Emerald curtains awash in living flame writhed as if they were caught in a gale. The silken fabric of the curtain rattled against stone, pinned as it tried to tear itself free. The threads of the cocoon-weave began to unfurl as they strained, uncovering a soft silhouetted form beneath. The silhouette shuddered, flexing and contorting as it fought confinement. It opened its mouth in a silent scream. From behind the curtain, Blane's eyes shined as if haunted through her soul.
Lines on the figure's skin began to fissure as flame seeped from every pore. Tolly tried to step back, to escape from the haunt before her. She was fixated now on the figure’s eyes as they were engulfed in white-hot flame.
She wasn't sure how long it had been, but Tolly was sure now, waking in a stupor and contorted on top of her sweat-covered duffle, that she had fallen asleep. She went to check her terminal. The time read two-thirty in the morning.
“Blane,” she said as sudden realisation came to her.
Without thinking, she made it halfway down the cafe steps before turning back for her forgotten duffle. She hoisted the luggage over her shoulder, moisture seeping through her already blood-soaked shirt. She headed out the cafe front door, not stopping to reminisce. Gods be damned if she was going to miss her chance to escape whatever shitstorm was going on.
On her way into the loop tunnel at the south end of Braidwood Street and Dube, she remembered what Connor had said last night outside the stadium; the tunnels will be madness. Go there if you want to die.
“_Think, Tolly,”_ she said, trying to come up with an alternative path to the airfield.
“Connor,” she said, aloud already tapping the icon of his face on her hand terminal, opening a bulletin.
No answer; she tried again.
“Pickup, pickup, pickup,” she pleaded.
Again, no answer.
“Damnit.”
With no other option and time ticking by, she headed down to steps into the loop station. The station was empty, save for a blinking advert board with a flashing message in horrendous neon glory:
Federation Strong!
The Eniks face the Alders tonight at Ternor Stadium. Tickets are sold out!”
There was a metre-wide bloodstain on the pavement near the ticket window, but there were no bodies, nothing like what she had seen in the waterfront. Windows were smashed in an all-too-familiar way. It wasn't until Tolly did a doubletake that she realised that the glass had been broken inwards into the booth. There were torn bits of uniform in the Enik’s colours in the window frame and the bloodstain that started at the foot of the ticket window, Tolly saw, now carried on down the hall, leaving her line of sight as it dropped down a flight of stairs. It seemed as though someone had been pulled out through the ticket window and down the dark steps towards the loop platform, where she needed to go.
She wanted to turn back, to run. She wanted to be still back home in bed, with the morning sun beaming through her window, urging her to get up. She wanted to ignore it, ignore everything, and go back to the much simpler morning when the only pain she knew was the only sadness she felt was from losing Groen. What a beautifully simple pit that could have been. How she wished to go back to this morning, to last week even. Hell, even dying back on the Perun sounded better than this.
She remembered something her sister had said to her growing up. It had been the day after their mother had died Blane had told her to “just keep living.” The words seemed hollow then, half-hearted even. Now, however.
Wandering in the dark never really bothered Tolly. Thirty-one minutes in, she had her terminal's torch on, illuminating the way ahead of her. Tolly had passed by several overturned and half charred loop pods. Each pod had been damaged in nearly the same fashion as the ticket window, their external windscreens shattering inwards, bits of cloth and human gore around the edges, with dried rivulets of red heading off in the direction she was still reluctantly headed. Every time she had the urge to turn back, to flee, she would say the same words aloud.
“Just keep living,” she said again after a particularly nasty pile-up of three overturned pods featuring multitudes more blood than before. The blood here was still wet, still wreaked in the way that the cafe’s aluminum awning did after each bout of rainfall. She was sure that that fragrance was now ruined for her.
It wasn't until forty minutes later, nearly four in the morning, that her surroundings began to change. There was a faint light now illuminating, however dim, the path out of the tunnel. She could see the yellow edging of the exit platform and a green-blue warning light flickering further down the tunnel in a direction; she guessed north? — heading away from the platform. It was so hard to tell down in the tunnels which direction was which.
It wasn't until Tolly had almost reached the station platform that she heard it. A dull groan, almost as if someone was in pain, came from down the tunnel. Tolly hesitated, not knowing if she should answer. What if it was one of those black soldiers from the alley?
“H–hello?” she squeezed out.
As soon as she said it, the pained sound faded away.
“Hello?” she repeated, hating herself for her own recklessness.
The sudden rush of a single pair of footsteps quickened into a sprint, and between the flashes of the blue-green emergency lighting, Tolly began to make out a figure. The shape was not very large, no more than that of an average man or teenage boy. It was thirty metres off, but it was coming fast. Tolly’s heart pounded in her throat.
She lept and heaved herself onto the platform, not bothering to look for a ladder. The hastened footsteps met a patch of puddles and reverberated throughout the tunnel. Tolly leapt over the turnstile that made an audible chirp while also flashing a warning banner on her terminal, scolding her for neglecting to swipe her ticket upon exiting. She could hear the steps coming faster, or at least they seemed faster. They were behind her, a cacophony of clacking.
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Her pursuer was gaining on her as she squeezed through a quarter-metre gap in a fallen section of the loop station. Spying an upgrav pallet dolly, she quickly powered it using her terminal. Briefly, she was amazed at the lack of security in leaving the parked dolly unlocked to the public. That amazement fizzled, however, when she looked back at the gap to see her pursuer less than ten metres off and closing. They were still shrouded in the dark of the tunnel, but Tolly could make out that its arms weren't carrying anything, at least not like the black soldiers had been carrying their assault rifles. Instead, its arms seemed to flail wildly, only to briefly make contact with the pavement as they pushed it forward towards her.
Tolly quickly piloted the dolly over to the gap and leant over to knock it vertical. Then, reaching for her terminal, she cranked the dolly's upgrav setting all the way to maximum. The dolly revved and slammed against the gap, closing it just as her pursuer slammed into it.
The figure wailed and hissed as it reached for her. It was then that Tolly got a halfway decent look at her pursuer as it struggled just out of reach of her.
The thing had silvery skin, almost like it was painted in oil, that glimmered in the dim daylight. Its long arms, way too long to be human, were tipped in a mix of sharp talon-like projections interspersed between missing or broken fingers that were now clawing to get through the barrier at her. The thing's face, half of which was blocked by the dolly while the other half contorted in an attempt to squeeze its way past the barrier, bore a haunted expression despite its lack of human features. There were protrusions, scars, notably missing sections, erupting boils, but no softness, nothing you would expect from a human face. Especially considering the monstrosity had no eyes or any discernible nose or nasal openings.
“Gods, aren't you hideous,” Tolly said to the creature.
This thing was so alien, so far from reality, that Tolly didn't know what to make of it. She was afraid, sure, cripplingly afraid, but she was also fascinated. It stood nearly two metres high, even at a lean against the barrier.
The monster's torso and upper legs were blocked from view, but from what Tolly could see, its muscles rippled as they strained against the dolly. Its pearlescent skin tore as blood flowed freely over it. Its voice popped and whined, reminding Tolly of a chair chafing across a tile floor in a windstorm. She could almost feel its frustration, unable to reach her, to tear her apart.
The dolly would only hold as long as its battery’s charge, and Tolly knew she had to cut her examination short. She raised her terminal and took a quick picture before heading up and out of the station exit into the Mercao District.
Thirty minutes later, Tolly headed south along Briar Street in central Mercao. She knew the airfield was ahead of her, though she couldn't remember how far. She ran a query in her terminal for the quickest route to the airfield.
No results found.
“Right. LPS must be out,” Tolly said to herself.
Tolly walked along the familiar streets. She often came to Mercao with Blane growing up to sample the local market on Saturdays. The stall owners that had populated the streets with their impromptu tents, each with their own elaborate marquee, would lay out platters of their goods to attract customers. Blane and Tolly, being such impressionable shoppers, always jumped at the chance, feasting on fresh fruits, domestic wines and meads, expertly smoked meats and sharp aged cheeses. Despite the inevitable stomach aches that followed each excursion, the two of them came back week after week. The whole ritual continued through it all, their mother's passing and dereliction of their father, through the good and ultimate bad at the Academy, finally coming to an end when Tolly had left the city to join the crew aboard the Perun.
The thought of it was bittersweet walking through the now crumpled stalls, which Tolly could see had been dressed up exceptionally well for the Parade festivities. The tents themselves ripped and, in some cases, lost beneath fallen rubble. Some marquees still even flickered with neon light, while others lay in shambles spread across the laneway.
There was no blood here, no trampled bodies, no wanton streaks of maroon trailing off into the dark. It seemed as though Mercao’s citizens had been evacuated. Tolly let out a long sigh of relief.
Just then, Tolly heard the unmistakably familiar pop and hiss that she recalled from down in the tunnel. Her heart leapt from her chest and, before she knew it, slipped into an alleyway at full sprint. She waited there for several moments as a cacophony of wails and footsteps reverberated like war drums in amongst the buildings.
Where before there was nothing but cold silence, now the street was filled with a torrent of monsters. In all the stampede, much of the silvery things resembled the creature Tolly had encountered in the tunnels. She could also make out several outliers. Some had four feet, galloping past their peers with reckless speed. There were some larger than the rest; giants, interspersed in the sea of bodies. They were hulking things with arms half the size of enik trunks. The giants pushed their way through the crowd, carelessly trampling any of their comrades that got in their way.
The whole host passed by her like a freight train. Tolly realised that she had been standing in plain sight, awestruck by the chaos that flooded past the alleyway entrance. The earth under Tolly's feet shook. As quickly as the flood of bodies had appeared, they had vanished, clearing out of the streets heading northward. Unsure what to feel, Tolly tried Connor one more time, tapping his icon on her terminal screen with vigour.
The call rang several times before it was answered.
“Tolly?” Connor said, his voice slow and sullen.
“Connor, thank the gods! Are you alright? Where are you?” she rattled off.
“I'm– I'm at home,” he began. “Tolly?”
“Yes?” she said, attempting to conceal her trepidation.
“Tolly, my mother, my father, Elanie– they're all gone. There's blood everywhere.”
Tolly knew just what he meant.
“I'm so sorry, Connor. I'm so sorry,” she tried to console him.
“Tolly,” his words cut like knives, “Tolly, I don’t want to do this anymore. The stadium, the bodies in the streets, that was one thing. There was still a part of me then that knew they would be here for me when I got home. I know it sounds stupid, but I just knew that mother would be here, fixing us all breakfast by now, with father sitting in his chair reading the feed off his terminal.”
“Connor, I know what you're seeing. We don't know what happened.”
“I do,” he spat back at her. “I can see the blood, read the shattered stuff all around our apartment, the broken windows. I know that they’re gone.”
“We don't know that,” she lied.
“Tell me. Tolly, what did you find when you went home? Was there blood everywhere?” he said with blatant condescension in his voice.
“There was a note,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean–”
“Then how would you know? The most obvious answer is usually the truth.”
“Connor, stop. You're scaring me.”
“What is fear even? “ he scoffed, “How can we ever feel more pain than we've already experienced tonight? How can there ever be more trauma in the world?”
“Connor, please. Come meet me. I'm on Briar near Bute. I'm headed to the Mercao Airfield to meet Blane. I'm—”
“See?” he cut her off, “even now– Even now, there's hope for you. For me–?”
“Connor, there's always hope. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel. If you'd just follow it,” Tolly said, her words feeling hollow even to her.
She could feel him slipping away, leading off into a place she couldn't follow. She feared what he was going to say or do next.
“You just need to hold on. Take the capsule, come meet me.”
“I'm sorry, Tolly,” he said at last before the bulletin dropped.
