Inception

Chapter 32: The Little Kaiju

 Its bulbous white eyes, with pinprick black pupils, found her the same time she found it.

It froze, stilling the noise of it's scuttling long enough for the hum of Lena's knife to fill the air.

Then it screeched, bared its cutle fish fangs, and refocused its attention on peeling back the metal.

"Bastard!" Lena shrieked. Any fear was swallowed up in sudden, ferocious rage. She lunched, knife crackling.

Her first stab missed, crackling off metal. The cat sized kaiju dodged, hissing, and sped up its metal tearing.

Her next swing swiped off two legs and a pincer, but far from stop it, it only seemed to enrage it. The scream it gave pierced her ears.

It lunged. Crab legs stabbed into her arm and side. Pincers snapped towards her face.

Lena screamed just like it and stabbed. She kept stabbing even when the pinpricks of electricity zipped into her own muscles. The knife skid off a hard exoskeleton, but she just went for those bulbous eyes instead. Black blood splurt out.

The kaiju screamed. Lena screamed. At one point when a leg got too close she went at it with her teeth and felt a solid crunch of carapace between her teeth, even as kaiju blood filled her mouth.

The kaiju fell. It's body thwacked against the floor, crab legs splayed.

Lena stood breathing heavily, a few dismembered crab legs sticking out of her sides and thighs. She spat out blood and waited for her heartbeat to stop thudding against the back of her eyes. It tasted and felt like she'd chewed a wad of aluminum foil.

She ran to the container, still holding tight to the humming knife in her sticky palm.

She couldn't see anything. The red light was too dim. Fear prickled her heart. What if the kaiju had damaged it?

She turned to rush back into the lab for a penlight, only to stumble as the various bits of crab blade made themselves known. One scraped against the bottom of her ribs. She thought she could hear it. Bone against bone.

Unwisely, she yanked it out, only to regret it as her vision spun. She swore under her breath, then swore against as pain begun to trickle in. It was too hot, like fire, and sharp.

"Oh...oh this hurts," she mumbled, surprised. It hurt a lot. Like...a lot. Hot damn.

She still tried to make it back to the lab. A first aid kit was in there if nothing else. Something to stop the bleeding so she could make it back to the bunker. Get help. She managed to hobble across to the red-cross adorned box on the wall and snap it open, but all the way the ends of the crab legs made her muscles spasm and filled her ears with the sound of bone scraping bone.

A rumble of a distant explosion made the lab shake. It was enough to make Lena drop to her knees. On the floor she could see she'd left a trail of blood behind her that seemed to glow on the clean, white linoleum.

She grit her teeth. Fought to stand. But her head gave a nauseating spin and her vision crowded with black.

No, she thought. She couldn't let this happen. She couldn't pass out now. If she passed out here she'd bleed out. She'd die. She couldn't do that to Leno. And how long would it be for someone else dumb or desperate enough to try and wipe out the source of kaiju to arise?

Lena gnashed her iron flavored teeth. She clawed the wall with her heavy arms. She roared, only for it to come out a weak warble. Her whole body shuddered to reply.

The black closed in.