Blood in the Dark

Author: Joseph Dreadloch

Original post: https://beatsandlevels.blogspot.com/2012/12/blood-in-dark.html

Entry for the YC114 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.

He could feel the blood pumping in his head. His temples ached and there was an uncomfortable undulating pressure at the back of his eyes. The pain of his headache woke him from his sleep and he opened his eyes. He blinked a few times, unsure of whether his eyes were open or closed, if they were open the room was pitch black. Zero-Light he thought, that’s what they called it in D.E.D. training. He couldn’t see anything at all, not even his own body, and for a terrifying second he wondered if he had gone blind. This thought however was interrupted by one even more grave: he couldn’t feel anything. He could sense that his body was reclined but he couldn’t feel a bed beneath him, was he paralyzed?
In a panicked motion he flailed all of his limbs and they responded. His legs found nothing but empty air but his right arm felt a tugging resistance followed by a sharp pain near his wrists. With his left hand he felt at the source of the pain and found tubing burrowed into his upper arm. An IV he thought for a fleeting second, before his mind was flooded with a multitude of questions.
Why can’t I see anything? Am I blind? Is there no light here? Where is here? Why can’t I feel anything around me? Am I-- then seemingly in answer to all of his questions the lights came back on. The sterile white light was painful to his eyes and they were forced to a squint. He could see the ceiling above him, thin steel grating painted white, dingy with age. It didn’t occur to him that the ceiling seemed much closer than it should be. His eyes went to his arm, to the IV, down the length of the tubing to a complex series of machines whose various lights and interfaces were blinking apprehensively, like some sort of animal waking from a long hibernation. He was floating near the ceiling of the room, tethered to the ground by the IV. He heard the dull hum of the air scrubbers kicking back on and he understood the situation. Something had gone wrong with the life support systems and they were starting back up. He fell from near the ceiling, one side of his body landed on his bed but the other missed, causing him to roll and crash to the steel grating of the floor. He groaned with pain, and the familiar distant whine of the gravity well spooling back up hit his ears. “What the hell,” he said aloud, as he propped himself up against a wall and sat on the floor. His right arm ached from taking the brunt of the fall and from the needle buried deep inside. His headache was gone now, and he realized that it was from ‘space adaptation syndrome’. He had suffered the same terrible headaches in D.E.D. zero-g training and had consistently been one of the worst in his unit during those exercises as a result. He was obviously in some sort of medical facility, and he expected a nurse to come through the door any moment. If all the life support had been knocked out and even the generator powering the backup lights, something serious must have gone wrong. Maybe a massive solar flare, or maybe some EMP ordnance had gone off he thought.
As he surveyed the room around him, he realized he didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t quite remember how he got wherever ‘here’ was either. The last thing he could remember was the excruciating pain of his body being crushed. He remembered massive chunks of steel plates crashing down upon him, a bulkhead had been blown apart. Was it in a ship or a station of some sort? Everything before his accident and since was clouded in his mind. He could feel the memories there, sense them, but he couldn’t make them out. As if his mind was in a state of zero-light. After a few moments spent on the floor against the wall, nursing his arm, he realized no one was coming. He could hear no sounds of movement in the hall, only the dull droning of the life support systems. He grasped the IV in his arm by the tubing and pulled. He dragged the needle out from his vein, metal slowly exposing itself from beneath his flesh for what seemed like an impossibly long time, until finally it came loose with a disgusting pop. Blood sprang to the surface following the needle, its bright red hue stood in stark contrast to his pale skin. A few beads of blood began to roll down his arm through the holes in the grated floor. He pulled himself up and found his footing to be unstable. His leg muscles felt weak, and he was barely able to support himself as he rummaged through a drawer. He found a gauze and some medical tape, and stopped the bleeding. He took slow deliberate steps to the doorway, his muscles seemed unaccustomed to movement at first. He shuffled into the hallway and found no one. The halls were the same white grated steel as his room. All of the doorways in the hall were open. From where he stood outside his room all the other rooms seemed empty. “Hello?” he croaked, his throat dry. He was met with no reply. Why would a medical facility be empty? Why would they leave him behind? His eyes gravitated to a mark that seemed to be out of place. The white wall was splashed with red. He moved towards the mark on the wall, his legs finding at least a bit of their old strength as circulation returned to them. He dabbed the red with his fingers and brought it to his nose. Metallic he thought; blood. The lights went out and darkness crashed around him. He heard a hydraulic hiss behind him followed by thud, as the door to his room slammed shut. He stood still in the darkness, completely blind but now at least with the knowledge of which direction the hallway ran. He allowed a moment for his eyes to readjust to the darkness as he tried to make sense of the situation. If the life support systems keep going off and on then they obviously aren’t stable he thought. When the lights were on he didn’t see anyone around, or any bodies either for that matter so they must have evacuated and left him for some reason. Maybe the door to my room was stuck closed with the life support wavering? A massive low rumble met his ears and the flooring beneath his feet shook violently. In the distance he could hear the high pitched squealing of metal being torn.
His eyes had adjusted to the dark now and to his surprise he could make out a dim light in the distance down the hall. The light was faint but he could tell it was a deep cardinal red. He shuffled his way down the hall, his bare feet sliding along the cold grated metal floors. As he passed other rooms in the hall he could feel that they all seemed to be open. His room was the only one in this wing that was closed. With the power problems they couldn’t get in so they had to leave him behind when they evaced the others he thought. He was going to have to evac himself. “Hello?” he cried again, as he made his way slowly down the hall the red light in the distance becoming brighter. No answer again. He could see the silhouettes of objects, a few monitors here, a gurney there. He shuffled his way around the obstacles until he reached the source of the light. He was in a lobby now, a few dozen chairs sat in rows back to back, some facing in toward the facilities and others out a long panoramic window. He leaned against the window and was bathed in the dim red light of a magmatic planet, half eclipsed by the dark of the moon that the facility was orbiting. From his vantage point he could see down the length of the station. A huge portion of the bottom of the facility hung free, tethered to the rest of the station by a few stubborn girders. It looked as if the main docking bay had been blown open. The image of the docking bay blown agape brought a fresh memory to his mind, something that was obscured before. He saw a man next to him, in full combat gear but something was wrong. He had taken a blaster round to the face and his jaw hung loosely by a few tendons, as the docking bay now hung before him. Combat, he had been injured in combat. He remembered D.E.D., the training, the drills, the few campaigns he had been on. He remembered fighting in some sort of facility and the explosion that brought the bulkhead down upon him. He felt fear, but he didn’t know why. He had never feared death, his training had taken that away from him. Everyone dies, most of decrepitation, others for pointless causes. A D.E.D. officer who dies in combat dies fighting for the people of New Eden, they die fighting against the forces who seek to disrupt the order enforced by CONCORD. The day he had been promoted to Special Affairs for Regulations & Order was one of the happiest in his life. SARO, the spearhead of the D.E.D. had a staggeringly high fatality rate and he welcomed this. He welcomed an honorable death, a death full of meaning and sacrifice. Why then was he afraid when he fell in combat? Why was that same fear creeping into him now? His eyes darted to movement in the debris field. A tight formation of a dozen ships in the distance, armageddon class, their silhouettes standing out against the magma planet. They weren’t heading towards the station though, they seemed to just be in orbit. After a moment they had left the field of view of the window but before his mind could make sense of it he noticed more movement, this time much closer. Two hulking forms glided by the window in the same direction the Armageddon fleet had been heading. Their shapes were semi cylindrical yet bulging, like ticks who had just finished gorging. Bestower class, transport ships. That must be the evac he missed, how was he going to-- That’s when he saw it, and everything changed. Dark mottled red splotches covered the bestowers. Everything flooded back to him, the dark portions of his memory illuminated in an instant. He was trembling, the cold of the station seeming to hit him all at once. He knew now why he had been afraid, why he was afraid now. There are things worse than death. He remembered the facility that he was injured in. They had cleared the first field of victims with little resistance. Thousands upon thousands of men and women strapped to metal beds. The restraints were all but a formality as the forms they held down barely had the strength to breath let alone escape. Their bodies emaciated and pale, kept just on the edge of survival so that their captors could continue to harvest from them. Human cattle. Each with a massive and deep bruise on their arm from where the needle and tube penetrated their flesh and dug into a vein. Miles of tubing weaved between the beds like a capillary system before converging in the center of the massive room and diving down a dark chasm. The blood of the captured flowed down these tubes into that dark abyss to be collected. He had tried not to think about what they used the blood for at the time, and found himself doing the same now. The first ‘field’ as they called them cleared, his unit had moved onto the second. They were waiting for them. A massive detonation rocked the facility behind them and Blood Raider soldiers poured from every corridor. It was a slaughter. He remembered the fear that gripped him as his body was crushed by the falling metal, the fear of life as a slave, as cattle. He had to get out. He wouldn’t let them take him. His heart began to pump adrenaline to his extremities and he found his old strength and wit. Escape pods, there have to be some left he thought. They’ll be by the barracks where ever those are. He turned away from the glowing red light and eyed the reception desk across the lobby. He crossed the room in a few strides and was behind the desk, searching. He found a flashlight and a handheld terminal in a drawer. With the press of a few buttons he found a map of the facility on the terminal. A three dimensional hologram of the facility sprang to life before him, glowing a pale blue. The medical facility was near the top and there was a large elevator that ran down the length of the station. The barracks were marked eleven floors beneath him, and sure enough so were the escape pods. As he moved deeper into the facility towards the elevator, he saw the first people he had seen since he had woken up, what was left of them at least. Nearly all the rooms along this hall were full of the remains of human beings. Their bodies had been drained of blood on the spot, turned to husks, their rib cages and spines protruding through their taut skin. His wing of the facility must have been for stable patients, which is why all the rooms were empty. The raiders would take them to their farms. This wing however must have been some sort of intensive care unit where the patients were too unstable to move, so they were drained of all blood on the spot. Lifeless eyes caught and reflected the light of his flashlight back at him as he trotted down the hall. The expression on each face was different, but they all conveyed the same horror in their own way. He tried not to notice them in his peripheral vision as he moved past, and failed. The gravity well failed again and he found himself suspended in the air. Zero-g, zero-light, his unit used to call this the BLANK scenario. He gently kicked off a wall and glided down the hall. As he reached an intersection he turned his flashlight left and saw the elevator shaft. He made his way to the shaft, occasionally grasping the wall or a door frame to correct his course through the air, and peered in. His light was swallowed by the darkness and he could see nothing up or down but it didn’t matter, he had no idea how long he had and knew he couldn’t hesitate. He found the back wall of the elevator shaft, inverted himself and climbed downwards. The S.A.S. began to hit him again as he descended and his head began to pound. All the doors to the shaft were open and as he passed he noticed nothing but more darkness beyond, until he reached the floor seven down from the med facility. As he passed he was bathed in orange-blue light. A fire was burning. In zero-g the fire was completely stationary, like a sphere of flame centered around whatever had been lit ablaze. And then the gravity well kicked back on, and he was falling. The open doors sped by his face in a steady rhythm as he passed them in free fall. His first thought was of the bottom of the elevator shaft. At least he’d certainly die from the impact, he wouldn’t be taken. In his mind the bottom of the shaft was like an old friend that he was rushing to meet. No. No, he thought, you still have a shot to get out of this alive. He’d have to time it perfectly though. He studied the rhythm for a brief second, and kicked off the wall. His left leg crumpled from the impact as he propelled himself forward. A split second later his ribcage found the edge of an open door and he screamed in pain as he felt a rib crack. Desperately his arms scrambled forward and grabbed a hold of the familiar steel grating of the hallway flooring, as his lower body dangled in the open elevator shaft. He couldn’t feel his left leg but he felt the weight of it hanging, broken he thought. He felt a rush of air hit his back as he hung grasping to the floor and the sound of something rushing towards him. The elevator. He flung his good leg up out of the shaft and rolled away. A second later the elevator swooped past, blasting him with air as it did. He lost the terminal, and his flashlight in the fall, and he was pretty sure he had broken at least one rib on top of shattering his leg. He lay there on the floor in the dark in excruciating pain. Every breath of air he took was met with sharp, hot pain. He slowed his breathing as much as he could and tried to think. He’d fallen well past the barracks, thirty of forty floors maybe, and had no idea where he was. The only way to find out is to look, he told himself. He grabbed at the wall and pulled himself upright, his ribcage protesting his movement with more sharp pain. He tested his leg and it supported no weight, it simply hung from his body now. He dragged himself along, using the wall to support the weight that his leg couldn’t. The hallway seemed larger to him than the one in the med facility, and no doors branched off it as far as he could tell. As he shuffled down the hall he could hear a dull roar ahead of him. Louder and louder the roar grew as he inched closer. He emerged from the hall into the massive cavern of a secondary docking bay. Far below him he could see thousands of bodies milling about a bestower class ship. He could see a procession of captives being rolled on gurneys. Another line of captives were being forced aboard at gunpoint, their hands bound behind their backs. Huge lifting machines rumbled back and forth loading a stack of large cylindrical containers onto the bestower. He knew what was in those containers, he knew the fate that awaited the captives far below him. Fear gripped him harder than before and his broken body fell from the wall to the floor. He hit the grated metal with a crash and eyes from below were cast up towards the direction of the sound. A giant light that had been shining on one of the lines of captives swiveled up and illuminated him on the catwalk. As the bright light hit his eyes the adrenaline coursed through his veins once again. Up. Now. They’ll take you, he thought. You can’t let them take you. He was on his knees, scrambling along the catwalk like a wounded animal. Away from the docking bay, but towards what? He didn’t know where he was going but he knew he had to get away. He exited the docking bay and turned a corner when he heard the sound of boots behind him. The sound was getting louder as he scrambled along the ground, his head swiveling madly searching for anything that could help him. He passed through a bulkhead door and reached up from the ground, his ribs making a wet scraping sound, and pounded on the switch. The door stayed open. He scrambled on, the sound of boots nearly on top of him now. The hallway opened into a square room. The faint red light glowed through a small window in a dark section of the wall, but was not enough to illuminate the room. He could make out a stack of crates by the dark wall and he crawled behind them. They entered the room in tight formation, the lights attached to their rifles searching the room frantically. He held his breath, not daring to move or make a sound. A few times their lights passed over his eyes, peering out through cracks in the stacks of crates. Several of the raiders continued on down the hall, and two were left to search the room. He could feel the vibration in the floor as one of them approached his hiding place. The lights snapped back on and the room lit up in an instance. The two raiders looked to each other briefly and then to him, behind the stack of crates. They leveled their rifles at him and for the first time he could see them. Their faces were the only thing exposed, the rest covered in combat armor. Their skin was sickly pale and their eye sockets dark and bruised. The eyes that peered out from those dark sockets didn’t seem human. The sclera was a deep rich red instead of white, and the pupils seemed abnormally sharp. The pain of his injuries, the weakness of his atrophied muscles and the fear of a fate worse than death hit him all at once and he was ready to collapse to the floor again. He had failed. They would take him, and if they could fix his body easily enough he’d spend the rest of his life in a comatose state, slowly being drained of his blood. If he had broken his body too badly they’d jam a tube straight into an artery and forcibly drain every ounce of blood from his body. As the raiders approached him he climbed to a crouched position and looked around the room one more time. Then he saw it. The dark wall he was standing in front of was an airlock. Without hesitation he flung himself forward with all the strength his one good leg could muster and slammed into the manual switch that controlled the airlock. The vacuum of space took him and the raiders. For a few moments he was still alive as he hurtled away from the station. He smiled victoriously as moisture from his eyes evaporated away, causing them to boil behind closed lids. A moment later his lungs ruptured in explosive decompression and it was over. His corpse drifted off into the dark empty recesses of the system, a dessicated smirk forever locked on its face.