A hole appeared in the wall of cement as Zero-Nine's human hands swelled with inhuman muscle.

"A few more whacks!" she said, and Petre watched as the purple-haired punk punched through the cement as if it were paper mache.

"Come on!" Zero-Nine called as she clambered through the small hole she had made. Petre could hear her continue her assault from within the hole.

"They put up a feeew layers," Zero-Nine said as Petre stumbled through the crumbling cement. A second wall appeared over them a meter away.

Zero-Nine's swollen fists, the size of plump watermelons, chipped away at the cement to reveal an encased door. It did not share the modern and sleek design of the rest of the facility.

"Knock, knock!" Zero-Nine cried out happily, and the door fell apart in a shower of splinters. She skipped merrily through the newest opening with a cheerful swagger.

"Blurb no like..." Blurb said from his shoulder, and Petre tickled her black goo.

He opened his mouth to offer consolation, to soothe his deformed little pup, but found his throat was too dry to speak. His head had started to ring with a faint white noise (Which he blamed on all the stress). And so he followed Zero-Nine without a word through the shattered door, and saw still another wall of cement. Its bulk was cast entirely in black. The light from the hallway behind them had all but vanished.

Zero-Nine broke through the newest barricade with a merry smash, and Petre saw that the sealed hallway opened up into a large room. He had certainly not seen any space as wide in the facility behind them.

"Come on, come on," Zero-Nine said with a wave of her hand. Even in the pitch black, Petre could make out her gestures and even the ridges of her smiling teeth.

He followed her through the small hole she had made, but his foot caught on some of the chipped cement.

Zero-Nine laughed as he stumbled forward. He caught himself less than a meter over the floor.

And beneath him was a woman in a long dress.

Petre's eyes widened. The breath went out of his lungs, and he stumbled away as Zero-Nine continued to fill the room with her mirth.

A clatter rang out through the vast hall, and Petre turned to find still more bodies. Some wore torn lab coats and others bulletproof vests. Their clothes entombed the definite outline of their skeletons.

"Blurb no like spoopy skeletons..." Blurb said, but the comment did not earn her another tickle.

"P-people...?" Petre sputtered as his mind raced with the sight of so many dead. Along the cement barrier there were at least a dozen skeletons, many with their skeletal arms outstretched towards the erected cement wall. As if they had tried to claw it down in one final desperation.

"Mhm," Zero-Nine said, and Petre jumped at her closeness. He could feel the heat of her breath on his neck. "The slow ones."

It was a moment before Petre understood, and then he recoiled.

"There were... were still people down here? They just, just left them down here?"

Peter could not understand why they not been evacuated. A glance around the destroyed hall revealed over ten skeletons.

"Fo sho," Zero-Nine said with an emphatic nod. "I'm sure there are still a buuuunch down here."

Petre stared at Zero-Nine, but then he realized he must have misheard her. Still a bunch of dead bodies down here. Or skeletons, anyways. Because it had been over forty years since Zero-Nine had tried to destroy her sister. There was no way people could have survived down here for all that time.

The room around them was cast entirely in black. There was not even the faintest coo of light. The sleek modernity of the facility above held no sway here. Everything was a mess. He could see overturned benches torn to shreds. Medical carts clung to walls, some dented and destroyed. Their contents had collected so much dust and muck that in the dark, even with his unnatural night vision, Petre had no idea what they were.

"Well!" Zero-Nine said, and she offered Petre a slap on the back. "Let us find muh sis."

With an unnatural excitement, her arms swinging back and forth as if in play, Zero-Nine stomped towards the nearest set of doors, or what was left of them. The doors themselves had been torn off their hinges and lay in various pieces around the doorway.

One of the skeletons shifted from behind them, and Petre rushed after Zero-Nine in a whir of panic. Everything was dead down here, which made it somewhat safer than the facility upstairs with all of its guns and syringes. But it was a hard truth to swallow.

"Z-zero-Nine?" Petre called as he rushed through the doorway. He found her not too far away, inspecting a pair of skeletons.

"Hmmm?" Zero-Nine hummed.

They had entered a cramped hallway. Further down the way, Petre could see a small barrier had been erected out of various carts and other items. But at the moment his attention was drawn to the skeletons beside Zero-Nine.

It was impossible to tell if they were man or woman. They both wore faded lab coats in various states of disarray. There was something off about them (Besides the being dead and all), but between the peculiarity of his night vision and the eerie half-quiet that surrounded around him, Petre could not be sure what bothered him.

And then Zero-Nine stepped away, her interest lost, and he saw. The two skeletons had not fallen on top of one another nor were they locked in a lover's embrace.

"They... killed one another...?" Petre said as he realized that their skeletal hands were wrapped around one another's skeletal necks. "What happened here...?"

"Humans being humans," Zero-Nine said, and she offered the violent embrace a kick. She sent some of their dusty bones skittering down the hallway, all the way to the barrier Petre had noticed earlier.

"Peterey..." Blurb cooed from his shoulder, but he scarcely heard her.

He walked slowly to the barrier of carts and torn beds and rusted bed frames that blocked off the hallway.

He found still more skeletons, and some clutched makeshift weapons. His eyes were drawn to the barrier, more specifically to where it had fallen apart. Someone had broken through the haphazard pile, as evidenced by their skeleton draped over one of its carts, their skeletal arms outstretched.

A large knife remained embedded in the empty socket of their skull.

"There was fighting," Petre said, his voice louder now. Zero-Nine had dragged him into a veritable horror story, and he had no idea what was going on. "These scientist types... killed one another!"

He turned away from the dusty violence, a fire born of fear in his chest.

"Zero-Nine!" Petre called, his voice louder, made stern with fear. He glanced around the cramped hallway. "Zero-Nine?"

But she was nowhere to be seen.

He was alone.

"Blurb... W-where is... where..."

But as the words touched the air, Petre noticed that his shoulder lacked a familiar weight. He looked down to where his black wet pup had mounted herself like a guard dog.

Blurb was gone. The only reminder of her presence was a wet splotch like the creeping red of an open wound.

Petre's voice retreated deep down his throat. His eyes scanned the floor for where she might have fallen off.

In the distance...

From the other room...

A creeping black yawned and tickled the air around the doorway. A black so thick that even his night vision could not penetrate.

"Zero-Nine?"

And from within its maw...

"...Blurb...?"

A distant crawling...

The sliding of wet flesh....

The pushing aside of debris as the dead rose from their restful sleep...

Petre could hear the soft, tired rattle of bone as the other room slowly roused. No flesh at all, but bone speckled white and dusty. They drew closer to the distant doorway as the unnatural black deepened.

He did not have time to think. He turned back to the small barrier and threw his weight against the carts and the bed springs. It had been left undisturbed for possibly three dozen years, and needed only three slams of his shoulder before enough fell apart to reveal an escape.

Petre glanced over his shoulder, and his heart chilled at what he did not see. It was as though his night vision had been taken from him, for an impenetrable black had fallen over the hallway like the cover of night. He thought he could see the faintest movement from within the churning abyss.

He clambered over the barrier and launched himself into the hallway beyond...

...and into the outstretched arms of the angry undead.

Petre's face alighted with the white heat of pain. He screamed, the noise rising from the deepest black of his soul, and fell over in a clatter of bone.

When he jumped to his feet, Petre saw that the other side of the hallway was full of skeletons. They had died with their hands wrapped around one another's throats, with their hands inside one another's rib cages as if they they had died ripping and tearing at the ropes of one another's entrails.

"Zero-Nine! Please!"

The same wall of black appeared over the battered barrier. It obscured the carts and the bed springs like a malicious miasma, clawing closer and closer to Petre. He could hear the chattering of a dozen teeth, he could feel their hate for his flesh, their unslakable jealousy for the warm blood that pumped through his veins.

The hallway continued in a jumble of overturned carts and shredded benches. His head bulged with the dull throb of panic.

"Zero-Nine! Blurb! Where are you!?"

Petre turned into the first room he passed and found that he had entered some sort of maintenance room. The walls were lined with locker after locker. Almost all were in various forms of neglect, their doors either torn off or so miscolored with rust to look like a new coat of paint.

There was only one body in this room, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw that they had died clenching an ax in their emaciated hands.

He had no idea what the black was or what dwelt within it. He had no idea where Zero-Nine or Blurb was, but an axe seemed like a welcome weapon.

He hurried over to the disheveled man's side. He was horribly starved. His ribs poke against the tight cover of his skin.

Petre pulled the axe from the dead man's hands with little difficulty. The weight of the ax offered him some comfort as he backed into one of the room's corners. He tried futilely to open one of the lockers, but the doors were completely rusted shut, and Petre was too afraid to make noise and force them open.

He waited in his corner, axe in hand, its handle slick with the dead man's blood.

With the dead man's... wet blood...?

And with a dull throb of horror Petre realized.

That the man had been a man and not a skeleton.

The maintenance room filled with the black miasma. It swallowed the man's body. It obscured row after row of locker until Petre was cast entirely in darkness.

And then the room started to fill with their noise.

He could feel them slither and stumble.

Closer and closer they pressed...

Until he could feel the razor edge of their fingernails scraaaaaaaape against the soft nape of his neck.

From amidst the cloying black he saw them.

The white of their eyes danced around him.

Their shadowy faces misshapen and malformed.

A sweet rot roiled off their broken flesh, the heat filling his nostrils as they drew ever closer.

Petre clamped his eyes shut and mumbled to himself in confused prayer. Because he wanted Blurb. He wanted Zero-Nine. He wanted Manya. He did not want to be alone. He did not want to be alone.

A familiar whisper filled the room, and Petre dared to believe.

He opened his left eye.