Chapter 1: Commotions from Underground

It was quiet in the lab. Akio Sato sat at his desk, filling out numbers on sheets and calculating chemical ratios regarding plant hormones. It was getting on pretty late, past nine o’clock, so the lab was mostly empty. The only light was his desk lamp.

Mitch came up to his desk and tapped on it. “Alright there, buddy?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Akio hastily, straightening his spine. He subtly reached under his goggles and glasses to scratch an itch under his eye. “Why?”

“You stay late all the damn time,” said Mitch, his hands in his pockets. “You ever go out or something?”

Well, he usually went out to the bar after he left work at ten o’clock and got completely hammered, but he’d learned during his time in America that most people here thought that was unhealthy. “Uh, sometimes.”

“Alright, pal, just… take it easy, hey?”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

Mitch gave him a casual two-fingered salute as he turned and walked towards the front desk so he could punch out.

The lab was somewhat spacious. There were tables covered in test-tubes, vials, and notes. Whiteboards lined the walls, blocking most of the natural light from entering the room during the day. The air smelled faintly of chemicals, and the floors were concrete.

Akio was the only person left. He reached for the vial of isopropyl alcohol, but his aim was a little bit off due to his grogginess. The vial slipped from his fingers and smashed onto the floor.

Akio stared at it for a few moments. He blinked. Then, the alcohol began to seep towards his shoes and he quickly pulled his feet away. He sighed, picked up the largest pieces of glass, tossed them in the trash, mopped up the mess, and swept up the shards.

It had been a very long week. He dug through the cabinet under his desk to find some more alcohol, but he couldn’t find the bottle.

“Fuck.” He groaned. He snapped his gloves off, tossed them onto his desk, and removed his goggles. He rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “The hell do they keep it?”

He nosed around the lab, but he didn’t have the keys to the cabinets of his coworkers. The communal cabinet didn’t have any left. There must be some more down in storage.

The lights rarely worked, so he grabbed the massive flashlight that was kept on top of the cabinet before he proceeded down the stairs.

The lights flickered. The flashlight was heavy in his hand. The stairs were long, this staircase went all the way down to the boilers and heating systems. He’d been told that there was a rat problem, and that had been more than enough to keep him out of there.

He stepped into the walk-in closet and winced. It smelled really strong in here, it almost made his eyes burn. He finally found what he was looking for, right at the back of the bottom shelf.

Then he heard a scream.

It was faint, far away. It was a scream of pain and terror. It made him falter. He slowly replaced the bottle. The lights went out.

Akio turned on the flashlight and stepped out onto the staircase.

There it was, again. The muffled scream. It made him shudder.

It was coming from down the stairs.

Akio trembled. His instinct was to run, he was not the type who would fair well in a combat situation… but his curiosity was overwhelming. He had to find out what was going on. Besides, what if someone was in trouble? He could call the police or something.

He tiptoed down the stairs. Even though his footsteps were light, they echoed in the concrete stairwell.

He got to the bottom of the staircase. The door was massive, thicker than a door to the janitorial section should be. It was card access.

Akio swiped his card. It was declined.

He examined the door and he realized that it was cracked open a tiny bit, barely an inch. He gave it a gentle push, and the massive door swung slowly open inwards.

He could hear footsteps, and voices speaking in busy murmurs. He slowly slipped inside, and he found himself in a bright white hallway. The floor was still concrete, but something felt distinctly off about this place. The boiler and heating ducts were supposed to be here.

Where was he?

He walked slowly down the long hallway. He began to realize that this portion of the building far exceeded the upstairs departments where he worked. The current hallway he was in had at least twenty doors, each of which had windows that let him peer down into even longer hallways. The doors were all labelled with things like “ Bio-Mechanics Department ”, “ Nanotechnology Department ”, and “ Experimental Surgical Procedures ”.

Experimental surgery? Akio swallowed the lump in his throat. This had to be a dream. There was no way in hell that this could be real.

He could hear voices coming from the hallways. He quickly hurried past, he wasn’t supposed to be down here. What was he doing? He could get in so much trouble.

He heard another scream, but it was different from the first two that he had heard. This wasn’t one made from fear or pain, it was one of anger.

“ You sons of bitches! Come near me and I’ll rip your fucking guts out! ”

The voice was coming from behind the most formidable looking door in the hallway. It was labelled “ Genetic Engineering. ”

“ Yeah, you better run you motherfuckers! Go tell your piss-ass little friends that if they touch me I’m gonna- ” The rest of it was muffled from footsteps racing down the hallway from behind the door, towards Akio.

Akio panicked. He pressed himself up against the wall behind the door. It slammed open and two men in labcoats rushed past him.

“... subject still displaying high levels of violence despite sedation, send reinforcements to retrieve…” said one to the other, but their words were lost as they bustled down the hallway. Akio could have sworn that he saw a flash of blood.

Subject?

Akio grabbed the door before it closed and slipped inside.

He gaped at what he saw. The hallway was massive. There must be at least fifty doors lining the walls. More hallways branched off from the main one, each one of those must have had a dozen of doors leading into different rooms.

Every door had a number and a tiny window. He passed by numbers twenty, nineteen and eighteen, and he stood on tiptoe to peer through the window.

He hid a gasp. It was a cell. A person was sitting on the bed, their head in their hands, wearing a white uniform. There were a few books on the table but otherwise the room was sterile and empty.

He backed away before he saw the scales covering their forearms.

Akio realized that every single one of these doors was a cell. People were being held prisoner at this institution! What the hell? What was he supposed to do? How had he been working here for six months without noticing that something was off?

“ If I catch any of you little cocksuckers around here, I’ll rip your goddamn heads off! I’ll use your eyeballs to garnish my fucking martini! I’ll strangle you with your own intestines! ”

Akio couldn’t stop himself from moving forward, from following the voice. He paced forward, and he realized that the voice was coming from behind one final door at the end of the long hallway. It was bigger than any of the doors he’d seen before. It was solid steel, with a keypad password lock and a bullet-proof window. It almost looked like a vault to a bank.

He stepped up to the window and looked inside.

A person was standing in the centre of the room, holding a jagged and bloodied piece of mirror in their hand. The mirror in their room was smashed, the bed was broken, and there were splatters of blood on the wall and on the floor. They were standing over a corpse in a white labcoat with blood puddling underneath them.

The person whipped around and saw Akio’s horrified look. They smirked and stepped over to the window.

Akio couldn’t tell what gender they were. Their hair was blonde and shaggy, their eyes were grey, and their nose had a broad scar cut across the bridge.

They grinned. “Who’re you?”

“I-I…” he said.

“Pff, I don’t give a fuck.” They tossed the jagged mirror from one hand to the other. “You’re just some punk-ass piece of shit who found me by mistake, ain’tcha?”

“How can you tell?” he asked.

They gave him a look. “You’re terrified. Doy.”

They were right. He was trembling. “What’s… what is all this?”

They rolled their eyes. “Listen, kid. I ain’t about to explain this all to you. I don’t fucking care. Just hear this.” They crooked their finger. “Come closer.”

Akio inched a bit nearer, until his breath fogged the bullet-proof glass.

“You listening?”

“Y-yeah.”

“ GOOD! ” They yelled, slamming their fist on the glass. Akio reeled back. Blood splattered over the window, it was impossible to tell whether it was theirs or their victim’s.

“ IF I EVER CATCH YOUR ASS NEAR ME AGAIN I’M GONNA FUCKING SHRED YOU, DO YOU HEAR ME?! I’LL GUT YOU LIKE A SOW, I’LL TEAR YOUR THROAT OUT, I’LL PEEL OFF YOUR SKIN INCH... BY... INCH! ”

Akio stumbled away from the door and sprinted down the hallway. He could still hear the prisoner screaming behind him.

“ I’LL KILL YOUR WHOLE FAMILY, DO YOU HEAR ME?! I GOT NOTHIN’ TO LOSE! I’LL RIP YOUR HEART OUT AND FEED IT TO THE RATS WHILE IT’S STILL BEATING! RUN, YOU COWARD, RUN!!! ”

Akio booked it up the stairs, slamming the door shut behind him. It was only when he was finally out of the building and into the dark night that their voice finally stopped echoing inside his head.

He stood on the sidewalk outside of his building, leaning against a street lamp. His knees were shaking, and his breath was shallow. The white lights of the company’s logo bleached the darkness with the word “ Monsoon ”.

He shook his head. “ Fuck, I-I need a drink.”

In the haze of the next morning’s hangover, he managed to convince himself that what he saw was all a dream.