Nasferas: The Begotten

22

Davidar punched the window. A flash of pain lit through his wrist but didn't deter him from the task at hand. Tranz still writhed on the floor of the Transfer Bay. While the doors remained open to the new world, whatever had afflicted his cousin, continued its deadly onslaught.

Ranloo stormed around the corner. He held a plasma pistol in his left hand.

Fladir stood. He'd been sitting with his back against the bay doors. "Put it down, Ranloo," he demanded.

"The door!" Ranloo rubbed saliva from his mouth and nose. The weapon trembled as he shook it at his brother. "Now ... Fladir ... open the door!"

"We can't. You know contamination protocol."

"It's all your fault." Ranloo's finger rubbed steadily against the trigger. "If you would have let him wear a blast suit, he wouldn't be in there dying."

"He's not going to die." Fladir sounded sure of himself, but Davidar still wasn't convinced.

Ranloo stopped pointing the gun at Fladir. Instead, he aimed the barrel at the Transfer Bay window.

Davidar slipped in front of him. "Are you insane?"

"Move, Davidar. I'm going to save my little brother."

Fladir placed one hand on Ranloo's shoulder and gently took hold of the weapon with the other. "The plasma will ricochet through the halls and kill anyone in its path," he said. "Go back to the helm and get Tranz on coms. Find out what's going on. If he can shut the blast doors, then we can go in and get him."

Davidar nodded in concurrence with his new captain. Maybe that's how it should be. And the realization brought into question his paranoia. While Davidar's father was the best fighter pilot on Nasferas, Fladir had been trained by the best engineer and star captain. Still, he couldn't believe Tranz's predicament wasn't somehow instigated because Fladir had caught his younger brother snooping around the computer systems.

Fladir eased the blaster from Ranloo's hand. "Hurry. I'm not sure how much time we ... er ... Tranz has."

A slip of the tongue?

Confused, Ranloo wandered back to the Flight Room.

Davidar and Fladir had their noses to the glass, helpless in every way. Tranz's eyes had swollen shut. His desperate hands searched the area. Davidar then noticed Tranz's earpiece had fallen out. He quickly joined the search. His eyes darted from one end of the room to the other, but he couldn't see it anywhere.

"It wasn't supposed to happen like this," Fladir whispered.

Davidar raised his eyebrows. "Wasn't supposed to happen like what?"

"Whatever's happening to him, needs to run its course."

"That's not what you meant."

"Does it matter? My brother's in trouble."

He couldn't argue with that logic.

"Tranz," Ranloo said over the comms. "Get to the coms by the blast doors. If you can, close them. We can't come in and help you until you shut them. Nod if you understand."

Tranz nodded and crawled toward the button at the other end of the room. His body shuddered, and he went limp. Blood and yellow puss gushed around his face as it hit the floor. His arms wiggled until he managed to roll onto his back. The skin from his forehead, face, and hands hissed against the floor where they remained stuck. He squirmed on the ground, struggling to sit up. When he did, he unzipped the front of his flight suit and peeled the warped skin from his body. The suit-top dangled at his waist. Skin from his torso and back clung to the inside of the material.

"No!" Davidar watched in horror as he realized, Tranz had skinned himself alive.

Between the raw muscle and strands of veins left where his skin should have been, new bubbles emerged.

"We have to help him!" Davidar ignored the pain in his arm and slammed his fists against the glass.

Tranz turned slowly toward them. A red iris floated in a vitreous goo he held in his hands. The rest of his skin boiled and popped around his empty eye sockets. Chunks of muscle and skin dripped to the floor. A tuft of smoke came from his mouth and his body slumped forward. The intense heat chewed away at the exposed muscle tissue. Veins and arteries tripled in size and ruptured simultaneously. The force of the blast threw Tranz's headless body across the room, slamming it into the window.

Davidar slid to the floor. Screams of sadness, terror, and pain seared his mind, yet his mouth stayed agape ... and silent.

A tingling started in Davidar's hands and ran up his arms. At first, he thought it came from his broken wrist, but his skin began to itch and burn. The intense heat built until the excruciating pain brought Davidar to his knees.

Fladir rolled on the floor as if trying to put out an all-consuming flame.

Steam enveloped Davidar's hands and face. He took one last look and saw the blast doors in the Transfer Room hadn't been closed. At that moment, he realized he and the others had now succumbed to the same fate as Tranz.

Voices he barely recognized through the collapse of his inner ear structures, cried out for a reprieve. He couldn't will himself to look. Not because of the pain, but from the horror streaking through his mind. Images of his entire family in agony, skin boiling, eyes bursting, heads exploding, filled his mind.

His own skin became a foreign substance he had accidentally spilled on himself at the factory. This entity needed to be purged from his body. Only it wasn't an entity at all, it was himself. The Nasferian which covered his truest, most perfect form, had to go.

Davidar dug at the skin on the back of his left hand. The pustule-bursting epidermis peeled away and left a smooth surface of pale skin underneath. It felt different than the rich dark-gray skin he'd been born with. Under the patch he'd excavated, the pain stopped. A quick realization of how to rid his body of the agony came to him. He clawed maniacally and purged the rest of the skin from his left hand and forearm.

Fladir groaned as he latched his fingers under his jaw and pulled. The skin peeled away like a tribal mask.

When Davidar disrobed most of the flesh underneath stuck to the inside of his suit, and patches of pink skin appeared in its place. He sat naked on the ground, pawing away at the remaining painful swatches of flesh.

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