OGENUS EARTH 🌎 🌊 {Dystopian Sci-Fi Adventure}

Fox On The Run

A horrendous scraping pain met Sandra's attempts to open her eyes. She was vaguely aware of something wet beneath the patches of her exposed skin. The familiar tang of blood clung to her lips and lingered in her nostrils, but that wasn't what made her vomit.

With a mighty heave, Sandra rolled her torso enough to spew salty bile and grit onto the tiled floor to mix with the crimson muck she'd been laying in. Her conscious registered that it was her own blood, but the voice screaming in her skull overruled reason.

You have to get up! It shrieked. You have to warn them!

With trembling limbs, Sandra pulled herself through the gore leaving a streaking trail behind her. She concentrated on the dogged sound of her teeth grinding together as she dug deep for bursts of adrenaline. Minuscule shards of glass seemed to be knicking and slicing up her veins, pushing to find a way out with every anemic beat of her heart.

The stain beneath her was not lessening and Sandra knew that she was losing more blood than her body could sustain. As long as Arturo hadn't reversed the emergency code protocol, she could still get a message to them.

Sandra had been wise to throw in couple errant keystrokes to fool Lauren. It wasn't difficult to exploit Lauren's naïveté, as someone else had so clearly done in this case. Sandra had trained Lauren ten years ago when she tested into the Architects stratum, and she'd genuinely liked her tutee's sweet nature. Sadly, there is always an opportunity to manipulate innocence for evil.

Sandra used the edge of the control panel to pull herself up by her fingernails. When her elbow was wedged on the console enough to lean her body against it for support, she could try to enter her code.

She choked out a sigh of relief when the code was accepted and swiftly sealed the door to the Shipping Bay control room. There was no telling when someone would notice that she had moved or a bot would come to clean away her body.

Sandra selected the heat-mapping module to find a concentration of six bodies spaced in a semi-circular formation on the same floor. With a few more strokes, she was able to patch herself into the comms speakers hidden in the ceiling tiles.

"Arturo," she whispered, her voice choking around the dried blood and vitriol in her throat, "if you can hear me, do not give them the code to unlock Coeuss. Please, for the safety of everyone on the remaining Arc Cities, they cannot have control of the system."

As she waited for a reply, her body gave out and Sandra collapsed onto the floor in a heap. Her breaths came in shallow pants so as not to aggravate the gripping pain assaulting her senses. There wasn't much more to do now but die.

A muffled whooshing sound passed over her, but Sandra's hearing had been drowned in the confusion of asphyxiation. She was distantly cognizant of a figure looming over her and felt the cool blade that stole her final breath before it reached her lips.

Hot, viscid blood ran from the slice in Sandra's neck. There wasn't enough left in her body to shoot out and spray Gayle, just sad impels in ebbing waves until Sandra was drained of life.

"I kept my promise," Gayle told the corpse. "You're out of harm's way."

With little more than a passing thought, she stepped over the body and through the hole that her plasma gun had left in the door. Outside stood the rest of the Architects, awaiting her counsel.

"What do we do now?" Sarah practically shouted over her frenzied wits. "Coeuss didn't have a scenario for this! We're locked out of the system and Sandra-"

"We all know what Sandra did. Lauren most of all." Gayle rasped, ire flashing behind her eyes.

"I'm sorry!" Lauren babbled nigh tears. "I hit her so hard she was bleeding from the head, I thought I'd killed her!"