Artificial air cycled through the pitch black corridors of the maintenance tunnels I had wasted my life in since I was a young man while muffled screams echoed from outside the welded closed doors. It had all happened so quickly, too quickly for even the security officers to contain it. I was just lucky to be repairing a hull breach when that…abomination got loose. I was huddled in a ball deep in the darkness, where I wanted to stay until the screaming stopped.

My name is Marcus, and I’m a janitor. Well, the official title is “Supervisor of Station Infrastructure” but all that means is I get mechanical limbs when the carbon-fans chop off my legs.


Fun.

For twenty years I had been serving on Station Beta Calderas Storage VIII, an undermanned dirthole where I did far more than any janitor should. Did you know people store giant, rapidly evolving brain-melting parasites in jars of pickles? Yeah, neither did I. In fact, something like that is why I’m huddling in a corner with my head in my crotch while every living soul on the station is being torn limb from limb.


Pop.
My breath caught in my throat and I quit shaking as I heard, just on the other side of the wall I was hiding behind, an arm being ripped from its socket and a tired, hopeless scream rock that hallway. As if the poor sod at just given up and fallen to the ground while they were being chased. Just accepting their fate. It was that which scared me the most, would I just give up and die too?

Did I even have a choice in the matter? I was an old man, almost eighty. My time had passed decades ago and it’s not like I was any more important than the money invested into my robotic legs. What right did I have to survive this mess while younger people-those in the prime of their lives-just lost it all?

At the edge of the tunnel, at the welded door, I heard pounding at the usually automatic door. There was a certain disparity about the sound that differentiated it in such a way that made it difficult to accurately describe. It sounded as if the one doing the pounding believed without any hesitation or doubt that it was the only thing they could possibly do to save their lives. Like a sinner pleading before the gates of heaven for mercy and only greeted with the uncaring touch of metal and death.

“Open, come on you stupid thing open!” The young sounding girl pleaded with the slab of metal that was incapable of allowing her passage, “Please! Help! ” She begged, I felt tears forcing their way out of my eyes because I knew that there was nothing I could do for the poor girl…

Deeper into the choking darkness I retreated. I couldn’t bring myself to suffer the pain of hearing her die because of my own cowardice. There was nothing I could even hope to do for her, right? I kept running until I reached the near end of tunnel and my adapted eyes saw the outline of another exit into the main ship. This specific door emptied into the Medical Bay, I was about to open it when I heard a rustling.

A rustling of objects which were far too large to be so easily moved, what sounded like cabinets and medical equipment being opened and then thrown to the floor. My breath hastened and I began to take steps away from the light when my cheap sole was caught on some sort of tube and I crashed to the floor with a “clang”.


The noises behind the door stopped. So did my breath.

An almost tranquil moment of silence seemed to fall over the entire station as I slowly edged my way up. Being faced with such direct terror kick started my sense of self-preservation. There were maintenance tubes at the other end of the station, they weren’t very clean but if I could get to them I would be able to escape to the docking bay and access any escape shuttles that were left! I would have to act fast, though. First I would have to deal with the door, it wasn’t locked so the slightest push could cause it to open as they were fully-automatic. I used my unaging limbs to my advantage and leaped to my feet, using my momentum to slam my hand onto the locking mechanism, a cheap lever, and hearing the satisfying hiss of air-tight seals closing. With a sigh of relief at being that much safer, I rested briefly on the door’s edge. Immediately I felt a heavy frame bash against the door, as if it was being body-slammed by an elephant, and I threw back towards the wall, feeling a crack in my chest and hearing a pathetic, wheezing yelp of pain.


To my pride’s discomfort, I realized it was me.

I tried to ignore the pain and scrambled to my feet clumsily, coughing profusely as I tried to run towards my last hope of survival. Even now I could hear the locked door being forced open by bestial strength beyond my limited comprehension. I could hear the monster’s primal pants as it smelled my fear, my tears, and chased after them. It was obviously faster than me, and by the ever-louder pounding of its footsteps behind the clanging of my own robotic variant I knew it was getting ever closer. I could smell the irony stench of death on its body and felt my gag-reflex almost force me to the ground.


How many had died already? Did anyone escape!?

In the darkness, I could not see the small hole in the wall that would mark the location of the ship’s ventilation, but they had a distinctive smell to them that made them impossible to not notice: Stale air and dead mice. It was close now, right in front of me even; I took what could be my final breath and jumped towards where I estimated the uncovered ventilation to be.

“NO.” I heard snarled behind me from a voice that could never be human, it was deep and primal, and echoed immediately as if multiple voices were speaking at the same time. I felt my metal legs be pulled back just as my torso entered the dust-infested crawling tunnel and my hands held onto the edges with all the might unfeeling metal can provide.


The powerful mechanisms in my mechanical arms whined under the stress of fighting the strength of such an unnatural thing, and were leaving imprints of my hands into the metal of the ventilation walls; if this went on for much longer they’d overheat! Then, I heard the sound of metal being strained too far too fast and just ripping in too as I suddenly shot into the ventilation shaft with all the momentum I had been building up. The last thing I heard before I hit a wall and darkness took me completely was the frustrated roars of an angry beast echoing throughout and empty station.