Quarantine (The Shadow Wars Book 7.5) (6 page)

Chapter 06

–
Entering Solitude
–

Alone again.

Why was he alone so often? Allan thought he'd get used to it, and he supposed he had, to a certain degree, but still, as he split off from the others and stood at the mouth of another derelict corridor, he felt a wave of loneliness slowly wash over him. How long had he been alone? Allan wondered about that as he began walking down the corridor, his only company the soft sounds of the ship, the occasional distant shriek and his clanging boots.

When he was growing up, he hadn't had many friends. There were some that came and went, and he'd had one particularly good friend for a few years, through elementary school, but then his friend had moved away, leaving him alone again. In middle school and especially high school, he'd been shy and socially awkward. After joining up with SI, things hadn't gotten much better. He'd made a few colleges and did the cliché thing of going out for drinks after work, but it hadn't really gone beyond that. He'd lived alone in his quarters with only the occasionally girlfriend that never really turned into anything serious.

He could remember wanting to have some real friends. People who actually understood him. And now, here he was, having tossed his lot in with a group of people who were utterly unique in that they had survived absolutely insane shit they shouldn't have...just like him. This was as close as he was going to get to having a genuine group of people who understood him. Who better to make friends with? But did he deserve them?

Allan didn't think so.

Not after what he had done. The atrocities he had committed on Lindholm.

He was pulled out of his malignant thoughts by a nearby grunt. Allan hefted his machete and prepared himself. The sound was coming from an open doorway. Of course it was the way he needed to go. In order to get to the living quarters, he had to cut through a pair of mess halls and a cold storage bay. Stepping in through the open doorway, he surveyed the area. The mess hall was large, only one of four. An expanse of tables and benches, bolted to the ground, cast in gunmetal gray, awaited his inspection. The place was a wreck.

It looked like a lot of people had been eating here when...whatever it was had happened struck. There were close to two dozen bodies spread out across the area, broken in death, arms and necks twisted or bent at painful angles. Plates, silverware and food was everywhere, largely reduced to so much debris crushed underfoot. Another grunt, then a moan, from nearby. Allan froze, looking around, and finally decided it was one of the bodies.

He looked around for a long moment and finally saw one of them move a little. He let out a low whistle as he approached it: all the arms and legs had been broken. Still alive, though. Allan raised his machete, then paused. The man, what appeared to be a former medic, was lying on his back, eyes wide and wild, rolling around, the breathing rapid.

“Can you understand me?” he asked.

The medic let out a grunt that sounded like tired anger and shifted slightly, as though trying, even as broken as his body was, to attack Allan. What had done this to them? What made them insane like this? The man continued to grunt and shift.

“I'm going to kill you,” Allan said calmly.

No change. No effect. Allan sighed, raised the blade and brought it down swiftly on the man's neck, severing his head in a visceral spray of blood. Allan stood, feeling suddenly very tired, wanting nothing more than to lay down and sleep for an era. Instead, he started walking again, crossing the mess hall, boots squelching in the blood. He navigated between the tables, over the bodies, and passed through a door at the back into the next mess hall. As soon as he stepped into the room, he froze, spying four demented crewmen.

They were spread out across the room, but they all immediately took notice of him. Allan decided he needed to go on the offensive. Turning, he began sprinting across the room towards the nearest crewman, a bulky security officer. There was nothing in between them. Allan brought the machete around in a tight arc towards the man's neck, but the officer ducked down at the last second, preparing to tackle Allan, and the blade slammed into his head instead. It buried itself in the insane man's skull and killed him instantly, but now it was lodged there and the blade was torn from Allan's hand as the man collapsed.

It took him just a second to glance back and calculate that there wasn't enough time to break his machete free of the corpse's skull. Allan turned, just having enough time to pull out his pipe, when the rest of the crew members rushed him. The first one was easy. A skinny female technician went down fast and hard when Allan played baseball with her head. He smashed the pipe into her face, barely hearing the dull crunch that must have been her teeth shattering. Her head twisted and her neck broke. She fell back, hit the ground and didn't rise.

The next two, however, proved to be more difficult.

Both of them were men in decent shape, and they both leaped into him mindlessly. Allan grunted as he was forced to the ground. The pipe flew from his hands. The fact that they were both trying to attack him simultaneously worked for him. They kept getting in each others' way. Allan kept rolling, shifting, trying to get out from beneath them as they pounded him with their fists. Again, he marveled at how powerfully they could punch. A closed fist should've done next to nothing against his armor, but he could
feel
those hits.

He finally managed to get out from beneath them. He kept rolling, reaching out, grabbing the nearest one's head and slamming it down into the ground as hard as he could three times in a row. Something cracked and the body went slack. There was just enough time to appreciate that there was only one more when that final man jumped back onto him. Allan reached up with his left hand, holding the man up, fingers wrapped around his neck, squeezing, while groping along the floor with his right hand, hunting for something.

He found it, a discarded utensil, and immediately brought it up and drove it into the thing's right eyeball. It was a fork. There was a spray of gore that leaked all over Allan's visor and he made a sound of disgust, then punched the fork the rest of the way, piercing the brain and killing it. With a grunt of exertion, he shoved the body up off of him and then sat up. Breathing a sigh of relief, he looked around to see if anyone else had joined the party, but he was alone in the mess hall. Allan crawled to his feet, then reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a cloth he kept for such occasions as this. He began wiping at his visor.

After a moment, his vision was clear and he tossed the wipe away. He quickly recovered his pipe, then frowned at the bent nature of it. Before long, he'd have to find some other blunt object. He slid it back into his belt, turned and went over to the body holding his machete captive. As he knelt to retrieve it, wrapping his fingers around the bloody handle, Allan hesitated. This particular crewman wasn't wearing much, and as such, more of his skin was exposed. Something new was showing, something that made Allan's entire body go cold.

A rash of angry red welts had broken out across the man's back. Allan gently probed one of the welts with the tip of the machete and felt his gorge rise as it burst and viscus black liquid slowly oozed from the wound. He took an involuntary step back. His first instinct was that it was some kind of sickness. Is
that
what had been making everyone insane? What, exactly, had they been doing on this godforsaken plague ship, Allan wondered miserably.

If it was a sickness, it had obviously spread fast. Some kind of virus or disease...he didn't have any kind of knowledge on that sort of thing. Not even vague, general information. The only thing he could think of was how could it get into him? Touch, probably. He was in this suit, and none of the blood had gotten on him. Hell, he hadn't even had any kind of skin contact. So he was probably safe. Right? Hopefully...

Unless it was airborne.

Or...he remember swallowing that water in the infirmary. What if it had infected their water supply? What were the symptoms? Were there any? Allan realized that it didn't matter, because without information, he wouldn't figure out shit. He took off running, sprinting across the mess hall, prepared to go grab Fletcher, open the lockout to the bridge and find out exactly how fucked he was. As he stepped into the cold storage unit at the back of the mess hall, his radio abruptly crackled to life. Through a haze of static, he heard Fletcher.

“Gray...come get me, hurry! They're outside the door...I think they're trying to get in,”
she whispered, sounding absolutely terrified.

“I'm coming, I'm almost there,” Allan replied.

“Hurry!”

Allan took in the cold storage bay as he passed through it, checking for anymore demented crewmen. Fridges and freezers lined the walls. Everything was covered with a smooth layer of ice and a thin gray fog clung to the environment, still on the air. There was nothing and no one waiting for him in there. Pushing through it, Allan hit the far door, opened it up, moved through a small antechamber and came to the living quarters section.

“They've found me! They're breaking down the door!”
Fletcher cried.

He could hear pounding, but he wasn't sure where from. Letting out a short, frustrated huff, Allan took off in the likeliest direction.

“Is there any other way out?” he asked.

“No!”

“Just...hold on, I'm almost there!” he replied.

He raced through flickering, derelict corridors, passing several open and closed doors, trying to find the one Fletcher was hiding behind. It would at least be easy enough, considering there would be a mob of psychotics trying to break it down. Coming to the end of one corridor that terminated in a T junction, Allan hesitated, listening, then broke left. He pounded down another passageway, took a right turn, then stopped.

“ALLAN!”

He heard that both over his radio and from close proximity. He saw the back of a crewman entering one of the living quarters. Allan raced down the corridor, hearing Fletcher begin screaming. He reached the doorway, grabbed the nearest crewman by the back of his suit, pulled the machete back and rammed it forward through the man's throat. Not bothering to check and see if the man was actually dead, though he couldn't imagine him surviving, he ripped the blade out, yanked the body backwards and tossed it into the corridor.

He spied three or four more psychotic security personnel inside. He couldn't tell because they were all a tangle of thrashing of limbs as they converged on Fletcher, who, Allan realized with a sudden, stomach-freezing terror, wasn't wearing her suit of armor.

They managed to lock eyes once before one of the security personnel grabbed her head and gave a hard, vicious pull. The flesh around her neck ripped apart in a spray of blood. At the same time, another began the process of tearing her arm off. The other two began mercilessly pounding what remained of her body with their bare fists.

“
Fletcher
!” Allan shrieked.

Something broke in him, and suddenly, time seemed to come to him through a red-tinted haze in confusing flashes.

In one instant, he was bashing someone's head into a wall over and over again. Powerful hands grabbed him from behind as he watched the skull cave in, blood and brains spraying out from the wound he'd created.

Then he was bashing in a chest with his pipe, blood flying across his visor, his armor, other constantly shifting bodies.

In the next instant, he was on the ground, wrestling with someone, their face hovering above his faceplate, the face an expression of bloody fury.

Then he was squeezing someone's neck with his suit-enhanced strength, the neck collapsing within his hands, getting smaller and smaller.

Blood, so much blood, everywhere.

A flash of metal, bones crunching, a furious shriek.

Then he was sitting on the ground, his back to something, heart pounding, lungs heaving, his visor covered in viscera. Allan let out a low groan. His throat hurt, felt raw, and he had a bad headache. He tried to swallow, but found his mouth dry. As he stood up, he realized it wasn't just his throat that was sore, but his muscles as well.

Allan surveyed the room he was in.

For a second, he wasn't sure what had happened, he could only get flashes of violence. But then he remembered as his eyes fell on the five corpses. They were all horribly beaten, mangled and, in some cases, dismembered. His gaze paused as he spied what remained of Fletcher, and a sharp bolt of miserable guilt struck him. She had been trying to prove herself, just a scared tech looking to not go to jail because of political bullshit.

“Fletcher...” he moaned, then felt his stomach twitch.

Turning, groping for his visor control, he stumbled out of the room and just managed to get his visor open as he collapsed to his hands and knees in the corridor and vomited. He kept going for several seconds until he was dry-heaving, then pulled out a few of those wipes. After using one to wipe off his mouth, he hawked and spat several times, then closed his visor and washed it off with the rest. When he was finished, he spied his machete, half-in and half-out of the open doorway. He retrieved it, then realized his pipe was missing.

He spent five minutes looking for it, but never found it. Sighing, gripping his machete, Allan left the room, purposefully not looking at Fletcher, and went in search of the security center. Five miserable minutes later, he stood before the primary console, alone in the dim room. He quickly ran through the procedure, shutting down the lockout node. Once the process was finished, he took a minute to sit down in one of the chairs and pull out his portable medical kit. He was really starting to feel like crap. His whole body ached.