It was just down the hall. Thirty seconds at a dead sprint, and he could be safe.
She had already gone. Almost three hours ago, and he had listened with his ear pressed against the door as her footsteps had echoed down the corridor.
Other sounds had woken behind them. Loud and quick enough that, after the first few steps, he hadn’t been able to hear her anymore. Only the wailing racket, and he had stumbled back from the door, shuddering uncontrollably at the idea of claws, faces to match the sound, fangs, something shearing through its thick metal surface and finding him with nowhere to run.
Only one exit from that lobotomized little control room. She had made it; he should have gone at the same time.
Or followed already. She kept calling him over the comm, urging him to hurry. She wouldn’t wait for him forever.
Just down the hall. All he had to do was open the door. Hit the corridor at a sprint, and, like her, his echoes would fade just ahead of their claws. Fangs? No one had ever seen them before, except now her, maybe. No one knew what they looked like – only what they left behind.
Just thirty seconds to the shuttle bay. He could make it. But every time he imagined opening the door, he saw his legs spilling him limply down to sit. Fear making him silent and passive as the faces no one living had seen emerged from the dark.
The comm crackled. Her voice again – she wouldn’t wait forever.
She hadn’t said anything yet about prepping the shuttle. Engines hot, or given him any sort of countdown. All she said- every time, all she said- was that she was waiting for him.
Static hummed under her voice, giving it a faint, tinny echo. A chasing sound, like wails waking after footsteps running down too long a corridor. He knew her voice.
He knew her voice, and so he didn’t answer. He stepped back from the door instead, and sat beneath the console from which the voice crackled, and listened as it told him in echo, again and again, that it wouldn’t wait forever.
