Amidst Them

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Corporal Ronaldo saw it rip apart his squadmates, one by one. Like they were made of nothing more than tissue paper. He saw it laugh, heard its wretched cries as it bit and slashed—a nauseating display of cruelty and malice.
He ran, ran until his legs and lungs burned in the acrid air of the desert canyon. From the UEG base of operations nestled into one end, all the way across to the miniature mesa-like butte one and a half miles away. He hoped that the other squad stationed at the waystation there would be able to help. A hope, faint and fleeting, that he wouldn’t have to die alone.
His breath came in short, staggered bursts. He looked over his shoulder, but no one was on his heels. Perhaps the thing was too busy consuming the remnants of his squadmates, but he wouldn’t count on it.
He clambered up the raised rampway towards the waystation, begging and pleading with any god or spirit that would listen, clutching the crucifix nestled in between the dog tags resting around his throat.
He burst into the waystation with little ceremony, all but prying the sliding door along the rails as he went. When he entered the darkened station, he called out.
“Hello?” he coughed, a burning bile rising in his throat. He was wheezing from having run so far at full-tilt, he hadn’t done that since boot camp. “Hello?” he repeated. “Anyone here?”
Ronaldo inched his way deeper into the waystation, unslinging his MA5D from his back. He swept the shadows, but saw nothing, just a swirling yawning maw of blackness. He reached for the light on his flashlight and clicked it on.
Almost immediately he lost his footing in shock. The squad was butchered, laying in bloody, half-chewed heaps on the floor. Blood and sinew adorned the walls in grotesquely ornate splatter patterns, making the bile rise up in Ronaldo’s throat anew.
Before he could evacuate the contents of his stomach, a shadow darkened the waystation door. He turned around, squeezing the trigger of his MA5D in the process. His fight-or-flight was telling him to flee, but the thing was blocking the door.
His bullets went wide at first, and the thing stepped closer, closing the gap between them in an impossible display of speed. It was maddening to watch and to hear move. No form to it save for the stubby legs that sprang out of what once must’ve been an impressive suit of MJOLNIR armour. The entirety of its top half was bloated an malformed, with bones and tissue sticking out at odd angles. 
Half way up its torso, the spine bent sideways, and its two arms had migrated up from their sockets, now resting above the joints and pulsating like some sickening mockery of antennae.
In an instant, it was upon him, wrenching his rifle away and hoisting him up with one of its outstretched, grasping hands. The decaying flesh on its fingers sloughed off with each grab and grapple, and it closed around his throat tighter than a dead thing had any right to grab.
Three bristling red tentacles began to flap about his face, and the mouth of what once was a man split upwards in an impersonation of a grin.
“Found you,” it gargled.
Ronaldo had just enough time to scream before the three bristling fronds slid into his flesh.
----
 
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“I don’t like that simulation,” Ronaldo said, sulking over his meagre ration of lima beans and salted bacon.
“Only because you keep losing,” came a jab from his side. The smiling face of Audrey put him at ease, but in the back of his mind he couldn’t forget the way she had died.
“If you seriously have no problem going in there for hours at a time and dying over and over, then more power to you,” Ronaldo said, looking down at his meal and jabbing the fork into it. “There’s something wrong with it. Not just because they have us fighting those things.”
He shuddered, pushing his meal away once he started seeing a resemblance between the beans and those little blob-shaped skittering things that would scurry out of every nook and cranny at once.
“We have to learn how to fight the Flood, or one day we’re gonna be caught with our pants down,” Sergeant Jackson said, chewing on a hard bit of gristle. He smirked, pointing a fork over at Ronaldo. “And when that happens, I just hope I get to live long enough to see your ass cry one last time.”
The rest of the squad laughed, and Ronaldo’s face burned. He tossed his fork down and put his hands on the table.
“Do you guys seriously not have a problem with it?” he asked, looking at each of their faces in turn. “It’s sick! It’s like a dream, every single time I can’t relax. I can’t suspend my disbelief and just think it’s real, but at the same time it’s way to close to being real. I keep thinking I’ll go under into a Full-Immerse sim and just…” he gulped. “Not wake up one day.”
“Wow, Ronaldo,” Audrey leaned against him. “I didn’t know you had such deep emotions.”
There was a flurry of fresh snorts of laughter from around the table.
Ronaldo pushed her away.
“Get off me,” he sighed. “I just hope the next one isn’t a flood sim.”
----
Flood sims were the absolute worst, and Ronaldo would curse them until the day he breathed his last. They were needlessly horrific, cruel, and usually involved one or two of his friends being the ones infected with the parasitic buggers.
“Right,” he said. “Go over the rules for me again, and tell me why we can’t just blast the next person we see.”
An exasperated sigh came from his left, and he looked over at Audrey as she cradled her rifle close, sweeping it into every small space she could see. Shadows danced along the walls, cast from both her MA5D light and her helmet flashlights. This was the first sim in which they had been given enclosed helmets, complete with rebreathers.
Ronaldo didn’t like the implications of that.
“We go in,” Audrey said. “We repair the ship and assess the damage, the level of infection, and the possibility of salvage. If it’s less than 50% we call in the cleanup crews and exfil. If it’s over 50% then we head to the reactor and initiate a WILDCAT scenario.”
Ronaldo nodded, stepping left to sweep an adjacent room. There were spores floating about it in a lazy cartwheeling dance, and a pulsing organic growth on the wall that looked like a bulb of some sorts. Ronaldo shut the door with a hiss and tried not to think about what the bulb held inside it.
“Right,” he said. “And the catch?”
“Two of our squadmates are already infected,” she said. “But keeping up the ruse.”
“Oh that I hate.” Ronaldo definitely didn’t like the implications of enclosed helmets.
“Quit being such a baby,” Audrey snapped.
They walked to a crossroads. Ronaldo took a knee, sweeping the front and right hand side. The light was swallowed up halfway down the corridors, but what he didn’t see was any pulsing orange growths on the walls, which was a good sign in his book.
Audrey took a knee as well, sweeping the left hand corridor and the rear from whence they came. She froze and reached to her side to slap Ronaldo on the shoulder. “Hey, I saw something.”
Ronaldo pivoted immediately, pressing his back up to her side to keep their blindspot in partial view. “What?” he asked, his voice warbling a slight bit too much for his tastes.
Audrey didn’t notice—or at least pretended not to.
“Flash,” she whispered into the darkness.
A rifle emerged from the nearest room, followed by a helmet. “Thunder,” the voice beneath it said. “Thank God I found someone.”
He ran up to join the duo. “There was one on my tail,” The man held up a hand in front of his visor to shield himself from the light. “I didn’t see their tag.”
Audrey didn’t lower her gun.
Ronaldo’s gaze flipped down to the man’s breastplate—the tag read ‘Taz’.
“Good to see you alive, Taz,” he tilted his head to one side. “If you are, that is.”
“C’mon,” the man said, his shoulders slumping. “Even if I was, I wouldn’t be able to kill both of you. The other one would gun me down.”
Ronaldo nodded in agreement, sighing. “That is a good point.”
“Yeah,” Audrey said, an obvious smile lacing her words with mirth. “The two of us easily could overpower one.”
“Exactly,” Taz agreed.
Ronaldo felt a pit open up in his stomach.
“So, what’re we waiting for?” Audrey asked.
“Motherfu—”
Audrey’s faceplate shattered outwards in a flurry of glass shards and spiked flesh. The lancing weapon pierced Ronaldo’s neck in an instant, severing his windpipe. 
Taz rushed forward, extending both of his arms. His BDUs severed at the elbows, exploding around his fresh spikes where hands should’ve been. Both of them went through Ronaldo’s lungs, as though they took special interest in cuttinng off his breathing, just in case he should try to scream.
Ronaldo had enough time to try and curse at them before the world went dark forever.
Waking up in the sim-bed, Ronaldo didn’t even bother to try and get up. He just rested his head back on the pillow, raising one arm to put it under his head. If they were gonna pay him to do the sims day after day, then he’d make them pay him to rest in bed.
He really hated flood sims.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories
Category:Stories