The alarm klaxons weren't mechanical - they were human. Or what remained of them. The shrieks of dying researchers looped endlessly through the bunker's speakers, their final moments weaponized into a warning system. I pressed my palms against my ears, but the screams slithered between my fingers like living things.
Zayn's body convulsed on the surgical table, tendons standing out like cables beneath skin gone translucent. His black eyes locked onto mine as his jaw unhinged with a wet crack, words tumbling out in Captain Wang's distinctive Beijing accent:
"Check the third surgeon's cadaver. Left breast pocket. You'll know it when you touch it."
The shadow operators were retreating, their inky forms dissolving into the floor grates. But one gripped my wrist with fingers like frozen scalpels, its voice vibrating directly into my bones:
"We were the seventh containment team they sent. The first six... they didn't so much die as become repurposed." Its gelatinous form rippled toward a drain. "Listen to the walls. They still whisper in Dr. Kwon's voice."
The surgical cadaver's fingers were still warm.
Too warm.
As I reached into its breast pocket, the corpse's eyelids fluttered. A final synaptic firing, or something more deliberate? The folded documents bore the familiar winged-serpent logo of Aesir Biomedical, but with a handwritten addendum in bleeding ink:
PROJECT ECLIPSE
Phase III Human Trials
*Containment Protocol Gamma-9*
The pages revealed:
A vaccine formula using stabilized black fluid (designation: *Ouroboros-7*)
Satellite timestamps showing our plane was tracked since takeoff
A personnel list with four names circled - ours - followed by:
"Primary neural substrates acquired. Proceed with mnemic extraction."
Aaron's containment tube began fogging over from the inside. His reflection in the glass didn't match his movements - while his physical body spasmed, the reflection calmly pressed a palm against the glass, tracing coordinates with its fingertips. Numbers. Equations. A countdown timer ending at 06:00:00.
Insha tore the IVs from her arms, her pupils dilating unevenly. "That's not Aaron's reflection," she whispered. "That's Flight Engineer Cho from 1-Zeta. I'd recognize his watch anywhere."
The facility lights stuttered into crimson emergency mode. The lasers reconfigured into angular warning symbols across the walls - not any language I knew, but somehow understandable:
QUARANTINE LOCK INITIATED
PURGING SECTOR ALPHA
From the ventilation shafts came wet, clicking sounds. Not the shadows this time. Something with too many joints was crawling through the ducts, its breath rattling in a familiar cadence - the exact rhythm of Flight 1-Zeta's final mayday transmission.
Zayn's back arched impossibly, his spine cracking like a whip as a new voice erupted from his ruined throat - a woman's voice, calm and clinical:
"There was never going to be a Shanghai. Just Facility B. They needed carriers who could pass the blood-brain barrier. You were never survivors. You were always delivery systems."
The last functioning monitor flickered to life, showing black-clad figures extracting canisters from our plane's cargo hold. Each bore a three-digit code that matched our "subject numbers" from the documents.
But the true horror came when the camera panned to the crash site's perimeter.
Where four more figures stood perfectly still.
Wearing our faces.