Go For Stories

The shadow on the floor let out a long, low moan.

“Nooooooo.” It was a sound so full of despair it broke Nigel’s heart. “Nooo, leave me alone.”

“Levi? Levi, buddy, it’s me.” Nigel scooted over to the dark shape that had folded in on itself to form a human croissant. “Levi.”

He reached out a hand and placed it on the moaning shadow’s side. It reacted in an instant, thrashing out with one hand and scurrying backwards.

“I SAID LEAVE ME ALONE.” His throat was hoarse and dry. His words more animal than human.

Nigel was undeterred. “Come on, mate. It’s me. It’s Nigel. We’re friends.”

A low sound, gravelly and distant came from the quaking floor. “Nigel?” He lifted his head and turned to face Nigel. The whites of his eyes stood out in the darkness as he stared at his friend for what seemed to be the first time in a million years.

Nigel smiled. “Hey. ‘sup?”

Levi pounced on Nigel, knocking him backwards onto his arse. He wrapped his arms around Nigel’s throat and pulled him in. Nigel tried to push him off for a moment, before realising what this was. It was a hug. Levi clung to his friend and his entire body wracked with sobs. Whether Levi convulsed with happiness or sadness, Nigel couldn’t tell. All he could do was hold his friend and let him cry.

“Nige,” Levi said through the tears. “Nige, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shot you and hid you away in your room. I was wrong.” His sobs gained strength, coming out of him unfettered and free. “What is going on? I’ve been alone for so long. I’m scared, Nige. I’m so scared.”

Nigel wasn’t sure that it had been all that long since it all started. Maybe six or seven hours. By the numbers it added up, but it certainly felt like a lot more. Either way, it had been hard enough for Nigel with people around. As he patted Levi’s back like a child wakened from a bad dream, he realised how it must have been for someone alone, for someone who didn’t know what was going on.

Levi’s sobs calmed and his breathing evened out. He untangled himself from around Nigel’s neck and sat back, looking at his best friend. In the darkness, Nigel could see the insane look that marked the eyes of everyone he had seen today. The look that says, ‘We are not alone on this world’.

“I got out. After the siren, I got out. Everyone was dead. Those things, they, they saw me, they scratched at me and bit at me, but I ran. I shot and I ran. I came up here and-”

He shuffled back, raising his fists. Something had caught his eye and he didn’t like the look of it. Nigel turned to look.

“It’s okay, mate. You remember Milly? And Bec, I mean, Doctor Reynolds.”

Levi narrowed his eyes at the pair of shadows standing in the door. “Yes?”

“It’s okay, they’re here to help. We saw you, buddy. From all the way down there. We saw you and we came for you. Come on,” he said, grabbing Levi’s hand, “let’s get you up and we’ll get some light in here. Help you feel human again.”

He stood and helped Levi up. Even after so short a time, he seemed to have lost weight. He felt somehow gaunt and shrivelled.

“Okay?”

Levi nodded. Nigel looked to Milly, who also nodded.

“Okay. Stay there. I’ll be back in a moment.”

He walked the length of the room, past all the desks that had been shifted into a pile along one side to create a makeshift fort. He stumbled over random drawers that had been left behind and slipped on a jumble of pens, barely keeping his feet beneath him. Once he had traversed this jungle of junk, he pressed a button by the window at the end of the room, right next to his former office.

With a click, the blinds that covered the windows slid up, allowing in the light from the reactor. The slit of light wavered and shook, casting a hundred dancing shadows across the room. As they opened more, Nigel looked up at the reactor. It shone brighter than ever, white and brilliant. He couldn’t be sure, but Nigel suspected it was bigger than normal. It definitely quivered where it sat, high up in the complex, glaring at the horrific scenes below.

With the room open to the light and people around, Levi seemed to have regained some semblance of himself when Nigel returned. He stood by the wall with his eyes closed, taking deep, even breaths. Milly stood by him and Bec was busy closing the door, locking it as she did. Levi opened his eyes when he heard Nigel’s footsteps.

“So, are you going to tell me what those things are? What is actually happening here? Do you even know, or are you as lost as me?”

“Yeah, umm, I’m not sure the best way to put it.”

“Just be straight out with it.” His voice was still raspy, but he sounded more like the Levi of old.

“Well, they’re spirits living in the bodies of the people they killed.”

Levi nodded. “Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Of course. And how did these spirits get here?”

“That’s one for Reynolds over here to explain. She’s the genius that helped make them.” He regretted saying it as the words came from his mouth. He knew it wasn’t her fault, but she probably felt that it was. If she was offended, she didn’t let it show.

“It’s to do with electricity.” She leaned back against a wall. Story time.

“Electricity? Like with Frankenstein?”

“Yep. So, when we die, there’s this electrical charge inside us, coursing through us, sparking through our brain and our nerves, making us what we are. But it doesn’t just die, like we do, it has to go somewhere. A lot of people assume that this is what ghosts are, merely the latent electrical charge from a dying person, floating around with nowhere to go.

“When we die, there’s this electrical shift where it leaves the body. That’s what we were trying to bring back. So we developed the formula.”

“What, that green mist that killed Dr Peterson?”

She nodded. “It changes the electrical conductivity in the body. The theory was, if we could change that, we could bring back the electrical field that ‘lives’ inside people. Only, it seems that it just opens their bodies up to the other side.” She sighed. “We messed up, okay? You happy.”

“Nobody’s saying that, Bec.” Nigel could barely look her in the eyes out of guilt.

“You don’t have to, Astley. I can just tell. But it’s fine, you know? The place will blow and we’ll all be absolved, right?”

He clenched his jaw and bit back a snarky retort. “Sure. As far as I’m concerned, we were all in on this, anyway. There’s nobody here that, on some level, didn’t suspect something unsavoury was going on. We all unleashed something on the world and we’re all responsible for fixing it.” A thought hit him. “Hey, you say electricity?”

Bec hesitated to respond. “Yeah?”

“When I was in, you know, the other … nevermind. I went somewhere just before all this went down and I hit one of those ghosts – not the albinoids, the dark ones – with my taser. It completely fried it. The thing melted in moments.”

“That makes sense,” said Milly. “If you hit it with enough electricity it could have disrupted the charge that was keeping it active in the … afterlife, I guess?”

Bec scratched her chin. “It’s entirely theoretical at this point. We know basically nothing about the other world but, yeah, that does make sense.”

“Guys,” Levi spoke up quietly from outside the group.

“Hold on, mate.” Bec held out a hand. “You say you hit it with your taser and it melted?”
Nigel nodded.

“Guys.”

“We could use that to stop these things. We could use the electricity to kill the albinoids before we all die.”

“No, it’s too late for that. The reactor is going. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

“Yes, but-”

“Nigel!” Levi got to his feet and pointed at something near the window. “What is that?”

Nigel looked over to where Levi pointed. He saw nothing at first, perhaps a flicker of a shadow but, as he watched, it deepened and cleared. As the shadows darkened and the lines grew bold, it took the large form of something unattractively familiar.

“Oh, fuck,” said Bec. “It’s the bat-scorpion.”

“Jarrod Anderson.”

“What?” Milly snapped a look at Nigel, her brow furrowed.

“Its name is Jarrod Anderson.”

“Jarrod? … Ander-”

Before she could finish, the beast materialised in full and swept through the room towards them with a guttural roar; wings flapping, sting poised and fangs bared. Milly dove to the side, Levi let out a terrified moan and fell back against the wall and Nigel tackled Bec to the ground.

They all moved too late.

It rushed through the lot of them, claws raking through their bodies. It salivated in victorious glee as it surged to the end of the room. It skidded to a stop and spun around as if to survey the carnage it had wrought, only to find all four entirely unscathed.

They scrambled to their feet and patted themselves down, checking for injuries. The beast, Jarrod, cocked its head to the side in a gesture that would have been comical if not for the fearsome look on its face. And the evil in its eyes … exactly the same as the man Nigel saw in it.

Bec let out a laugh and stepped towards the beast. Its lip curled back in a snarl, revealing blackened gums and rotten flesh.

“Bec, don’t.” Nigel reached for her, but she batted his arm away.

“It’s fine.” Her voice almost sounded like a laugh as she stepped closer still to the beast.

“No, seriously. Bec, stay back.”

The beast lunged forward, swiping its razor-sharp claws through her face. She laughed again.

“See?”

It roared louder.

“Die,” it said with a voice that choked on itself with fury. “Die, meat.”

“I don’t think so, mate.”

“Bec,” Milly joined her voice to the chorus, “please come back.”

“It’s okay, Mill. It’s harmless. Like a dickless puppy.”

It struck out at her, again and again, each time more furious than the last. Its wings flapped with each strike. Nigel moved to grab Bec by the arm, but was held back by a deep roar and the smell of decay on the vile creature’s breath. Bec spun around and held out her arms with a wide smile on her face.

“You see? The ugly critter is stuck in its stupid dead realm. It couldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Hurt,” it growled, raising its tail between its wings, “you.”

With that, Dr Bec Reynolds’ smile faded as her chest exploded outwards in a deep red mist.