Project Zero: Evolution Protocol

Three Minutes

[SEAL IN: 02:41]

Cyrus stared at the dead thing on the floor and did the math.

One hundred and sixty-one seconds. Forty meters to the stairs. One leg that wouldn't close and a mob on the other side of a door.

Twenty seconds, maybe, to take what it had.

Twenty seconds was the difference between making the stairs and eating the floor. Twenty seconds was a f*****g luxury.

But his leg wouldn't close, his body kept doing things nobody had asked it to, and if the thing in his head was going to turn him into something, he wanted a say in the pieces.

"You're out of your f*****g mind," he told himself.

He did it anyway.

He dropped to his knees beside the corpse, ignoring the white-hot scream in his thigh, and set the scalpel at the base of the skull where the nostril slits met bone. The skin parted like wet paper. Steam rose from the cut.

Inside, nestled in a cradle of bone, sat an organ the size of his fist. Pale. Ridged. Wet. Pulsing, faintly, in the red light.

Still alive. Somehow, still f*****g alive.

"Jesus Christ." His stomach rolled, disgust and hunger twisting together until he couldn't tell them apart. He hated how much of it was hunger.

He cut. He pulled. It came free with a sound he knew he'd hear in his sleep.

He wrapped it in gauze and shoved it into his waistband beside the notebook.

[SAMPLE COLLECTED: SCENT-TRACKER, OLFACTORY ORGAN]

[ANALYSIS REQUIRES REST: 8 TO 10 HOURS]

"Eight hours," Cyrus snarled. "Of course. Eight f*****g hours."

So it was useless right now. A promise in a bag. But a thing that could smell him through concrete was a thing he needed to understand, and he wanted whatever it had.

[SEAL IN: 02:09]

His thigh throbbed with every heartbeat. He could feel the cut gaping, a wet, hot mouth, and the sweet metal stink of his own blood filling the little room.

Whatever else was in the building, it could smell him. He might as well have set himself on fire.

He tore a strip off his scrubs and cinched it around his thigh until the world went white at the edges. Then he looked at the gurney.

Steel frame. Heavy wheels. A mattress he could tip against his chest like a shield.

"Okay, you dumb son of a b***h. Think."

He locked the wheels, flipped the gurney on its side, and shoved the mattress hard into the door.

The chair gave out first. One snap, and the legs folded. The door slammed inward and the mob came through it, gray and wet and screaming, and Cyrus drove the gurney into the opening like a plow.

Bodies hit the steel. Bone cracked. A hand wrapped around the rail and he stamped on it. A jaw snapped an inch from his face and he put his axe through it.

"Move! f*****g move!"

He shoved. The gurney rolled. The corridor lay ahead of him, thirty meters of red light and flailing arms, and he was a man pushing a battering ram into a meat grinder.

A Hollowed with no jaw, just a long, wet tongue, got under the rail and bit the mattress in half. Another one went down beneath the wheels and Cyrus felt the gurney bump over it, felt the crunch up through his wrists, and didn't let himself think about that.

"Eat s**t!" he screamed, and swung.

The axe took a shoulder. Then a neck. Then it stuck in somebody's collarbone, and he had to put his boot on a chest to wrench it free.

[HOLLOWED ELIMINATED: 5]

[HOLLOWED ELIMINATED: 6]

"I don't care! I don't f*****g care!"

[SEAL IN: 01:31]

The notebook jabbed his ribs with every shove. The organ pressed cold against his stomach. His lungs burned. He had stopped counting kills and started counting breaths, because breaths were the only thing he could still afford to run out of.

A Hollowed climbed up the side. A big one, a man once, with a Helix lanyard still hanging from its neck. Cyrus squeezed the bleach bottle into its face and it fell back shrieking, claws raking its own eyes out.

"Don't f*****g touch me!"

The gurney jammed on a body. The front wheel skewed sideways and the whole thing stopped dead. Hands came over the top.

Cyrus let go.

He ran.

His left leg screamed on every step. The tourniquet bit. The blood was running again, warm and thick, and he could feel it soaking through his sock, squelching in the clog.

Behind him, claws scraped steel, then tile. They'd gotten past the gurney.

A speaker boomed overhead.

"Attention. Sector Three seal will engage in sixty seconds. Please proceed to the nearest exit."

"Yeah, I'm f*****g trying!" he roared.

Twenty meters. Fifteen.

At the far end of the corridor, a steel shutter began to descend from the ceiling. A yellow light spun on the wall. The stairwell door sat just beyond it, a gray rectangle, a way out.

The shutter dropped three feet. Then four.

"No, no, no, you fucker!"

He threw himself at it.

Something grabbed his ankle. He kicked, felt his heel connect with teeth, and the grip let go. The shutter was at his waist. His chest. He dropped flat and slid across the tile on his back, the axe clutched to his stomach, the steel scraping his ribs.

For one second he was under it. The rail passed over his face like a guillotine, so close it kissed his scalp and took a strip of skin with it.

His boot was still on the wrong side.

He yanked it in with a scream and the steel took the heel off his clog.

Then he was through.

The shutter slammed behind him with a boom that rattled his teeth.

[SECTOR THREE: SEALED]

He lay on his back on the cold concrete of the stairwell landing and stared at the ceiling.

Alive. Bleeding. Alive.

He'd read it in the notebook. Subject did not make it to the stairs. Subject took the elevator. Six people had been where he was and every one of them had died in a hallway.

He was on the stairs. He had made it to the f*****g stairs.

"f**k," he whispered. Then, louder, a laugh scraping out of him: "f**k. f**k me."

The notebook was still in his waistband. The gauze-wrapped organ was still pressed against his stomach, cold and wet and faintly pulsing, as if it were breathing.

He sat up. His thigh had stopped bleeding. Barely. He tightened the strip, hissing through his teeth.

Above him, the stairs rose into gray daylight, or the idea of it. Below him, they dropped into the dark. Every step he took from here would leave a smear.

Good f*****g luck to anything that tried to follow it.

He looked at the shutter.

A narrow window of wired glass was set into its center, a foot wide, at head height. Through it he could see the corridor, lit red.

The Hollowed had piled up against the steel. A dozen of them, maybe more. They hammered with their fists, their foreheads, their open mouths. The shutter rang like a bell.

Good, he thought. Hit it all you want.

Then he noticed the last one.

It stood well back from the others. It wasn't pounding. It wasn't screaming. It was a woman, or had been, in a torn Helix jacket, with a name badge still clipped to the pocket.

It was watching the shutter.

Not the glass. Not him. The steel itself, the seam where it met the floor, the way the others battered themselves to pieces against it and gained nothing.

Cyrus pushed himself up, slapped the glass with his palm, and shouted, "Hey! Hey! Don't you f*****g dare!"

She didn't look at him. She never did. She studied the shutter the way you'd study a puzzle you'd watched somebody else solve.

Then her gray head turned, very slowly, toward the wall beside the frame, where a small red plastic flap sat under a stenciled label.

EMERGENCY INTERNAL RELEASE. FOR USE BY PERSONNEL TRAPPED IN SEALED SECTORS.

Somebody at Helix had written that for the staff. For the technicians and the guards, the ones who got locked in.

For the ones with hands.

"No," Cyrus whispered. "No, no, no. You're a f*****g corpse. You can't know that."

The woman walked to the wall. She lifted the flap with one gray finger.

And closed her hand around the lever.