CHAPTER FIVE
“What the hell?” I asked myself the question, sitting there in the darkness like a baby, crying for what? The relief of surviving the most recent of trying tests that I had undergone must have overpowered all my sense of reason.
Rubbing my right wrist over my tear soaked face, eyes and then slowly hauling myself to my feet, I leant over to pick up the rifle and other things that I had thrown onto the floor from the room below.
It was at that precise moment that I heard the sound...
My body shot up rigid, and remaining as still as the two corpses lying below, I listened for the noise that removed all fear of the darkness and silence from my mind. There was nothing, but I was certain that I heard it.
Nothing.
Moments moved by as if they were in slow motion, my body felt incredibly sluggish and tired, for a moment the thought of drifting off to sleep in this eerie darkness seemed too hard to resist.
I knew that was out of the question, I willed my limbs out of temporary atrophy and grabbed for the two guns and magnesium flare that I had acquired from before. I didn’t know where I was in this compound but I knew that I had to keep moving, my mobility was my only ally in the dark catacombs around here. Removing the near empty magazine from the pistol that the South African man had dropped, I began to slowly move down the corridor.
There wasn’t ten feet travelled before the first dilemma came to my attention. The corridor spanned off in two directions, to my left it was utterly dark and it wasn’t the direction that either of the two men had come from. To my right, the darkness seemed to lift just a little as my eyes began to grow accustomed to it.
Standing there for a few moments in the silence and glancing back at the opening I had just come from, I hoped to see some sort of instrument panel on the wall, maybe to raise the floor and open the large metal doors on the ceiling. There was nothing but pale concrete.
Shrugging off the dark-fear again, I chose to go down the lighter of the two pathways as my eyesight was not as accustomed to the darkness as some of the dwellers in here. The corridor was just high enough for me to walk comfortably in, and it was around three people wide. I continued to walk with my fingertips brushing gently against each wall, just in case there was an opening my untrained eyes missed. I tried to move as quietly as possible, training myself to stop and listen for any sounds of activity, even the hint of someone breathing in the distance.
Nothing.
The corridor veered to the left abruptly as the darkness in this area was beginning to lift, but the silence was still just as deafening.
All of a sudden I stopped, not knowing why for a few moments I continued to stare straight ahead. The sound of my own breathing seemed to thunder through an almost tangible silence, the decadence reaping through the air as I remained static, almost questioning myself as to why I ground to a stop.
Then it came to me, rushing forth like a tidal wave. My eyes shot straight to my left hand, which was dangling freely in the darkness at about waist height. The sensation coming to me made me dizzy as I slowly looked up from it, to the section of wall that was missing. A dread swept over me in a way that made my limbs shake uncontrollably, the sensation that was now creeping in to my periphery made my anxiety even more prominent.
Just around the height of my neckline my eyes lifted to see that in the alcove, was a floating metallic sphere. About the size of a soccer ball, it remained absolutely still as I could only do the same while staring at it. It was jet black, the smooth underside of the sphere contrast heavily to the top side, that was covered in hexagonal plates, each with a small barbed spike in the centre. Luckily for me it that side was facing the ceiling.
Slowly as my shaking hand would allow, I moved my right hand for the pistol that was holstered on the left hip, choosing to leave my left hand dangling in the precipice of darkness, some seven inches below the object of my worst nightmares.
Well, some of the bad ones at least.
I managed to get my grip on the pistol and free it slightly before something again stopped me in my tracks, it took me a moment to figure out what it was that had stopped me.
In the top right hand corner of the dark space that lay to my left (I still hadn’t turned to face it) there was something moving, slowly and methodically, it moved out of the darkness right the edge of the opening, so only the front of it could be seen.
My heart dropped to my stomach, the noise that I had heard earlier and so easily dismissed came back to haunt me in the long, crescent shaped metallic face that wasn’t directly facing me, but I knew that it was looking at me.
Now it was all about speed, and maybe a little of that luck that seemed to be floating around back there in the loading bay, a place that I longed to be back in given my current situation. I had no idea where I was, and that made running to safety just that little bit more difficult, right now I found myself side facing death, and running around the darkness to fall, trip or run into pretty much the same…
In the back of my mind the pain in my left foot reminded me that running may be a short lived experience, but right now my whole life had a big neon light flashing “Short lived” attached to it.
I dropped to the floor a little heavily as the sphere clicked into place so that the hexagonal barbs faced my direction, then the whole sound of the world around me changed.
The silence disappeared to be replaced by a whirring sound of hydraulics and a screeching that almost knocked me off my train of thought. As I rolled to the right towards the direction I was headed, the first crunching and almost deafening sound came. The metal spiked sphere crashed into the wall opposite, and quickly retracted, leaving what I knew would be a large, ragged indentation in the solid concrete.
I knew this but never saw it, because I was already running down the corridor as fast as my limbs and injured heel would take me, somehow I knew that alone was not going be enough.
Ladies and gentlemen, making its own introduction, The Jackhammer…
