Why did they ever think it was a good idea to go uphill?

The tunnel’s uncomfortableness was magnified tenfold climbing up the alien shafts. Even now, with their new clothes and light, it was hard work crawling upward. It was busier too. More squid aliens seemed to travel the tunnels, spraying the claustrophobic spaces with strange smelling oils and other such ointments, so now the humidity was also getting to them.

The squids were content with treating them as obstacles rather than escapees, though, and were more concerned with their ‘jobs’, sliding around the humans as they blindly made their way up the hellscape.

“Oh shit.” So far their travels had been a steadily inclining slope. Neither man was expecting a sudden sharp increase in verticality. It was a dead end, and their only course of action was up.

“Beau?” Ryo questioned him from behind.

“We gotta go up…” Beau pointed.

“How far?” the youth asked. Beau peered up, and didn’t like what he saw.

“Uhhh… I can’t see too far without the light, but several storeys at least.”

“Does it go anywhere?”

“Up!” He could feel the kid groan. “Do you want to risk it?” Ryo nodded.

“Lets go.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Going straight up wasn’t so bad. At least he could stretch his legs, and it felt like they were making much better progress. They passed a few more tunnels deviating off the tall shaft, more squids and more tubes of different colours. It must have been an artery, in more ways than one.

Beau occasionally lifted the light higher, wishing he had something decent like a flashlight with a focused beam. At least then coming to a dead end wouldn’t have been as surprising as it was.

“This is our stop,” Beau called. Climbing around to crawl into the last tunnel, he pulled Sugawara up with him and they took a break.

“I’m thinking,” Beau said out loud, “we start looking to where the cameras are, see if we can find a way to get out of this stank ass vent.”

Ryo nodded his head enthusiastically. He was pouring sweat down his brow and neck. The clothes the squids brought them didn’t breathe much. Poor kid was probably drowning in his own sweat. “...But we’ll take it easy for a moment, don’t want you dropping dead on me, eh?” He shook the kid’s shoulder gently. Ryo didn’t fight back, just laid down still on the floor, composing himself.

Beau crawled a little further down the tunnel and came across another camera. He grimaced before plunging both hands into the goop and pulling it from its cavity. It landed with a squelch, and a light from below blazed through the opening.

This one was as good as any.

Beau looked down into the room. There was a large ledge close by that they could use to get down. Lucky them. He tried to find a seal to pull up the plastic casting, so as not to draw too much attention. He couldn’t see anyone down below, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there. There wasn’t a gap or seal for him to pull on, so he grabbed the alien taser and extended it out, stabbing it into the floor around the cavity.

The soldier flinched as dark blue liquid bubbled out of the wound.

“Fuck it.” Staying quiet wasn’t worth staying inside this nightmare anymore. “You ready Ryo?!” he called, and after an affirmative answer Beau used all his strength to kick down an opening.

The plastic case popped off no trouble and clanged its way down to the floor.

It was a drop of a few feet, but with the ledge close by them it wouldn’t be too far from there to the floor.

Beau’s feet hit metal, then quietly slipped down, landing on top of one of many, many containment vats.

“Your turn.” He gestured to the kid, helping him out of the hole and onto the tube before lowering him down to the floor.

It was eerily silent. The gentle bubbles of a filter gurgling in the background, a slight sloshing of unidentified fluid. Beau wiped the glass of the one closest to him and came eye to eye with a deformed human face.

Eyes large and misshapen, nose and ears non-existent, jaw stretched and teeth moulded into one continuous plate. Limbs elongated while missing fingers and toes. It was like someone’s interpretation of what a human was…

Beau stepped back from the glass, processing the shock, and looked down the hall.

Row after row of vats filled with monsters.

Beau’s chest tightened with a carnal revulsion, anger, disgust and the urge to destroy confronted his senses all at once.

How close was I to becoming one of them? Were they even human to begin with? Beau asked himself, glaring into the eyes of the dead creature from behind the glass. What was the point of it all?

The sharp crack of an alien taser snapped in the air as Sugawara pulled out his weapon and held it ready it for combat.

As they walked further down the hall of horrors, the bodies in the tubes began to take different forms, large muscular builds, stretched lanky skeletons, large heads, black eyes, some even had tentacles protruding from chests and backs. Terrifying skewed visions of living things.

Then, they came across the degrading specimens.

Slowly rotting flesh, cancerous bone growths and cavities riddled with tumours, dozens became hundreds as they carefully crossed the laboratory of malformed horrors.

Beau looked back over the entire facility. It was a storage block. They were all failed experiments, every one of them.

Beau reached for his own weapon and readied it as Ryo had done.

A burst of cold anger forced his hand.

The taser sword punctured the tank as though it were cheap plastic, and a sour stench permeated the air as pink fluid gushed from the opening.

Beau heard Sugawara shout in his foreign tongue, and back away from the encroaching goo.

Beau did not look away even as he felt the fluid run over his feet. He was watching the creature twitch and thrash inside its prison. Dead eyes stared straight ahead, void of understanding, it couldn’t stand under its own weight, and barely resembled an animal. Guttural cries forced their way out of the monster’s lungs, its head smashing against the glass before it sank, lifeless, to the bottom of the tank.

Beau stared it down, watching its final, wretched moments.

Sugawara shouted at him again, desperate, afraid, but Beau only moved onto the next tank and repeated the process.

There was a darkness in his eyes, a deep moral fury burning inside him. He had been through hell, watched the best and brightest suffer pointless torture, but this… This was truly a fate worse than death.

One by one he granted them mercy, aiming for their hearts so the end was swift.

“Beau, stop!” Sugawara shouted. “Help!”

Suddenly the soldier’s attention was drawn to his companion, who was struggling to keep an alien from escaping. A goddamn raptor, the lizard squawked and scratched while Ryo held it in a headlock. Beau charged in to help, grabbing the creature by the leg and forcing his foot through its knee. It snapped instantly. Shrieking in pain the lizard dropped to the floor out of Ryo’s arms. But Beau wasn’t done yet.

He grabbed the lizard by the neck and slammed its face into a full vat, screaming with the full force and fury of his being,

“Are you responsible for this?!” His voice shook with outrage as he crushed the lizard’s windpipe with the might of his bare hands. The raptor could only whimper in reply.

“Beau! Company!” Sugawara shouted. More aliens stood in a doorway, paralysed with fear.

Beau threw the lizard on the floor and made his way over to the enemy. Taser in hand, he dialed it to shock.

They wouldn’t get away with the horrors they created, he would ensure they knew the full weight of their crimes.

There was no room for negotiations now.