Gord Zajac - Major Karnage

“Just keep swimming.” Karnage did his best to kick and help propel them forward.

It was much farther away than it looked. The white ring slowly grew in size, from a man-sized hole to something that would accommodate a jumbo jet. Exhausted, Sydney pulled them through the grate onto its dry smooth surface. They lay there a moment, catching their breath. Finally, Sydney spoke. “There really are aliens, aren’t there?”

“Not just aliens,” Karnage said. “Squidbugs.”

Sydney looked out at the giant vat of liquid. “What the hell do we do now?”

“First,” Karnage twisted his back towards Sydney, “you can take off these handcuffs.”

“Right,” she said. “Sorry.”

Karnage heard her fumble in her pockets. “Shit,” she said.

“What?”

“I can’t find the key. I must have dropped it.” She ran her hands along the base of the tunnel, then looked with dread out at the liquid. She looked back at Karnage.

He ground his teeth. “This is great. No, this is beyond great. Fantastic! How the hell am I gonna defend myself against a squidbug attack?”

“Maybe you can kick ’em to death.”

“Can’t you just poke the cuffs with a toe or something and snap ’em off?”

Sydney shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“No,” Karnage said. “Of course not.”

“Come on.” Sydney helped Karnage to his feet. “Maybe we can find something at the end of this tunnel.”

Karnage looked down into the darkness. “Where does it go?”

“It goes that way. Come on.”

They walked down the shaft for what felt like hours. Karnage rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms. They were starting to get sore. He tried glowering at Sydney’s back to make himself feel better. It didn’t help.

The tunnel slowly slanted upward. It ended at a bend that took it straight up a few feet before ending at a giant sealed grate. Nothing but darkness was visible beyond the grate.

A set of rungs led up to the grate. Sydney climbed up and tried to lift it. It didn’t budge. She looked around the edges. “Maybe there’s a nodule thing we can hit.”

“I don’t see one,” Karnage commented.

“Keep looking.”

“What’s that?”

A flashing pinprick of white light shot across the grate. The edges of the grate glowed, and it lifted and slid open.

“Nice work,” Karnage said.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Worry about the who and the why later. Help me up.”

Sydney helped Karnage up the rungs, and the two of them pulled themselves through the open grate. Karnage felt like a rat crawling out of a drain. Every movement echoed through the cavernous darkness. The only light in the room was the ring of white light around the grate. All that it illuminated was Karnage and Sydney and a soft circle of grey floor.

The ring of light pulled itself from the edges of the grate, and pooled into a puddle under their feet. It shot a squiggling luminescent tendril forward and formed a second puddle just a few feet ahead of them. A third tentacle shot out of the second pool, forming a third, and then a fourth formed out of the third. The pools propagated themselves off into the distance until they were barely visible at the edge of a black horizon, ghostly white lily pads in the dark, quivering and fidgeting.

“That looks like a path,” Sydney said.

“I know,” Karnage replied.

“Think we should follow it?”

Karnage shook his head. “Fuck no.”

“Me neither.”

The lily pad beneath their feet flickered for a moment, then winked out.

“Is that supposed to be a hint?” Sydney asked.

“If it was,” Karnage said, “I’m not listening.”

The next nearest lily pad winked out. Then the next and the next in a chain reaction of winks that looked like a long line of eyes closing in a Rockettes-style routine. Finally, only one tiny pinpoint of light flickered in the distance.

“I think they really want us to follow the path,” Sydney said.

“Well, they can go fuck themselves.” He looked up into the dark. “I’m not gonna be led around like a rat in a trap! You hear me?!”

The pinprick of light shot off angry squiggling lines in all directions, stretching from horizon to horizon. Then, impossibly, the lines turned sharply upward and shot up walls the height of cliffs. They disappeared behind dark rounded masses above them, and spanned out, soaking the walls in a grey luminous glow.

Karnage and Sydney stared up at the dark mounds high above. White light flashed and popped from bulbous mound to bulbous mound. Suddenly, the mounds twitched, and the entire ceiling slowly lowered towards them.

“Back through the grate!” Karnage shouted. But it was too late. The grate had slammed shut behind them.

They looked up and watched as the ceiling slowly moved down.

As the ceiling grew closer they saw it was composed of thousands of translucent spheres of varying sizes. Dark shapes bobbed within them. The spheres stopped lowering just inches above their heads. The sudden stop forced the dark shapes to float down against the bottom of their spheres. A human face appeared. It was a man with his knees hugged to his chest, sleeping peacefully. He bobbed back up and disappeared into the mists of the sphere.

“They’re human,” Karnage said.

“Not all of them.” Sydney reached up and grabbed a sphere the size of a basketball. She pulled it down. Its curled dark shape bobbed down and up, a tail clearly drifting from its back. “This one’s got a cat in it.” Sydney let the ball go, and it pushed up into the mass, forcing the other spheres to make room. The spheres rippled and bobbed out.

There was a faint rumbling, and suddenly the spheres parted to make room for one the length of a bus. It pushed itself well down through the mass, forcing Karnage and Sydney to drop to the floor. The sphere slowed to a stop inches above their heads, and moved back up again. The enormous black shape within pushed at the curve of glass for an instant, before the sphere and its contents disappeared back up into the ocean of spheres. Karnage and Sydney looked at each other in shock.

“Was that… a whale?” Karnage said.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t see it if you will.”

They tentatively stood. Karnage looked at the millions of spheres floating above them. “What do you think? Two of everything? Maybe more?”

Sydney shook her head. “What the hell is this?”

“Maybe it’s their larder.”

The spheres began to rise. The grey lights flickered out of them and moved back into the walls. The lights in the walls narrowed into tight lines and pulled back down into the floor where they collected in a pool of light under Karnage’s and Sydney’s feet. The room descended into darkness, but Karnage kept staring up, thinking of the millions of spheres hovering above him.

The puddle of light under their feet flowed forward, pulsing patiently just in front of them.

“I think it wants us to follow it again,” Sydney said.

“Yeah.” Karnage stared at the pulsing spot of light. It waited patiently as he tried to stop thinking about what loomed above him. He looked at Sydney.

“Well,” he said, “so long as they’re bein’ polite.”

They followed the light across the floor for what felt like days. It stayed a half-step in front of them, rhythmically jumping ahead to prevent them from touching it with the tips of their feet. Karnage’s feet were starting to hurt and his neck ached from looking down at the light when it finally stopped moving.

Once they were standing on it, the glowing pool shot a coil of light forward that instantly sped straight up a wall directly in front of them. The lights flared out into tiny filaments and outlined a door the size of a hangar bay. The filaments broke apart, and rained down into a large glowing ring around the door. The door spiralled open with a loud aching groan. The lights flowed back into the lily pad under their feet. The lily pad drifted through the doorway, and pulsed patiently on the other side.