Project Zero: Evolution Protocol

Don't Bleed

The screws kept coming.

Four. Five. Six. Each one dropped onto the gurney and rolled to a stop in that same patient row.

Cyrus pressed his back against the wall beside the sink and held the axe low. Behind the door, nothing. Above him, the grille tipped outward on its last two screws, and a smell rolled out of the vent like a grave being opened: wet, sweet and old.

Then the thing poured itself out.

It came headfirst, folding through a gap that wouldn't have fit a dog, unspooling one joint at a time. Four limbs, far too long. It landed on the gurney in a crouch and didn't make a sound.

Cyrus had watched men die in a dozen bad ways. He had never seen anything move like that: no hurry, no rhythm, just a slow, boneless certainty, like water finding its level.

Skin the color of wet paper, stretched over a ribcage you could count. Where the eyes should have been, smooth, blank skin. Where the nose should have been, two wet slits that flared and closed like gills.

[ADAPTED: CLASS II]

[SPECIALIZATION: SCENT TRACKING]

"Oh, that's f*****g great," Cyrus breathed. "You come with a label."

No eyes. He held very still anyway.

The head swung left, then right, slow as a compass needle. The slits flared. Then it dropped off the gurney on fingers that clicked against the tile and went straight to the sink.

It pushed its whole face into the basin and began to lick the drain.

Slow. Almost reverent.

The pink water. His blood.

"Okay," Cyrus whispered. "Okay, that is not f*****g good."

He tried something. A roll of gauze sat on the shelf beside his shoulder. He nudged it with the axe blade, and it tumbled off and bounced across the floor.

The creature didn't flinch.

He tried again, a little louder, scraping the axe along the wall. Nothing. It didn't turn, didn't blink, didn't care. Not blind and deaf, exactly. Uninterested.

It wasn't hunting him. It was hunting what was inside him.

[HOST BLOOD: HIGH ATTRACTANT]

"Don't bleed," Cyrus said under his breath. Eleven years of training had come down to two words. "Don't you f*****g bleed."

Too late. The creature's head lifted from the sink and turned toward him.

His eyes dropped. The axe haft was smeared brown where his knuckles had gripped it. His sleeve was streaked. He could see it now the way the thing could smell it: a trail of him, all over the room.

The slits flared wide.

Cyrus lunged for the shelf.

The creature was faster than anything that size had a right to be. It crossed the room in a blink, and he felt the wind of it on his cheek as he grabbed.

He didn't stop to read labels. His hand closed on a squeeze bottle with a red cap and a decon sticker, SODIUM HYPOCHLORITE 12%, and a scalpel lying on the tray beside it. He swept both into his arms and dove behind the gurney as something hit the steel over his head.

The gurney screamed across the floor. Teeth snapped on the rail an inch from his ear, and his own heartbeat roared in his skull, loud enough that he wondered, for one ridiculous second, whether it could hear that too.

He ran the options in the half second he had. The door was blocked by a chair and a mob. The vent was too small for him. The axe was a good tool, but it needed a target that held still, and this thing didn't hold still for anything except one.

He had one idea. It was a s**t idea, and he was out of better ones.

He dragged the scalpel across his left palm.

It hurt like a motherfucker. Blood welled up thick and dark, and the smell of it filled the room, copper and something sweeter underneath. The creature went rigid.

Cyrus flung his hand toward the far wall. A rope of red splattered across the white tile.

The thing screamed. A thin whistling shriek, almost joyful. It vaulted the gurney, cleared him by a foot, and slammed into the far wall, tongue stretched flat against the splatter, licking with a desperate, moaning hunger.

Cyrus watched it with a feeling he wasn't proud of. For one second, he wanted to lick it too.

What the f**k is wrong with me?

He pushed that down. He got to his feet.

Eleven years learning not to bleed, he thought. And now it was the only weapon he had. Christ.

He stepped up behind it, thumbed the red cap off the bottle, and squeezed.

A hard jet of bleach hit it square in the nostril slits.

The shriek that came out of it rattled his teeth. It reared back, clawing at its face, and the skin around the slits bubbled and went white. It spun, blind to everything now, and a hand like a bundle of knives raked across his thigh.

He felt the pain, then the heat, then the wet.

"f**k! Son of a b***h!"

He swung the axe with both hands. It bit into the side of the skull, and the creature dropped onto one knee, still reaching. Cyrus pulled the blade free and swung again, and this time it stayed down.

The silence afterward was enormous.

His hands wouldn't stop shaking. Not fear, exactly. Adrenaline burning off like fuel, leaving his legs hollow and his head light.

He thought of the notebook. Subject did not make it past the second landing. He had pictured those six as victims. He hadn't thought about how easy it would be to join them. One wrong turn, one drop of blood in the wrong room.

He stood there, panting, bleeding, the axe hanging from his hand. His thigh was open to the muscle. The blood ran hot into his sock.

[ADAPTED ELIMINATED: 1]

[SAMPLE AVAILABLE: SCENT-TRACKER, OLFACTORY ORGAN]

[SAMPLE EXPIRES IN 03:00]

"Not now, goddamn it," Cyrus muttered.

Then, because he couldn't help himself: "What happens if I take it?"

[DATA UNAVAILABLE]

"What happens if I don't?"

[DATA UNAVAILABLE]

"You're a real f*****g help."

The letters pulsed once, unbothered. A sample could mean power. It could also mean a fever, a hunger, a body he couldn't undo. The system wasn't going to tell him which. It never told him anything until after.

His eyes went to the sink, the bleach, the floor. Blood on the tile. Blood on the wall. Blood on the dead thing's skin, glistening. He had made a mess of this room, and he stood in the middle of it like a lit match.

He counted. He did not like what the counting said.

His palm was already knitting, thirty seconds and he'd be clean. His thigh was another story. The cut was too deep. It didn't crawl shut. It oozed, sluggish and stubborn, the bleeding slowing but not stopping.

So whatever his body could do, it had limits. Good to know. Shitty time to learn it.

Every step he took from here would leave a trail any f*****g thing could follow.

Behind the door, the pounding started again.

It came back all at once, louder than before. Fists, shoulders, bodies throwing themselves at the steel. Like someone had taken their hands off a leash.

The chair legs shrieked another inch across the tile.

"Okay," Cyrus said. "Okay. Come on, you dumb son of a b***h. Think."

He wrapped his thigh in a pad of gauze, wound a strip of surgical tape around it, and stuffed a second wad into his palm. His hands were slick. He wiped them on the scrubs and told himself it was enough.

It wasn't. He knew it wasn't.

He turned toward the dead creature and looked at the wet, glistening organ in its skull, and his stomach clenched with a hunger that had nothing to do with food.

"No," he said. "f**k no."

The hunger didn't care.

Then, overhead, a speaker clicked on.

Not the calm voice. A recorded one, flat and mechanical, a woman reading from a script that had been waiting for this exact moment.

"Attention. Lockdown protocol has been initiated for Sector Three. Seal will engage in three minutes. Any personnel remaining in Sector Three are advised that the seal is permanent."

The message repeated. Three minutes.

"Of course," Cyrus snarled. "Of course it's three f*****g minutes."

The service stair was at the far end of the corridor. Forty meters, give or take. Forty meters through whatever was pounding on that door, with a trail of blood behind him and a leg that wouldn't hold its weight the way it should.

And on the floor, a gland the size of a fist that might make him better at all of it.

Or might make him worse.

On the edge of his vision, the other clock was still counting.

[SAMPLE EXPIRES IN 02:47]

Both clocks ran down together.