T-Plus 2

  Oliver jolted and stiffened at the sound. He swiveled his head toward the barricade, hearing the rattling resume. He reached out for the extinguisher by his side, his only companion beside the trusty light. The technician stuffed the flashlight under his arm, the same one hovering over the extinguisher, using the other to steady himself as he stood.

  This could be it: his final fight.

  He shuffled closer to the barricaded door, pointing the nozzle forward. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, left, right... One step at a time, he approached the door. The rattling intensified. It was worse than when both he and Toast were here, and, as he approached, some of the smaller boxes they shoved on top tumbled down from their high perches. They crashed in a thundering cascade of clattering, the looser objects tumbling down alongside them.

  The technician stepped back, ducking under the conference table. Some of the boxes and chairs slid past him, rolling to a stop. The rest piled up, creating a wider barricade, and revealing the top edges of the door. The door was visibly shaking.

  Oliver shoved the heavier fallen items into a compact circle against the barricade, grimacing as he put more pressure on his legs. Halfway done with patching the barricade, he stepped onto some of the documents still littering the ground. His foot slipped, and his elbow smashed into the footstool beside him.

  He cursed in pain, clutching his arm as he stumbled backwards into the conference table. Pain spread from where he hit the table, connecting the pain in his legs to his arms. From his legs to his elbows, and now his side. What else could hurt? He bumped into the extinguisher, knocking it to the floor. The canister rolled off the table in a metallic clatter, spinning out of the radius of his light.

Oh. Okay then.

  Even during his stupor of pain, the barricade continued to shake. His legs began to shake. His whole body began to shake. The table began to shake. Oliver held onto the table, feeling the ground rumbling beneath his feet. He swiveled his light around, seeing the cabinets in the far corner shaking, their doors opening and closing. Holding onto the table to keep stable, he limped over to the window, pointing the light out.

  Everything was vibrating, rumbling, and skidding out of place. Oliver turned the light to point at the lab entrance. The barricade had completely fallen through. The crates had slid across the floor, slamming into lab tables or even into the aliens still patrolling. They splattered against the far wall in flesh colored patterns, out of view, out of sight. Most of those still left made for the door, pressing against it until they oozed through the cracks and disappeared outside.

  The quake continued on for a long while, enough for Oliver to count through five minutes worth, not including the time before he bothered to start counting. He clung to the conference table, climbing on it to dodge the chairs, stools, and other loose parts of the barricade as they came apart and tumbled towards him. They screeched across the floor, slamming into the conference table or into the other wall. He watched as the vent Toast had gone through was blocked by one of the filing cabinets.

  A large jolt shocked him from his position, and the whole room tilted the other way. He slid across the conference table towards the door, and the contents of the room followed suit. Oliver clawed at the table, holding onto the edges and stopping himself before he got slammed into the wall as another flesh colored splatter. His flashlight flew into the air, replacing him as it tumbled into the mess instead. The force of the furniture avalanche broke down the office door, and slammed into the lab wall.

  The shaking finally eased off, although some muted tremors still pulsed through the floor. Oliver let go of the table, climbing down.

Was it over?

  He searched for the flashlight, hoping to find a beam shining out of the mess of what remained. He was in luck. Stuck between one of the stools and the filing cabinet was his flashlight. Oliver picked it up, swinging it around to survey the damage.

  The entirety of the lab was a mess, again. Most of the boxes, crates, and furniture, whatever wasn’t nailed down, had formed a natural barricade on this far wall, once again blocking the lab’s door from entry. Of the aliens that didn’t make it out, they either become part of the furniture’s kill count or made it out as he had, by remaining on top of lab tables or wall cabinets. His flashlight spotted at least three of them, which was much better than the original number. None of them seem to be moving at the moment, so he left them alone.

“I hope Toast is alright,” Oliver muttered, retreating into the office again.

  The last time the station had a hull breach, if this was yet another one, the vents had twisted in on themselves. He could only hope Toast was either a fast crawler or he already found himself an exit before the quakes happened. Either way, he was on his own.

  With flashlight in hand, Oliver searched for the extinguisher. If Lady Luck was on his side, it’d be in an easy to reach location. Keeping a hand on the wall as he stumbled around, he discovered that Luck was not on his side this time. After making a few laps around the office, he still couldn’t find the extinguisher. Given the situation, it had probably gotten caught in the mess and was now deep in the pile of furniture and crates stacked against the wall, or, worse, rolled into the vent.

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  Giving up, Oliver sat on the conference table, giving his legs a break. The pieces of the lab coat Toast had used to wrap his legs were beginning to come undone. He swung one leg up at a time onto the table, setting the light down beside him. Grimacing, he tightened the whole wrap, putting a comfortable amount of pressure on his legs before tying it tighter. He did the same on the other leg.

  He lowered his legs off the table again, swinging them as he sat there in thought. He surveyed the room with the light, looking for anything useful that stuck out. Oliver turned the light toward the hangar entrance further in. One of the drones’ noses were poking out, and around its base was more crates of supplies. Behind it was probably a larger pile up of the other drones and their spare parts and tools. It was worth a look once he cleared the lab room of aliens and cleaned up. Now, the question was...

  “How the hell do I get rid of them?” he muttered, pointing the light at the closest one.

  It was moving now. He couldn’t tell if it was trying to get down from the lab table it was perched on, or if it was trying to cling onto the bottom half and just missing. Whatever it was doing, half of its squishy self was dangling off the edge of the lab table. A good body slam had already proven to do the trick, but Oliver wasn’t in the condition to be exerting himself like that at the moment.

  He got off the conference table, taking his time as he exited the office. No point in staying in there right now. He swung the light around, keeping his eyes peeled for anything useful in the main area of the lab. The technician paused in front of the lab’s entrance, blockaded by large crates. Well, it wasn’t the extinguisher, but he found the blowtorch used to weld drone parts together wedged into part of the barricade in front of the lab entrance. It must’ve tumbled out of the hangar.

  Oliver fished out the blowtorch, wiggling it out of its crevice between two of the larger crates. The canister was half the of the extinguisher and five times dustier from its rough handling by the quakes. Safety protocol called for a welding mask and at least some heavy-duty gloves, but he could find neither in the general vicinity. He picked up a crate lid, its matching crate somewhere else. It was from one of the crates that extra drone parts would be put in, so it was made to be heat resistant. This would have to do for now.

  The technician turned his attention back to the closest alien. It’d climbed down from the table now, although some of it was still attached to the table edge. Its face was facing him, the eyes and mouth drooping into a frowning expression. At this distance, it couldn’t sense him to approach him in one of its mad dashes, which was fine by him. The other ones further in were also making their way down from their perches.

“I wonder if this is how Toast feels during his experiments?” Oliver muttered to himself as he held his flashlight under his arm, holding the crate lid in the same hand with the blowtorch in the other. “Time to experiment.”

  He approached the nearest Nereid, holding his crate lid as a shield, and brandishing the blowtorch ahead of him. Unlike the faceless version he and Toast ran into on the first floor, this one reacted to him a lot faster. Their radius seemed to have expanded by a good meter. So this evolution of theirs was more than just the addition of their face.

  It swarmed at him, extending its usual tentacles towards him. He warded them off with the lid, starting up the blowtorch. Oliver waved his awkward blade of flame at some of the tentacles. The parts the flame touched sizzled and gave off one of the most rancid scents he ever had to smell: a mixture of melting plastic and burning flesh. He retched, retreating away from the alien. The alien did the same, its tentacles waving in the air. The tentacles he did burn were charred black, and burn marks continued to spread down the tentacle towards it main body. Despite the pain (Did these aliens feel pain?), the Nereid continued to approach him. Or rather, its attention seemed to be turned to the blowtorch he had in his hand. Oliver waved the blowtorch around, still spouting flames, and watched as the still moving tentacles followed its circular arch. He stopped, letting it get closer to him.

“Is this thing a bug?” Oliver wondered. “Like a moth to a flame... literally.”

  The Nereid tried to wrap its tentacles around the flame, burning and hurting itself in the process. Oliver was careful to dodge the few other roaming tentacles that tried to attach itself to his arm or the rest of him, burning as much as he could and watching as the black burns spread across its body. It was a good ten minutes of observing the alien go through its self-torture before it finally crumbled at his feet. Oliver stepped on it for good measure. It wasn’t getting up again. It stunk to the end of the universe and back, but it worked.

  Now, for the other aliens. He did the same for the rest of them, approaching them at his slow pace and watching as they did they work for him. It got a bit dicey when two of them approached him at the same time, but he kept the blowtorch between the two of them, and it worked out. Almost burned himself a couple of times, but he avoided the worst of it. In the end, it was just him and the black crumpled forms of the Nereids. He set the blowtorch and crate lid down.

“That solves two things. Nereids are vulnerable to open flames, and they probably have heat sensing organs... or whatever they have.”

  Oliver nodded to himself at the conclusion. He sat on the nearest lab table, resting his legs again. He swung the light around the room again, making sure it really was just him in here now. Nothing moved, nothing twitched. It was just him. He breathed out a sigh of relief. He pointed the light at the hangar’s entrance, his next goal. With the drone’s nose in the way, he’d have to make himself a way through by shoving everything below it aside, which was something he didn’t have the power nor energy to do at the moment. Only one way to fix that.

  He made his way back into the office, and cleared a suitable space on the conference table. Lowering himself onto it, he relaxed. Well, he’s slept on worse. Oliver turned the light off, keeping it and the blowtorch within arm’s reach as he closed his eyes. A fifteen minute nap wouldn’t hurt, right?