Chapter 14
Rayne and I both panted in unison as we stared at the dead army in front of us. Rayne and I were outnumbered almost ten to one. Some of them groaned while some of them flexed their newly reanimated muscles and limbs, but my eyes kept on drifting back to the headless zombie at the forefront of the gang.
I had never seen anything like it. Blood poured from the severed neck muscles, tendons dangled down the creature’s chest, and the body twitched as it stood in front of us.
And behind the headless corpse were dozens of eyes, all focused on us. I could feel their energy pushing toward us. They were itching to come at us, but it was as if both parties were daring the other to make the first move.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“Uh-huh,” Rayne uttered.
“Run,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said with a nod, and then we both turned, grabbed the trolley, and shoved it down the hall.
The moment we moved to run, the zombies let out blood-curdling screeches and started to tear after us. They scratched the walls as they fought and clawed at one another to get to us first. The headless body was overtaken and mowed down almost instantly, since a headless, eyeless body appeared to be at a distinct disadvantage, and I watched as all of the dead aliens trampled the body until it was just a bloody lump on the floor.
The rest of them, however, showed no signs of slowing down. They charged at us as fast as they could with their arms stretched out toward us. The hospital gowns worn by former patients billowed as they ran, almost like capes, and the sense that they were flying was only enhanced by how quickly they caught up with us.
At least we were far enough away from the oxygen canisters that I was free to use my gun. Rayne took over pushing the trolley while I took my gun out of its holster and set it to fire normal bullets first. I spun around as I ran and fired a shot perfectly in the center of one of the aliens’ heads. The bullet lodged itself in the creature’s skull, and it stumbled backward from the force of the bullet making contact with its head. But, instead of falling down, it simply shook its head, as though it had just had a sugar rush and not been shot in the brain, and sprinted toward us again.
“So, bullets are a no-go,” I said as I blindly switched the dial on the top of my gun to the next mode, turned, and fired.
The second shot hit another one of the aliens, and it jerked for a second like it might go down, but then it brushed off whatever had hit it. I glanced down at the gun and saw that it was set to electro-launch, the mode which usually made anything I shot hit the deck instantly.
“Electro-launch doesn’t work, either,” I said.
“What actually does work, then?” Rayne demanded as she tried to keep the trolley from tipping over.
“I’m working on that,” I replied.
“Will, Rayne, I am detecting more movement up ahead,” Francine-Bob said.
“Well, we can’t exactly go back that way,” I said as I turned back to look at the huge horde of snarling monsters that had formed a solid wall behind us.
“We can’t go that way, either,” Rayne said as she skidded to a halt.
I turned to check what was ahead of us, only to see about five more of the dead aliens lumbering toward us down the hallway. These creatures were in worse shape and had clearly come into the hospital for more serious injuries. One of them had a broken leg that was in such bad shape that the snapped, bloody bone stuck out through the skin, and yet it was pushing itself along on it as though it didn’t hurt in the slightest.
“In here!” Rayne shouted as she kicked open a door on the right side of the hall.
She shoved the trolley in, and then Bob and I hurried in after her just as the aliens reached us. Rayne and I shoved our weight against the door while the alien horde slammed against it on the other side. We were able to hold out for a few moments, but as more zombified aliens joined in, even the extra strength from the suits wasn’t enough. Rayne and I were finally pushed backwards, and we landed on our butts a few feet from the door.
Luckily, the aliens fought each other to be the first ones to the meal, so we had enough time to scramble to our feet. As I stood up, I took a quick look around the room for anything that could be used as a weapon, and I realized we were in an operating room.
Rayne scooped up some scalpels, which she threw with a marksman’s precision at the first alien through the door. The scalpels lodged in the alien’s eyes, which exploded, but the creature simply reached up, pulled the blades out, and snarled at us again.
“So, bullets and knives don’t hurt you?” I said as I turned the dial on my gun again. “Let’s see how you like this.”
I pulled the trigger, and a bright beam of light shot out of the end of my gun. The laser covered the distance between us and the aliens in milliseconds and cut through the first row as easily as an anchor through the ocean. I aimed it right at the center of their bodies and drew the laser across.
It wasn’t a pretty sight, that was for sure. I split the first five of them totally in half, and their torsos fell forward, while their legs crumpled straight down onto the ground. Different colors of blood covered the floor like some macabre abstract art piece.
The legs stopped moving the moment they were severed from the top of their bodies, but the top halves continued to attempt to pull themselves across the floor. Some of them dragged their heads through their own pools of blood, while one of them grabbed hold of the leg of the operating table and tried to pull itself up again.
“What the hell are these things?” I gawked as I watched the dismembered bodies continue to move around.
“I don’t know,” Rayne said as she pulled her fire-launcher off her back. “But I’ve had enough of this. Stand back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a nod.
Bob and I moved behind Rayne just as she pulled the trigger. A glowing, burning ball of flames shot out of the end of her hand-made weapon and soared toward the doorway. The moment it connected with one of the aliens, there was an explosion that sent the front couple of rows flying back out through the door. It also incinerated the torsos instantly, and the smell of burning flesh filled the OR a moment later.
“So, fire works,” Rayne said with a grin.
“Hell, yeah it does,” I replied. “How many shots do you have?”
“Ten,” she said. “So we need to be smart about when we use it.”
“Well, let’s get out of this room and see how many we have left,” I said. “There’s no other way out of here, and so far, that’s the only thing that works against these things.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she said as she raised the fire-launcher again.
She had taken out almost half of the aliens in one go, but the second wave had already begun to scramble over their dead cohorts and into the room toward us. Rayne waited patiently for all of them to pile into the room, and as soon as they were all in her line of fire and tearing toward her, she pulled the trigger and burned the lot of them.
“Damn,” I said over the sound of smoldering bodies. “I don’t remember that thing being that powerful.”
“I improved it with materials on your ship,” she replied with a smile. “Pretty cool, right?”
“Very cool,” I chuckled.
“I will clear a path for the trolley,” Francine-Bob said as the robot started to push the bodies out of the doorway.
“Thanks, Francine,” I said. “I really didn’t want to handle that job.”
Rayne and I pushed the Nano-Developer through the gap that Francine-Bob had made for us and out into the hallway. There were black scorch marks on the white walls from Rayne’s fire-launcher, as well as a remarkable variety of body parts splattered across the walls.
It seemed very violent to deal with them like this, but they were determined to kill us, and nothing else seemed to work. Besides, they were dead before we found them, so I wasn’t sure that I cared all that much about how we dealt with them.
I was still at a total loss as to what was going on, though. I wanted to know how all of the people on the space station had died, but more importantly, I wanted to know how on earth they were waking up again. If we made it back to the ship, the first thing we had to do was find a way to stop… whatever this was.
At least the hallway remained clear. Once we were free of the bodies, we moved more quickly, though every squeak from the trolley or thump from our footsteps made my heart rate jump as I checked for more aliens. I was also painfully aware of all of the bodies I had seen in the other rooms on the way down here, and the idea of another army of the undead waking up and giving chase was enough to spur me on.
“There is an elevator at the end of the hall,” Francine said inside my head. “We can use that to get the trolley up to the top level.”
“Will it work with only the backup generators powering it?” I asked.
“Yes,” Francine said, though she didn’t sound certain.
“Is that a yes, yes, or a yes, maybe?” I asked.
“The latter,” the AI admitted.
“It’ll have to do,” I sighed. “We just--”
I stopped talking when I heard a noise just up ahead of us. It was a footstep, I was sure of it, and it wasn’t Rayne’s or mine. Something up there was moving.
“What is it?” Rayne whispered.
I put my finger to my lips. A moment later, both of our eyes widened when we heard more shuffling steps coming toward us.
We looked around wildly, and I found a room to the left of us that looked empty. It had been an office, from what I could tell, but the main thing was that it had a solid door that closed and a window looking out into the hall.
I tapped Rayne on the shoulder and pointed to the office, and then we wheeled the Nano-Developer into the office as quietly as we could. Once all three of us were inside, I closed the door gently, and we crouched down against the wall beside the door. The window that looked out into the hall was just above our heads, but we were crouched low enough that whatever was out there wouldn’t have been able to see us.
We waited silently, and I hardly dared to breathe. We didn’t know how these things operated, like whether they found us by sight, by sound, by smell, or some other way entirely. Rayne put her clammy palm in mine and gripped my fingers tightly. The floor felt cold underneath us, and I stared ahead at the desk, the shelves, and the plant in the corner while I concentrated on listening intently to what was happening out in the hall.
The footsteps slowly grew louder. I couldn’t make out exactly how many of them there were, but it was definitely a group of them. They stalked down the corridor, and I heard the sound of fingernails scraping along one of the walls as they moved.
When I was sure the zombies were right outside the office, I froze in place like I’d just seen Medusa. I held my breath and gripped Rayne’s hand while we listened to the footsteps move slowly past us. The aliens were probably headed toward the smell of their burned kindred, and I just hoped that the corpses kept them busy enough for us to get away.
Once I heard the footsteps pass the office, I slowly turned around and risked a look through the window. I could see the backs of the zombies as they limped down the hall. There were four of them, and all of them were wearing long coats and scrubs, and had extra arms, like the other alien we had seen upstairs. The foursome had been part of the medical team then, before all the madness had started.
One of them had medical scissors sticking out of its arm, but otherwise, the small troop didn’t seem to have any real injuries. That was bad news for us, since these four would be able to move even faster than the horde that had attacked us.
They also seemed to be aware enough of their surroundings that they weren’t just blindly moving through the hall. They looked around and cocked their heads like they were listening for any signs of life.
I felt Rayne tap me on the arm, but I was so transfixed by the doctors that I didn’t react. Not until she tapped me a few more times on the arm.
“Will…” she whimpered.
I looked down at her, but I realized that she wasn’t looking at me. I followed her gaze into the room, and my stomach dropped when I saw what she was looking at.
A hand reached up from behind the desk. Its skin was pale, and I could see black veins on its wrist. The hand gently set down on the desk, and then the arm appeared. And then, that arm pushed the rest of the body up onto its feet.
The zombie straightened up and towered over us. The lifeless eyes looked down at us like broken lightbulbs, and its mouth hung open in a disgusting way. I was pretty sure that its jaw was broken, since the bottom row of its teeth jutted out to the left. It tried to move the jaw, but was having no luck.
I had heard that breaking one’s jaw was one of the most painful things a person could do, but the alien seemed unaffected. We hadn’t seen it lying behind the desk when we had entered, but now we saw the scrub-clad dead alien in all its glory.
I glanced back out of the window, but the group of the other doctors were still too close to us. If we got into any kind of fight with this thing, then they would hear us and come running. But, I didn’t see how we could even begin to get out of a confrontation, especially as the monster was looking right at us.
Then, a crackling growl began to escape its broken mouth. It started quietly enough, but then it grew steadily louder.
Rayne and I both started to reach for our weapons, when all of a sudden, a laser shot out of nowhere and cut the creature’s head off. Bob dove forward and caught the head with one of its grappling arms, while the rest of the body fell forward over the desk without making much noise.
I looked back out of the window, but the aliens had disappeared around the corner. They hadn’t heard a thing.
We knew from previous experience that decapitation wouldn’t kill it, but it sure as hell could slow it down.
We stared at the body for a moment and waited with bated breath to see what would happen. I checked the hallway again, but the doctors hadn’t reappeared.
“We should go,” I whispered to Rayne as I crept over to the Nano-Developer.
I started to push it toward the door as quietly as possible. Bob followed me and held the door open so I could push the trolley out into the hallway. I looked both ways first, listened out for any more sounds of movement, but the corridor looked and felt empty.
“Will,” Rayne whispered from inside the office.
“Rayne, come on,” I said from the doorway.
“There’s something moving inside it,” she said.
I turned back to her and saw that she was peering very closely at the severed neck of the body, and then I thought about the first body that had woken up. When its eye had popped out, I could have sworn I had seen something move in the socket, but I had just thought it was a muscle. But now Rayne thought she had seen something, too.
“What is it?” I asked.
I crept closer to the body and looked closely at the wound. Despite how disgusting and bloody it was inside it, I could immediately see what Rayne had noticed.
There was something in there that was moving. It was wrapped around the body’s spine and was slowly curling up toward the surface.
“What is that?” I muttered as I watched the thing slither over the alien’s spine.
Suddenly, with a burst of blood, a white object shot out of the body right at my face. Rayne screamed, and I managed to catch it before it got to me, but I found my nose was just inches away from a wide mouth with about four rows of teeth. The thing I was holding was squishy and wriggled in my grasp, and as I pulled my hand away from my face, I discovered that I was holding a worm that was about a foot long.
“Holy shit!” I shouted in shock.
The worm fought against my grasp as it gnashed its teeth, and it was so slimy that it slipped out of my hands and landed with a squelch on the floor. It started to slither toward me like the world’s fastest fucking snake, but instead of backing off from it, I stepped forward and stomped as hard as I could on it. It squealed as my foot crushed its body, but it wasn’t dead yet. I kept stomping on it as I aimed my gun at it, and then I took my foot away and cut it up into tiny pieces with my laser. It seemed to do the trick, and the little bits of the worm finally lay still.
“What was that thing?” Rayne panted.
“I believe that was a Brainworm,” Francine said.
“A what now?” I asked.
“A Brainworm,” Francine-Bob said. “I believed them to be extinct, but apparently, that is not correct.”
“Apparently not,” I sighed.
“They are vertebrae parasites that wrap around the spinal cord to control whatever body it chooses to inhabit, or it goes straight for the brain and controls it that way,” Francine-Bob said.
“So, that’s what happened to all of the people here?” Rayne said with a shudder. “They all have Brainworms inside them?”
“It would appear so,” Francine-Bob replied.
“Speaking of the other aliens,” I said as I stepped out into the hall to find the group of dead doctors had reappeared. “We need to move.”
Rayne and Bob hurried out of the room. I grabbed the Nano-Developer, and we ran as fast as we could toward the elevator at the end of the hall. Rayne sprinted ahead and pressed the button a thousand times until the doors opened. I shoved the Nano-Developer to her, which she wheeled inside. Bob leaped inside, and then I turned and fired my laser at the doctors as I backed into the elevator. The laser cut them up pretty well, but even as pieces of their bodies fell off, they kept on coming.
The doors started to slide shut just as I stepped inside. The aliens kept running at us, though, and as the doors slammed shut, there was a loud thud as the aliens crashed into the metal doors.
“I hate this,” Rayne sighed.
I pressed the button to take us to the top floor, and the elevator started to rise. It crawled up the elevator shaft at a snail’s pace, since it was working on the backup generator, but the fact that it was moving at all was a miracle, so I couldn’t complain.
I looked over at Rayne, who wrung her hands together nervously. I couldn’t help but wonder if she regretted coming with me after all of this.
She had signed up for adventure and for something other than the cruel planet that was Wildern, her homeworld. She definitely hadn’t signed up for zombies and Brainworms.
I turned to look at the Nano-Developer, and I silently hoped that all of this was worth the trouble we had gone through to get it. But then I told myself to stop worrying. For a moment, we had a second to gather ourselves. I leaned back against the wall, while Rayne stared absent-mindedly at the elevator doors. We had no idea what we were gonna be facing the moment those doors opened, but for now, we were suspended in a moment of calm.
I took a deep breath and looked at Rayne again.
She turned to me and smiled.
And then a Brainworm dropped down from the ceiling and landed on her head, and she screamed.