Stephen Landry: The Red Flower Was a War Factory

I began to search for my rifle. Maybe it was an animal that snuck in through some hole in the wall. Even though most wildlife on Errikus was hostile there were still a few smaller rodents, nothing more then scavengers feeding off the leftover kills of hell beasts and gorins.

The screeching sound came from behind me now. I turned around and swear I saw my assistant crawling on the ground. I saw his hand against the wall and his head twisted backwards. His eyes were a solid white. Then he was gone.

I had my rifle in my hand now. I was ready to shoot. There was no way what I had seen was real. My meditation had become unsettled. My mind was playing games with me. My implants immediately guided me to the most likely conclusion. I was feeling guilty. I was burdened by the death of a teammate, the death of a friend. Never in my life had I felt such pain. My stomach turned and I lowered my rifle.

“I’m going to be sick.”

The morning came.

I woke up on my side. When I opened my eyes I saw a dove appear in front of my eyes. It slowly faded into the air.

Every inch of the room had turned red. It was covered in blood. Every one of my team lay dead on the ground torn limb from limb. My hands were covered in blood but it wasn’t my blood.

I screamed.

Everyone had been killed in the night.

“HELP!”

“HELP!”

I screamed into my headpiece.

I began to wander room to room looking for any survivors. There was no one left. No one but me.

“Did I do this?” I was talking to myself, “I couldn’t, and there is no way I could do this.” Why was this the first thing my mind jumped to? How could I even imagine myself being capable of something like this? My implants were making me think this way. They were driving me to find a killer, a murderer and the only suspect was myself. I am only human after all.

“What about a hellbeast? A gorin? Maybe some psycho followed us from the city.”

I was pleading with my implants now. I was crying.

“It had to be a hellbeast, what else could rip these men limb from limb.” I could feel my implants feeding me logic.

The door was vaulted shut.

There was no one here alive but us.

This place has been abandoned for thousands of years.

“The skrav, it must have been a skrav, they are always finding new ways to kill us,”

Then my implants stopped.

The screaming in my head became an abrupt silence.

I began to look around.

I know I was walking back towards the exit but the embryos. The egg sacs had all disappeared.

I was still carrying my M44 rifle so I unstrapped it from my back and began to hold it in front of me.

“They were alive.” I said. My implants didn’t seem to feed me any other ideas. I had finally found the answer.

Where were they now?

It didn’t make sense. Why they didn’t attack me?

The hallways twisted and turned. What was once the throat had turned into a giant endless maze. Was someone controlling the bunker twisting the world around me? This was more then a trap. This was hell.

The path before me splintered and I saw one of the creatures. It was no longer a baby. It had an elongated head with a nose that bent upward and looked like an adolescent hellbeast. It stood on two hind legs and had four smaller arms in front of it. Its skin was pure black except it had small orange and red tumors covering it’s lower body. It looked like it was molting. It’s teeth were pure white and seemed to glow. It let out a cry as if it was dying. For a moment I began to feel bad for it. Then I remembered the bodies. I remembered my friends. I shot it. Over and Over. I never let go off the trigger. If it had been a hellbeast I would have melted it’s skin, bone, and organs into thin air. It stood there as if nothing was happening at all. It almost seemed to feed off the energy.

The only animals that could feed off radiation were the monsters rumored to live inside the immer. I had heard the trinity; the Tritan, Aelita, Erebus had seen them once or twice. The stories said they were massive whale like creatures that could grow to the size of a planet and swim through stars.

My implants began feeding me ideas. I could run but this thing was more then likely going to be faster. I could keep firing but it would soon attack me. My mind began to imagine the Lethe thousands of years ago experimenting with hellbeasts manipulating their genetic code and the code of some captured leviathan from the immer.

Then the underground fortress began to shake.

“It feels like bombs,” I said aloud. I began to panic even more. They were bombing this place. Something must have happened on the outside. Something must be happening. I began to scream again in rage, in panic, in fear. I ran. I ran so far and fast the creature didn’t bother to follow.

My anxieties made me throw up several times. The walls were closing in.

I began to hear a high pitch sound tearing at my eardrum. I felt like I was being tortured.

“This could be a simulation.” I said to myself.

My implants began to flood my mind with ideas on how that would work. We had the technology. Simulated realities have been used by many different species. Perhaps I had been kidnapped. Perhaps this was some kind of experiment and I had given myself freely to it.

“If I kill myself I’ll just wake up.” I said.