Screams of the Night

Jebediah, who upon turning to look back at them in the middle of his sentence, had noticed a door he hadn’t noticed as they were passing, for it was covered in muck and ooze. He only noticed it was a door because of the familiar indentations denoting an automatic sliding door. “Oi, Samuel, pull up that map will ya, what room is this?” Jebediah demanded.

“Should be the security room, why? Thought we were heading to the refinery.”

“Change of plans. Don’t you want to know what transpired here? Don’t you want to know what happened to this blasted colony?” Jebediah rhetorized.

“No not rea-”

“Of course you do!” Jebediah interjected as he reached towards the slightly cracked open door and wrenched it open. “Screeech!” the door rang out as it was thrust open, flinging sludge that had gradually built up on it. Jebediah shone his light into the room, illuminating its interior. Rows of monitors lined a far wall, a desk lay beneath them; cabinets crowded the sides, cramping the room. “Well boys, don’t just stand there, come on in,” Jebediah’s words echoed over his shoulder as he strode into the security room.

“Jeb, we don’t got time for fooling around, we need to get off this blasted rock, before it’s too late,” Isaiah tried to reason.

“Yeah, he does have a point,” Samuel concurred with his cousin, for once, “No time for tomfoolery.”

Jebediah, pointedly ignoring Samuel and Isaiah’s reasoning, slinked further into the room. He scanned around, shifted through loose papers, scoured through the cluttered cabinets, looking for some unbeknownst thing.

“Maybe he’s looking for that skeleton key or something,” Isaiah whispered to Samuel.

Finally, as Jebediah encroached upon the monitors, he stopped in his tracks, he gazed intently at them, wondering what answers he would find. Tramping towards the desk he flipped a series of levers, attempting to ignite a final semblance of power left on the outpost in order to turn on the monitors. But to no avail he strived.

“Well boys, it looks like we’re out of luck then,” he sighed in disappointment.

“No, you’re out of luck,” Samuel sneered under his breath, “About time we get goin’.”

“Samuel, I thought you don’t believe in luck?”

“False accusation. I merely stated that my neo-matriculous dodging of-”

Oblivious to the personal jabs and name-calling occurring behind him, Jebediah gradually stood up as the feeling of failure crept upon him; the feeling of curiosity began to drain away, as the knowledge of what happened on K-92 began to slip through his fingers.

Turning about, he glanced at his comrades in defeat. He treaded back towards the door, treading towards the darkness of the halls, treading as if to keep his head above the waves of misfortune that threatened to engulf him. But as he ducked through the door, a light flooded past him from behind. It was the light of hope; the light that he had not felt since the days of old, since those days before everything began to go wrong, since those days before some twisted experiment that shook the Extent to its core. Digressing from those negative thoughts, he turned his attention back to the hope of history that once again surged through his veins. He turned back and strode into the room, careening towards the monitors. He gazed up expectantly as the screens danced with joy as life once again surged through their crackling screens.

“They’re… they’re alive!” Jebediah exclaimed as he threw himself back onto the monitors.

“You gotta be kidding me, there ain’t no power here, just look around this dump,” Samuel sighed in disbelief.

“This place sure is strange,” Isaiah agreed.

As they gathered around the monitors, that were still booting up, they noticed something strange. As the apparent operating system was loading, the screens flickered, glitching out. Words swam across their faces, flicking by as they flickered in and out. Cryptic scripts of acid rain trickled down from the tops. Files opened and closed, entry logs displayed and dispersed, all the while enchanting the trio.

Finally, the monitors stopped their flicking and fluttering and displaying and dispersing. The room suddenly went dark, and within that darkness, the monitors seemed to finally make up their collective minds on where they all should be. One by one, from left to right, the screens solidified a singular shared image. All of them, all the screens displayed the same image. The perspective seemed to be from some old security footage.

“Strange, it appears to be of this very room, but it looks much cleaner,” Isaiah commented.

“Yeah, must be from when this place wasn’t abandoned ya dingus,” Samuel snorted.

“Shut up you two, pay attention to the footage,” Jebediah snarled.

The trio once again latched their attention back to the screens, watching for something, anything. Suddenly a man burst into the room on the footage. He was covered in blood, his arms outstretched, panting as if he had run for miles. Staggering, he stumbled into one of the cabinets, clabbering at it for support. He lurched forwards and collapsed onto the desk in front of the monitors. He looked upwards toward the monitors, a look of horror spreading across his face. His lips froze, trembled, then again locked into place. A moment of hesitation passed over him, then he slowly turned around; his eyes locked onto the security camera. Staring into them, his lips moved, uttering some unknown words as the footage flicked out.

“What in the world was that?” “What just happened?” “Jebediah what the heck was that?” Isaiah and Samuel stammered in confusion. “Jebediah, see if you can rewind the footage, what was on those monitors?” Samuel astutely observed as he always does.

Jebediah flicked some more levers, pushed some buttons, and watched as the clip replayed, pausing the footage as the monitors in the footage lit up.

“Zoom in,” Samuel commanded.

Jebediah zoomed in on the monitors and froze. Silence filled the room. “What the…” “That’s us.” “No fricking way.” “You gotta be kidding me.”

The trio stood in silence, looking at the monitors in the monitors, looking at themselves.

The footage, seemingly acting of its own volition, shot to the man’s lips. “Run…” he whispered. SCHAZOOOOOOOOOOOOM! The monitors exploded, sending shards of glass flying everywhere. SCZHHHHHT! “Uaghhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Isaiah and Jebediah fell to the floor, their knees knocked out from beneath them. The lights in the ceiling screeched, flickering like flashbangs in the darkness. The walls shook, the floors began to shake. In the midst of the confusion Jebediah noticed Samuel had vanished. “Where’s Samuel! WHERE IS HE!” Jebediah shouted as his eyes shot around the room scanning for him.

“SAMUEL! SAMUEL!” Isaiah and Jebediah shouted as the chaos continued to erupt.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!” a scream echoed from the hall.

Jebediah and Isaiah jumped up, flinging through the muck that hung from the entrance of the door, into the hallway. “WHERE’D HE GO!” Isaiah cried. “I DON’T KNOW! YOU GO THAT WAY,” Jebediah signaled down one side of the hall then signaled down towards the other end, “I’LL GO THIS WAY!”

They raced away from each other into the darkness flickering with light, running to their doom, rushing through the fingers of death that snatched longingly for their heels.

Lights flickered, as their feet thundered down the hall. Hearts beat, as screams shot from their lips. Lives quenched, as blasts cried from their guns.

Isaiah was running, running faster than he ever had before, running faster than when he was cornered by the armada of cyborg. His feet thundered, his emotions soared, his electrified heartbeat pounded through the storm. He was running as if there was no tomorrow. Down through the halls, hallucinations fluttered through his mind, as he shouted for his fellows, “SAMUEL, JEBEDIAH, WHERE ARE YOU!” His throat was raw. His legs were sore. He couldn’t continue.

Collapsing against the sludge covered wall, he hung his head. His temples thumped in his hands, his side panged with knife-like exertion, “Where are they… where are they…” he despaired. Lifting his head, he sighed. He let his hands slip to the floor, plopping them into the muck which was not there.

The muck… it was not there! Isaiah opened his eyes glaring at the walls in the flickering light. The ooze unoozed. The sludge unsludged. The scum unscummed. The decay undecayed. The walls shifted in the light; the light shimmered on the puddles which were ever decreasing and increasing. Toppled objects untoppled. Shattered glasses unshattered. “What in Skimp’s name is happening,” he swore to himself as his brain burst and unburst.

Time seemed to unwind and rewind, time unraveled and reraveled. Isaiah flipped out his tactical pocketwatch from beneath his vest. He tried to focus, with his tear-filled eyes, on the hands which were moving backwards, yet forwards. He ripped the bandages from his shoulder, tearing off the scabbing skin in the process, his wounds sutured and unsutured, his flesh healed and unhealed.

“Blast it! WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME!” he screamed. His voice echoed and unechoed down the halls, joining the screams of his mind and the screams of his fellows which wound their way through the halls, the halls of the blasted colony.

“Surrender… or… die,” a voice whispered, fluttering down the halls, seemingly coming from nowhere, yet everywhere. Isaiah whipped his head back and forth, glancing up and down the hallway. Gluagh uaaahhhh, a hand appeared in front of his face and grabbed him by the neck. The hand shimmered as the rest of the mysterious body slowly revealed itself from the mysterious undoing-doing-spectrum, all the while dragging him up the wall. “Surrender . . . or . . . die,” the voice repeated as the cold metallic unhuman fingers wound tighter around Isaiah’s throat.

“I’d rather . . . die than admit defeat . . . to scum like you . . .” Isaiah managed to spit out.

“So be . . . it,” the cyborg declared and slid his other hand around Isaiah’s throat. The cyborg squeezed, Isaiah’s eyes bulged, his tongue began to bloat out of his mouth, his eyes glimmered in their dying moments.

“So, this is how it ends,” he thought, “in a place like this, in a nightmare, in a living hell.”

His life flashed before his eyes, but before it could fully play out, it was interrupted and unflashed by a tumultuous roar. “OH NO YOU DON’T! DIE BLAST YOU! YOU PIECE OF…” Jebediah yelled as he thundered down the hall, blasting his CLLB. Brrrrrt… brrrooooom-boom-boom-boom-boom. The bursts ripped through the air as they ripped through the fragments of his unfinished sentence. Although Jebediah’s shots were aimed perfectly, it mattered not, for as the bursts were about to “blast the tin can to bits” the cyborg vanished, or was it the other way around? “What the… never mind that, Isaiah are you alright?” he imposingly inquired, grabbing Isaiah’s arm to haul him up.

“I dunno, maybe, where’s Samuel?”

“What are you talking about? Have you lost your confounded mind, he’s dead, HE IS DEAD! THAT BLASTED CYBORG BLASTED HIS BLASTED BLASTS AND BLASTED HIM TO BITS! YOU WERE THERE DON’T YOU HAVE HALF A BRAIN TO REMEMBER WHEN YOUR OWN COUSIN GETS BRUTALLY ANNIHILATED!”