Are You Coming 3D Render, Digital Artwork by RedSpartan

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Are You Coming

3D Render by RedSpartan

Mya moved her hand gently towards the girl's face, trying to reassure with a comforting smile, all the time realizing what she represented, the torment and anguish she must be feeling.

Suddenly the girl reeled back and raised the rifle menacingly once more. Her head darted to one side, and then the other, as if searching the dimly lit tunnels to either side of them for some hostile presence, a betrayal for lowering her guard.

‘How can I trust you?’ she spat, forcing Mya once more onto her back step. She raised her hands again, dropping the now useless pistol to the floor.

‘I can only ask you to believe that I’m telling the truth.’ she replied, unsure now whether she’d be able to abate the girl’s paranoia. ‘My mission was to infiltrate this facility, to find out what the hell they were doing here.’

The girl responded with a smug smile, ‘Hell?’ she spat, ‘ That’s a pretty appropriate name for this cursed place.’

The ominous sound of crashing machinery came from the direction from which they’d fled and both looked back with fear.

‘Takes a bit of killing then?’ Mya asked, a rising panic forming a lump in her throat.

‘They were researching the bodies ability to self regenerate,’ The girl responded, her voice disconcertingly detached, ‘But the subject began to mutate at an alarming rate. They tried to kill it during the evacuation but it got loose.’

Mya looked a her, wondering where her knowledge came from. ‘Subject?’ she asked, quietly dreading the answer even as she asked.

‘It was a man once!’ The girl replied bluntly, ‘A Commonwealth slave, like all the ‘subjects’ here, tortured and mutilated in the name of military science, for the greatness of the Confederation war machine. I actually think it want’s to die, that somewhere inside it’s tortured soul want’s the pain to end, the way it offered itself up to my gun. The cruelty is nothing seems to kill it.’

The girl shouldered the rifle on a clip at her back and went to move off, her mind seemingly made up about Mya.

She watched blankly as the girl moved away, perplexed and a little relieved at her change in temperament. So the intel they’d received had been right, she thought, just that the sheer extent of the horrors being perpetrated here had not come close to being accurate. Commonwealth captives were being experimented on to further their enemies military capability, but no one at Central Command had come close to conceiving the true atrocity, the horror of this place. As she watched the girl walk away she wondered how she had survived, alone and for so long in these tunnels full of monsters. Her experience was going to be an obvious asset if Mya had any chance of getting off this planet.

‘You coming?’ The girl asked, rising the few steps up to the next corridor, ‘It wont take long for it to get its bearings and come looking again. The regeneration thing was pretty successful, it was everything else that got fucked up.’

Mya took one last hesitant look over her shoulder, then went to quickly follow.

‘How do you live here with that thing roaming around?’ Mya questioned.

‘I don’t ‘live’ here,’ she responded absently, ‘that would be too dangerous. There are other things that haunt these tunnels, other monsters that used to be something else.’ She stopped for a moment, scanning the ceiling, ‘I only come in here to scavenge, for supplies and food. The forest isn’t very accommodating in that respect.’

Mya remembered the forest, more a jungle really, glimpses of which she’d had when the soldiers who had captured her transported her here. She recalled the stale stench of the grass against her face when they’d brutalized her. She shook her head to rid herself of the memory as the girl moved off again. The thought of other creatures like the one that pursued them made her blood cold.

‘What should I call you?’ She asked as she caught up with her.

‘Shaana.’ She replied quietly, as if she were afraid to offer up this secret to the encroaching walls of the tunnel.

‘That’s a beautiful name.’ Mya offered, trying to establish a rapport with the girl.

‘I thought so once,’ She replied, ‘Before the soldiers came to my home.’

Mya tried to imagine the terrors this poor girl had endured, but knew that offering her pity would probably be counter intuitive.

‘Shaana, I need a gun!’ She said, ‘Something mean and nasty, like your assault rifle.’

Shaana turned to her and frowned, ‘All of the armouries were stripped bare when the bastards fled, but there’s a gun locker three floors up that may still have something. And that thing won’t be able to follow. It’s pretty much confined down here.’

A disquieting noise came again from behind them.

‘Great,’ Mya replied, her voice notably tense from the unseen monster that was somehow, after all the violence Shaana had rained down upon it, stalking them again. ‘That’s a bonus I guess, So how do we get there?’

‘Yeah, well…’ Shaana responded, a hint of irony in her voice, ‘That’s the tricky bit.’

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This is an image I needed to move the story along, as the narrative was getting a bit too long if I included it with the next picture, which has a bit more action in it. So this one is just a bit of a filler so that I could include all the exposition that sets up the next section. Though not much is going on except conversation in the last couple of images I'm quite pleased with how the lighting and framing turned out. From now on though the fun starts....