“The coolant should be clear by now,” said the engineer, breaking the silence like a hammer blow. The clock was back on, movement was possible. He just had to make sure they got moving. He looked to Kulvinder. “Come on, give me a leg up.”
“We can't take the elevator?” asked Liam, his voice still low and soft, the enormity of the situation starting to crush him.
“The inner doors are welded to the outer ones,” whispered Johan, his eyes locked on the engineer. They were all watching him, eyes wide. He could only imagine the questions running through their heads. No time for answers.
He looked again at Kulvinder. The guard didn’t move, so the engineer made it clear in his expression that they needed to hurry. Eventually Kulvinder sighed, and grudgingly crouched with his fingers intertwined, ready to give him support. The engineer used the boost to jump up through the hole and grab onto a part of the metal roofing, somehow pulling himself the rest of the way using arms that felt so tired he didn’t know if he’d even be able to lift his wrench during the endgame.
He reached back and helped the others through, pulling each in turn, dragging them towards their future. They were all coming with him, still with him, even after he had told them everything... not everything.
When they were all out and gathered on the roof of the elevator he led the way and started to head slowly up the ladder at the side of the shaft. They moved one by one, in line and formation, like ants up a tree trunk. The heat was becoming unbearable – as it always did at this time – and sweat ran down the engineer's face and stung his eyes. His nose continued to drip slowly clotting blood, thick and dark as it dropped past his lips. He wiped it again with his sleeve to try and stop the blood falling on those following him and almost laughed at the pointlessness of such an action. Blood. There will be more than enough...
When he reached the top of the ladder he pushed himself up until he was sitting on a small ledge flush to the medical bay elevator doors. He looked down below at the small white square of light that shone out of the roof of the lift and for a moment became lost in the two or three times that he had stared at the same sight and chosen to simply jump rather than face the test to come.
He caught sight of Cathy, just behind Kulvinder and climbing steadily up towards him, He took a deep breath. Another try, one more.
He reached up to the manual release at the side and carefully slid it down, trying to make as little noise as possible so as not to alert more of the dead than necessary. It never worked but he still did it every time, just the same. An old, pointless routine.
The door slid open, revealing a scene of carnage. Blood, bones and gristle lay strewn across the reception area beyond. Broken glass and twisted metal were all that remained of the doors leading off from the large area, which was bathed in the same red emergency lights as the rest of the station, punctuated by the white flash of fizzing computer screens and smashed medical androids. Corpses were everywhere.
Seven or eight of the dead rose to their feet, alerted by the scrape of the doors as they slid back. The engineer quickly hauled himself upright, dropped the kitbag on the floor and pulled out the heavy wrench. As the corpses moved towards him – their legs trudging through the fleshy remains, dark bloody mouths agape like children reaching for food – he tried to remember what he had named his weapon in this particular rotation. It didn’t really matter, did it. A name was nothing, just a label the same as any other. The weapon still did the same job, it was still reliable and crushed the forehead and nose of the nearest corpse, sending it down to the floor in a heap.
He swung at another, caving in the side of its head as he waited for backup, the most reliable that he had found in all the familiar days. Kulvinder rolled over the lip of the doorway and pulled himself to his feet, unstrapping the nail gun from his belt and aiming it at a two more of the dead. They had been doctors from the looks of it, as they were wearing surgical gowns and were staggering in tandem towards them, masks still covering their features under milky white eyes. They dropped to the floor as he fired two careful and precise shots, his face an impassive mask.
Four more were left, lumbering with increasing speed as hunger drove them onwards. The engineer moved a little to make sure that Kulvinder had a clear shot and kicked hard at the ragged leg of the nearest corpse, making its knee buckle before he slammed the wrench into the back of its head. He always felt so guilty in the medical ward, as there was not enough time on any of the runs to look further into identities. He had no idea who any of these undead creatures had been. All that was left of their identities was lost, they were simply monstrosities to be dispatched now.
Kulvinder fired a little wide on one corpse, nicking its shoulder. He waited a few seconds, adjusted, then made no mistake as the nail slammed into its forehead. It had been a child in life, but was now nothing more than moving meat.
There were only two left, which the engineer left to Kulvinder as he started to haul the others up and into the reception. They all looked shaken, every one of them as he dragged them into that bloody area. The sound of a broken automatic door slamming awkwardly against its housing as it tried to close again and again sounded as if it were a heartbeat, the heart of a creature whose bloodstream they were wading through.
“Is that it? Is it clear?” asked Liam, his face so pale that it was a wonder that he was standing. Sweat stood out on his brow, beading and dripping down his features. A strange face for a hero.
“Not even close, I’m afraid,” said the engineer. “We need to head through the main wards to get to the escape pods.”
“I can imagine there were a lot of people in the wards who weren’t in any state to escape,” said Kulvinder, grinding his teeth. The engineer didn’t reply, instead heading carefully across the blood slicked floor towards where he knew he would find two surgical drip stands, folded under the fallen body of a nurse. He grimaced as he moved the body aside and revealed the metal poles with their four short legs, twisted and buckled. They were a little unwieldy and flimsy but they would do as weapons for Johan and Imogen. The blood pooled around his boots, a sea of tiny iron carrying vessels, source of life and signifier of death when spilled. He wondered how many gallons were now scattered across every surface of the station...
As he grabbed the makeshift weapons he noticed something that for some reason he hadn’t seen before. Maybe he had been too focussed on driving forwards in the past and his mental exhaustion and wandering thoughts had finally given him a chance to glimpse the dull brown stock of the shockgun, hidden under a chair near the dead hand of a headless guard that still seemed to be reaching for it, rigor mortis twisting the fingers into a spidery tangle.
He leaned down and pulled it out, before lifting it up and inspecting it in the dim red light. It was lightweight and sleek and the engineer knew it carried a non-lethal but still very potent punch, recalling how protesters had reacted when struck by the gun’s shot.
“Hey, give that here,” said Kulvinder, walking forward and pulling it from the engineer’s tired, unresisting hands. The guard checked the power source, pumped the stock a few times to loosen it up from the bits of flesh that had become lodged in it, before checking along the sight.
“This should help us, as long as the dead still rely on their nervous systems to move,” he said, nodding to himself a little in satisfaction. He passed the nail gun to the engineer, who took it and slung it by its strap to his belt. Another new situation, two in one run... nerves started to jangle but he tried to control himself as he passed the metal stands to Johan and Imogen. He needed confidence, otherwise he knew it would all fall apart.
“What about me? Where’s my weapon?” said Liam, wringing his hands together and trying not to look down at the carnage surrounding him.
“Better for you to just run,” said the engineer. “If you try and fight you’ll stop, and if you stop...”
“All right...” said Liam, swallowing hard. “I'll run.”
“Good man,” said the engineer. He reached forwar
d and placed a hand on Liam’s shoulder, looking into the man’s small eyes, brimful of fear and desperation. “Good luck Liam, and thank you.”
Liam looked confused but simply nodded, his breathing fast and shallow.
The engineer turned to Johan and Imogen and gave them each a nod. Every time, just a nod, which they returned. Every time. He had tried to warn them of the dangers inside in the past, give them a description of the safest route, but it had never worked. There were too many variables, too many bodies twisting and writhing. Most of all he couldn’t say what he wanted to say, about how much he admired their love, their bond, and how sorry he was that they would...
“...here we are, my weapon of choice,” said Cathy, picking a fire extinguisher off the wall. The engineer thought about handing her the newly acquired nail gun but he knew that she could use the fire extinguisher well. He needed her to survive. Cathy looked at him, a strange and unfamiliar look in her eye, a mixture of fear and wonder. New, again, this was new.
“I shouldn’t have said anything...” he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else, but Cathy moved in close and spoke to him softly and quickly, her breath warm on his face, words washing across his scars.
“If you’ve lied to us, played with the emotions of people who are already shit scared for their lives, then you’re right. If what you’ve told us is the truth, then you have nothing to be sorry for. If it’s all happening again and again then you’re as much a victim in this as us, if not more so. Yet you keep trying to fix it. How many times has it been?”
The engineer could say nothing in reply. He looked into her eyes, trying to ignore the scent of burnt flesh, the sound of distant screams that could still be heard at intervals and the pain of his own body.
“You’re old, aren’t you. I don’t know if I believe in souls but if they exist, then yours is ancient,” she said finally.
“And tired.”
“Well then... let’s try and make this the last time.”
The thought of an end of it all was bliss, a dream come true. A dream of oblivion.
“We should go,” he said suddenly, pulling away from her. He looked over to Kulvinder, who was pulling a flak jacket off the corpse of the guard and pulling it over his shoulders, the dead man’s blood mixing with the sweat on his skin. Kulvinder readied the shockgun and the engineer moved forwards to the automatic door that was still slamming pathetically against the frame again and again. He grabbed a nearby chair and waited for the door to open before jamming it into the gap near to the top, creating an entrance underneath. He ushered the others through, though he didn’t hurry them. Reticence was understandable and natural.
They moved down the corridor beyond, the lights of which had gone out to leave a receding darkness. As the thin light that was bleeding through from behind them started to fade, the engineer reached into his bag and pulled out his two torches, passing one to Liam and holding the other in his left hand, with his wrench held in the whitening knuckles of his right. As the gloom pressed in on them it made the corridor even more claustrophobic as it turned left and right. They passed smaller wards as they moved onwards, the doors of which were closed but were alive with sounds of scraping and moaning, filled with the dead. One or two corpses littered the floor, rising as they came near before falling under the impact of the engineer’s wrench or spasming and collapsing under the blast of Kulvinder’s shockgun. It was a temporary measure as the electrified bodies soon began to stir again, but by that time they had passed by safely.
Soon the engineer’s torch picked out the yellow paint that marked the main ward, the huge hall of beds and capsules that marked the last obstacle on the way to the escape pods. Kulvinder placed his hand near to the door controls and the engineer put his hand up in warning.
“They’re right behind the door.”
Kulvinder frowned but didn’t question it.
“It’s the only way, isn’t it,” he replied.
“Yes,” said the engineer. Kulvinder sighed, before hitting his forehead against the door three times, obviously trying to psyche himself up. The sound caused a roar of groaning from behind the doorway, piling the dead even higher. The engineer closed his eyes, cursing himself. The warning had probably made it even harder. He had never done it before, why now? Why was it all changing?
“You don't have to go first,” said the engineer suddenly. Though Kulvinder had gone first so many times before, the subtle differences in the strange repetitive narrative of his life in this run had thrown the engineer. The reality was stark, the smells acidic and cutting through him, and the pain – both physical and emotional – was starting to become almost unbearable.
“Yes, I do,” said Kulvinder, a strange look crossing his eyes. “It's my job. It's my role.”
Before the engineer could say anything else, Kulvinder pressed the release.
There was light beyond, and flesh, pounds and pounds of rotting flesh and bone. The mass of bodies that spewed out of the entrance threw Kulvinder back as he fired wildly, sending corpse after corpse wriggling to the ground even as others flung their glistening bloody fingers around his body, their teeth biting deep.
The way behind was opened for the moment so the engineer hauled the others through the doorway, not willing to let Kulvinder's sacrifice be in vain. As the bodies fell about him, the security guard still stood, firing round after round as his wounds increased. Fingernails dug into the man's flesh and even though the engineer didn't look back he knew that the man's right eye would be a mass of fibre and fluid, his left leg would be buckling as a corpse tore into his muscles with its teeth, but he would still be standing.
The way was not entirely clear and as the engineer kicked out at a large bloated corpse that was grasping for their ankles, another straggler reached out from behind a bloody curtain for Imogen's hair. The fingers flinched before they reached her as a bolt of electricity slammed into its body and threw it over a metal bed frame. It was Kulvinder's last act of protectiveness before he was finally dragged under the heap of bodies, screaming obscenities.
The engineer pushed Liam forwards as they picked their way through the huge hallway, a vision of hell alive with bodies rising from every corner. Nurses, doctors, patients, cleaners, visitors... all had succumbed in the first stages of the outbreak and were reaching for them, trying to draw them into the same everlasting hunger.
He swung his wrench with a fevered desperation, leading from the front and trying to anticipate the best course, weaving as he struck out at three, seven, ten, fifteen of the dead, skulls cracking and spilling their contents as he drove his group onwards.
Imogen and Johan moved along the left of the group, hitting out wildly but effectively until a corpse reached out from under a low lying bed and tripped Johan, sending him flying to the ground, slamming his head on a desk as he fell. The engineer turned, hoping to be able to save the man just this once, but there were already six... eight dead between him and the couple. Imogen screamed incoherently as she stood over her lover, swinging the pole at the increasing number of festering dead, quickly being surrounded and swallowed under the blackening bodies. Cathy gasped but the engineer gripped her arm tightly and forced her onwards as Liam followed, dodging by the reaching hands of an elderly corpse whose left leg was little more than bones and cartilage, swinging uselessly beneath its torso as it dragged itself along a reception desk in feeble pursuit.
The doorway beyond stood open, with the blinking blue emergency lights of the escape pods taunting them from beyond the sea of decay. The way ahead was blocked with six rotting, reaching bodies. The lights above flickered as Cathy swung the extinguisher, striking two of the dead across the face on the same arc. At the same time the engineer threw his wrench at another, obliterating the thing's skull in a shower of viscous yellow fluid. Three more...
He pulled the nail gun, a newly acquired tool that he didn't usually have a chance to rely on and took out two of them with a rain of wild shots. The final corpse threw its arms
around Cathy before the engineer could react, but Liam was there, dragging the body off her back and to the floor, even as it turned and bit hungrily into his face, tearing the skin from the fat man's screaming lips. Two more tumbled over a bed towards him, falling upon Liam and pulling at his dying body.
The engineer dragged Cathy onwards as she reached behind her head in a daze, feeling her neck and finding the skin unbroken. The engineer pushed her almost violently towards the blue lights... and as he turned his head... he saw that the way was clear.
There were usually three or four of the dead remaining at least. He had lost count of the times he had fallen at the last hurdle, trying desperately to protect Cathy whilst falling under those snapping jaws... but he had done it again. After all those times, after the ache of constant failure and the dull edge of trying to apply a formula to a chaotic, contained universe, he had finally found another way through.
They slipped into the small antechamber that marked the entrance to the escape pod corridor. It was mercifully empty except for one lone corpse, half eaten and reaching, small and pathetic on the floor under a control panel. The engineer ignored it and turned to the door behind them, closing it as quickly as the motors could work before throwing his bag to the ground and hauling out his signature override, running the small cylindrical magnetic tool across the square of black glass that covered the electronics of the door release and sealing it.
When he turned back he saw that Cathy had already dealt with the corpse and was still slamming the fire extinguisher down onto the mess that used to be the dead man's cranium, pulping the flesh and bone as tears ran down the grime on her cheeks.
As she raised the gore streaked extinguisher one more time he quickly but firmly took it from her hands, leaving her arms to fall by her side as sobs continued to wrack her body.
“Almost there, almost,” he said to her, glancing out of a bulkhead window nearby. They were finally on the outer shell of the station, a feat he had only managed once. Through the window the pinpoints of stars gleamed with a cold light, though the view was dominated by a swathe of nothingness that was drawing them ever further in. Time was short.
He tried the door to the pod corridor but it wouldn't budge – the same as the last time he had got this far – due to a loss of atmosphere in the corridor beyond. He wondered what had initiated the explosion that had caused the breach as well as damaging most of the escape pods, and whether he'd ever know.
“Hurry, please God hurry!” said Cathy, her whole body shaking as if she were allergic to the rotten stink of the dead station.
“Six minutes, I think. I just have to seal a few bulkheads and re-route the atmosphere,” said the engineer, pulling out the mobile system maintenance controller and connecting it up again. Cathy almost laughed when she saw it, the only other thing that he had left in his bag.
“You knew exactly what you would need, didn't you...” she said.
“Of course. I told you...”
“Yes, you told us. It's not as simple as that though, is it? There must be more, after the amount of time you've spent doing this again and again... what haven't you told me?”
The engineer closed his eyes, hearing the electronic chirps of the device as it went about its business.
“You knew they'd die, didn't you.” It was a statement, not an accusation.
“Yes,” he stated coldly, before adding, “they always do. I haven't found a way to stop it. There are so many of them in there, and I've only made it through once before myself. I can still feel the teeth. I've died...”
He felt himself choking with emotion so he set his jaw and looked down at the floor.
“I've died as many times as everyone else.”
Cathy looked back at the corpse, surrounded by the halo of sludgy, creeping black blood.
“Except you remember it.”
No answer. The machinery whirred.
“You said I told you about the black hole but I only know now because you told me... how am I supposed to find out?”
“Not yet, you don't know yet... I mean, you know, but you shouldn't,” said the engineer, feeling annoyance rapidly turning to anger. He didn't want to think, he just wanted out. He wanted it to be like the last time, when he had known nothing and had got through by sheer luck. Such a day...
“When?” she asked, her eyes narrow.
“On the pod, when we escape.”
Cathy thought for a few moments. The engineer busied himself by checking the readout. Three minutes. Shut up, just shut up and let us leave in silence, then you can talk all you want.
“If we escape... are we out there somewhere? Are there infinite copies? How many...”
“Just once, one time only.”
“She's dying!”
No answer, though he knew they could hear. He gasped for air, feeling his fingers tighten as his blood struggled to spread what little oxygen he had. He had never felt so powerless.
“Please!”
A hundred on board the lifeboat. He would have killed them all himself just to save her. Such a thought was damning, and he was damned.