Chapter 5
The stranger's long coat billowed out behind him like a dark flag as he broke into a run. He didn't look back to see if Cypher was following. He didn't need to. The choice was follow or die, and he knew it.
Cypher scrambled forward, his legs still feeling a bit disconnected from his body, his hydro-spanner clutched in a white-knuckled grip. His world narrowed to a single, frantic task: keep the man's dark coat in sight. It was a moving patch of darkness in a world of grey Fog and yellow emergency lights, a beacon in the middle of hell.
The rooftops had become a graveyard where the bodies were still warm. The chaos was no longer a race; it was a panicked, disorganized slaughter. A body, limbs flailing, fell from a higher ledge and slammed onto the roof just a dozen feet in front of them with a sickening, wet crunch. The man didn't even flinch, simply adjusting his path by a few feet to avoid the fresh splatter. Cypher flinched hard, his stomach churning, but forced himself to keep moving.
He had to leap over a tangle of intestines that had spilled from a ripped-open torso, the organs glistening horribly under the emergency lights. The air was thick with the smell of blood and something else, a sharp, chemical tang that he knew was the Fog. Screams echoed from all directions, some human, some monstrous.
"Keep up!" the man barked over his shoulder, his voice a harsh rasp. He moved with a frightening efficiency, his single brown eye seeming to see everything at once. He never took a wrong step, never hesitated. He flowed over the landscape of rust and death like water finding the quickest path downhill.
Cypher felt a heavy weight shift on his back. Glitch, who had scrambled onto his shoulders, tightened its grip, its metal claws digging into the thick fabric of his jacket. The automaton was silent, its optical sensors glowing a steady, watchful blue, a silent partner in their desperate flight. The weight was both a burden and a comfort, a reminder that he wasn't entirely alone.
They leaped across a wide gap between buildings, landing hard on the other side. Below them, the streets were worse. People weren't running north anymore. They were just running, a terrified herd with no direction, scattering as the winged creatures descended from the Fog, picking them off one by one. Cypher saw a woman clawing at her own face, her screams turning into an inhuman gurgle as her features began to melt and shift under the Fog's touch. He looked away, his focus snapping back to the dark coat ahead of him. Don't look. Just run.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of running through a nightmare, the man skidded to a halt in front of a hab-block. It was just as rusted and run-down as the one Cypher lived in, another forgotten box in a city of them. The man slammed his palm against a security panel, and the door hissed open.
"In," he commanded, gesturing with his pistol.
Cypher hesitated for a fraction of a second. The doorway was a black square, unknown. Out here was chaos, but at least it was a chaos he could see. His friend had just been killed. His entire world had been upended. Trusting a stranger, a scarred, one-eyed man who had punched him, felt like a fool's move.
That single moment of hesitation was almost his last.
A high-pitched buzzing sound, like a thousand angry hornets, sliced through the air. A creature, smaller than the others, shot out of the Fog. It looked like a nightmarish mix of a bee and a mosquito. It had an iridescent, armored body, four rapidly beating wings that kept it hovering, and a long, needle-like nose that suddenly split open, revealing rows of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. It shot directly towards Cypher's exposed face, its mouth wide to bite and tear.
Cypher yelled, stumbling backward, bringing his hydro-spanner up in a useless gesture of defense. He was too slow.
Crack!
Another bolt of blue light shot past his ear. It hit the bee-creature mid-air, and the thing exploded in a shower of black shell. A piece of its wing, sticky and wet, slapped against Cypher's cheek.
The man lowered his pistol, his one good eye boring into Cypher with impatience.
"Are you going to get in," he growled, his voice dangerously low, "or are you going to stay out here and make friends with them?"
Not needing to be told twice, Cypher scrambled through the doorway, nearly tripping over his own feet. The man followed right behind him, and the heavy metal door slammed shut, plunging them into darkness. A series of loud, heavy clicks echoed in the small space as the man engaged multiple locks. A final, heavy thud sounded as he dropped a thick metal bar into place.
The sudden silence was deafening. The screams, the buzzing, the chaos, it was all gone, replaced by the sound of Cypher's own ragged, desperate breathing.
A moment later, low lights flickered on, casting a dim, reddish glow over the room. Cypher was standing in the middle of a single-room hab-unit, but it was nothing like his own. Where his was cluttered with spare parts, wires, and engineering tools, this place was something else entirely. It was a workshop, but also a laboratory.
The man didn't pull off his heavy rebreather mask but he shrugged off his long, dark coat, revealing a simple grey shirt underneath, a holster for his energy pistol strapped tight to his chest.
With the man momentarily disarmed and his back turned, Cypher's eyes darted around the room, taking everything in. The walls weren't bare. They were covered in detailed drawings, sketched in charcoal with an unnervingly precise hand. But they weren't schematics for machines. They were anatomical studies of the creatures from outside. A dissected wing, with notes on its bone structure. The jaw of a monster, its teeth counted and labeled. A full-body rendering of a creature he hadn't seen yet, something with far too many legs.
On a long metal table against the far wall, bones were laid out neatly on a dark cloth, cleaned and organized. The skull of the bird-like creature the man had shot on the roof sat next to a collection of vicious-looking claws. At first, Cypher thought the skull was that of the same that had attacked him but he shook the silly thought away.
They were the same but different. He was sure of it.
In glass jars on a shelf, strange, fleshy things floated in a murky, yellow liquid…organs, Cypher realized with a jolt. Fossils of animals that should never have existed. This wasn't an engineer's space like his. This was the den of a hunter, a scholar of monsters. What was he doing with all these?
Cypher's grip on his hydro-spanner tightened. This man didn't just survive the monsters; he studied them. He brought them home.
The man turned, his one good eye catching the movement of Cypher's hand, the way he clutched the heavy tool like a weapon. The man's expression didn't change. There was no anger, no surprise. He just looked tired.
"You can relax," he said, his voice a low rumble in the quiet room. "If I wanted to kill you I would have done that a while ago."
People remaining: 298,999
Accepted residents: 0