Project Zero: Evolution Protocol

Fever Dream

[TIME REMAINING: 8:41:09]

Cyrus lay on the concrete with his cheek pressed to the cold floor and listened to his own heart betray him.

Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

He couldn't stop it. He had tried holding his breath, tried clenching his fists, tried biting his tongue until he tasted blood. It didn't matter. Under the floor, two thousand hearts kept time, and his own fell into step like a soldier answering a drill sergeant.

"Stop it," he whispered. "Stop it, you stupid f*****g organ. Stop it, stop it, stop it, fuck."

The organ didn't answer. It was in his stomach now, or in his blood, or in every cell, and it was doing something to him that he could feel but not name. Fire crawled up his spine. His teeth ached. His stitched thigh throbbed like a second heart, hot and tight, and every time it pulsed he swore through his teeth.

"s**t. s**t. Goddamn it."

The caged bulb above him buzzed, and every buzz was a needle in his skull.

[GENETIC STABILITY: 91%]

[PULSE SENSE: STABILIZING]

"Fractured," he mumbled. "Functional. Con... con..."

He couldn't finish it. The word had slipped out of his head like a coin through a hole in a pocket.

"Son of a bitch."

That one he could still say.

Somewhere in the boiler room, three small, ragged beats shuffled in the dark. He could hear them breathe. He could hear the wet click of their jaws.

He closed his eyes, and the floor turned to stairs.

*

Twelve.

He was nine years old and the stairwell smelled like boiled cabbage and wet laundry. A small girl was climbing ahead of him, one hand sliding along the rail, her lips moving.

"Thirteen. Fourteen."

"Wren," he groaned. "Come on. You're holding up the whole f*****g building."

"Fifteen." She didn't look back. She was six, with a missing tooth and a braid coming loose, and she counted every step they had ever climbed. "I have to, Cy."

"Why?"

"So I know where I am."

She said it like it was obvious. Like the whole world was a place you could lose if you stopped counting.

"Sixteen."

On the day he shipped out, she had pressed something into his palm at the bus station. A cheap green climbing clip. Scratched already, even then.

"So you can find your way back," she'd said.

He'd laughed. He'd clipped it to his chain. He'd never taken it off.

*

[TIME REMAINING: 6:30:47]

He woke to the sound of feet.

Not a few. A lot. Dragging, shuffling, bare soles on concrete, right on the other side of the door.

Cyrus went rigid.

His body was on fire. His mouth tasted like pennies. His nose had started bleeding again, a slow hot thread over his lip, and he clamped his sleeve against it with a shaking hand.

Don't bleed, he thought. Don't you f*****g bleed. Not now. Not with eleven of them standing on the other side of a door.

The letters rose, pale and unhelpful.

[BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURES: 11]

[DISTANCE: 1 M]

Eleven hearts. Right outside. He could hear every one of them. He could hear the slick pulse in their throats, the clicking of their tongues. He could hear the exact, wet tick of the one standing nearest the door.

It had stopped.

He stopped breathing.

The axe haft rattled in the handle, once. A gentle test. A hand tried the lock, a soft, patient scrape.

Cyrus's good hand found the pistol. Eight rounds. Eleven of them. Math he didn't like.

"s**t," he breathed, without making a sound. "s**t, s**t, shit."

The thing outside leaned in. He could hear it sniff. He could hear the slow, wet in and out through slits of a nose.

"Please," he mouthed, to no one. "Please. Please, please, please. f**k. Please."

The sniffing stopped.

Its heartbeat slowed. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

It had matched his.

For a long, terrible moment, they stayed like that. Him on the floor, one hand on a gun, the other over his bleeding nose. And the thing on the other side of the door, close enough to share his pulse.

Then, one by one, they moved.

Eleven sets of feet, shuffling away down the corridor, soft and steady and perfectly in step. One. Two. One. Two.

Counting.

He didn't hear it. He felt it. In his bones.

*

[TIME REMAINING: 4:12:33]

The hunger woke around the fifth hour.

It didn't ask. It came up through him like a flood, a black, ravenous thing that stripped every thought away. He found himself on his hands and knees, teeth sunk into the sleeve of his scrubs, chewing, tearing, tasting salt and old blood.

He ripped his mouth free and gagged.

"What the f**k is wrong with me?" he rasped. "What the actual fuck."

His stomach twisted. He wanted meat. He wanted it so badly that his hands shook, and when he looked at his own forearm, for one half-second, he saw it the way the thing in his chest saw it.

He sat on his hands until it passed.

The fever deepened.

Mercer sat beside him on the concrete, laughing. "So there's this goat, right? And the goat, the goat is a motherfucker." The punch line wasn't coming. It never did. Brandt stood against the wall, a kid in a clean uniform, saying "Sir? Sir, you need to get up, sir." Okoye was whispering a prayer in a language Cyrus didn't know.

Lopes leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed, grinning, a burned truck smoking behind him. "I got you, you dumb prick," he said, soft. "I always got you."

"You're not real," Cyrus croaked. "None of you are f*****g real."

"Go away," he told them.

"Eighteen," said a small voice from the stairs.

"Wren?"

"Nineteen. Twenty."

He turned his head. Behind the boys, behind the dead men, a little girl stood at the top of the stairs with her braid coming undone. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at her feet.

"Twenty-one."

"Wren, wait."

She went down a step.

"Twenty-two."

He tried to stand. His legs didn't work. He tried again.

"Wren, wait for me."

He got up.

*

The door was open.

He didn't remember opening it. The axe haft was in his hand. The bucket lay on its side. The caged bulb buzzed behind him, and ahead of him the corridor stretched dark and endless, and at the far end, small and bright, a little girl was walking down the stairs.

"Twenty-three."

He followed.

The world slid sideways. He walked past the boiler room, past a pile of bodies, past a man in a lab coat standing against the wall, facing the corner. He kept his hands loose and his head down, the way a drunk man crosses a room.

Feet shuffled around him. Hollowed. Dozens of them, a slow river of gray flesh flowing in one direction. He was in the middle of it.

They passed him, inches away.

He couldn't hold a thought. Every part of him screamed to run, to fight, to scream. But some animal under the fever knew better, and that animal kept his feet moving and his eyes down and his mouth shut.

A shoulder brushed his. A hand dragged along his sleeve. A face with no jaw turned toward him, and he looked at it, and it looked at him, and neither one of them stopped.

Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

His heart. Theirs. The same.

"Twenty-four," the little girl said, somewhere ahead.

"Come on, Cy," she said. "You're slow."

"I'm trying, kid. f**k. I'm trying."

He followed her down the stairs. Through a door. Through another. Past a loading dock with the shutters torn open and daylight pouring in like water.

The air hit him like a slap.

He stepped out into it.

[MUTATION COMPLETE: PREDATOR, PULSE SENSE]

[MUTATION SLOT 1/3: FILLED]

[GENETIC STABILITY: 91%]

[INFECTION SYNCHRONIZATION: 23%]

Cyrus blinked.

"What the f**k," he whispered.

Gray sky. Cold wind. The smell of diesel, wet gravel and old meat, so thick he tasted it on the back of his tongue.

He was standing in the middle of a gravel yard, his scrubs plastered to his back, his thigh throbbing, his lips still moving.

"Thirty-one," he whispered. "Thirty-two."

He stopped.

Buses stood on every side of him. Forty of them, lined up in tight, silent rows. Cracked windows. Dirty glass. And behind every pane, pressed shoulder to shoulder, faces.

Two thousand of them.

His heart slammed. It didn't matter. It was still in time with theirs.

"Oh, you have got to be shitting me."

Every one of them was turned toward him.

And every one of their mouths was moving, very softly, in time.