THE BURNING OF SECTOR 9
Description: The Burning of Sector 9 is a short story written in 2013 that first introduced the alien-spider hybrid parasites (CL-X509 Robustus), but retrospectively, a prototype of the enhanced arachnid that would become the subject of future EonCorp experiments in the South Mill District (and the related film series). The illegal Sector 9 spider experiments were an effort by rogue scientists to hybridize humans with the alien species Octosisdama, to create a superhuman variant, but instead, the Sector 9 spiders caused grotesque mutations of their hosts. The advancement of Post-DeTech insurgents caused the Sector 9 facility to evacuate, leaving behind many of their mutated specimens and arachnid parasites. When the insurgents attacked the Sector 9 facility, they found themselves doing battle with what was left of the spider-spliced mutants. The short story can be read below -
Description: The Burning of Sector 9 is a short story written in 2013 that first introduced the alien-spider hybrid parasites (CL-X509 Robustus), but retrospectively, a prototype of the enhanced arachnid that would become the subject of future EonCorp experiments in the South Mill District (and the related film series). The illegal Sector 9 spider experiments were an effort by rogue scientists to hybridize humans with the alien species Octosisdama, to create a superhuman variant, but instead, the Sector 9 spiders caused grotesque mutations of their hosts. The advancement of Post-DeTech insurgents caused the Sector 9 facility to evacuate, leaving behind many of their mutated specimens and arachnid parasites. When the insurgents attacked the Sector 9 facility, they found themselves doing battle with what was left of the spider-spliced mutants. The short story can be read below -
THE BURNING OF SECTOR 9
By Joe Meredith
2013
By Joe Meredith
2013
Its wicked eyes watched out through the wide glass window of the containment chamber. The room outside was now pitch black. The Doctor had been gone for a long time, now. Something had happened. The only light now was the beaming set of red attached to the ceiling of its cell. Its wicked eyes rolled downward on its pale, marble face and it noticed the enormous, black spider curled up dead by its ravaged rib cage.
Now that the spider was dead, the top of its skull could heal back to its congenital form. Now that the spider was dead, its limbs were reattaching themselves and becoming stronger. Its body was no longer the spider’s nest. With its skull healing, its mangled brains were starting to pull the pieces back together, bringing it to acknowledge its place in time and space.
Its thoughts began in a flurry of observation. The pale marble of its skin was scabbing over its once exposed, grimy organs. The last remains of spider web was absorbing into its body, supplying the last of nutrients that it was going to get, unless it found a way out of this containment.
Before, the spider fed on the fruit of its guts, and in exchange the spider’s abundance of thick, silky web would over time dissolve into sustenance for the host. The spider, with its creeping and fidgeting and urges would sometimes separate its host’s limbs, but often she would reconnect the appendages with web, and the nourishing value of the web would cauterize the host’s wounds.
Sometimes the spider would become too vicious, attempting to expand her home. She would begin tearing her host apart, a means of filling the breadth of the chamber. But the Doctor prevented this activity, as it would have most certainly killed the spider’s host. With the press of a button, the Doctor sent a gas streaming into the cell, calming the spider, and she would again become peaceful and coexistent.
The Doctor spent a lot of time observing the spider and her host. It remembered that the Doctor would often talk to it and the spider. It remembered that the Doctor often called it ‘H-3.’
‘Do you remember anything before this, H-3? Do you remember being human, H-3? You are so far the most perfect of all of my specimens, H-3,’ said the Doctor, it remembered.
So as its mangled brains continued to pull the pieces back together, it began to associate itself with the name, ‘H-3.’
One of H-3’s earliest and most vivid memories was of when the spider formed her egg sac in its throat. When the offspring hatched, their multitude bloomed out of its mouth, swarming the pale marble and wounds of its flesh. The rest of the multitude poured into its belly, feeding violently. The Doctor released a potent stream of gas into the chamber, sedating all of the arachnoids. The Doctor and a couple of assistants then removed H-3 from the incubation chamber. And as the Doctor and his assistants removed the baby spiders from the incubator, H-3 lay staring up into the glaring, astonishing, infinity of laboratory fluorescence. Its wicked eyes mingled blissfully with this milky oblivion. This enrapturing, cold brightness sent a stream of intoxicating energy throughout H-3’s body, especially vibrant in its groin. And as though distant, at the edge of this experience, H-3 could hear the voices of the Doctor and his assistants:
‘The fighting’s spread to Sector 9,’ said one of the assistants.
‘This situation is spiraling out of control,’ said the other.
‘Those ignorant vigilantes will be doomed if they come near this facility,’ said the Doctor with a deep, harsh, voice.
Then H-3 was plucked out of its beautiful, great white experience. They put its limp and mangled body back into the incubator with no more arachnid young to feed on its body. H-3 kept its wicked eyes locked on the whiteness of the outside room. But soon the mother spider was conscious again, and resumed with her eight, bony, creeping legs into the opening at the top of H-3’s skull, sending the host back into half-consciousness, and down she crawled, into its belly to feast and fidget.
But now the spider was dead. Its ghoulish carcass was curled up by H-3’s chest. The spider’s nutritious web was almost gone, and H-3 was beginning to feel very hungry. It had found itself all alone, with its mangled brain coming back together again, and the seeds of desire were beginning to sprout. Its orchid lungs began a lively pulsation, and it began to push its scabbed, healing body forcefully into the wide glass window. It pushed and beat at the glass, wailing horribly, cracking it more and more, smashing the spider’s corpse between its chest and the glass, until finally, the glass shattered to the floor, with H-3 plummeting with it, into the pitch black of the room.
For a while, limp and twisted in the glass, it lay. Its wicked eyes mingled with the blackness, until its sight began to adjust to a flickering light. The flickering made visible the room’s exit. H-3 stirred, and lifted itself from the glass the only way it felt it could. Picking itself up with wounded, gnarly arms and legs, it arched its spine, and leg before arm, as the arthropod does, it began to crawl like it remembered the spider once crawled, with a click and a clack, creeping, fearsomely, unnaturally, with its wicked eyes beaming, nightmarishly, through the blackness of the room.
The exit led out into a narrow corridor, seemingly miles long. The overhead flickering was the result of emergency protocol in the building’s electrical system. Above the immediate doorway was the label, H-3, and further along the corridor, H-3 came to another doorway, above which there was the label, H-4. It looked into this new room and could see at the back of the pitch blackness, the beaming red of another incubation chamber like that of its own. Inside this incubator, another spider still crawled, and its host had been slaughtered and spread out and covered in an abundance of web. The dead host was deteriorating in the thick, useless web, and the spider was starving.
H-3 moved along, and next was the doorway labeled H-5. Emergency lights blinked nearer to this room’s entrance, and H-3 could make out more detail of the interior. There a scene of carnage unfolded. Blood and other gruesome ejections were pasted on the floor and walls. Spider web stretched out across the room. The red-lit incubation cell was opened and empty. The bloody body lying in the middle of the floor was barely recognizable as one of the Doctor’s assistants. And as H-3’s wicked eyes adjusted to the scene, it could see over in a corner of the room that a host lay in a pile of its own dried, purple guts.
Then swiftly out of the blackness came hissing a fierce spider, slashing and grabbing at H-3. Its fangs were foaming with starvation. This spider was significantly larger than H-3’s own. The overfed arachnid overwhelmed its prey against the wall, but H-3’s time of healing proved an advantage against the predator. With adrenaline-pumped might and clicking muscles, H-3 pressed down on the spider’s head, keeping the razor-edge fangs at bay, and with malignant teeth, H-3 started chomping and gnawing and tearing at the spider’s bulbous abdomen. The spider hissed in pain, bleeding yellow ooze, and pouring foam from its fangs. In this savage rage, with a crunch, H-3 accidentally crushed the spider’s head against the floor, and with its bony fingers tore the abdomen open wide, spilling out all of the opponent’s insides, yellow, gold, and glistening, with the here and there indication of unborn arthropod-formations that poured out with it. H-3 held its mouth opened, gruesome with yellow spider blood, and its wicked eyes beaming with murderous victory.
Nearby, sounds of thumping and clicking and clacking began. Its wicked eyes moved around their surroundings, its primal mouth ready for the taste of more blood, if needed. In the flickering lights it watched as two creatures appeared. Both were creepy-crawling on hand and foot. Their scabbed, pale, marble flesh contrasted the darkness, and H-3 saw that it was among its own kind. Both were much smaller than H-3. Their bellies were very round, almost filling the whole of their contour, other than the scrawny, disproportionate arms and legs on which they crawled. These other hosts passed by H-3, watching it along the way to ensure their own safety. They crawled on.
H-3 knew with its healing brain that it was superior in might to these lower organisms, so with their threat relinquished, it followed behind them, passing by the doorways labeled H-6, empty and black, H-7, with its dead host and near-dead, starving spider, H-8, with an empty red incubation cell and a dead spider on the floor.
The host out of the room labeled H-10, some seven feet long and with a total of six, stubby appendages came crawling out with H-3 and the other two. With a healing brain, it recognized that these were among its own kind.
Eventually at a right turn in the corridor, a light shone. The hosts all saw this with wicked eyes, desiring this great brightness. They turned toward this light. At the end was an opened doorway shining the most intoxicating radiance. But before they could get to the light, a group of figures emerged, obscuring the luminosity. The figures all crouched into a threatening position and shots were fired toward the hosts. H-10 was blasted into the belly and groin, sending it down with a horrific, high-pitched, whistling scream of pain. One of the little round hosts was popped in the belly, too, spraying velvet blood, but the little round host kept moving.
In a fit of hateful rage, H-3 picked up its steps, swift toward the assailants. With a quick leap it kicked one down and spun itself upward to bite the victim into the temple, its bottom jaws puncturing the assailant’s eyeball. And with its bony fingers, it pressed into the victim’s throat, hard and viciously, it tore into the throat, pulling, yanking, until the crunchy detachment of the victim’s head was apparent. And still H-3 tore at the stump of victim’s neck. And the two little round ones had together pounced one of the other assailants, as the other of the gunmen backed up with quick steps, astonished.
Victorious, the last three hosts continued toward the intoxicating light, careless of the threat of gunmen waiting out there. And out into the light they went. H-3’s wicked eyes moved around in this outer world, seeing pale marble hosts, many piled up and dead, and some just laying there, staring out into the brightness.
Among the dead hosts were also dead gunmen, all variously mutilated. It could hear the voices of the assailants calling out. Then H-3 looked up toward the source of the grand light. A magnificent yellow orb shone down. H-3 was intoxicated by this incredible thing of brightness.
This grand, yellow orb shone and burned into H-3’s eyeballs. Its feet and hands faltered and it lay staring out into the great luminosity, with energy enrapturing its body, intoxicating it limb to limb, especially vibrant in its groin. Its wicked eyes burned and sizzled in the light. And in the distance, as though at the edge of this experience, it could hear the voices of the militants:
‘What the fuck is happening to them?’ yelled one of the militants.
‘They’re stopping at the sunlight!’ yelled another.
‘Their eyes are fucking boiling, man!’ yelled another.
‘Dr. Kaufman was a lunatic,’ said another, walking by the intoxicated
H-3.
‘Bring the flamethrower, burn all of them, and bring the lab to the ground,’ said another, in a commanding tone.
Shots were fired into the heads of intoxicated hosts. H-3 lay in blissful psychosis, in love with the light. Burning, boiling, its wicked eyes then saw amazing white, and pleasure mingled in its groin, and then all that it saw was black, its blindness complete. At the point of blindness, a militant kneeled down to H-3 and began to speak loudly:
‘Hey, Mike, come here! It’s Robert, it’s fucking Robert, man!’ the militant said.
With its brain still coming back together, it remembered that it was once a man named ‘Robert.’
‘Poor mother fucker, Kaufman really did him in,’ said another militant, close by.
Then Robert was plucked from his experience, and thrown onto a lump of heads and limbs.
‘Man, I can’t let Robert go like that,’ the somehow familiar voice said.
‘Then shoot him, man’ said another.
‘This is fucked up,’ said the somehow familiar voice.
The man spilling gasoline all over the pile of intoxicated hosts was done and then lit and threw a match onto the pile, setting it ablaze. H-3 began to feel painful flames at its feet and then its legs.
‘You want me to do it?’ said someone.
‘No, no, I got this,’ said the somehow familiar voice.
The militant hesitated for a moment, but his trigger-finger faltered, and the blind intoxication of Robert abruptly ended.
And Robert’s pale marble body burned.
Now that the spider was dead, the top of its skull could heal back to its congenital form. Now that the spider was dead, its limbs were reattaching themselves and becoming stronger. Its body was no longer the spider’s nest. With its skull healing, its mangled brains were starting to pull the pieces back together, bringing it to acknowledge its place in time and space.
Its thoughts began in a flurry of observation. The pale marble of its skin was scabbing over its once exposed, grimy organs. The last remains of spider web was absorbing into its body, supplying the last of nutrients that it was going to get, unless it found a way out of this containment.
Before, the spider fed on the fruit of its guts, and in exchange the spider’s abundance of thick, silky web would over time dissolve into sustenance for the host. The spider, with its creeping and fidgeting and urges would sometimes separate its host’s limbs, but often she would reconnect the appendages with web, and the nourishing value of the web would cauterize the host’s wounds.
Sometimes the spider would become too vicious, attempting to expand her home. She would begin tearing her host apart, a means of filling the breadth of the chamber. But the Doctor prevented this activity, as it would have most certainly killed the spider’s host. With the press of a button, the Doctor sent a gas streaming into the cell, calming the spider, and she would again become peaceful and coexistent.
The Doctor spent a lot of time observing the spider and her host. It remembered that the Doctor would often talk to it and the spider. It remembered that the Doctor often called it ‘H-3.’
‘Do you remember anything before this, H-3? Do you remember being human, H-3? You are so far the most perfect of all of my specimens, H-3,’ said the Doctor, it remembered.
So as its mangled brains continued to pull the pieces back together, it began to associate itself with the name, ‘H-3.’
One of H-3’s earliest and most vivid memories was of when the spider formed her egg sac in its throat. When the offspring hatched, their multitude bloomed out of its mouth, swarming the pale marble and wounds of its flesh. The rest of the multitude poured into its belly, feeding violently. The Doctor released a potent stream of gas into the chamber, sedating all of the arachnoids. The Doctor and a couple of assistants then removed H-3 from the incubation chamber. And as the Doctor and his assistants removed the baby spiders from the incubator, H-3 lay staring up into the glaring, astonishing, infinity of laboratory fluorescence. Its wicked eyes mingled blissfully with this milky oblivion. This enrapturing, cold brightness sent a stream of intoxicating energy throughout H-3’s body, especially vibrant in its groin. And as though distant, at the edge of this experience, H-3 could hear the voices of the Doctor and his assistants:
‘The fighting’s spread to Sector 9,’ said one of the assistants.
‘This situation is spiraling out of control,’ said the other.
‘Those ignorant vigilantes will be doomed if they come near this facility,’ said the Doctor with a deep, harsh, voice.
Then H-3 was plucked out of its beautiful, great white experience. They put its limp and mangled body back into the incubator with no more arachnid young to feed on its body. H-3 kept its wicked eyes locked on the whiteness of the outside room. But soon the mother spider was conscious again, and resumed with her eight, bony, creeping legs into the opening at the top of H-3’s skull, sending the host back into half-consciousness, and down she crawled, into its belly to feast and fidget.
But now the spider was dead. Its ghoulish carcass was curled up by H-3’s chest. The spider’s nutritious web was almost gone, and H-3 was beginning to feel very hungry. It had found itself all alone, with its mangled brain coming back together again, and the seeds of desire were beginning to sprout. Its orchid lungs began a lively pulsation, and it began to push its scabbed, healing body forcefully into the wide glass window. It pushed and beat at the glass, wailing horribly, cracking it more and more, smashing the spider’s corpse between its chest and the glass, until finally, the glass shattered to the floor, with H-3 plummeting with it, into the pitch black of the room.
For a while, limp and twisted in the glass, it lay. Its wicked eyes mingled with the blackness, until its sight began to adjust to a flickering light. The flickering made visible the room’s exit. H-3 stirred, and lifted itself from the glass the only way it felt it could. Picking itself up with wounded, gnarly arms and legs, it arched its spine, and leg before arm, as the arthropod does, it began to crawl like it remembered the spider once crawled, with a click and a clack, creeping, fearsomely, unnaturally, with its wicked eyes beaming, nightmarishly, through the blackness of the room.
The exit led out into a narrow corridor, seemingly miles long. The overhead flickering was the result of emergency protocol in the building’s electrical system. Above the immediate doorway was the label, H-3, and further along the corridor, H-3 came to another doorway, above which there was the label, H-4. It looked into this new room and could see at the back of the pitch blackness, the beaming red of another incubation chamber like that of its own. Inside this incubator, another spider still crawled, and its host had been slaughtered and spread out and covered in an abundance of web. The dead host was deteriorating in the thick, useless web, and the spider was starving.
H-3 moved along, and next was the doorway labeled H-5. Emergency lights blinked nearer to this room’s entrance, and H-3 could make out more detail of the interior. There a scene of carnage unfolded. Blood and other gruesome ejections were pasted on the floor and walls. Spider web stretched out across the room. The red-lit incubation cell was opened and empty. The bloody body lying in the middle of the floor was barely recognizable as one of the Doctor’s assistants. And as H-3’s wicked eyes adjusted to the scene, it could see over in a corner of the room that a host lay in a pile of its own dried, purple guts.
Then swiftly out of the blackness came hissing a fierce spider, slashing and grabbing at H-3. Its fangs were foaming with starvation. This spider was significantly larger than H-3’s own. The overfed arachnid overwhelmed its prey against the wall, but H-3’s time of healing proved an advantage against the predator. With adrenaline-pumped might and clicking muscles, H-3 pressed down on the spider’s head, keeping the razor-edge fangs at bay, and with malignant teeth, H-3 started chomping and gnawing and tearing at the spider’s bulbous abdomen. The spider hissed in pain, bleeding yellow ooze, and pouring foam from its fangs. In this savage rage, with a crunch, H-3 accidentally crushed the spider’s head against the floor, and with its bony fingers tore the abdomen open wide, spilling out all of the opponent’s insides, yellow, gold, and glistening, with the here and there indication of unborn arthropod-formations that poured out with it. H-3 held its mouth opened, gruesome with yellow spider blood, and its wicked eyes beaming with murderous victory.
Nearby, sounds of thumping and clicking and clacking began. Its wicked eyes moved around their surroundings, its primal mouth ready for the taste of more blood, if needed. In the flickering lights it watched as two creatures appeared. Both were creepy-crawling on hand and foot. Their scabbed, pale, marble flesh contrasted the darkness, and H-3 saw that it was among its own kind. Both were much smaller than H-3. Their bellies were very round, almost filling the whole of their contour, other than the scrawny, disproportionate arms and legs on which they crawled. These other hosts passed by H-3, watching it along the way to ensure their own safety. They crawled on.
H-3 knew with its healing brain that it was superior in might to these lower organisms, so with their threat relinquished, it followed behind them, passing by the doorways labeled H-6, empty and black, H-7, with its dead host and near-dead, starving spider, H-8, with an empty red incubation cell and a dead spider on the floor.
The host out of the room labeled H-10, some seven feet long and with a total of six, stubby appendages came crawling out with H-3 and the other two. With a healing brain, it recognized that these were among its own kind.
Eventually at a right turn in the corridor, a light shone. The hosts all saw this with wicked eyes, desiring this great brightness. They turned toward this light. At the end was an opened doorway shining the most intoxicating radiance. But before they could get to the light, a group of figures emerged, obscuring the luminosity. The figures all crouched into a threatening position and shots were fired toward the hosts. H-10 was blasted into the belly and groin, sending it down with a horrific, high-pitched, whistling scream of pain. One of the little round hosts was popped in the belly, too, spraying velvet blood, but the little round host kept moving.
In a fit of hateful rage, H-3 picked up its steps, swift toward the assailants. With a quick leap it kicked one down and spun itself upward to bite the victim into the temple, its bottom jaws puncturing the assailant’s eyeball. And with its bony fingers, it pressed into the victim’s throat, hard and viciously, it tore into the throat, pulling, yanking, until the crunchy detachment of the victim’s head was apparent. And still H-3 tore at the stump of victim’s neck. And the two little round ones had together pounced one of the other assailants, as the other of the gunmen backed up with quick steps, astonished.
Victorious, the last three hosts continued toward the intoxicating light, careless of the threat of gunmen waiting out there. And out into the light they went. H-3’s wicked eyes moved around in this outer world, seeing pale marble hosts, many piled up and dead, and some just laying there, staring out into the brightness.
Among the dead hosts were also dead gunmen, all variously mutilated. It could hear the voices of the assailants calling out. Then H-3 looked up toward the source of the grand light. A magnificent yellow orb shone down. H-3 was intoxicated by this incredible thing of brightness.
This grand, yellow orb shone and burned into H-3’s eyeballs. Its feet and hands faltered and it lay staring out into the great luminosity, with energy enrapturing its body, intoxicating it limb to limb, especially vibrant in its groin. Its wicked eyes burned and sizzled in the light. And in the distance, as though at the edge of this experience, it could hear the voices of the militants:
‘What the fuck is happening to them?’ yelled one of the militants.
‘They’re stopping at the sunlight!’ yelled another.
‘Their eyes are fucking boiling, man!’ yelled another.
‘Dr. Kaufman was a lunatic,’ said another, walking by the intoxicated
H-3.
‘Bring the flamethrower, burn all of them, and bring the lab to the ground,’ said another, in a commanding tone.
Shots were fired into the heads of intoxicated hosts. H-3 lay in blissful psychosis, in love with the light. Burning, boiling, its wicked eyes then saw amazing white, and pleasure mingled in its groin, and then all that it saw was black, its blindness complete. At the point of blindness, a militant kneeled down to H-3 and began to speak loudly:
‘Hey, Mike, come here! It’s Robert, it’s fucking Robert, man!’ the militant said.
With its brain still coming back together, it remembered that it was once a man named ‘Robert.’
‘Poor mother fucker, Kaufman really did him in,’ said another militant, close by.
Then Robert was plucked from his experience, and thrown onto a lump of heads and limbs.
‘Man, I can’t let Robert go like that,’ the somehow familiar voice said.
‘Then shoot him, man’ said another.
‘This is fucked up,’ said the somehow familiar voice.
The man spilling gasoline all over the pile of intoxicated hosts was done and then lit and threw a match onto the pile, setting it ablaze. H-3 began to feel painful flames at its feet and then its legs.
‘You want me to do it?’ said someone.
‘No, no, I got this,’ said the somehow familiar voice.
The militant hesitated for a moment, but his trigger-finger faltered, and the blind intoxication of Robert abruptly ended.
And Robert’s pale marble body burned.