Chapter 12
“Oh, shit!” I gasped as I knelt down beside the body.
The alien on the ground had a purple outfit that somewhat resembled hospital scrubs. The scrubs covered up its narrow, orange body, but its limbs stuck out from the clothes and revealed one of the reasons the doctors here were so renowned for their skill and their work.
The alien had two legs, which was normal to me, but it was the four arms sticking out of its torso through four different sleeves that caught my attention. It meant that the doctor would have been able to do four things at once, which would have made them quicker, more efficient, and by looking at its long, dainty, agile fingers, a lot better at the finer stuff.
I checked the body over for any sign of injury, but I wasn’t able to see any blood or wounds anywhere. I moved my attention up to its face, which was the same dark orange color. It had closely cropped hair on the top of its head, a gaping mouth that didn’t have any lips, two holes for the nose, and wide, bulging eyes that looked glassy and lifeless. The spark was gone from behind the eyes, and the skin was dull and bloodless.
But there was no obvious injury. I carefully rolled the alien’s head to one side and then the other to check there wasn’t a wound on the back of its skull, but there was nothing. It looked like the alien had just died while he was walking along the corridor. A heart attack seemed possible, but why hadn’t someone rushed the alien to the medical facilities?
I checked for a pulse just to be sure, although the dead eyes and motionless body kind of gave away the fact it was dead. There was no pulse, but to my surprise, the body was still putting off heat.
“What is it?” Rayne asked when she saw the confused look on my face.
“The body’s still warm,” I said as I pressed the skin underneath my fingers.
“Really?” Rayne asked as she kneeled down beside me and felt the alien’s arm for herself. “You’re right. It’s almost body temperature.”
“He must have died a few minutes ago, if that,” I said with a frown. “But I can’t see any injuries or blood. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What if it was some kind of virus?” Rayne asked as she hurriedly put her mask over her nose and mouth. “It would explain the lack of injuries.”
“I cannot see any signs of a viral infection on the body or in the vicinity,” Francine said through Bob. “And I can assure you that your suits will protect you from whatever killed these people.”
“Still, do you think we should even go inside?” Rayne asked. “It could be dangerous.”
“It is likely,” Francine said.
“Then let’s just get back on the ship, then,” Rayne said as she spun around to go back toward the ship.
“Hang on a minute, Rayne,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“We both saw what happened on Lilacron,” I said. “We saw how easily the Karaak wiped the entire planet out in one attack. Hell, we almost got killed ourselves.”
“I know,” she said. “But what does that have to do with this?”
“Everything,” I replied. “Francine told us about the nanotechnology they have here. If it’s true, and it really is that advanced, then maybe it can help me get that edge that might give us a chance against the Karaak. They’re gunning for Earth, and it’s pretty high on their list, from what I can understand. It’s my home, and if this nanotech can help me beat these bastards, then I’m not leaving without it. Plus, we should see if there’s anyone in here who could tell us what happened. Now, I don’t blame you if you wanna wait in the ship--”
“Screw that, I’m not waiting around for you,” Rayne said. “We’ll find this thing, and then we’ll get out of here.” And with that, she shuffled through the gap in the doorway without hesitation.
I followed her through, stepped carefully over the corpse, and found myself in an enormous entrance hall.
It was about two stories high. There was a sculpture in the center of the room, and a long line of elevators and doorways that led off in different directions. The roof was like a skylight, which meant that I could see the stars glistening beyond the space station as we slowly circled the dark pink planet. It was a spectacular view, and for a moment, I just drank it in.
“Oh, God,” I sighed as I looked back down at the floor.
The whole room was covered in dead bodies. Some were leaning up against walls, some were lying on the floor, and a few were piled up on top of one another where they had collapsed. It was like a bomb had gone off and left death and destruction in its wake, but the only things it had destroyed were the people, not the environment around them.
“What happened here?” Rayne gasped. “There are so many of them.”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Everyone’s…” Rayne said and then trailed off out of the shock of the situation.
“Dead,” I sighed. “Yeah.”
“Was it the Karaak?” Rayne asked.
“No,” I said and shook my head. “This doesn’t look like their style, and there aren’t any injuries.”
“Then what could it have been?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But it’s very possible that whatever did this is still here.”
“Great,” Rayne sighed. “That’s not terrifying at all.”
I nodded and then stepped further into the room. It was eerily quiet and everything was still. The bodies covered the floor, and we had to watch where we stepped in order to leave them in peace. The sight of all of this made my skin crawl, and another shiver ran down my spine.
A part of me was screaming at me to turn around, get back into the ship, and fly away. But I needed to see if there were any survivors, and I wanted to know what the hell could have done this to all of these people. Rayne seemed to be feeling exactly the same as I did as she tiptoed through the entrance hall. She had her gun in her hands and her finger on the trigger, and she jumped every time one of the lights buzzed or an elevator beeped. All of our senses were heightened, and I felt like every muscle in my body was tense and trembling, ready to fight if any danger came at us.
“Where should we go?” Rayne asked.
“I would recommend that you do not use any elevators,” Francine-Bob said. “Just in case the electricity fails. You do not want to be stuck in this space station if a problem does arise.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I say we start on one side of the space station and work our way around. We can check for survivors in all the rooms, and if we do find any, maybe there’s something in the medical bay that could help them.”
“That sounds good to me,” Rayne said. “Maybe there could be some answers in one of the other sectors that could tell us what happened here.”
I nodded, and then together we made our way over to a doorway on the right-hand side of the room, which opened out into a wide corridor. There were more bodies here, too, of multiple different species. Some of them were the same as the first alien I had encountered by the door, while others were species I hadn’t seen before.
There was some blood on the walls in the hall, but that was just because some of the people that had fallen had hit their heads on sharp corners, or in one of the doctors’ cases, it had actually impaled itself on a scalpel that it had been carrying.
But, there was still no sign of foul play. It didn’t even look like there had been any forced entry, either. It just didn’t add up.
We moved slowly, and I made sure to check behind us every so often. I wasn’t about to let whatever murdered all of these people sneak up on us from behind.
Eventually, we came to the first door on the right-hand side of the hall. I glanced at Rayne, who gave me a nod, and then I slowly pushed the door open and slipped inside.
The room was absolutely huge and filled with long tables that stretched the entire length of the room. Long benches sat on either side of the tables, and half-eaten plates of food were cooling on the tabletops. A long counter sat in front of one of the walls with buckets of food ready to be eaten, only there was no one there to serve it. The servers were all lying dead on the floor beside it, slowly cooling beside the hotplates.
There were more bodies in the rest of the room. I put my hand out and pressed it on the neck of one of the closest bodies to me, and though there wasn’t any pulse, they were still warm, just like the first body had been.
“This guy can’t have been dead for more than a few minutes,” I said.
“In fact, I am detecting body heat from all of the corpses in this room,” Francine-Bob said. “But there are no signs of any survivors.”
“What?” Rayne sighed as she looked around at all of the bodies inside the room.
“It has to be viral, right?” I suggested. “I know you said you couldn’t detect anything, Francine, but I mean, what else could it be? There’s nothing to suggest that any of these aliens were killed, or that anything came in here and took them out. So, maybe some sick patient from some unknown planet came in here carrying a deadly virus, and it killed everyone?”
“It is a logical scenario,” Francine said. “That, or they were poisoned somehow. While these are, or were, the best doctors in the galaxy, there is always a risk when bringing in patients that they will be infected with something that none of the doctors know how to fight, and that none of their immune systems could handle.”
“It could explain how it killed all of these people so quickly,” Rayne said. “If they’d never been exposed to something like this before, then maybe it worked faster than it did on the patient that was brought in.”
It was a logical explanation for their deaths, but something still didn’t quite sit right with me about it all. I wanted to think it was a virus because that was the easy explanation, but something in my gut was telling me that there was more to it than what met the eye.
If this was something even more severe than a virus, then I needed to work out what to do about it before we left. It was possible that it could endanger the lives of any other travelers just like us who turned up here unaware of the dangerous situation they were walking into if we didn’t work out what had happened here.
I needed to be methodical and objective. We would check as many rooms as we could, look for any survivors that might need our help, and then we would slowly make our way to the medical bay, where I hoped we would find some answers.
“Let’s move on,” I said.
We walked back out into the hallway and continued on around the corner.
“Oh…” Rayne groaned when we found a young alien’s body lying in a pool of vomit on the floor.
The alien was young, around the size of a six-year-old child back on Earth. My heart broke as I looked down at the small body lying in a pool of its own vomit. That body had been a kid just a few minutes ago. It probably had parents, friends, and a life before all of this. And now, here was this kid, dead on the floor, all alone.
There was throw-up all around the kid’s mouth, down the chest, and all over the floor, and I was pretty sure that the yellow-green glop was the entire contents of the kid’s stomach. The stench of it was absolutely awful, and if it wasn’t for the breathing tube in my nose, I was convinced I probably would have thrown up as well just from the smell. I silently hoped that the kid’s death had been painless and that they hadn’t known what hit them before it was too late, though the vomit oozing across the floor hinted at something else.
I made sure to give the body a wide berth as we passed it, but as I turned to carry on down the hall, I could have sworn I saw something move in my peripheral vision. I immediately spun around and looked down at the body. I stared at it for a few seconds and tried to see any sign of movement or any twitching of its limbs that would explain what I thought I’d seen.
“What is it?” Rayne asked when she noted that I’d stopped walking. “Did you see something?”
“I thought I saw…” I said, but I trailed off when it really set in how truly and totally dead the alien on the floor was. “Forget it. I think I want to find survivors so much that I’m seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Me, too,” Rayne said and she put her hand supportively on my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s keep looking.”
I took a deep breath and forced myself to keep walking down the hall. I checked behind me one last time, just to be sure, but the kid was still motionless on the floor. I sighed at the loss of such a young life and then refocused on the task at hand.
The corridor took us around another two corners, and then we found ourselves looking at three doors. One on the left, one on the right, and one at the end of the hall.
“I’ll take the left,” I said.
“I’ll take right,” Rayne said.
“Bob, stay here and warn us if anything comes,” I said.
Bob beeped affirmatively and assumed his position as our lookout.
We split off from one another and went to our respective doors. I waited for Rayne to open hers and go inside, just in case anything jumped out of her room and tried to eat her, or something along those lines. But once she had disappeared from view and hadn’t ended up as some monster’s dinner, I opened my own door and walked inside.
I found myself in a huge kitchen. There were rows upon rows of metal counters where food was supposed to be prepared, and there were even some pots bubbling away on cookers that were mostly located in the center of the room. There was a walk-in fridge in the far corner of the huge room, but the door hung open, which meant the whole room was a couple of degrees colder. I felt the cool air on my face as I stepped inside, and there was a soft hiss of air as the door closed gently behind me.
There were a few aliens on the ground on each of the rows, and I quickly checked each of them for a pulse, but to no avail. All of them had died the same way as everyone else in the space station. No wounds, not gunshots, no murder from what I could see, just dead in a matter of seconds, before there was time to even realize what was happening.
I sighed as the number of bodies I was recording in my head got higher and higher, but I was pulled from my thoughts when I came across one of the bodies behind one of the ovens.
A sharp intake of breath rushed into my lungs when I first saw it. At first, I thought that the body was covered with blood and had bled out all over the kitchen floor. But, as I got closer to the body, I saw the huge cooking pot on its side just next to the victim’s head. An inappropriate laugh of relief escaped me when I realized what I was looking at, which stemmed from the fact that I was so used to seeing horrific murder scenes these days, that I hadn’t immediately realized that the body was covered in what looked like the Cersine equivalent of tomato sauce.
“Oh, dear,” I sighed. “That’s not something you see every day.”
I moved on and checked the rest of the bodies for signs of life, but I already knew in my gut that nobody was going to suddenly sit up or call out to me that they were alive. I was walking through a graveyard, and it was over-optimistic of me to hope that one of the dead bodies would just magically wake up.
Eventually, I trudged back to the door and stepped out into the hall just as Rayne emerged from her room. She looked at me and shook her head, and in turn, I shook mine.
“Damn it,” I sighed. “It looks like there aren’t any survivors.”
“What was in your room?” Rayne asked.
“A big kitchen,” I said. “You?”
“Uh… You don’t want to know,” she said with a shell-shocked expression in her eyes.
“Well, now you’ve said that, I wanna know even more,” I said.
“Trust me,” she said. “It’s… gross.”
“Sounds interesting,” I said as I pushed past her to get to the door.
“No, seriously, you can’t unsee it,” she said.
“Okay, the record shows that you’ve warned me,” I said, and then I opened the door and looked inside. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
This room was the one they used to cut up the meat for the food they cooked. Only, all of the butchers had died with their cleavers and knives in their hands, which meant that most of them were impaled on them and lying in pools of blood on the floor.
The walls were splattered with blood from where arteries had burst, and there was a body right by the door that had a cleaver right in the middle of its face. It was split in half, and I could see the two halves of the skull on either side of the blade, as well as the dead flaps of skin, the severed muscle, and even some of the mashed-up brain matter had spilled out of the wound and onto the unfortunate Cersine local’s face.
The sight of the alien, plus all of the others who were equally covered in bloody holes and stuck full of knives, made me feel sick to my stomach, but it also lit an angry, vengeful fire in my stomach as well. I stared down at the body, and it was like I couldn’t drag my eyes away from it.
I started to turn toward Rayne to make some angry comment about finding justice for these people, but the lights suddenly blinked off, and we were plunged into darkness.
The place was so black that I couldn’t even see an inch in front of me. I backed into the hallway and felt around for Rayne’s hand, which I eventually found. I linked my fingers with hers, and she gripped my hand tightly. We stayed completely still, and the sound of our shallow breaths echoed along the hallway and seemed to multiply, until it sounded like we were in a crowded subway station.
I felt a creeping feeling on my neck, as though a hand was just behind it, ready to grab it. My mouth was dry, and I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, although it was possible that it was Rayne’s heartbeat that I was hearing. I held my gun in my other hand and prepared to defend us from whatever danger came out of the darkness.
Was this what had happened just before we arrived here? Had the lights gone out and allowed whatever evil was lurking here to attack its blinded prey? And was it planning to do the same thing to us?
Then, the backup lights came on with a quiet hum, and we found ourselves bathed in dim, green light.
Rayne and I both let out a sigh of relief and turned to one another.
“Well, that was terrifying,” Rayne whispered.
“I think it was a bit of a blessing in disguise,” I said as I glanced back at the room full of dead butchers. “I could hardly tear my eyes away from what was in there.”
“I told you not to look,” she said.
“It would have eaten away at me if I hadn’t,” I said.
“But…” she pressed.
“But I am now, admittedly, scarred for life,” I chuckled.
“Told you so,” she said smugly.
“Yeah, well, you were right, as always,” I sighed.
“Can I get that in writing?” she asked.
“You wish,” I said. “But--”
Both of our heads snapped around to look at the door at the end of the hall when we heard a faint thud from behind it. Our bodies tensed, and both of us raised our guns again. There was no doubt about it. I’d heard a noise, which meant something behind that door was moving.
I put my fingers to my lips, to which Rayne nodded, and then we both tiptoed toward the door. I moved slowly and carefully so that my footsteps hardly made a sound. Bob followed behind us both with his laser raised at the door, ready to fire on command.
“Francine?” I whispered.
“I am not able to detect anything behind the door,” the AI said.
“But I heard something,” I replied.
“Perhaps the door is thick enough to block my sensors,” Francine suggested. “But I doubt it, if you were really able to hear something.”
I frowned, confused by this information, but we were in front of the door and there was only one way to be sure. I looked over at Rayne, who nodded and raised her gun up to eye level, ready to fire. Slowly, I reached out and put my hand around the door handle. I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and then I wrenched the door open.
A body fell into the hallway and landed in a heap on the floor. Clearly, it had been leaning against the door until I had opened it.
“Why do the bodies keep doing that?” I grimaced as Rayne and I knelt down beside the body and checked for a pulse.
“The body is still at normal body temperature, which means that this person died only moments ago,” Francine-Bob said.
“What the hell?” I asked as I started compressions on the alien’s chest.
“That thud was the body falling against the door,” Rayne said.
“How did they die?” I asked. “We would’ve heard someone kill them, surely? And I didn’t see anyone running away from him.”
“I’m just circling back to the virus theory,” Rayne said. “Maybe this one was more resistant to it?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “Francine, is the CPR helping at all?”
“I do not believe so,” the AI said. “According to the records I have accessed, this species does not have the same circulatory system as humans do, and do not have hearts that would react to chest compressions.”
“Damn it,” I grunted as I stopped compressions and got to my feet angrily.
“So many dead,” Rayne said. “If we’d gone through that door a few seconds earlier…”
“No, you can’t think like that,” I said. “Don’t play the ‘what if’ game. It’ll eat you alive.”
Rayne nodded, but I could still see some regret in her eyes.
I raised my gun and walked through the doorway to see if anything was moving. I realized that we had done a full circuit of the space station and had arrived back in the entrance hall. I found everything exactly as we had left it when we arrived. Hundreds of bodies all over the place, the skylight overhead, and the dead alien sandwiched between the exit doors.
I looked to my right and found myself looking at a stairwell that led down to the other levels. I beckoned Rayne and Bob to follow me, and then we crept across the entrance hall and stepped into the stairwell.
As soon as the door closed behind us, we began our descent. I held the railing with one hand, and I could feel the cold metal under my palms. Our footsteps echoed as we made our way down toward the next level, but the dim light made it difficult to see all the way to the bottom.
“Doesn’t this remind you of where we first met?” I whispered. “At the nuclear power plant on Wildern.”
“Not the most romantic setting,” Rayne chuckled. “What with the mutants and all that fun stuff.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I hope there’s none of those in here.”
“At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was,” she sighed.
We arrived on the next floor down, the second of the four levels. When we went through the door, we discovered that this level was the trading floor. There were no wall divides at all in the enormous space. Instead, it was lined with hundreds upon hundreds of stalls from wall to wall, which had basically everything any space traveler would ever want to buy on sale.
There were ship parts, medical supplies, food boxes, clothes, and plenty of things I couldn’t even identify. The lights were dim on the trading floor, too, which confirmed to me that the entire space station was now running on its backup generators. There were bodies everywhere, and even more different species on this level than there had been upstairs. No one was moving, so Rayne, Francine, and I all decided that we wouldn’t venture too far into the room.
Instead, we returned to the stairwell and trudged down to the next floor, and then the next. As soon as the door opened, I knew exactly where we were.
“This is it,” Francine-Bob said eagerly. “The medical bay.”
This level was even creepier than the other two, mainly because it was like we were exploring an abandoned hospital, only this abandoned hospital was also full of mysteriously dead bodies that we had no cause of death for yet. The air felt even more stifling down here, as though I was wrapped in a thick blanket and couldn’t get out of it. The hospital had a number of different wings within it, so Rayne and I methodically worked our way through the different rooms, offices, operating rooms, and even something that had to be an ER.
I could hear a clock ticking, but I wasn’t sure exactly where from. As we passed one of the bedrooms, I saw what looked like an IV drip still hooked to a dead patient. The clear liquid still trickled down the tube, but all I could do was shake my head.
We came to an OR and found there was blood all over the floor from where the patient that was on the operating table had bled out. The surgical team was sprawled on the ground as well, covered in blood and organs from the patient. It looked like one of the surgeons had been in the middle of removing something when he’d died, and when he’d collapsed, he’d pulled most of the organs with him.
It was even more disturbing than the butcher shop, and I had to close my eyes for a second as I turned away.
For once, the morgue was the least unsettling place we visited, only because all of the people who were dead in here were actually supposed to be dead. A small part of me wanted to stay there for a while and enjoy the normalcy for a moment, which was something I never thought I would ever say about a morgue, but I knew that we had to keep looking.
So, we pressed on until we ended up in a room full of beds filled with dead patients. The ward also happened to be decked out with a ton of technological medical equipment.
“There it is, at the back of the room,” Francine-Bob said as the robot scampered over to a machine that sat on top of a trolley.
Rayne and I hurried after the yellow bot, though I tried to check the patients we passed for any signs of life. We passed one alien that was tucked in under a blanket, though I could see a laceration on its forehead. Other than that, there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with it. I couldn’t imagine checking into the hospital with a cut on my head, only to end up dead not long after.
“Is this the nanobot thingy you were telling us about on the ship?” Rayne asked as she poked at the device.
“Yes,” Francine-Bob said excitedly. “I do not mean to be insensitive, but there is not another machine like it. So, I think we should take it with us.”
“I know we need it, but I still feel weird taking it,” I said. “It feels like we’re robbing a grave.”
“But think of what we can do with this technology,” Francine-Bob said. “Consider what I did for you with the nanotechnology I possessed. It was incredible, but it could only do so much. With this, you could increase your power, your skills, and your body’s capabilities exponentially, which would mean you would be far more effective in protecting the Lilacrons and Earth from the Karaak. And look, it’s on wheels, so you do not need to carry it.”
Rayne snorted at this extra detail, but Francine really knew how to sell to her audience.
“Damn it, Francine,” I sighed. “Why do you have to be so persuasive?”
“I learned from you,” the AI said. “You convince me all the time to let you run head first into risky situations--”
“Which usually pays off,” I pointed out.
“The least you can do is take the Nano-Developer with us,” she said.
“Alright, fine,” I said. “We’ll take it. Happy?”
“Very much so,” Francine said with a smug tone of voice. “Was it the wheels part that convinced you?”
“That was a contributing factor,” I admitted.
“I’m curious to know what you were like before the nanobots,” Rayne said.
“I was the same guy,” I said. “But I got out of breath if I took the stairs too often. And a few gray hairs.”
“Right,” she chuckled.
Suddenly, we heard a rustle behind us. Rayne and my eyes locked with one another, and neither of us moved as we waited for another sound.
A moment later, there was another rustle, like the sound of material moving.
“You heard that, right?” Rayne whispered.
“Yep,” I replied.
“Should we…” she began.
“Yes,” I replied.
Slowly, we both turned around to look at what had made a noise behind us. For a second, I didn’t notice anything that could have been the source of the rustling.
But then the body under the blanket in the bed closest to us twitched underneath the covers. It was the one with the cut on its forehead, only that was the least worrying thing about it at that moment.
It started to sit up. It shuddered as its core muscles tensed, and it didn’t use its arms to push itself up. In fact, it seemed to just fold in half until eventually, the alien was sitting up in bed, with its back dead straight as it stared blankly ahead.
Then, both of its arms began to move. They moved in unnatural jolts, like a puppet whose master had only picked it up for the first time that day. The alien’s hands opened and closed awkwardly, and then it gripped the blanket covering its legs and threw it off its body and onto the floor. I hardly breathed as I watched the reanimated alien drop its arms back to its sides again.
There was a pause where the body did absolutely nothing. It just sat and stared at the wall with its lifeless eyes like it was waiting for the next command.
And then its head slowly turned toward us, and its haunting, dead eyes met mine.