Morgan: Chapter 1 (Reader release) (Patreon)

And with Chapter 2 out here is last month's CYOA chapter for the rest of ya.  Hope you enjoy.

***

“What’s up with those armored vans out front?”  You ask Mike, your fellow bike messenger, who was just heading toward the exit of the old brick office building as you are heading in.  The pair of you step to the side to allow the flow of folks coming into work to stream past you through the marble floored lobby. “FBI raid or some shit?”

“I guess they found some sort archaeological thing in the basement.”

“Archaeologists drive armored vans?  Unmarked armored vans?”

“I dunno man.”

Just then a crackle comes from the two-way radio of the security guard posted at the door.  “Not lookin good down here.  They’re talkin about closin it down Al.”  Says a voice, taut with nervous uncertainty.  “We might be evacuating the building.”

The security guard speaks into the radio.  “Shit, I’m alone up here!  They couldn’t have told us this an hour ago?”

You and the other courier look at each other with concern.  What was this about?  You spin the sealed manila envelope in the air and catch it again deftly.  “If I’m gonna get paid for this I better get going.”

“Sure man, catch ya later.”  The pair of you fist bump.  “Ride safe out there.”

“You too.”

You’d barely taken a step apart when the gleaming white marble beneath your feet begins to vibrate.  The bustling office workers feel it too as most of them stop and start looking around, all of them as confused as you were.  A moment later you realize the sensation wasn’t coming from the floor but seemed to be within your feet themselves as an unnerving pins and needles numbness sets in immediately after.  Confusion swiftly turns to concern as the men and women start shifting and hopping and rubbing at their legs as that sensation climbed from feet to ankles to calves.

Seizing the initiative the security guard calls out.  “Alright folks!  We’re evacuating the building.  Please leave in an orderly…”

His voice is drowned out by the rising din of the workers.  Your voice soon joins the chorus as the feeling had crawled up past your knees and you realized that you could not move everything now tingling.  “What the hell?”  Try as you might to move your feet would not lift from the floor.  Around you full blown fear had set in as people try desperately to unroot themselves or scramble for their phones to call 911.

“What the fuck’s happenin man?”  Mike says behind you.

You would have turned to look at him but the numbing had already reached your waist.  It felt like standing in rapidly rising water, water that was coursing with electricity.  Dropping the envelope you try to slap your legs back into motion.  It is only as it reaches your navel that it dawns on you.  What was going to happen when this…thing that was happening reached your heart!?

Nothing you can do can stop it or even slow it down.  Around you the screams and prayers of others ring in your ears, though you barely hear them as your mind turns to the important things.  Mom.  Dad.  Friends.  Family.  The choices you never made.  The roads you never took.  The relationships you never had.  Your cat Scrumpy all alone in your tiny apartment.  It is a relief as the effect does creep past your clavicle and you find yourself still conscious even though your chest no longer rose and fell with your breath.  The tingle rises up your neck…chin…face…all until it passes over the crown of your head.

All is quiet.  You can still hear the muffled sounds of traffic beyond the building along with barely audible screams from the floor above.  You still can see.  You stand frozen in place with the others, turning the grand art deco lobby into a museum of living statuary.  And for a couple of agonizing minutes you stand as if captured in amber, your flesh crackling with the strange unnerving energy.

There is moment, just a split second, where everything goes still.  No sound.  No tingle.  Just a moment of complete and utter…still.  And then you feel a sensation the likes of which you had not felt before or even imagined possible.  The weird invisible energy or field or whatever that had risen up through the building was now being drawn back down again.  Pulled along with it your body sags under the current and then liquefies!  Not in physical form but in some deeper and more essential way.  Though it never changes shape it felt as if your body had turned to a viscous oil and was slowly oozing down through the grate of a storm drain.

Held helpless in the grip of this phenomena the lobby around you begins to flicker and fade.  Somehow you can sense though that it is not the lobby shifting but you.  You and the others who remained sharply in focus were being pulled away from it to somewhere else.  The shining white floor becomes cracked and covered with a thick coating of gray dust and ash.  Every window disappears leaving hollow spaces that looked out onto a desolate rain soaked city ruin.  The buildings that you could see become bleak and shattered shells of what they once were as if some great war and a few hundred years had ground them down in the matter of seconds.  To all sides the walls fade from standing strong to broken foundations of themselves.  And above you the ceiling slowly dims from vision altogether leaving open sky above you, steel gray clouds swirled where once there was nothing but azure blue.  You also see suspended above you were four stories of other inhabitants from the building still frozen in midair where they had just been standing upon solid floors.

All at once you are released and the collective gasp of dozens let out as one.  An instant later the bodies begin to fall.  Those from the second floor hit the broken and rubble strewn ground first, most of them landing heavily with twisting ankles and buckled knees at the unexpected drop.  Those from the two floors above do not fair as well.  The crunch and crack of flesh and bone hitting hard marble turns your stomach.  A few of you that were lucky enough to be on the ground level take the brunt of some of the falling figures, thankfully you are not one of them.

You look around, a cold rain spattering against your face, and try to make sense of what was happening.  Were you dreaming?  It didn’t feel like a dream.  Were you having some sort of hallucination or mental break?  Perhaps, though everything seemed real enough.  Just ten feet away the wide dead eyes of a woman who had passed you by while you were locking your bike, her body bent, broken, and oozing warm blood from a dozen places, was more real than anything you’d seen before.

“Wha-Wha-What the fuck?  What the fuck!?”  Mike stammers.  “What the fuck was that!?”

Other voices echo out uttering similar questions and general confusion.  All around the slumped bodies of the groaning injured writhe.

Frantically you are looking, looking, looking.  You were in the same city though it had greatly changed.  The buildings were toppled and great upheavals in the land had transformed the landscape around you.  The vehicles on the streets were rusted and burned out, some of them showing signs of violent damage.  A towering bank of fog looked to be rolling in from the West and the frigid sleet that wet your arms felt more like it came from late December than the early July sky that you had just moments ago been basking under.  It is then you catch little motes of light there and there and there flickering to life in the darkened ruins of nearby structures.  Like beads of rain gathering on a windshield they steadily grow then begin to streak, all of them heading directly toward you and continuing to grow brighter.  There was something in the sickening yellow light that gnawed at your gut and told you that whatever they were they weren’t good.

“We gotta move.”

“Move?  Move?  Where!?  What’s going on?”

You shrug off your pack, the parcels and envelopes within it would be of no use to you now, and turn to Mike.  While those around began to panic you hold onto what wits you had left to remain focused.  That focus is shattered a moment later however as beside you a woman lets out piercing wail of terror.  Your head snaps her way to see that she staring down at the horror crawling up her leg.  Three feet long, black and chitinous it was vaguely centipede in form but with a line of wicked curved stingers running down its top and bottom.  Snapping between each stinger sizzled red energy that arced like electricity but danced like fire.  Where the energy touched the tender skin of her inner leg it scorched it and left it black and sizzling.  The smell of burned meat fills your nostrils.  Most disturbing of all however was at its head, between its three inch long mandibles, was what appeared to be a bulging half-exposed human eye!

“HELP MEEEE!!!”  She cries as she strikes it with her purse in a futile attempt to get it off of her.  The security guard has the wherewithal to draw his gun but then freezes in shock as we watch it scurry up under her skirt.  The woman grabs onto the creature’s body too late, the stingers burning and piercing through the flesh of her hands like a white hot knife through butter.  It does nothing to slow it.  Up under her skirt it crawls between her legs.  The sickening tear of flesh, a spatter of fresh blood hitting the floor, the woman shuddering and falling to her knees as the centipede climbed…burrowed…ever higher.  The blood drains from your face as you realize where it must be entering her by.  The woman looks skyward, tears streaming from her wide terror filled eyes, and gasps a single word.  “God?”  A moment later she spasms violently and drops to floor convulsing.  Her belly bulges and you see the red glow of the monstrosity through clothes and flesh.  You catch more movement.  There and there and there.  Crawling from cracks and rubble and hidden spaces more of these creatures and others like them.

All hell breaks loose.

People scream and scramble, some to flee and some to fight, but the scuttling horrors move with unnatural swiftness.  Death surrounds you.  Bloody, gory, sizzling death, grotesque in its brutality.  In a flash you realize that if you had any hope of escape from these things it was NOW.  Now while there was still fresh meat to occupy their attention.

As the security guard falls to his hands and knees as two of the burrowing insects tear into his fat gut you look to your buddy Mike.

“Let’s go!”

He stares at you, looking you straight in the eyes with the strangest look of calm you’d ever seen.

“Mike?”

His arms go stiff and he shudders, his eyes going wide as his head tilts slightly to the side.

“M-Mike?”

A trickle of crimson rolls from his left nostril over his open lips and from behind his eyes the red glow begins to burn.

“No.”  You gasp.  You had no time to mourn now though.  You take a step, pause, then spin to snatch the guard’s pistol from he’d dropped it.  Adrenaline pumping through every muscle you make for the nearest gap in the building which happened to be the front door through which you’d just entered.  Behind you are the sounds of carnage but you force yourself to stay focused on just one thing.  Escape!

You dart through the empty space where the revolving door once stood and as you break into the open you just keep running.  Three years of long shifts on the bike had your legs primed for just such an occasion.  It also helped that you knew this city’s downtown core better than the features of your own face.  Opting for a narrow alley across the way instead of the open streets where the monsters would see you you veer right instead of left.  Your legs pumping, your eyes sharp for movement, you spare a single instant to glance behind you.  You see blood, so much blood, but you also see the sickly yellow-white motes had now gathered over the group like a mass of maggots feasting on rotting flesh.  Over the bodies of those still with life in them they hover and congeal as piss colored energy reaches down to lick at the writhing survivors.  By the unholy moans of the people it sounded as if the motes were siphoning their very souls.

Sight is broken as you sprint down the crack of an alley.  As you pass you hear other creatures stir to your footsteps but you spare not a second to look or ponder and you are past them before they even realize what happened.  A pile of rubble blocks your way but you leap up the nearby wall and push off it and over the pile in a move a parkourist would have been proud of.  You scramble down the other side, around the hard corner, and just keep running.  You hit the street, cut right now safely out of sight of the initial building, and run with all you had down the open corridor between the fallen buildings.  Behind you the cries of people fade into silence.

Spotting a turned over delivery van ahead you make for it.  You run up to duck behind it.  With the pistol clutched in both hands tight to your fast beating heart your eyes dart this way and that.  What do you do?  Where do you go?  What was happening!?  In your panicked scanning about you catch the silhouette of a lone figure against the gray sky standing on the ridge of a nearby cliff.  It was a woman, tall and athletic of build, with long white hair that flowed in the wind and sparked like freshly fallen snow.  You might have been happy to see her…except for the fact that she looked to have a sniper rifle trained right on you!

Before she can shoot you duck back behind the van.  Clouds of steam escape you with hard panting breath.  Your back tight against the roof of the van, your hands trembling from the cold and the fear, you clutch the pistol and click off the safety.  What do do?  What to do?

Going back toward the slaughter was not an option.  Ahead of the van was a clear stretch of road that would make for good running but would make you a sitting duck for a waiting sniper.  You would have to show a lot of trust in someone who you had just seen pointing a gun at you to go that way just so that you wouldn’t be alone.  To the opposite side of the van and back just a little you knew there was another of those hidden alleys that you might be able to duck through unseen and come around further down the cliff, perhaps allowing you to make your way closer to the strange woman unnoticed and maybe even allowing you to get the drop on her.  And to this side of the van was a low wall about thirty feet away that you could possibly make it to if she wasn’t ready for you to go that direction.  From there you could make your way to a park then beyond to the less dense areas and try to figure out what this place was along the way.  Or maybe you could just throw yourself at her mercy and step out with your hands up in surrender.

What to do?  What to do!?

Chapter 2