Petre opened his left eye, and a fire tickled at the tense muscle of his arms and hands.

A malformed slab of meat hovered before him, hidden behind the black miasma. Its eyes were misshapen and misaligned. Its mouth hid in shadow, but a few crooked teeth dyed yellow with decay poked through the black veil.

Petre raised the axe high over his head and felt d̷̘̾ȩ̷̓l̷̠͝ĭ̵͙g̵̼̑h̷͍̕t̷͙̽ as its sharp blade fell on the horror before him.

The axe remained lodged in the foul broken flesh of the creature, but Petre riiipped it free in a mist of red. He raised the axe higher still and felt freedom as the room around him filled with the wet squeelch of each blow.

Petre could not hear the chattering of maligned teeth over the onset of shrill laughter. The maintenance room seemed to grow more and more cramped as Petre's arms burned with exertion and his face became sloppy with wet.

And then the comforting weight of the axe was torn from his bloody hands. The cold grasp of death pinched his cheeks.

Something wet and slimy pulled apart his lips, and the creature invaded his mouth with their retched rot. Vomit rushed up his throat as their rancid stink burned his nostrils, but the creature pushed the slimy black of their tendrils deeper down his throat.

Petre felt his stomach writhe as their ichor continued to trick, trickle, trickle.

"You stop!" a familiar voice said, full of protective instinct. "Your colour bad colour!"

A rush of air filled Petre's lungs as he broke free from his assailant. He collapsed onto the cold ground. Hot tears ran down his face. A wet slobber like the kiss of a untrained Mastiff coloured his cheeks.

"Had fun?" another voice asked from over him, its words dripping with mischief.

Petre looked around the maintenance room in a confused panic. His head throbbed, and his chest continued to rise and fall as he took in the same rusted lockers, the same dead body, and the blood-stained axe.

He looked up, and then recoiled. Zero-Nine, with her purple-streaked hair and ear-to-ear grin, stood over him. But great grooves of flesh had been shaved off her human head and body as if in violent assault.

And then his eyes fell back to axe.

"I think he is awake," Zero-Nine said with a smile that betrayed the blood that ooozed from the butchery of her face and chest.

"Petery! Petery!" Blurb said, and she slid over the floor to where he lay. "Blurb no like here. Place make Peterey fun-fun."

"Where..." He swallowed down his confusion and took one more look around at the familiar maintenance room. "Where did... you two go?"

"We didn't go anywhere," Zero-Nine said, and she crouched over him, some of her red blood dribbling onto his clothes. "Did you have fun?"

Petre looked away from the carnage of Zero-Nine's form. His head throbbed with confusion. It made no sense. Moments before he had been surrounded by eyes and faces in the dark. One of them had even tried to-

He looked back at Zero-Nine, back down at the axe, and it all clicked.

"I... did that... to you?" Petre asked, and a distant fear made itself known. Because how would this creature react to his assault?

But from her twisted smile, Zero-Nine did not seem to care.

"You reaaaaally went to work on this cute face of mine," she said. "I don't know what she showed you, but- "

"Showed me?" Petre interrupted. One of his hands drifted unconsciously to where the black ball of Blurb snuggled against his chest. "What she showed me? You mean..."

"Zero-Zero," Zero-Nine finished with the flash of a smile. "They have an... interesting effect on humans. Did they say anything?"

Petre shivered as he remembered the creeping black and the many faces. The chattering of teeth made the hairs on the back of his neck standup.

"I can't..." Petre began. He could remember noise, but nothing like words. "A whisper..."

"Good enough," Zero-Nine said, and Petre shouted in surprise as he was lifted into the air. "Let's keep moving, shall we?"

The abandoned facility, full of rust and broken furniture, took on a new horror for Petre as they left the maintenance room. He kept one hand wrapped around Blurb's gooey tentacle.

"Don't be so doooown," Zero-Nine said as she looked around the hallway. "This mean's you're still human. At least a little bit."

Petre did not answer. He looked back at the maintenance room, still overcome with shock. His eyes fell on the dead man, and a panic alighted in his breast.

"Z-zero-Nine!" Petre said. He pointed back at the room, his hands trembling. "That man. In there."

"Hmmmmmm?"

"He's not... a skeleton?" Petre did not understand her disinterest. Her aloof attitude made him want to grab her human throat and s̵̰͘c̴r̵̖̀ë̶̥́ȧ̴̯m̴.

"Them some eagle eyes, you have," Zero-Nine said. She made an emphatic jab down the hallway and started away from the room.

"W-wait!" Petre said, and he rushed after her, still clutching Blurb's tentacle. "I mean... You said... How is he not a skeleton!?"

Zero-Nine looked over her shoulder, and Petre was taken aback by her confusion.

"I already told you...?" she said, each word slow and deliberate. "There are probably... a few dozen still down here...?"

Zero-Nine did not offer him the chance to ask more. With a comical karate chop and an inflated arm and fist, she crashed through a section of the hallway wall. She disappeared through the hole she had made, and a white terror filled Petre. He almost fell over himself in his haste to reach her.

"See?" Zero-Nine said.

The wall had crumbled away to reveal the inside of a filthy bathroom. Petre was not sure what she wanted him to look at, but then he noticed the movement from under her foot.

Petre's eyes widened as a small... human creature squirmed and writhed under Zero-Nine's heel.

"I could smell their stink since we first entered," Zero-Nine said, oblivious to Petre's rising horror.

It did not look human. Their eyes were wide and bulging and did not seem to blink. It was hard to tell if it was a man or woman. Their skin kissed the bones beneath, making it impossible to tell their age. They scratched at Zero-Nine's legs with uncut nails that looked more like claws. The little hair that sat on their head was a stringy mess that flew in a mad jostle.

Zero-Nine lifted her foot, and the human-like creature darted away on all-fours.

"Probably taste awful," Zero-Nine said. "But now we follow them home."

She stepped further into the filthy bathroom, and Petre was forced to follow. His mind still lagged as it tried to reconcile what he had just seen. Because it did not seem human. But how could it after forty-something-years with Zero-Zero?

"Forty years...?" Petre said the number aloud because it did not seem to make sense. The human-like creature had seemed small. Almost like... "... a child."

His stomach did a small somersault and his head throbbed violently as the implication settled in. Because there were still humans down here. And some of them had made new humans in this twisted hellscape.