novelraw Chapter 422: Something That Needs To Die
Chapter 422: Something That Needs To Die
The corridor outside Alexei’s cell had been loud for hours in the way he hadn’t heard in a really long time. Not since the time he annulated the ’class’ under him at the State Run Orpanage for taking the last peice of stale bread before he could get it.
Ah... good times.
Metal doors slammed shut with enough force to echo through the walls. Boots pounded outside of the corridor that they were locked in. Speakers barked orders that nobody seemed to be able to obey fast enough.
Every sound came with the same sterile echo, as if the whole facility had been built to amplify panic.
Then a different noise started bleeding through the vents.
It wasn’t the siren. It wasn’t shouting. It was a wet, collapsing sound, like something alive being turned into something else one breath at a time.
Alexei listened to it without moving, because listening was safer than guessing or assuming that he knew what was going on.
Then, the smell reached him next.
Sweet rot watered down with disinfectant, thick enough to coat the back of his throat. Alexei’s stomach didn’t turn. His body had stopped pretending to be fully human before he could ever blame the fleeing on the creature inside of him.
Still, the scent was wrong for this place, wrong for humans who had been so careful about sterilizing everything around him.
His creature snarled the moment it hit him. That’s not bleach. That’s death. Real death. And it is coming closer.
Alexei stayed sitting on the narrow bench bolted to the wall.
His hands were loose in his lap, his fingers uncurling and re-curling as he sorted the sensory input into useful pieces. The air pressure was shifting, pulling harder through the vents like someone had thrown the building into a different protocol.
He knew what emergency containment felt like. He’d lived through it in other facilities before he had been sent to Country N and the KAS team... and long before this world decided rules were optional.
This was the same. Negative pressure, the system reroute, the building trying to breathe inward to trap something.
Only this time, it smelled like the building itself was inhaling disease.
A thud echoed down the hall, heavy enough to shake the cell door. It was followed by two more. Alexei counted on instinct. The rhythm wasn’t a firefight. It was bodies falling, one after another, too close together to be coincidence.
His creature pushed hard against the inside of his skull. Let me out. Let me out now. Someone is killing our food. Someone is coming for her.
Alexei didn’t answer it, too caught up in trying to process everything going on around him. He let Psycho rattle itself raw against his nerves while he kept thinking.
Not every smell meant danger. Not every death was theirs.
But Sera’s absence had been the only thing in this wing that never made sense to him. They had taken her to another place, away from the men, away from whatever experiments Mercer thought he could run without consequences.
That meant the consequences of their actions were already happening somewhere else.
The vents hissed louder.
A breath later, a scream cut off mid-note. The sound was sharp enough to slice through the sterile hum in the walls. It ended wet, not like a gunshot, but like a throat filling with something it couldn’t push out again.
Alexei stood.
The chains on his ankles clinked softly against the metal floor as he moved to the bars. His cell was reinforced, more like a small pen than a room, with a thick glass front and a secondary steel gate behind it.
The glass had sensors embedded in it and a lattice of wire that glowed faintly with power.
He could break it if he had time. He didn’t.
His creature slammed against him again. She is close. I can smell her. I can smell what is on her. Open the bars... or better yet, give me the bars and let me break them.
Alexei pressed his palm flat to the glass. It was cold. The cold wasn’t a comfort, but it was familiar. His breath fogged the surface in a thin white smear. He listened again, pulling apart the sounds like a puzzle.
Boots ran toward them, not away. That meant the CDC still believed they could contain whatever had breached the wing. Their training kept them moving even when their instincts should have been screaming to retreat.
He almost admired it.
A crash echoed farther down the corridor. Not a door. A wall. The metal vibrated with the impact. After it, there was a brief, ugly silence that carried weight more than sound.
Then the screaming started all at once.
Alexei couldn’t see it, but he could map it out in his mind.
The voices weren’t close enough to be in his line of sight. They were coming from the junction near the decon bay where they had entered.
That meant the breach had hit the facility’s circulation. It was spreading toward the cages.
His creature laughed, low and vicious. Good. Let the humans be the ones trapped for once.
Alexei’s eyes tracked the thin line of corridor visible through a narrow angle past the door frame. He could see the white floor, the overhead lights flickering between emergency red and raw white, and the faint shadows of movement beyond.
The air grew hotter and wetter in the span of a minute, like too many lungs were exhaling rot at once.
He smelled it again, stronger now. The rot wasn’t just a scent. It was active. It had an edge to it that made the skin on his arms tighten. This wasn’t a natural pathogen drifting through old bodies.
This was something alive in the air.
And it tasted like death.
Alexei didn’t know the exact name of it yet. He didn’t know the shape. He just knew the taste of the air had changed in a way that had never happened before.
His creature already knew what it was going to do.
It’s not the traitor and it definitely isn’t human. It’s something else. Something that wants her. Something that stands between us and our forever. Something that needs to die.