my forearm. The spike had ended up going through the bottom of their head and the pallet separating mouth, right into the brain.
Sliding my arm and weapon back out the way it had gone in, I turned and ran as what felt like dozens- if not hundreds- of invisible eyes turned to look at me.
The next thing I remember, I was on the road back to the hotel, arm still soaked in gore with an inert spike in the passenger seat. The memories of that night only came back to me a few days later when the heavily censored news of what had happened broke.