Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Julia woke once again. She had drifted off after just a couple more minutes, after her brain had been telling her to just lie down and wait for help. Now it was totally dark. She had fallen back inside the office and it appeared as if the door had been pushed close, held only partially open by her foot resting against it. Julia stood up slowly, trying to regain her senses and pushed open the door.

"H-..hello?" Her voice quavered and echoed. The hall was dark except for a fluorescent light, swinging by its remaining cord from the ceiling. The other source of light was what really bothered her. All around her Heliogel seeped from cracks and crevices in the walls. It hung from the ceiling like vines, oozed from the floor like moss, and pulsating holes dotted the gel intermittently, spurting out more Heliogel in a more liquid form. The worst part of it was that every 20 feet or so, small domes of pale blue-white light would pulsate from the growth. It appeared the same as the fragile domes that had emerged from the Heliogel when it was capturing the dark node. She hoped that it was only an after effect, but a part of her knew that the dark node was still down there; chugging along in its happy case. For all she knew it was moments away from another explosion, possibly even worse. Julia also knew that the heliogel had displayed nothing like this in her experiments and limited testing. It always generated in amounts that generated structured, very ordered shapes. Nothing like this dark vomit all throughout the hall of different textures and shades. And it certainly didn't grow to any volume larger than what was administered. Another thing she noticed was that she was alone. Besides the slowly spinning light and parts of the gel pulsating, nothing was moving and there were no bodies on the floor. She supposed grimly that the rest of the group could have woke up and evacuated through the elevator, but why leave her? She doubted that they hadn't seen her, and doubted even more that her friends wouldn't of noticed her absence. Julia had been incapacitated, sure, but their had to of been enough strong people left to carry her. She looked back down the hall to her right where the beam had fallen on the man's arm. Nothing. The gel was for the most part not infecting that area and there was still not any sign of human flesh. Julia stared at the floor unbelievingly.
"How could they of t-taken him and not me..?"

- By Ashton