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Shattered: Redux

Chapter XI: Dark Inheritance Part II

The past is not so easily forgotten...

-Anonymous

_ _

Fox and the others walked down a long uninhibited corridor. Any form of chatting had long ago died out, strangled by the all-encompassing silence and air of abandonment that lingered throughout the corridors of the venomian research facility. They had not encountered anything, living or otherwise since they had entered the doors after the guard post where Alex had been taken by something or someone. Trying to get him on the radio failed, it was as if something was blocking transmissions, a thought they didn't want to consider for what it might ultimately entail.

All that they found were empty rooms and dim lights. It was if they were the only things left alive. They kept telling themselves that was ridiculous, that somebody had to be here, but their denial was starting to lose its power.

Fox looked over his shoulder at Krystal and Miyu. The pair had been walking in the middle of their group and had not said a word since Alex vanished. Both were deeply troubled and worried, as were the other members of the team. It had not looked good, but they still had hope that they would find him. Until they found evidence otherwise, he was still alive.

The vulpine's attention shifted to Fara. She and by extent, her team, had been leading the group onwards through the research base. He was uncertain as to what her goal was at the moment, she seemed to have no interest in finding Alex, and appeared to be solely concerned with their objective.

She had been leading them through the desolate base for the past two hours, and since then they had not seen anything. It was unsettling. Where were all the venomians? At the moment he would be glad to be in a firefight. At least then the oppressiveness of the base would lessen.

The squad of commandos found a stairwell and they stopped for a moment. "Mack, check it out." Fara ordered her gunner.

"Roger that ma'am." The large armored fellow growled out, hefting his gun and slowly walking down the steps. Judging by the depth of his voice and bulky physique, Fox guessed that he was a bear of some kind.

Mack went down until they couldn't see him anymore, and after a minute, he called up. "All clear ma'am."

Fara motioned for the rest of her team to head down and Fox followed along with his. They traveled down the short spiraling staircase and into a large open place with tables and chairs. It looked to be a rest area of some sort, undoubtedly for researchers and the like who were relaxing.

It. Like everywhere else up to this point, was deserted. The only thing that was different was that it looked as if there had been a commotion here, chairs were scattered about and tables were turned. From a distance, they could see that the point of disturbance narrowed till it stopped near a set of locked doors.

"All right guys, watch yourselves." Fox muttered as he had a bad feeling about this place. They split into two teams and explored the room in halves. Fox took his team one direction, and Fara took the other.

After a quick study they regrouped at the center of the room. "It looks like they were in a rush." Fay remarked.

"Yeah, and judging from the dispersal patter of the chairs, they were running." Fara added, deep in thought. "Why would they be running, and from what?"

"Maybe they were experimenting here, creating some sort of creatures." Falco tossed his guess in. "It could have escaped, or maybe there was a leak of some kind, I don't know."

"In any case, we need to find out what happened here." Fara replied. "In order to do that, we need to find and get access to the base's data vault. Where can we find that?"

"Data vaults are usually near the research levels." Slippy added helpfully. 'Well, at least in cornerian bases, it might be different here."

"Thanks Slippy, now all we have to do is find the research level" Fara muttered thoughtfully. "That means we need to find a terminal and get a layout."

In the background, one of the chairs fell over and they heard a scuttling noise. Instantly, guns were raised and they all went on alert. "Who's there, identify yourself or we will open fire." Fara barked a warning and aimed her carbine in the direction of the disturbance.

After a few moments of silence, a figure rose up from behind a table, hands in the air.

"Identify yourself." Fara ordered commandingly.

"Uh...Dan...the janitor, ma'am." The figure answered timidly and stepped forwards. He was a short and scrawny possum and his dark blue janitorial uniform was covered in grime and tattered.

Fara and the others sighed in relief and lowered their weapons slightly, adrenaline fading. "Get over here Dan." She ordered casually.

The possum hesitantly made his way over and looked at the large group. And they saw that his paws were filled with food, bags of snacks and cans. "A-are you part of the rescue party?"

Fara decided to play along. "Yes we are...can you tell us what happened here Dan. Where is everybody?"

"In the mess hall." The fidgety possum answered as he looked back and forth. "Which is where we should all be heading, right now, too much noise attracts them."

"Them?" Slippy asked.

"Yeah, no one knows for sure why they happened, but it did start a little after some salvagers found something in space we should really be heading there. It will be much safer to talk. We managed to seal it up and that seems to have stopped them...for the moment." The janitor babbled as his pink furless tail whipped around behind him."

"Who, or what is this them?" Fara pressed, annoyance clear in her voice.

"No no no no no, we should really get going now. They are probably already coming." Dan mumbled dismissively and turned to head to a door to the left. "Follow me! Quickly!" He scampered without so much as looking over his shoulder and Fara looked back to the others and shrugged.

"It would appear that if we want to find answers, we will have to follow him."

They walked in the direction of the anxious possum, who stood waiting by the door now, nervously wringing his tail in his paws. "Hurry, hurry, hurry, we must keep moving, quickly now." He murmured more to himself then to them.

"Right buddy or they'll come we know." Falco smirked. "We got the message."

The possum did not answer and instead opened the door and they stepped inside, heading to wherever it was that he was taking them.

Up to this point, Krystal and had been quiet, not saying a word and keeping to herself, hanging in the back of the group. All her thoughts were focused on Alex, she could not sense him. it was as if he had dropped off of the mental radar. She could feel the team, including Fara's squad. But the possum fellow was a jumbled mess of inarticulate thoughts and emotions.

Her stomach was a hard ball of tension and she continuously fiddled with her tail, preoccupied with Alex's violent disappearance. All she wanted at the moment was to get him back, she felt vulnerable and anxious without his comforting presence. More than that she was worried about his health, there was a lot of blood in that guard post. That could only mean that he had sustained a serious injury. What had happened in there? She had no idea what could have been responsible for what happened. Perhaps Falco was right, and the venomians accidently released a biological weapon. The late tyrannical dictator Andross had a thing for organic weapons.

But still, none of that mattered as much as reuniting with her human. Krystal would not even consider the possibility that he died. There was too much left unsaid and done to let that notion gestate in her thoughts. First they would go where this strange janitor was taking them, and then they would do their best to find him.

**********

The first step to survival was to find the base's clinic. It should have plenty of antibiotics and gauze or whatever it was that they used, which he needed to stem the flow of blood from his shoulder. Alex had no skills in battlefield first aid, so that ruled out stitching himself up. He would just have to get some gauze and antibiotics on and hope that would suffice until he found someone who could do better.

He in fact had a spare rifle, but he had not familiarized himself with the alien weapon he had taken and had no desire to try it out in what could prove to be a fatal mistake. It would be best to hold on to it until he had no choice but to use it. All that left was finding the team, and since the necromorphs were here, that meant that there was a marker, which would explain the lack of radio communications. Markers were capable of disrupting communications and other sensitive equipment, something to do with its signal. He was never certain on the details.

Holding the brightly glowing sword in his left and the handgun in his right, Alex stepped out of the small office he had first fallen into, only giving it a cursory backwards glance as he exited into the hall.

Outside, the corridor was deserted in either direction. To the left, it spanned a hundred meters or so before branching off into two opposite routes. The right only went a few meters and then hit a dead end. There were three other offices in this hallway and he had no desire to explore any of them. Offices and other small rooms were where necromorphs tended to lay in wait; the tight spaces gave them a shear advantage and made it hard to wield a firearm or melee weapon. It would be unnecessarily foolish and risky to check them out. Alex gave them little attention beside the customary wariness as he passed to the fork.

The two stemming paths split. Thankfully there was a sign there to help him out.

Level 2

?** Research and Development**

?Utilities

Alex took a logical guess and chose the left path. No doubt, the clinic station was among the utilities, or at least he hoped that was true. Although he made sure to memorize the route back in case he was wrong. Besides, if they had created a marker, it would be in the R&D section of the facility.

The human shook his helmet as he took the right corridor. How could they be so foolish? Do they have any idea what cataclysm they have unwittingly unleashed upon this system and all its inhabitants? The necromorphs would swarm across the stars, consuming everything that lay in their ravenous path...unless he found a way to stop them.

This was his fault, he should have never have come here, it was he that had brought this necrotic plague with him. And while he had not been directly responsible for arriving, he should have destroyed the ship long before they accidently brought him here. But...he had been too cowardly to kill himself. Instead he wanted to survive, hanging on to the tatters of his life for as long as he could. It would have been the honorable and noble thing to detonate the ships reactor, scorching away any trace of the terrible infection.

Yet some small part of him still thought he could pick everything back up and try to put it together. It reminded him of a man in a sinking boat, trying in vain to keep it afloat with a tiny bucket in a massive ocean. Only, boat was his sanity, and the ocean was the madness that lay within.

Alex entered a large rectangular room, filled with strange equipment he had no understanding of. Blood was splattered all across the floor and even on the ceiling. He kneeled down at the entrance to the room and dragged a gloved finger across the blood covered floor.

But judging by its color and viscosity, it was at least a few days old. With that new piece of knowledge, he was able to piece together that whenever the outbreak had started, it had happened within the time frame of a week or so. Blood usually hardened within minutes or hours, depending on volume and the humidity of the surrounding environment. Alex had gained and unwelcome amount of knowledge pertaining to crimson substance.

As he moved to stand up, he suddenly became nauseous and a faint red flicker seared its way across his vison. A faint whispering voice rebounded inside his throbbing skull and almost made him drop his weapon.

"You said you loved me..."

'You said we would always be together...."

Alex shook his head and tried to clear his suddenly jumbled thoughts. "No...not again." He hissed in frustration, barely refraining from clawing at his helm with his armored hands. "I don't want this...I can't take it."

It was starting again, and it was coming back in full force...signal madness. That meant that there was without a doubt a marker in this facility. Only being in such close proximity to one would rekindle the more serious effects.

A shadowy skittering emanated from the far side of the room and the human desperately tried to clear his foggy mind and focus on the danger that noise represented. He scanned the opposite side of the blood covered chamber, fingering the hilt of his sword and readying his handgun. Earlier, he was denied the chance to get a good look at the necromorph that had jumped him. And he had no idea how they would manifest with the different species of this system. And he was definitely not eager to find out.

His vison tinted orange and he found it almost impossible to concentrate, it felt as if he had been drugged and thrown down a hill. His reaction time was sluggish and it was taking him a long time to process the area around him.

A small shadowy shape scurried to and fro towards him, moaning pitifully as it advanced across the floor and towards him. Alex struggled to raise his handgun and sight the small hard to see creature, but couldn't get a grip on himself.

Perhaps sensing that he was incapacitated, the small thing squealed and rapidly increased its speed, all but flying across the ground at him.

Alex's heart began to hammer and his brain was flooded with the familiar gut wrenching fear that had hounded him back on the ark as he had been hunted by the undead. He began to panic and fumbled for his grip on his sword, bringing it up halfway when the little beast shot towards him. All he could see were fangs and claws. The man swung his sword with as much strength as his feeble body could muster and managed to score a lucky hit on the creature, the glowing blade struck somewhere along the middle of the thing's body and it shrieked in agony as the plasma blade lit it ablaze.

It howled as it dropped to the floor, writhing as it was cooked in the intense heat. Whatever corruption that plagued it must have caught well with the high heat sword. Alex then raised his foot and crushed it, repeatedly slamming his armored boot into the soft tissue of the creature, relishing in the sound of its cries and snapping bones. When it came to these beasts, he felt no pity or remorse, whoever they had once been were gone and it would be a kindness to end their body's suffering.

By the time he was satisfied that it would not rise again, it was nothing but a pulped puddle of scorched dead flesh.

He scanned the room quickly and tried to focus on his current situation. The faint orange tinge slowly receded and the nausea went down to a manageable level. He needed to hurry; he would not be able to stave off the marker's influence forever. Eventually the hallucinations would start and then he would be a danger not only to himself, but anyone else he came in to contact with.

Alex quickly took the exit to the room and back into the maze of hallways that comprised this entire base. He needed to get patched up, his shoulder ached terribly and he could feel a warm trickle run down his armor and he could hear the faint patter of fresh blood dripping onto the metal flooring. Not all of his fatigue could be attributed to his sanity. If this continued, he would only get weaker as his lifeblood funneled its way out of him.

He passed a set of doors and into a mid-sized room with a red cross in front of it. It looked like he was at his destination, but before he could do anything something slammed into his wounded shoulder and sent him sprawling to the ground. Instinctively he raised his arms and caught his attackers plunging jaws, holding them a hairsbreadth from his visor as they snapped at him, spraying fetid saliva across his vision.

He groaned in exertion as he tossed the attacker back and scrambled for his dropped weapons. Alex snatched them up and righted to face his foe, finally getting a good look.

It was once had been a reptilian of indeterminable species, whatever it had been was obscured by the decomposition and heavy mutation. Its scales were almost all peeled away, exposing greying muscle and calcified bone. The necromorph's arms were split down the middle, giving it four clawed appendages in total. The claws on its feet however, were elongated past whatever could have been normal and looked sharp enough to cleave through steel. Yet the most gruesome part of its appearance was its maw. A muzzle of fangs split into a set of terrifying mandibles filled beyond reason with dagger-like teeth. And its eyes were gone, nothing but empty sockets trailing blood gazed at him.

Alex shuddered in revulsion and backed away, bringing his sword up.

It sniffed at the air and its eyeless head shifted in his direction and he swore it grinned savagely at him before it charged with a hiss that sounded as if someone had stepped on a bag of snakes. It swiped two of its clawed hands and Alex ducked them, firing four shots into its left leg. The necromorph fell as its kneecap was shattered but swiped a bladed tail across the ground as it collapsed, sending the human down to the ground with it.

As he tumbled, Alex righted himself by rolling on his good shoulder and got back to his feet. The creature rose as well, unconcerned by the disabled leg. It reared its head back and hocked in his direction, surprising the human as a wad of greenish brown slime splattered across his helm, almost immediately his HUD was lit up with red warnings and he heard a loud sizzling.

With a panicked yelp, Alex dropped his weapons and began to wipe at the acidic saliva in an attempt to remove it. As he he cleared his vison, he saw a set of fangs clamp down on his left hand, slicing through his palm and he howled in pain as his ring finger was severed. Now enraged, he brought his right arm back and brought it crashing down on the creatures decayed snout. A sharp snap was heard and its jaws flapped open, releasing his injured hand. Alex then delivered a round-house kick that sent the creature stumbling backwards. Grabbing his sword's hilt off the floor in a blood soaked hand, he whipped it downwards and scythed through the necromorph's shoulder and down to its left leg. The horizontal gash separated the creature into two parts and it fell to the ground in a heap with a low moaning hiss that faded into silence.

Alex staggered away from the dead monster and looked to his left hand. Three fingers and a thumb graced his eyes, but his ring finger was not one of them. Instead a steady trickle of blood exited the agonizing wound and traveled down the hilt of his weapon, dripping to the floor.

All the blood loss was starting to affect him and everything was starting to go blurry. These necromorphs were far more lethal than the ones he had faced before. Their hosts bodies were already formidable and with the mutations they became even more so. Alex was starting to think that he would not be making it back to his friends. It was a sobering thought. He would most likely die before he saw Krystal, Miyu or the others again.

And it terrified him.

He did not tell Krystal and Miyu that he loved them and if he died, they would never hear him say that. That scared him more than dying.

Alex lurched across the room and towards the door to the medical supplied, but it was locked. Not willing to be stopped by such a trivial occurrence, he reached for the controls and began to fiddle with it. In a moment he managed to get it open and he tossed himself inside. The door closed behind him with a clang and he got to his feet. He scanned the area and saw several beds and equipment, besides these were cabinets of medical supplies and small wheeled tables with tools on them. But, there was something that stuck out to him, even in his delirious state. One of the beds was tented in the shape of a small body.

Curious, he lumbered over to it, heavy boots dragging across the floor as he left a trail of blood in his wake. Halfway there, he heard a noise to his left and looked over, all he saw was a bed pan flying towards his head and a heard a gruff feminine voice growl threateningly.

"STAY AWAY FROM HER YOU FUCKING MONSTER!"."

"Wha..." Alex trailed off before the pan crashed into his damaged helmet and rendered him unconscious as he fell to the floor. Why me? He thought with a sigh.

As he faded out he heard a gasp and soft whine.