Sneak Peek: The Hungry Stars, Interrupt - Defiance (Patreon)

Kevin, Susan called to him. He wondered if her body was still falling. He’d heard the voices of the dead before and wondered if he’d gone mad. What are you doing?

“You know what I’m doing. It’s exactly what we talked about.” He had to be crazy, didn’t he? The dead couldn’t talk. But it sounded so real, like it was coming from nearby and not within his own head.

But we were wrong. You’ll see that. We were wrong.

We were wrong, another voice answered in support of Susan. Another ghost. It sounded like Kelile. The tall man had been taken – died – three days ago. Next to Kevin, the rope shivered. He looked up, the flashlight affixed to the end of Widowmaker shining up to the tunnel he had rappelled down from. It caught the glinting of eyes and then revealed a face peering down at him from the tunnel mouth. It was Daniel. Or what had been made of Daniel.

He had four arms now. Two were on the lip of the tunnel, on either side of the rope. The other two were shaped almost like his original arms, but those charcoal-limbs were nonetheless unmistakably inhuman, grown from the nightmare gestating within his stolen flesh. They were holding onto the sides, as if he’d been caught trying to decide whether to climb down the rope or skitter across the walls like Susan. His limbs had become grotesquely long. The skin and muscle had torn, with biomechanical growths connecting the elongated segments. His eyes, once a kind brown, shone pale blue, slowly changing with the rest of him.

If Kevin were to find himself in a horror movie, he supposed Daniel would be grinning. It would be a malicious grin, too – much too wide with teeth far too white, but instead there was only a terrifying blankness on the man’s face. Kevin could even see the gap in his mouth where Daniel had lost a tooth in the fight with Kareem. At being detected, he paused, tilting his head briefly before backing away into the darkness.

“Run then!” Kevin shouted, bolstered by rage. “You can’t have many left, can you? I can go through the rest them! How many, then? How many are left?” A pause, his voice shaking. “How many of you do I have to kill again and again?” He almost wept. These were his people, his friends. His responsibility. They’d trusted him and he’d led them all to their deaths. Worse than death; he’d led them to damnation. “How many times is enough?” He screamed into the dark, his voice swallowed by the endless silence around him.

It was only broken by the whispers of the dead.

But we’re not dead, Kelile assured the cardinal. His voice was nearby, but Kevin couldn’t find him. We were saved. We were wrong all this time. You can’t kill us, but we can see how you are hurting. We can take the pain away. You can join us.

“Shut up,” the former cardinal snapped. The dead weren’t – couldn’t – be talking to him. He’d gone insane, truly insane. He lashed the reins of the anti-grav sled across his chest and began to pull it. The damage it had suffered meant that while he didn’t have to pull its full weight across the walkway, he still felt the mass of its cargo, or at least enough that it was an effort to move.

Even as a young man, he didn’t know if he would have had the strength to singlehandedly pull a five hundred megaton bomb.