Eric lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children where he continues to write tales of the hungry dead, blazing guns, and the things that lurk in the woods.
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PROLOGUE
Dr. William Craven’s customarily pristine lab coat was shredded, long strands of loose fabric billowing wildly about him as he ran for his life. Ragged, claw-shaped gouges were etched across the chest of his coat and down the back of it; underneath, his red-and-white plaid-patterned shirt was tattered as well. In several places, the white fabric of his coat was stained with deep red splotches of drying blood. The doctor wasn’t sure who the coppery liquid belonged to. It very well could have been his own blood, or it might have belonged to one of his slaughtered colleagues left behind in the laboratory. Then again, it could have been a mixture of both.
A thick layer of salty sweat covered Craven’s leathery, crinkled, vulture-like bald head. The thin pair of spectacles that usually sat at the end of his beaky nose, in front of his steely grey eyes, was gone; lost at some point during the man’s mad rush as he fought to escape the blazing lab. Without his glasses, Craven was almost as good as blind; the world around him appearing blurred and distorted. Still, in a way, part of him was glad he had lost his spectacles. It meant he didn’t have to see his horrific creations hounding after him in all their putrefying, macabre glory.
Exhausted and terrified, the spindly limbed man stumbled down the hallway. With arms outstretched and his bony fingers feeling along the cold walls, the doctor tried desperately to steady himself, his arthritic legs periodically giving out on him. Worse still, every so often he felt the floor move beneath him, the ship tilting nauseatingly to one side or the other, its massive bulk rocking on the hectic, roiling waves. Slanting this way and that, Craven’s thin frame was painfully battered off the walls of the ship.
Wheezing like an emphysema patient, Craven tried with everything he had to outrun his bloodthirsty pursuers. Alongside his original test-subjects, many of them were former colleagues, all now transformed into something barely recognizable as human. The ageing man’s breathing was short and sharp, his lungs burning as they struggled to suck in a proper breath and hold it. He could feel his energy being sapped with each second that passed by. Craven felt about inside his pockets, searching for his asthma inhaler, but he couldn’t find it in any of his myriad pouches. He realized then he had probably left it back in his stateroom. The black-grey smoke wafting into the hallway was choking him, causing the doctor to hack violently, and cough up smarmy globules of green-yellow gunk.
Behind the figure of the winded doctor, phantom-like shapes shambled after him, some of them even wielding makeshift weapons in their scabbed and purulent hands. They snarled and screeched like minions shat from the bowels of Hell, their ghastly shrieks echoing off the metal walls. Their inhuman cries curdled Craven’s blood, sending a creeping chill up his gnarled spine, each one making him regret his decision to unleash them that bit more. Beyond the ghoulish horde at his rear, a fire continued to rage back inside the ransacked laboratory. Golden light from the relatively small conflagration seeped out into the tight corridor, casting gruesome shadows along its walls. Spider-like limbs and fingers danced along the corridor’s smooth surfaces, seemingly reaching out after the fleeing figure of Dr. Craven. Occasionally, William heard a member of the ship’s security detail fire their sidearm; the weapon issuing a distinctive pop! which caused him to jump with fright every time it sounded.
Through his hazed vision, William thought he could make out an opening ahead of him – a doorway perhaps. This sent a rush of adrenaline coursing through his flagging system; something that the exhausted doctor desperately needed if he was going to make it out alive. By this point, Craven could feel fluid building up inside his lungs, making it harder to breathe than it already was. Still, he fought on, desperate to make it to – what appeared to be – a flight of stairs lying in wait a little further up in front of him. If he managed to climb the stairs before the vile things chasing after him caught up, Craven knew he might be able to seal off the entry and lock them in – the rest of the crew be damned.
Traitorous bastards.
One of the lanky, trundling figures eventually found its stride, breaking into a kind of awkward jog. Others soon followed, traipsing after their cohort at a similar pace. Howling insanely, the inhuman things tried to catch up with their would-be prey, increasing their speed. Gnashing teeth and flailing emaciated limbs, their rising bloodlust continued to entice the throng of monsters, riling them on.
Without warning, a deep animalistic bellow tore through the confines of the corridor, reverberating off the high, metallic walls. It sounded like a cross between a bear and a lion, or so the petrified doctor thought to himself. The hellish noise came from somewhere inside the flaming laboratory. William noted this cry was different to that of the others. The creature making this clamour was something else entirely, much fiercer – and larger – than the other things wandering about the lower reaches of the facility. He knew exactly what the cries belonged to… PROJECT: CARCHARIS. Craven’s pet creature was coming for him, apparently finished with making examples of the doctor’s dissenters.
No! It isn’t supposed to be like this!
Craven was almost at the base of the stairwell when he heard the thundering footsteps of his greatest creation bounding down the hallway. Looking over his shoulder, the doctor could only make out blurred stick-figure-like silhouettes. Then something significantly larger than all the others appeared at the far end of the smoke-filled corridor, its head and neck obscured by a cloud of dense smoke hanging over the chaotic scene. The dark figure charged furiously in line-backer fashion up the linear hallway. The hulking shape broke through the black-grey fog, shouldering and swatting the smaller forms out of its way, treating them as if they were nothing more than bothersome flies. William could only listen as the bodies of his lesser creations were splattered against the surface of the vessel’s walls. He heard bones crunching and breaking as the big brute bowled down the hallway trailing after him, grunting like an incensed gorilla.
Dr. William Craven hadn’t expected to die this way. He always thought he would go out a little more peacefully, during his sleep perhaps. Once he had retired and completed his research, of course. For a second, Craven pondered the poetic justice of it alclass="underline" the thing which he had given life to was about to take his away from him. Fate was a funny thing.