E (24:59)
We rolled in responding as CDC because it clears places faster than anything else and it keeps civilians from doing heroic things that make our job harder. You show up in a hazmat with the right letters on your chest and no one tries to stop you or call anyone else. By the time our vehicle hit the ambulance bay, security had a rope line up and administration was in the exact kind of panic where they were desperate for someone to take control away from them. We gave them that. We moved in a six man team, full hazmat suits, respirators on. We cleared the corridor leading to the wing, pushed stack back with short commands and kept our pace steady so it looked like we were there to help. The wing was empty by the time we made visual contact with the room. Doors were shut, lights were on, monitors were running. We had eyes on the patient through the room window. She was on the bed, upright, legs drawn up, arms locked around her midsection like she was trying to hold herself together by force. She was swollen in a way that wasn't fluid retention or bloating. Her skin was distended in uneven patches, rising and falling in different places, like something inside her was inflating sections of her and letting them collapse, then inflating somewhere else, then collapsing again. Her face was wet and streaked dark. She was crying, blood thick, bright at the corners of the eyes, then darkening as it ran, and it kept coming. Her mouth was bleeding too. Every time her lips parted, it poured out in short pulses like the pressure behind it was rising and falling. There was blood dripping out from from under the gown, pooling and spreading. We made contact through the glass. She turned her head toward us, like she'd been waiting for someone to finally show up and help her. She said, I can't hold it back anymore, and she got maybe half through the sentence before she gagged on blood and swallowed hard to keep it down. I asked her what she meant by it. She shook her head once, small Vast. And then she started crying harder, and the swelling in her neck jumped like something under the skin had flexed. At that point, our attached scientific asset arrived at the corridor entrance carrying a hard case. He looked through the glass for less than 10 seconds, and then he told me he wasn't going in without her being fully restrained. We cleared the rooms in the hall and sealed the wing behind us after verifying it was empty. The wing was contained as far as physical access goes. We breached the patient room, and a second the door opened. The smell hit us. Blood has a smell everyone knows, metallic and hot, but this had another layer under it, like raw meat left out too long, and it coated the inside of my respirator. She looked at us and tried to speak again, but her stomach convulsed and she folded forward with a sound that started as a sob and turned into something else. As her body locked up, the swelling changed in function. It stopped being random bulges and started resembling a pattern. You could see distinct areas of her torso and thighs and upper arms distend in sequence, then relax, then distend again, like a wave traveling through her, and each wave was deeper than the last. Then the light started. It wasn't on the skin like a tattoo. It was inside her. It lit up in seams between muscle, thin lines at first and then thicker, branching and linking, and they were not straight. They curved and intersected like circuitry, and they glowed a deep red that made the blood on her look black by comparison. The lines weren't static. They grew, etching themselves through tissue, and wherever a line formed, the flesh around it tightened as if the line had tension of its own. Her ribs shifted under the skin like they were being pushed from the inside. Her abdomen swelled outward and had pulled inward hard enough that you could see the outline of her pelvis change. She let out a series of screams, interrupted by choking and gagging, and the sound of it was distorted and wet. We moved to restrain. I gave the command before hands ever made contact. Her back arched violently and her head snapped toward the ceiling and her mouth open like she was trying to draw in air and couldn't find it. Her eyes rolled up, blood still running, and all the red lines inside her frightened at once. The bulges became structure, muscle separated from bone, not tearing like an injury, but peeling like something was unfastening it along natural seams. It rose under the skin and pressed outward until the skin split in multiple planes across the torso and shoulders, and when it split, it wasn't a clean cut. It ripped in jagged lines as the tension exceeded what skin can endure, and the edges curled back like damp paper. What came out was the meat that had been inside her reorganized. A shoulder shape rose first, then the other, then a thick column of muscle that lifted a neck without a head, and as it rose, it dragged more tissue with it, as if it was pulling itself free by its own cognition. The red lines ran through it like veins of light, and they kept forming as it moved, mapping across newly exposed surfaces, bridging gaps, tightening things into place. She was still on the bed as it pulled itself out of her. Her eyes were open and still blinking, but the color was gone from her deflated skin as everything emptied out of her. The thing escaping her grew as it rose. It added length and mass as it pulled the rest of her interior structure into alignment, and it got big fast enough that the rooms stopped accommodating it. Ceiling tiles popped, light fixtures snapped, sprinkler lines broke and water dumped, dousing the muscle surface and running down in sheets, turning the floor into a pink puddle. It stood fully upright and its upper body pushed into the ceiling space, forcing panels aside. By the time it cleared the bed, it was already taller than the door frame. When it straightened, it was nearly 20ft, bending at the torso because the room wasn't built for was muscle, skinless, wet, and steaming into the cold air of the room with no head. Above the thick neck column, there was a light structure, red, shaped like a crown or a ringed crest, not attached by flesh holding position above where a head should have been. The light it cast cut across the ceiling and left a shadow where there was nothing to cast it. A head shaped silhouette projected below it. My Keem froze for a fraction of a second because nothing in training prepares you for this kind of shit. It reached out and grabbed the agent to the right of me. It enveloped him in a mass of large muscle digits that tightened around his torso and lifted him off the floor like he weighed nothing. The crown light hovered above and the red lines across the muscle brightened along the arm that held him, as if the limb was receiving more current. It began separating him, peeling pieces away like it was opening a fruit. It pulled his arm straight until his shoulder joint failed, and when the arm came free, blood sprayed in a hard arc and hit the wall and ceiling. His scream came muffled through the respirator. It set the arm down, controlled like it was placing a treasure. Then it opened his chest. The sound was a wet ripping and then a sudden rush as pressure released. Blood poured down the front of his shredded hazmat suit in sheets as organs and intestines dropped onto the floor. His body went slack. The creature held him up for another second or two, then let him fall. He hit the floor hard and didn't move again. That's when I ordered engagement. We fired controlled bursts, targeting the torso. Because there was no physical head, the rounds punched into muscle and disappeared into it. There was impact and splatter, but there was no sign of any pain response. The creature shifted its weight and the floor cracked under it. A chunk of ceiling came down and crushed the girl's empty body. The scientist deployed a device from his case, some kind of emitter or projector, throwing a patterned red light into the room that matched the lines already in the creature's body. For a moment, the creature's movement stuttered. That moment lasted a second, maybe less. Then it moved faster than we could follow. It crossed a space to my left and backhanded one of my men. He went flying across the room and hit the wall head first, leaving a bloody smear before collapsing into a heap. He convulsed, seemingly still alive, but before we could do anything about it, the thing was there, putting a foot on his back and pressing until the spine broke and his torso turned to mush. The hallway outside the wing filled with noise alarms, people shouting evacuation orders over the intercom. You could hear staff at the far end of the corridor screaming without seeing what was happening because all they had was the sound of gunfire and the building shaking. I lost two more in the next 30 seconds. One was lifted and folded several times before being dropped into the pink pooling floor, a messy square of broken flesh. The other had managed to dodge several rapid attacks while emptying his magazine and reloading, but simply couldn't keep up. It got its hands on him and twisted until he came apart. At that point, it was me, one other agent, and a scientist who was backing up while still trying to work his device, his hands shaking enough that he could barely hold onto it. The creature turned its focus on me. It closed the distance by doing something I can't quite describe. It was almost like it was able to move through a moment in time, ending up where it wanted to be. Behind me. It grabbed me around the torso, trapping my left arm. The grip was like a steel vise, tightening slowly and deliberately. I could feel the hard parts of my vest pressing into me as my ribs started to crack. My vision narrowed. The crown light was above me, close enough that the red glow flashed across my face shield and turned everything into a deep arterial color except the shadowy Outline of a twisted face hanging above that stump of a neck. I reached for the artifact with my right hand. I was told only to use it as a last resort. I deemed this as an appropriate usage. Short length, heavy bone handle with a dormant rune on the pommel. I thumbed it and a glowing blade matching the same same red of the entity sizzled to life. I drove it into the creature's wrist, then pulled it towards me hard. The blade parted the tissue in a clean smoking line. The grip loosened enough for me to drop and land on my feet. But still feeling my lungs complain as air rushed back into them. The creature stumbled back and its body shuddered. The sound it made wasn't a screen scream the way an animal screams. It was layered noise, high and low at once. It went down on one knee, then fell onto its side, hard enough that the floor cracked beneath it. I sprang forward, moving on adrenaline and training. I ran in and cut into the abdomen, the blade opening it, revealing thick muscle and red pulsing lines. It swung at me. I rolled away and the swing hit the wall and continued into the next room. Drywall studs and dust filled the corridor beyond. I pulled the containment spike from my kit. It was a specialized compact device, heavy for its size, a worn metal mixed with something that looked ancient, engraved with shallow channels and ruins. I rushed back in and drove it into the wound I'd made, deep enough that only the tip remained outside and hit the activator. Sharp spikes unfolded internally and locked into the flesh surrounding it. The tip of the device flared red, not the same red as the creature's internal lines, but close. It sparked and pulsed like it was attuning to the thing's energy. The creature stopped moving, its thrashing cut off mid motion. The sound cut off and the whole room went quiet except for sprinklers and distant evacuation announcements and my own respirator filtering my ragged breathing. It rose to its feet in one smooth motion and it turned toward me. The crown light held steady above the neck column. The muscle line still glow glowed, but they dimmed slightly around the containment spike, like the energy had been rerouted. Then it lowered itself and knelt, as if waiting for instruction. I keyed my radio and gave the casualty count and status update. I reported catastrophic structural damage to the wing and adjacent corridor, as well as ongoing civilian evacuation. Then I said, the only line that mattered to awaiting command asset is contained. As I looked at what was kneeling in front of me. 20ft of skinless muscle with a crown of red light and veins of ruins. Whatever this thing is, I Hope you know what you're doing.
