There was movement, footsteps that made no sense, and something scraping against metal. Then there came a cry from down on the floor: One of blind terror. It quickly shifted into a quick blast of agony as someone died to a horrid rending noise.
“WHAT IS THAT?!” another man yelled.
Feet moved, there were high, panicked voices, and more movement that made no sense. Through it all, Gaylen heard a faint, rapid clicking. Even as the colour attacked his wits, he recognised it as trigger-pulls.
“My gun doesn’t work!” a man on the walkways shouted, and was echoed by another man on the floor.
Gaylen tried the reset button on his own weapon, but nothing happened. The weapon was dead.
“Do something, do something!” Sammy yelled, and was clearly simply panicking.
There was a great noise of large metal being abused, voices shouting curtly in a language Gaylen didn’t understand, moving feet, and yet more dry clicks.
“Stab it!” someone shouted, in a voice that indicated he didn’t intend the act himself.
Gaylen risked a peek down, and saw a nightmare.
It was the colour. That colour from the Korokis Effect. If it even was a colour. The madness. And another thing had emerged from it.
He only saw it as a silhouette, but it was huge, more humanoid that he remembered, but still oddly proportioned, and had an amorphousness that he didn’t know whether to blame on the confusing lights, his own perception, or the thing itself.
He had a view down into a maze of sorts, within which human beings looked like rats being chased by a cat. A Green Jacket, moving blindly around the leftover machinery, moving towards the back door. It brought him into direct line of sight with the thing, and it lunged with speed that belied its size and mere two legs.
It caught the man in a hand, or something like it, and then ripped his torso in two.
The back door! Gaylen thought.
If the men were still up on the walkways, then he couldn’t see them through the moving shadows and shifting colours. That had to mean they couldn’t see them either. And so he swung his legs out of the light, and let himself fall.
The drop felt longer than it should have been, and the landing rattled him harshly. But he kept moving. Survival. He was good at survival. He had even survived this once before.
With Bers’s help, admittedly.
There were more screams of terror and pain, and maybe a couple of actual battle. Direction felt a bit tricky at the moment, but he was as certain as he could be that none of it was coming from the bottom of the stairs. He ran down, skipping he did not know how many steps with each leap. He wasn’t too confused to sense the difference when he reached the floor, nor to remember that the door was to his left.
Gaylen turned, and sprinted, ready to rush out into the night and find Herdis and Bers. He didn’t manage to stop in time; merely slow down before he smacked into the obstruction.
It was some of the leftover machinery, torn, bent, tipped over, to block the back door.
That rending noise earlier…
Gaylen heard another man die, and another who sounded like he was in the process of dying. He also heard footsteps coming, just as fast as his own.
Sammy came out of the colour, wide-eyed with fear, and he spotted Gaylen.
The man turned his momentum into an attack. Gaylen caught it, threw him over his shoulder, and got moving again.
There were the windows. They were high up, not easy to access, but necessity was a powerful force. He caught glimpses of the thing, through swirls of the colour, in between machinery and pipes and pillars. It was hunting through the maze, moving like some quick little bird, rather than the huge horror it was. A Green Jacket was screaming for help in true despair, and someone was beating on the outside of the blocked door.
Gaylen did his best to circle around the whole thing, guided only by the brief glimpses he caught. Given how fast the thing could move they meant little, but he had to try. He crouched low and shuffled awkwardly beneath some piping, only to hear footsteps coming.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
This time it was the head agent, the kicker. He had a blade in one hand; one of those short, vicious things halfway between knife and sword, for cramped shipboard fighting. And clandestine work.
Gaylen raised his useless pistol.
“STOP!”
The agent did stop. Gaylen could see the calculations in his body language and partially shrouded face; weighing the chances of Gaylen having a working gun.
The man had a bulk to him that hadn’t been there before; evidence of body armour, and wore a poncho long enough to hide weapons from casual observers. He had come ready for complications. But not for this.
Gaylen circled around, keeping the weapon trained on the man on his way to the building’s front wall. The agent kept his distance, tense and ready.
Running feet moved close to them, and whether it was the effects of the colour, this whole situation, or just a momentary brainfart, Gaylen glanced to the side. The agent, of course, lunged at him.
Gaylen twisted away from the blade, but it was a close thing. Of course, he couldn’t shoot, and so the ruse was up. The agent lunged again, coming even closer this time. Gaylen jabbed back, and the barrel of his pistol smacked into the man’s eyesocket. It stunned him for an instant, and Gaylen jabbed again. The agent stopped the third attack with his free arm, and a big slash of the blade forced Gaylen back.
And then the thing found them.
It came out from between the colour and some of the machinery, trailed by the screams of someone who was terribly injured. Those overlong arms that made no sense spread out wide, seeking, grasping, clawing, and Gaylen didn’t give a damn about the Heg agent. He just bolted to the side, and heard metal part as it was slashed in a great swipe.
He wove and jumped and zig-zagged across the floor, away, away, away from a thing he didn’t understand and couldn’t fight. He did a quick backwards glance, and thought it wasn’t on him for the moment, but that was no reason to stop. Or to hide. A previous resident had tried to hide. He’d seen the stain they’d left.
He had to get out, and with the thing not immediately on him, he tried for the main door. There were still a few others alive in this mess, trapped in here with him. He heard them move, and yell, and make confused noises as they tried to make sense of a waking nightmare.
The colour… the damned colour… it was so confusing. It felt like the space around him was moving. Maybe it WAS moving, on some incomprehensible border between realities. But he made progress. Somehow, gradually, stepping on gore as he went, he made progress towards the main door.
It was a hefty thing, meant for transport vehicles, and had a sturdy interior lock. Not sturdy enough to withstand plasma, but of course his gun was useless.
He felt around, desperately looking for a plain, manual locking mechanism, that didn’t require a retinal scan, or DNA, or a key fob or whatever people used on this particular backwater planet. For two agonising seconds, he found nothing. Then came the noise. He turned, as metal let out a horrid squeal of abuse, and something even bigger than the thing moved.
A large section of the machinery came crashing down, pushed over by the thing. A man who had been hiding behind it let out a yelp just before he was crushed. And then the floor gave way.
All he could do was tuck his limbs in and try to shield his head. The floor didn’t shatter; it broke into sections, and one dumped him down like a slide before fully collapsing. Dust was thrown up, more machinery fell, followed by smaller bits of piping and floor.
Gaylen realised that he was both alive and relatively uninjured, and so he pushed himself up. He swayed a little, but ultimately stayed on his feet.
He was in some kind of cellar. Someone had put all that industrial machinery on a relatively flimsy floor, above a cellar network. Because of course they had.
Well, his legs were working, and a quick check confirmed that so were his arms and hands. He started walking again, cautiously moving over fallen debris he could only barely see. He wanted to get back to running, but he also didn’t want to impale himself.
A cellar meant a set of stairs, or at least a ladder, and so that became his vague goal; a way out, back to the car. He took his comm out, but found it just as dead as the pistol. Well, he had to check.
Someone groaned painfully, clearly injured, and somewhere else a man coughed. Coughed and moved.
Gaylen drew his knife; that thing still worked, at least, and he kept on moving. As the dust settled a bit he saw Sammy. The Green Jacket underboss, or whatever he was, moved in a pained stagger, but was picking up speed as he recovered from his own trip down to this place. And moreover, he wasn’t fumbling blindly, like Gaylen. He moved steadily in a single direction. He knew a way out.
Gaylen slowed down a little, shifting his focus to moving as stealthily as he could, given very adverse circumstances, and followed the man. Sammy kept on coughing, and brought out his own comm as he continued making his way.
“Hello? Hello! Kaff! Damn it! Hello?”
Then the thing arrived.
Gaylen heard a heavy thump behind him; about what he expected from a large biped dropping down a storey and a half. He turned his head, and through the dust and the outskirts of the colour he saw a huge figure, and the long, sharp appendages its arms ended in.
Sammy screamed, and Gaylen gave up on stealth and caution both. Tripping was no more dangerous than being slow. The thing wasn’t done, but it was running low on targets. Its feet, or whatever it had, crunched on broken plastic, resin and bent metal as it came after both of them.
Gaylen followed Sammy, who went into a tunnel that led away from the basement area. Tiny lights lined the ceiling on both sides, giving just enough illumination to run by. They stretched on, and Gaylen realised this was part of some sort of network. He had a way out, and the ceiling was lower than the thing’s head.
And so he ran, after Sammy and away from the thing, and wondered what was going on with the crew.