‘Why me?’ Kara asked herself. ‘I’m just an assistant.’
She had chosen to stay late that night to care for the lab rats and to prep the ones they were going to use tomorrow for testing. The lights had gone out when she was in the middle of changing their water and she had gotten attacked in the dark by an intruder. S he fought to protect herself from him but he managed to stab her with his knife before she could get away. It penetrated deep into her side making her lose a lot of blood. She pressed a hand against the wound in an attempt to staunch the bleeding as she stumbled through the dark to where they kept the most valuable of the lab’s creatures; the symbiote.
The symbiote was an artificial life form created by the lab for medical proposes with help of military funding. It had shown quite a bit of promise in the most recent tests. During the tests, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, right up until it ate its hosts from the inside out. But in spite of this she knew that it was the best chance of her surviving the night. The wound by itself would be fatal if untreated but she doubted the intruder would let her live long enough to receive help. She could hear him looking for her in the main hallways as she used the maintenance tunnels to get to the main lab where they kept the symbiote contained. She hurried as fast as she could to the lab and her only hope for surviving the night.
When she got there, she went towards the control panel of the symbiote’s still glowing containment unit to release it. It still had power due to being hooked up to a separate power source so the symbiote would remain contained in case the power went out in the rest of the building. She could see the symbiote’s shapeless form moving aimlessly in the giant glass tube of its containment chamber and she watched it formed a pair of white ‘eyes’. It used them to watch her as she approach the containment unit’s control panel.
When she reached the panel, she began to manipulate the controls to open the creature’s cell. It watched her work for a moment before using a part of its body to form a question mark symbol on the inside of the tube. She looked up at it with a sad smile knowing that it was at least semi intelligent but she didn’t have the time or the strength to explain what was going on. She could feel herself grow cold and her sight grew dim as her body weakened from the blood loss. She paused for a moment to look one last time at the symbiote before entering the final command that would open the containment tube and release the creature. Now finished, she leaned on the console before collapsing and falling to the floor.
The creature confused and concerned for her, created multiple question marks with parts of its body and started to bang against the walls of its cell in an attempt to get her to react. It ignored lights illuminating it when they turned red and started to flash but it reacted when the emergency hatch on the side of the tube broke its seal, letting in a rush of outside air. It recoiled from it preferring the warm humid air of its enclosure then the cooler dry air its creators’ favored. It looked over at the woman’s still form before deciding to brave the unfavorable environment to go and help her. It poured out of the hatch and onto the floor moving swiftly over it to where she lay.
Comments (0)
See all