Wandering Corridor II - The Blurring Edge

The laboratory was, like most of the facility, utterly sterile. White paneled polymer walls and rubberized floors, the faint smell of bleach always clinging in the air, and a certain liminal cleanliness about the whole place.

In the corner of testing bay 14, a towering, cylindrical chamber of stainless steel and bulletproof glass encased a monster. Test subject 14-42, an anomaly captured by the military wing of the lab’s parent company some six months back.

Heading the current research project was a balding, grey-haired man, facial features sullen and distinctly Slavic, with hazy green eyes gripping bags caused by seven nights of too little sleep. On the lapel of his knee-length lab-coat was affixed a bluish metal name tag. “Dr. A. Boslav” it read, in thick block lettering. He sunk yellowed teeth into an apple. Dry, almost flavorless, like most food was in the facility. Perhaps it too was sterile.

“Chensky, prepare the mechanical surgeon.” Boslav droned, his voice nearly as emotionless as his face.

A younger, redheaded man nodded to his superior, fetching a robotic arm from a nearby barrel of acetone and approaching the glass case with a small wrench in hand. He walked carefully across the floor, remembering the horrifying story of the last guy to slip and fall with one of these things in hand. His knees felt weak and his fight or flight was difficult to keep under wraps whenever he was this close to the test subject…As he began to affix the four bolts that would secure the surgical arm to the chamber, he couldn’t help but occasionally stare through the three inch thick pane of glass.

Behind it, a humanoid beast nearly twice the size of a full grown polar bear floated dormant under the effects of the powerful tranquilizing compound the chamber was full of.

Dormant, not dead. Chensky couldn’t help but remind himself as he gazed down at the thing’s hands.

They were massive, with stout bone structure and a thick claw about two inches long at the tip of each digit. Visibly sharp, even through the slight blue haze the liquid inside gave off. Chensky shuddered at the thought of those claws in action.

The beast weighed 6000 pounds when last they measured it, though it’d fluctuated significantly during the capture process. Chensky recalled one of the soldiers saying something about it getting bigger every time they shot it. Shifting his focus up the wrist and forearm of the monster, it was clear that this thing was all muscle, beneath that dense coat of nightmare black fur.

“Chensky, is it ready?” Boslav said impatiently, jarring his younger colleague to jump slightly. “Y-yes sir, just tightening it down.”

Once Chensky had given a final twist to the bolt, he slid his wrench into his coat pocket, backing away from the chamber with uneasy steps.

“Good. Now, we’ve been tasked with extracting the biocomputer from the base of the creature’s cerebellum. From there, we must refrigerate the specimen and send it to the tech division.” Boslav says, the smallest tinge of excitement in his accented voice.

Chensky scrambled over to his work station, donning a pair of rubber gloves and sliding a tank of liquid nitrogen out of a rack on the wall. He stood beside the containment chamber, hoping Boslav would work quickly.

The mechanical arm made a hissing whirr as its enclosure shut and pressurized, swinging to the interior of the chamber where its various tools, blades, probes and retractors fanned out of the central stalk, like a flower of stainless steel needles and saw blades. Boslav stood at a console, about ten feet from the front pane of glass. He, unlike his younger comrade, enjoyed staring at the subject. It was clearly a product of intelligent design, and judging by how difficult it had been to capture, it possessed great intelligence of its own.

The senior scientist piloted the mechanical limb with great precision, watching a camera feed that played in live time from one of the mechanical arm’s camera attachments. “Looks like it’s running smoothly.” he said, glancing at Chensky’s quivering form and huffing a slight chuckle. “You don’t have any idea how strong that sedative is, do you? There’s enough in there to kill an elephant, for fuck’s sake. Grow a pair, da?”

Chensky glared back, shaking off his fear as irritation took its place. “Asshole.” he muttered.

Rude as his words had been, Boslav’s statement was almost comforting.

Enough to kill an elephant huh? This thing’s big, sure, but not elephant big. Why hasn’t this dosage managed to kill it?

Chensky sighed, taking another look at the beast and watching as the mechanical limb began to move towards the base of its skull, a central drill beginning to rev up in preparation to make a pilot hole for the rest of the process. He gazed now at its head, having to crane his neck slightly to do so, as it was nine feet off the ground. It was wolflike, quite distinctly so, though the jaw seemed to take after the heftier bone structure of something like a bear. Chensky’s grip on the large beaker tongs that held the below zero liquid nitrogen shifted nervously, and a cold sweat began to form on his brow.

Boslav’s tongue stuck slightly from his lips as he focused intently on the task at hand, eyes fixed upon the small monitor on his console as his hands smoothly scooted the drill’s point toward the heavily muscled neck of the creature. A loud bang caused him to jolt in surprise, arcing the drill haphazardly into the meat of the right trapezius muscle. Chensky had dropped the liquid nitrogen flask, and was on the ground, crawling backward away from the chamber with terrified breaths.

“Damn you, son of a whore!” Boslav seethed, pulling the control stick backward to dislodge the drill bit from the beast’s bleeding trapezius muscle. “Get ahold of yourself or get the hell out of my lab! Useless!”

Chensky didn’t have the breath to explain himself, or even utter a word at all. Not after he’d seen one of the beast’s blaze orange eyes open and lock onto him with reptilian-like, vertical slit pupils full of malice and hatred.

He scrambled to his feet and collapsed again near the entrance of the room. “Fuck you, I quit!” he finally gasped, fiddling with the keypad to open the pneumatic door, but finding that his hands shook too much to enter his code on the infuriatingly small keypad.

Boslav rolled his eyes. “Good, maybe someone more competent will take your place.” he reoriented the camera stalk on the surgical arm, flicking his wrist slightly with the joystick in hand in order to glance at the wound he’d accidentally made, watching as the inch wide gap slowly sealed itself closed.

Boslav couldn’t help but chuckle at the sight of such a marvel. “Your secrets are precious, let us see where you keep them, hmm?” he said to himself, ignoring the quiet cries of the younger man behind him. He centered the camera back on the drill head.

Upon seeing the bloodstained surface of it, he squeezed a trigger on the joystick, shaking off the red residue and pressing forward. The fine-tipped drill bit did well to penetrate what must have been the outer skin layer, though it began to meet resistance upon breaking through that. A few strands of dark red, what might have been blood vessels perhaps, seemed to entangle the bit once he’d pressed it about three inches through, gripping it tight enough that the device made mechanical clicks, servos overloaded from the strain.

“Damn. Strong blood you have, beastie. No matter.” he said, a cocky confidence in his tone as he began to back the drill out.

His grin faded though as a noise cut through his focus, not caused by his invalid of an assistant this time, no, this sounded like water, bubbling inside the tank. He shot a glance to one of the large monitors on the wall, gasping as he noticed the tank’s internal temp had risen to 200 degrees, and the display flashed orange indicating that such temps were… problematic.

“Chensky, make yourself useful and turn the coolant valve.” Boslav said, pointing at the chamber as one would to command a dog.

“Eat me. I’m leaving as soon as this fucking door cooperates.” the man hissed back, gripping his own wrist with his left hand in an attempt to steady it to punch in his code.

Boslav growled, slamming a fist into the console in front of himself in a tantrum. “Such a waste of oxygen! Fine then, I will do it myself.”

He stomped over to the chamber, having no clue his punch to the panel seconds ago had jostled the control stick forward, drilling deep and fast back into the small cavity he’d made a moment ago.

“Warning- Dangerous Temperatures.” a robotic voice spoke over the room’s PA system.

Approaching the coolant valve, Boslav could feel the heat radiating off of the chamber. “I’m well aware, stupid machi- Aigh!” Boslav retracted his hand from the yellow valve after hearing his fingers sizzle on contact, the metal itself was hot enough to sear his skin. “How is this possible?!”

Boslav took a wide sidestep, gazing into the red-clouded liquid of the chamber, large bubbles visibly rising from it.

Compound decoded, Fortifying cell structure…Complete.

The chamber began to emit an awful creak, as the weight of the beast within shifted. Both eyes, glowing brightly with the hue of a forge’s molten core flashed open, sliced through the bloodstained sleep compound the creature was encased in like hellish spotlights, and their predatory glare fixed on Boslav. One of its massive hands smashed against the glass, the dull thump resonating through the room sending chills up Boslav’s spine, and shocking his already-panicked coworker into hyperventilating as he managed to slowly, shakily enter the first three digits of his seven digit code.

Oxygen required. Engaging defense protocols.

The beast’s right fist pounded the glass, and a terrible crack formed, spreading out like the reaching tendrils of a lightning bolt as the thunderous boom shook the lab. Boslav’s face went pale. Another furious punch, and the crack tripled in length, the trickle of blood and liquid tranquilizer beginning to ooze from it. “Structural integrity compromised” the PA said.

The monster’s claws began to prod into the small crack, and it braced its feet against the rear of the chamber, pressing against the glass with great strain. Liquid now gushed out of the crack as it widened and spread apart. Boslav sprinted over to his desk, picking up the phone from it and activating the PA’s broadcast system. “Heavy containment compromised in test chamber 14!” he shouted, slamming the phone haphazardly down as a jet of the boiling substance struck his hand.

Oxygen required

Oxygen required

Oxygen required

A muffled snarl echoed through the room as the beast flexed its entire body, the thick glass beginning to crack more violently. Boslav reached into his desk drawer, retrieving a Makarov pistol and racking a round into it. It wouldn’t be enough, he knew. “So this is how it ends. The greatest weapon of our foes in the old world, still just as potent all these years later.” he said, a frightened resignation coming over him.

OXYGEN REQUIRED

The beast’s furious fists conquered the glass with a deafening explosion, spilling a wave of its blood and the powerful sedative that failed to contain it flowing over the floor of the lab room. The creature itself splayed out on the floor amidst the broken glass, its enormous body twitching and spasming as it coughed out liters of the fluid. A long tongue lolled out of its toothy maw, and the beast took a massive, deep breath, the bulk of its chest stretching as the lungs within filled with air. His tongue ran across his teeth.

Oxygen acquired

The giant stood, rolling its shoulders, eyes flicking between the horrified pile of quivering meat that had become of the man nearest the door, and the more composed supervisor figure. Was it trying to determine which to eat first? The thought bounced across Boslav’s mind, and his grip tightened around the steel frame of his sidearm.

“Where am I?”

Kazlov’s eyes nearly fell out of their sockets, widening with shock, horror, and intrigue all at once. “It…it can speak?!” he croaked, backing away from a monster now made that much more terrifying.

This almost unimaginable physicality, and a mind on-par with a human’s. Perhaps even, Boslav mused, on par with his own mind. He laid the pistol back in its drawer, sliding it closed fully conscious he’d never get the chance to grab it in time if his test subject didn’t like his answer. Laying both hands on the surface of his desk, Boslav cleared his throat, which had become a desert with the revelation of sentience in what he’d thought was little more than a dated bioweapon. Those hellfire-tinted eyes bored into his own relentlessly.

“You are a mile underground, Fort New Constantine, Saint Petersburg.” Boslav said.

The beast nodded slowly, an evil grin spreading across his face.

“Russia?”

Boslav’s expression of concern intensified, and he shook his head in the negative. “Ororussland…Aeberium.” he included the planet’s name.

This was after all, not the Earth that the creature originated from. Had it really been captured so easily, with such intellect? Boslav began to doubt the low death toll the snaring operation had officially given. Something like this was built to conquer battalions of men at a time. Hell, tanks, artillery, aircraft, for that matter. Boslav shuddered again.

The beast’s grin disappeared, brows lowering ominously as it looked away from Kazlov to stare at something on the desk in front of him. Released from the stare, Boslav inhaled as if having been released from a neck-crushing chokehold. Given the choice, the doctor would’ve taken the chokehold. He followed its gaze hesitantly to the desk. Neatly folded papers lay in stacks, some loose, others bound in red leather bindings marked with a central star, as was conventional for the Soviet empire his employers idealized. The Neosoviet Party of Communist Aeberium’s logo differed from the classic soviet union subtly, a laser rifle and hypodermic needle taking the place of the hammer and sickle.

The sound of something metallic being slotted into place seized the attention of the beast and the transfixed doctor, and both turned to look for the source. A keycard, it seemed. Fleeing footsteps informed Boslav that his spineless accountant had made himself scarce, at last having inputted the correct code.

Alone with the devil. Boslav thought, grinning a little.

It wasn’t the worst way to go. There were far more benign things to lose your life to, after all. Who knows, maybe he could cut a deal. A bit of his soul in exchange for the chance to tell the story around the table with his comrades. His smile faded at the image. No…his comrades would sooner put a bullet in his head for having lost this genetic marvel, which must’ve taken legions of men to bring down.

“I am a dead man walking.” Boslav announced. “You will find your exit to this place on floor forty one. Currently, we stand on floor thirty.” he added.

The brutish superorganism before him nodded in agreement. “That you are.” it spoke more calmly now, and the glow in its eyes was dimming to a less violent shade.

The longer Boslav looked, he noted it was shifting hue as well, from orange to blue. Boslav was absolutely fascinated.

“Not by my hand, though, as it stands. Don’t make me regret leaving you alive.” it said, posture straightening from the hunched and bestial looming it was doing a moment ago into that of a veteran soldier. Shoulders squared, spine straight. There was pride in this creature.

No, not creature. Supersoldier. That’s what he really was...

Boslav simply pointed to the door. “Security will be here in moments.” he said.

Great. Can’t even take you hostage. Damn commies’ll shoot right through you to get at me. the beastman’s thoughts echoed.

He lifted a basketball-sized fist to knock on the ceiling, about 15 feet off the ground. It wasn’t concrete, like the red, rubber-coated floor, but panels of drab gray sheet metal, sounding hollow and less than a half inch thick.

“Leave it to communism to skimp on the interior.” the mutant chuckled, burrowing its silver-colored claws into the roof tile and pulling it off effortlessly. “Vents, lovely.” it said, eyeing the flaky-finished aluminum shaft running concealed beneath the panel veneer.

Before Boslav’s eyes, the monstrous creature shrunk, in bulk and in height, until it was no more than a head taller than himself, slim and lithe-built, a far cry from the hulk of muscle it’d been before.

The doctor sputtered as the law of conservation of mass was broken so rudely before him, and he was reduced to making addled noises as he watched the test subject tear open the bottom of the vent, peel it open like the canned tuna rations that were handed out by the local governance, and haul itself inside. He sat down at his desk, all fear and terror displaced from his mind as the riddle of the powers he’d just witnessed rocked the very foundations of his scientific career. He couldn’t even go through with his plan of eating a bullet from the gun in his desk now, he had to reason with the reality he’d just been pushed into. The reality that some things he’d regarded as firm and unchanging, like the laws of physics, could be shattered…

The wolflike humanoid crept through the ventilation shaft with impressive speed. Distantly, he heard yelling from the direction he’d come from. They’d know he was in the vents in minutes. That meant an exit was in order. His eyes scanned the repetitive hallway of ductwork, spotting a grate. He shuffled over to it, gazing through. It appeared to open out into a broad hallway with glossy red concrete floors. Occasional guards passed by, their tan uniforms reminding him of the classic cold war Russian ones, right down to the jackboots and AK style rifles they held, though he had his doubts that these extraterrestrial neo soviets were genuinely using non-high tech weaponry, even if it might resemble the old school tech he preferred.

“Such enthusiasts, my my.” he chuckled to himself.

Pulling the grate off quietly and setting it inside with him in the duct, he poked his head out slowly, getting a gauge of where the troops were moving. Once he’d noted down their patterns, he made his well-timed exit from the vent, meeting the ground with a somersault and taking in his surroundings.

The walls were a drab beige, and decorated with framed paintings of what must’ve been the current administration of the party. He took pensive steps, hunting for a window to bail out through. Peeking around a corner, he nearly shoulder checked a surprised looking soldier, whose gasp was cut off by the wolfman’s iron grip around his throat, his other hand snatching the guard’s rifle. Once the disarmed Soviet was limp, the wolfman stashed his body in a nearby maintenance closet. He examined his acquired prize as he walked down the hall. Externally, it indeed resembled an AKM, as he’d suspected, but removing the magazine revealed neon blue-tipped ammunition which glowed dimly, surely more powerful than what would’ve been used in the original platform.

Satisfied, the beast returned his focus on the task at hand, rocking the magazine back into place. There it was, at the end of the hall was a large, stained glass window, depicting Stalin. A grin spread across the beast’s wolf-like snout as he began to sprint for the window, performing a front flip and crashing through the expensive looking art piece.

He was surprised to land in a cold, massive, interior space. The frigid, white interior was nothing like the gallant, or at least gallant by communist standards, hall he’d just burst out of. Turning around, he noticed the bit of the lab he’d left was just a small complex in this enormous facility.

“Got my work cut out for me…” he muttered.

After sprinting to the nearest white wall, he slung his rifle to his back, raking his claws into the strange polymer-paneled surface.

“Need the mass back for this one.” he growled.

He focused his mind, his biocomputer broadcasting its etheric frequency and transferring his former height and hulking muscularity back into being, summoned from somewhere else entirely. With a powerful snap kick, his huge leg blew a massive hole in the wall, which he ducked through into what looked like a grotesque assembly line of human bodies, immediately covering his sensitive nose in shock at the smell.

“Christ.” he muttered.

In another feat made possible by his biocomputer, he manually dampened his olfactory senses.

“What the fuck are they doing to you?” he said to himself, looking at one of the passing bodies.

It was emaciated and starved-looking, with huge surgical scars down its torso and across its forehead. It appeared several organs had been removed, and the body lay disturbingly flat below the ribcage.

"Gutted.” the beast growled. “I’m gonna shut this down.”

He followed the conveyor belts up towards the source, coming to a doorway draped in long, opaque plastic sheeting, stained in blood. He pushed through them, seeing a huge bulk of coiled wire stemming from a generator in this room. Shouldering his rifle, the beastman fired a few rounds into the generator, hearing the machines in the previous room sputtering to a stop. To his discomfort, the lights also went out.

His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, his ears to the silence. There were…footsteps. Yes, bare footsteps, at first only a few, but eventually at least a dozen sets. Lupine eyes flicked to the bloodied plastic sheet he’d just walked through, seeing at least thirty silhouettes stumbling eerily behind it.

Chills ran down his spine.

The beast growled defensively, slinging the rifle onto his back. Once again the floodgates of biomass were opened, and the monster’s glossy black hide began to shift and stretch over a rapidly growing frame.

My turn.

He lunged into the room full of shuffling drones, uttering a guttural, feral roar. The barefooted test subjects issued their own hisses in return, and he let loose his claws. Every strike splattered the concrete floor with long streaks of brownish-red, and the more thoughtful of the beast’s two personas wondered if the blood in these things hadn’t been pumped by the heart in a while, if they even had hearts... Three of the shamblers encroached from behind, their veiny fists slapping uselessly on the wall of muscle that was the beast’s back. A spinning paw swipe exploded their heads with its sheer force, spattering browned gray matter amidst crumbly, yellowed bone.

Were these things built out of corpses?

The bioweapon was losing his appetite at this rate, and as his bloodlust faded, his lucidity restored.

“Fuck this.” he growled, flicking the vile ichor from his hands and sprinting out of the darkened room.

He emerged into a brightly lit hallway, so white it made him squint. Old memories of snow-shod battlefields replayed themselves in the recesses of his mind, and his lip curled in a scowl. He stomped down the hall, cognizant of a faint rattling the light fixtures overhead made with his every footfall. The noise began to grate on him, and he started running on all fours, his behemoth form thundering through the hall like an avalanche of stygian rage until finally bursting through a pair of airlocks into a much broader corridor, large enough for four lanes of vehicle traffic.

Armed guards shouted in panic as the dust began to clear, and the beast felt the sharp sting of several rifle bullets jabbing into his thick skin. Every hit was a log on his inner flame, and pushed him further over the edge. He snatched a rifle from the nearest guard’s hand, clubbing another in the head with it before tomahawk throwing it, lodging the bayonet in the chest of a third with enough force to knock him on his back. An elevator dinged behind the beast, and from it a larger security team equipped with stun batons rushed in, the heads of their clubs arcing noisily as they collided with the bioweapon’s legs and back. The voltage cascaded through him, oversized muscles spasming and forcing him to the ground. The men cockily continued their beatdown, as if this were some rioter they were showing who was boss.

Insulating tissues…

The men were briefly stunned by a loud, wet gushing sound emitting from their target, who spasmed in pain, jaw clenched and breathing heavily.

“You...should’ve run.” the beast seethed through his canid teeth.

The security force resumed their attacks, finding their stun batons would no longer arc, simply thudding off the beast’s enormous chest as if striking a truck tire. His claws clamped around the throat of the leading officer, and effortlessly crushed his spine and windpipe, before swinging the ragdolled corpse in a wide arc, bludgeoning the rest of the squad. The beast stood to all fours, beginning to shed biomass as he made a mad dash into the elevator.

The excess muscle was almost instantly converted to a surplus of energy, and sharpened the beast’s senses. He stood to a height not impossible for a normal human, just over 6’5”, and pressed the topmost elevator button, hearing the muffled sounds of the security force groaning in pain and rolling on the floor.

Poor bastards.

The beastman wondered what the sods were being paid to guard a place like this, if they were paid at all. This was a neo-communist regime after all. Given a brief moment to relax and reflect, the beast caught his breath and leaned against the wall. He felt something jingle against his chest, and his hand discovered a pair of military dog tags.

“Steele Van Der Weiss.” he read his own name engraved on one, upon the shiny chromed surface.

The other was much older in design, with significant patina, though it too bore his name.

“We need to get home.” he said to himself, letting the tags fall back upon his chest on their chain.

“Auxiliary power levels critical”

Flashed a TV screen on the wall, the blocky text alternating between English and the Russian translation. Steele anxiously hoped he’d make it to the surface before the elevator gave out. He unslung the rifle from his back with hands much better suited to the scale of the weapon, and he proceeded to reload it with the only spare mag he’d scrounged off the dead guard.

The lights overhead flickered, dimmed, and eventually extinguished. The beast cursed under his breath as his eyes began to adjust to the darkness again, and he felt the elevator slow to a halt. He’d made eight floors of progress, but still had another 12 to go, judging by the buttons on the now dead panel that were glowing a second ago.

Prying into the crack between the doors with his claws, Steele heaved the elevator open, crawling through the upper gap left from the elevator stopping between floors. An emergency broadcast began to blare from overhead speakers.

“Attention Station 9 personnel. A class 6 specimen has broken containment. Lockdown has been initiated. Unarmed personnel are advised to shelter in place. Security teams must report to floor 18B. Be advised, specimen is-” the broadcast was cut by static, and the beast felt the ground shake seismically.

An actual earthquake? Steele knelt down, trying to determine if it was something more localized. Indeed, it seemed to be coming from a few floors down, and his keen ears picked up on the sounds of distant gunfire and screams. Maybe the gutless drones he’d encountered were arranging an escape of their own…

Not one to pass up an opportunity, the beastman’s eyes scanned overhead signs, lit only by the glare of red klaxon emergency lights along the walls.

“Records.” he read aloud.

If he was going to make it out of here, he needed intel, and he needed it fast. Steele crept into the room, occupied by a single desk worker perched in front of a holographic monitor, wearing headphones and blissfully unaware of his presence. Steele grabbed hold of a fire extinguisher from the wall, sneaking up behind the worker.

“Sorry.” he muttered, smacking him upside the head with the bright red canister with a satisfying thunk and putting his lights out.

Steele shifted the snoring worker out of his seat and took it for himself. Analyzing pages of data about Fort New Constantine’s layout, he began to formulate an escape plan.