The Steel Ark: Chapter 5 – Beyond Reason, Still a Fact

  Dmitry had barely plummeted into a deep, leaden sleep when a hand shook his shoulder without ceremony.

  "Ah! What? What’s happening?!" He bolted upright, his heart hammering against his ribs. His voice was hoarse, sounding as though he had slept for an eternity rather than a few minutes.

  His back immediately flared with a sharp, malicious pain. His spine—long accustomed to the high-tech, pressure-relieving mattress of the Ark—rebelled against the thin floor mat. This was how he used to sleep on Earth, a lifetime ago, before the accident. His limbs were numb, his lower back stiff as a board; he hadn't moved an inch since his eyes had closed.

  "Master Dmitry, it is your turn for the watch," Baron Cohen muttered sleepily. The young noble looked decimated; as soon as he finished speaking, he collapsed onto the vacated spot and vanished into oblivion.

  Dmitry wiped his palms hard across his face, scrubbing away the remnants of sleep. He checked his watch: 03:45. Nearly six hours of sleep—a luxury by current standards. Yet he felt as though those six hours had been spent being systematically beaten.

  With a heavy sigh, he pulled his Benelli shotgun close, threw on his jacket, and crawled outside. Hans was asleep near the tent, curled in his tattered cloak, clutching the shaft of his spear like a lifeline. Dmitry straightened up slowly, feeling his joints creak, and performed a few cautious stretches. The raw night cold bit at his skin, instantly clearing the fog from his mind. His back throbbed, but it was manageable. Too early for another injection, he decided.

  Sitting in the doorway of the tower, Dmitry pulled out his headlamp but left it off. Outside, an absolute, primordial darkness reigned—the kind where you cannot see your own hand. A nightlight flickered inside the tent, but its dim glow failed to penetrate the double-layered canvas.

  The world shrunk to sound. Dmitry became all ears, catching every vibration in the air. A light breeze rustled the sparse grass; somewhere in the distance, the bare crowns of the forest groaned. His thoughts cycled sluggishly. He fantasized about returning to the Ark, taking a scalding shower, and collapsing in front of a screen with a massive bowl of popcorn. No cold, no mangled corpses, no forced marches with a heavy pack...

  The sky began to brighten into a heavy, leaden gray. The silhouette of the forest emerged—a grim black wall a few hundred meters from the outpost. The space between, littered with stones, slowly gained form.

  "Strange geology here," Dmitry noted idly, eyeing the boulders scattered across the clay soil. "One of them is even sliding..."

  He froze. The lethargy vanished instantly.

  It wasn't a stone. A thin, broken shadow was approaching from the forest in jerky, rhythmic pulses.

  "What the..." Dmitry whispered.

  The figure was barely a hundred meters away. A person? But something in its movement made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The guest moved with a stuttering gait, stumbling every second but never falling. Its head was thrown back unnaturally toward the sky, its torso canted to the side, and its arms hung like limp vines, nearly touching the ground.

  Wounded? Looking for help? Dmitry desperately sought a logical explanation.

  But the figure drew closer. Now he could see the tatters that had once been clothing—filthy, rotted rags hanging off a skeletal frame like moss on a dead branch. Through the gaps, the skin was visible: dry, gray, parchment-like. On one foot, a boot without a sole; the other was bare, slapping against the wet mud with a dull, dead sound.

  When the guest was twenty meters away, Dmitry remembered his duty. He stood, leveling the Benelli, and shouted, tearing the silence:

  "Halt! Stay where you are! Do not approach!"

  At the sound of his voice, the creature jerked as if struck by a whip. The upturned face turned slowly, creaking toward Dmitry.

  In that moment, the engineer's legs turned to water. He was looking at it. A face devoid of life or emotion. The skin on the cheekbones had split, exposing yellowish-gray bone. And the eyes... milky, sunken, like those of a rotting fish. There was no intellect, no pain. Only a void.

  The creature froze in the dancing sights of the shotgun, then suddenly crouched and emitted a raspy, piercing wail. The sound made Dmitry physically nauseous. The thing howled, arching its spine backward in a mockery of a wolf's cry, but there was nothing animal about the sound.

  Dmitry stopped breathing. Paralyzed by a primal terror, he completely forgot he held a weapon. His world narrowed down to this wailing nightmare.

  "UNDEAD!" Hans’s voice roared right in his ear. "To arms, my lord!"

  The tent flap burst open. Staggering, the Baron emerged with his sword drawn, flanking Dmitry.

  Dmitry’s hands were shaking uncontrollably. The creature wouldn't stop, continuing its vibrating shriek.

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  "Focus!" Hans literally hammered the word into Dmitry's mind.

  And Dmitry focused. He exhaled sharply, pushing out the panic. The shotgun’s front sight stopped dancing and settled dead-center on the creature's gray head.

  A heartbeat. The trigger pull.

  The roar was so loud it boxed his ears. The recoil kicked familiarly into his shoulder. Through a blue cloud of propellant gases, Dmitry saw the creature's head burst like a ripe watermelon, its upper chest shredded into a bloody pulp.

  The entity collapsed backward. Silence returned to the outpost, broken only by the ringing in his ears and the heavy breathing of the three men.

  Dmitry stood frozen, still gripping the shotgun's forend. A bitter, stinging cloud of smoke drifted before his eyes. A high-pitched, unbearable whistle had taken up residence in his ears, cutting him off from the world.

  Hans, standing nearly flush against him, was doubled over, having dropped his spear. The veteran pressed his palms to his ears, his face twisted in a mask of rage and pain. He was shouting something, his mouth wide, but Dmitry couldn't hear a word. He could only see the tendons jumping in the old man's neck. Hans squinted, blinking desperately to clear the "flashes" and dust from his eyes. Judging by his lips, the old soldier was unleashing a stream of the foulest curses, damning the undead, Dmitry, and his "thunder-stick."

  To the right, Baron Cohen was on all fours. He was retching directly onto the rotten straw at his feet. The sight of the shattered head, turned into a mash of bone and gray matter, combined with the sonic shockwave, had been too much for the young aristocrat.

  Dmitry felt himself begin to shake violently. The adrenaline surge ebbed, leaving behind an icy void and a tremor in his fingers. He tried to breathe, but his lungs felt full of cotton.

  "Hans!" Dmitry yelled. His own voice sounded distant, as if coming from under fathoms of water. "Hans, can you hear me?!"

  The veteran finally pulled one hand away from his head and, staggering, grabbed Dmitry by the collar. His eyes were bloodshot, filled with a raw, primal fright.

  "YOU... YOU..." Hans choked on his words, trying to scream over the tinnitus. "WHAT WAS THAT?! YOU NEARLY DEAFENED ME, YOU DEMON-SEED! MY HEAD FEELS LIKE A DRUM!"

  "It’s a weapon!" Dmitry bellowed back, feeling cold sweat roll down his face. "That’s how it shoots!"

  Cohen, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his wet doublet, struggled to stand, leaning against the wall. His gaze, glassy and haunted, was fixed on the corpse of the thing, which was still smoking a few meters away.

  "Is... is it dead?" the Baron wheezed. "In one strike? Master Dmitry, was that lightning magic?"

  Dmitry went to answer, but the ringing in his ears suddenly dipped, and another sound broke through. The kind that turns blood to slush.

  From the depths of the forest, like an echo, came a responding howl. First one, then two more—from different directions. These were not cries of pain. This was a roll call.

  Hans instantly went rigid. The anger drained from his face, replaced by the deathly pallor of a professional who had just realized the scale of the catastrophe. He snatched up his spear.

  "Shut up! Both of you!" he barked, and this time, Dmitry heard him clearly. "Listen."

  They froze. In the pre-dawn mist, where the forest met the clearing, they heard the dry snap of branches and the rhythmic, heavy slapping of bare feet on mud. Only this time, there were many more.

  "It wasn't howling in pain," Hans said, his voice becoming eerily calm as he leveled his spear. "It was marking us. Master Dmitry, get your pipe ready. We have guests. And this time, there are four of them."

  Dmitry felt the shotgun in his hands grow heavy, as if filled with lead. The reprieve was over.

  Dmitry couldn't see the enemies yet, but the thumping of multiple feet and the crunching of wood in the fog gave them a clear heading. A pack of the animated dead was sprinting straight for them. For some reason, Dmitry trusted Hans implicitly: if the old soldier said there were four, there were four. And the shotgun’s magazine held five rounds. There was no margin for error. He had to make every shot count.

  The sharp clack of the slide—and a shell moved into the chamber. Dmitry squinted into the gray haze until he finally discerned four thin, broken silhouettes among the boulders.

  The new creatures were little different from the first: the same desiccated bodies and tattered rags. But these weren't hobbling like clumsy dolls. They were running at full tilt, oblivious to the path, arms flailing like whips. They tripped, rolled through the wet mud, but instantly scrambled back up and continued their charge. The most terrifying part was their silence and that fixed, "fish-like" stare locked onto the tower's doorway. They were no longer howling. They had found their target.

  When the dead were forty paces away, Hans stepped forward decisively. He leveled his heavy boar spear, braced the butt of the shaft against the earth, and dropped to one knee directly in front of Dmitry, forming a human shield.

  "Don't fail me, Master Dmitry!" the old man cried without looking back.

  Twenty paces. The dead reached the flat ground of the clearing. Now, nothing could slow them. Dmitry leveled the shotgun, catching the ribcage of the lead runner in his sights. Exhale—squeeze.

  BOOM. The first corpse somersaulted across the dirt, its torso halved. Dmitry’s hands worked mechanically: the rack of the slide, the blast—the second buried its face in the mud. Another—hit!

  Five paces. The distance evaporated. The last ghoul slammed into Hans at full speed. The veteran tried to impale the thing on his spearhead, but the creature dipped under the shaft with unnatural agility. A thin, gray hand slashed across the veteran's chest. The blow was so forceful it literally lifted Hans off the ground; he was thrown aside and went rolling across the stones without making a sound.

  "Hans!" The scream died in Dmitry's throat.

  The shot. A spray of buckshot hit the undead in the legs, effectively severing them from the waist. But the creature didn't even seem to notice the loss. Propped up by its left hand and reaching with its right toward Dmitry’s face, it pushed off the ground in a leap that defied every law of anatomy.

  Dmitry was fast enough. He chambered the final round and fired when the putrid maw was barely half a meter away. The point-blank blast pulverized the monster's head and shoulders, turning it into a cloud of bone shards and gray mist.

  An oppressive silence fell.

  Dmitry moved like an automaton. His emotions had burned out, leaving only cold calculation. Without taking his eyes off the dark edge of the forest, he began methodically feeding a new set of shells into the Benelli’s magazine. His hands remembered every motion, while his mind scanned the surroundings for a fresh threat.

  A dead silence settled over the area. Not a rustle, not a sound—only Dmitry’s heavy, whistling breath and the muffled sobbing of Cohen, who had scrambled into the corner of the tower. Dmitry turned. The Baron sat against the far wall, curled into a ball, clutching his old sword until his knuckles were white. His eyes, wide with terror, looked through Dmitry into some other abyss known only to him. The youth's lips moved soundlessly, as if reciting an endless prayer.

  Deciding that Cohen was in relatively stable condition and not in immediate need of help, Dmitry shifted his gaze to where Hans lay. The old soldier was a motionless heap, showing no signs of life.

  The Situation: Hans is down. The wound is deep, and the "medicine" in this world is centuries behind. As a doctor, Dmitry has a plan, but the margin for error is zero.

  Question for you: Do you think improvised modern triage can save a man in a world where the undead are the new norm? Or is the veteran’s journey over? Let me know your theories in the comments.

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