The sparks died out, sputtering into the dirt and the blood. He lifted his arm and turned on his wrist-con and looked around. The light didn’t go far but he could tell he was in a cavern larger than the last, colder than the last, and there was life skittering around him. He waited for his eyes to adjust into night vision.
There were plants and small rodent-like creatures, blinded, and bugs–always bugs–coming to feast on the dead.
He sat up and looked closer, holding his arm out before his face. The body next to him twitched.
And then he felt it...something under him poking up from the ground like needles. His neighbor’s torso sucked inward as if something was slurping it from the inside-out, and it sounded as such.
Fuck.Dommik lifted himself to his feet and moved away, he wasn’t going to stay and watch when he could be its next meal. His circuits fired with each footstep, sending tiny jolts to his limbs. It was several yards of dragging before he stepped off the dead and onto the ground, the light of his tech leading the way.
His foot sank into the wet soil; the ground sucked at his every step.
Dommik gritted his teeth and looked down.
He saw the flowers.
Drifting toward the pile of gore with needle-like vines, sucking out the blood.
He stopped and watched, dazed as he began to actually sink. And as the wafts of putrid waste, marinated for an eternity wrecked his senses, the flowers dined. The sound of a hundred footfalls echoed above him where the floor had opened up.
So this is their secret. Carnivorous flowers.There had been no mention about the flower itself in the missive, only the ritual and perceived properties taken from the Trentians and the half-breeds that bought them. The real bloom wasn’t even suppose to exist.
He stepped farther away from the pile and located several flowers amongst the outskirts, unhindered by blood or crushed by bodies and metal, and appropriated it from the muck. It fought him with barbs and twisted like a snake in his hand. Carefully, he pulled it away from the floor, mindful of the gooping roots as he opened up a container under his arm.
A roach-like creature scuttled between the petals.
Dommik marveled at it for a moment before sticking both creatures away.
Time to go home.
If the flowers are down there, it meant there had to be a way out. An entrance and exit for the harvest. He waved his wrist-con above him and looked at the closest wall. He followed it with each lumbering step. The flowers and bugs paid him no mind, their focus on the easy meal of corpses in the center.
When he found a carved out ladder, gouged into the wall, and intermittent hand-supports he climbed it to the top, hauling the incredible weight of his broken legs behind him. His fingers dug into the stone as another jolt went through his systems, causing him to jerk and nearly fall. Something was sizzling inside him.
His tech could get wet, it was built to withstand the elements but his tech couldn’t get crushedandwet. He was on the edge of short-circuiting, he was going to fry.
Dommik gritted his teeth and kept going. He reached a shallow landing several meters up that led to a closed stone door. He laid on his back and took a long, frustrated breath before he broke the ground with his hands and gripped the bottom of the slat. He put his muscle into it and heaved the door up until he had enough room to crawl beneath it, pivoting and ducking his useless limbs through first.
He found himself in a dark tunnel that curved out of sight.
On either side sat half-empty crates and strung up animal carcasses being drained of blood. He tried not to smell; he tried instead to imagine fresh air and Kat’s erotic scent, but the rot was pervasive and forced its way inside. It left him feeling hungry for blood of his own.
His broken legs ground out the path behind him as he crept along, it screeched and thundered, creating their own echoes off of the walls. He didn’t try to be quiet, it would’ve been to much effort.
Before long the Trentians joined him in the shadows and fed his bloodlust. Each death brought him closer to turning off his humanity.
Each kill made him crazed. Crazed for violence and sex. Blood and rope, and his fairy waiting for him to take her.
A lever filled his vision. It stuck out of the stone wall at an angle. His eyes twitched and flashed as he ran for it.
An alarm rang as he re-entered the cavern, and released the floor. It was too late for the savages caught in their own trap.
The rest he killed with his claws.
***
Kat heard the androids first. Then she heard the hatch.
Her first instinct was to stay calm and peek around the corner, in case someone besides her Cyborg overrode the ship’s systems.
