The Deep End
Title: The Deep End
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Gen - Yokoyama Yu; Maruyama Ryuhei; various cameos
Summary: Four long weeks he's been in the Box, dreading that he's been forgotten. But maybe for four long weeks he's been as safe as he's ever going to get.
Notes/Warnings: Contains graphic violence, lots of gore, character death(s), probably bad science. Written for this year's je_squickfic exchange. Inspired very loosely by the video game Bioshock.
If the main power goes out, Yoko knows that there's a five second interval before the backup generators come online. He's never been afraid of the dark, not really. Darkness is nothing compared to the deep.
Even now he knows it's all around him, the ocean depths. The heavy pressure and the constant prayers that the special glass and metal they used in constructing the place will hold up. The strange fish swimming around on the other side of it that defy the imagination. And they're only visible because of the lights sprinkled across the entire compound, guideposts for the subs that come down to Station 8 with fresh supplies from the surface. He's just glad he wasn't living here when they built it.
He hadn't grown up with the intention of working hundreds of feet underwater, just another cog in the machine. Because it's not like the ads said that working in a geothermal plant was exciting. It was more the number of zeroes they promised in each paycheck. High risk, high return. He had younger brothers to feed and put through school. So into the sub he'd gone, a four year contract with a month off every year to return to the surface, get his bearings back.
But there's no getting his bearings now. Not when he knows something has gone catastrophically wrong.
Yoko knows he has a mind that goes straight to worst case scenario every time. He's been at Station 8 for over two years now. He's been through his share of evac drills and decompression drills and every other conceivable drill. This isn't a fucking drill.
Four weeks earlier, Yoko had contracted pneumonia. He'd just gotten back from one of his precious months off, not realizing he'd contracted the bug up top. As soon as he got out of the sub and into Sakurai-sensei's med lab, they'd put him in the Box just before the coughs and chest pains took him over.
Station 8 is closed off. Everyone breathes the same recycled air, so one guy coming down with something can trigger a chain reaction. Into the Box he'd gone. Quarantine down here isn't really so bad. They'd given him a crate full of food he could heat up in the Box's microwave, some books to read. Hell, Maru had even snuck him in a few porno mags. Pneumonia sucked, but with the antibiotics from Sakurai-sensei, he should have been on his feet and back to work in two weeks, three tops.
Sakurai-sensei stopped coming in for check-ups after the first few days, which was when Yoko first wondered if something had happened. He'd been too weak then, still barely able to get off the bed. It had taken a few more days for him to have the strength to pound on the door, calling out Sakurai-sensei's name. The one good thing the Box has going for it is the lack of windows. That weirds some people out, but not Yoko. He sees more than his fair share of the ocean from the porthole in the dorm, from the thick glass ceilings in the cafeteria, the gym.
But the downside to the lack of windows is, of course, that he can't see what's going on in the lab or anywhere else. He's locked up good and tight in here, for better or for worse. And as the days had ticked on and his appetite returned and the supplies dwindled, he'd grown worried that they'd evacuated the station and forgotten him entirely.
In the third week, the alarm had sounded. He'd beaten the door until he ended up on the floor, wheezing, still not in the best of shape. And that had been the one and only noise he'd heard until it cut off abruptly about ten minutes after it had started. The Box shuts out the sounds of the med lab, the ever-present churning from the reactors, the bullshit chatter of the other plant workers. It's meant to be self-sufficient - even the plumbing's separated from the main line so his piss can be recycled separately from everyone else's. The Box is supposed to be a place of healing, and now it's a prison.
By week four, by week right fucking now, Yoko is in full-on worst case scenario panic. They've left him behind at the bottom of the ocean. Because what else could it be? Sakurai-sensei has a shitty bedside manner on account of being a medic down here instead of some fancy Tokyo hospital, but he's not inhuman. Surely he would have remembered Yoko was in the Box.
And so Yoko focuses on the lights, the artificial flickering buzz of the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. The microwave works, the john flushes. This means that Station 8 is still up and running. But since this week's started, the flickering overhead has increased. His microwaved noodles come out crunchy. Main power's being taxed beyond its limits. Only a matter of time before there's a switch to the backup generators.
If the main power goes out, Yoko knows that there's a five second interval before the backup generators come online. Five seconds where the door will be unsealed because the grid's switching over. And that's all the time he'll have to rush the door and get the hell out of here.
The flickers increase. He's able to dim the lights when he goes to sleep, but he doesn't dare now. He's down to his last two meals, three if he's conservative with his portions (which is not fucking likely). He waits.
--
Of course, with his luck the lights die off in the middle of the night when he's finally fallen asleep after too many desperate hours trying to keep himself awake by leaving the sink on or staring at tits in the magazines from Maru. He's got his blankets twisted around his legs when the generator kicks in and the lights return, much dimmer than before. The backup generators are mostly to keep the plant going, forget human comforts.
It's kind of an orange haze now, and his stomach flip flops a few times as he kicks the sheets away and tries the door. Nothing. Re-sealed.
So that's it then. He's going to starve to death in this room.
So he doesn't sleep. He doesn't eat - there's still one thing of noodles left. He lets it sit in the crate, settling down with his back against the bed, staring at the door and wondering why the hell he thought he'd ever be fast enough to get to it. He's been down here for so long, doing the same job. He sits at a console and monitors the readouts. He's gotten fat and lazy, and when he dies down here they'll find him dressed in stinky white scrubs with a porno mag and not much else to his name.
If they find him.
--
It's almost two days before he caves in and goes for the noodles. He's halfway through desperately slurp-chewing on the nasty things when he hears the hiss of the door being unsealed. He's barely gotten to his feet when he hears the bloodcurdling scream.
Four long weeks he's been in the Box, dreading that he's been forgotten. But maybe for four long weeks he's been as safe as he's ever going to get.
The med lab beyond is cast in the same faint orange glow, and the recycled air of the Box is all too quickly and horribly replaced with the smell of decay. The smell of rot. Four weeks, Yoko thinks, stumbling back as if the Box is going to seal up again. Like he's still a caterpillar in a cocoon and not yet ready to face the world. Four weeks, and everything has changed.
What the hell happened here?
He hears a scream again - not the same person. This one's even further away. Both screams have come from some place beyond the med lab. But who unsealed the door?
With his brain spinning, the smell, the unbearable stink seeps into the Box. It replaces the clean, stark isolation of the room with air so foul his precious noodles hit rewind. He doesn't even make it to the john, noodles and bile burning up from his belly to splatter across the pristine white tile.
He's shaking when he wipes his mouth on the sleeve of the scrubs. He's a chatty guy, Yoko is, and he wants to call out, ask who opened the door. Who has bestowed upon him the precious gift of freedom?
It's a precarious journey, the mere twelve, fifteen feet Yoko shuffles along to enter the small corridor that separates the Box from the rest of Station 8, or from hell, if the stench is anything to go on. Maybe nobody left. Maybe everyone's dead out here, waiting patiently for him to join them.
Normally the smell of puke is enough to induce more puke in someone as twitchy and particular as Yoko, but the bitter reminder of what he thought was his last meal almost seems pleasant in light of what awaits him in the med lab. The walls and portholes are streaked with blood, so much that it looks like a slaughterhouse. He has to dodge blood stains on the floor, like a perverse game of hopscotch.
There's a body on one of the two med tables in the room. Sakurai-sensei's various machines have been toppled, bits of metal and papers from everyone's medical records strewn across the room along with what Yoko soon realizes are body parts. Fuck, there are people's limbs in here, littering the floor like dirty clothes. Escape, he thinks. You need to escape. You can't be here.
But he's in the destroyed med lab in bare feet and thin cotton scrubs, pneumonia a recent memory, and the body on the table looks like Miyake who worked the swing shift. He hears something. Scurrying. Scurrying with some quickness, and it's overhead. He crouches down behind what had been Sakurai-sensei's work table.
There's a bang coming from the ceiling. Coming from inside the ceiling, and Yoko is so frightened he can't even make a sound. He's a few seconds from pissing himself, but the thought of trying to run and escape in nothing but piss-soaked clothes is embarrassing, even now.
The cacophony in the ceiling is soon matched by a howl in the hallway. Everyone's gone insane. While Yoko ate his noodles and waited for the lights to flicker, Station 8 has become pandemonium. And because he's so distracted by the noise in the ceiling and the noise elsewhere and the god damned pile of body parts near what had been Sakurai-sensei's sink, he's not quick enough to avoid the person who'd been waiting for him in the shadows.
"Fix you," the scratchy voice says as he leaps at Yoko, getting an arm around him and hauling him to his feet. He knows this voice. The voice that set down his bin of food, checked his blood pressure. "Gotta fix you so you aren't broken. Everybody's broken."
"Let go!" Yoko shouts uselessly, but Sakurai-sensei is stronger on account of not having just recovered from illness. And most likely from being completely nuts. "What the fuck is going on here? Let me go!"
The doctor gets Yoko to his feet, dragging him across the lab. Yoko can just feel his feet smearing through the blood on the floor and he wants to retch, but there's nothing left to come up.
"Fix you. I'm a doctor," Sakurai-sensei assures him, muttering a million miles a minute. "Doctor's job is to fix you. Make you all better."
He tries to struggle, but Sakurai gets him on the table next to the one with the corpse, strapping him down. It's only then that he gets a good look at him. Sakurai had been one of those pretty boy geniuses, the type who didn't belong at the bottom of the ocean with a bunch of plodding losers like the rest of the plant. And he was keen on letting you know it, too.
Is he still pretty? Hard to say with the dried blood freckling his face, the stained lab coat with the stethoscope around his neck almost like a noose. And his eyes...
Yoko has to look away, struggling against the cords Sakurai's used to keep him on the table. It's rough-hewn rope, probably from the cargo bay, from the crates their food comes in.
The noise in the ceiling gets louder, like the pounding of drums.
Sakurai yanks up Yoko's shirt, jabbing his filthy fingers into Yoko's abdomen, poking and prodding. "This'll have to come out. Nurse, scalpel." Sakurai blinks. "Nurse, scalpel."
Yoko struggles, watching Sakurai grumble as he moves to the corpse on the other table. "Have to do everything around here." Yoko nearly passes out when he watches Sakurai's hand disappear into Miyake's open abdominal cavity, digging around inside.
"Nurse, these tools aren't sterile. I'm going to have to write you up for this," Sakurai complains. His hand emerges clutching a filthy looking tool.
Seems as though Miyake's been hollowed out to serve as the doctor's med kit.
"Now hold still," Sakurai says, brandishing the scalpel. "You're broken, and I've gotta fix you."
Yoko howls, screaming bloody murder like the awful sounds echoing off the metal bulkheads. The fish outside keep swimming on by, swimming on by, and Yoko's going to die.
Sakurai comes closer, breathing heavily, his eyes wild when the ceiling vanishes just above them. The metal panel falls, banging against the floor, and the doctor's distracted. Someone comes out, and Yoko wonders if it could get any worse. He struggles against the rope, and a dark shadow of a man comes dropping down from the ceiling, his work boots squeaking against a pool of blood.
They're faster than Sakurai, who drops the scalpel with a gasp as the ceiling intruder's blade slashes his throat, blood spraying out to decorate the still clean parts of Yoko's scrubs. He can't help but cry out, expecting his turn to be next. What's a better death, he wonders. Starvation? Impromptu surgery? Or a quick opening of his throat?
"Yuuchin," the intruder says as Sakurai falls to the floor to bleed out. "Yuuchin, stop screaming. You have to be quiet."
He blinks, trying to see who they are in the orange glow of the med lab. The person's tall with a mop of greasy dark hair, his eyes wild and alert. Then he smiles. Yoko barely recognizes him, mostly on account of the crazy he sees in him.
"Maru, Maru is it you?"
Maruyama's contract started the same time as Yoko's. They'd come down on the same sub and everything. Maruyama and Yokoyama, down from mountainous Japan to under the sea. Yoko for the control room, Maru and his made for hard labor frame in the cargo bay, managing everything in and out for the workers in residence. A kind soul, a gentle soul. The person who has just murdered another man in front of him.
To save his life.
"Yuuchin, the med lab is not safe territory," Maru says, cleaning off the steak knife he's holding on Sakurai-sensei's lab coat. Steak knife from the cafeteria, Yoko's savior.
While his friend helps to untie him, Yoko's questions come rapid fire as he tries to find something in the room he can focus on that isn't dead Miyake, dead Sakurai, or dead miscellany from who knows how many of his coworkers, his friends. He settles for Maru's shirt, the plain t-shirt he always wears under his cargo bay jumpsuit. It wasn't always red. He asks about the doctor, about being locked up tight in the Box, about why the world has become something he doesn't recognize.
"How?" he begs. "Maru, how?"
"Come on," Maru says, severing the last of the restraints with the trusty knife. "I'll explain on the way."
"On the way to what?" Yoko asks, barely able to get out of the way in time as Maru easily hoists himself up onto the table Yoko's lying on, grabbing hold of the ceiling panels he didn't break to pull himself up and into it again.
He reaches down a hand, smiling. "Yuuchin, I'm so happy I got to you."
--
Maru's been living in the air ducts that connect Station 8 for almost three weeks.
Maybe a day or two after Yoko was stuck in the Box, things started to happen. The water, everyone realized too little, too late. There was something in the water, some poison. Drink it down, piss it out, shower in it. The water drove them all crazy. Some grew hostile, some grew murderous. Some hid away until hunger brought them into the open air, easy targets. Easy pickings. Fewer mouths to feed.
Yoko wants to know why Maru isn't crazy, why Maru's coherent enough to flit around like he's on a wild survival adventure. He wants to know why Maru's still here.
"You were still in the Box, Yuuchin," Maru explains when they're tucked into one of the ducts that connects the women's dorm to the cafeteria. "I had to get you out."
Not everyone at Station 8 had a good diet. With his cargo bay job, Maru drank what seemed like his body weight in sugary soda every day to stay alert. The more they drank the water, Maru tells him, the crazier they got. The packaged food, the preserved food is okay.
Some have banded together, barricading themselves in certain parts of the plant, of employee housing. It's an obstacle course now to the sub room, to the docking bay where the subs used to come in. In the first days, when people were still coherent enough, messages for help were sent to the surface. But no subs have come. It's been almost a month and no subs have come. No rescue, no supplies. It's no wonder everyone's gone mad, gotten so desperate. Maru's cushy job in the cargo bay was eliminated, sending him on the run because he wasn't interested in withholding supplies from anyone else.
There are emergency escape pods in the sub room. They can get ten passengers each to the surface in several hours with a slight risk of the bends. Plenty of room for everyone, but someone fried the oxygen supply in each of them in the beginnings of the panic. None of them have gone anywhere, and one of the factions that's arisen has conquered the territory while they try and fix them.
"But nobody can fix them," Maru assures him. "They're crazy. Can't fix crazy, thus you can't fix the pods."
Maru seems remarkably upbeat given the situation, given how he's surviving off of the small bits of food and bottles of green tea he's stashed at places in the ducts. Maybe he's still on his rescuing high. Maybe he'll break down soon.
He has a crude map, drawn hastily on one of the shipping manifests Maru managed to smuggle out with him before Taichi's crew claimed the cargo bay and all the food that won't make him and his gang any crazier than they already must be.
There's pretty much no light in the ducts, and they have to climb down into the women's locker room, one of the marked off "safe zones" that have either not yet been claimed or there aren't enough people to actively guard them.
"But where are the women?" The plant has a staff of nearly 300, maybe 25 of them women.
Maru can't bring himself to answer, merely pointing out a splotch on his map, deep within the confines of the main engine room. Sakamoto, the first shift foreman's turf. Yoko shuts his eyes, says a prayer that they're dead already. Any other possibility makes him ill.
How many of these people, these men and women, did he work alongside every day? Sit with in the cafeteria? Play a pick-up game of basketball with in the gym? How many of them rang in the New Year in the employee bar, throwing confetti and drunkenly pointing out the glass at all the ugly, terrifying looking fish that lived down here in the ocean's depths, rarely seen by surface dwellers?
They sit huddled together on the locker room bench. The room's mostly untouched. He can still smell perfume in the air, and he shuts his eyes.
"So what you're saying," Yoko says quietly, his hands balled into fists uselessly, "is that we're fucked. We're going to die. And painfully."
He almost envies Sakurai-sensei's quick gurgling death on the filthy floor of the med lab.
"We're not going to die," Maru assures him, nudging his arm and trying to get him to look at his stupid map.
Yoko's job at Station 8 required him to monitor numbers, percentages, to find errors and correct them. Yoko is a realist. Maru's job was all about numbers too, keeping track of stock, ordering more. And yet he thinks he's cracked the impossible code. Maru sees the numbers, sees the percentages. He sees in them some manner of survival.
"Can you even fix an escape pod?" Yoko asks him bitterly.
"Sure," Maru says. "The computer does most of the work, you know."
"So, genius, what's standing between us and sweet freedom?"
Maru twitches a bit. His entire bloodstream is likely caffeine and not much else. Yoko watches Maru's finger, the nail angrily bitten to the quick, caked in dried blood. It drifts across the makeshift map in a confusing pattern, dodging sections that are for Taichi, for Sakamoto, for quiet, calm Tsuyoshi who'd worked the monitors on the shift after Yoko. Taichi has the food, Sakamoto has the power supply, and Tsuyoshi has the sub room, the pods.
Maru's route will snake them throughout the plant and what seems to be a no man's land of pit stops necessitated by block points in the ducts. Loosely guarded or populated by pure crazy - Maru can't guarantee one or the other because it varies from day to day as new factions try to take power or take each other out. Maru says he watched Tacchon, one of the cooks, upend a pot of boiling water over someone's head the second week. His reward? A candy bar he seemed to really want.
Yoko shivers.
They hear a horrible scream coming from the women's dorm. They've lingered too long already. Yoko has no time to ask Maru just how they'll be getting past Tsuyoshi's group in the sub room before they're back in the ducts.
--
The bar was really nice as far as employee bars went at the bottom of the ocean. The bar itself was solid cherry wood, always kept polished. Good liquor, good music from the jukebox. And the view was pretty much unmatched anywhere else in Station 8.
On his off time Yoko used to sit at a table in the rear of the lounge. Far from the bar, but tucked in just the right spot. He could tip his chair back against the heavy glass and everything above him was ocean. The lights from Station 8 aglow, the ugly creatures that dared to get close enough meandering through the dark. The giant bulging eyes, the jaws straight out of sci-fi, some of them bioluminescent and speckling the blue black with their own eerie light.
The bar's changed a bit. It's a cemetery now. Some particularly enterprising members of Taichi's crew have brought corpses in and covered them with tarps. The closest to decency the dead are likely to get. The smell is worse than the med lab, and Maru's able to walk the room without gagging. Yoko tries diligently but still manages to lose the handful of potato chips Maru served him earlier. He'll be dehydrated before too long, and he has little choice but to opt for the bottle of expired club soda that nobody has decided to liberate from the bar.
He's just twisting the cap back on to carry it with them for the next leg of the journey when he hears a groan under one of the tarps.
"We should move," Yoko can't help but say. His own human decency is all too quick to abandon him, but Maru has always been a sweetheart.
He moves to the tarp, lifting it to reveal a mess of black hair, tired eyes, chapped lips. "Dokkun," Yoko murmurs as Maru continues moving the tarp. Dokkun, Ryo-chan...the guy had only started down here a few months back.
Maru crouches down, gets Ryo sitting upright. Force feeds him some chips.
"Is this heaven?" Ryo asks, looking steps from death's door as it is.
"Not even close," Yoko says.
Ryo doesn't smell like death, at least not as much as he could. Instead he smells like whiskey. Which makes sense because there's no corpses beside him, only empty bottles. Drinking yourself to death seems to be a slower process than Ryo had anticipated. "Can you walk?" Maru asks him. "You could come with us."
Yoko almost wants to say no. No, Dokkun isn't allowed. He'll slow us down. And as soon as he thinks it, tears spring to his eyes. It's too easy to understand how quickly people could turn on each other. Yoko knows instinctively that if he hadn't spent a month in the Box that he'd have clamored to join up with Taichi, with Tsuyoshi, with whichever group would take him in, feed him. He'd do anything.
"Take my chances here," Ryo assures them, his eyes glassy as he looks up at the ocean above. With the backup generators on, the powerful lights of Station 8 are more like flickers in the darkness, the orange light in the bar casting strange shadows. The fish in the depths are nothing but the occasional movement in the distance, a flicker of life carrying on, the world itself carrying on while Station 8 dies. Maybe they'll lose their way in the dark, thunk against the glass.
"You heard the man," Yoko says, guilt propelling him to his feet. The sooner they leave, the sooner he can forget that Ryo is alive. Can pretend that Ryo didn't make it, is lying dead under the tarp.
Maru seems more hesitant, but Ryo shoos him away. The bar's been otherwise raided, so there's nothing more to be done here. With great reluctance, Maru navigates them away from Ryo. His map takes them out of the swinging bar doors, marked with a T. Marked in blood, Yoko notices, and by now nothing's going to surprise him.
They leave Ryo to his fate and carry on, sliding into a storage closet to clamber back into the ducts. Yoko tries to remember his special table in the bar, the calm after a long shift. It's not a comfort. Not now.
--
There's no sense of time in the vents or in Station 8. Because of the dark ocean surrounding, engulfing the plant, Inohara from management liked to sound Reveille in the early morning hours to keep their body clocks functioning. If there was a decided upon morning, afternoon, and evening, they could all function better on the job, could keep under control despite the claustrophobia that a place like Station 8 could induce.
Yoko used to pretend they were in a spaceship, like in Star Trek or something. The black of the vast universe, speckled with stars. The cold empty vacuum of space, not so different from the crushing pressure of the Pacific. The fish in the water were the Klingons, the Romulan Star Empire. But Inohara would sound Reveille and they would know a new day had arrived. They could continue to boldly go where no man has gone before. It sure sounded more interesting than working in a geothermal plant, staring at computer readouts.
Inohara's dead, Maru tells him. There were some suicides after they received word that no subs were coming. And then where management was concerned there were some murders made to look like suicide. Maru is convinced that Inohara was taken out by one of the new bullies in charge. It doesn't really matter which one.
They catch quick bits of sleep. Fifteen minutes here until a scream gets them on the move, an hour there when Maru decides that nobody's going to come up into the ducts. They have to double back a few times, their exhaustion growing each time they hit a dead end. With all the water in Station 8 potentially contaminated, some idiots thought that the ocean was the obvious answer to their thirst.
Entire sections of the station, whole corridors and compartments, are blocked off with the water-tight doors. Yoko can hear the sloshing of water inside. The doors groan with the load they bear, rumbling and creaking, and if Yoko places a palm on the metal it trembles. He thinks the sound, the rumbling, will stay with him forever.
He wonders how they broke the glass, if there are any breaches elsewhere in the station and if the doors will come down in time. He wonders how many of them drowned. He wonders how their bodies reacted to the sudden change in pressure. He wonders if they simply popped.
He'd watched a documentary on TV once, right after he'd taken the job and before they'd sent him down on the sub. About divers and excess nitrogen forming bubbles in the blood. About how fish who live down here have evolved in such a way that they can't survive closer to the surface, subsisting on the detritus floating down from the upper levels of the ocean.
He wonders how many of his coworkers are now detritus.
Fish food.
--
Ohno Satoshi loves the ocean. If he could be a fish, he'd be a fish. Yoko's always been convinced of that. They sat side by side monitoring various plant processes, and Ohno was one of the few friends he and Maru had in common. They'd sit together, the three of them, at Yoko's special table in the bar, shooting the shit and drinking. Ohno knew the name of almost every hideous fish that floated by, his face lighting up like a Christmas tree. "Gulper eel!" he'd say in joy as Maru turned away from the glass in fright.
He and Maru find Ohno in the library, marked with Taichi's T and the fourth alternative route they've had to take this morning (afternoon? evening?). Ohno's hobby, other than being a fish otaku, is art because it allows him to draw every strange looking ocean creature he sets his eyes upon.
The poisoned water's gotten Ohno, and it's gotten him bad, and when he and Maru drop down out of the ceiling, Ohno doesn't even move. He's using the library wall as a canvas. There are scattered corpses here, kind of like in Sakurai's med lab. Sakurai was trying to fix people. Oh-chan is painting with them.
There's a pile of open books on the floor, dry and boring texts about geothermal capacity, and Ohno's laid out one of the younger workers on top of the open pages. Taguchi, Yoko thinks, if the long legs and dyed blond hair are anything to go on. Because there's not much left of his face, and he's been split open in half a dozen places, the oozing blood serving as Ohno's limited color palette.
Gulper eel, Yoko thinks nervously as he watches Ohno's graceful paintbrush strokes. Taguchi's helping Ohno paint his beloved gulper eel.
Just when Yoko thinks that maybe a fifth alternative route is in order, Maru's heart wins out over Maru's brains. "Oh-chan!" he says like he's greeting an old friend. He is, technically, but even if he's painting a fish on the wall, this is not the Oh-chan they really know. This is an abomination.
Ohno turns, and his eyes are blank, dull. There's no flicker of recognition, just a bit of disappointment that he's been interrupted halfway through his masterpiece.
"Hello."
"We're just passing through," Maru says, and their exit will require them to pass by the Taguchi painting kit, past Ohno himself to the door at the rear of the room. "We can leave you to your painting, okay?"
Yoko wonders how Maru has survived this long.
Ohno turns around, continues painting, and they tiptoe around the books, around the blood. There's another corpse propped up against the bookcase, intestines long since pulled out and left in his lap like gooey rope. Does blood from the intestines blend well with blood from the heart? Does it make for high quality paint?
They're just about past him, just about to the door. If Maru had kept his mouth shut, Ohno probably wouldn't have turned around. Not when it's a gulper eel. But Maru's hand is on the doorknob when there are footsteps behind Yoko and then a sharp searing pain in his side.
He screams, stumbles forward. Stabbed, he's been stabbed. "Maru!" Yoko howls, falling with Ohno clambering on top of him. He's on his stomach, desperately rolls onto his back just in time to see the crazed look in Ohno's face as he slices downward with his makeshift knife. He's resourceful, Ohno is. Human blood for paint, a wall for canvas. And a paintbrush, the wooden end filed down into a sharp, deadly point. Ohno stabs at him, misses when Yoko dodges. He stabs downward again, letting out a scream that speaks of a month of isolation, trapped in his own insane mind.
"Oh-chan," Yoko gasps, "Oh-chan, please..."
Yoko can smell Ohno's rancid breath, his body odor from weeks without so much as a sponge bath. Oh-chan just wants Yoko to help him with his art.
"I'm sorry!" Maru screams, and then Ohno collapses atop him, the modified paintbrush weapon falling from his fingers.
Yoko struggles. "Get him off me. Get him off me!"
Maru's steak knife caught Oh-chan between the shoulder blades, and he's not quite dead yet but the fight's certainly gone out of him. Maru's openly crying as he pulls their friend off of him. Yoko can't move, looking down at the gouge in his scrubs. He hadn't felt guilty about taking shoes off a dead man, but he's kept the clothes on from the Box.
"He stabbed me, Maru, he..."
"Let me look."
"It hurts, damn it," Yoko grumbles, hoping his noisy complaints will drown out the sounds of Ohno, their good friend Ohno, slowly bleeding out and dying beside them.
The paintbrush has punctured the soft meat of Yoko's side below his ribcage, but it's not deep. It just hurts like a son of a bitch, and between his own exhaustion and the dwindling adrenaline that keeps him moving forward, he isn't too sure if it's worth fighting much longer. How many more friends and colleagues will try and kill them? How many more will they kill?
Maru rips at the fabric of Taguchi's t-shirt, finds a spot that isn't blood soaked. He balls it up, has Yoko press it against his wound. Hygienic care is beyond them now, and they rip at the pant legs of Yoko's scrubs, turning them into shorts to tie the fabric around Yoko's waist, secure the shirt material in place.
When Yoko gets to his feet it stings, like he's being jabbed over and over again though the injury only needed to be inflicted once. "I can't keep up with you," he admits. "Not now, Maru."
Maru doesn't seem concerned, picking up the tool from the floor that's left Yoko wounded. "You may as well have a knife too, Yuuchin."
--
As they get closer to the sub room, the dead ends start to increase. More and more sections are closed off to them, and structural integrity becomes a worrisome issue. With all the breaches throughout the plant, Yoko suspects that it's weakening the parts of Station 8 that remain intact. The pressure of the water against all those water-tight doors is adding up. They're meant to contain the random leak, and systems are in place to pump the water out. But not this much water. And certainly not on backup generator energy.
The groaning becomes an ever present companion, and Yoko can't sleep now because of it. Every waking moment may be the one when the bulkheads fail, when everything buckles, where the glass fractures like walking on a barely frozen pond.
They're in the ducts, munching on some rice crackers, when war breaks out. Maru's not sure which factions are fighting at first. There's a vent a few feet away and they crawl as quietly as they can to avoid detection. Looking out through the metal slats, the gym is below them, and men are beating each other with pipes, with anything they can get their hands on. There's maybe six or seven to a side. Yoko knows some of them, he thinks, though a month has made them mostly unrecognizable. Masuda with his mushroom cut, howling in pain as a pipe cracks against his spine. Nakamaru uselessly calling for his team to fall back, trying to maintain order in chaos like the general on a losing side.
It's a turf war, and they can only watch. The sounds the men make are almost primitive in their fury, and he has to look away as it winds to a close and nothing has been accomplished. Except that twelve, fourteen men he'd worked alongside have just butchered each other underneath a basketball hoop, their blood coating, pooling across the brown boards of the court.
It was Sakamoto's squad trying to take out Tsuyoshi's. Looks like Sakamoto picked the wrong part of the station to control - Taichi's group will live for weeks off of the food in the cargo bay, but Tsuyoshi guards the only way out. If Sakamoto cuts the power, everybody dies, himself included. He has no real advantage.
But the only positive, the only god damned positive, is that now Tsuyoshi's side is down a half dozen men. Fewer obstacles now between them and the pods.
Maru scouted a week earlier, when half the plant wasn't submerged or impassable. Tsuyoshi's got men at the main entrance, the most logical entrance. The freight elevator that brought food up from the subs to storage in the cargo bay was dismantled in the second week by Taichi lest Tsuyoshi's crew get hungry. Tsuyoshi still has men there by the elevator in case Taichi's men come swinging down the cable to race for the pods.
This leaves the ducts over the pod room. Unless Tsuyoshi has men patrolling, looking up, it's doubtful he's guarding the ceiling. Because who would risk snapping their legs in a twenty foot drop from the ceiling overhead to the unforgiving metal floor of the pod docks?
--
They're running on no sleep, and there's only a few more corridors to hurry through before they can locate the duct they need that will take them up and over the pod room. Like clearing a level in a video game, Yoko thinks, even though this experience is not giving him the same thrill an afternoon of Monster Hunter might have years back. In games, even with a game over you could start again. Such a luxury is not possible here.
Tsuyoshi's crew have been scouting the area, their patrols consisting of nothing more than one frightened, possibly insane soul wandering the halls with a nervous giggle, brandishing a knife that might have come from the same set Maru's had. They decide against taking the poor guy out - they figure the one sent after him might be even crazier.
They wait for him to pass, hidden behind some overturned crates. They used to hold replacement parts for the more complex machinery of the plant, but they've been emptied now. The giggles die down and they're on the move, Yoko wishing he was faster but his side still aches terribly from Ohno's attack.
Sakurai, Ohno, Ryo. None of them bad guys, not when you came right down to it. Taichi, Sakamoto, Tsuyoshi. They're all just trying to survive. Who knows what even happened to the water?
There's a corridor ahead on the other side of a water-tight door, and they manage to get through it only to hear the creaking get louder, loud enough to send off alarm bells. There's a fracture somewhere because there's ankle-deep water. But it's the only way, fifty precarious feet separating them from the duct they need. And yet Yoko just wants to turn around.
If there's a fracture in the glass, it could go at any time. It wouldn't even take much, not with the pressure down this far. Maru hesitates, water sloshing around his boots. "Yuuchin, if we run, it'll be okay."
"I can't run," Yoko says, fingers absentmindedly drifting to the bundled up material under his shirt. "You know I can't run."
Maru ignores him, his pace picking up. The water starts to messily splash. The creaking noise reaches a fever pitch, and they're only halfway through.
"Please don't break," he mumbles to himself as the ice cold water that's accumulated burns at his ankles. "Please don't break."
He hears a crack, an audible crack in the glass. Like a twig being snapped in half, and Yoko finds that he can in fact still run. The groaning pressure builds, and he's starting to feel woozy. He imagines being sucked out into the nothingness, his body contorting, compressing. It's enough to propel him forward after Maru, his legs freezing as they make it to the door.
They get it open, just barely, hearing more cracking sounds. They get the door closed, Yoko wheezing, and that's when it must burst because there's a noisy rumble, the scream of the broken glass and the ocean flooding inside. Now they're cut off from the rest of Station 8. He wonders how many are stranded on the other side.Yoko's alive because he could run, and he can see blood soak through his shirt. Five, ten seconds difference between life and death.
Maru pulls him along, not giving him a moment's rest. "It might not be able to hold in here." They hurry through the empty halls, the constant threat of a breach following at their heels.
They make it up and into what Yoko hopes is the last air duct he'll have to be inside for the rest of his life. They can finally stop for a minute, and there's not much to be done for Yoko's wound. Maru has been far less chatty since what he had to do to Oh-chan, and there's really not much left to say. They just need to get out of here.
After they've finished the rest of the food Maru has on him, they slink through the ducts. Maru's stashed rope is waiting for them, the escape plan going all too well. Nobody's been up here to mess with it, thankfully, though Yoko is disturbed to find that the rope is a bit short. They'll have to jump and pray for the last six or seven feet. Drop and roll, Maru informs him, like it's all too easy.
They wait in the duct, the pods all lined up in the massive launch room below them. Tsuyoshi seems to have all but abandoned the place. No guards patrol below as they try to control their breathing, look out through the vent. Could they not get them working? Has this all been for nothing?
"Maru," Yoko whispers. "Why did you come get me? Why didn't you just try to leave if the pods haven't been guarded heavily?"
His friend looks oddly pleased with himself. "Because it requires two passcodes to launch. That's why they don't know how to make it work. They killed off the management, and only they knew about it. I just got lucky overhearing it in the ducts."
So it could have been anyone, Yoko realizes. Maru just needs one person with him. If Maru had happened upon someone else who was still sane, maybe Yoko wouldn't be here right now. It chills him to think of selfless-seeming Maru, who wanted Ryo to come with them, who cried about Oh-chan. In the end, all Maru really needs Yoko for is his employee passcode.
But he has no time to feel sorry for himself, thinking Maru helped him out of genuine friendship. Better a way to escape than none at all.
--
As Station 8 groans around them, seemingly in its death throes, Maru pops the duct's panel off. He lets it noisily fall to the floor - they've waited a few hours, and not one person has entered the pod room. Maybe Tsuyoshi's entire cohort, maybe Tsuyoshi himself, is dead.
They wriggle down the rope, Maru first so he can wait at the bottom and help ease Yoko's landing. Each handhold down the rope burns. His side is stretched by the effort it takes, reawakening the searing pain of his wound. His body is starting to run out of steam. A normal person in his pneumonia-recovering state would rest up, take it easy. He's been attacked, he's been on the run, he's crawled on his hands and knees through duct after duct.
But they're here. After blood and guts and unforgiving ocean washing it all away, they're here. Thanks to the backup generators, the power's still online. There are over 30 pods, each spherical in design with room for ten inside on what barely pass as seat cushions. It's automated, only programmed to do one thing. Surface. It's a simple enough process, and they're all unlocked since Tsuyoshi's faction was either too dumb or too crazy to get them moving. It's an even slower journey up top than it takes in a sub on account of the pressure. They're not as forgiving in construction as the subs. If they went any faster, it would be the bends for sure.
So as soon as they get her fired up and launch, the pod will be expelled into a holding tank and then into the open. It'll be hours before it crests the waves, maybe a full day, inching ever upward. But, Yoko decides, they won't be here, and that's just fine by him. He's had more than enough of Station 8.
"Okay," Maru says, looking everywhere but at Yoko. "Gonna need your passcode."
Yoko's just about to key in the last number when he realizes that Maru's behind him, closer than he needs to be given all the hours they had to be in the ducts together. He pauses with his finger over the keypad.
"You need my passcode. It takes two to activate the pod."
Maru says nothing, but Yoko can hear him breathing behind him. Can feel the steak knife poised at the small of his back.
"You need my passcode, but you don't really need me."
He turns around, and there's something empty about the way Maru's looking at him now. Knife in hand, muscles tensed, shaking uncontrollably. Maru's been in the vents for weeks, had that rope, knew about the lack of guards.
Yoko's not the first person Maru's brought here. But he's probably the most coherent. The most likely candidate to actually remember his passcode and be dumb enough to share it.
Maru drank the water the same as all the others, probably in a smaller amount. But it was obviously enough to put him over. He's just been so focused on getting Yoko here, on still being the Maru Yoko's needed him to be, that he's managed to keep the crazy hidden. But now he's so close to getting what he wants. He doesn't much care now.
Yoko takes a step away from the keypad, withholding his precious passcode, his final number. It's four, by the way. Four like the four weeks he was alone in the Box, unaware of the chaos surrounding him, destroying Station 8 from within and without. Four weeks to fear his own death, four weeks thinking he'd been abandoned. But he's seen worse than that out here. The absolute worst.
"Yuuchin, I just need that last number, okay?"
"Room in here for 10 people," Yoko says.
Maru smiles, beaming from ear to ear. "You can catch the next one, okay?"
He looks like Maru, smiles like Maru. He's shaped like Maru, calls him Yuuchin like Maru always did. He's not Maru though, not now.
But Yoko is still Yoko. He firmly believes it. Knows it to be true. Four weeks in the Box, monitoring the flickering lights, has given him decent enough reflexes that he's got the makeshift paintbrush knife out and buried in Maru's neck before his friend can say another word.
If you're dumb enough to key in your passcode first...
He watches Maru sink to the floor, surprised, and Yoko uses his remaining strength to haul his friend out into the pod room, lying him on the floor to die. Maru hasn't been Maru for some time, and maybe now that he's taken a life, Yoko isn't Yoko. He didn't drink the water. Maybe he didn't have to.
He limps back into the pod, shutting the door behind him. Once he's sealed inside, it's like being in the Box all over again. Clean, quiet, recycled air without the stench of death in it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Yoko presses four on the keypad.
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Gen - Yokoyama Yu; Maruyama Ryuhei; various cameos
Summary: Four long weeks he's been in the Box, dreading that he's been forgotten. But maybe for four long weeks he's been as safe as he's ever going to get.
Notes/Warnings: Contains graphic violence, lots of gore, character death(s), probably bad science. Written for this year's je_squickfic exchange. Inspired very loosely by the video game Bioshock.
If the main power goes out, Yoko knows that there's a five second interval before the backup generators come online. He's never been afraid of the dark, not really. Darkness is nothing compared to the deep.
Even now he knows it's all around him, the ocean depths. The heavy pressure and the constant prayers that the special glass and metal they used in constructing the place will hold up. The strange fish swimming around on the other side of it that defy the imagination. And they're only visible because of the lights sprinkled across the entire compound, guideposts for the subs that come down to Station 8 with fresh supplies from the surface. He's just glad he wasn't living here when they built it.
He hadn't grown up with the intention of working hundreds of feet underwater, just another cog in the machine. Because it's not like the ads said that working in a geothermal plant was exciting. It was more the number of zeroes they promised in each paycheck. High risk, high return. He had younger brothers to feed and put through school. So into the sub he'd gone, a four year contract with a month off every year to return to the surface, get his bearings back.
But there's no getting his bearings now. Not when he knows something has gone catastrophically wrong.
Yoko knows he has a mind that goes straight to worst case scenario every time. He's been at Station 8 for over two years now. He's been through his share of evac drills and decompression drills and every other conceivable drill. This isn't a fucking drill.
Four weeks earlier, Yoko had contracted pneumonia. He'd just gotten back from one of his precious months off, not realizing he'd contracted the bug up top. As soon as he got out of the sub and into Sakurai-sensei's med lab, they'd put him in the Box just before the coughs and chest pains took him over.
Station 8 is closed off. Everyone breathes the same recycled air, so one guy coming down with something can trigger a chain reaction. Into the Box he'd gone. Quarantine down here isn't really so bad. They'd given him a crate full of food he could heat up in the Box's microwave, some books to read. Hell, Maru had even snuck him in a few porno mags. Pneumonia sucked, but with the antibiotics from Sakurai-sensei, he should have been on his feet and back to work in two weeks, three tops.
Sakurai-sensei stopped coming in for check-ups after the first few days, which was when Yoko first wondered if something had happened. He'd been too weak then, still barely able to get off the bed. It had taken a few more days for him to have the strength to pound on the door, calling out Sakurai-sensei's name. The one good thing the Box has going for it is the lack of windows. That weirds some people out, but not Yoko. He sees more than his fair share of the ocean from the porthole in the dorm, from the thick glass ceilings in the cafeteria, the gym.
But the downside to the lack of windows is, of course, that he can't see what's going on in the lab or anywhere else. He's locked up good and tight in here, for better or for worse. And as the days had ticked on and his appetite returned and the supplies dwindled, he'd grown worried that they'd evacuated the station and forgotten him entirely.
In the third week, the alarm had sounded. He'd beaten the door until he ended up on the floor, wheezing, still not in the best of shape. And that had been the one and only noise he'd heard until it cut off abruptly about ten minutes after it had started. The Box shuts out the sounds of the med lab, the ever-present churning from the reactors, the bullshit chatter of the other plant workers. It's meant to be self-sufficient - even the plumbing's separated from the main line so his piss can be recycled separately from everyone else's. The Box is supposed to be a place of healing, and now it's a prison.
By week four, by week right fucking now, Yoko is in full-on worst case scenario panic. They've left him behind at the bottom of the ocean. Because what else could it be? Sakurai-sensei has a shitty bedside manner on account of being a medic down here instead of some fancy Tokyo hospital, but he's not inhuman. Surely he would have remembered Yoko was in the Box.
And so Yoko focuses on the lights, the artificial flickering buzz of the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. The microwave works, the john flushes. This means that Station 8 is still up and running. But since this week's started, the flickering overhead has increased. His microwaved noodles come out crunchy. Main power's being taxed beyond its limits. Only a matter of time before there's a switch to the backup generators.
If the main power goes out, Yoko knows that there's a five second interval before the backup generators come online. Five seconds where the door will be unsealed because the grid's switching over. And that's all the time he'll have to rush the door and get the hell out of here.
The flickers increase. He's able to dim the lights when he goes to sleep, but he doesn't dare now. He's down to his last two meals, three if he's conservative with his portions (which is not fucking likely). He waits.
--
Of course, with his luck the lights die off in the middle of the night when he's finally fallen asleep after too many desperate hours trying to keep himself awake by leaving the sink on or staring at tits in the magazines from Maru. He's got his blankets twisted around his legs when the generator kicks in and the lights return, much dimmer than before. The backup generators are mostly to keep the plant going, forget human comforts.
It's kind of an orange haze now, and his stomach flip flops a few times as he kicks the sheets away and tries the door. Nothing. Re-sealed.
So that's it then. He's going to starve to death in this room.
So he doesn't sleep. He doesn't eat - there's still one thing of noodles left. He lets it sit in the crate, settling down with his back against the bed, staring at the door and wondering why the hell he thought he'd ever be fast enough to get to it. He's been down here for so long, doing the same job. He sits at a console and monitors the readouts. He's gotten fat and lazy, and when he dies down here they'll find him dressed in stinky white scrubs with a porno mag and not much else to his name.
If they find him.
--
It's almost two days before he caves in and goes for the noodles. He's halfway through desperately slurp-chewing on the nasty things when he hears the hiss of the door being unsealed. He's barely gotten to his feet when he hears the bloodcurdling scream.
Four long weeks he's been in the Box, dreading that he's been forgotten. But maybe for four long weeks he's been as safe as he's ever going to get.
The med lab beyond is cast in the same faint orange glow, and the recycled air of the Box is all too quickly and horribly replaced with the smell of decay. The smell of rot. Four weeks, Yoko thinks, stumbling back as if the Box is going to seal up again. Like he's still a caterpillar in a cocoon and not yet ready to face the world. Four weeks, and everything has changed.
What the hell happened here?
He hears a scream again - not the same person. This one's even further away. Both screams have come from some place beyond the med lab. But who unsealed the door?
With his brain spinning, the smell, the unbearable stink seeps into the Box. It replaces the clean, stark isolation of the room with air so foul his precious noodles hit rewind. He doesn't even make it to the john, noodles and bile burning up from his belly to splatter across the pristine white tile.
He's shaking when he wipes his mouth on the sleeve of the scrubs. He's a chatty guy, Yoko is, and he wants to call out, ask who opened the door. Who has bestowed upon him the precious gift of freedom?
It's a precarious journey, the mere twelve, fifteen feet Yoko shuffles along to enter the small corridor that separates the Box from the rest of Station 8, or from hell, if the stench is anything to go on. Maybe nobody left. Maybe everyone's dead out here, waiting patiently for him to join them.
Normally the smell of puke is enough to induce more puke in someone as twitchy and particular as Yoko, but the bitter reminder of what he thought was his last meal almost seems pleasant in light of what awaits him in the med lab. The walls and portholes are streaked with blood, so much that it looks like a slaughterhouse. He has to dodge blood stains on the floor, like a perverse game of hopscotch.
There's a body on one of the two med tables in the room. Sakurai-sensei's various machines have been toppled, bits of metal and papers from everyone's medical records strewn across the room along with what Yoko soon realizes are body parts. Fuck, there are people's limbs in here, littering the floor like dirty clothes. Escape, he thinks. You need to escape. You can't be here.
But he's in the destroyed med lab in bare feet and thin cotton scrubs, pneumonia a recent memory, and the body on the table looks like Miyake who worked the swing shift. He hears something. Scurrying. Scurrying with some quickness, and it's overhead. He crouches down behind what had been Sakurai-sensei's work table.
There's a bang coming from the ceiling. Coming from inside the ceiling, and Yoko is so frightened he can't even make a sound. He's a few seconds from pissing himself, but the thought of trying to run and escape in nothing but piss-soaked clothes is embarrassing, even now.
The cacophony in the ceiling is soon matched by a howl in the hallway. Everyone's gone insane. While Yoko ate his noodles and waited for the lights to flicker, Station 8 has become pandemonium. And because he's so distracted by the noise in the ceiling and the noise elsewhere and the god damned pile of body parts near what had been Sakurai-sensei's sink, he's not quick enough to avoid the person who'd been waiting for him in the shadows.
"Fix you," the scratchy voice says as he leaps at Yoko, getting an arm around him and hauling him to his feet. He knows this voice. The voice that set down his bin of food, checked his blood pressure. "Gotta fix you so you aren't broken. Everybody's broken."
"Let go!" Yoko shouts uselessly, but Sakurai-sensei is stronger on account of not having just recovered from illness. And most likely from being completely nuts. "What the fuck is going on here? Let me go!"
The doctor gets Yoko to his feet, dragging him across the lab. Yoko can just feel his feet smearing through the blood on the floor and he wants to retch, but there's nothing left to come up.
"Fix you. I'm a doctor," Sakurai-sensei assures him, muttering a million miles a minute. "Doctor's job is to fix you. Make you all better."
He tries to struggle, but Sakurai gets him on the table next to the one with the corpse, strapping him down. It's only then that he gets a good look at him. Sakurai had been one of those pretty boy geniuses, the type who didn't belong at the bottom of the ocean with a bunch of plodding losers like the rest of the plant. And he was keen on letting you know it, too.
Is he still pretty? Hard to say with the dried blood freckling his face, the stained lab coat with the stethoscope around his neck almost like a noose. And his eyes...
Yoko has to look away, struggling against the cords Sakurai's used to keep him on the table. It's rough-hewn rope, probably from the cargo bay, from the crates their food comes in.
The noise in the ceiling gets louder, like the pounding of drums.
Sakurai yanks up Yoko's shirt, jabbing his filthy fingers into Yoko's abdomen, poking and prodding. "This'll have to come out. Nurse, scalpel." Sakurai blinks. "Nurse, scalpel."
Yoko struggles, watching Sakurai grumble as he moves to the corpse on the other table. "Have to do everything around here." Yoko nearly passes out when he watches Sakurai's hand disappear into Miyake's open abdominal cavity, digging around inside.
"Nurse, these tools aren't sterile. I'm going to have to write you up for this," Sakurai complains. His hand emerges clutching a filthy looking tool.
Seems as though Miyake's been hollowed out to serve as the doctor's med kit.
"Now hold still," Sakurai says, brandishing the scalpel. "You're broken, and I've gotta fix you."
Yoko howls, screaming bloody murder like the awful sounds echoing off the metal bulkheads. The fish outside keep swimming on by, swimming on by, and Yoko's going to die.
Sakurai comes closer, breathing heavily, his eyes wild when the ceiling vanishes just above them. The metal panel falls, banging against the floor, and the doctor's distracted. Someone comes out, and Yoko wonders if it could get any worse. He struggles against the rope, and a dark shadow of a man comes dropping down from the ceiling, his work boots squeaking against a pool of blood.
They're faster than Sakurai, who drops the scalpel with a gasp as the ceiling intruder's blade slashes his throat, blood spraying out to decorate the still clean parts of Yoko's scrubs. He can't help but cry out, expecting his turn to be next. What's a better death, he wonders. Starvation? Impromptu surgery? Or a quick opening of his throat?
"Yuuchin," the intruder says as Sakurai falls to the floor to bleed out. "Yuuchin, stop screaming. You have to be quiet."
He blinks, trying to see who they are in the orange glow of the med lab. The person's tall with a mop of greasy dark hair, his eyes wild and alert. Then he smiles. Yoko barely recognizes him, mostly on account of the crazy he sees in him.
"Maru, Maru is it you?"
Maruyama's contract started the same time as Yoko's. They'd come down on the same sub and everything. Maruyama and Yokoyama, down from mountainous Japan to under the sea. Yoko for the control room, Maru and his made for hard labor frame in the cargo bay, managing everything in and out for the workers in residence. A kind soul, a gentle soul. The person who has just murdered another man in front of him.
To save his life.
"Yuuchin, the med lab is not safe territory," Maru says, cleaning off the steak knife he's holding on Sakurai-sensei's lab coat. Steak knife from the cafeteria, Yoko's savior.
While his friend helps to untie him, Yoko's questions come rapid fire as he tries to find something in the room he can focus on that isn't dead Miyake, dead Sakurai, or dead miscellany from who knows how many of his coworkers, his friends. He settles for Maru's shirt, the plain t-shirt he always wears under his cargo bay jumpsuit. It wasn't always red. He asks about the doctor, about being locked up tight in the Box, about why the world has become something he doesn't recognize.
"How?" he begs. "Maru, how?"
"Come on," Maru says, severing the last of the restraints with the trusty knife. "I'll explain on the way."
"On the way to what?" Yoko asks, barely able to get out of the way in time as Maru easily hoists himself up onto the table Yoko's lying on, grabbing hold of the ceiling panels he didn't break to pull himself up and into it again.
He reaches down a hand, smiling. "Yuuchin, I'm so happy I got to you."
--
Maru's been living in the air ducts that connect Station 8 for almost three weeks.
Maybe a day or two after Yoko was stuck in the Box, things started to happen. The water, everyone realized too little, too late. There was something in the water, some poison. Drink it down, piss it out, shower in it. The water drove them all crazy. Some grew hostile, some grew murderous. Some hid away until hunger brought them into the open air, easy targets. Easy pickings. Fewer mouths to feed.
Yoko wants to know why Maru isn't crazy, why Maru's coherent enough to flit around like he's on a wild survival adventure. He wants to know why Maru's still here.
"You were still in the Box, Yuuchin," Maru explains when they're tucked into one of the ducts that connects the women's dorm to the cafeteria. "I had to get you out."
Not everyone at Station 8 had a good diet. With his cargo bay job, Maru drank what seemed like his body weight in sugary soda every day to stay alert. The more they drank the water, Maru tells him, the crazier they got. The packaged food, the preserved food is okay.
Some have banded together, barricading themselves in certain parts of the plant, of employee housing. It's an obstacle course now to the sub room, to the docking bay where the subs used to come in. In the first days, when people were still coherent enough, messages for help were sent to the surface. But no subs have come. It's been almost a month and no subs have come. No rescue, no supplies. It's no wonder everyone's gone mad, gotten so desperate. Maru's cushy job in the cargo bay was eliminated, sending him on the run because he wasn't interested in withholding supplies from anyone else.
There are emergency escape pods in the sub room. They can get ten passengers each to the surface in several hours with a slight risk of the bends. Plenty of room for everyone, but someone fried the oxygen supply in each of them in the beginnings of the panic. None of them have gone anywhere, and one of the factions that's arisen has conquered the territory while they try and fix them.
"But nobody can fix them," Maru assures him. "They're crazy. Can't fix crazy, thus you can't fix the pods."
Maru seems remarkably upbeat given the situation, given how he's surviving off of the small bits of food and bottles of green tea he's stashed at places in the ducts. Maybe he's still on his rescuing high. Maybe he'll break down soon.
He has a crude map, drawn hastily on one of the shipping manifests Maru managed to smuggle out with him before Taichi's crew claimed the cargo bay and all the food that won't make him and his gang any crazier than they already must be.
There's pretty much no light in the ducts, and they have to climb down into the women's locker room, one of the marked off "safe zones" that have either not yet been claimed or there aren't enough people to actively guard them.
"But where are the women?" The plant has a staff of nearly 300, maybe 25 of them women.
Maru can't bring himself to answer, merely pointing out a splotch on his map, deep within the confines of the main engine room. Sakamoto, the first shift foreman's turf. Yoko shuts his eyes, says a prayer that they're dead already. Any other possibility makes him ill.
How many of these people, these men and women, did he work alongside every day? Sit with in the cafeteria? Play a pick-up game of basketball with in the gym? How many of them rang in the New Year in the employee bar, throwing confetti and drunkenly pointing out the glass at all the ugly, terrifying looking fish that lived down here in the ocean's depths, rarely seen by surface dwellers?
They sit huddled together on the locker room bench. The room's mostly untouched. He can still smell perfume in the air, and he shuts his eyes.
"So what you're saying," Yoko says quietly, his hands balled into fists uselessly, "is that we're fucked. We're going to die. And painfully."
He almost envies Sakurai-sensei's quick gurgling death on the filthy floor of the med lab.
"We're not going to die," Maru assures him, nudging his arm and trying to get him to look at his stupid map.
Yoko's job at Station 8 required him to monitor numbers, percentages, to find errors and correct them. Yoko is a realist. Maru's job was all about numbers too, keeping track of stock, ordering more. And yet he thinks he's cracked the impossible code. Maru sees the numbers, sees the percentages. He sees in them some manner of survival.
"Can you even fix an escape pod?" Yoko asks him bitterly.
"Sure," Maru says. "The computer does most of the work, you know."
"So, genius, what's standing between us and sweet freedom?"
Maru twitches a bit. His entire bloodstream is likely caffeine and not much else. Yoko watches Maru's finger, the nail angrily bitten to the quick, caked in dried blood. It drifts across the makeshift map in a confusing pattern, dodging sections that are for Taichi, for Sakamoto, for quiet, calm Tsuyoshi who'd worked the monitors on the shift after Yoko. Taichi has the food, Sakamoto has the power supply, and Tsuyoshi has the sub room, the pods.
Maru's route will snake them throughout the plant and what seems to be a no man's land of pit stops necessitated by block points in the ducts. Loosely guarded or populated by pure crazy - Maru can't guarantee one or the other because it varies from day to day as new factions try to take power or take each other out. Maru says he watched Tacchon, one of the cooks, upend a pot of boiling water over someone's head the second week. His reward? A candy bar he seemed to really want.
Yoko shivers.
They hear a horrible scream coming from the women's dorm. They've lingered too long already. Yoko has no time to ask Maru just how they'll be getting past Tsuyoshi's group in the sub room before they're back in the ducts.
--
The bar was really nice as far as employee bars went at the bottom of the ocean. The bar itself was solid cherry wood, always kept polished. Good liquor, good music from the jukebox. And the view was pretty much unmatched anywhere else in Station 8.
On his off time Yoko used to sit at a table in the rear of the lounge. Far from the bar, but tucked in just the right spot. He could tip his chair back against the heavy glass and everything above him was ocean. The lights from Station 8 aglow, the ugly creatures that dared to get close enough meandering through the dark. The giant bulging eyes, the jaws straight out of sci-fi, some of them bioluminescent and speckling the blue black with their own eerie light.
The bar's changed a bit. It's a cemetery now. Some particularly enterprising members of Taichi's crew have brought corpses in and covered them with tarps. The closest to decency the dead are likely to get. The smell is worse than the med lab, and Maru's able to walk the room without gagging. Yoko tries diligently but still manages to lose the handful of potato chips Maru served him earlier. He'll be dehydrated before too long, and he has little choice but to opt for the bottle of expired club soda that nobody has decided to liberate from the bar.
He's just twisting the cap back on to carry it with them for the next leg of the journey when he hears a groan under one of the tarps.
"We should move," Yoko can't help but say. His own human decency is all too quick to abandon him, but Maru has always been a sweetheart.
He moves to the tarp, lifting it to reveal a mess of black hair, tired eyes, chapped lips. "Dokkun," Yoko murmurs as Maru continues moving the tarp. Dokkun, Ryo-chan...the guy had only started down here a few months back.
Maru crouches down, gets Ryo sitting upright. Force feeds him some chips.
"Is this heaven?" Ryo asks, looking steps from death's door as it is.
"Not even close," Yoko says.
Ryo doesn't smell like death, at least not as much as he could. Instead he smells like whiskey. Which makes sense because there's no corpses beside him, only empty bottles. Drinking yourself to death seems to be a slower process than Ryo had anticipated. "Can you walk?" Maru asks him. "You could come with us."
Yoko almost wants to say no. No, Dokkun isn't allowed. He'll slow us down. And as soon as he thinks it, tears spring to his eyes. It's too easy to understand how quickly people could turn on each other. Yoko knows instinctively that if he hadn't spent a month in the Box that he'd have clamored to join up with Taichi, with Tsuyoshi, with whichever group would take him in, feed him. He'd do anything.
"Take my chances here," Ryo assures them, his eyes glassy as he looks up at the ocean above. With the backup generators on, the powerful lights of Station 8 are more like flickers in the darkness, the orange light in the bar casting strange shadows. The fish in the depths are nothing but the occasional movement in the distance, a flicker of life carrying on, the world itself carrying on while Station 8 dies. Maybe they'll lose their way in the dark, thunk against the glass.
"You heard the man," Yoko says, guilt propelling him to his feet. The sooner they leave, the sooner he can forget that Ryo is alive. Can pretend that Ryo didn't make it, is lying dead under the tarp.
Maru seems more hesitant, but Ryo shoos him away. The bar's been otherwise raided, so there's nothing more to be done here. With great reluctance, Maru navigates them away from Ryo. His map takes them out of the swinging bar doors, marked with a T. Marked in blood, Yoko notices, and by now nothing's going to surprise him.
They leave Ryo to his fate and carry on, sliding into a storage closet to clamber back into the ducts. Yoko tries to remember his special table in the bar, the calm after a long shift. It's not a comfort. Not now.
--
There's no sense of time in the vents or in Station 8. Because of the dark ocean surrounding, engulfing the plant, Inohara from management liked to sound Reveille in the early morning hours to keep their body clocks functioning. If there was a decided upon morning, afternoon, and evening, they could all function better on the job, could keep under control despite the claustrophobia that a place like Station 8 could induce.
Yoko used to pretend they were in a spaceship, like in Star Trek or something. The black of the vast universe, speckled with stars. The cold empty vacuum of space, not so different from the crushing pressure of the Pacific. The fish in the water were the Klingons, the Romulan Star Empire. But Inohara would sound Reveille and they would know a new day had arrived. They could continue to boldly go where no man has gone before. It sure sounded more interesting than working in a geothermal plant, staring at computer readouts.
Inohara's dead, Maru tells him. There were some suicides after they received word that no subs were coming. And then where management was concerned there were some murders made to look like suicide. Maru is convinced that Inohara was taken out by one of the new bullies in charge. It doesn't really matter which one.
They catch quick bits of sleep. Fifteen minutes here until a scream gets them on the move, an hour there when Maru decides that nobody's going to come up into the ducts. They have to double back a few times, their exhaustion growing each time they hit a dead end. With all the water in Station 8 potentially contaminated, some idiots thought that the ocean was the obvious answer to their thirst.
Entire sections of the station, whole corridors and compartments, are blocked off with the water-tight doors. Yoko can hear the sloshing of water inside. The doors groan with the load they bear, rumbling and creaking, and if Yoko places a palm on the metal it trembles. He thinks the sound, the rumbling, will stay with him forever.
He wonders how they broke the glass, if there are any breaches elsewhere in the station and if the doors will come down in time. He wonders how many of them drowned. He wonders how their bodies reacted to the sudden change in pressure. He wonders if they simply popped.
He'd watched a documentary on TV once, right after he'd taken the job and before they'd sent him down on the sub. About divers and excess nitrogen forming bubbles in the blood. About how fish who live down here have evolved in such a way that they can't survive closer to the surface, subsisting on the detritus floating down from the upper levels of the ocean.
He wonders how many of his coworkers are now detritus.
Fish food.
--
Ohno Satoshi loves the ocean. If he could be a fish, he'd be a fish. Yoko's always been convinced of that. They sat side by side monitoring various plant processes, and Ohno was one of the few friends he and Maru had in common. They'd sit together, the three of them, at Yoko's special table in the bar, shooting the shit and drinking. Ohno knew the name of almost every hideous fish that floated by, his face lighting up like a Christmas tree. "Gulper eel!" he'd say in joy as Maru turned away from the glass in fright.
He and Maru find Ohno in the library, marked with Taichi's T and the fourth alternative route they've had to take this morning (afternoon? evening?). Ohno's hobby, other than being a fish otaku, is art because it allows him to draw every strange looking ocean creature he sets his eyes upon.
The poisoned water's gotten Ohno, and it's gotten him bad, and when he and Maru drop down out of the ceiling, Ohno doesn't even move. He's using the library wall as a canvas. There are scattered corpses here, kind of like in Sakurai's med lab. Sakurai was trying to fix people. Oh-chan is painting with them.
There's a pile of open books on the floor, dry and boring texts about geothermal capacity, and Ohno's laid out one of the younger workers on top of the open pages. Taguchi, Yoko thinks, if the long legs and dyed blond hair are anything to go on. Because there's not much left of his face, and he's been split open in half a dozen places, the oozing blood serving as Ohno's limited color palette.
Gulper eel, Yoko thinks nervously as he watches Ohno's graceful paintbrush strokes. Taguchi's helping Ohno paint his beloved gulper eel.
Just when Yoko thinks that maybe a fifth alternative route is in order, Maru's heart wins out over Maru's brains. "Oh-chan!" he says like he's greeting an old friend. He is, technically, but even if he's painting a fish on the wall, this is not the Oh-chan they really know. This is an abomination.
Ohno turns, and his eyes are blank, dull. There's no flicker of recognition, just a bit of disappointment that he's been interrupted halfway through his masterpiece.
"Hello."
"We're just passing through," Maru says, and their exit will require them to pass by the Taguchi painting kit, past Ohno himself to the door at the rear of the room. "We can leave you to your painting, okay?"
Yoko wonders how Maru has survived this long.
Ohno turns around, continues painting, and they tiptoe around the books, around the blood. There's another corpse propped up against the bookcase, intestines long since pulled out and left in his lap like gooey rope. Does blood from the intestines blend well with blood from the heart? Does it make for high quality paint?
They're just about past him, just about to the door. If Maru had kept his mouth shut, Ohno probably wouldn't have turned around. Not when it's a gulper eel. But Maru's hand is on the doorknob when there are footsteps behind Yoko and then a sharp searing pain in his side.
He screams, stumbles forward. Stabbed, he's been stabbed. "Maru!" Yoko howls, falling with Ohno clambering on top of him. He's on his stomach, desperately rolls onto his back just in time to see the crazed look in Ohno's face as he slices downward with his makeshift knife. He's resourceful, Ohno is. Human blood for paint, a wall for canvas. And a paintbrush, the wooden end filed down into a sharp, deadly point. Ohno stabs at him, misses when Yoko dodges. He stabs downward again, letting out a scream that speaks of a month of isolation, trapped in his own insane mind.
"Oh-chan," Yoko gasps, "Oh-chan, please..."
Yoko can smell Ohno's rancid breath, his body odor from weeks without so much as a sponge bath. Oh-chan just wants Yoko to help him with his art.
"I'm sorry!" Maru screams, and then Ohno collapses atop him, the modified paintbrush weapon falling from his fingers.
Yoko struggles. "Get him off me. Get him off me!"
Maru's steak knife caught Oh-chan between the shoulder blades, and he's not quite dead yet but the fight's certainly gone out of him. Maru's openly crying as he pulls their friend off of him. Yoko can't move, looking down at the gouge in his scrubs. He hadn't felt guilty about taking shoes off a dead man, but he's kept the clothes on from the Box.
"He stabbed me, Maru, he..."
"Let me look."
"It hurts, damn it," Yoko grumbles, hoping his noisy complaints will drown out the sounds of Ohno, their good friend Ohno, slowly bleeding out and dying beside them.
The paintbrush has punctured the soft meat of Yoko's side below his ribcage, but it's not deep. It just hurts like a son of a bitch, and between his own exhaustion and the dwindling adrenaline that keeps him moving forward, he isn't too sure if it's worth fighting much longer. How many more friends and colleagues will try and kill them? How many more will they kill?
Maru rips at the fabric of Taguchi's t-shirt, finds a spot that isn't blood soaked. He balls it up, has Yoko press it against his wound. Hygienic care is beyond them now, and they rip at the pant legs of Yoko's scrubs, turning them into shorts to tie the fabric around Yoko's waist, secure the shirt material in place.
When Yoko gets to his feet it stings, like he's being jabbed over and over again though the injury only needed to be inflicted once. "I can't keep up with you," he admits. "Not now, Maru."
Maru doesn't seem concerned, picking up the tool from the floor that's left Yoko wounded. "You may as well have a knife too, Yuuchin."
--
As they get closer to the sub room, the dead ends start to increase. More and more sections are closed off to them, and structural integrity becomes a worrisome issue. With all the breaches throughout the plant, Yoko suspects that it's weakening the parts of Station 8 that remain intact. The pressure of the water against all those water-tight doors is adding up. They're meant to contain the random leak, and systems are in place to pump the water out. But not this much water. And certainly not on backup generator energy.
The groaning becomes an ever present companion, and Yoko can't sleep now because of it. Every waking moment may be the one when the bulkheads fail, when everything buckles, where the glass fractures like walking on a barely frozen pond.
They're in the ducts, munching on some rice crackers, when war breaks out. Maru's not sure which factions are fighting at first. There's a vent a few feet away and they crawl as quietly as they can to avoid detection. Looking out through the metal slats, the gym is below them, and men are beating each other with pipes, with anything they can get their hands on. There's maybe six or seven to a side. Yoko knows some of them, he thinks, though a month has made them mostly unrecognizable. Masuda with his mushroom cut, howling in pain as a pipe cracks against his spine. Nakamaru uselessly calling for his team to fall back, trying to maintain order in chaos like the general on a losing side.
It's a turf war, and they can only watch. The sounds the men make are almost primitive in their fury, and he has to look away as it winds to a close and nothing has been accomplished. Except that twelve, fourteen men he'd worked alongside have just butchered each other underneath a basketball hoop, their blood coating, pooling across the brown boards of the court.
It was Sakamoto's squad trying to take out Tsuyoshi's. Looks like Sakamoto picked the wrong part of the station to control - Taichi's group will live for weeks off of the food in the cargo bay, but Tsuyoshi guards the only way out. If Sakamoto cuts the power, everybody dies, himself included. He has no real advantage.
But the only positive, the only god damned positive, is that now Tsuyoshi's side is down a half dozen men. Fewer obstacles now between them and the pods.
Maru scouted a week earlier, when half the plant wasn't submerged or impassable. Tsuyoshi's got men at the main entrance, the most logical entrance. The freight elevator that brought food up from the subs to storage in the cargo bay was dismantled in the second week by Taichi lest Tsuyoshi's crew get hungry. Tsuyoshi still has men there by the elevator in case Taichi's men come swinging down the cable to race for the pods.
This leaves the ducts over the pod room. Unless Tsuyoshi has men patrolling, looking up, it's doubtful he's guarding the ceiling. Because who would risk snapping their legs in a twenty foot drop from the ceiling overhead to the unforgiving metal floor of the pod docks?
--
They're running on no sleep, and there's only a few more corridors to hurry through before they can locate the duct they need that will take them up and over the pod room. Like clearing a level in a video game, Yoko thinks, even though this experience is not giving him the same thrill an afternoon of Monster Hunter might have years back. In games, even with a game over you could start again. Such a luxury is not possible here.
Tsuyoshi's crew have been scouting the area, their patrols consisting of nothing more than one frightened, possibly insane soul wandering the halls with a nervous giggle, brandishing a knife that might have come from the same set Maru's had. They decide against taking the poor guy out - they figure the one sent after him might be even crazier.
They wait for him to pass, hidden behind some overturned crates. They used to hold replacement parts for the more complex machinery of the plant, but they've been emptied now. The giggles die down and they're on the move, Yoko wishing he was faster but his side still aches terribly from Ohno's attack.
Sakurai, Ohno, Ryo. None of them bad guys, not when you came right down to it. Taichi, Sakamoto, Tsuyoshi. They're all just trying to survive. Who knows what even happened to the water?
There's a corridor ahead on the other side of a water-tight door, and they manage to get through it only to hear the creaking get louder, loud enough to send off alarm bells. There's a fracture somewhere because there's ankle-deep water. But it's the only way, fifty precarious feet separating them from the duct they need. And yet Yoko just wants to turn around.
If there's a fracture in the glass, it could go at any time. It wouldn't even take much, not with the pressure down this far. Maru hesitates, water sloshing around his boots. "Yuuchin, if we run, it'll be okay."
"I can't run," Yoko says, fingers absentmindedly drifting to the bundled up material under his shirt. "You know I can't run."
Maru ignores him, his pace picking up. The water starts to messily splash. The creaking noise reaches a fever pitch, and they're only halfway through.
"Please don't break," he mumbles to himself as the ice cold water that's accumulated burns at his ankles. "Please don't break."
He hears a crack, an audible crack in the glass. Like a twig being snapped in half, and Yoko finds that he can in fact still run. The groaning pressure builds, and he's starting to feel woozy. He imagines being sucked out into the nothingness, his body contorting, compressing. It's enough to propel him forward after Maru, his legs freezing as they make it to the door.
They get it open, just barely, hearing more cracking sounds. They get the door closed, Yoko wheezing, and that's when it must burst because there's a noisy rumble, the scream of the broken glass and the ocean flooding inside. Now they're cut off from the rest of Station 8. He wonders how many are stranded on the other side.Yoko's alive because he could run, and he can see blood soak through his shirt. Five, ten seconds difference between life and death.
Maru pulls him along, not giving him a moment's rest. "It might not be able to hold in here." They hurry through the empty halls, the constant threat of a breach following at their heels.
They make it up and into what Yoko hopes is the last air duct he'll have to be inside for the rest of his life. They can finally stop for a minute, and there's not much to be done for Yoko's wound. Maru has been far less chatty since what he had to do to Oh-chan, and there's really not much left to say. They just need to get out of here.
After they've finished the rest of the food Maru has on him, they slink through the ducts. Maru's stashed rope is waiting for them, the escape plan going all too well. Nobody's been up here to mess with it, thankfully, though Yoko is disturbed to find that the rope is a bit short. They'll have to jump and pray for the last six or seven feet. Drop and roll, Maru informs him, like it's all too easy.
They wait in the duct, the pods all lined up in the massive launch room below them. Tsuyoshi seems to have all but abandoned the place. No guards patrol below as they try to control their breathing, look out through the vent. Could they not get them working? Has this all been for nothing?
"Maru," Yoko whispers. "Why did you come get me? Why didn't you just try to leave if the pods haven't been guarded heavily?"
His friend looks oddly pleased with himself. "Because it requires two passcodes to launch. That's why they don't know how to make it work. They killed off the management, and only they knew about it. I just got lucky overhearing it in the ducts."
So it could have been anyone, Yoko realizes. Maru just needs one person with him. If Maru had happened upon someone else who was still sane, maybe Yoko wouldn't be here right now. It chills him to think of selfless-seeming Maru, who wanted Ryo to come with them, who cried about Oh-chan. In the end, all Maru really needs Yoko for is his employee passcode.
But he has no time to feel sorry for himself, thinking Maru helped him out of genuine friendship. Better a way to escape than none at all.
--
As Station 8 groans around them, seemingly in its death throes, Maru pops the duct's panel off. He lets it noisily fall to the floor - they've waited a few hours, and not one person has entered the pod room. Maybe Tsuyoshi's entire cohort, maybe Tsuyoshi himself, is dead.
They wriggle down the rope, Maru first so he can wait at the bottom and help ease Yoko's landing. Each handhold down the rope burns. His side is stretched by the effort it takes, reawakening the searing pain of his wound. His body is starting to run out of steam. A normal person in his pneumonia-recovering state would rest up, take it easy. He's been attacked, he's been on the run, he's crawled on his hands and knees through duct after duct.
But they're here. After blood and guts and unforgiving ocean washing it all away, they're here. Thanks to the backup generators, the power's still online. There are over 30 pods, each spherical in design with room for ten inside on what barely pass as seat cushions. It's automated, only programmed to do one thing. Surface. It's a simple enough process, and they're all unlocked since Tsuyoshi's faction was either too dumb or too crazy to get them moving. It's an even slower journey up top than it takes in a sub on account of the pressure. They're not as forgiving in construction as the subs. If they went any faster, it would be the bends for sure.
So as soon as they get her fired up and launch, the pod will be expelled into a holding tank and then into the open. It'll be hours before it crests the waves, maybe a full day, inching ever upward. But, Yoko decides, they won't be here, and that's just fine by him. He's had more than enough of Station 8.
"Okay," Maru says, looking everywhere but at Yoko. "Gonna need your passcode."
Yoko's just about to key in the last number when he realizes that Maru's behind him, closer than he needs to be given all the hours they had to be in the ducts together. He pauses with his finger over the keypad.
"You need my passcode. It takes two to activate the pod."
Maru says nothing, but Yoko can hear him breathing behind him. Can feel the steak knife poised at the small of his back.
"You need my passcode, but you don't really need me."
He turns around, and there's something empty about the way Maru's looking at him now. Knife in hand, muscles tensed, shaking uncontrollably. Maru's been in the vents for weeks, had that rope, knew about the lack of guards.
Yoko's not the first person Maru's brought here. But he's probably the most coherent. The most likely candidate to actually remember his passcode and be dumb enough to share it.
Maru drank the water the same as all the others, probably in a smaller amount. But it was obviously enough to put him over. He's just been so focused on getting Yoko here, on still being the Maru Yoko's needed him to be, that he's managed to keep the crazy hidden. But now he's so close to getting what he wants. He doesn't much care now.
Yoko takes a step away from the keypad, withholding his precious passcode, his final number. It's four, by the way. Four like the four weeks he was alone in the Box, unaware of the chaos surrounding him, destroying Station 8 from within and without. Four weeks to fear his own death, four weeks thinking he'd been abandoned. But he's seen worse than that out here. The absolute worst.
"Yuuchin, I just need that last number, okay?"
"Room in here for 10 people," Yoko says.
Maru smiles, beaming from ear to ear. "You can catch the next one, okay?"
He looks like Maru, smiles like Maru. He's shaped like Maru, calls him Yuuchin like Maru always did. He's not Maru though, not now.
But Yoko is still Yoko. He firmly believes it. Knows it to be true. Four weeks in the Box, monitoring the flickering lights, has given him decent enough reflexes that he's got the makeshift paintbrush knife out and buried in Maru's neck before his friend can say another word.
If you're dumb enough to key in your passcode first...
He watches Maru sink to the floor, surprised, and Yoko uses his remaining strength to haul his friend out into the pod room, lying him on the floor to die. Maru hasn't been Maru for some time, and maybe now that he's taken a life, Yoko isn't Yoko. He didn't drink the water. Maybe he didn't have to.
He limps back into the pod, shutting the door behind him. Once he's sealed inside, it's like being in the Box all over again. Clean, quiet, recycled air without the stench of death in it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Yoko presses four on the keypad.