Night 59: Main Hallway, 1-West

[doneinthree]

[from here]

Kirk ran into the main hallway and found nothing there except more pink light coating everything. His gut feeling said that if something was happening, it should've happened already, but he was a loss to explain what was going on. The system (if he could call it that, vague as it was to describe the whole Landel's torture/experimentation assembly line) had broken down at least once already, on that night when I.R.I.S. had first(?) appeared, and the whole of the building flickered like a malfunctioning hologram. Was that what the glowing cover was for? To prevent... he didn't know. Something. Something bad enough to warrant a Code Red.

(What had killed that creature?)

Waiting around here was already bad enough on normal nights, what with it being an open space with high traffic, but he'd picked it because it was the quickest and most obvious meeting place for all of them. Now with the whole area lit up like the inside of a strip club, Kirk was starting to feel like a lone piece of meat wrapped in a gold ribbon and tossed out for the wolves. He made a face for a second as he considered the unfortunate implication of mixing those similes, then decided that the dumb thoughts which crossed his mind ranked considerably lower in priority than, you know, paying attention to his surroundings and not getting himself killed.

Kirk swung the lead pipe in his hand once, just to focus, and shook his head as pain rippled out from the still-healing gunshot wound on his right arm. Take it easy, Jim, he admonished himself silently. It was still early in the night. Someone would be along shortly. And if not... he was giving his crew one minute. One minute, and then screw it, he was tracking down everyone himself.

[KIRK TO ENTERPRISE]

Comments

[sainted]

At Edward's assured smile, Stefan heard himself laugh. He watched Edward in that next second, fascinated by the force and speed of his graceful movements, as deadly efficient as a vampire even two or three hundred years older than him. And the second was over, and Stefan was moving too, his face changing at the smell of blood in the air. He might not be as strong as any vampire fuelled by the normal diet, but a few rabid animals still posed no real threat.

They were, however, an unwelcome distraction. Even as Stefan fought off the dogs at Edward's back, dodging teeth and tearing limbs to make sure the beasts didn't rise again, he looked for an opening to escape. He had the sense that this wasn't random, that the animals were specifically targeting them, and each second they spent held up here meant another second they weren't protecting Elena and Bella.

The hunger drummed inside of him as Stefan turned to face the next animal, moving into kill before it could move against him, but the dog was unresisting when he grabbed it, and he was still too much of a ripper to not notice when his prey wasn't fighting back. Its mad red eyes drooped sleepily, and Stefan became aware of a girl's clear voice singing somewhere.

The pack now lay motionless around him and Edward, most of them dead, the rest asleep. Stefan wasn't going to question it. He touched Edward lightly on the shoulder — let's go — and ran before anything else decided to track them down.

[to here]