Gaian Halloween Challenge
The light was fading as Lion slunk through the tiny gap in the gates, stooping to pick up the bag he’d thrown over the imposing metal bars first. Considering the razor wire fences around the abandoned GeNtech facility, he’d found his best way in was through the front door, so to speak. Curiously, a lot of the razor wire seemed pointed in rather than out.
That’s probably for safety of the wildlife. But there’s so much security for an inactive R&D facility in the middle of East Bumfuck, he thought to himself. The only thing around the facility for miles was forest and empty farmland. And from all indications, it hadn’t been in use for years.
Well, that was why he was here, after all- to figure out why the facility was abandoned. Lion grimaced, shouldering the strap of his backpack as he headed up the road towards the main lab building. Training mission, my ass. I think sensei just wanted an excuse to get rid of me for a few days.
Near as he could tell, there wasn’t anyone watching the facility, and the security checkpoints he walked by were all empty and dark, cameras long since deactivated. Records said the power grid got shut off a few years ago. . . since the tenants weren’t exactly paying the bills.
Lion tripped over a pothole in the growing dark, and narrowly avoided falling into a puddle by wind-milling his arms. Such beauty, such grace! He snickered as he went digging for his flashlight in the backpack. Yeah, he had a long way to go before he was anything more than a kid, even if he didn’t like to admit it. So, in the event he got found out on this little info rustling escapade, he was going to look like exactly what he was: a teen-aged kid with a flashlight running around in an empty building the night before Halloween.
It was a dare! I had to do it; the guys won’t leave me alone if I wimp out! Lion grinned to himself. It was a perfect cover, and really, who wouldn’t believe it?
The teenager cranked his head back to look up at the imposing shadow that the six story lab formed, his flashlight making odd reflections off the dusty and occasionally broken window.
This place would make a great dare, he had to admit. The lab had presence. Being the sort of kid that loved getting scared stupid on roller coasters and scary movies, Lion was actually kind of looking forward to this now.
He cracked open the door to the employee entrance, and promptly started coughing on the musty air. Ewww. It reeks in here. They really ought to have broken a few more windows before they left this place to rot.
The flashlight played over a perfectly boring entryway: another security checkpoint, a whiteboard, an area for picking up and dropping off passes. There were a few doors off of the room; checking them revealed nothing more exciting than lockers and coat rooms. Lion grumbled to himself. Come on, I wanted something spookier. Be thematic!
Obviously he needed to go somewhere more exciting. Lion picked a hallway at random and started wandering. The first floor was nothing but dusty, dusty, mostly empty rooms. By the time he walked face-first through the third cobweb, he was beginning to get the feeling he was the first person there in years.
Blech, spiderweb. Still brushing off his face, Lion shined his light around the small room he’d found his way into on the second floor. He was still in the middle of the management offices, but this area looked like it’d been cleaned out in a rush. There were still desk lamps, coffee mugs and dead plants. It looked like the only things pulled out were the filing cabinets and the computers.
Saving the records, probably. Lion sighed, taking a closer look around. Man, they never want to make my life easy. But it gives me more of an excuse to keep looking! His flashlight finally caught on a scrap of paper wedged between a desk and a wall. It looked yellowed, with splotches of dark brown stain across it exactly like someone had spilled their coffee in a rush. Thank you, sloppy secretaries!
Lion teased out the paper and smoothed it flat as best he could. Holding up the paper in one hand and the flashlight in the other, he began to read announcer style, “Official office memo, top security clearance, eyes only, blah blah blah!” He squinted at the official GeNTech seal smudged across the top. “Really, very sloppy secretary to let this slide, but I’m not complaining.”
He resumed his recitation with gusto, mimicking the time-honored fashion of radio announcers everywhere. “Re: L-coffee blob Glass Lahyr Project! Due to the cryptic optic quality of the coat, subject CX is SMEAR! How informative. . . . Blah blah, bah blah blah, blah blah. Containment breached, that’s never good. . . All employees must make way in orderly fashion to nearest exits, obeying all safety rules and protocols 28c through 39b as stipulated in Employee Guidelines of Death and Destruction. At this point, we must consider- making spill-proof coffee mugs . . . Project terminated. Aww, boring.”
Lion shoved the paper into his bag, figuring his sensei would want to see it.
And now, I get to go exploring!
Aside from the cobwebs, he’d found the dusty, just-abandoned offices only marginally creepy. If he was going to make a proper dare out of this info-gathering mission, he needed to go somewhere. . . more interesting. He shuffled back to where he’d seen the stairwell, then made his way up.
“Second floor. . . cobwebs! Administrative offices! Dead plants!” He made his way around the flight of stairs to the third floor and attempted to push the door open. “Third floor-“ The door didn’t budge. The teen-ager grimaced. “Third flooooor-“
He pushed harder. Finally, he gave up and kicked the push-bar as hard as he could. The door made an awful crunching noise, then slowly started to swing open with the resounding creak of horrifically rusty hinges.
Lion blinked into the gloom of the hallway, bringing his flashlight back around to bear down the corridor. He cleared his throat in the sudden silence as the echoes died away. “Uhm. Third floor. Creepiness, locked doors, and- WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?”
Flattened against the wall, Lion swallowed hard, then stepped forward to look at what was crunched between the wall and the door. Yellowed white, fragmented. . . bones. No sign of a skull. . . and too small to be recognizably human-sized.
Not human, thank god! Lion put a hand against his chest, feeling his hammering heart beat, and sighed in relief. “One of the test subject dogs got loose or something, but couldn’t get out. Poor bastard.”
Taking a second look at the bones, with the fractures and teeth marks, Lion swallowed hard again. “Aaaand he was dinner for someone else. Uhm. There had better be a larger dog skeleton around here.”
He grimaced, making his way uneasily down the corridor. I so could have done without seeing that first. He perked up, the initial fright giving way to the usual after effects of an adrenaline rush. But it makes for great atmosphere!
The third floor proved to be full of labs, labeled chemicals, vials, and huge machines that Lion couldn’t make heads or tails of. He prudently avoided the labs with the radioactive signs on the doors, after the comment in the memo about a containment breach. Sensei says I’m a mutant enough as it is!
He made his way upwards without looking back, but something was starting to bother him. Maybe it was just the infrequent signs of bones and the tiny rotting rats in corners. Maybe it was the way he hadn’t run into any cobwebs across doors yet, even though all the surfaces were just as dusty as downstairs. It might have just been the smell; of dust and decay and dead things closed inside to rot for years.
Why am I getting the feeling something’s watching me?
Lion shrugged his shoulders under his backpack, trying to ease the itching feeling in his back. A quick spin and flashing the light down the hall behind him showed nothing that hadn’t been there when he passed it. Ugh, Lion, when did you become a chicken?! Come on, you might still be in training, but you’d know if there was anything there. There hasn’t been any noise, just some skittering rats; this place is dead quiet.
Trying to ignore what looked like claw marks scratched into the tile floor, Lion winced uneasily as he walked past kennels and rooms of rodent cages, several still with occupants that had long since breathed their last. Maybe dead quiet was a bad choice of words.
Lion was starting to wonder what the hell they’d been experimenting on; the cages kept getting larger and larger, until they were the size of cubicles at least. Those were some really, really big dogs. It’s not like experiments on so many larger animals were sanctioned, right? Right?
He almost missed the door when he passed it, but Lion pushed open the metal door to find a large interior room. He seemed to be looking at a double image; an open space only occupied by a pair of metal tables, chairs, a clipboard. It took him a second to realize that the clipboard was only on one of the tables; the other looked like a reflection but wasn’t.
“Oooh, a two-way mirror! Observation room, I guess.” Lion approached the glass divider with interest, tapping a fingerprint onto the dusty glass. “I wonder what they were observing. . .”
The teen-ager looked up as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He found his eyes going wide as he stared.
“That. . . is not a dog.”
Looming in height well over the metal table, a tall, gaunt form the color of cobwebs stared back at him through the glass mirror. It didn’t look like anything Lion had ever seen before: huge paws on long thin legs scuffed almost silently on the floor; a lupine head lowered and flicked huge tufted ears; the emaciated body looked almost feline under the thick, ragged coat; the long plumed tail swished slowly with interest. Tattooed on its left shoulder, the numerals CX were half-covered by the long fur. But there were only two things Lion really noticed: the pupil-less white glowing eyes, and the rust of old blood on the creature’s mouth and paws.
Razor wire on the inside. Containment breach. Subject CX. The bones. It’s been left here. . . and I’m the first person to show up in years. Oh, SHIT, I’m dinner!
Lion edged carefully along the mirror, watching as the huge white-eyed head turned to follow him. “I think. . . now would be a very good time to go. . . wouldn’t you agree?”
He started sliding backwards away towards the door, keeping his eye on the glass to make sure the creature didn’t move. It seemed to be waiting, almost amused. . . and hungry.
He was almost passed the table when he felt something. . . odd. Warm air, moving. Breath on the back of his neck. Lion swallowed hard and slid just a little further backwards. The creature lowered its head and sniffed audibly.
The sound came from behind him.
“Oh god,” Lion squeaked. He bolted. He wasn’t sure how he made it passed the creature to the door, but he was screeching around corners without a care for where he was going, just away. Frighteningly, there was no sound of pursuit yet Lion kept imagining he heard the scuff of paw pads on floors.
He slammed through a set of fire doors into a second wing, jumping over increasingly large piles of bones as he sprinted down the corridors. Oh god oh god oh god, I’m in its territory. He nearly skidded out as his foot hit a femur and slid. Lion stared at it with wide eyes for a split second. It’s been eating. . . BIG THINGS. I am so on the menu.
Lion couldn’t help a squeak as he heard the fire doors shoved open by agile paws in the distance. He shoved back up to his feet and ducked into the nearest room; it turned out to be an employee washroom. Lion tried to still his breath, clinging to a sink, frantically thinking mantras he didn’t dare speak. I’m not here I’m not here I’m not here! Come on, stealth, do your trick!
He looked up in the mirror in time to see a white nose shove open the swinging door, sniffing left and right, before it retreated. Lion waited a frantic breath or two, then dove for the door to go back the way he came, whichever way the creature wasn’t facing.
But it wasn’t there.
He stared blankly, until a sudden shuffle of paws made his hindbrain decide for him.
“AAAAAAAH!”
No point in being quiet now, it sure as hell knew where he was, since it was right on his tail. His sneakers squeaked as he shot around a sharp corner; the sound of claws scrabbling on the floor behind him made it more than obvious where his pursuer was.
Lion nearly sobbed when he tripped over a stray bone; he rolled to his feet as best he could and shot down a side corridor.
He risked one look back at the seemingly empty hallway, the beam of the flashlight bouncing around as he ran break-neck speeds around the labyrinth of corridors. Still nothing.
I don’t care what my eyes say, IT’S STILL THERE. Oh god, what did they do to this thing?!
Lion wished he had marked the walls of the hallway earlier, or that the secret laboratories of scientific mutagenic doom would at least have the decency to be properly marked.
“For the love of- WHERE AM I NOW?!”
Lion barely stayed upright around a turn by bouncing off the walls, gasping before shoving off to fling himself headlong around another turn. Only the screeching claws on the turns let him know his pursuer was still with him.
“I could REALLY use some STAIRS about now!”
Panting hard, the student ninja had to thank his sensei for his excellent training regime. It beat the hell out of track and field. Another person would have been critter-kibble by now.
And then he noticed the skittering was gone.
Oooh, shit. Well, that’s great. Now I’m screwed. Lion winced. Obviously the thing had noticed they were going in circles- and it knew this place far better than he did. He was beginning to think he had better start bathing in A1 sauce when he spotted the EXIT sign reflecting his flash light.
Thaaaaaank yoooooou!
Walking as softly and quickly as he could, Lion crept towards the exit. He was just leaning in to press open the door to the stairs when he saw a white head over his shoulder reflected in the safety glass.
There was no hope for it: Lion flung the door open and lunged down the stairs, screaming like a banshee the whole way. From the sounds of impact behind him, the four-legged creature had more difficulty navigating the slippery metal stairs than he did- but Lion never thought of slowing down. The sounds came ever closer as he hit the first floor and shot through the doors. Unfortunately, the maze of offices left even fewer options than the labyrinth of corridors upstairs. Lion took a wrong turn and found himself lodged in a room of cubicles.
Cubicles. I must have skipped these earlier. For the love of- I am NOT going to be eaten a la carte on someone’s office desk!
Offices. Corner offices. Windows! Lion skidded on the carpet as he screeched into the corner cubicle, vowing to set up a shrine to someone as he found the window he was looking for. Small, but it would do. He promptly picked up a paperweight, wound up, then pitched it through the window. The sounds of snuffling, searching sniffs drove him to jump onto the desk to kick out shards to open the hole. He stopped just as the reflection of a rust-tinged nose came into view behind him. Now or never-
“BANZAI!”
Lion barely scraped through the window, then promptly had to fight his way out of the overgrown bush that broke his fall.
Gotta run gotta run- he can’t fit through that window, but there’s nothing to say he doesn’t have another exit-
He ran all the way down the road to the gates, tripping over potholes the whole way. Lion barely slowed to squeeze through the bars of the gates, then collapsed gasping on the grass not ten feet away.
“Oh . . . god. . . I am . . . never. . . doing. . . that. . . again.”
The crunching of gravel let him know he had company even before the low growl rumbled. Lion waved a limp hand amiably at the gate, gasping, “Hey, puppy. I bet you can’t get out, or you would have a long time ago.”
Claws scrabbled at the pavement beneath the gate and Lion blanched. “Or. . . you could always try, try again. Oh god.”
The student ninja scrabbled on to his bike, hurriedly kicking up the kickstand. He pushed off and pedaled away to the sounds of scrabbling and whining behind him.
Oh, man, if sensei wants a more thorough report on this one, I’m going to tell him he has to come out and look for himself. I’m not coming back here again- unless I have a cow.
Eerie howling tore through the night behind him; Lion shuddered and pedaled as fast as his exhausted legs could manage.
Make that three cows.