" Do it!" Mohini commanded.
Ruchi gave her a determined nods and exited the control room. She had the permission she needed to incinerate that goddamned head. She couldn't wait to get to the lab, to consign it to a fiery death.
Ruchi failed to notice that Vice Captain Sudhir who was right beside Captain Mohini, monitoring the horrifying events in the engine room and keeping an eye on the ships vitals, had quietly slipped out and was shadowing her, as she made her way towards the lab.
The Z1000 display case hosting the head was capable of many tasks, not just storage. It could analyse the chemical constituents of an object, disinfect it, perform dissections and of course, destroy it. Most importantly all this could be done with the flick of a button. This was a boon to Ruchi, who did not want to touch the head.
She found this new found terror of the maligned body part at odds with her intellect, everything that her scientific training had taught her.
Yet, here she was, in front of the head. In the grip of a terror that had transformed her from a scientist to a cowering Stone Age cavewoman.
The things she had seen. The things that happened on the ship. That Was happening on the ship currently. All leading to one undeniable truth.
There was no scientific language, no scientific methodology that could help explain the head's vile influence and deadly intentions. She did not want to spend one more precious moment with an invisible serial killer on this ship.
Space station Sudarshana was a few hours away and she did not want this curse to be preserved and passed over to other scientists and the innocent residents of Sudarshana.
So she did not waste a second. She accessed the panel on the Z1000 unit and toggled through the different menus presented to her onscreen, to bring up the destruction protocol.
She felt her sense of dread heighten. The eyes on the head was closed, but she it was not fooling anyone. She knew it was sentient, capable of great harm.
She chose the incineration mode and waited for the sequence to load up.
<enter your id>
She put her name in.
<enter security pin>
She typed in the 14 digit strong number she had memorised and used several times while operating dangerous equipment in the lab.
Initiate incineration mode. YES , NO.
She didn't think twice before pressing yes.
She stepped back and waited. The progress bar slowly inched towards completion as the equipment warmed up.
What would her scientist parents think of her at this moment. Her mum was a xeno-archaeologist and her father was geneticist. She grew in a house where the mere mention of stories about ghosts would have been scoffed at by her father.
"When you have a perplexing problem, do not resort to your baser instincts, view things through the lens of science," her father would tell her.
But her mother was always supportive of alternative methodologies, other ways of looking at things.
"Trust your guts Ruchi. Know that we don't have all the answers. If the cave drawings that I find regularly is anything to go by...," her mother would stop and look at her father. "And I drew conclusions from it and put it in a scientific paper. I would be a laughing stock. But the possibility remains that our ancestors may have worshipped deities that may be extraterrestrial in origin," she would say pointing to the sky.
"Bollocks!" Her father would respond.
The progress meter was fast approaching the completion marker..
"Not long to go," she muttered she impatiently tapped her knuckles on the table.
<The door opened>
She turned around and glanced.
There was no one there.
"That is odd," she said.
Incineration sequence in 5,4.
She turned and looked back at the machine.
3,2,1
<failed ignition>
Nothing. Just some smoke snaking out of the nozzle that was meant to spew forth hot fire.
Nothing.
She checked the Digital screen. Green means Go. Green means, the head should have been a charred mess by now.
<A smash behind her>
Startled, she looked behind her again.
No one there, but she discovered the wall panel which housed the Camera's vital electronics had been smashed in.
She looked up at the camera monitoring the room. The red light was missing.
Someone was in there with her. Someone with bad intentions.
She decided to press the Go button one last time before making a run for the door. She wanted it destroyed. Gone.
She pressed the button without success.
<failure to launch>
The incineration system was offline.
"What the fuck!" She said slamming her hand on the table.
<riser>
She saw something reflected on the glass unit. The reflection of a serpentine monster juxtaposed on the head.
One terrible creation meeting another.
It was behind her.
"God,' she said. A word she hadn't uttered in years.
She grabbed a forcep lying on the table, with the intention of turned around swiftly and stabbing the creature in the face, instead, she felt its strong, clawed hands grab onto the back of her neck and left arm.
The thing, whatever it was, had the strength of 10 men. She felt like a tiny gazelle in the mouth of lion, an enduing image from one of the nature documentaries she watched as a kid.
The creature pressed her face against the glass case. The Rakshasa'ss evil eyes opened to gaze at her terrible plight. Its lips curled up. Arrogance lit up its face.
It slowly poked out a long grey, dry tongue with a cracked surface, like the bark of a long dead tree, and licked the surface of the glass. Ruchi was glad she is on the other side of the glass..
She screamed, struggled, stomped her feet, shook her arms to loosen the creature's grip on them.....all in vain.
And it did not take Kindly to her protestations.
The monster slammed her head into the glass repeatedly.
Her skin tore open, her skull cracked and the flesh that held her memories spilled out onto the glass. On the other side, the head kept licking the glass in a frenzy, desirous of the bloody contents smeared across the surface of the case.
Although it couldn't taste the contents of her brain, it could taste her pain, her fear, her desperation, her sense of having failed at her duty in her final moments. And this it valued over any taste of real flesh.
The dread rose in Mohini as she tried to raise her crew on the Comms channels.
"Raghuram report in. Ruchi have you managed to incinerate the head. Sudhir where the hell are you?"
The camera feeds had dissolved into static on her control panel.
She realised, she might be the only one left on the ship, trapped with a serial killer who had managed to cut off video links to key areas of the ship.
As this thought about the video channels being compromised ran through her mind, her eyes fell on the panels in front of Sudhir's seat. He had direct access to communications scanners and the ship's video and audio feeds.
She stepped forward to take a closer look. But it was as if she already knew what her eyes were about to absorb.
The control had been trashed.
"Sudhir..."she said..
<door opens>
She slowly turned around.
Entering the cockpit, wearing Sudhir's uniform was a hellish creation. It was an imperfect amalgamation of a serpent and a man she knew, a man who was once her husband's friend, a man who had nefarious desires for her.
Its snake eyes blinked as it gauged her intensions. A long forked tongue flicked in and out of his mouth, which featured two great fangs and rows of serrated teeth.
It was not a prefect transformation. She could see that the existing human structure had been twisted with evil intentions to create this monstrosity. Scales and blotchy human skin and exposed flesh created a tapestry of horror so disgusting, Mohni was struggling to keep her lunch down.
There was no mistaking its intentions. While it may have been an imperfect physical specimen, it had perfectly married Sudhir's hatred towards her with its blood thirsty demonic soul.
It strolled towards her with supreme confidence, like the blessed soldier of a merciless elder god, destined for fame in the bloody halls of hell.
Comments (0)
See all