NINETEEN
"THE SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE HAS BEEN
activated," a recording intoned, reverberating through the
room, crowding out the rest of its message. "You have four
minutes thirty seconds to reach minimum safe distance."
Combined with the sirens and flashing emergency lights,
Chris was on sensory overload before the fight even began.
Alexia raised her hand to hit Claire, and Chris fired,
the .357 bucking in his hand, the shot blasting over the
self-destruct alarms, deafeningly explosive.
Yes! A clean hit, right through the gut, and Claire was
already at the elevator, pushing the button, stepping inside...
... but instead of bleeding, instead of faltering even a
step, Alexia smiled at him. She lifted one of her slender
gray hands and pushed it into her body, the flesh melding
seamlessly, flowing like water. A second later she
held up the round he'd nailed her with and gently tossed
it in his direction.
Bad, this is very, very bad, Chris thought numbly, and
then she started to change.
The lithe gray female crouched on the metal grid and
her liquid flesh started to tremble, to form tiny peaks
and dips all across her body, the tissue bubbling, expanding.
The peaks became mountains, the dips, valleys,
all of it gray and swelling as her limbs started to
fold in on themselves. Her arms curved over and joined
the growing mass, the legs disappearing into it, the texture
turning rough and striated, veins like cables rising,
and she kept swelling. Her head rolled down and became
part of the giant, rounded body of her, gray becoming
muscle-tissue red, the purple and blue of blood
vessels networking across like a tide.
"You have four minutes to reach minimum safe distance,"
someone said, but Chris barely heard her, he was
backing away, becoming more and more convinced that
this was not going to end well. The elevator was
blocked, and she just kept getting bigger.
Thick tentacles pushed out from beneath the elephantine
mass, undulating like waves, spreading out across
the platform. Chris's back hit a wall, stopping him, and
the thing, the massive, tumorous thing suddenly rose up
as if unbending from some non-existent waist, spreading
giant wings, a dragonfly's wings, raising a contorted
and deformed half human face.
The face opened its mouth and a gigantic roaring
shriek spilled out, the wings trembling from the raw
power of the sound - and then it spit at him, a thin
stream of yellow green bile that splashed on the platform
at his feet, and began to eat through the metal.
"Shit!" Chris shouted, and barely jumped out of the
way as one of the tentacles slashed forward. He had to
watch the mouth and tentacles at the same time...
... and from rounded, quivering pink spheres that had
grown up around the base of the giant body, moving
things began to crawl out.
Chris ran to the farthest corner from the Alexia-thing
and raised the .357, not sure where to shoot. The small
subcreatures were landing on the platform, some like
flat, rounded rocks with tentacles, some like beetles,
some like nothing he'd ever seen before, and they were
all coming toward him, moving fast.
The eyes, if you can't kill it maybe you can blind it...
but the eyes were already blind, round gray holes with
darkness underneath, and he'd already seen how effective
bullets were against her flesh.
That decided it for him. Chris took aim and fired...
... and the pulsating, bloated creature was screaming
again, this time in pain, one of her wings fluttering
down to the platform.
A few of the small organisms had reached him, one of
the beetle creatures leaping onto his leg, trying to climb
up. Disgusted, he brushed it off, but there was another to
take its place, and a third. A tentacle flew at his face,
shot from one of the rounded stone shapes. Chris
blocked it, but barely.
Move!
"You have three minutes thirty seconds to reach minimum
safe distance."
Chris ran along the back wall, reached the other corner
in front of the creature and targeted again, trying for
another wing. The shot went high, but the next one hit.
It howled, the broken wing hanging from shredded
connecting tissue, and then spit again, the stream of bile
missing his face by inches. The thing now had only its
two uppermost wings, and though he knew he'd hurt it,
it didn't seem to have suffered anything close to serious
injury.
And I have two rounds left.
There had to be something he could do, some way to
stop it, the self-destruct was going to blow all of them to
hell and it would be his fault. He leaped away as another
tentacle whipped out from the creature's base, trying to
think, this was a goddamn emergency and he had to
think...
... emergency release only.
The bloated monster shrieked. More of the beetles
were jumping at him but he ignored them, having only
to turn his head to see the inset weapon next to the door,
the one with the lockdown bar. A grenade or rocket
launcher, whatever it was, it was beautiful, but the bar
was still down, it hadn't released.
"You have two minutes to reach minimum safe distance."
Ka-chunk.
The bar flipped up.
Chris snatched it out, lifting and aiming it at the creature's
swollen guts. He didn't know what it would do
but he hoped it was good, he hoped it would shut that
bitch down.
There was no safety, nothing to chamber. Chris pulled
the trigger...
... and a fury of white light and heat leaped from the
barrel, blowing into the fat belly like an arrow into a balloon.
The effect was huge, the explosion monstrous.
A fountain of blood and gray jelly splatted out from
the gaping, ragged hole, backsplattering onto his face,
but he only had eyes for the screaming Alexia beast as
its flesh and bone form gave out, deflating...
The upper body of the creature was trying to pull free
from the dying mass, the two wings flailing frantically
at the air, but with only two, it couldn't free itself...
and so it was dying, he knew because he could see its
blood draining away, because the color of its horrid
flesh was changing, turning ashy, the subcreatures shriveling,
because of the absolute, complete hatred on its
face ... and the absolute surprise.
As the Alexia monster fell silent and began to sag, her
features dripping, Chris heard that he had one minute
left.
Claire.
He dropped the incendiary launcher and ran.
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