Isolation-#Wattys2015

Final Excerpt- To The Gates Of Hell

Alcatraz and I did not sleep at all that night, as most of it was spent in paranoid fear. We could hear Martin's abominations circling us, hiding just out of the influence of our lights and my telekinetic field. There had to be hundreds of them, at least, watching, listening, waiting for us to make one mistake in our patrols that would allow them to flood in and murder us. The light seemed to bother them, so what we ended up doing was cutting sticks and ripping up dead grass to make as many torches as we could. Once we had run out of dead grass, we lit the torches and set them all around the camp. When the torches died about a half hour later, I pulled the 16 hour road flares from my vest and used them, which allowed one of us to sleep and the other to pull guard duty. Ios had about a 20 hour night, but the sun began to rise in the last four, which provided enough light to allow both of us to sleep. In total we each had about 12 hours of sleep, which was good enough for me. That morning we gathered up our things and took down the renaming mile to Biosphere. The front door wasn't unlike any other scene in the lab, dead bodies strewn about, chewed on and disfigured, blood and spent brass littered the grass and concrete guard post by the front door. They were facing the front door primarily, which told me they were trying to escape. The bodies and blood were fresh, victims of Martin's creatures no doubt. Another thing that I didn't quite fail to notice was a suit of what appeared to be X-5 Power Armor, which was some of the best armor money could buy if you were a human, if you were a Xenomorph, you should probably be ready to pay two arms and a tail for it because that shit is not cheap. It was sporting a Biosphere labs Mechanical Digital paint, which if I was honest was some scary looking Camouflage, which was covered in scratches and blood splatters. This armor had seen some action before it went off line, no doubt.

"Wonder who left this behind?", Alcatraz asked as I inspected it.

"I wouldn't know", I said pulling the Alloy Fusion Cell out of it and inspecting it, finding it had been fried, overtaxing probably, "but it's worthless to us, this cell is fried."

"Maybe not", Alcatraz said, "James required all guards with a X-5 on their team to carry two additional Cells, let's search these bodies and see what we can find."

I nodded to him and began to check the guards over. I found a bunch of ammo for the FAL, my Hi-Power and about 40 rounds for it, but no cores."

"I got no cores on this guy", I said.

"I've got two on this guy", Alcatraz said holding up two, foot long red plastic cases with metal end caps.

"Awesome", I said, "lets get this thing powered up, find the others and then pay psycho bitch a visit."

"I'll power up the armor while you find the suit that's meant to be warned underneath it", Alcatraz said, "though I suppose that you could go without it if you don't care for your exoskeleton."

"Noted", I said as I began searching around.

The operator of the suit turned out not to be hard to find. He was a younger guy, I'd say 17 or 18, not that far from Alcatraz. He looked like he had suffered as he died, judging by the Larva that was currently trying to crawl out of his neck. At that moment, I felt a wave of influence from my Primal side saying, "kill it." Never one to ignore my instincts, I reached down and picked up the larva, turning it over and inspecting it as it squirmed in my hand. It was about twice the size of a normal larva and all black as opposed to the normal, tanish color and judging by the scent, was a female. She squirmed, squealed and hissed at me, trying to get free from my grip.

"Your not worthy of life", I growled at it as I dropped it and crushed it under my boot, "burn in hell you mutant fuck."

Returning to the task at hand, I carefully removed the power armor jumper from the dead Xeno, trying my best to disturb the body as little as possible. I had just gotten the suit off and was standing up when a note fell out of a pocket on the suit. I picked it up and when I read it, felt my heart drop.