Sunday 18 April 2010

The Shattered World Part 7 - Sacrifice

Darkened halls. Strange noises that made you look around and see shapes in the shadows. Horrific shapes. The Eden Facility had long been abandoned, but you could feel the spirits of the dead workers haunting your footsteps. Rebecca didn't notice. Yarofev was dead, and with him her only hope of finding out who she was. She didn't care if she lived or died anymore.

Rebecca was supported by Christian and John. Emily walked behind them and turned around, her gun ready, when ever she heard something. They didn't have time to shut the door, and the Creature was still after them. Their only hope was to activate Eden.

John had no idea where they were going. He had found a map and could roughly work out where they were, but the facility was not like Yarofev's. Yarofev was a maze of underground tunnels and a manor house on top. Eden was many, many floors below them. John had found a maintenace shaft, and had hoped that it would take them down far enough.

************

Eden was still not ready. The Survivors had moved to quickly under the guide of Yarofev and the machines creating Eden were old. It needed another hour or it would go horribly wrong. If activated before completion, anything within a thousand miles would be utterly destroyed in the resulting blast.

The Creature had killed Yarofev, but it was still a threat to Eden. When the Survivors were a few floors down, it would destroy the uppermost floors. It would bring in many Zombies, but by then it could be activated.

Eden sighed. Everything was going to be alright after all.

************

The lift was slow. They had to get down about 20 floors underground and they had only just gone past the fifth. Ten minutes of waiting and all the time the Creature was getting closer. If they didn't reach Eden soon, they may never reach it at all.

Rebecca stood silently in a corner. She kept reliving the scene of Yarofev's death. The Creature, the metal pole, the blood seeping out of the wound. She closed her eyes, and tried to hold back the tears that tried to break through. It would be so easy to take her own life; she would be free of this world and could finally meet her parents in the afterlife, if there was one. But she couldn't: she was the only one who could activate Eden and the entire world and anyone left alive relied on her getting to floor BG-20.

Then, at floor BG-17 it happened. A tremendous explosion shook the lift and everyone in it. Looking up, the group could see what remained of the upper floors.

The floors that were no longer there.

"What the fuck just happened?" Emily was shouting, and Christian pointed towards the edge of the newly formed crater. The Creature had not been killed in the blast, and the group were now extremely exposed to the outside world.

************

People say that Zombies hunger for blood and flesh, but that is only how it is observed. It's said that they howl to communicate with eachother when tracking down a victim. But it has never been seen from the Zombies point of view.

When a body dies, it is still functional in some ways. When the virus spread, it simply restarted the body and brain. And so the Zombies were born. But there was a difference: they retained some of their basic knowledge from their previous life. When they howl, they scream for help because they know what has happened to them. They kill people in anger when no help is given. They are seriously misunderstood creatures.

But when they see or hear and explosion, they are always drawn towards it. In the ground, a huge crater and a lift traveling slowly down underground. A lift that contained life. Life that had failed to help them.

The Zombies flocked towards the Eden Facility to stamp out the last of those who had kept the luxury of being fully alive.

************

The lift doors opened, and the Survivors were surprised to see a lit up room ahead of them. A huge hall and, at the very end, a huge tank with something blue inside. The tank was completely glass, and stretched from the floor to the ceiling. If you looked carefully through the dark blue liquid, you could almost make out the shape of a person.

Christian and John rigged the lift with explosives, to buy some time from the Zombies that they knew were headed their way. As Rebecca and Emily trudged ahead, they found some pages lying on the floor. Rebecca was instantly upon them, taking in information from the 'Eden Archives'. So, a man named Yematin had worked with Richard and successfully created Eden. Or not so successfully, as it was not yet complete. According to a countdown on a strange machine, they would still have to wait another 15 minutes before Eden could be activated.

As Christian and John finished rigging the lift, they heard the screams of the Zombies. The next quarter of an hour would be a long, and bloody, one.

************

The Creature looked down the maintenance shaft. It had been locked up here, but very recently it had broken out. About 93 years ago, it was captured in basic Zombie-Form and experimented upon. It had grown bigger, stronger and more angry over such a long time, locked up in a tiny rotting cell. It had killed a former worker of Black Row, he knew, and he would now destroy another of their projects.

It still held the metal pole, but the sharp end was covered in blood. Blood as black as the night sky. The pole had been blunted by the concrete wall, but the blood would not come off and further blunted the pole. It would be no more a weapon than a walking stick.

The Creature tossed the pole to his side and jumped down the shaft. All the floors down, right to the bottom.

************

Emily was the first to hear the Creature. There was a solid thud as it hit the lift, and then it exploded. The trap had been set off, but it had not worked. The Creature picked up a concrete slab and hurled it at the Survivors. It missed Eden with inches to spare.

Rebecca, Emily, Christian and John spread out. If the tank was destroyed, all hope would be lost. For ten minutes they avoided things thrown by the Creature, but then Emily's luck ran out. In an attempt to dodge a machine being thrown at her, her leg was sliced open on a torn piece of metal. She tried to get up, but she couldn't and she became an easy target. Her end was quick.

Rebecca couldn't wait much longer. She turned and sprinted for the controls to Eden. Zombies were pouring in through the shaft and Christian was surrounded. Only she could save him. She activated Eden and supplied a blood sample. The DNA was accepted, and Eden began to hum. It started shining with an inner light, and suddenly its glare was blinding. Rebecca closed her eyes and turned away. The Zombies stopped fighting and tried to flee the facility.

Through mental connection, Eden looked into Rebecca's mind. It felt her pain from losing Yarofev, and it felt sad. No longer did it want Yarofev destroyed so badly. Eden was active, but it was not ready. The entire facility exploded, destroying everything for miles around.

************

Yarofev woke up. He was lying on a field of grass, but he could remember everything. The Creature, Eden, Rebecca. She had done her job, but she had died in the process. He looked at his hand, and willed it to transform into a claw. It did, and he was shocked. Richard knelt over and cried. Eden was supposed to repair the world and reverse what Yarofev had done to him, but it had only done one of those.

Yarofev got up and pulled is hood back over his head. His glowing eyes stood out in the shadow the hood created. He wanted a cure and answers, so he began his journey. A journey that would take him back into the heart of Black Row.

1 comment:

  1. Fast-paced, tightly plotted and pretty profound. Your writing really got better over the course of this story.

    But one scary question - is this the end? Of the Shattered World that is?

    I know there's going to be more though... mwahahaha...

    P.S. I think I've got more of a grasp about what your next story's going to be about. If you want a break and want me to write it, I'm more than happy.

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