Isolation-#Wattys2015

Excerpt 8- Vents

Mike laughed at my comment as I helped him up.

"That was too close", Allen said, "there were at least four dozen of those things."

"Seemed like there were more", Mike said wiping dirty, bloody sweat off his forehead, "is there a working shower here?"

"In the lounge", Allen said, "have Sarah take a look at your wounds once your clean, I can see the bone in your arms."

Mike laughed and slung his AR over his shoulder before walking towards the lounge. Now that the power was on, I had a good look at the lab where we were hiding. The hallway was about 50 or so feet long and about 10 or 15 feet wide. The walls were painted a grey color and the floor was polished, bare steel while the walls were actually heavy iron and concrete, rather than the plate steel I had originally mistaken it for. The lights were set a ways into the ceiling and their position just barely cast the shadows of their fixtures. There were two computer terminals that had signs above them that read "Lab Network Access" and the computers were currently offline. The entire building had a weird, military like vibe to it strange when you thought about it. Ios was in the middle of Confederate Space, light years from any border and even then the Confederates had next to no military to speak of, plus, since when to research lab workers carry handguns? Not to mention having a small arsenal in a random security room and a chief armed with an M240 Bravo?

"Why are you guys so heavily armed?", I asked picking up the ammo boxes, "you and Mike alone have the firepower to win a small war. Even with what you do here it seems like a couple of Ar-15s and a few shotguns with exploding shells would solve any problem that happens to spring up. Slavers don't come out here either."

"It became lab protocol in 2068 after a single mutant nearly killed everyone and everything here for all researchers and guards to be armed with Military Grade weaponry", Allen said, "there were four survivors of that escape out of the 5K people that worked here."

I whistled, "your saying one creature killed 4,996 people?"

Allen shook his head, "I remember that day all too well. I was only 2, but the image is seared into my brain. We didn't have the firepower or the ammo to punch through the creatures armor. What ever it was. It was luck that my Dad's friend James managed to get it to swallow an live Willy Pete."

"Ouch", I said laughing a bit, "I know what that shit feels like."

Allen looked at me curiously. Crap, that was supposed to stay in a thought bubble!

"You know what White Phosphorous feels like?", he asked, "how?"

I winced, "because I've been fraged with it before, let's leave it at that."

"You don't seem interested about opening up about your past", Allen said as we walked into the lounge and back into the security room.

"Because I don't want too", I answered, "please can we just leave it there?"

Allen sat down in the chair and spun around to face me, "yeah. Leave it there."

"Thank you", I said, "now, what's next on my hit list?"

"Nothing for the time being", Allen said, "now that we have power back I want you to see what you can do to help the others try and improve our situation."

"What about you?", I asked.

"I'll try and send a signal to the rest of the lab to check for other survivors, I'll tell you if any answer back, but for now try and unwind a bit, the basement generators are next."

I nodded and left the room. I peeled off my vest and set it on the couch next to my pack with the guns. None of the others, except for Mike, were anywhere to be seen so I assumed that they were roaming the halls, looking for anything that we could use. I stepped outside of the lounge and peered down the hallways, I could see Tyler working on the big door at the end of the hallway and he had bottles of what I assumed was hydraulic fluid around him. Since I was really only competent with a wrench around a High Compression A-Class engine, I opted to avoid getting in Ty's way and went looking for the others.