Page 36 of Reaper
My brain froze for a split second, and I swallowed down the bile threatening to rise in my throat. My head jerked towards the mummified remains of the membrane on the walls and ceiling of the basement. It was beyond dead. Nevertheless, the same sensation of being stalked I had felt that first night they had given me my private room aboard the ship came back with a vengeance. Heart pounding into my throat, I moved hastily towards the elevator, my eyes flicking between the various patches of dead membrane. I blindly pressed on the interface to call the hovering platform, feeling stupid for my irrational fear while being grateful that even should the membrane come back to life, it wouldn’t be able to harm the Creckels as long as they remained closed up.
When it finally arrived, I took the platform up to the main floor. As soon as I reached it, my heart nearly jumped out of my chest upon hearing the tortured screeches of the man being attacked. Multiple voices overlapped each other, shouting orders and suggestions while the team tried to liberate the membrane’s victim. Among them, I distinctly heard Jessica’s voice attempting to calm the poor man. Martha and Madeline both stood in the hallway, staring in horror into my parents’ lab where the drama was unfolding.
I rushed to the door, my gorge rising at the sight of the horrible vision similar to the one that had haunted me for weeks before being rescued. Terrence, standing near my mother’s computer, was fighting off the membrane that had landed on top of his head. In my visions, I had been the one being digested while helplessly trying to free myself from that silent predator.
Doom’s and Reaper’s efforts to liberate Terrence only made things worse. Both in their battle forms, the Warriors slashed and hacked at the membrane that had wrapped itself like a fleshy blanket over Terrence. However, you needed to cut it in very tiny pieces to ‘kill’ it, although it didn’t really die... yet.
The membrane was a complex organism, without an actual brain, that responded to a series of stimuli and needs. The Kryptids trained it through a cycle of pain and pleasure. Right now, the membrane was in serious pain from a critical state of starvation. Its instinctive need for survival superseded any other pain. As long as it had enough muscle to latch onto its prey, every single one of its cells in contact with Terrence would secrete a digestive acid to break down his flesh and absorb it.
By cutting up the membrane, the Warriors were merely allowing it to spread over a greater surface of its victim. Some of the smaller pieces they had hacked writhed on the floor where they had fallen, reaching out for other pieces to rejoin into a stronger patch to resume their attack.
“Stop! You’re making it worse!” I shouted to Doom and Reaper while rushing towards one of the drawers to retrieve a thick pair of arm-length protective gloves. “Hold him still, but don’t try to cut the membrane,” I continued, my hands tossing things around in the other drawers as I rummaged in search of the electric wand. “Jessica, sedate him!”
Without a word, she darted out of the room to race back to the Infirmary on the ship. I cursed under my breath at failing to find the wand in yet another drawer.
“Fucking do something!” Martin yelled, pulling out some sort of blade.
“Don’t!” I pleaded, trying to contain my growing panic while also trying to block out the agonizing screams of the poor man. “You can’t peel it off him. It will just make—”
And then I found the wretched wand.
“Yes! There it is!” I exclaimed, yanking it out of the drawer before turning towards the screaming man. Shoving Martin out of the way, I approached Terrence. “Hold him still,” I ordered the Warriors.
Without hesitation, I flicked on the electric wand, the narrow, forked tip of the stick crackling with electricity. Thanks to my upgraded optical aid, I easily recognized the brighter, pinker spots of the membrane, indicating the most active bundles of nerves. I zapped one located near the edge of the flap covering the left half of Terrence’s face, including part of his lips, most of his nose, and his left eye. That section of the membrane immediately went limp, the nerves and muscles rendered numb by the electric discharge. I reached for it with two fingers while zapping the bright spots in that vicinity, peeling the flap off Terrence’s face, before it sustained irreparable damage.
I swallowed back the gasp of horror and pity that almost escaped me as removing parts of the membrane revealed the extensive damage to the poor man’s face where the digestive acids had begun eating away at his flesh. Despite Doom’s and Reaper’s best efforts, the man’s struggling to free himself, and in response to the atrocious pain he felt, just made it harder to accurately target the bundles of nerves. Just as I was lifting the membrane off his head, Jessica ran back inside, breathing heavily.
In the split second she took to press the hypospray containing the sedative on Terrence’s scorched neck and inject him, a flap of the membrane all but jumped onto the back of her hand. Jessica hissed in pain and yanked her arm back, stumbling a few steps backward. Lucky for her, that flap had been attached to the larger segment wrapped around Terrence, preventing it from latching on to our Medical Officer. She gingerly cradled her arm to her chest, an angry red blotch on the back of her hand indicating where the hungry membrane had tried to devour her.
But I couldn’t focus on her right now. With Terrence going limp, I had an easier time zapping the rest of the membrane off him and off the Warriors holding him up. Thankfully, their scales—even thicker now in their battle form, not to mention the vicious spikes along their arms—protected them from any real damage from the membrane. My own shoulder-length glove sheltered me from its attempt at making me its snack.
By the time I liberated Terrence, the initial sections of the membrane I had zapped were slowly recovering. I electrocuted them while the team rushed the poor man out of the base on a hover stretcher. I then proceeded to do the same with the flaps that the Warriors had cut off earlier and that were still writhing on the floor.
“We need to burn this thing so that it doesn’t hunt someone else,” I told Reaper, while rolling up the limp membrane into a bundle. I gestured with my chin at a metal door on the wall with a thick glass viewing port. “Open that door for me, please,” I said, picking up the membrane and holding it at arm’s length from me.
Reaper complied without question. In the five steps it took me to reach it, the wretched membrane was already trying to climb my arms to reach my exposed flesh. Thinking on his feet, Reaper grabbed the electric wand and zapped the damn thing a few times, allowing me to toss it inside the incinerator. He immediately slammed the door shut, then locked it.
Through the viewport, I watched the membrane slither along its surface, looking for a way to get to us. A part of me ached with sorrow for it. I understood too well what debilitating hunger felt like. But worse still, as much as the membrane had become an abomination, for decades it had kept the modified Creckels and me alive. While killing it now was both an act of mercy and the only way to ensure our team’s safety, a part of me felt like a traitor for murdering the last surviving section of what had helped feed me for two decades.
When I activated the incinerator, nothing happened. It shouldn’t have surprised me considering so many things had become defective over the years. My heart sank further. Even though the membrane wasn’t a sentient creature by any standard definition, it felt pain. I didn’t want to condemn it to a slow death while it starved, which would likely take a few days if not a couple more weeks as it fed off itself. Thankfully, after the third attempt, the incinerator kicked into action.
Unlike the membranes inside liveships that emitted sounds—at least according to my mother—this specific membrane didn’t. And yet, I could have sworn it had screeched in agony in the seconds it took for it to be burnt to cinders. It was completely illogical of me, but my eyes pricked, and my throat tightened painfully as if I’d just witnessed the death of a long-time frenemy.
In a way, I had.
Taking a deep breath, I turned to Reaper, looking at him without truly seeing him. “I have to go help Jessica,” I said distractedly. “There’s a specific way she must clean the flesh before treating it to reduce scarification and the risk of sepsis.”
“All right, love,” Reaper said. “I’ll wrap things up here and then catch up.”
Feeling numb, I nodded and hastened out of the base.
Chapter 14
Reaper
Ilocked gazes with Doom. The fathomless dark pool of his eyes devoid of sclera reflected the thoughts crossing my mind. As one, we turned to the computer on the desk. Terrence had hacked into it. The micro data key plugged into it had finished downloading all the files he’d been copying while we were attempting to free him from the membrane.
“What the fuck could he possibly want with this old research?” Doom mused out loud, while removing the key.