"Oh the suns, rulers of the sky, please give us your guiding light in these dark hours." Dena prayed with a trembling voice. Her brother was dazed, looking at the ceramic tiles of the floor with no particular expression.
Elyas and Claire weren't so different. They just covered up the shock better.
How am I supposed to deal with something that has the body of a monster, and the power and intelligence of a Dreamer? Without having access to any of my own abilities?! Elyas screamed in his head.
He was rightfully angry, but something overtook that fury. A nagging feeling in his mind. It was an itch in the back of his head, pointing him towards something he had neglected to consider.
The voice on the speakers… it didn't say anything about the beast stripping us of our powers… That fact had several implications, neither of them good.
"So what are we going to do now? Just stand here till we die?" Claire spoke, breaking Dany and Dena out of their trance. "What are we going to do?" Dany said before adding with rage, "What can we do?! Just walk outside and serve ourselves on a silver platter?!"
Dena didn't contribute to the conversation. Choosing to sit behind her desk and pray to her gods some more.
"We have to go. There is no other way. We only have water and food for a day or two at most. That is, if we ration them. Our only chance is to group up with your coworkers." Elyas spoke, getting Claire's commendation.
"He's right. We don't have any other choice Dany, we have to go." The blond man gritted his teeth, but reluctantly agreed in the end.
…
After packing their stuff, the group ventured into the hallway. There was no sound but their own uneven breathing or the rustle of their clothes. Each step into the dark faded into red as they traversed the maze of corridors.
It didn't take long for them to reach it. A yellow mark on the wall. "Y"
Elyas used his pocket mirror to check if the hallway was safe to enter. Based on what he saw, the hallway was empty, so they moved forward. Much like their own section, this one housed a Janitor's closet with a metal door at the far back, a storage unit and an office.
They stepped to the dark. As Elyas and the rest approached, they took note of the fact that the office door was bashed in, pieces of it cracking under their feet.
No light was on. And no sound came from inside. But the smell of fresh ink on paper and cigarettes was still present in the air.
There was nobody. It was as if the very earth had opened up and swallowed the people. But the few signs of struggle they saw, painted a much more horrid picture.
With the fear that if they lingered any longer they would join the missing Enforcers, the group left without even trying to scavenge for supplies.
Soon they reached the next mark. "X"
Doing the same for this corridor, Elyas used his mirror to verify their safety. There was only black in the corridor, so they moved. This time Elyas was relieved. He didn't need to speculate if someone was inside. The lights of the office were on.
They would find people soon. Gather Intel, supplies and manpower to attack with all they got and eliminate the threat. That was the plan that Elyas and Claire had outlined. It was simple, too simple in fact. But having a plan was better than having none.
At the end of the hallway was the Janitor's room, a storage unit a bit further up, and to the group's left, the office.
Dany rushed to the door as soon as he saw it, but he was pulled back by Dena's death grip. He was confused for a second, but then he heard it too.
The sound was louder here, so it caught their attention. It sounded like the howling of the wind. It persisted the entire time they walked, so they had ignored it as just that. Wind.
But… They were underground. Winds did not come here.
Elyas noticed it first, and Dena second. It was Gasping. Loud, deep, even gasps were coming from the end of this hallway. At that moment, the red light came and brightened the entire floor with its hue. Everywhere was lit up. Everywhere except the breathing corner at the end of the hall.
Without wasting a second, Elyas shouted, "Run!" They didn't need his reminder, their bodies had reacted before their minds could even process the event. Everyone ran towards the door.
Elyas dashed forward with his speed, sliding on the floor past the door and towards the beast. Before reaching it however, he managed to push himself back, run to the door and turn the handle.
It didn't open.
As the Enforcers rushed to catch up, the darkness moved. The clump of black redacting the light slithered with unexpected speed, the heavy gasps coming closer and closer and with them the dark.
Elyas shouted for help, for someone to open the door… but no one answered. He gave the rapidly approaching darkness a cursory glance before banging at the door harder.
The slithering mound of black housing breathing horrors was now less than a dozen meters away, getting closer with increasing speed.
Dany reached Elyas first, without saying a word, both men began bashing the door. Dena joined them a moment later, but it was not enough.
Claire came in last. She hurriedly pushed the three aside and bashed the door with her elbow. A part of it broke off, allowing her to grab the knob from inside and turn it.
It didn't open.
The darkness was only a dozen steps away now.
She cursed under her breath as she tightly squeezed the knob and pulled. The door rattled as the entire lock department got detached, dropping on to the ground. She pulled her hand out and ran inside with Elyas and the rest, leaving the breathing dark to bang at the door in their stead.
Elyas and Dany held it shut as Claire grabbed a file cabinet and placed it down, holding the door in place. Almost immediately, Elyas, Dany, and Claire dropped to the ground, finally getting a chance to take a breath and look around.
The office was big. Twice the size of the one on section Z. There were tables and paper scattered all over the ground as if a storm had hit the office.
Moving a bit to find a comfortable sitting position, Dena stepped on the broken parts of a typewriter. Dany's attention wasn't on his sister's now pained expression, but the Enforcers. He watched the twelve Enforcers huddle together with clear malice.
Noticing this, Claire dragged herself tiredly and whispered in his ear, "Don't do anything stupid."
Elyas watched all of this without sparing a single detail. He needed to understand who he was dealing with after all.
In front of him were fifteen strangers each with their own motives and lines of thought. All of these people, including him, had just experienced one of the worst scenarios they could get stuck in. Irrational or erratic behavior was the least they were capable of now.
Sighing, he got up and walked towards the twelve Enforcers. "Hello. I'm Elyas and these are your coworkers on section Z." He said as he gestured to Claire and her coworkers before adding, "Do any of you mind explaining to us, and primarily me, what the hell is going on?"
A young red-haired lady wearing a revealing green dress spoke with a shaky voice. "The monster, It attacked us but we managed to hold it off and lock the door…" The woman's body was shaking. A brawny man stepped forward, comforting the lady. "A few of the offices nearby came to us for help but…" He dozed off, his gaze sweeping an empty but bloody corner of the office.
"It took them away."
Dena and Dany's expressions fell almost instantly, only Claire managed to hold onto her's. "... what's the situation with the supplies?" She asked as she stepped away from Dany.
A man who barely fit into his uniform raised his hand. "I take care of the storage unit of section X, if you have any questions you can ask me."
"How much food and water do we have?" Elyas asked in place of Claire.
"The supplies dedicated for a breakout were supposed to be recuperated this weekend." The fat man spoke, causing the morale to plummet even further. The brawny man directed his overweight coworker a question, "So you're saying we have nothing Hart?"
The fat man shook his head. "No. What I'm trying to say is that we are lacking compared to what we could have had. Although a breakout happened a week ago, because it got taken care of rather fast we didn't use much of the emergency supplies." Hart's explanation allowed for much needed ease.
Claire nodded and reframed her question. "How many days?" Hart answered immediately. "Taking into consideration that eight of us are dead and you have joined us, we should be able to last a few weeks. At best, a month." Claire nodded again, a flame of certainly now dancing in her eyes.
"Good, but that won't be enough. We need enough to feed at least three dozen men to hunt the anomaly." The woman in the green dress was left speechless, much like all the Enforcers in the office.
"You want to capture the thing? With what?!" The brawny man said in exasperation, not fully convinced by what he heard.
"Miss, I don't want to be rude but…You know that it's the reason we don't have our powers right?" Hart added, expressing his unwillingness to cooperate with Clair's proposal.
One after another, all of the Enforcers of section X rejected Claire's suggestion, calling her mad and naive. The two offices' conversation slowly dispersed into chitchat before people separated into small groups. Each picked a corner for themselves to rest and recover for the next day.
Elyas sat beside Dena and Claire. Out of their group, Dany was the first one to sleep. Using his uniform as a blanket and his sister's leg as his pillow.
It didn't take long for most of the people to join him. It had been a long, stressful day for all of them. So, without having any reason to stay awake anymore, he too gave in to the call of the night and fell asleep.
…
He was woken by Dena and the sounds of screaming. "Someone is dead." That single sentence of hers made Elyas jolt awake instantly. He looked around. In the middle of the office between two tables, was a gathering of Enforcers.
Dena remained silent as they walked to meet the rest. In the crowd was Hart, the lady in the green dress and the brawny man. Dany was standing side by side with Claire who was kneeling beside the deadman.
He looked to be in his sixties. A man with brown hair and deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Rarely any was on his forehead. He must have had a happy life. The old man had a bleeding wound on his chest, clearly the blow that had finished his long life.
Claire closed the man's eyes before standing up. "May the dark sun's embrace be welcoming of his soul."
The Enforcers tensed up. The door was barricaded, the anomaly couldn't have gotten inside… That left them with one possibility.
All of the grieving people stepped away and drew their guns, pointing them at Claire's group and by association, Elyas. "Why did you do this?!" A balding man with bloodshot eyes asked, he clearly hadn't gotten good sleep.
"We had nothing to do with this! First you shut the door on us and leave us to die, and now you blame us for some old f*ckers death?!" Dany spit for half of his words.
"Don't you dare talk about my father like that!" The man with bloodshot eyes spit back, now aiming his gun solely towards Dany.
"Everyone calm down. It wasn't us who did this." Dena tried to calm the angry crowd, but her denial only added fuel to the flames. Their voices slowly increased in tone, turning from yelling to shouting, and then to screams demanding an explanation or punishment.
Just as things were about to take a turn for the worse, Elyas spoke. His voice, calm but carrying an unnatural resonance, sliced through the rising panic. "There are more than one." Everyone's attention fell on him. The man with bloodshot eyes asked with his hoarse voice, "What do you mean?"
"The breakout. A single Anomalous Artifact hasn't escaped. There are multiple of them." The fear caused by his words doused the flames in their eyes to some degree, but the crowd still stayed vigilant. "How are you so sure?" A man asked. "What does that have to do with our colleague's murder?" A woman said.
"The handling instructions didn't say anything about an anomaly capable of completely suppressing our powers. But we know there is one with such ability. The instructions instead talked about a being we can't look at or talk to, and we are still alive after seeing the breathing dark. So we know that on top of it, the one we cannot see is somewhere on this floor as well. And last—" Claire cut Elyas off, having just now realized what he had noticed already.
"Nothing could have come inside without us noticing, so the murderer had to have been here before the door was barricaded!"
Elyas nodded, resuming, "On top of that, even without power, killing a Dreamer would be a tall task for any of us without the use of firearms. And as far as I know, that's not a gunshot." He said, pointing to the knife wound on the victim's chest.
"That means the victim had to have dropped their guard or were surprised. Also, as cruel as it sounds, we wouldn't gain anything by murdering one of you."
Hart's face brightened both with understanding and dawning terror. "You mean…"
"Yes," Elyas said before adding, "There is another monster among us."