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Tumbling Down…

“Bit of a problem,” Lashar spoke aloud over the blaring alarm. The air was starting to smell a bit smoky and Lashar lashed his tongue at the air. “Think we might have overdid it.”

Brolath snarled, baring his fangs.

“Hey now, there’s no need for that!” Lashar hissed at the angry Regulian.

Closing his eyes, Brolath sheathed his fangs, “Apologies, I was angry at myself, not you.”

“Could have fooled me! Fucks sake, you guys only got two expressions don’t you? Inscrutable and berserk!”

“And you lizards have none at all.”

Lashar laughed, his facial expression changing little save for the opening of his mouth and letting laughter escape his lungs, “At least we’re consistent!”

“Hmph,” Brolath edged towards the door. “You regret what we did?”

“Regret is the most useless emotion. Logos isn’t a fan,” Lashar waved towards the storage room door. “Lets go, now or never!”

“Not like this...” Yuri hissed under his breath as he rushed towards a second security door, flipping open a panel and punching keys. “Come on...come on…!”

Meyer took one final drag on her cigarette, the slender ivory paper rapidly turning to ash, before she flicked it onto the ground and stomped, “I’ll secure the sample.”

“Doc,” Hada objected, “it’s probably too-”

“I said I’ll fucking secure it!” Meyer screamed, slamming her fist against the wall. “We can’t let this all be for nothing! We can’t!”

There was a loud ding followed by a sharp hiss as the security door cracked open slightly. Yuri poked his one good hand between the crack and sighed, “Can I get some help over here?”

Abel and Hada immediately rushed to his assistance, with Abel taking his place on the same side as Yuri. Thin black smoke began to sift through the door, not quite enough to choke on but plenty concerning enough in a bunker like this.

Grunting, Abel’s muscles tensed as the door screeched along the floor. The moment it was just wide enough open, Meyer slipped through and took off.

“Hey!” Hada shouted and banged her head against the door. “That fucking idiot!”

Darting away from the door, Hada picked up a phone next to the security monitors and punched a few keys in. After a brief wait, she suddenly, “Meyer’s gone to get the sample, how bad is it?”

Abel walked up behind Hada and put his hand on her shoulder, but also tried in vain to hear on the other side of the receiver.

“Fuck!” Hada exclaimed. “The smoke’s that bad at the lab? She’s gonna die!”

Lashar… Abel tried to draw the map of the place in his head. Was he anywhere near the lab?

And Asha...he was definitely there. There was no telling how good the ventilation was in his cell.

“Are you ins-” Hada shouted back at the receiver before gritting her teeth and sighing, “No, I understand. Orders are orders.”

Hissing, Hada slammed the receiver down and stormed away from the console, accidentally brushing Abel’s hand aside.

“Abel, come on, we need to go to the ventilation controls.”

“What!?” Yuri shouted. “We can’t vent the place, we’ll be seen!”

“We’re going to vent one of the exhausts, not all of them,” Hada pulled her pistol out of its holster and examined it. “If we lose the sample now, we’ll never get it back!”

Yuri nodded at her handgun, “Expecting trouble?”

“Just in case,” Hada pulled the slide back and nodded back at Abel. “Come on, lets go.”

Something about the way she said that sent a chill down Abel’s spine. Hada was convinced it was an accident but people are prone to paranoia the more stress builds up.

But then if she mistrusted him, why invite him along to the room to begin with?

Acrid smoke blasted Abel in the face as he slipped past the doors. Slipping up his shirt past his nose, Abel followed Hada in the haze, walking up a set of metal stairs leading up from the panic room.

After reaching the final staircase, Hada slammed into a door at the top and pointed her gun past the doorframe, sweeping from left to right.

“Clear!”

Entering the hallway, Abel could not help but try and catch the blurred figure of Lashar and his companion, a feat that would be next to impossible as the air turned black and the dim emergency lights flickered.

“Where is-”

“Save your breath,” Hada coughed. “Just follow.”

With his lungs burning, Abel saw no reason to push Hada and complied, trailing behind her like a scared puppy.

Abel didn’t recognize the hallway at first thanks to the smoke, but when Hada swept her gun into a room on the left and Abel looked in behind her, he saw the cafeteria. The same one that Glass had dined with him earlier.

The base had always been a relic of a different time but without the soldiers and other crew sitting around, it truly looked like something out of a pre-war history book. A place that once teemed with the greatest human minds pooled together to conspire in apocalypse. And all of it was for naught, for the Regulians outshone humanity at it.

There were only ghosts here now.

Hada kicked aside a plastic cup as he led Abel through the cafeteria, the barrel of her gun constantly scanning in every direction. Every overturned table and chair drew her suspicion, which thankfully turned out to be unfounded.

After venturing past the cafeteria, Hada opened up one final door and Abel found themselves in a small room with a flashing computer console. A lot of it was beyond Abel, but the yellow O2 symbol in the side panel spoke volumes.

“Okay,” Hada whispered as she typed in the password.

With a click, Hada hit the enter key and the computer loudly groaned. Hada put her gun down and clenched her fists while the loading bar slowly crawled to the right.

Abel looked at the gun. Hada had already chambered the bullet. She was taking a huge risk turning her back to Abel.

But Abel meant no harm to his friend of course.

Hada tapped a square box on the screen which was labeled as “Vent01,” and a green check-marked popped up in the box. A distant fan began to hum and it might have been just Abel’s imagination but the air started to taste a big cleaner.

“What about the subjects in the lab?” Abel asked. There were seven other vents listed on the screen.

“The sample is what matters, not them,” Hada sighed and rubbed at her eyes. “Just give me a minute...”

“Where will we get another Lacertan?” Abel rubbed his fingers together.

“Too dangerous to transport like this,” Hada paused, holding her temples. “We’ll have to worry about getting one of them an-”

Abel snatched Hada’s pistol and cradled it. He hesitated to point at his friend’s head, even when she realized what happened and started to spin her chair around.

“Don’t,” Abel spoke coldly. “Open the vents.”

Hada froze and raised her hands slowly.

“Why are you doing this?” she spoke with an ache in her voice.

Hada, the strongest of Abel’s friends by far, was in pain.

God dammit, why…

“Open the vents, all of them.”

“We’ll all die, Abel, the Regulians will spot us,” Hada’s throat quivered. “Are you with them?”

“No,” Abel wanted that to be a lie, but in the end, whether coerced or not, Abel was an agent. “I just don’t want the Lacertan to die.”

“The Regulians won’t spare him. Are you really willing to endanger humanity over a fucking lizard?”

“Hada, don’t make me-”

“You’re not going to,” Hada said firmly and turned around, looking up at Abel with her brown eyes. There were hurtful tears in her eyes but also a resolve, “you don’t have it in you.”

“I’ve killed before.”

“You killed someone who had tortured you. You’ve never killed someone with their hands up, let alone a friend.”

“I...”

“You once said you wanted to free the planet with as few lives lost as possible, human or alien, but you’d kill if you had to,” Hada stood up and spread her arms. “I’m one of those you need to take out. I won’t move, not for whatever the fuck it is you think you’re gonna do and I don’t care to talk about it.”

“Hada, if you just...”

“No,” Hada shook her head and closed her eyes, “you’re too soft, Abel.

“I’m not.”

“Then do it.”

“I’m...!”

“I SAID FUCKING DO IT!”

What began as a mildly irritating smog was starting to become unbreathable. Grit was starting to mix with Brolath’s saliva and coat his lungs.

If this keeps up I’ll need to talk to Proclath’s doctor about a lung transplant.

Stopping, Brolath planted his paw against the wall and suppressed a cough. Between the constant alarms and the mostly vacant hallways, there wasn’t much of a reason to keep quiet, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

Unable to control it anymore, Brolath coughed, hacking up phlegm onto the tiled floor. Covering up his mouth, Brolath looked around, past the shimmering image of Lashar’s cloak, waiting for the inevitable guards.

None come.

“Logos has implants that allow us to breathe in carbon monoxide, you know?” Lashar whispered as the outline of his form leaned up against the wall next to Brolath.

“Do you have it?” Brolath caught a cough in his throat.

“Nope, only firefighters get it,” Lashar swept his tail. “We gotta hurry.”

Brolath knelt low and took in a breath of air before rising and continuing to follow the Lacertan without any complaints.

The air continued to grow thick as they crawled seemingly endless hallways.

As they reached a fork in the road, Lashar suddenly hit the floor and flicked his tongue on the ground.

“Asha,” he hissed and pointed down the corridor to the right, “they’ve taken him this way.”

Nodding, Brolath took the Lacertan at his word and followed. The Regulian could have sniffed the floor to make sure but that would mean wasting more oxygen which was already growing more and more precious.

A steel airlock was on the right, unguarded, and with a biometric scanner next to it.

A prison? Or a lab?

“He’s in here,” Lashar hissed and felt up the heavy door.

Hacking, Brolath went over to the biometric machine. It looked like it scanned human retinas, neither of which they possessed, let along the right ones.

Using his claws, Lashar quickly unscrewed four screws from the biometric machine and pulled out a small computer and an even smaller tube from his pocket. He pulled out a cord from the computer, placed inside the open panel, and squeezed the tube, spilling a thick metallic liquid onto the tip of the cord and the chip within.

“What is that?”

“An intelligent electrical/data interface,” Lashar began typing on his computer as a series of incomprehensible characters began parsing onto a command line. “I’m going to hack it, keep a watch.”

Brolath began checking his pistol but before he could so much as count the darts and power, Lashar suddenly pressed a few buttons on his rifle and tossed it to Brolath.

“I’ve disabled Logos’ bio-security on it and readied it, just point and shoot like any other laser rifle.”

The rifle seemed unusually heavy as Brolath shouldered it. He was bigger than the Lacertan but it would seem he had unusually powerful strength within his muscles, for he never so much as grunted wielding the rifle earlier.

Still, it was not enough for Brolath to shirk his job. He let the cloak slip over the barrel and leaned up against the wall, scanning both corridors.

“Silent alarm activated,” Lashar hissed. “Couldn’t be helped.”

Letting out a hoarse cough, Brolath replied, “They’d be foolish to come down here.”

A figure swerved into view and Brolath quickly identified his target. Human, not Abel, rifle…

Flames burst on the soldier’s chest, leaving nothing more than a scorched hole behind. Brolath had barely so much as pulled the trigger and the soldier was now on the ground, choking on his last gasps of air.

Brolath didn’t bother identifying his buddy who popped out of cover just long enough for his face to fry. He probably didn’t even see it coming.

There was no recoil or effort in firing but Brolath’s lungs were hurting and his head floating.

As the smoke residue made his eyes water, Brolath turned to the Lacertan, “How much longer?”

“An hour at least.”

“We don’t have that much time,” Brolath coughed up some more mucus. “We-”

A new noise suddenly hummed, muffled by the alarm. The faint whirr of fans rushing through the vents above Brolath. He could feel his fur tickle as the smog was sucked out of the room gradually and cool fresh air rushed in from another vent.

“Someone up there must love us,” Brolath grunted.

Another enemy popped into view: human, not Abel, no rifle.

That last part granted the human one extra second to surrender.

“Don’t shoot!” the human put up her hands. “Please, don’t!”

“Who are you?” Brolath demanded, keeping his cloak on.

“Regulian?” the human sighed. “Thank god! They’ve been holding me here for months! They said they’d kill my husband, a Lupiad, if I didn’t cooperate!”

She took a step forward and Brolath pointed his gun forward. She halted.

“A hostage?”

She peered past Brolath, “Your friend? I can get him in the lab! We need to destroy what they’re making!”

Brolath clutched at his chest with his left paw and coughed, still shouldering the rifle with his right. The air might have been getting better but the damage had been done.

“My name is Dr. Meyer. Please, you have to trust me!”