"So, how are you enjoying your stay here in The Hole?" V asked.
"I'm not," Eric grunted, reaching out and moving a pawn.
The barest exhalation of a laugh escaped V as he reached forward without hesitation and moved one of his own pieces. Eric sighed and his frown deepened as he studied the chessboard.
"That's what I figured," V said. "You're different."
Eric didn't say anything for a moment longer. Finally, he reached out and moved a piece. "In what way?"
V moved another piece without hesitation. "You don't belong here, but that's because you don't belong anywhere."
Eric looked up, a little startled. He could count on one hand the amount of people in his entire life who had accurately guessed that about him, or told him to his face. V stared back passively. Eric looked back down at the chess pieces.
"Why do you say that?"
"Something about you, the way you carry yourself, this sort of vague discomfort. You're like a man out of time. You don't belong anywhere or anywhen. Or maybe you'd feel a lot more comfortable and satisfied in the stone age. Although we could probably quibble over Neolithic or Mesolithic."
Eric laughed softly, but he felt something spark uncomfortably at his words. "You think I'd be happier sleeping in a cave, carrying a club, spending as many calories hunting as I manage to get by hunting, if I'm lucky?"
"Yeah, I do. I've lived that way."
Eric raised an eyebrow. "You've lived in a cave, hunting with a rock or maybe a spear? Drinking from a river, making clothes from skinning your kills, picking wild berries?"
"Yes."
He considered it. He'd heard bolder claims, and it was a common fantasy that normally got kicked out of young Privates' heads, convinced they were caveman alpha males because they'd been through Basic, about three days into their stay in impoverished conditions in some third world nation while on deployment.
A lack of internet connectivity and air conditioning tended to fuck with most people more than they liked to admit.
"Why'd you stop?"
V lost his very slight smile. "I made some mistakes before I discovered who I really was. Mistakes have a way of following you, I've learned. And the world just wouldn't leave me alone. So now I'm here. For the time being, anyway."
"What kind of mistakes, exactly?"
"I killed forty seven people."
"Wow. That's...a lot."
"They had it coming."
Eric considered and rejected several responses, but in the end, he decided that he hadn't been there, so he didn't know. He reached out and moved another piece.
V regained that razor's edge of a smile and moved his own piece. "Check."
Eric sighed and studied the board for another long moment.
Two days. He had been in prison for about two days now. And so far, it was going about as he had expected. In a way, he knew that he was privileged, being V's cellmate. The sheer fact that V had chosen not to kill him, let alone to play chess with him, gave him a kind of immediate legendary status among the prisoners.
During breakfast yesterday, Ranse had told him that V had killed at least twenty people during the four months he'd been there. And he was not subtle about it. And that list included every single cellmate. So it was an interesting position to be in. For now, he was still getting the lay of the land, but even here, the land was boring. He ate three meals of gray glop a day. He went to the bathroom. He took a shower. He resumed working out. He considered his overall life goals.
This new landscape was not completely boring, however.
Beneath it all, in some deep dark cavern of mystery, lay the enigma. The question of what the UAC was really up to here. What sick experiments they might be performing on the prisoners. What twisted tech they were dreaming up. He asked around where he could and people were mostly polite to him now that word had spread.
Eric moved another piece in a fit of desperation. V chuckled softly and moved his own. "Checkmate."
Eric sighed. "I'm not much for chess."
"I'd have to disagree. You lasted longer than most people do. By the way, I have one more piece of advice for you."
"I'm listening."
V nodded casually. "See that guy with the muttonchops?"
Eric looked and spied a man sitting at a table reading with a deep frown. The book looked out of place in his hands. He had short, dark hair and long sideburns, a heavy brow, and a frame packed with hard muscle. Like V, he looked racially ambiguous. In fact, he looked like how V had described him a few moments ago: like a man out of time. Or, more accurately, he kind of did look like an actual caveman.
"Yep."
"That's Torque. Steer clear of him. He's like me: he genuinely does not give a fuck. If he gets pissed, he'll do whatever he wants to do and fuck the consequences. I once saw him pull a man's eye out and stuff it down his throat."
"That seems a little intense."
"It's an intense atmosphere."
"Crowe!"
They both looked over. Behind the safety barrier that ringed the whole silo was a narrow passageway. It was how the guards got around. It was mostly unbreakable glass so they could tap on the window of their private zoo.
Johns stood back there with two heavies with deep frowns and strong batons.
"Get your ass over here, Crowe. Got a special assignment for you."
"How's the finger, Johns?" V asked with a jovial smile that somehow managed to look utterly alien and yet completely sincere on him.
"Fuck off, V," Johns snapped.
Eric got to his feet and walked over, curious. He kept his movements careful and deliberate, as not to get them excited and give them some excuse to kill him.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"Got a special assignment for you, Crowe." Johns had a slight, cruel smirk. "Come on." He opened up the barrier.
Both guards had Raptor SMGs. Eric knew that they wouldn't have an issue putting half a magazine in his head, but what truly kept him from snatching one of the Raptors out of a guard's hands and returning the favor was the fact that he was curious. Something significant was happening. He wasn't sure what it was, but his instincts were warning him, like the buzz of an electric fence, unseen but not unheard.
Maybe more accurately, like a minefield. He'd walked through enough of them that he could read them, see where to step. Usually.
They were walking into a minefield of some kind.
"Don't try anything stupid, Crowe," Johns said as he gave him a shove towards a doorway at the back of the curved corridor the door had admitted him to. "We love excuses to break skulls. And believe me, we do crack craniums here. Like eggs. And watch the 'yolk' leak out."
He chuckled darkly as he reached out and tapped his baton painfully against Eric's head a few times. He considered a response and opted out of one.
"Yeah, yeah, get moving hardass," Johns grunted, putting a boot to Eric's back and shoving him forward, through the door.
The four of them came to an antechamber with more doors, two to either side, all closed, and an elevator at the end. They marched up to it and Johns scanned his retina and then his thumb. The doors slid open, revealing a sparse, titanium white interior. They shoved him inside, got in after him, and then Johns hit a button and they shot down and stopped abruptly enough that everyone stumbled slightly. The doors opened up and pushed them out into an institutional gray antechamber with more doors.
"Come on, move it," Johns grunted tersely, pushing Eric again.
Yet again he found himself considering violence, he didn't react well to people laying hands on him even at the best of times, but he was well into their clutches now. Even teaching Johns another lesson, (the temptation to flounder, fall on his ass, and then drive his heel into the man's shin and break it, was almost overwhelming), seemed like it would be met with a furious overreaction.
There were a handful of Corrections Officers around and they all looked tense. Johns and his two flunkies got Eric up to a big steel door stamped with the UAC logo. This time he had to slot a vibrantly red keycard to open it up. And it led to an airlock. They all shuffled in and began a decontamination process. Red light flashed and air hissed. There was an uncomfortably long pause, then the opposite door opened up and admitted them into a significantly more high-tech security checkpoint manned by half a dozen guards in full tactical gear.
Eric immediately felt a change in atmosphere. Everyone looked at them as they came in.
"We all set?" Johns asked one of the guards in a control booth.
"Yes, sir," he replied curtly.
"Excellent. You two, lock him in six," Johns said.
Almost before he'd finished speaking the two silent heavies started pushing him through the checkpoint room. They got him through a door at the end, which led to a large corridor that stretched away to either side. Ahead of him, a row of heavy metal doors awaited, each with a stark black number stamped onto it. A feeling of unreality and dread settled over him like a smothering smoke. This place felt increasingly and utterly unlike the rest of the prison he'd seen so far. The heavies marched him down the line to the door marked with a flat black 6.
There were two pads, one on either side of the door, and they both had to sync up their thumb scans to get it to open.
"Good luck, bitch," one of them growled as they shoved him inside.
The door immediately slammed shut and locked with a heavy, resounding thud behind him. Eric looked around the area and in an instant that dread morphed into full-blown screaming warning. This was a place where people were sent to die. It was a square, sterile room of gunmetal gray steel. There were a lot of dents and scratches and old bloodstains on just about ever surface. There was another door the same as the one he'd come through immediately opposite his location. The only thing in there besides him now were a few cameras.
Eric immediately began preparing himself, limbering up and going through some fast-prep tension-release exercises with his muscles. There wasn't a lot of room to work with, it was a simple ten by ten by ten square.
He jerked slightly as an intercom crackled loudly to life and Johns's voice came through. "All right, hardass, if you're such a good murderer, then why don't you do it one more time? Show us what you're made of."
So it was true then? They had prisoners fight each other?
"I don't kill for anyone's pleasure but my own," Eric replied.
Johns's laughter cut harshly through the air. "I like that, that's original. Never heard that one, actually. You're a real piece of work, Crowe. Well, how about this then? Kill it or it's gonna kill you, soldier boy."
It?
Eric could sense something approaching. He popped his knuckles, then his neck, then balled his hands into fists and stared intently at the opposite door.
A long, long moment of utter silence passed, stretched, grew bloated.
Then the door snapped open.
A man stood just beyond the threshold. Eric prepared himself, unsure of what exactly was going to happen. He wore a prisoner's orange jumpsuit, had prison tats, but...something was very clearly wrong with him. His skin was ashen and his veins were visible and dark. His eyes were cloudy and milky. He was drooling and...there was blood on his mouth.
And his left forearm was pretty torn up and bloody.
Eric realized with a start that he had been chewing on his own flesh. Eating it even? What the hell was going on? Was he insane? Maybe he was an experiment gone wrong. Or maybe he was an experiment gone right? Sick with something? Or maybe some kind of new battle drugs? Whatever it was, this didn't really seem like a soldier worth sending into battle.
The man finally seemed to notice Eric and he let out a disturbingly animal grunt as he raised his hands and began to walk into the chamber. With him came a scent, a horrifyingly familiar yet impossible scent.
That of rotting human flesh.
This guy was dead.
It was impossible, the dead didn't wander around like that, but this guy was definitely dead. Eric shifted on his feet, staring unblinkingly at the walking corpse. Maybe it was being manipulated somehow? He thought he'd heard a rumor maybe a year back of exoskeleton-controlled dead bodies. But he saw no hint of an exoskeleton and that wouldn't explain the guy's face. He looked dead, but his mouth was moving, his eyes were moving.
He was aware of Eric.
No, it.
Johns had called this thing it.
So what then?
Was he looking at a fucking zombie?
Well, if it was, then they weren't all that hard to kill. Provided you had something hard or sharp. Which he did not have. Contrary to advice, he hadn't gotten his hands on a shiv. Now that he was thinking about it, that probably had saved him some trouble, as he had no doubt that security checkpoint would've picked it up. Maybe he could do it the old fashioned way and just beat the fucker's head in.
Only he had no idea what kind of zombie this was. Was it just a puppet? Or could it transmit its infection? If so, what did it? A bite? The blood? Just the skin? Was its breath enough to turn you into the walking dead?
The corpse abruptly staggered forward and made a grab for him. Eric stepped back, out of its grasp, and then punched it in the side of the head. He hissed in pain. It was like punching a brick wall. And it was cold.
Okay, okay, he was going to have to come up with some kind of plan or end up this thing's dinner. And he had no intention of that happening. There was nothing in the chamber with him, nothing on him, which just left...
Eric saw a flash of something wet and white as the creature made another reach for him. In its wound. It had chewed down enough to reveal some bone. An idea flickered and caught in his mind, and he went ahead with it before he could think better of it. It was how he made most of his decisions in the midst of combat.
The zombie made another grab at him. Eric grabbed its left wrist and brought his knee up and his elbow down at the same time as hard as he could manage. The force of the impact snapped the bones in the thing's forearm, exposing them. They ended in sharp, red-stained points. Eric took a quick moment to yank the broken arm and point the broken bones towards its own eyes, then shoved it as hard as he could.
The bones penetrated the eye sockets and punched right into its brain. Something vital was damaged intensely and the creature collapsed into a heap of slack limbs with a resounding and fading groan.
"Holy shit," he heard Johns say over the intercom, which was apparently still on.
"Can he do that? What the hell?" another voice muttered.
"What are we supposed to do to? No one's ever-"
"Hit the gas, moron! Wipe him! That's the damn protocol!" Johns snapped.
Eric began looking around for a way out, but both doors remained stubbornly closed. He heard a loud hiss come from everywhere and nowhere, and suddenly the room began to fog up with a faintly blue, luminescent mist. He immediately began to feel its effects and his head started to swim as his body grew numb.
His last act was to quickly lower himself to the floor so that he didn't hit his head when he-