Syberian Sunrise (3 page)

The figure turned around. Enzo knew, right away, that something was very, deeply wrong. Crimson lines, not veins, as they were too thin, but something else entirely, ran across the man's face and exposed skin. They seemed to radiate some kind of malignant sickness. And his eyes...they still held some kind of awful intelligence. Originally they had been a sharp green, and one of them glowed faintly with artificial light, signifying that the man had implants. But now they were bloodshot to the point of caricature.

A feral hunger, something primal and predatory, now stared out at Enzo. The thing made a noise, some horrible sound of triumph and anger, and took a few lumbering steps towards him. Enzo backed up instinctively, terror flooding his veins...but already his combat-ready mind was reacting, planning, hunting for weak spots.

He scanned the thing lumbering towards him as he backed up further into the corridor. The skin looked waxy and somehow tough, almost like an animal hide. Scrawling red lines against pallid flesh. And those reaching hands...all the fingers ended in long, jagged claws. Definitely not standard fare for the average human. Enzo had just about decided to go for the neck or the eyes, whichever one presented itself a better target, when he noticed something. The chest was slightly bulged. Something clicked on in his brain.

This was a weak spot.

Unfortunately, the thing had on a bulletproof vest. Enzo sighed and went for the neck as it came within arm's length, reaching for him, making awkward, eerie noises. The tip of the scalpel punched into the flesh and Enzo realized his instincts had been correct: it didn't have the soft, yielding give that regular skin did. He still got through though, and a gout of thick, bright red blood sprayed across his wrist. The creature let out a shriek as he grabbed the scalpel with both hands and brought it across the thing's neck, effectively cutting its throat.

More blood sprayed. The beast reached up and grabbed his artificial arm. He registered pressure, but no pain as the claws dug into the fake flesh, tearing it. Enzo tore the scalpel free, threw off the thing's hands and jabbed the tip into its right eye, where it stuck fast. Instead of trying to retrieve it, he forced it deeper with the palm of his hand. The entire scalpel nearly disappeared into the thing's eye, a scant few centimeters of metal protruding.

Here the former human let out a long wail, twitching spasmodically, and crashed to the ground. Enzo stepped back as it thrashed for a bit, then became still. He frowned, studying it for a long moment, waiting to see if it was playing dead. When he finally decided it wasn't, he stepped forward and crouched cautiously by it.

In the dim light of the corridor, the thing before him, the...his mind wanted to give it a name. He took in the awful features. It didn't so much seem decayed as it did changed. Its skin was stronger, and those red lines...he noticed they were receding, slowly, almost visibly. And the eyes, not empty, still intelligent, still there, but different...

Mutated.

That was it. The name stuck. This was a Mutant. Some kind of awful changeling. What had caused this? In the dim light, it looked hideous, perhaps because there was still something human lingering about the wrecked ruin of its face. He began to grab his scalpel, but noticed that the Mutant had come equipped with some supplies. He began by undoing the bulletproof vest. Enzo lamented the thought of walking around with the godawful stench of this thing, but armor was armor. It was still basically functional, so he pulled it on.

As he patted down the pockets, he found a few treasures. No gun, but a combat knife with a sheath that could be attached to a belt. He did just that, clipping the sheath to his own belt and checking out the knife. It was a right nice combat knife, eight inches of unbreakable steel, one smooth edge with a sure grip. No serration so that it wouldn't get stuck in someone's gut. He abandoned his scalpel in favor of the knife and sheathed it.

His final piece of salvage was a radio. It was a little black earpiece wraparound, obviously not being utilized by the creature. Enzo found it in one of the pockets, brought it out and activated it. He slipped it into his ear.

He spent a moment listening on the dead air, hoping to pick up some radio chatter, but there was utterly nothing. Checking the radio, he found that it worked appropriately. It was just that no one was talking. He consider his options.

Finally, he opened his mouth. “Is anyone there?”

There was a length pause, then, hesitantly, a female voice came back.

“Who is this?”

Chapter 03

–
All Question, No Answer
–

Enzo considered the situation. He had no idea who was on the other end, who they represented. There was a good chance it was an operater for whoever the fuck was running this freak show. Between waking up naked on a bed corpses in a furnace and having to do battle with...his eyes shifted to the corpse he'd made...whatever the fuck this Mutant thing was, he was really having a difficult time trying to suss the situation out.

“It's not important who I am. What the fuck is going on here?” Enzo replied.

There was a long pause.
“Listen...I need to know, did you wake up in a furnace?”
Enzo said nothing, waiting, not feeling good about this. The woman sighed.
“Look, the situation is fucked, okay? We're going to have to trust each other. I'm the one that put you there.”

Enzo snorted. “That is
not
a ringing endorsement for trust.”

“What? I saved you!”

“By putting me in a fucking furnace naked?!”

“Yes! It was the only way to free you from your holding tube.”

He opened his mouth to respond angrily, to ask what the fuck he was doing in a holding tube, but then a memory came to him. It was faded and fogged, less of a memory and more of a half-recalled nightmare from the distant past. And yet...he felt like it was a memory, and a recent one. Enzo could remember waking up, beating his hands against glass...something covering his face, keeping him breathing...being submerged in liquid.

“Where the fuck am I?” he asked.

“You're in the bowels of Syberia Installation. Listen, I freed you, it was my only shot. There's so few of us left and I
need
someone down there to activate the auxiliary generator before we lose the whole fucking grid. Now where are you?”

“I...” Enzo could hear the raw need, the desperation, in her voice. He'd gotten good at sniffing out bullshit down the years and prided himself on being able to figure out when someone was lying to him, even people that were really good at it. “I'm not sure,” he said, deciding that whoever this was, they were genuine.

For the moment, at least. He'd also found that people could love one second and the next fuck you over easy as can be.

“There's four sections down there. The first is disposal, which is where you would have woken up. The next is containment. That's going to have a lot of big containers in its main room,”
the woman advised him.

“That's where I am. In one of the offshoot corridors. I'm trying to find my way out. The only door, as far as I can tell, is locked down,” Enzo replied.

“I was afraid of that...hold on...”
A long pause left him drenched in gloomy isolation. He jumped as the body shifted slightly. He took a step back, knife out, staring at it.

“Any day now...” he muttered.

“Hold on,”
the woman replied irritably.

Enzo stared at the corpse. He'd only heard it move, not seen it, and the sound had been very slight. As he continued watching the body, he began to wonder if it was just his imagination playing tricks on him. In a gritty, industrial place like this, apparently buried underground, it was easy for that to happen. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

“Fuck!”
the woman snapped, making him jump.
“Okay, that door isn't opening, and it's the only conventional way out. Which means you'll have to get unconventional. I need you to go back into the main room, find Container Seventeen. It should be empty. Open it, crawl inside. It'll lead you to a maintenance hatch that will give you access to the maintenance areas. Move through that area. You'll have to proceed through the next section, which is the refinery, to get to the auxiliary generator. I need you to turn it on, the procedure is very simple.”

“Before I do
anything
, I want you to tell me where I am, who you are and what the
fuck
you people have been doing down here, because I just had to kill something that was most definitely not human!” Enzo snapped.

“We don't have time! Look, if you don't turn on that auxiliary generator in the next twenty five minutes, we're all
dead
, do you fucking understand me!?”

Enzo frowned. It didn't seem like she was exaggerating. Overreacting, perhaps. But Enzo was still just on the side of wanting to remain alive, at least to find out what the hell was going on. He took a moment to center himself.

“All right, fine, but after I do that, you give me fucking answers, got it?”

“Yes. Fine. Now, please go, I can guide you and...oh shit. Hold on. Gotta go dark.”

Abruptly, the connection was cut. Enzo frowned. “Hello?” Nothing. Dead air mocked him. “Hello!? Where the hell did you go?”

He was alone again.

Enzo sighed. Well, he'd better get moving. He took a step, then froze as the body shifted. This time he
did
see it. He stepped back, eyes wide, studying this new development as the corpse twitched and moved. For a second, he thought it was somehow coming back to life. Only no...
it
wasn't still alive, he realized, but something
inside
of it.

Trying to get out.

The chest bulged and shifted, partially exposed now that the vest was gone. Thoughts of contamination or infection had briefly rattled through Enzo's mind, as obviously
something
had taken this human and twisted it, but now he thought it was something entirely different. And his thoughts were confirmed as, through the slit he'd made when he'd cut the thing's throat, some kind of horrible creature emerged.

It was covered in blood and, after a moment's inspection, Enzo decided that it looked like a big slug. It slithered sluggishly from the corpse, about a foot long. The creature was coming towards him. What made it most like a slug were the two stubby eye-stalks that emerged from one end. As it came within a few feet of him, it reared up suddenly and a tiny mouth opened to emit a high-pitched shriek. Enzo leaped forward and stomped on it.

The result was fantastically disgusting.

A thick, syrupy crimson liquid splashed across the floor and his boot. There was a loud squealing noise that abruptly cut off. Enzo made a face as he pulled his boot back. A sound of suction split the air as he peeled his boot off the floor, then scraped it along the metal a few times to get the thing's guts and gore off.

“Gross,” he muttered.

As he prepared to leave, Enzo noticed something. The corpse was missing all those crimson lines just beneath its skin. It made sense to him that this thing, this...Mutant Slug, was response for what had happened to the body. It must have gotten inside, taken over, made changes. The blood it bled was roughly similar to the stuff that had come from the corpse when Enzo had cut it. So at least he now knew how this had happened.

It was a relief. He'd been briefly concerned about blood-borne or airborne viruses that could mutate him similarly. Now all he had to worry about was not letting these Slugs down his throat...unless they started small and grew from within...He grunted, turned and took off. Still too many unknowns. He needed some fucking answers. He wanted to believe that the mystery woman would have at
least
given him information on how not to get infected, and the fact that she didn't meant that it was the obvious answer: the Slugs.

Or maybe she'd been too busy and had forgotten.

Enzo reemerged in the main containment room. Moving along the nearest row of them, he checked their numbers, which were stenciled onto the front of each one above the dim glow of their control panels. After a moment, he'd found seventeen. Enzo spent a moment checking its levels and confirmed that it was empty. An emergency maintenance hatch was built into the bottom of it, just beneath the control panel.

Enzo sighed and knelt, opening it up. The things he had to do just to get along sometimes...He pried it open and looked within. The chamber was clean on the inside, as though never used. An eerie red glow permeated from the interior. A maintenance light. He clambered into the chamber and closed the hatch behind him. As he did, the light shut off, encasing him in an impenetrable darkness. Sighing again, Enzo pondered his choices.

Leave it closed, and secure, and fumble in the darkness, or leave it open and himself vulnerable and be able to see?

Choices, choices.

Finally, he decided to take his chances and left the hatch open. The creepy light returned, illuminating a very minimal ladder built into the side of the chamber. He marched over to it, secured his gear and hurried up it. It wasn't long before he'd hit the top and discovered another hatch. Using his more powerful arm, he screwed it open and peered cautiously through the hole. There was nothing there but darkness.