With the ringing of an old telephone, the man shot up in his bed after an indeterminate amount of sleep. He no longer kept the time in that small room of his, he found it easier to hold a disregard for time’s infernal marching. The room was small and the walls were composed of cold concrete. The space where the walls met the ceiling were fitted with blue fluorescent lights that hummed as long as they were on. When they weren’t on, the room was completely dark. He had a radio, but it had broken a long long time ago. The only communication came in on direct lines through the telephone that still sat ringing. The lights were programmed to switch on automatically once any signal was carried through the line and into the phone.
The man sat up in his filthy bed stained with grease and reached for the phone that rested next to his bed on a rotting wooden bedside table. He answered and listened. He said nothing in return. They were orders from his jobsite demanding his presence, and he had no choice but to go or else they would cut electricity and rations. He stood up and put on his cracked boots and worn jeans. In one corner of the room, a crate of canned food with bright labels sat open. He packed as many cans as would fit into his backpack. The site was at least 5 days out given he didn’t run into any trouble. He put on his thick jacket that reeked of stale sweat, his gloves, and slung his rifle about his shoulder. There was no use in staying much longer. It had been a while since he’d been called on his last job, and this would break up the monotony.
He stepped onto the ladder that sat in the corner of the room opposite his bed and made his way up the ladder grunting. His job was to go to research centers that had had a breach in security, handle the ongoing situation, and clean up the resulting mess. His bunker laid at the midpoint of five centers, each being a few days out. The one he was currently tasked with handling was the median in terms of distance. The light from the outside was a dull yellow. His eyes weren’t used to the natural light, but the smog kept the light from blinding him. He quickly scanned the landscape for threats, and upon recognizing there were none, he pulled a small box out of his jacket pocket. It was a small tan rectangle that housed a screen that could scan his location and point him in the direction he needed to go. He read the direction and set off.
The air stood still over the vast stretches of waste. Because of this, it was almost completely silent. All creatures lay noiseless or dead. At the time of the outbreak, none of the emerging creatures were able to make it overseas. With the near complete devastation of North and South America, the ravaged continents became a home for researchers and vagabonds. Degenerates with a taste for flesh and a delight in pain. He hadn’t run into them since an incident years ago. He believed their kind to be eradicated, but still held a healthy fear for the possibility that there lay an extant outcropping of them. The silent landscape was a blessing and a curse for the man because if anything were to make a significant noise, he could hear it. The problem lies in the fact that they could hear him just as well. Because of this, he made his way to an old and abandoned road. It was once an interstate highway, but now it’s altogether empty save for the stretches of abandoned cars in highways congested in the confusion of terror and swelling of fear.
He walked quietly on the highway until the sun began to set. With all the listening creatures sleeping in their burrows, the visual hunters stepped up to play. These were the real threat. The man had only encountered those peering eyes a few times on the road, and a few times on the job. The true origins of this creature is altogether unknown as is the whole of them. There is general disagreement among the living, but it is generally agreed upon that wherever these beings came from, their prey were bioluminescent. Their eyesight is extremely sensitive to light and is generally useless in the day. However, at night they can pick up the slightest glimmer of light relative to its surroundings. Bonfires became a thing of the past as did flashlights.
He slept without any fire and ate a can of strawberries with his hands. There was never a truly good time to sleep, but night was the least inopportune time to do so. It was better to sleep at night because all the listeners sleep as well, and the watchers don’t have great ears, so any movements or noises that the unconscious mind is accountable for are permissible and not nearly as dangerous as it is during the day.
As he woke, he walked through the dew covered grass and made his way back to the road. After he had been walking for a little while he found himself on the portion of the highway that was bordered in trees. The trees were never thriving, but they clung to what life they had with what light the sun could muster. After some hours, he heard something skittering through the trees on his right. He slung the rifle off his shoulder and turned the safety off. He watched the trees and stood still, waiting for another noise. With the sudden stop of the rustle coming shortly after the halt of his movement, the man began to wonder if the predator beyond his sight preyed not using the sound nor the light but rather the mind. He had only encountered such creatures on the job and sparsely at that. They were tricky and difficult to handle in the environment of a lab. These things that were made not by god but rather some pagan deity not native to Earth could sense the thoughts and emotions of its prey. They couldn’t read the actions of the man, but they were intuitive enough to make semi-accurate predictions based on the mood.
Upon this realization, the man cleared his mind of any thought of any kind. A blank canvas ripe for the painting of some horror of the beyond. After some time unmarked, the creature poked its disgusting head out from the shrubbery and gazed upon its target with cutting eyes, drawing blood in the mind of the man and staining his perfect canvas. With one loud pop, action was engaged and ended. The creature slumped to its side with a low fountain of blood rising until it fell over time and halted with a slow, viscous bubble. The revolting quadruped was draped in a flesh of burgundy and hairs the color of snow running down the length of its contorted spine. It most closely resembled a vile boar of which no god had the dignity and self respect of signing its name under and taking credit for.
Two more days passed uneventfully. The man was simmering with frustration regarding the momentary delay, however the anger didn’t stink enough to draw him under attack once again. He trudged on.
At one point he stopped. He could feel a putrid breeze brushing up against his leathered skin. This in of itself wasn’t completely unnatural except for the fact that the noises made by the wind didn’t stop while the wind was in remission. Something was wrong. He hadn’t experienced anything like this before that caused his senses to work as if they had suddenly stepped out of sync. He gazed around him, but his vision did not move with him. He looked to the right, and he saw the road before him. He looked straight ahead and saw the same road. To the left and behind him once again stood the exact same image of the road. It was as if his vision had decided to plaster a poster in front of his eyes displaying a still image of something he had already seen.
In the confusion stirred up by this, he heard a slow and heavy set of steps in front of him. Two, three, eight, five legs. The mental image of this creature shifted in his uncertain mind as something from a hell undiscovered made its way in front of him, and suddenly behind him, above him, and in all different directions. He halted his movement and let it continue without interruption. Inaction, to him, seemed a better choice than poor action. He heard trees crack and fall beside him as the lumbering mass passed before him. The sound trailed off in all directions in much the same way the sound of a gunshot dissipates around the epicenter of the shot. His vision cleared up and began to move again. To be sure, he looked to his left and saw a line of toppled trees. The same to his right. Behind him was the same road he’d been walking on. He kept moving.
Half a day off-schedule and during dusk the man came upon the research bunker. It was difficult to find, but his device in his pocket lightly rumbled once he was in front of it. He opened the hatch and walked inside. With the opening of the hatch, the lights turned on in the same fluorescent blue that he lived in. The bunker didn’t have a ladder like his but rather a stairwell so that shipments and supplies could be carried in and out. The hatch above him was closed to prevent anything from getting in or out.
He walked through a long corridor that housed doors on either side. They were all shut for the length of the hallway. At the end of it was a door tightly shut. He stepped through it into a much larger room. The ceilings were high and the lights were sparse. This was no fault of the workers but rather the work of the creature that had been negligently released by the staff. This work of nightmares stood beyond the door and was revealed with its opening. The man clutched his rifle. A sour and rotten smell hit the man like a wall of misery had just wafted towards him. Bodies lay strewn about the room. Shattered bits of table and chairs that were thrown aside accompanied these cold approximations of humanity. It was most likely a dining room. The corpses were partly dried and beginning to decompose. Blood spattered in arcs around the room and on the walls. The bodies that were in the light were almost picked clean, but those in the dark were only sparsely chewed. In the dark corner of the room he heard a shifting. The floors here were also made of concrete, and the sound of being’s claws scraping against it could be heard. From the void a myriad of eyes caught light and could be made out, although the thing attached to them could not be. The man stood with his gun pointed at the thing. He always found it difficult to clear his mind when confined in a room of viscera. His hands did not tremble, although his breath certainly did. He slowly advanced into the room as to avoid getting pinned to the wall he just entered from. The gore of the fallen stuck to the bottom of his rotten boots.
He gazed into the darkness and the darkness gazed back tenfold. With each photosensitive eye another laceration was made in his soul, and with every glimpse of this thing’s handiwork more pressure was applied to the perimeter of it, slowly tearing at his once hardened but now vulnerable essence. One step forward in the darkness, one backward in the light. The thing slowly advanced, and the man tried to quell the screaming of every earthly instinct he had urging him to turn and run.
With a loud scrape and quiet absence of roar, the thing lurched forward with its mouth open. The man sprinted off to the side and into the darkness, into his habitat, out of the monster’s homeland. The abomination that lay before him was now in complete view of the man save for its face. In its lunge it missed and hit the wall leaving a few seconds for the man to properly observe it. It stood on four wretched legs that bent backward and then forward again. Attached were four mitts with yellowed claws. Its back was practically bursting out of the flesh that housed it, and its ribs expanded outward with every vile breath. It was roughly the size of a moose. The man slowly backed away hoping to stay concealed within the dark, but in his movement he stepped on the arm of this creature’s previous dinner. The sound of the man falling and the rifle clattering gave the creature a good enough estimate of where the man laid and at once it turned around, rearing its wretched face towards the man. Its disgusting flesh clung tightly to its skull. Its head was shaped much like the skull of a deer except in the place of antlers were two large pillars of flesh adorned with yellow eyes that spiraled around and down them. All its teeth were incisors, and its putrid maw stretched backward down the length of the sides of the skull and up into a vile expression of mirth.
With another lunge the creature was over the man and was preparing to bite down when the man’s knife was thrust into its throat. The creature paused for only a few moments, but moments enough for the man to roll over and grip his rifle. He leveled the gun and fired. A large exhale was heard but no shriek nor roar followed it. He stepped back again keeping his eyes in the dark. He fired once into the dark and in the flash of the gunshot he saw where that blood-smeared watchman had shifted, and using guesswork and his ears, he fired again. The shot was accompanied by a thud.
With this he made his way to the door on the other side of the room while walking backwards. He opened the door and quickly closed it. From there he pulled out the box from his coat and used the flashlight mounted on the back to see into the room through the circular glass window. The thing laid there still breathing but otherwise motionless. The man moved through the halls. The walls of the passageways were spattered with gore and more bodies lay strewn along the floor there. Claw marks were made distinct on the concrete walls, and some lights were knocked out. After a thorough sweep of the building determined that there were no other threats actively present, the man made his way back to the cafeteria where the beast lay bleeding.
As the hunter’s blood mixed with the prey’s, the man leveled his rifle and aimed for where he assumed the brain to be. Before he fired, the horrid thing looked at him with all its eyes and pierced directly through his soul. With the shot the creature was felled, and the man walked away shaken.
Passing through the blood-soaked passageways, the man made his way to the control room. A man sat in the chair in front of the console. The top of his head was burst open and a small handgun lay in his now limp hand. The man pushed him aside and onto the ground and typed a report of the current state of the research center. He will clean up the site at the end of the message he’s writing once the sending and reception thereof is confirmed. There are no more active threats. Requesting extra bleach. Signing off.
This is the first story I’ve written, so I apologize if it’s rough around the edges.