Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Fighting the Infection

His head rang. Adam held his hands to his head and kept his eyes squeezed shut for a time as the sound eventually died away. The creature inside the barn crumbled to ash leaving nothing behind her but a rather sloppy pile of unmentionable wet sludge. Outside, Adam lay atop the corrupted Earth hald in and half out of Sunny's arms. In his full armor, he was far to large for even her to carry, so she sat with him her spear held at her side at the ready if something were to come along.

Behind them, figures raced across the open and corrupted farmland. A woman in gore stained BDUs skidded to a stop beside them, opening a pocket on the front of her plate carrier with the ripping of Velcro, "What's wrong, did he git hit?"

"No I.... no, I think this is something different." He groggily heard the sound of worry in Sunny's voice, and more overtly the worry that was swirling around in her head. He could hear it all despite his best efforts, her concern for him spilling into his mind like a river torrent washing away his own thoughts.

What's wrong.

What is this.

Is this the surgery

And then off to his other side, the thoughts of the medic.

No penetrating wounds on the armor, so perhaps it is blunt force trauma, pain indicators are towards the head, so perhaps it was a concussive impact to the head, but then again that hardly makes sense with the SE suit.

It took him almost a full minute to regain control, slamming the barriers down around his head so the flood waters wouldn't pour in and drown him. With a sigh of relief, he shifted and began to ccrawl to his feet.

Sunny raised a hand to help him, "Adam are you ok? What was that?"

"Something we can deal with later."

Their medic looked just as confused, but she didn't bother to argue. Adam headed back into the barn retrieving his spear from the sludge and shaking it off with a face. Outside the sky was still red. Helicopter and hover jet rotors thrummed in the sky where they openly engaged wheeling packs of void kree.

The roar of distant jet engines echoed from somewhere above the bank of clouds.

Below them the ground still rumbled with anti air fire, and now Adam could finally see where it was coming from.

He pointed and sunny followed his finger to look, "The military installation. They must have set up anti air defenses when they built the compound around the void site.

Sunny nodded as the two of them broke into a jog, moving back up to join the formation and fill the hole they had briefly left, "The void must have taken over the system when the UNSC was forced out."

Adam nodded his agreement.

Looking to his right, just through a line of corpse white trees Adam could see another group of soldiers slowly moving forward towards the void site . They were getting closer and their formation was beginning to close inward.

It was an odd experience, Adam recognized the landscape around him despite how alien it was.

There in front of them was the dry creek bed where he had pretended he was exploring an alien planet, and over there was the rickety barbwire fence he had gotten his pants caught on that one time, and then there was the three he had fallen out of when he was nine years old, and yet the bark of the tree had gone white and porous like bone. Stepping forward to examine the tree and he swore he could see a delicate mist or red rising out of the porous holes.

Adam lifted a hand to his head again, as, in that instant his vision was suddenly..... overwhelmed with light and color.

His brain was almost overloaded as he tried to make sense of the view he was taking in, for a horrible moment he thought he had gone blind, which was completely insane considering he could SEE, he just couldn't make sense of what he was seeing. It was simply a horrible mass of colors and light and dark and contrast.