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jaws-and-canines · 3 years ago

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In The Walls, #1

A Growing Pains story. Content warning for body horror.

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Angelo was the one, at least on paper, to find the colony.

Transport Security was subordinate to Infrastructure Security, and all the power grid people tended to have more important things to do, so Angelo found himself dispatched to a call about something drawing power illegally from the grid of a high rise. Thirty-odd floors up, carpets black with dirt, cream walls with brown drips of mould down them and windows so dirty that it looked like the skies had turned yellow again, as they sometimes did.

Angelo doesn’t really like being able to see out of the window this high up, so he shrugs off the filth around him and tries to work out which way the flat is. He can’t read the signs, so has to go around with his phone, comparing the numbers until he finds the correct corridor and walks towards the flat where the complaint was issued from, only to find a rather harried-looking Civil slumped outside it, respirator on, head in hands.

“Lance Corporal Morrow, ATLAS’d, Transec,” he says, holding out a hand for the Civil to shake. The Civil ignores him. “What is it?” he asks.

“They sent us a fucking… transport security spannerhead? What are you going to do, stand in the hallway and look menacing with a semi automatic?” half-laughs, half-sobs the Civil. “There’s a colony in there. We need a Meridian Alliance person here. I can’t… I don’t know what to do. I’ve never seen one of those before.”

“I’ll call for backup. You go and take some fresh air,” says Angelo.

They’re thirty-odd floors up and the windows don’t open.

The clearance specialist arrives within fifteen minutes, a brusque, short white-haired man who introduces himself as Sergeant Reeves. Angelo salutes him, and turns command over to him. If corralling a weak-at-the-knees Civil Authority constable and an irritated landlord could really be called a command, anyways.

“If we’re going in there,” says Reeves, throwing a thumb back towards the stained door of the room. “I want full face respirators on all of you.”

Angelo itches his nose, and shrugs off his rucksack. His regular respirator is clipped to the outside, a dual-filter model designed for Carriers like him, and his full-face is further down in his bag.

The landlord pauses. “I don’t have one of those,” he says.

“Well,” says Reeves. “Stay back. The hosts spit sometimes. Don’t get ichor in your eyes or you’re fucked.”

They breach the room with Angelo taking point, shotgun levelled at the four corners of the room, Reeves over his shoulder. “Clear,” calls Angelo. The Civil and landlord shuffle in after him.

Reeves looks up and down the room, shining the torch under his gun over the walls, over the network of fine black and grey fibres tearing into the plaster, and across the ceiling, where moist bundles of pinkish growths hang down. The ones that reach the floor spew black growths out at the bottom, creating living pillars. “There,” he says. At the back of the room, slumped over at the desk, is the body of the host, shaking and shuddering uneven breaths, skin almost split from the pressure of the ichor the colony is forcing through its too-human veins. All the growth in this room leads back to him, a huge carpet of tiny twisting and turning fibres.

“Fucking hell,” says the Civil. He looks practically green beneath his respirator. The landlord just looks annoyed.

“This is why you’re having a power problem,” says Reeves, finding a point on the wall where the plaster has been split open and the colony has grown beneath, into the ducts of the building. “It’s feeding off the power grid.”

Angelo rocks on his heels and shakes his head. “Wait, wait, wait,” he says. He taps the side of his respirator, turning off the internal lights. Something feels a little off to him, a subtle prickling at the back of his neck, so he holds up his hand. “I need to listen. Hold your breath. It’s too loud.”

Angelo closes his eyes. He listens to the gasping of the host beside him, and files that to one side of his head, focusing on the surrounding sounds. The subtle pumping of ichor, the drip, drip, drip of moisture off the humid walls, the hissing of electricity through the wires.

The second gasping breath that underlays the first. He grabs the broken bit of the wall and pulls.

“I hope you’re going to pay for that,” says the landlord. Angelo ignores him and cracks a chunk off the plaster and peers into the duct behind. “Sergeant, I think you’ll want to see this,” he says, glancing behind him.

Reeves frowns, but peers into the ducting. The duct opens out into a void between the floors that spans under the flooring, and up and down, metal gratings and ladders right through the building. And the void is seething with life. Even as Angelo covers the light on Reeves’ gun with his hand, it glows a steady fleshy red.

“Well, fuck,” says Reeves.

“What is it?” asks the landlord.

Reves chuckles and turns back to the landlord. “Your whole building is alive. The entire fucking building’s infested.” He orders the Civil to go and pull the fire alarm, get everyone out.

“What do we do?” asks the landlord, hands on his head. “Oh, God, I can’t lose the whole building.”

Angelo leans a little further out into the void. It’s awfully humid, but he has a short-sleeved shirt on and it would be stupid to walk into a Phobos colony with uncovered skin. “Sergeant, we could go in and try to find the heart. Kill it, then there’s no need to burn the place down. I’ve had enclosed spaces training. I could do it.”

Reeves looks at him, raising an eyebrow. “Alright,” he says at last. “But the moment you find anything that remotely looks like an amniotic sac, you run.”

“I’m good at running,” says Angelo bluntly.

#count the days #horror #original writing #angelo my beloved

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