This is why he’s a Scavenger commander.
There’s a sudden crack along the wall, and I dance away just before it bursts open with a long Creep tendril that cuts the air where my head used to be. As I stumble back, I hit the ground, pain shooting up my back as I do.
Dad twists toward me, rushing to grab my hand. “Jackie!” he screams, but as he turns, a hole bursts open from the rooftop. A tendril whips downward and grabs him by the arm, hauling him back toward the wall. His rifle hits the ground as he wrestles with the creature, screaming as he tries to keep himself from getting pulled into the ceiling. I don’t have time to think as I grab the bat at my side and fly into the air, the hard edge of my weapon pounding into the muscle and tissue that makes up the Creep. The thing shudders at the impact, and I go rolling along the ground, sliding to a stop as I watch my dad collapse onto the floor. Freed, he grabs for his gun, brushing the attack off like it’s nothing and spewing a torrent of fire into the air behind me.
I roll toward him and turn to watch as a wall of Creep at my back ignites into fire, its pink skin searing black under the heat. The thing shudders before collapsing to the ground, exploding into a hundred disgusting chunks that splatter along the wall and floor. Dad hauls me to my feet, and we rush toward the Security team, which is just lighting up the hallway. Abbott’s there in the center, trying to cut his way through wave after wave of living tissue, but Sally doesn’t seem to have a limit to how much she can summon.
Dad squeezes my arm and glances down at me. “You’ve still got the injection, right?”
“Yeah, Dad,” I nod, tapping the bag on my hip. “I’m ready.”
“You’ve got to stick close and don’t worry about me when we go in. I’ll get you near to Sally.”
I nod, and he yanks me forward, bringing up his flamethrower as we run. We cross by Abbott, who’s busy swinging that sword of his, and leap over a huge tendril of Creep that bursts from the wall and swipes at our legs. Dad squeezes the trigger as we come within feet of her, but she counters with an endless wave of twitching muscle that meets us halfway. Flame and flesh battle each other for a second, and then I notice the roof above me and the walls at my side lighting up in an inferno. The rest of the Security team is dousing the hallway, and the entire area is erupting like a scene from hell.
Dad shouts at me, “Go, Jackie!” and I nod. Creepy Sally seems as if she’s distracted for the first time since we’ve got here. Maybe even she can’t deal with this much firepower. I duck beneath the web of thin stalks that she’s weaving across the hall in an attempt to create a wall of Creep between herself and the team, then leap at her. She doesn’t even see me.
I’m inches from her when I’m caught around the waist. I can’t hold back the squeal I let out as I feel my body suddenly collapsing beneath the pressure of a meaty limb that bursts out of the floor. She holds me just outside of arm’s distance, too far away for me to inject her.
But not too far for my bat.
I rear back and swing with every bit of power my muscles can give me, absolutely crushing the side of her skull. Her head rocks backward and she drops me, her hand going to her face. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in pain.
And she starts crying.
More like screaming and wailing, but her defenses are down. I start to rush her.
Then?
Then the floor beneath us groans like a dying animal before shattering into a hundred pieces, plunging us all downward. Fire, ash, and smoke rain down from above, along with burning muscle and skin. Nothing breaks my fall as I slam hard onto the ground, the breath escaping my lungs as I feel a hard piece of concrete slam into my stomach. I suck wind hard as I flip around, my vision going blurry while the corners of my eyes seem to fill with blackness. For a moment I’m too weak to even twitch my fingers.
Dad’s voice comes out of the haze of black smoke filling the air. “Jackie!” he calls. I see him leaping through the dark clouds pouring off the ground, only to see his body flail backward as a tendril strikes him in the shoulder. He screams as it cuts right through him, pinning him to the wall. Blood bursts from his upper arm as he struggles to pull the Creep from his body.
A thin-framed silhouette pops into view from the wall of flames raging hard to my right. It staggers forward, weak limbs carrying it step after step along the ground. The crying, though. The sobbing. She just keeps wailing as she stops near my dad and looks at him, her jaws detaching wider than humanly possible while she moans. Then she raises her hand. She puts it to his chest, and Creep just starts to pour out of it, like she can create it from herself. It starts to cover his body, molding over his chest and swarming down his legs.
I reach out. I try to do anything. I can’t. I can’t move. I can barely scream one word.
“Daddy!”
Sally’s head tilts up, and she looks off to the side, her lips quivering. Then she looks back at me, her eyes hidden behind those bangs of hers. She stares at me, struggling to speak. Then she says the only word I’ll ever hear from her.
“Da… ddy?”
Her mouth explodes into a scream as her arm erupts into ash and fire, a solid blade of flame cutting through it. Abbott’s sword separates her from Dad, but as she falls to the ground, she manages to create a thick limb from the floor that slaps the blade, and Abbott, like toys into the inferno. Off-balance and screaming, she collapses groundward, the back of her head hitting the floor next to me.
She’s breathing hard. So, she does get tired. She obviously feels pain. She cries.
Sally reaches upward, her fingers grasping at memories I can’t see. She’s sobbing.
“Daddy… Dad… dy…”
What kills me is that she remembers. At the very end, she remembers her daddy.
Whatever she was a minute ago, she’s different now. At least for that second when she remembers.
And yet there’s nothing else that we can do. The family she had died over a hundred years ago. The only reason she’s still alive is because of the Creep.
So I do the only thing that can be done.
I turn and plunge the needle right into her neck. She kinda jolts for a second when it hits, but she doesn’t scream this time. Actually she just looks at me. She stops crying. She smiles.
And then she’s gone.
Recording Forty-One
Real quick: Abbott survived. Of course he did.
Whatevs.
Things move fast after Sally goes down. First off, the Creep. I mean seriously, what the heck? One minute we’re swimming in gunk, and the next it’s gone. It’s like someone pulled the plug on a bathtub drain, and it all just recedes away. Well, whatever power Sally had, Dad was right about her keeping the infestation going. Once she was gone, the entire floor settled down. Lockdown’ll stay in place for a few hours while they do some patrols ’cause, you know, that’s just sort of Security’s thing. Still, everyone’s obviously a lot more chill once we’re not ankle-deep in muscle tissue.
Which obviously, you know, makes sense.
Anyway, I’m not out of trouble, so I won’t act as if everything’s peaches. It doesn’t take Security more than a few minutes to clean up the area. You know, wiping away all that ash-gray goop. Afterward it takes them just a couple seconds more to grab and haul us back up the stairwell. It’s a forced march that’s just killer on my knees. As if we didn’t just fall through a hellish inferno onto the lower floor. Oh well, I’m young and strong, right? Guess I can take it! At least that’s how they’re acting. I mean, who cares about the girl that just put an end to Creepy Sally?