Necrocide

Chapter 43

THREE YEARS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK...

The Ambrosia Project seemed to have taken a turn for the worst.

None of the test subjects could tell what went on in the advanced trial rooms, but all they could tell was that it was agonizingly painful. Screams of pain and cries for help were constantly heard around them, like tortured souls trapped in a haunted house. Anytime someone would go in, they would never come back out. The luckier test subjects only caught glimpses of the inside of the advanced trial rooms and the main things they could remember were rows of knives and scalpels and blood everywhere. The floors. The chairs. The once-white clothing of a dead test subject.

But they never saw what would actually happen to them. Or the bodies once it was all over.

While the scientists showed no emotion as they did God-knows-what to those poor subjects, Bennington was the complete opposite. He seemed to enjoy his job too much. There were times he'd walk into the mess hall wearing an apron stained red as a tomato, and he often hid bloody knives in his pockets that darkened right through his clothes. Those brave enough to talk behind his back joked that he either couldn't afford bandages or watched Monty Python so much that he began to believe every cut he received was "just a flesh wound."

As Simon and Hera cleaned blood off the seat from the last trial, Schaefer and two other scientists named Helios and Hypnos by the facility's Greek figure-themed identification system dragged the deceased test subject toward the garbage chute at the edge of the room. It was a young woman with multiple lacerations all over her body, and most of the flesh around her face was peeled off to reveal her teeth. Bennington had gotten carried away with his job.

"You're only supposed to test their pain tolerance as a result of the Ambrosia," Hypnos groaned, both out of disgust and exhaustion as he continued hauling the corpse toward the garbage chute. "No one ever told you to slice her lips off."

"Plus, I thought the point was not to kill the subjects," Helios added. "Or at least not intentionally."

"We may be striving to be gods, lads," Bennington replied. "But we're still humans. We make mistakes, some more often and more critical than others. Not everyone can be saved by our project."

"But you're not saving anyone yet," Helios said.

"Shut your mouth and open up the chute," Bennington threatened.

Helios left Hypnos and Bennington to hold the corpse as he trudged over to the chute and slid it down, revealing a dark infinite tunnel traveling deep down into the unknown. Except for the fact the "unknown" was actually the forbidden sub-levels of the facility that, as far as anyone knew, only contained garbage and the many bodies of the fallen test subjects. Being sent down the garbage chute meant being sentenced to the facility's makeshift catacombs.

But nobody ever expected a so-called corpse to lash out at them one more time.

Before the corpse could vanish into the chute forever, it jumped out at Helios and grabbed his arm with the strength of a titan. Its grip was powerful enough to leave behind bruises from the spot it lurched onto, and it tore off a good chunk of skin before disappearing into the darkness, hissing like an angry snake. Its shriek faded out as it journeyed down the chute until everything went silent and the only thing one could hear in the room was Helios muttering swears underneath his breath in pain.

"What the hell?" Hypnos said, glancing at Helios's new wound. A long bloody gash travelled along the crease of his arm, blood dripping down his skin. He quickly wrapped gauze around the new wound, the white almost instantly overtaken by dark red.

"That looks painful," Bennington said.

"No shit, Sherlock," Helios replied, grasping the gauze around his wound. "If you hand me your knife, I can show you what it feels like. You seem obsessed with taking chunks out of people. Wonder how you'd feel if the same thing happens to you."