Specimen : Blighted Monstrosity, Fauxnir

The teeth ripped and tore. They scraped across her like says, ripping her clothes to shreds and taking chunks of skin with them. The thing’s head slammed into the wall harder than the drop pod landing. Iris screamed, but not from pain. Not one single pain sensor had gone off. The bite couldn’t break her sub-dermals. She screamed because her clothes were getting ruined.

“Fuck off!” The micro-blade had dug into the thing’s palette, sliced straight through the flesh and dug in. She could feel the GPS receiver in other other hand, precariously held between the opposing jaws, but safe. So, she twisted the sword and ripped through the mouth. The graphene edge hacked through, cleaving part of its jaw straight off. That released her legs as it thrashed in pain, whipping her around like a rag.

When she turned the blade around to slash, it released her, sent her flying through the air and back up the concrete tunnel she had come from. Iris hit, rolled, and sprang back to her feet. Silvy’s voice popped into her head the moment the hummingbird detected her. “Iris! What the hell is happening?”

“Now is not a good time,” she shouted back. She only had an instant to see the thing, the corpulent flesh with mismatched eyes, before it barreled at her once more. She hacked down with her sword, straight between the eyes and barely felt any resistance. The head kept coming at her, knuckled down like a charging rhinoceros. Like it hadn’t been cut at all, it slammed into her and picked her off her feet.

She hit the wall behind her hard enough to shatter the concrete, half her body getting buried as pain sensors started to flare. Some of her joints had bent. The valves regulating her oxygen intake clogged and a choking sensation grabbed her mind. Before the internal reserve could kick in, the biological monster reared back and shook its head out. The cut had bifurcated its face, and the two sides slapped together as it straightened its neck once more. It was like it didn’t have bones, or a brain. At least not a brain where it should have been.

It lunged forward again, broken maw gaping. Iris ripped herself free of the wall and rolled. She hit the ground as the thing bit into the wall. “What kind of monster doesn’t die when it gets its head cut open?” she demanded, sprinting back up the basement tunnel.

“How do you expect me to know? I don’t even have a visual feed on it!”

“Well, get one,” Iris screamed as she sprinted back up into the cabin and bolted for the door. The floorboards shattered beneath her, a forest of fleshy appendages encircling her. She hacked through the ones in front of her, dropping the tendrils like reaped chaff. One survived behind her though, and grabbed her by the ankle. The monster flicked her back, smashing her body through the roof before she cut herself free and let herself go flying through the air.

One of the hummingbirds intercepted, letting her slam into its body to catch her. Beneath the hazy blue sky, she hacked and coughed, clearing her air vents and sucking in fresh, relatively speaking, air. “Silvy, I’m going to need something more than a micro-blade,” she said as she stuffed the GPS receiver into the hummingbird and told it to stay well away from the monster. She’d need both hands.

“What the hell did you find down there, Iris?” Silvy asked. The roof of the cabin shredded in half as the biological monstrosity emerged. The size of it was like a blue whale had sprouted legs. “Oh, I see. How does an orbital strike sound?”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Iris said, getting lowered to the ground by the struggling drone.

“Please delay it for thirty seconds.”

Iris sighed and sheathed her micro-blade. She shouldered her mag-rifle. The stock didn’t sit right against her shoulder, not with ragged flaps of cloth and silicon wadded up across her joint, but it still synchronized with her vision. The crosshairs popped up as the thing spotted her. She started firing.

Mag-rifles didn’t use explosives, but the sonic booms of the slugs still have a satisfying blast as she put round after round into the thing. She drew a line from chin to sternum, each slug punching a hole through the monster the size of her fist.

It didn’t bleed. No matter what she did to it, it didn’t bleed. The wounds oozed something that glistened, but it wasn’t red, it was white, contrasting the black flesh. The oozing fluid didn’t even give a satisfying gush. It dried up after barely trickling across the cannabis field. “Oh no,” Iris said. “It’s fungal.”

“Iris sweetie, sit tight. I’m sending in the wolves to put some fire on it.”

Iris scowled and slotted another magazine. The creature had already shaken off the impact and was crawling over to her. She glanced up at the open sky, the gap between the trees made by the farm. She was dead center in the best spot for an orbital strike. “Unless they have actual fire, I’m still going to be in trouble. This thing’s a mutant.” She racked in a slug and took aim. In three round bursts, she punched a salvo of slugs through each of the creature’s eyes. Had there been a brain, it would have been turned into paste, but fungi didn’t have specialized cells like that.

It just charged at her, sprouting new eyes along its shoulders. No brain at least meant it wasn’t a cunning creature. Its attack was nothing more than another open mouthed charge.

She switched back to her micro-blade and vaulted. A twist and twirl, she flipped over the head and cleaved through its neck. The graphene sliced straight through the semi-structural mycelium. Its jaw gouged into the loam, ripping the head structure clean off as Iris landed atop the elongated neck. The thing didn’t even flinch in pain, like she had done nothing more than trim its nails. “Time?” she asked, sprinting over top it and dragging her sword through the flesh like a box cutter.

“Fifteen seconds. The drones are arriving now. Give them line of fire and get some distance,” Silvy said.

Iris sliced through one of the new eyes, bursting the sack of gel, and leapt off. “Roger.” Combined fire from the chrome boys laid into the thing the moment she leapt off it. They shelled it from all sides, hammering rifle rounds through the mutated flesh until they shredded through its legs and beached it. The creature still didn’t scream, even as it fell atop the crops and thrashed forward.

Iris took one last glance over her shoulder. The wounds weren’t dribbling the white fluid anymore. New eyes were sprouting from folds in the fungal flesh. The wounds looked like they might even be shrinking, sealing up, regenerating.

Then the orbital strike hit. Faster than its own noise, Iris saw the field flicker and flatten. The pressure wave rippled out as she dove for cover behind a tree. The noise and the shockwave hit her from behind, throwing her to the ground as the farm went up like a volcano. Dirt geysered into the sky, higher than the canopy.

It didn’t stop there though. The shockwave echoed, like it went down and bounced off something below. The world cracked. The dirt, the roots, the tree itself between her and the farm, all lurched downwards. It collapsed inward, taking the farm, the cabin and everything into an abyss below.

Iris fell with it and she finally realized just what the structure was : a missile silo.

“Iris! Iris hang on! I’m calling in backup. Rescue is coming!” Silvy screamed before the radio connection degenerated into nothing but static.

Iris could barely listen. She sprinted along falling debris, leaping from rocks to the concrete slabs that had shielded the aperture up to the oversized tree. She ran up the trunk as far as she could and leapt, micro-blade overhead. She slammed it into the dangling slab of concrete shielding like an ice-pick and–

The concrete shattered. Her sword found no purchase. She tumbled down through the pit and hit the stagnant water below. Her body, mostly metal, sank. Again, she had to switch to internal oxygen as she groped through the darkness. Rather than a bottom, there was a mushy bog of rot. The silo had been reclaimed by nature and turned into a swamp beneath the forest.

Iris found her way up only by happening to grab hold of something straight and metal. Turned out to be a staircase railing, but she hauled herself out of the mud with it regardless. The noontime sun overhead struggled to illuminate the silo, fighting with odd shadows and corners. The walls themselves seemed to suck the color from the light and leave darkness below. The scale of it seemed almost impossible to believe, just how far up the silo reached just to get to the surface. Surrounding the main blast chamber, half a dozen railed slots led to housing tunnels where other intercontinental missiles would have been held.

All of it had been choked by swamp and by root. No sign of missiles or warheads left, not even paint left on the walls. The orbital strike had done nothing to damage it, just knocked the cap off to see inside. Iris coughed out some of the mud and sighed. She tried to imagine a way for the thing to have survived the orbital strike, even if it could regenerate.

Just in case, she switched her vision over to infra-red and took a look around. The water was cold, probably chilled by leftover permafrost. It made the bodies stick out like flares in the night. The thieving scavenger had been caught in the collapse. Iris could see his mangled, but still breathing, body near the wreckage of the cabin.

She could also see the thing swimming through the water towards her.