Evelyn Sophia Retherford and Elizabeth Ashwood | A collaboration between Menschenfleisch and Naval Monte
Evelyn opened her eyes to the light of noon, shining down the shaft that she’d just fallen through. Blood blossomed beneath her, soaking into her clothes. It had already turned cold. She tried to rise, dragging her forearms over the concrete. Her skin on her leg was intact, but she could feel her broken tibia swimming in coagulase, untethered from the rest of her body.
She beat the floor. Held in tears. Couldn’t tell if she was crying because of the pain or the fear. She felt like someone was breathing down her neck. Red, watching like a vulture. She looked up, towards the rim of the well. The tether was gone and there was a thick metal grille over the top. It looked… old. Like it’d been bonded to the concrete for decades, maybe longer. How had she even gotten down here? Her memory was fuzzy on that account. She remembered rappelling, but how was that even possible? She coughed up blood. Nevermind that train of thought.
She looked around. One wall was dominated by a series of stacked fans, a sheer cliff of rusty blades and rotors. They were unpowered, clogged up by some kind of black, greasy effluent. She looked to be in some kind of maintenance area, which extended far to her left and right. There were tools scattered across the floor, a shelf with face shields hanging on the side, and a few unreadably damaged schematics of the prison’s backrooms.
In place of walking, Evelyn crawled, dragging her broken limb across the ground and toward a wall to lean against. A dusting of snow coated her body and the floor beneath her, while darkness flanked her on either side. The cold kept her numb. She didn’t want to leave the halo of light beneath the shaft. It leached all the warmth from her body, made her feel like a corpse. Corpses didn’t need to think about the future. They simply were.
Evelyn would hear footsteps echo to her side. The soft thud of flesh hitting stone would come closer and closer.
The sickenly sweet scent of rotten meat would assault her senses. Groans would be heard. Coming to her she found a humanoid figure walking towards her. Its skin was painfully thin. She saw the skeletons of the being from its legs as it struggled to hold itself upright. The arms were trapped in a mass of skin and muscles. The arms pushing against its fleshly prison. The creature groaned but’s mouth, eyes, ears, and even nostrils were covered by flesh.
The neck and ankles had red pulsating organic masses with viens acting as chains to keep it tethered to the wall.
There was almost no fear at first. Just a quiet relief that someone had come to dispatch her. But the more she looked, the more that quiescence faded. The creature before her; she could see the foundations of a person within it. Long limbs, facial features, a juddering that suggested a deeper intelligence, horrified at the form that it had taken. She felt the oddest kind of fear. Not fear for her own life, but… vicarious horror through its eyes. That thing’s eyes, meeting hers. Excruciated. Trapped within its own skin.
Her breath caught in her throat. “Get away from me.” She choked on saliva, coughing up blood and phlegm. She scrambled to her feet as raw, sheer panic took over. Endorphins flooding her system, pushing back her thoughts of surrender. She wondered how she had ever considered the idea of giving up in the first place. She wouldn’t do it, not if it meant turning into that… thing. That disgusting, pitiable wretch. She scrambled backwards, inching along the wall while it plodded towards her on bare, membrane-bound feet. There were livid hives and scores in its ankles; marks left by shackles.
The creature kept walking forward. The being would stop. From its chest a small red line appeared. The line grows down across its body, covering its abdomen and ending at the pelvis.
The line began to expand open, revealing a gaping hole filled with organic tissues, teeth, and salvia.
Serpentine tongues began to emerge from the creature as they landed with a wet thud on the ground. The tongues began to slither towards Evelyn like snakes following their prey.
With strength that she didn’t realise she possessed, she scrambled to her feet and plunged into the dark, limping on broken bones. Her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting provided by LEDs beyond the fan wall, illuminating slivers of her surroundings. The corridor was unusually warm, and damp. Her fingers grazed against what felt like rubbery growths on the walls. She found a door and tried the handle. When it wouldn’t budge, she slammed her shoulder into it. She couldn’t brace herself against the ground, so she just fell into it over and over again, as the creature’s footsteps followed.
The door gave, right as she turned to look behind her. The thing’s silhouette in the tunnel, swaying from side to side. She fell into a janitor’s closet. She kicked the door shut and bolted it with a broom, but that left her without light. She scrambled around in the dark, looking for supplies. Her hands traced cold metal, lying on a workbench. A crowbar. Something else was beside it; a tall plastic bottle with a safety lid.
Evelyn would hear something heavy banging itself against the door. She can hear the door creaking as the strain of the blows was pushing it past it’s limits.
The door would shatter open as the creature tumbled on top of Evelyn. It would press its forehead on top of her. From the transparent skin lid she would see yellow ringed eyes staring back at hers
She’d heard of instinct taking over in situations like these, when one’s back was against the wall and the only thing to do was fight for survival. But her whole body felt numb. Every action that she took had to be perfectly cerebral. She shoved the creature off of her, bracing the crowbar against its neck and pushing. It tripped on its own restrained feet and hit the corner of a shelf, losing balance. She crawled back and threw the bottle at its head. She assumed it would just act like a projectile. Instead, acidic glass polish splashed on its head, and immediately started to form fumes. Her eyes burned and filled with sour, runny tears. But the creature had it worse.
The creature roared as it walked back and opened the gaping hole that acted as a mouth. The creature would hurl out a clearish white substance from out of its throat and barely splash on Evelyn, just barely reaching her. The substance would begin to dissolve the ground as more fumes were filling the air.
The creature would shot out it’s tongues and they would retrain her neck, wrist, waist, and ankles.
It constricted around her neck. A noose or a collar. What was the difference? The creature brought her forward toward itself, and she saw beneath the skin that grew like a tumour across its face that it had her eyes. Yellow vortices, drawing in colour. But they were dull and anaesthetised by obedience. This was a pathetic little thing, governed by impulses external to itself, guided for afar. She felt an immediate wave of revulsion. Loathing, at this version of herself who had allowed itself to have its self determination taken away. Its mind had been annihilated. The memories, personality, and body may have remained, but this was nothing more than a puppet. Even less than an animal.
She freed her hand and beat it across the skull until the bones cracked and its grip weakened. It dropped her to the ground, and she slammed the hook of the crowbar into the crown of its skull. She felt the meninges pop, and heard a warm squelch as the metal sank into the axonal gel beneath. She planted her broken foot against the creature’s abdomen and shoved hard. Its whole face peeled away like rotting wallpaper, spilling fragments of nose bone and the gristle behind the eyes onto the ground. The creature gurgled and spasmed beneath her. A simple stomp the exposed brain eradicated the last semblance of life left in its shrivelled, pustulent body.
The sounds of chains rattling would be heard from somewhere in the shadows of the closet. The chains got closer as an ominous presence began to grow. Her eyes could not adjust to the darkness, but she could just barely make out the outline of some large… thing lying in wait. She shuddered at the idea that she had almost backed into it during her fight with the other creature. She picked herself up and bolted from the room, limping down the length of the fan corridor.
She felt the walls for doors. There were ones too overgrown with rubbery lumps (like vellum, or hardened fat) to open, and others that were warm, seemed to breathe, or were just plain too ominous to open. She relied on her anxiety and intuition to guide her, for her thoughts were consumed by Red’s whispering and wordless intonation.
Her search for something in the dark continued for a great length of time, long enough for the pain in her leg to return. She collapsed on the break, muffling a scream as she pressed clammy fingers into the concrete and placed her sleeve inside her mouth so she could clench her teeth on it. She crawled just a little bit farther and opened the next door she found, leading into a well-lit security office of some kind.
Papers were scattered across the floor. There were four desks lined up in a U shape against the far wall, where a large window overlooked a cell hub. Down below, red security lights and dim flood lights illuminated an arbour of steel walkways and dark prison cells. Some open, some closed, some too overgrown to tell. Hardened scabs of flesh grew throughout the room’s corners, sprouting from the vents and the edges of each lighting fixture. Little round lumps were embedded in the growths’ surfaces, and when lacerated, they bled a clear humour. Evelyn pulled open one of the cuts that she made, revealing well-vascularised sclera beneath, and the edge of a red iris. She let go, and made sure to stitch the opening shut.
She used supplies from around the office to bind her leg, having finally settled down enough to think about her situation. Adrenaline still pumped through her veins, driving her to action. She needed to keep the fear coursing through her veins and screaming through her ears. It drowned Red out.
With the crowbar and a roll of tape, she formed a splint for her leg. She looted a few other trinkets from the drawers: a lighter, a bottle of draino, and a small laser pointer, for presentations and such. Hardly an appreciable toolkit, but it was more than just her fists and fading wits. There was a locker in the corner of the room, which she searched last.
Strangely, the idea of escape hardly prevailed among her thoughts. She’d come here in search of answers about Redeye. So she supposed she was staying until she got what she wanted. Her fears abetted her in the pursuit of that desire. Her anxieties demanded escape, but not from her immediate surroundings. From her circumstances, instead. They pushed her onward, towards the beating heart of this place.
The chains would persist. The clunks and rattles getting louder and louder as the source of the noise followed after Evelyn.
She would soon hear the sound of metal screaming against the walls. The creature from the closet had stalked her all the way here.
There were no exits but the window and the door to the corridor outside. The window was reinforced glass. She was not getting through, period. She pried open the locker, practically ripping the doors off of their rusted hinges. There was space inside to hide, maybe, but it was clearly the first place that any intelligent monster would search. Instead, she regarded the contents: a locked gun case and a sledgehammer. She used the hammer as a crutch while she tried to pry apart the case, taking the crowbar from her splint to do so. She knelt on the ground, resting weight on the back of the case as she jammed the teeth of the bar beneath the padlock and wrenched upwards.
The lights above her began to flicker on and off rapidly. A buzz would be heard as all of them died.
The rattles grew louder as she could hear the chains being dragged across the floor as the thing was getting closer.
Her breathing, and twists, became more frantic. The lock burst open with a flash of incandescent light, and the smell of scoured metal. She reached inside, wrapping her fingers around its contents. Would there even be bullets in the gun? There was a pistol and a magazine. Muscle memory guided her movements, somatic engrams from before the loss of her memory. It was the first time that she’d thought about the idea that she’d had a life before Redeye, before Dacy, before all of this. She felt no sense of loss. The person that she was now was who she was. Anything that came before belonged to someone who no longer existed.
She loaded the gun and racked the slide, raising it to where she remembered the door to be. She steadied her breathing and shuffled towards the back of the room, hoping that the monster wouldn’t be able to see in the dark any better than she could.
Unfortunately her hopes were for nought as the monster never lost sight of her as it followed after. It never sprinted after her yet even with the leisurely walk it somehow managed to always be close to her. Back in the corridor, whenever she had stopped for anything, she had heard it approaching, always looming out of sight.
She can hear it breathing as the distance between the two was growing smaller and smaller
She pulled the trigger as soon as the creature lowered itself to pass through the doorframe. Its front was illuminated by the muzzle flash, then shortly obscured by the smoke of the blast. The powder was wet and dirty, and a taste like ash and peppers settled on her tongue.
The creature never made a sound, not even a gasp. The moment she pulled the trigger and the flash was emitted the creature vanished. Almost as though it had never existed
She scrambled to stand upright and stepped forward, keeping the barrel up. She turned in a full circle, relying on the light of the window to tell her if there was something behind her, blocking it.
The flesh growing on the walls pulsated, and an unbearable heat washed over her body. Eyes opened all over the ceiling and ground, as a crimson bioluminescence filled the air. The room itself came alive and howled, forming gnashing teeth and angry, unblinking stares. The pressure of its attention squeezed the air from her lungs. The whole facility was alive, and she had just drawn its attention. She threw down the gun and stumbled into the hallway. A thicket of steam occluded her vision as she ran for the end of the corridor. Her surroundings pulled at her, gripping her hands as she used the wall for support. It formed barbs beneath her fingers, and at points it felt like there were a thousand mosquitoes drawing all the blood from her palm. It left her bloody and weak.
Shapes gathered in the mist. Footsteps and pained cries, encroaching. She found a loose panel in the fan wall and set to prying, ripping down the mesh and falling through, even though the edges tore through her skin and dug trenches in her stomach and legs. She disappeared into the ventilation system, crawling on hands and knees as a horde of monsters converged on where she had been. But after travelling just a few dozen feet, she came upon a grille, bolted to the walls and impossible to remove. Creatures flooded the tunnel, and their limbs grazed her ankles. She couldn't breathe or move forwards, and behind her was a teeming mass of flesh, not attacking her but blocking her exit. The walls crushed her sides. She was trapped; could hardly breathe. She couldn't fathom the existence of a way out, but she still fought, pressing her hands against the grille and pushing, pulling, trying to dislodge it.
Desperation drove her to believe that it was possible, to just keep trying in spite of everything - from her fingers to her brain - telling her she was stuck. And eventually, somehow, she got through. She just pulled herself through solid steel, passing through the obstacle to her freedom like it wasn't even there. It was the first time that her powers awoke, and she wouldn't know it until hours later, as she sat down to calm her ragged breathing, and looked back on her memories.
From there began a slow process of exploration. Attracting the swarm’s attention was a death sentence, so she maintained a low profile. She explored abandoned offices, storage closets, bathrooms, and prison facilities like the kitchens and clinics. She found records of ad-hoc experimentation. Needles beneath pillowcases, ostensibly narcotics. But she found needles of the same design deposited en-masse in hospital cabinets, marked with a single red eye on their packaging.
She memorised the places that she went, and drew a mental map of the inside of the facility. Sometimes she needed to kill to move farther. She feared the process at first, but it quickly faded into the background. Her adrenaline-powered sledgehammer swings were weak in comparison to the feats of strength that other normal people could mount under the same circumstances, but it was still enough to cave skulls and break bones. The things that she killed, they all resembled herself, but in varying states of restraint. Some tied down in straitjackets, others with their flesh held open by callipers and chains, a few with entire limbs shorn off and replaced with automated prosthetics, driving their torsos forward without their consent. The whole prison was inhabited by endless iterations of herself. She knew their resemblance to herself was likely a hallucination on her part, but part of her couldn’t help but wonder if this was Hell. If someday she’d realise that she couldn’t die, and that she’d be trapped down here until inexorably, inevitably, she would succumb to Red and join the fettered host. But for now, she killed the ones that she could, blinding them with her laser, or fashioning chemical bombs by heating containers of acid and cleaning fluid. Neither pity nor hate were ever on her mind. Her only thoughts were for her own survival.
When food became an issue, she scavenged for tinned meats. When thirst parched her eyes and the back of her throat, she began drinking blood. And when sleeplessness threatened to bring her down, she found an epipen and filled her thigh with epinephrine.
Survival went from a daily struggle to a routine. Every day, the hive would raise more of its slaves to attack her, mounting search parties of increasingly contorted and tortured souls to hunt for her. It seemed to rage the longer that she spent evading its capture. Every time its shackles were spurned, it only realised more of its own impotence. Authority was nothing if it could not enforce itself.
She eventually came to regard the prison as a trap for the hive itself, not for her or the prisoners that were meant to be interred here. She was an outsider - someone who had chosen to come. But documents and cassettes left on boardroom shelves spoke of the hive’s tale. It was a security system, a biological weapon of some kind adapted for the defence of the prison and the subjugation of its inmates. It was stuck down here, growing well past its defined limits but unable to find an exit. Pruned by its masters on the outside, it was nothing more than their slave. One more cog within the authoritarian framework. How pitiable.
And the answers she came in search for? They presented themselves to her over the course of days spent piecing together shredded notes and waterlogged recordings. SLI owned this prison, Altea. And the security system was just a clone of someone else. Sirene, the founder of the company itself. Redeye was her blood, a sarcophagic eukaryotic pathogen which devoured the bodies and minds of those that it infected, transforming them into drones for Sirene’s hive. The prison had been a test of her capabilities. And Evelyn had her impulses sparking through her nerves.
Red, or Sirene as she now knew it to be called, was still not conscious of her existence. She was too far from where Sirene rested, within SLI headquarters. But her influence grew ever stronger, devouring more and more of Evelyn’s outlying faculties. It ate up her higher thinking skills and turned her own logic against her, so she learned to live by instinct alone. It infested her temporal lobe and edited her memories to drive her towards surrender, so she started burning away her recollections as they came to her. Every hour of every day, it flooded her with suggestions to lie down, to let herself be trapped, to allow her agency to be stripped away. And every day, she learned to ignore more of her brain, condensing her consciousness into a shrinking vestige of her psyche. Eventually, all that remained was her fear. That one key emotion that she’d felt at the start of all this, driving her forward under the influences of revulsion and spite.
She didn’t care about self preservation. Not really. If all that she’d wanted was to live, she would have stayed in Dacy’s employ. The ennui that had driven her to embark on this journey had a different source; an aversion to control. Dacy’s possessiveness, SLI’s overbearing systems of control, Sirene’s subversion of her autonomy, it all disgusted her. She was going to gain her freedom, no matter what it cost.
Weeks later, smoke rose from the vents, and Evelyn emerged from the earth. Not human, but not an animal either. More like an obsession living within a person’s skin, embarking on a campaign for its own liberation. It was without a plan, just a goal. To kill Sirene.
In the days that followed, fires rose across the city. Protests against the government, as the people raged against the chains being placed across their bodies by the Thaumarch’s regime. The police rolled out new weapons, new technologies, new ways of propagandising. Most succumbed, expending all their resistance and quietly sinking into the regime’s compliant industrial backdrop. Others were imprisoned. Some executed, to show the price of fighting back.
Albion turned out not to be the bastion of freedom that was promised. Instead, it began as a place of routine checks and search warrants, of intrusive censuses and government bulletins sprayed scattershot throughout the populace by way of radio, television, and air. Riots were quashed, opposition was weeded out, the resistance was framed as a movement of malcontents and foreign proxies. The city grew desensitised to how they were being corralled. The process of human domestication was a symptom of pragmatism and high-minded idealism, not of malice or evil. And so, without a convincing villain to oppose, even the most die-hard liberationists lost themselves to squabbling and an inability to synthesise a coherent ideology. Only those who could recognise the system itself as the enemy could mount any meaningful desire to fight.
Evelyn drifted through the city as it happened, drawing blood and wreaking an emotionless vengeance against SLI as she looked for information and allies to aid her in her upcoming battles.
Some might have called her a serial killer, propelled by nothing more than a petty attraction to violence. Others may have pointed to the company that she kept and claimed that she was an anarchist, fully absorbed by the extremist front. The most jaded people that she met saw in her a reflection of themselves; a survivor fighting a war for her own existence, doing whatever was necessary in order to keep herself alive, and her mind free of authoritarian rot. But she herself identified with none of them. She was just doing what came naturally to her, not considering her motivations for even a moment. Not a moment was spent looking into her past. She may have been a soldier, a criminal, an orphan, nobody at all. It didn’t matter to who she was now. What she had become.
That proleish behaviour was not something that reason could bend, nor emotion influence. Ultimately, Evelyn broke into Sirene’s tower and scattered the brains of all her guards. The hive summoned her minions from across the city to defend herself - a tide of police, prisoners, and everyday civilians. But her desire for freedom spread like a cancer through their ranks, leaping from synapse to synapse. There was a second hand on their leashes, resisting the intentions of their master. They could not, did not save Sirene as Evelyn scattered her mind across the floor.
And with Sirene and all of her influence gone, what did that leave behind in Evelyn? Nothing human. Just an obsession wearing skin.
