Kyle West - Darkness

The turret thundered and flashed as the bullets zinged through the air, entering the Behemoth’s thick skin. In the fitful light, I could see the Behemoth’s features — he had been a man, once — probably someone from this very Bunker. He was completely bald, with sickly pink skin. As the trail of bullets reached the Behemoth’s head, he crashed to the floor with a pained groan. His white eyes flashed up and settled on mine. I froze.

There was something familiar about the shape of those eyes. Something familiar about that face, even as grotesque as it was.

Then, I realized…this Behemoth had once been my father.

I felt it, even if the Behemoth didn’t. I knew it to be true. As this realization dawned on me, the possibility became greater and greater.

“Dad…”

There almost seemed to be a gleam of recognition in those haunted white orbs — or had I just imagined it? Whatever the case, the Behemoth’s gaze broke as it crashed chest-down onto the floor, planting its face on the ground. The surrounding Howlers scattered in the wake of the monster’s fall. I could only stand, quiet, as the Howlers started battering the Recon anew, their yowls and yips loud in the air.

“What now?” Ruth asked.

Neither she nor Anna knew what I had just witnessed. I could only stare, uncomprehending. I had finally settled on the truth that I would never see him again. Now, I had seen him again, and in a way I would never be able to erase from my mind. My dad had turned into a Behemoth.

I realized that I was just standing there, not answering Ruth’s question. This was yet another thing I had to forget. I had to keep it to myself — at least for now. We had to focus on getting out of here alive.

“The Recon’s already pointed toward the door,” I managed. “We just have to open it.”

“Open it, how?” Anna asked.

We looked at the Howlers below. We were safe as long as we stayed up here. The Recon itself was fortified enough to where it would be a long time before they could break in through the reinforced glass of the windows.

“I don’t think we can access it remotely,” I said. “There must be at least two hundred Howlers down there. Maybe more. Pretty much every Howler that heard us in Bunker 108.”

Anna nodded. Her hands still grabbed the handles of the turret.

“Maybe we can just crash through the door?” Ruth asked.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said. “A Recon is powerful, but the door might not fall off cleanly. After all, the garage doors themselves are highly fortified and were designed to withstand something like that.” I frowned. “No, we have to find some way to open it.”

“So, where is the actual opener?” Anna asked.

“Darcy seemed to have some sort of opener to get the motor pool door open,” I said.

“If you want to dig around his nasty corpse, be my guest,” Anna said.

I didn’t relish that thought. If there was someone who had to do it, it would have to be me. I was the only with immunity to the xenovirus, since I was already infected. But not until we had exhausted the most obvious option.

“It needs to be unlocked and opened manually from this side, then,” I said.

“We can’t do that unless we kill the Howlers,” Anna said.

“Maybe there is a ‘safe’ way we can do it,” Ruth said. “Take out a few with the Recon, duck into the Recon, wait for them to explode. Rinse, wash, repeat.”

“That might work,” I said. “Or I could just do it myself. I can’t get infected.”

“Yeah,” Anna said. “But you can’t just walk around with slime on you. You’ll just infect us.”

Anna did have a point. “Right. We can take shifts, then.”

Anna nodded, holding my gaze for a moment.

“I’ll take first shift,” I said. “If this thing is going to blow up in our faces, I might as well be the guinea pig.”

Ruth smiled. “I see what you did there.”

“What?”

She sighed. “Never mind.”

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

We fought the Howlers in just the way Ruth suggested. I took the first shift, and it became clear that we had far longer than five seconds to shoot. From death, it took the Howlers about twenty seconds or so to start inflating. To be safe, we shot for ten second stretches before ducking back inside the Recon.

Needless to say, it was two hours of shooting, hiding, and coming back out again before all of the Howlers were dead. When it was my turn, I tried not to look at the faces of the people below. Though it was dark, I was afraid I might recognize one of them. And I kept my eyes off the Behemoth. Thankfully, its face was turned away, toward the door from which it had come. I only hoped it had been my imagination, but deep down, I knew it wasn’t. My main regret was that I would no longer be able to think of my father without thinking of this.

I would have to tell Anna about it eventually, but for some reason, I just kept my mouth shut. After a while, though, she started to notice something was wrong. We were standing in the cargo bay while Ruth took her turn above.

“You alright?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I think the big one was my dad.”

Anna’s eyes widened. “Really?”

I nodded. “Something about the face…”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“It is what it is,” I said. “He had to turn into something. Why not the biggest, baddest Howler there can be?”

“I guess that’s one way to look at it. Still…”

The turret above began to fire, interrupting our conversation. It continued shooting for another moment before turning off. Ruth’s feet clambered down the metal ladder. She hopped to the floor just as several plops sounded from outside.

“I think I got the last of them,” she said.

“Well, let’s check it out,” I said.

Anna and I climbed the ladder, followed by Ruth. When we reached the top of the Recon, I looked out at the gory mass of some two hundred bullet-riddled Howlers, ripped asunder by their own explosions. A fetid stench hung in the air, horrible beyond imagination. Purple coated the floors, the walls, and the Recon itself. Very little of it had made its way to the turret, thankfully. It was dead quiet.

“Let’s go see about opening that garage door,” I said.

We went back into the cargo bay. With a deep breath, I unlatched the back door, allowing it to slide up into the ceiling of the Recon. We stepped on the sticky purple floor. This couldn’t be safe, romping around with all of this purple gunk on our boots, but we were stuck here unless we tried to open the door.

The girls followed and I did my best to ignore the severed limbs, purple gore, and bits of flesh that plastered every surface.

“This is beyond disgusting,” Ruth said, wrinkling her nose.

“We’re almost out of here,” I said. “Just don’t touch any of it. We just need to get to the door.”

We walked around to the front of the Recon. There were less bodies here, and the metal pull-up garage door was right in front of us. A little bit of purple flecked its surface, but it looked like it had escaped the brunt of the Howler massacre. There were two handles, one on each side of the door. Anna went to the other side of the door to get the left handle while I got the right. We gave it a pull. It was locked in place.

“Here,” Ruth said.

She twisted a knob on the right side of the door, while Anna untwisted one on the left.

“Again,” I said.

Anna and I lifted. The door didn’t want to give, but after we put our backs into it, the door suddenly shot upward, retracting into its slot in the ceiling. Outside, red dusk was revealed, and a blast of dry, cold wind bit at my face. The red sky stretched hazily above in its perpetual blanket of cloud. A wide ramp of rock led upward to the surface, and rock walls rose on either side until the ramp was even with the surface above. I had no idea where we were, because no one had ever told me where the motor pool exited from Bunker 108. Only authorized personnel had been allowed to use this entrance, and Chan had hardly used Recons in the interest of not alerting Wastelanders to our location.