Saturate (The Shadow Wars Book 15) Read online

  Well, he’d have to avoid that area.

  There was no one moving on any of the monitors. In fact, there was no one at all in sight, alive or dead. He had no idea what was going on, but this place had the ominous feeling of abrupt abandonment, of people leaving suddenly, fearing for their lives. They hadn’t even shut down their workstation. It was possible that whoever ran this area was just out for a coffee break or something...but then there was a break room and a bathroom within ten feet of here. So where had they gone? Who was running this damned show?

  Time to find out where that last door led.

  Greg moved back out into the hallway and moved up to the closed door. As he began to reach out for the control pad, something made him stop. There was a little red light flashing next to a tiny screen set into the pad. Fearing the worst, he leaned down and studied the screen. 0% ATMOSPHERE was flashing in blood red lettering across it.

  “Well...fuck,” Greg muttered.

  He stood there for a long moment, considering the situation. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anything, not when he had to piss so badly, anyway. Heaving a sigh, he turned and moved back into the bathroom, then took a moment to relieve himself. Once he was finished, he flushed, washed his hands and moved into the break room. He poked around in the cabinets and the mini-fridge, but they were as empty as the gun lockers.

  “Fucking wonderful,” he muttered.

  Dejected, hungry and annoyed, Greg moved back to the main door and tried to clear his mind. He obviously had to get out of here. Which meant he had to pass through that atmospherically compromised room. But he didn’t have a suit. Greg closed his eyes, looking at the situation from whatever angles he could, trying to reason it out. Vents? he wondered suddenly. Or maybe some other exit he hadn’t seen, like a maintenance crawlspace in the floor or the ceiling? Greg turned and began another thorough search of the area.

  Twenty minutes later, he found himself back at that door, even more dejected and miserably frustrated than before. There were no vents he could gain access to, and no crawlspaces hidden anywhere that he could find.

  He was going to have to face this, he realized slowly.

  He was going to have to face it head on.

  Okay, okay, okay...he could do this. He’d gone through worse and come out the other end. Greg sighed and decided to tackle the first step, which would at least be easy. He returned to the security station and grabbed the gasmask, then pulled it on securely over his face. At least it would protect his face from the lethal cold of near absolute zero. He’d heard about people surviving being in zero atmosphere environments before.

  And all he had to do, judging by the monitor, was cross ten feet, open a door, get through and close the door.

  Easy.

  Plus, the gravity plates were still functional, since nothing was floating free in there. So that was a bonus at least.

  Greg moved up to the door and tried to pump himself up for this. He stared down at the pad, the flashing red light and words. His finger hovered over the open button. He knew there were things that could go wrong. The door on the other side might be broken or he might trip or something else totally random could happen. But he was at a dead end here. It was either do this or wait for someone else to come and rescue him.

  And Greg had never been good at waiting.

  He clenched and unclenched his fists several times, took a few deep breaths, shook his head, (which only made the low pounding worse), cracked his neck...man, he did not want to do this! But, in the end, he knew it was going to be stupidly dangerous and painful, and, well, he couldn’t lie to himself about it: he liked the danger.

  Greg pushed the button.

  The pressure difference sucked him out into the room, giving him a good start, and he began running.

  The cold hit him like nothing he had ever felt before.

  It sapped the strength from him immediately, sucked the life right out of him in mere seconds. It was a burning agony, an ache that ate right down to his bone marrow. He pushed through it all, through the pain and the suffering and the godawful misery and sprinted across the short junction. He hit the open button and the door slid open. This time, the pressure difference worked against him. Greg forced himself in against the winds of the atmosphere being sucked out and the very second he was on the other side, he slapped the close button.

  The door closed and he dropped to the deckplates, gasping, moaning in sick agony. He hurt all over, everything on his body burned and he was writhing in pain. He curled up into a ball, crying out, tears of pain escaping his eyes.

  Then, mercifully, all went dark, and he was returned to unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 02

  –Damage–

  For the second time that day, Greg awoke to pain.

  Only this time it wasn’t just his head that hurt, but his whole goddamned body. As an added bonus, he now heard a distant, eerie groaning sound that seemed to resonate within his skull. Greg grunted and snapped his eyes open, anxious fear shooting through him. He knew something was wrong, he shouldn’t be in this situation, he was vulnerable. He was in an L shaped corridor, at the bend. Sterilized white-tiled walls surrounded him. He got up onto his knees and stumbled to his feet. But he stood up too quickly and crashed back to the floor, crying out as pain flared across his body. What he had been doing just now…

  The room.

  The zero atmosphere room.

  He’d gone through it. Groaning, amazed that he’d made it through more or less intact, Greg got up onto his hands and knees and hung his head, closing his eyes, waiting for his body to be ready to try standing up again.

  He realized that he still had the gasmask on and pulled it off, tossing it aside.

  Distantly, he heard that groaning noise. It was definitely not mechanical or artificial in nature. Something was making it. His heart pounding faster in response to the sound, which caused his headache to flare, he grit his teeth and stood up. This time he at least stayed upright. Something was around here with him. No doubt that something was a monster, a lethal entity that would kill him very effectively on sight if he gave it the chance. Greg looked around, trying to determine where the sound had come from, but it had faded.

  Sighing, he took stock of the situation. Six more doors to play with. Two of them were positioned at the ends of the hallways and he didn’t count the one behind him, the one that led back the way he’d come. Two of them were on the inner walls of the L, so they probably led to the same room, and two more were in the outer walls. He decided to start there. Moving over first to the right, he opened the door and peered in. Just a storage room, shelves shoved up against the walls, some crates piled in the corner, a technician’s workbench dominating the center of the room beneath a light centered directly overhead.

  He left it alone after making sure it was empty of hostiles and moved on to the second door. Opening it, he found another bathroom that was vacant. Greg made for the first inner door, moving slowly. Jeez, he felt like shit. Pain ran through his body, flaring in some parts. He opened the door and felt a tremendous relief settle over him. He’d been right, both doors led into the same room, and it was a small emergency infirmary.

  He almost collapsed at the sight, but he couldn’t. Forcing himself to stay upright, Greg turned back around, closed and locked the door he’d just come in through. Then he lurched over to the other door, locking it as well. There was just one other door at the back. He moved to it, opened it up and poked his head inside. It was a changing room that came complete with a shower stall. Greg took a deep breath and let it out.

  “Thank fuck,” he whispered.

  The first order of business was to see what he had to work with. He spent a little bit of time poking through the various cabinets, storage bins and drawers, coming up with enough medical supplies and painkillers to tide him over. He also managed to find, of all things, another jumpsuit. This one was midnight black and looked a bit more durable, more like something a security officer would wear beneath the
ir armor.

  Perfect.

  He gathered up all these things and went into the changing room, then closed and locked the door behind him.

  First order of business: Greg stripped everything off and took a look at himself in the mirror. He winced when he saw that several blood vessels had burst beneath his skin, a few across his chest, more on his arms. Great. They were ugly, and painful, but there wasn’t much he could do about them now. He was glad to see that there wasn’t really anything else, no scrapes or burns or cuts, nothing he needed to tend to. With that out of the way, he fired up the shower as hot as it would go and stepped inside. The comfort and pleasure and relief that swept over him was so powerful that he almost passed out. He tried not to linger, as he had no idea what might be going on outside the walls surrounding him, but it was very difficult.

  The shower just felt so fucking good.

  In the end, he managed to cut the water off after about five minutes. He got out, dried off and dressed in the new black jumpsuit. This one fit him better and just generally made him feel more put-together, more able to face what lay ahead. It was interesting the effect something as simple as the clothes you wore could have on your psychology. Freshly washed and dressed, Greg clipped the knife and the medical kit to his belt, then stepped back out into the main infirmary. His gaze zeroed in on something he’d seen before but hadn’t fully registered: a mini-fridge. Maybe this one would actually have stuff in it.

  Crossing the room, he opened it up and peered inside. He immediately grabbed the PB&J that was wrapped up in plastic, tore it open and ate it after making sure it wasn’t old. When that was done, he tossed aside the plastic, grabbed a can of Vex and drained it all in one go. All that was left after that was an apple, which he ate down the core and tossed aside as well. There was nothing else. Sighing, he stood back up and took a moment to stretch out. It hurt, though not as much as it had before. He popped several of his joints, trying to prepare himself for whatever was ahead, then he dry-swallowed a trio of painkillers.

  “Okay,” he muttered, pulling his knife out. “Enough’s enough.”

  It was time to get back to work.

  Feeling more focused and alert than he had since he’d first awoken aboard this miserable place, he promptly noticed something he’d missed coming into the infirmary. Something that was actually pretty crucial. A map. He stepped up to it and looked the map over. It was a simple paper map, laminated and framed and attached to the wall. Pretty convenient if the power failed. Or if you didn’t have access to a digital copy.

  It just seemed to show the local area, which was fine for now. He saw the area he’d been in, confirming he’d seen all it had to offer, and found himself on the map. Okay, the door directly ahead of the one he’d originally come through after getting through the wretched, atmosphere-compromised area led to a control room. Oh, thank god. The next door led to a larger area that held more cells, an office area and another break room. There was also an exit that led to, presumably, the rest of the...ship? Space station?

  Where was he?

  Unfortunately, that information wasn’t available. Greg left the infirmary and marched quickly to the control room door, still wondering in the back of his head what in the hell that groaning had been. He hit the access button...and promptly received a sharp, angry buzz. Studying the control pad, he saw that it was locked down, and it apparently wasn’t going to open without ‘proper authorization’. Given the fact that there was a magnetic card reader beside it, it must mean a keycard. Of fucking course, because why not!?

  Grumbling, clenching the knife tightly in hand, Greg turned and marched back down the hallway, took a right and marched to the end of the second hall. He hit the open button for the door there and hesitated as the door slid into its niche. For the first time, he saw some kind of obvious, overt sign that something had gone very wrong in the area. The clues had all been there before, but now it was right there, in his face.

  He was granted access to a larger lobby area.

  A pair of corpses were strewn out haphazardly across the main floor, each in their own pools of blood that had dried up. A large, ugly smear of blood led off to the left, through one of the three doors in the room. There was a door to either side of him and another dead ahead, at the top of a stairwell. Greg moved slowly closer to the bodies. He peered in through the one open door to the left and could see another hallway where the smear continued, but nobody and nothing actually in the hallway. He took a moment to search and study the bodies.

  Both were men wearing jumpsuits. One dark blue, one black, like his own. They’d been ripped open, it looked like. The man in blue had long gashes down his chest and most of his face looked like it had been eaten off. The man in the black jumpsuit had had his stomach ripped open. His foamy red-and-purple intestines had spilled out, snaking across the polished white floor, looking hideous and stomach-churning.

  The smell was awful, but one that Greg had gotten used to dealing with.

  Unfortunately, neither of them had a keycard or even a single bullet to their name. Sighing, he straightened back up and made for the left door after seeing that both of the other ones were also locked down. He stood at the head of the corridor, considering the situation. Four doors to either side, one at the very end. He knew each of the doors led to individual offices and the one at the back was the break room, but what to do?

  It was obvious where the...the whatever it was had gone to, given the blood trail. And...he could hear it now. He could hear chewing, and the occasional wet snapping. His entire body went cold. Zombies? Please, fuck, not zombies again. He’d had too much of them, more than enough to last a lifetime. Greg made himself focus. Either take it head on or search the other offices first. He decided to do that one, and tried to tell himself that it was a tactical advantage. He didn’t want to be fighting this one thing and have another one he’d missed come up behind him and kill him when he was in the middle of combat.

  It wasn’t just because he was afraid to face whatever it was and stalling.

  Greg began moving through the four offices he could check out before getting to the door in question. They were, unfortunately, all empty and held no clues, no supplies, no reasons not to go on and face down this unknown horror. Gripping the knife firmly, Greg moved slowly and carefully up to the third door on the left. He pressed his back to the space in between the two doors, listening to the awful sounds, trying to convince himself that he was ready for this. Yeah, some adrenaline junkie he was. Couldn’t even face a monster without practically wetting himself, and after all this time dealing with them…

  He forced himself to look around the corner, in through the doorway.

  There it was, crouched, facing away from him. What appeared to be a man in a shredded, stained jumpsuit. It was pulling pieces of skin away from a corpse and feeding them slowly into its mouth. God, zombies again! Why?! He had to deal with this thing and do it fast. Raising the knife, concentrating intently on the awful, wretched thing, Greg stepped into the room, took two quick steps forward and plunged the blade into the back of its neck.

  It didn’t even make a sound. Instead, it just died instantly and fell forward onto the body it had been feasting on.

  Greg let out a small sigh of relief and then kicked the body over. He frowned. Something was wrong. This wasn’t a zombie. First of all, the lines beneath the skin were red and thin, not thick and black like the zombies he’d seen before. And the skin itself didn’t look decayed. It looked sallow and waxy and tough, almost like some kind of natural armor. And its chest was slightly but noticeably bulging outward.

  So what was it?

  Abruptly, the body shifted. Greg took a step back and then watched in growing horror as the bump in its chest moved. It began sliding up, through the neck, forcing the skin there to bulge. The dead man’s jaw opened up and something began slithering out. A large, thick, black slug-like creature. The thing rose up out of the corpse’s mouth and somehow seemed to sense Greg. As it did, facin
g him, it opened its mouth and issued a tiny, hissing shriek.

  Crying out, Greg stabbed down and drove the tip of the knife into the thing. The shriek cut off abruptly and the overgrown slug went limp.

  Pulling his knife from the hideous little corpse, Greg stared at it for several minutes. He knew he should be moving, knew he had to get the keycard and watch his back, but...he couldn’t stop staring. Because he knew what this was, he actually recognized it. Not from any of his own experiences, but from what Enzo had told him when they were swapping war stories and comparing scars. Mutants, he’d called them. People mutated from some kind of alien slug that got inside of them. It was exactly what he’d just fought and killed.

  A kind of relief swept through him then. The method of infection was very obvious with the mutants: the slug had to get inside of you. And that was something he could defend against. Not like with the zombies, where they could just touch or scratch you. Although he’d already survived that once, Greg had no desire to go through it again. There was no promise that it would work a second time and even if it did, he’d be left vulnerable for who knew how long. Being unconscious in a dangerous environment typically was a one way ticket to death. He’d gotten lucky twice so far in that regard and didn’t feel like pushing his luck any further.

  Making himself stand up, Greg gingerly patted down the Mutant corpse and, again, found nothing worthwhile on it. Sighing, he rubbed his hands off on the carpet and then resumed his search of the office sector. In the end, he discovered the security keycard he was looking for on the corpse of a security officer in the break room. He’d been decapitated, his remains shredded, and Greg had had to wipe the card off for almost a whole minute before it was free of blood and gore. With the card in hand, he jogged back to the security room and slid the card through the reader. It buzzed green and the door slid open.