LINKAGE

CHAPTER 9: LIFELESS PUZZLE

The elevator went down slower than it would normally do, making Isaac count the seconds for the doors to open. It was still dark inside it, but the aura of the moment was filled with anxiety and fear. Gavin was violently dragged out of the second floor by the horrific force that's been haunting Qorjal for the past few days and by now he could be dead already. That monster exterminated around two thousand people in the Camp so easily that nobody even noticed. It was like they blinked and didn't have the chance to see the things that surrounded them anymore.

The doors were now wide open, and the corridor was still the same shadowy and empty from minutes earlier. With a gun in his hands, Isaac started walking, and the only thing his ears detected was the sound of his boots slipping on the floor slowly. He went from door to door, room to room, to find nothing but dead bodies in each one of them, so he decided to go back to the lobby, where he saw that the night time was getting closer and that he should hurry up. The night in Qorjal was difficult to deal with sometimes, it would get too cold to stay outside.

Isaac was lost, he didn't have a clue where Gavin should be and he didn't know much about the place's facilities. He looked at his left and his right. Only darkness was visible. But then he heard something like a pipe bursting strongly, but it was a muffled sound like it was on another floor. After hearing the sound, Isaac got steady, gun pointing towards the way he was walking into, and since he didn't have any other clues, he started looking towards the stairs that would lead him underground.

He had a little flashlight inside his pocket and he took it with his free to brighten the way. This time he was walking into the left corridor, the same that was entirely dark, and the same Gavin had his back turned to when he asked Isaac: Is there something behind me?

Once he reached the edge of the corridor, he turned right and pointed his flashlight toward an informative board attached to the ceiling, where an emergency exit was listed, and pointed to the corridor on his left. While walking down this new hall, he spotted a tree inside the big dome they previously spotted and noticed another other four bodies lying on the grass, now lifeless bodies.

He didn't have time for the dead, he had to focus on saving another person from the death inside that building.

When Isaac reached the stairs, he went two floors down when he saw a door with a sign written Engine Rooms, and then he knew he was in the right place. Down there was cold, so cold that smoke came out of his mouth every time he breathed out. He was starting to think that the monster is actually something worse than a usual monster.

His flashlight illuminated the walls made of brown bricks and he saw lots of pipes on the up edges of these walls, thinking that he may be close to the place where another one exploded. He was now in front of three ways that could lead him to Gavin or nowhere - a corridor in his front and two in his sides.

He smelt humidity and heard droplets of water reaching the floor, but didn't catch a single noise or voice. Isaac knew that it wouldn't resolve a single thing, but he hoped that he could frighten the monster by making it known that Isaac was there. So his voice was thick and loud when he called: "Gavin!" Nothing happened. He started to walk straight down the corridor in his front. "Show up fucking little demon."

He felt pathetic by wanting to talk with the monster. He didn't even know if he could hear it or understand it. A part of Isaac was wishing that the monster couldn't understand it because calling it out loud would just bring death to him. But he also knew that was a necessary risk at the moment.

Then he heard an insane laugh coming from all the sides of that floor. It was a loud and cracking laugh, that became thick and demonic with the pass of the seconds. It stayed irritating Isaac's eardrums until he was pushed so strongly into the brick walls that his lungs didn't take it and he started coughing while trying to get up. Once back up on his feet, Isaac was now facing the demon itself - he didn't see any trace of his face because his flashlight was now lost, but he did see the red eyes of the monster and that was when he shot, but the bullet past straight through its body. Now Isaac was really terrified.