"How'd they get in here anyway?" Nanami had asked no one in particular. "They should still be tearing apart the tunnel and the test center trying to get out of there. It couldn't be...the hive..." That last thought sent a shiver through her spine as she considered that all the xenomorphs might now be free.
But, finally, she was in medical. The boosters were in her reach, all she had to do was find them.
There was something immediately wrong with the infirmary as she found it. No one was there, no one on duty to handle any incoming wounded. She didn't immediately worry herself with that, however, she could administer the shot herself. And this way, there was no way for her to infect anybody else...or end up with security again.
She stumbled through the darkened infirmary and found the locker with the T-Virus vaccines, or at least she found what was left of it.
"DAMN IT!!!" Nanami shouted, slamming the butt of her stolen gun against the locker next to the counter.
The metal door swung open and corpse of a woman stripped to her underwear poured out of it. Nanami shrieked as the woman, her face literally ripped off, fell over her. She stumbled away and fell back onto the examination table, waiting for the corpse to start to rise up and try to have her lunch.
After a few seconds in which the body remained on the ground she allowed herself to relax and leaned backward for a moment to rest. She glanced upward and found the infirmary staff, lying dead atop of the light fixtures.
She screamed again and fell backwards to the floor painfully, rising up clumsily, eyes fixed on the bodies up there, backing slowly away, swivling her eyes and the gun wildly in every direction.
Then the spiked tail whipped out around her and tore the pistol from her hand.
In the extreme of terror, Nanami felt an incredible calm washing over her as she turned around to see the drone that was about to carry her off or kill her.
The calm was shattered when she saw a black-haired humanoid dressed in stolen security gear calmly retrieving the pistol from her tail. Nanami swallowed and backed away from her until bumping into another form behind her.
Another tail whipped out and she was pressed against the wall.
"Why didn't I feel them coming?" Nanami thought to herself. "I should have felt the hostility..."
It didn't take long for her to realize after that, there was no hostility toward her. Caution yes, but not hostility, and, curiously enough, a little concern.
Then it hit her, the cloned hosts, but why had they mutated so much?
"She's ill," the woman said in Japanese. "The body's fighting but it won't last long."
"Smell's wrong," the man agreed.
"I...I have vaccine," Nanami said, reaching clumsily for the Japanese she'd studied as part of connecting with her roots. She would have pantomimed an injection, but the man's tail still had her pressed against the wall.
"You speak Japanese?" the woman said in surprise. "Where are we? What is this place?" She looked at her self and stroked her tail. Nanami felt the anger rising slightly. "What did you do to us?"
The man pushed harder against her to emphasize the point.
Nanami panicked for a moment, but the idea that she was dying anyway came to her, and she calmed down. Death was going to be release, actually, if they killed her, she would be spared a lot of pain. Even if they didn't prevent her becoming a zombie, she'd already be gone by then.
"I tell you what I know," she said. "But you help me."
"How's that?" the man asked.
Nanami sighed and swallowed, gearing herself to ask what she needed of them.
"Tear my head off," she said tightly.
"Excuse me," Ranma said.
"I'm infected with the T-Virus," she said. "One hour, I'll be untreatable. When I die I'll become...something else. A mindless zombie...destroy my head and I'll just be dead."
"You're treatable now?" the woman asked.
"Kodachi, what are you thinking?" the man asked. "She's not like us."
"Perhaps that could change," Kodachi suggested.
"You saw what our blood does now," Ranma said. "That'll melt her face off if we try that."
"I'm thinking of another way, love," Kodachi said.
Kodachi's tail swished in front of the woman and Nanami supposed that it was just her mind playing tricks on her, but it seemed to be changing shape slightly. A sac of some type was growing near the tip which was now leaking something out the tip.
"What are you..?" Nanami's question was cut off as the tail launched forward and struck into her shoulder. She felt something push into her and gasped. Then the tail slipped out of the wound and she felt herself falling as the sounds of the man snapping at Kodachi in confusion faded into the darkness.
She hit the ground in a solid lump and Kodachi bent down to her as Ranma demanded to know what was going on, mentally and verbally. Kodachi smiled as she showed Ranma the fingernails turning black and took in a deep breath of the woman's smell, and felt her presence enter the private channel she had with Ranma.
"Her body is winning now," she said simply.
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(Posted Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:14)
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