Ficly story: A bit of speculative fiction, some kind of disease, contamination.
The filter on the big rubber suit doesn’t keep out the stench. Dim light, dark green and brown on the walls. The mask blocks my peripheral, and I turn clumsily to look over at Evan who is standing under one of the few functioning lights in the hall, scraping a thick, pillow-like block of mold off the wall with an old, short pencil. He fumbles with it through his thick yellow glove.
I peer down the hallway, into the relative blackness. The only way out is through there.
“Evan.”
He keeps scraping away. I walk up and grab his wrist, shaking the pencil from his grip. He just looks down at the wood and graphite on the ground. I tell him not to touch the growths. There’s a rumble in the distance. There’s always a rumble before one of us… goes missing.
A thick power cord leads from one end of the hallway, and down into the dark, towards the exit. Innumerable turns, miles of hallways in between here and there.
Evan is still looking at his pencil, lodged tip first into a dried spot of grime, when I pull on his arm and tug him with me down the old tiled floor. He comes uneasily, staring back until we’ve gone twenty or thirty feet. If I let go, he’ll just stop walking, and I’ll lose him. He snapped after the horror of losing the first of our five man party. We all snapped a bit. Now it’s just the two of us.
The original team of twenty sent five of us to go fix the broken power cable. We had lost communication with the Outside. Now there are two of us, and we can’t fix it. It’s been two days of wandering, looking for the end of this labyrinth, of which I only assume is in the direction we’re walking.
I’ve almost forgotten what it was like finding the torn cable. Approaching the break in the thick wire from a distance was nerve wracking, but it wasn’t until we got near that one man vomited. You couldn’t mistake it. The wire had been gnawed on, and the voltage hadn’t killed whatever it was.
The flashlight on my shoulder is starting to go.
I hold my deafening breath, but the slamming in my chest takes its place. I’m pressed up against the wall, listening to the muted sounds outside my suit. There’s nothing, I think. Probably nothing.
Evan stands in the middle of the hall, ignoring my gestures for him to move closer to me. I hiss. He doesn’t bat an eye.
Looking through the cheap plastic visor of this helmet is like watching this all happen on a screen. Camera, first person. The narrator starts to turn a corner, slowly, silently, watching his boots so that he makes no sound. He is feverish, shivering. He looks back, and his companion is gone.
Just like that, I’m alone. Evan is gone as if he had never been, leaving only a trace in the muck on the floor. The finality of it is the worst part.
Nothing but silence. I shake my arms, trying to get a grip, and with that, my light flickers once, twice, and dies. Nothing but silence.
-Adam
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