Brotherhood of the Last Shelter

Down On The Floor

"Cover your heads!" I screamed.

The pale creature in the vent lunged forward, its split jaw opening so wide the skin around its cheeks tore open. Yellow fluid sprayed across the floor, hissing where it touched the concrete.

I didn't throw the cylinder into the shaft. If the blast took down the roof right now, we would be buried alive under four feet of rubble.

Instead, I kicked the brass regulator valve clean off the neck of the tank with the heavy heel of my work boot.

A deafening roar filled the small room. Compressed gas shrieked out of the broken valve like a jet engine, blasting a freezing white cloud straight into the creature's wet face.

The pale thing recoiled, letting out a strangled squeal as the sub-zero blast froze the yellow slime on its snout into brittle ice.

At the exact same instant, the front door gave way.

CRACK.

The last steel bolt ripped out of the stone wall. The heavy alloy door swung violently inward, slamming against the workbench.

Standing in the dark tunnel outside was a towering bulk of black cables and jagged steel plates. It wasn't a hound, and it wasn't alive. It was a salvage frame, twice the size of a man, with a rotating pneumatic drill where its right arm should have been. Three red lenses in its torso burned like hot coals through the dust.

The radio static hadn't lied. The things from below had broken into the subway, and the machines were hunting them.

The machine stepped through our shattered threshold, its red lenses locking onto the pale, thrashing flesh of the sewer creature by the vent. It didn't even look at Donald or me. To the machine, the biological anomaly was the primary threat.

"Get Marcus behind the rack!" Donald yelled, his voice raw.

Donald lunged forward, grabbing Luggard by the collar of his jacket and hauling him backward. Together, they dragged Marcus behind our heavy steel shelving unit, shielding the injured man with bags of dry concrete mix.

The drill machine charged.

It moved with brutal, mechanical speed, its iron boots cracking the concrete floor. The whirling steel bit on its right arm drove straight into the pale creature’s chest with a sickening crunch of breaking ribs.

Black grease and yellow slime exploded across our north wall.

The pale beast screeched, wrapping its rubbery limbs around the machine's torso, its bone spurs scratching violently against the iron plates. The two monsters slammed into the brick ventilation flue, tearing the fan motor from its mounts.

The heavy iron fan housing crashed to the floor, rolling between my boots.

The room was collapsing around us. The brick intake shaft was buckling under their combined weight, and thick black smoke was pouring from the machine's crushed battery core.

"James!" Donald shouted from behind the metal rack. "The line! The 600-volt line is still live!"

I looked down at the wall seam.

The heavy brass jumper clamp was still hooked into the red cable, sparking wildly where the alien semiconductor plate had melted into the wooden workbench. The purple glow was dying, replaced by bright blue electrical arcs that leaped from the copper wire to the floor.

"Donald! Throw me the cable cutters!" I barked.

"They're under the bench!" Donald shouted back. "Near the machine's leg!"

I didn't hesitate. I dropped flat onto my stomach, crawling across the wet, filthy concrete.

Above my head, the two beasts thrashed in a frenzy of tearing metal and ripped muscle. A chunk of broken red brick hit my shoulder, sending a dull ache down my arm, but I kept crawling. My hand brushed against the cold rubber grip of the heavy cable cutters lying in a puddle of water.

I grabbed them, rolling onto my back.

The drill arm of the machine tore through the sewer beast's throat, pinning it against the brick wall, but the creature’s lower claws tore open the machine's chest armor, exposing a glowing bundle of high-density capacitors.

Both of them were locked in place. Neither could move.

I pushed myself up, brought the insulated handles of the cutters around the live copper feed, and aimed the bare, sparking ends straight into the machine's exposed chest.

"Down on the floor!" I roared.

I jammed the live six-hundred-volt leads directly into the machine's torn power bank.

A blinding flash of blue-white light swallowed the room.

The shockwave hit like a physical fist. The sheer electrical feedback vaporized the moisture in the air, creating a concussive bang that blew the remaining louvers out of the brick wall.

Blue lightning crawled over both creatures, fusing the machine's gears together in a shower of molten sparks and boiling the pale beast's blood until its skin blistered and popped.

The machine's red lenses shattered. The pale beast went limp in its mechanical grip.

Then, the high-voltage fuse somewhere deep in the city subway grid finally tripped with a muffled, distant boom.

The lightning died.

Darkness rushed back into the room, broken only by the dim, flickering beam of Luggard's flashlight behind the shelves.

Thick, grey smoke filled the air, smelling of scorched flesh, burned copper, and fried circuits.

In the center of our bunker, the two giant corpses stood locked together in death, fused into a smoking heap of iron and blackened bone, blocking the ruined doorway.

I lay on my back, gasping for air. My hands were numb from the electrical backfeed, and my ears were ringing so loud I could barely hear my own breathing.

A pair of boots appeared beside my head.

Donald dropped to his knees, his face black with soot, his hands shaking as he grabbed my jacket and pulled me into a sitting position.

"James," Donald breathed, his voice cracking. "James, look at me. Are you breathing?"

"I'm... I'm breathing," I coughed, spitting a mouthful of bitter dust onto the floor. "Luggard? Marcus?"

"We're here," Luggard’s voice came from the dark. He stepped out from behind the rack, his face pale, his arms wrapped tightly around Marcus’s good side. "We're in one piece. The shelves held."

I sat up slowly, leaning against the side of an empty water crate. Every muscle in my arms felt like it had been pulled through a meat grinder.

In front of my eyes, the familiar blue screen flickered back to life, but this time the edges of the box were jagged, glitching with static lines.

Emergency Encounter Resolved. Hostile Entities Neutralized: 2/2. Shelter Integrity: 12% (Critical Structural Failure). Perimeter Status: Breached. Warning: Secondary swarm attracted by high-voltage discharge. Arrival estimated in 45 minutes.

I stared at the red warning text.

The room was ruined. The door was torn off its hinges. The ventilation fan was crushed scrap metal on the floor, and the entrance was plugged only by two smoking corpses that would draw scavengers from every sewer line in the district.

We couldn't stay here anymore.

Donald looked at the broken doorway, then down at the two dead monsters, his jaw tightening into a hard, stubborn line.

"The room is finished, isn't it?" Donald asked quietly.

"Yes," I said, forcing myself to stand up on shaking legs. "We have forty-five minutes before more of them get here."

Marcus looked up at us, his hand pressed against his bloody bandages. His voice was faint, but clear.

"The clock tower," Marcus rasped, pointing toward the ruined air shaft behind the dead beasts. "The brick wall is broken open now. The emergency ladder to the park is right behind them."

I looked at my two brothers. We were bruised, filthy, and our safe bunker had lasted less than a day. But we were still standing, and we still had our lives.

"Pack everything in the bags," I told them. "We're going up."