“Dark Space” Written by Michael Clark
George Riley was the first to walk down the freighter’s ramp. There were four security officers and one captain waiting to greet them. George was wearing one of the commando’s armor and holding their assault rifle.
He opened fire and sprayed left and right before they could even speak to him. Three of the guards went down immediately from the hail of gunfire. The docking guards who were watching safely from a booth two floors up set off the alarms. The surviving guards returned fire, but George’s armor mostly protected him.
A horde of the Medusa VII colonists rushed out of the freighter’s cargo hold and charged the security personnel. They savagely bit into their necks, wrists, or shoulders. The hangar was filled with screams of terror, and the sounds of flesh being ripped apart.
The captain’s last sentiment was one of regret, he wished he was one of the men gunned down before they knew what happened to them.
The security officers shrieked as their skin was shredded and torn apart by rotting teeth. One of the guards in the booth made urine. The other was screaming into comms for backup. Neither of them had considered putting quarantine measures in place until it was too late.
George telepathically ordered his followers to spread out and turn everyone they came across.
The first batch of reinforcements arrived from a different doorway then the welcoming party. They caught him off-guard and opened fire. He launched himself into a massive thirty foot leap into the air. Before he landed on the reinforcements, he spit out bile onto one of them. The stomach bile was much more acidic than when George was alive. It melted the guard’s face almost instantly. By the time his corpse fell to the ground, his skull was visible.
George landed on the second guard, and his hand-stinger ripped through his throat. The third shot him point-blank with a shotgun, knocking him backwards. The frightened guard was about to fire it again, when George launched the stinger from his hand. It landed right between the eyes of the guard, who slowly fell backwards to the ground.
Thick and rusty blood seeped out of his wounds, but George stood up. Launching his stinger had hurt far more than the bullets, but he could regrow it in time. He still decided to rest and heal. He grabbed the guard’s shotgun, and retreated back to the freighter. Faint sounds of gunfire and screams could be heard in the nearby halls.
Right before George reentered the freighter he saw the two guards in the booth get slaughtered. His minions clawed at them with sharp nails. Their blood splattered against the plexiglass. With each new follower he gained, his power grew. Those in the booth will become his soon enough. They all would.
*
Warden Joshua Martin watched the camera feeds in absolute horror. Out of all the things that could possibly kill him, he had not expected anything like this. The Captain of the Guards, CO Giovanni Kodlak, waited patiently for an answer.
“Evacuate, or lockdown?” he asked calmly again. Martin had no clue how anyone could be any sort of calm after watching these ravenous, human-like monsters tear through their people. And they were getting closer to the prison blocks. Martin was still staring at the vidscreen consoles.
“Lockdown,” Martin finally said, after trying to swallow the lump in his throat. It was the answer Kodlak expected. The prison was far too large to evacuate on such short notice. There were hardly enough ships and escape pods to evacuate all of the workers, let alone any prisoners too.
“Attention all personnel! This is Giovanni Kodlak. This is Code Red. I repeat. Code Red. Initiating lockdown protocol A3. Report to your stations and make sure you are armed at all times. Good luck. Kodlak out.”
“Out here, it’ll take an S.O.S. approximately ten hours to be transmitted to the nearest UNSF satellite, and then at least another four to reach someone who can do something about it,” Kodlak said. He looked grave and solemn.
“Do you think we can last a full day? Is it possible that we can eliminate those… things?” Martin asked.
“Sir!” A CO said, after he came bursting in. He was clearly out of breathe.
“What?”
Warden Martin wasn’t sure he heard the man right through the blaring of alarms. “Say again trooper?”
“I said, ‘our long-range communications are down’!”
Kodlak slammed his massive fist against the wall. “Assemble our best riot forces. We have to secure that area!”
*
When George heard the alarm change patterns, he knew he had almost forgotten to do one thing first. He stabbed the captain of the greeting party in the head with his small stub of a stinger that was regrowing in his hand. It took a little longer than he would have thought, but he was able to download the data from the man’s knowledge banks that he needed. He ordered a good portion of his subjects to head to the area that could send long-range communications. Some were cut-off, as large metal doors came and blocked off hallways, or as some steel doors became locked indefinitely.
But the lockdown was mainly designed to prevent a successful prison riot. It didn’t account for subhuman creatures able to jump twelve feet and break into the ventilation systems that couldn’t fit your average human.
Two hours later, their numbers were starting to grow again. One by one, the dead became undead, or the colonists that were gunned down, healed and got back up.
When Giovanni Kodlak and his best men fought their way to the communications center, two hours had passed from the time that the first guard was killed. By the time they made it there, they found all of the equipment was in shambles. Everything was savagely attacked until it was a pile of electronic garbage. Some of it was actually still on fire.
Kodlak punched another wall. Three of his best men had died on their journey here, even with their thick riot gear. But that wasn’t the worst of it. What Warden Martin told him through their comm channel was much worse.
*
“Their numbers are growing every time they kill my men. There’s no hope. I’ll have everyone converge on my position, then we’ll fight our way to the hangar bay.”
“And then?” asked Martin’s assistant. She was terrified. She watched her office staff get mauled by only one of them. She hardly made it to the Warden’s office in one piece, barely escaping one of the possessed things that chased her.
“And then we head for that science outpost on that new world. They’ll call for backup, and then we can decide if we should terminate the entire station, or liberate it.”
“Where’s C.O. Kodlak? We’ll never make it without him.”
“He’s busy.” Martin had informed him that one of the major prison blocks had become compromised by the monsters. Allegedly one of the security guards let out a bunch of prisoners to try to kill the thing that was chasing him.
For the first time ever, some prisoners were actually happy to be in a locked cell.
But when the zombies made it to the other guard station in that prison block, they smashed everything electronic. This unlocked most of the prison cells. The prisoners in this block began shouting and screaming. Chaos spread like fire.
That meant two prison blocks were compromised. Now the prisoners joined the legion of bloody casualties. And then they joined the walking dead.
There was a cell block in between the two that were contaminated. The prisoners and COs could all hear the others fighting for their survival. For a short time their entire area was dead silent. They were all contemplating what to do, or wondering if they would be next. They were listening to screams and gunfire and curses. Other unconventional noises were not so easily deciphered.
It was the loud voice of Felix Sherman that began the shouts. He called out to the CO in charge of their block, a young man by the name of Logan Johnson.
“HEY CO JOHNSON, YOU CAN’T JUST LEAVE US IN HERE!” Sherman screamed. Moments earlier, one of the possessed creatures fell through a ventilation shaft. It broke both its legs when it landed, but it still crawled towards the nearest cell and began reaching for the inmate inside.
CO Johnson came over and shot it in the head, but his partner, a man twice his age, ran out of their detention area without a word. Everyone came to the conclusion that the thing that fell from their ceiling was the reason why the prison had a blaring alarm sounding off. The same thing making inmates and guards alike scream in pain or terror in the adjacent cell blocks.
“I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME! YOUR BUDDY LEFT YOU, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN WE SHOULD BE LEFT IN HERE LIKE CATTLE. DO THE RIGHT THING MAN, LET US OUT! WE WON’T HURT YOU, WE JUST WANNA LIVE OR GET THE CHANCE TO DEFEND OURSELVES FROM WHATEVER’S GOING ON!”
The inmates who knew Sherman looked at him with awe. Sherman poked his head as close to the bars in his cell as he could, he saw the CO heard him, but he made no reply.
“IF YOU DON’T LET ME OUTTA HERE, I’M GONNA RIP OUT YOUR TONGUE KID,” another inmate on the opposite side screamed.
Other voices took up the chant and began pleading, begging, and threatening the CO. Some said nothing at all, hoping to be left alone in their cell.
Then there was a banging noise at a locked door. Everyone shut up and listened. It wasn’t a knock. It was the sound of multiple hands smacking the metal door violently. The inmates closest to that door saw the fingers reach under the door and actually start lifting it up. It was a sliding door, but it was impossible to open them manually like that. Or so the designers thought.
The inmates near the door started screaming and yelling, and then the rest of the inmates started screaming too like a domino of voices.
It was about then that CO Johnson received the message from the Warden giving the okay to abandon post and converge on him for a staff evacuation.
He started leaving and the prisoners called after him.
“YOU’LL ROT IN HELL FOR THIS KID!” One voice called. “I DIDN’T EVEN DO NOTHIN,” another shouted.
The sliding door opened and Johnson turned to leave. He was met with a taller man in a prison jumpsuit. And his shiv. The hand holding the weapon struck out like a cobra. As CO Johnson began bleeding out on the floor, the inmate went to his console, and hit the OPEN ALL button. The inmates cheered.
The man who released them shot Johnson’s sidearm into the ceiling.
“If we’re gonna live, we need to band together. Save your prison feuds for another day. Today, we LIVE!” They cheered even louder. CO Johnson bled out watching the inmate who shanked him dish out orders like it was his second-nature.
*
The warden and his party were decently far from the majority of the outbreak. In fact, the only infectious zombies that were anywhere near this level at the top of the station, were there because they chased staff members that fled this way. Still, they had gotten lucky and hadn’t really encountered anything on the way. For the most part.
“Warden! Mayday, mayday!” One of the troopers called out.
“Copy, what’s going on?” Martin solemnly realized he was talking to the guard he sent to protect and secure the private docking bay.
“We’re under attack! We’ve got dead guards AND dead prisoners attacking us!” Martin could hear the sounds of gunfire very clearly through the comm channel.
“Fall back to a defensible position, I’ve got about fifteen armed men with me! We’re right down the hall!” Then he heard more gunfire, but louder this time. This time it was the sound of one of his men in the rear-guard firing.
The unarmed people he brought with him, some twenty bodies, started screaming and pushing the other way. They almost knocked him over which surely would have helped him get trampled if he didn’t manage to stay on his feet like he did. The guards in the front pushed through the mob of people running the opposite direction and helped the rear-guard dispose of the couple of zombies attacking them. They took them down, minus one guard who got dragged off by his ankles before they could save him.
The mob of untrained people ran right into a mob of undead, who preyed on them like minnows in a shark tank. The warden watched with terrible horror, and the guards ran back to the front to join the fray.
Warden Martin watched his assistant get slammed into a wall, and then bitten in the jugular by one of those things. A guard kicked the thing chomping on her neck, and she fell against the wall with blood squirting from her neck like a fountain.
The warden looked over his shoulder and saw one of them was coming towards him, but all of the guards went towards the hangar to fight the main mob. He ran as fast as he could, faster and farther then he thought was within his limits.
He went into the hangar bay and saw his ship. The remaining guards he stationed there were killing off the last few things, but he could see that they had lost some men too. Some of the surviving people entered the hangar bay in tow.
“Who can fly my ship?” when two people raised their hands, one being a guard, he shouted “Go! Go!”
Then they all got cut off as the human-like monstrosities jumped and blocked their passage. They made no move to attack, causing the guards to nervously hold their fire too.
Five of the guards from the hallway battle entered, but they were still outnumbered by almost double. The warden noted that two of the untrained people had weapons in their hands, despite how much they were shaking, he was still impressed.
One of the creatures pushed through the crowd of undead, and walked in between them all. No man’s land. It wore the armor of a commando, but it looked different than any of them. It had a long stinger jutting from its hand, and it’s skin was a dark grey. The helmet was off, and Martin saw all the hair had fallen off of it’s head. Instead, black veins were wrapped around it’s head like spiderwebs.
Martin defecated in his pants, because the thing actually smiled. It’s lips curled up. It was looking at him triumphantly. Looking directly at him! Like it knew who he was. The things all took a step towards the survivors one step at a time. Martin could hear them quivering. The COs were looking at him, with eyes begging him to do something. What could he do? Offer them credits? Tell them to open fire? Ask them why this is happening?
He was about to make a break for his ship anyway, and let everyone else figure their shit out, when he saw Kodlak arrive with a small team of five men in riot gear. Kodlak quietly stepped towards the crowd of things.
By god, he’s trying to flank them and catch them off guard!
Incredibly, Martin found himself smiling. He loved the man more than ever right now. “KILL THEM ALL!” he shouted, and his men and Kodlak’s men opened fire on the creatures at the same time. Several of their heads burst into gory fireworks from headshots.
Then the thing in the commando armor whipped out a weapon of it’s own and fired back at Kodlak’s team. The man next to Kodlak took a bullet in the face and died instantly.
“Oh shit,” Martin whimpered. He didn’t think those things could use weapons. He found himself returning to his prior plan. He ran onto the ship. Miraculously, he made it. He went to the cockpit and found the two pilots seated and prepping systems, he let out a sigh. “Let’s go now!”
“What about the others?” the CO asked.
“They’ll be fine, Kodlak is there! Close the ramp, quick!”
He went to one of the windows and saw the other unarmed people flee to the next closest ship. None of them made it. Kodlak’s men were shield bashing the things, and decapitating them after knocking them down.
Kodlak took a shotgun from one of the dead guards and fired it, tearing off the hand of the armored creature. The gun fell with it. He went to shoot it once more, but one of the other things jumped in the way and absorbed the shells.
The creature fired the stinger attached to it’s hand like a projectile, and it impaled the guard next to Kodlak and pinned him against Kodlak’s leg.
That was the last Martin saw of any of them. His shuttle took off, and flew through the hangar bay shield, and into the dark of space.
“Head for Eden Prime at once!” He told the cockpit. He didn’t wait for an acknowledgement. He grabbed his favorite bottle of whiskey and went to the bathroom drinking it. He looked in the mirror and washed his hands and face. He could smell the stink of the wet fecal matter in his pants. He’d have to do something about that.
“I’m so losing my job,” he muttered. He realized he was still breathing heavily. He threw up into the sink. Not knowing whether it was the trauma or the speed of which he drank, that made him puke. The warden looked back up into the mirror. He saw one of them behind him. He tried to scream and turn around, but it had already impaled him through the stomach with it’s powerful arm. He guessed it had done so before he had even seen it in the mirror. Blood spurted up his throat and leaked out through his lips.
Joshua Martin tried again to scream, but it used it’s other hand to claw out his throat, while simultaneously biting his shoulder. He saw all of this through the bloody bathroom mirror until he fell out of sight.
The ship continued on it’s flight path to Eden Prime until it breached the atmosphere. When it did, it crashed instead of landing. There were no survivors, because the crew was dead before it even touched the ground.
