Dead Space: Isolation

I don’t know what happened!” Tight Wind explained frantically from the other side of the call. We were nearing the Healing Through Faith hospital when the pegasus soldier got the transport’s receiver working again. Well maybe it wouldn’t be appropriate to give him the credit, the receiver was working fine. Truthfully, his fears were correct, the soldiers just couldn’t pick up.

“It looks like they shot each other...” The pegasus mused, looking off at something. Presumably the other two soldier’s corpses. “Danik looks like he was hit by a grenade,” this was the first time I got to see Wind without his helmet. He looked like a skinny, frail buck with a dark grey mane and soft yellow eyes. His pale tan coat grew more white while he examined the bodies. “And seems like a few shots went through Tiedemare’s helmet.”

“That doesn’t seem right...” Cutter mumbled. The next few minutes were theories between the two soldiers of what might have happened. Eventually Cutter told Wind to expect two friendly ponies. I hardly listened, instead looking to the hospital in the distance. I could see it at the end of the long street we were on. The purple, twisted crest in the shape of the Holy Marker sat on the top of the large building, covering a large portion of the front. Underneath it was the hospital’s name in Unitology. It was hard to tell from a distance but it looked like the place was boarded up.

Fuse was at my side, studying our destination as well. “So Caasi,” she began, still looking toward the hospital. “What’s your story?” I was surprised by the question and if I didn’t have my helmet on my feelings would have been obvious.

“I didn’t know you cared,” was my response. She wasn’t the friendliest pony, she made no effort to hide that but she wasn’t not friendly to me. I mean she wasn’t nice to me either but she hadn’t really interacted with me much since we got here either.

“I’m just curious,” she explained. “You seem so... different from everypony else on this mission.”

“What do you mean?” We all seemed different in my opinion. A cowardly pegasus, a senator's daughter, a technician that was pretty good with a pistol, Cutter seemed to be the most normal pony among us that would be chosen for something like this. He was a strong and effective leader, a good soldier.

“Well everypony here has had combat training,” she pointed out. “Even Tight Wind I’m sure has shown some fighting prowess to be here now. You’re different though, you’re not a soldier.”

“What about you?” She was a technician but she fought like a soldier. At least to me she did.

“I’m an army technician, Caasi. They taught me how to defend myself,” a chuckle echoed from her helmet. “Why do they think you were chosen to come with us?”

“My mom,” I sighed. She looked at me, her expression masked by metal but the tilt of her head told me she was confused. “She’s a senator housed in Ascension. I was an engineer working for the city there. She was able to pull some strings and get me here. Not that I really wanted to,” I rolled my eyes.

“Then why’d you come here?” she asked.

“I...” I really had no answer to that. It was something my mother wanted me to do but I never really cared much for her anyway. So why had I? “I honestly don’t know. I suppose simply because it’s a job,” I shrugged. “I got jobs all the time back in Ascension and did them without question. I guess I just saw this as one of those.”

“Well look here that got you.”

“Yeah...”

***

“ARG!!” Cutter bellowed while he slammed himself against the boarded up entrance of the hospital. With a loud crack, the boards and doors broke open after the third impact from the massive stallion.

“Well then,” Cutter huffed, panting loudly, “Here’s our way in.”

“Why are we even going through here?” I asked, looking at my holographic map. The hospital wasn’t anywhere near the power station and we certainly didn’t need to go through it from here. If we were hoping to get to the power station before nightfall, I doubted we’d make it. The clouds above already shined a brilliant pink, telling me that dusk was arriving.

“The tram,” Cutter said, moving into the building. The light from his Pulse Rifle illuminated the room as he scanned it with his weapon. The interior was much of the same as the apartments we saw. I assumed the inside of all the buildings were similar. Writing on the walls, the chairs from a waiting area were strew about, ridiculous amount of blood on the walls and ceiling. Much like the apartments, there was no corpses to be found. Not even horribly mutilated, chewed on ones. More small hoofprints lined the wall and ceiling, except instead of only one set, there were dozens and it sent chills down my spine for some reason.

“The what?” I looked around the room, taking in each gruesome detail. The initial shock from when we stumbled upon the apartments wasn’t as strong, but I wasn’t used to the sight of the carnage. I was expecting it, but it was still very hard to accept.

“There’s a series of tram tunnels underneath the city, linking to major sites in the colony,” Cutter finished his scan and glanced back to me. “This isn’t my first trip to Harmony. Best part is that they run on their own power, incase something happens and ponies are in need of quick travel.”

“And there’s one in the hospital?”

“The hospital is an important place,” Cutter pointed out. A sound echoed from a nearby hall.. It was a sickening wet noise and the only thing I could compare to it was when I was sent to an old factory where I found a swarm of cockroaches that bred in the walls. At first I thought it might have somehow been the bugs but then there was another sound that accompanied it. This one was similar to something sharp penetrating flesh followed by growling and hissing I traced back to the zombies, the Necromorphs from the apartments.

Cutter and Fuse remembered too, readying their respective weapons. I aimed my tool toward the hall as well but I wasn’t sure how effective it would be against the undead. The bright blue beams of light from our aiming systems seemed to dance with each other’s as we moved toward the the hall. The entrance of the hospital branched off with stairs and a ward.

We turned to the ward, where the noises sounded from. The ward was somehow worse than the entrance or the apartments. The bodies of the patients were either torn to pieces or simply gone. The beds were drenched in red liquid and blood trails led from them to smashed open vents. The beds also had some pale, chunky, vomit like fluid strewn about them.

Our weapons aimed at the source of the sound, which was partially obscured by a dirty curtain and a medical table. Something poked out slightly, a pale hide with the tips of tentacles flailing about. Soon the growling was louder and the sound of ripping flesh echoed through the ward.

Whatever was blocked now jumped out of its cover. This had to be a Necromorph, but the Necromorphs we saw were different and all had similar appearances... I think. I didn’t get too good of a look at them. I was too busy running for my life. I think I got the basics though, namely the large blades that come out of their backs that they used to balance on their hindlegs.

This one though... It landed on a pair of pale, messy wings that seemed to stretch over most of its body. It’s head was a light blue eyeless pony head though. The most disturbing thing about it though was a meaty wet meniscus justing out of its forehead, ending in the pony’s horn. Scratch that, the most disturbing thing about this creature was the realization that this thing was made of two different ponies. A unicorn and a pegasus almost like a horrific pseudo alicorn.

Fuse’s shot buried itself into the creature’s eye socket. It let out a shriek that nopony could possibly make and retreated into the broken vent with a flap of its grotesque wings. That’s when two familiar blades jabbed into the floor and a Necromorph similar to the first few I’d seen rose off the medical bed with a large hole in its head. This one was darker than the other necromorphs, it looked more decayed and a yellow light shined at us from its eyes.

Cutter growled and sent a barrage of Pulse Rifle rounds deep into its rotted torso. It did nothing to stop the undead beast as it calmly walked towards us on it’s hind legs. The blades coming from it’s back clanged on the ground being used as its forelegs. Its mouth opened much wider than possible for a pony, the skin on its cheeks stretched like taffy until the bottom jaw detached from the rest of it and dropped to the ground. Its cheek skin sagged beside its mouth and several wildly flailing tentacles extended from its throat, dropping a green substance from them.

I was so focused on the monster’s face that I didn’t realize the rest of its body was going through similar disgusting changes, bones jutting out of its hooves, hair and fur dropping from it, even its ribs beginning to poke out of its skin and as these changes went on, it moved faster.

By the time Cutter’s gun clicked empty the thing was charging us. Fuse took off a portion of the Necromorph’s head with a well placed bullet but it did nothing to slow it down. I was too petrified having the corpse running toward me to do anything. Luckily I didn’t need to. Cutter bashed his body into it when it was close enough to us. It tumbled back on the ground while Cutter stood over it menacingly.

“The elevator is on the second floor!” Cutter yelled as the creature’s back bent awkwardly to get back up. “I’ll catch up!” A blade launched at the stallion but Cutter deflected it with one of his gauntlets and bashed his helmet into what was left of the monster’s skull. It flinched back and sent another blade at the Captain with a roar. Cutter tried to deflect it as well but the sharp appendage found purchase in a less armored part of his leg. Cutter yelped from the limb digging deep into his leg but he yanked it out and slammed his armored hoof into its face, pulping the rest of its head.

The beast wasn’t done yet but I didn’t have a chance to see the rest of the fight because Fuse and I took off up the stairs. The second floor wasn’t much better off, bodies ripped up, blood everywhere, several Necromorphs stalking the halls... exactly like the first floor besides the layout.

The necros somehow didn’t see us right away and Fuse used this to her advantage. She lifted her hoof above the ground and a blue light shot down from under it, shooting down the hallway and to the right in the form of a line.

“Locator says this way. Come on!” Fuse barked and raced down where the locator told her where the elevator is. I followed without hesitation. The necros noticed us but we ran past too quickly for any of them to successfully attack us. Soon we amassed a large amount of zombies after us. They were slow and clumsy on their hind legs however, giving Fuse a few seconds at a time to check her locator.

We reached the room with the elevator to an unsettling sight. A nurse stood before it, waiting for us. Her blue eyes were lifeless and secreted the sick green goop that came out of the dark monster’s mouth. Her coat and scrubs were coated in blood and more of that green stuff. She held both a bonesaw and a bottle in her magical grip.

She flung her bottle at Fuse but the unicorn charged right through it, her armor protecting her from the shards, and collided with the nurse. The nurse stumbled back and heaved her saw into Fuse’s shoulder, bouncing off in a flurry of sparks. Fuse pressed her pistol against the nurse’s horn and fired. The nurse let out a long inequine moan as Fuse caught the saw in her magic grip, digging it into the nurse’s neck with a whirring sound.

She continued this until the nurse’s head of cut from her neck but the nurse didn’t die. Instead, her body rose onto its hind legs and the flesh of her upper torso ripped to shreds like tissue, large flailing tentacles taking her body’s place.

“Fuck me...” Fuse stared up at the tentacles flailing above her. She narrowly dodged one of the barbed appendages as it slammed into the ground where she once stood, destroying a medical bed that was behind her.

The tentacles were too preoccupied with the technician to notice me watching in amazement. I aimed my Rivet Gun at the base of one of the new limbs and shot molten steel through it. It dropped to the ground detached to the rest of the body. Fuse noticed this and jumped over a low sweep from one of the barbed tentacles, the saw still held in her grip. She brought it horizontally along the base of one more limb and the rest of the body fell over limp, including the last tentacle.

The group of necros had gotten uncomfortably close and I ran after the other mare. We made it to the elevator and clicked the down button but nothing happened. The group of necros behind us hissed and roared down the hall, prompting her to click repeatedly.

“Fuck!” she yelled out in a mixture of frustration and fear. “It’s locked!”

“Hang on.” I told her, looking at a panel to the side of the elevator.I pulled the panel out and I could see a variety of wires behind it. “Buy me some time!” I told her, calibrating my kinesis module on my foreleg to a gentler setting.

“Easier said than done.” Fuse growled, looking at the hall with her pistol at the ready. The necros finally made an appearance from the hall, stumbling on each other while they tried to get to their next victims.

An explosion shook the room and Cutter charged through the horde of zombies, a dozen severed limbs following him. His dash had a domino effect on the necros in the hall, knocking most of them over. Once he was at a halt he turned and fired a line of Pulse rounds into one of the few standing monsters, severing it’s bladed appendages and mulching the head. These ones seemed much weaker than the dark one.

“Aim for the limbs!” he shouted to us, firing another grenade into a pile of knocked over necros. “It’s the only way to kill them!” Soon Fuse charged into the fray with Cutter but after that I’m not sure what happened with my companions. I was focused on re wiring the elevator. I blocked out the gunfire and roaring from the zombies behind me, giving my full attention to the energy from my forehoof extending and lifting the wires inside the wall almost like a unicorn’s magic. Soon enough the red light above the elevator glowed blue, telling me that it wasn’t locked anymore.

“I fixed it!” I yelled out, pressing the down button. The door opened to an occupied, dim elevator. My eyes widened. The pseudo alicorn was waiting for me. It jumped on me, knocking me on my back as I screamed for help. Its wings wrapped around me and the intestines from two different ponies gripped around my body, holding me close to it. I struggled and fired rivets into its underside but its grip didn’t loosen.

It raised its horn into the air, ready to penetrate my skull. That vomit like fluid spewing from its mouth and onto my chest. A pistol round penetrated the creature’s horn and it screamed from its toothless, vomit filled mouth. Cutter charged and bucked the monster off of me with enough force to send me to my belly. My companions ran past me and into the elevator.

“Come on, Caas!” Fuse called out. I rose to my hooves only to duck again as a blade slashed above me. I launched myself toward the elevator and jumped in just as Cutter launched a grenade, decimating another large portion of the Necromorphs and pressing the button down.

I leaned against the wall and sighed, tears rolling down my cheeks. How was I going to survive this? I was going to die in this city.