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<span class="mu-i">Too precise in some places. Too animal in others. Unlikely to be scavengers. High probability: rampant android.</span>
"...was that-" you begin nervously, but Harper cuts you off.
“That wasn’t there last time.” His voice does a poor job of belying his alarm. “What the hell…?”
You swallow.
<span class="mu-i">Drip.</span>
The torch beam travels upward. Fresh blood streaks the ceiling tiles, slow trails descending like a rain of thick wax. Claw marks rake across the junction box above, the polymer torn to shreds as if a wild animal had gotten into them.
“…could be dogs,” he suggests, eyes sharp and alert.
You give him a disbelieving look. <span class="mu-i">On the ceiling?</span>
He forces a thin chuckle, the humor brittle enough to snap. He steps further down, distressingly further from you, to check another angle, only to freeze mid-stride.
More bodies. Not old, nor stripped of gear by scavengers or desperate survivors. <span class="mu-i">Torn apart</span>. A shoe still laced to a foot, the leg ending in a frayed, red stump and jagged bone. A helmet with the head still inside, its mouth frozen in a scream of agony.
Harper swears under his breath as he moves back towards you.
Then you both hear it: a faint scrape of metal against concrete. Somewhere out of sight, somewhere uncomfortably close. Too slow for settling debris, too fast for an animal. Too deliberate to be an accident.
He flicks his gaze back to you. “How long?”
You don’t answer immediately. There isn’t a final firewall as much as a protocol you’d rather not trigger. Something about tear gas or an alarm that would lock down the commissary with steel gates. You’d rather not trigger both.
The access light shifts amber.
“Almost through,” you whisper.
Another sound. A breath. Wet, ragged and rasping.
Harper’s voice is barely audible. “Eyes peeled, Lydia. We aren’t alone.”
Both of you freeze at the sound of faint laughter.
<span class="mu-i">“Mousey-mousey-mous-”</span>
Metal clinks softly somewhere beyond the shelving. A rhythm that isn’t random – a tapping pattern. Impatient.
<span class="mu-i">Predatory.</span>
Your voice is impossibly small. “Cannibals?”
Harper answers too quickly. “They don’t waste meat. Not scavvers either.”
His light swings towards the far end of the commissary. A phrase is carved into the concrete, jagged letters cut and painted by bloodied claws:
<span class="mu-s">HeLLoOOoo mY LiTTle SuuuBBbSCrrribErSsssSS</span>
Your mouth goes dry. Harper curses.
“Cyberpsycho-!”
The electronic lock disengages with a heavy <span class="mu-s">KA-CHUNK</span>. Everything happens at once.
A metallic shriek tears through the air as a shape drops from the rafters like a spider unlatched from its web. Harper barely has time to shove you aside before it slams down where your head had been, claws singing against concrete in a fountain of sparks.
Its scream is a raw, throat-shredding digitized sound – half-human, half-modulated:
<span class="mu-s">“IT’S MINE – MINE – MINE!!”</span>
(cont.)
