Claws sounded much better than 'overgrown nails'.
----
The main intersection was deserted. Dan glanced around quickly to double check that nobody was watching before approaching the broad metal doors shielding away the basement. He stuck his key in the lock and turned it, half expecting it not to work. The lock beeped in response and creaked open slightly, revealing the depths of the basement just feet away—
“Going somewhere?” A voice behind him inquired. Dan swung around, startled, and came face to face with the head guard, Durc.
“I don’t recall you being assigned to patrol the basement, especially this early.” Dan tried to sum up an excuse on the spot, but was cut off. The vykker examined one of his claws boredly as he continued, his voice oozing with suspicion.
“And I don’t see you wearing your armor... plus you don’t have any weapons
and you’re alone.”
Durc’s threatening eyes squinted in his direction. Dan felt as though the guard was trying to burn a hole in his head using just his vision. But, to Dan’s surprise, he didn’t dwell on the matter.
A buzzing sound filled the air. Durc lifted a violently-trembling walkie-talkie to his ear and spoke into it.
“Yeah, what?” He asked. Angry squawks erupted from the device’s voicebox. Durc turned it off abruptly. “Come with me.” He said, marching smartly off towards a hall. Dan was the only other person around, so he followed.
Durc was walking so fast that Dan had trouble keeping up. The guard’s eyes were constantly shifting left and right as though expecting something to jump out of a closet and attack him. Dan couldn’t help but notice that Durc had a little hacker and a snoozi strapped to his belt despite the fact that he wasn’t on duty.
‘He takes his job way too seriously,’ Dan thought with a sigh.
They came to a room with the number 31 painted to the door in wide, white lettering. Dan frowned; why would the head guard be summoned to an average fuzzle storage room? They entered nonetheless.
The room was packed to the brim with vykkers, interns, and sligs. All the racks of fuzzle cages had been pushed against the walls, and the rooms perimeter had been blocked by yellow police tape that read ‘CAUTION - INFECTION ZONE’. Despite the warning, nobody wore protective gear. Durc and Dan ducked under the yellow tape. Durc immediately began chatting away to a nearby vykker, gathering the details of whatever had happened in the room. Dan spotted another intern named Jub who was helping investigate the scene. Jub was a short, scraggly fellow who was always twitching and shivering as though he was half frozen. Despite this, Jub worked for the guard and could handle a little hacker with professional agility.
What happened now? Dan asked, sounding rather uninterested. Jub’s left shoulder jerked as though it had been punched.
Somebody found an infected cylonite fuzzle crammed half way down a drainpipe, The intern said in a small voice. He motioned towards a drain in the floor that was surrounded by interns and vykkers taking samples for crime analysis. The outside of the drain looked to be covered in a dried, brownish-red crust.
Somebody musta’ stuffed it down there, but nobody knows who.
Suddently the crowd shifted. Most of the people there, Dan thought, didn’t need to be there. They simply had nothing else to do. They formed a small circle around a vykker who was leading the case to discover how the fuzzle had gotten down there. He coughed into his hand and began to speak. The crowd fell silent instantly, though somebody in the back was taking pictures.
“At exactly o-seven-hundred hours,” A few people looked at each other, unsure of what that meant, “an intern collecting fuzzle cages stumbled across the dried remains of a dead fuzzle in this drain.” He pointed to the drain and paused for dramatic affect. “When we came to examine the fuzzle’s remains, this is what we discovered.
“That the fuzzle had been infected with the deadly germ known as cylonite,” a small gasp swept through the crowd.
“That the fuzzle had been killed and stuffed down the drain with this mop,” he held up a disgusting, disease-ridden mop that looked as though it had been dipped in blood,
“And, from our analysis,” he said, his eyes suddently darkening, “that the fuzzle had died with intern blood in its mouth.”
The crowd stood mesmerised, hanging on his every word. They dreaded what they knew he was going to say.
“Somebody in this ship has been bitten by a cylonite-diseased fuzzle.”
The vykker nodded to himself as though thinking he had handled the situation rather well. The opposite could be said, for a meager two seconds later, everybody ran around screaming like they were being chased by a three-headed slog!
“We’re gonna die! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” Somebody wailed. The vykker paled suddently.
“No! Wait! WE ARE NOT GOING TO DIE!” He contrived. “If you calm down WE’LL ALL LIVE!”
Somebody fired two shots at the ceiling that silenced the crowd instantly. Dan skidded to a hault from his mindless careening, realizing that the head guard, Durc, was the one who had pulled the trigger.
“Will you calm down?!” He demanded, his voice shrill. “You’re all running around like a bunch of scrabs with your heads cut off! Its not the end of the world!”He looked around accusingly as if expecting someone to shout out ‘yes it is!’
“Ahem,” the vykker from before said, his face as white as chalk. “Very good. Thank you, Mr. Durc. As Durc so clearly stated, its not the end of the world. We have, of course, the sample of intern blood that we managed to save from the fuzzle. Its simply a matter of extracting the DNA from the sample and seeing who it matches with. No big deal!”
“Oh, well sorry to rain on your parade, but it is a big deal. It’s a
big, big deal.”
The vykker that had spoken out of turn was Helix, Dan’s previous boss. The other vykker frowned.
“Okay,
Helix,” he said venomously, “why is it a big, big deal?”
“Well,” Helix said, “unless you happen to have a blood sample from every intern on board, enough of that DNA to go around, and a lot of time on your hands... we’re screwed, man.”
“What are you talking about?” The vykker snapped. “Of course we have a sample from every intern on board, its basic regulations, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“Its not regulations at all,” Brux said quietly. For once he wasn’t cheery and exited, which was a relief. “That rule only applies to vykkers.”
“Why?” The vykker asked, looking around weakly. “Thats the dumbest rule I’ve ever heard of.”
Helix shrugged. “Interns are expandable.” He said. Dan looked horrified. “Keeping track of them all would be too tedious.”
There was a long pause. All the interns in the room shifted uncomfortably, wondering just how much of their well beings were at stake. The vykker asked quietly,
“So what should we do?” He asked. Helix sighed.
“Tell everybody to keep on the lookout for odd behavior. Infected subjects tend to have dramatic mood swings that always lead to violence, a fear of light, and poor conception of time.”
Dan felt his heart skip a beat, felt his insides melt, felt the color drain from his face. ‘Could...?’
“Oops,” Helix said, looking at his wrist watch. He spoke as though he didn’t care what happened. “Its my lunch break. See ya.”
He stalked out of the room without further word. Nobody followed.
<~{.epidemic.}~>
Nedd was as stiff as a corpse, his body aching as though he had been hit by a bus. Slowly, carefully, he opened one of his eyes. The blue lights above blinded him temporarily, and his head pounded with every heavy beat of his sluggish heart. He weakly pulled himself up and winced as he felt scabs on his back crack. His vision danced before his eyes, filling his brain with twisting, evil shapes.
‘I can’t take this.’
He leaned against the metal wires behind him and flinched as he felt them cut through his soft, sensitive flesh. He turned as best he could, his vision steadily clearing, and glanced down at his back. The crosshatched gashes from the slog attack were glazed over in a sick, yellowish layer of pus, and the skin around them was still swollen.
‘I can’t take this.’
He stood for a moment, balancing precariously on his feet, before collapsing to his knees. Somewhere, a wound split. A thin trickle of blood ran down his shoulder. Tentatively, Nedd reached up and felt his face. His mouth had been cut free, but badly; he had missed the stitches completely at some parts, leaving bits of tightened thread at the side of his mouth. His needle-sharp teeth were clearly visible and ran down his vertical mouth in a zipper shape, each one surrounded by thin layers of skin and curved like mandibles. Even with his mouth closed tightly they were constantly visible.
A voice in his head was screaming at him, but suddenly, in a flush, he realized that it wasn’t in his head; that he was half-screaming and half-humming it, his mouth flashing like a dangerous, empty abyss.
‘I CAN’T TAKE THIS, I CAN’T TAKE THIS, I CAN’T TAKE THIS!”
He slammed himself against the wire mesh. He forced himself to stand despite the pain and torture it inflicted on his body.
He wanted it over!
He wanted to die!
He darted forward and slammed violently against a wall with enough force to render a normal intern unconscious. His bloodshot eyes swivelled suddenly, and both is pupils and irises shrank to the size of a small button. Muscles bulged in his back, tearing at his injuries almost on their own accord. What happened next was a blur, but when the small strand of sanity that had kept him alive finally re-gathered itself, Nedd found himself sobbing on the floor of an abandoned room in the basement, far from the cooling system, surrounded by broken bottles... and blood.