1 . Name: mumbling mice @ 2012-10-28 21:06

Happy Halloween!

Warning: gore and disturbing imagery. Based off of the works of HP Lovecraft.

~~~~~

Forgive me for writing this in my native tongue. I'm afraid I haven't got the energy to write this in English. There is also something strangely comforting about writing in German. A sense of familiarity, if you will. But I digress.

It would be wise to be brief, for I am certain to die soon. However, I am not sure if this is a story that can be properly explained in short.

This will all probably sound very inconceivable, perhaps even insane, but I implore you with every remaining breath in my body to please take my words as truth. They are all to true to me as I sit here, desperately writing this in a darkened, stinking sewer shivering and covered in blood that isn't all mine.

As I write this, the Demoman sleeps on my shoulder. The creature punctured his remaining eye. He is now totally blind. He was weeping blood on me before but it seems that he has finally exhausted himself. I am trying to be as careful as I can so as not to wake him.

We are the last remaining members of BLU team, and I have come to terms with the fact that it will not be long before BLU team no longer exists.

This inexplicable cosmic horror has somehow bypassed the respawn system. I cannot tell you how. It was our Engineer's job to look into it, but his eventual conclusion did nothing but further baffle me.

For the horrors that have been instilled upon my comrades, I have no one to blame but myself. It was I who had insisted we keep the strange book nestled in the enemy's intelligence, when they wanted to burn it. It was my own morbid curiosity that drew me to the mysterious tome. It was I who took the Demoman's warning of it containing 'unnatural evils' and twisted it into a forbidden knowledge that could somehow benefit me.

It did not.

I currently feel an overwhelming heaviness in my heart, but it is not wise to give my limited time and paper up to ranting. I will start from the beginning.

I have been employed by Builder's League United for the past three years as a field Medic. My real name is inconsequential. There was a time in my life when I felt quite the opposite, but I am now so utterly ashamed by what I have unleashed upon the world that my own name sickens me.

As a mercenary for BLU, I and my team were contracted with the task of, among other feats, obtaining certain intelligence from the headquarters of Reliable Excavation Demolition. They have proven themselves to be highly skilled in defense, but after months of failing at infiltration, our Scout finally returned to our base with their intelligence briefcase strapped to his back.

Inside was only a book, bound in light, unidentifiable leather speckled with freckles and soft blonde hair. On the back of the book was a puckered, brown blemish that was slightly larger than a shriveled raisin.

Our Sniper, who was someone I would love to have as a companion in the outback but hate to have as a dinner guest, identified it as tanned human hide. Considering his travels in the bush and doubtless experiences with various heathens, I trusted his judgment, but ran DNA tests on a small sampling of the leather just to be sure.

It did, indeed, end up being human.

While most men might take this as a sign to stop, the macabre nature of its binding did nothing but further pique my interest. In the week we were allowed off because of our victory, I pored over the book obsessively, attempting to decipher the strange foreign language it was scrawled in. The antiqued pages were filled with these unidentifiable words, leaving only the blankest bare minimum of space for a series of bizarre illustrations of unknown beasts and deformed human-like anatomy. It was like my very own macabre Voynich Manuscript.

The spell it held over me was very sudden, very intense, and very inexplicable. In retrospect, my fixation with it was no doubt partially the fault of the supernatural, but I am not completely innocent. My blind, idiotic delusions of grandeur drove me to pursue the possibility of forbidden knowledge, for the mere sake of knowing something I wasn't supposed to. I fancied myself a god, and the respawn system did little to diminish my feelings of immortality.

One evening, the Spy came to me as I was analyzing an etching of what appeared to be a priest vomiting a fountain of blood and tentacles. I hadn't been sleeping much, and my eyes stung underneath the lamp and my legs ached, but I felt compelled to keep on. I did not realize he was in the room, but that had nothing to do with my fixation with the book—the Spy tended to make inconspicuous entrances. I finally noticed him when he snatched the book from underneath me and snapped it shut, forcing me to look up and see him sneering down at me, one hand clutching a crimson-stained handkerchief to his nose.

"It would be nice if you could actually serve your purpose, Doctor, rather than play Sherlock Holmes with an old book," he hissed as blood seeped between his teeth. For all he did to maintain his gentlemen's façade, he was really quite an unpleasant man.

Glaring, I straightened my spectacles with a huff and stood to go and fetch my medigun, inwardly fantasizing about chopping off his head and keeping it in my fridge. "Might I ask what happened?" I inquired, opening my cabinet and pawing through the clutter.

He walked over to me as I heaved the medigun off the second shelf. "The Demoman is opposed to being snuck up on while he is sleeping."

"I'd venture to say that most people are," I replied, balancing the backpack under my armpit and poising the gun towards his head. "Although I can't help but notice he's been especially on edge lately."

"It's this," the Spy said, holding up my book as the healing fumes curled over his body. The blood dried on his nostrils and he stuffed his handkerchief within his suit. "The man is as superstitious as an Italian grandmother, so naturally he thinks it holds some kind of unspeakable evil."

I switched off my medigun. "Do you?"

The Spy snorted and turned his back, walking to my desk. "I don't believe in 'evil', Doctor." He placed the book back on to my desk. "But I won't deny the fact that I find it just as unsettling as the rest of the team does. I suggest you dispose of it."

"I suggest you leave my office," I growled.

The Spy pursed his lips and withdrew his cigarette case. Placing a smoke between his lips, he left without another word, choosing to use his infernal cloaking device rather than simply walking out the door like a normal human being.

Bitterly cursing him, I sat back down at my desk and flipped open my book, back to my page, only to find a fresh drop of blood dotting the pages like smudged ink.

Looking back, this must have been what sealed his fate. At the time I was merely fuming with irrational anger that the his blood had desecrated the object of my fixation, but what I was really doing was beckoning forth a cosmic being, offering the body of what it must have perceived to be my enemy. My offering. My sacrifice.

The Spy I knew must be long gone by now. I wish there could be some sort of way for me to let him know how sorry I am.

The first change that I noticed after this event was not with the Spy, but with the book itself. It became heavier. The back cover became engorged and rounded, and the shriveled blemish stretched over the swollen mound to the point where it almost resembled a human nipple. The alteration in shape was incredibly accelerated, but I never actually saw it change. It just seemed to happen.

It piqued within two days, having reached the crude appearance of a woman's breast. When pinched, it secreted a yellowish, semi-clear pus that fizzed and ate away at the fingertips of my gloves.

I tested this mysterious secretion, but its results bore no resemblance to anything else I knew of. It was highly corrosive and gave off the stench of rotting flesh. A person with a lower threshold would have gagged at the foul odor.

The night the book reached its full form, I was awoken at some time around two in the morning to the sound of scuffling and slamming in my office. Bitter and grumbling a string of colorful language under my breath, I threw on my robe and slippers. I then swung open the door and switched on the light.

What I then saw was the first thing that made me realize something was very, very wrong.

The Spy was on the floor leaning against my desk, his knees drawn up to his chest. My book was in his hands, pressed against his face. The slurping sounds should have immediately been indicative of what he was doing, but it took me a moment to register the fact that he was suckling on the book's teat. A line of the fluid dribbled down his chin. How he was capable of tolerating such acidic material, I do not know. He drank hungrily, like the insatiable embodiment of Id. He was enveloped in the hypnotic process and did not even seem to realize I was standing over him until I snatched the book out of his hands.

His eyes were wide and bleeding at the corners. He looked up at me and emitted a gut-hollowing hiss. I cried out and covered my face with my arm as the remnants of the book's 'milk' sprayed at me through his gritted teeth, leaving dotted welts that burned through cloth on my skin. He then ran out of the room, hunched like an ape.

I stumbled to my cabinet and ripped it open, rummaging inside until I found my syringe gun and a pack of sleeper darts. I fumbled with delirious hands to hastily load them into the gun, hurrying out the door after him. He galloped down the hall with a crazed, animal gait, squawking and foaming at the mouth.

"Get back here!" I shouted, raising my weapon and shooting a stream of darts. He took a sharp turn at a corner, and all of the darts imbedded themselves into the wall.

Panting out a string of curses, I placed my hands on my knees, gasping for air. Behind me, bedroom doors began to swing open.

"What's all that ruckus, Doc?" The Engineer poked his head out and squinted at me sleepily.

"The—the Spy," I said, straightening up and wiping my sweated brow with the heel of my hand as the Engineer walked out, clad in dirty old tee-shirt and teddy bear patterned pajama bottoms. "There's something wrong with him. He broke into my office and he—" I wasn't even sure how to explain to him what he had been doing. I had not mentioned the swollen breast bump to my teammates. It was not a piece of information that could be brought up in general discussion. And besides, I could barely understand what happened to the tome myself

"It's okay, Doc, catch your breath." The Engineer slapped his hand on my shoulder as the other men began to sluggishly crawl out of their rooms, grumbling in confusion. "I'm sure this is just some kind of misunderstanding—"

"Would any of you ladies like to inform me as to why we're clucking in the hallway like hens at three in the morning?" The Soldier startled us, having somehow appeared next to us without our noticing, wearing a moth-eaten robe and a particularly deep grimace.

The Engineer stroked his chin. "Looks like the Spy's been actin' a bit fishy. He spooked the doc out somethin' fierce—"

"Hey yo!" The Scout came jogging down the hallway, in juvenile footie pajamas, which on any other day I may have found to be hilarious. "Anyone wanna explain to me why the frog just barked at me and ran into the sewer?"

"So that's where he's gone," I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose.

The Engineer, bless him, tried to comfort me. "Doc, it's fine. Scout'll run down and look for him tomorrow morning."

"Yeah, Doc, I'll—wait, what? Aw Hell no, I am not going after that—"

The Engineer shot him a venomous glare. "Let's not argue about this right now, young'un. The doctor needs to rest."

My fellow science-minded teammate guided me back to my room. After he departed, I flopped down on to my bed, too exhausted to remove my glasses or my slippers or robe. I don't recall lying awake for very long. In my sleep, I experienced a most unsettling nightmare.

I dreamt that I was on a boat as it sliced through thick morning fog. The only other person on the ship was the Demoman, and he sat up in the crow's nest looking at the bleak mass of nothingness through a brass spyglass. I asked him who was steering the boat, and with a wild grin, he called back down to tell me that the boat to Hell had no captain.

"There is a ferryman, though!" The Demoman bellowed through the howling winds. "But you can't pay his fair, mate. There's not enough gold coins in the world to spare you!"

It was then that the ship began to rock violently, and an enormous beast rose above us from the waters, wrapping its huge, slippery tentacles around the vessel and squeezing tightly. The fog was so thick that I could make out nothing except the vaguest shadow of its form—a looming, lumped torso with wriggling tendrils. It spoke in a language I had never heard but somehow managed to still understand. "You have done a great service to me, Doctor," it hissed. I could not see its eyes, but I could feel them. "But a great disservice to mankind."

It was at this point that I sat up in a cold sweat, wide awake, and yet my thoughts rang with one last message from the dream creature—"Stay out of the sewers if you wish to live."

Shaken and taking this as a sign, I hastily changed and hurried to the rec room. The Engineer and the Sniper were the only ones in there, playing chess as an announcer with a nasally voice buzzed through the radio the details of a baseball match in Philadelphia.

The Engineer looked up at me and grinned as his queen took out one of the Sniper's last knight. "Hey there, Doc. Feelin' any better?" he asked me briskly as the bushman slumped in his chair, grumbling.

"Where is Scout?" In retrospect, my urgency may have come off as rude. Now, as I face a certain death, I find myself reflecting on all of my worst moments in regret.

"Why, he went down into the sewers at about nine o'clock this morning," the Engineer replied, scratching his ear.

The Sniper checked his watch, and then reached over and moved his pawn up a space. "S'only been an hour and a half."

The Engineer leaned forward and squinted at the board, planning his next his next move. "I expect he's on his way back soon. I told him to buzz me through his headset if—"

It was then that the baseball game began to falter in waves of high-pitched static. Its grating fluctuation crashed and throbbed in that little room, a sea of electrical nonsense. The Sniper and I cringed at the sound, but the Engineer stood up and hunkered towards, unfazed.

"That's bound to be him right now." He began fiddling with a few dials until he hit what clearly sounded like the Scout.

"Help—I—it—the—" The signal faded in and out, the young man's voice muffled, but shaky and pleading. I felt a cold chill in my chest.

"Scout? What's going on? Can you hear me?" The Engineer grabbed the small microphone attached to the side of the radio and tried to adjust the antenna. "Talk to me son, where are you?"

"It—monster—down—kill me—the—help—Spy's—" There was a sudden bone-chilling scream and a crash, and then the radio went to static.

The Engineer solemnly placed the microphone back on its hook and switched the radio off. "Lost connection. Looks like he's a goner. We best head over to Respawn and see what's going on."

The Scout was not in Respawn.

We waited. First a minute. Then five. Then ten. Then half an hour.

Finally, the Engineer booted up the computer in the corner. It groaned and lurched to a start, spitting out a series of random numbers in green text before filling up the entire monitor with the harrowing words SYSTEM OFFLINE.

"What in tarnation?" The Engineer smacked the side of the monitor. The screen shook slightly, but the image did not change. "That can't be right."

"So, what?" The Sniper gaped at him. "Does this mean he can't come back?"

The Engineer began typing furiously into the keyboard. "Not unless I can get the system back online." He pressed the Enter key, and then sighed when SYSTEM OFFLINE popped back up. "This is probably gonna take me a while, boys. I wouldn't stick around—you'll start countin' the tiles on the ceiling. Best go tell the others about the situation."

The Sniper and I left the room, and then parted ways.

I found the Demoman sitting alone in the mess hall, smoking a cigarette and staring at the linoleum floor. I was suddenly reminded of the dream I had that night, the way he cackled madly on our dark voyage to Hell. A wave of unease washed over me as I approached him.

He looked up me, his last eye heavy and his face ragged. "You kept that bloody book, didn't you, Doc?"

I said nothing.

"Answer me, Doctor!" he spat, slamming his fist on the table.

"Yes!" I snapped in response. My following words were weaker and said with a sigh. "Yes, I did."

"Aw, Christ." He buried his face in his hands. His voice quavered. "Ye—ye don't understand what you've done. What you've unleashed." He looked back up and me and shouted, "You've doomed us all, Doc! You've gone and bloody fucked us over this time, because you couldn't just leave well enough alone!"

Someone cleared his throat behind us.

We turned to find the Sniper standing in the doorway, wielding his bow and arrow. His expression, obscured by dark sunglasses and a low-tipped Akubra, was unreadable. "Just thought I'd tell you lads that I'm heading down to find Scout and Spy."

The Demoman solemnly shook his head with a tight jaw and wide eye. "Don't do it, mate," he whispered. "Don't go down there."

A smirk twitched the bushman's mouth, as if the Demoman's warning amused him. "I'll make it back. Don't worry 'bout me. If there's anything down there, I can guarantee I've fought worse. Trust me, I'll come back."

He eventually did.

I wish he hadn't.

Out of all of them, I may pity the Sniper the most for what he endured. I cannot even begin to imagine what painful, degrading horrors the monster must have put him through. If only the beast had just killed him instead. In a quick death, he could have at least been left with some semblance of dignity.

After he went down, we all attempted to go about our daily activities, but it was nigh impossible. Everyone was uncharacteristically quiet and uncomfortable. We all mostly hovered around the rec room , except for the Demoman, who had locked himself in his room and sobbed silently into a bottle of whiskey, and the Engineer, who did not leave Respawn until the Pyro rang the bell for dinner. We tried to occupy our time and ease the knots in our stomachs by reading or watching television. The Soldier and the Pyro played Parcheesi together for a while before the Pyro got angry with the Soldier not following the rules and set the board on fire. The Heavy sat on the couch and read Chekhov, and I read too, but I didn't absorb any of the words no matter how long I stared at them. There was a part of me was itching to return to my office and tear through the pages of the mysterious book in hopes that it might have an answer, but the Demoman's words stayed cemented deep in my gut.

It was myself, the Engineer, the Pyro, the Heavy, and the Soldier at the dinner table that night, eating lukewarm Salisbury steak and packaged vegetables, the only noises heard being the clink of silverware to ceramic as our forks scraped against the plates. The Engineer held his head in his robotic hand, his eyes hollow and bagged and his eyebrows twisted in knots—it didn't look like he was having any success with getting the system back online.

Just as I put my last piece of meat in my mouth, the Sniper fulfilled his promise and came back to us.

We noticed the pungent smell before we saw him. He stood in the doorway with neither the Spy nor the Scout. He had nothing. No teammates. No weapons. No clothing. His thin, shivering body was stained with the dirty brown bile that simmered at the bottom of the sewer. His arms and ribs were bruised. Fresh, dripping blood was smeared between his thighs.

He startled us with his utter nakedness, but he did not even seem to notice it. He had passed into a realm of thought beyond shame or modesty. He bordered on catatonic, and his eyes were empty and far off, even as he stared at us with an intensity that felt like a cold finger running its way down one's spine.

"I need to lie down," he finally whispered. For the first time since he had walked in, he blinked when he spoke, as if he was surprised by the sound of his own voice. As if he wasn't sure if it would still be there.

As the others around the table gaped at him, I took my due responsibility and hastily stood up, tossing my napkin onto my unfinished plate and pushing in my chair. "I will make you a bed in the infirmary, Herr Mundy," I said.

"Doc." The Engineer stopped me on my way towards the naked man. With two snaps, he undid his overall straps. He fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, stripped it off so he was just in his white undershirt with slightly yellowed armpits. He handed it to me, and then fastened his overalls once more. "Please."

I draped the shirt around the Sniper's shoulders. The Engineer was far smaller than the Sniper and his shirt did little for decency, but it was an act that puts a lump in my throat. It was a sign of compassion. I feel a sense of jealousy. I am not compassionate. I never used to care about that. Now I wish more than anything in the world that I had been.

I guided the Sniper out of the canteen and down the hall. He walked stiffly in a dull haze.

When we got to the infirmary, he sat down on the edge of the bed, knotting the fabric of the Engineer's shirt between his fingers and stared at the wall as though it had just told him his mother was dead. I sat down next to him and said nothing. I was watching him, but he did not look at me. He just stared at the wall, his eyes glazed over with a kind of agony that had transcended any sort of pain and achieved a baffling tier of sheer numbness. Eventually, he fell down onto the bed and curled up in a fetal position, clutching his abdomen gingerly. He swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut and stayed very, very still, with only the soft expansion of his breathing chest to remind me he was alive.

I watched this pathetic husk of a man and felt a deep chill run through my gut. What had reduced him to this? What had taken that gritty, stoic survivalist I knew and replaced him with a naked, fluid-covered shell? What thing possibly could have stripped years of calloused skin and thorns down to the soft, pale underbelly?

I had no idea what to do. I knew nothing of psychology save for a few functions of the brain stem and the limbic system and what have you—the basic biological aspects. I didn't know how to approach someone in a near catatonic state. However, my lack of knowledge in a field has never discouraged me from attempting to act as if I know what I'm doing anyway. In retrospect, it is dangerous and selfish. But I suppose I fancied myself an off-beat experimenter at the time.

"Are you going to tell me what happened to you, Herr Mundy?" I finally said after clearly my throat loudly to get his attention. I removed my notebook from my lab coat pocket. It was time to play Freud.

He inhaled very slowly. "No."

"And why not?" I inquired.

"You don't want to know what happened to me, Doctor." He opened his bloodshot eyes and stared at me. "You think you want to know, but you don't."

"I can't help you unless I know."

"It's—agh!" He cut himself off suddenly as he cried out and curled in on himself, holding his lower belly. He gritted his teeth and a vein in his forehead tensed as dark blood began to ooze from his rear end.

I stood up and backed away, hypnotized with curiosity. Part of me wished I could have just sat there and watched him as he moaned in pain, but the other half—the half with morals—knew I had to act fast.

I snatched my medigun from my desk, and when I spun back around I found him writhing as another burst of blood squirted out of him. At the time I thought it was my panic playing tricks on my perception, but I know now that his abdomen was beginning to swell.

I locked my medigun on him, and the floating stream of healing rendered him quiet for a brief moment, before he suddenly screamed again, his hands reaching up to his scalp and tearing at his hair from the roots. His belly was now undeniably distended. Raw stretch marks appeared and began to bead with blood as his skin strained against the rapid growth.

"I think you need an x-ray," I said, more to myself than to him.

As he gritted his teeth and banged his head against the bed, hot tears pinching the corners of his eyes, I swept over his body with my handheld x-ray. Starting from the top he seemed normal, save for a bit of scoliosis, but my eyes widened as I lowered the device towards his abdomen. A shifting mass that appeared to be rapidly expanding was in his intestines—in any other case I would have said it was impacted stool, but to the best of my knowledge, stools don't often move. Nor did it tend to multiply in size at such an accelerated rate.

I did not have time to theorize the identity of this strange mass before it decided to introduce itself to me.

The Sniper screamed and contorted his body with a snap, into a ghastly and unnatural position. I stumbled back, dropping the x-ray device as the medigun clattered to the floor and switched off. His lower belly suddenly burst open like a squeezed tomato, in an explosion of blood and chunks of stringy pink insides.

With a shout, I shielded myself with my arm, turning away to only feel the drops of blood land on my back. He had stopped screaming, and I assumed he was either dead or in severe shock. When I heard a soft purring and the sound of wet, wriggling movement, I turned back to the scene.

Stubby, squirming tentacles flowered out from his abdomen. They wallowed in the spilt fluids, violently caressing the edges of their intestinal nest with lusty fervor. They were fleshy in color, and almost looked like entrails that had come alive. Upon closer inspection I realized that they possessed pink, gummy suckers that left purple welts along the skin of the corpse.

Swallowing back a wave of bile, I grabbed my syringe gun from my side table and desperately shot at the creature. It let out a high-pitched shriek. Spurts of thick, black blood burst out with each needle to flesh contact.

I scrambled out of the room and slammed the door behind me. Panting, I slid down against the wall. Around the corner, the Heavy came bounding towards me, the Pyro at his tail.

"Doktor, what happened?" He crouched down next to me.

I gulped, still trying to catch my breath. I looked down at the soaked blood that contrasted so vividly against the light blue of my lab coat. "Herr Mundy," I said in a hoarse voice. "He's—he's dead. He—" I couldn't even begin to explain what just happened. I jerked my head around. "Where is Herr Conagher? Where—where is the Engineer?"

"He is back to fixing Respawn," the Heavy told me. "Do not worry, Doktor. Sniper will come back. They will all come back."

The Pyro stood on his tiptoes to peer through the glass of my office door. If I could see his eyes, I'd imagine they must have popped out of his skull when he squeaked and clamped his hands over where his mouth must presumably be.

"There is something very bad down there," I said, turning back to the Heavy. "In the sewers. I don't know what it is, but it is something I don't think any of us are prepared to take on."

The Heavy absorbed my words, and then narrowed his eyes. "Little baby in sewer stands no chance against me," he told me solemnly, standing up to his looming full height.

"Urrnd muhhr!" the Pyro added, spinning and placing his hands on his hips with a stamp of his foot for added emphasis.

I opened my mouth to protest, but wasn't sure what to say. I wasn't sure of anything at all, anymore.

Unsurprisingly, when the Soldier arrived not long after he was quick to join in on the plan. He glanced into my infirmary, his tongue running over his top row of teeth in excited bloodlust. "Looks like ceasefire's ended early, boys."

I looked at him and saw myself not a few days ago. It sickened me.

There was no convincing them to stay. They were men of optimistic action, still untainted by the inconceivable horrors that had burst forth from that cursed book. They would come to learn, eventually.

The three of them tried knocking on (and considered blasting open) the Demoman's room, but he gave them no response other than a muffled, "Sod off!"

"Do not look so worried, Doktor," the Heavy said to me as I buffed the three of them with overheal outside the sewer entrance.

I pressed my lips into a thin line. The man could absorb a tremendous amount of damage, but he wasn't as invincible as he liked to think he was. It was my genius that was responsible for that. "You are sure you don't want me to come with you?"

"Da. You must help Engineer fix Respawn."

I watched the three of them as they marched into the darkness, and as I did I accepted the fact that they would most likely die. I wish I could tell you that their deaths meant nothing to me.

I returned to my office, where I sat at my desk and held my head in my hands for a long time.

The infirmary still held a corpse and his splattered remains on the walls. I am not sure why I expected the mess to disappear. The smell attacked my nostrils but I was numb to it. Even my doves, the morbid little monsters they were, stayed away from his body and his peculiar, dead offspring. They sidled uneasily in the rafters, cooing softly. I wonder if they know what I've done.

I had not noticed my book was missing until the Engineer to my office. He crept with an eerie silence, refusing to look at me even as I watched him. He stood quietly over the deathbed of his teammate, looming with a face drained of color, sagged as if it was melting off of his bones. The book that had caused it all was in his possession. It held itself limply, with a tired sort of satisfaction, leather sloughing in his hands. The tome fell from his hands onto the floor as thin lines of blood trickled from the insides of his ears. His eyes bore the same catatonic deadness of the man whose insides had just exploded.

"Herr Conagher." I stood up. "You look ill. What—?"

"There are some things humans ain't meant to see," he whispered to me, his voice a vacant husk.

With that, he revved up his robotic hand and it spun at a dizzying rate, like a saw, which he then plunged into his own stomach. The buzzing blades cut through flesh and whipped clots of blood and chunks of flesh through the air. His eyes rolled back into his head and the hand gradually stopped spinning as he fell to his knees.

The Engineer was not a stupid man. Out of everyone on the team, I can say with certainty that I tolerated him the most. He was educated. He was an intellectual. He was like me.

As he laid there at the foot of my last patient's bed, I stared at him in wonder.

This was the result of insatiable curiosity. This is what happens when a man gets the taste of blood and decides he wants more. This is the result of getting more than one may have bargained for, more than one may be able to handle.

I saw his fate as a warning. In his still, mutilated form, I saw a twisted mirror image of myself.

I could not hide anymore.

I had unleashed this. Now it was time for me to face it.

I changed out of my blood-stained attire into a fresh uniform. As I buttoned up my lab coat it struck me that I was dressing myself for my own funeral, and this is what I was wearing; the uniform of a war that was meaningless and inconsequential.

I never thought it would end like this.

I strapped my medigun pack to my back and packed my bone saw. Before walking out the door, I took a brief moment to stare at the haggard man in the mirror. At first I thought he was me, but then I didn't know who he was. He was a gray shell of his former self, a bitter old man with his forehead wrinkled in pain.

I was ready to set out, but I could not do this alone.

"Herr DeGroot." I knocked on the Demoman's door.

He did not respond, and I felt my heart flutter nervously.

"Herr DeGroot, if you are alive, please answer me. I believe we may be the last ones left and I—" My words caught in my throat. "I need your help."

The door unlocked with a click and the Demoman stood before me, his grimace dark. In his hands he clutched an ancient, ornate sword. His one good eye glowed with bitter passion, a vendetta he had deep within him.

"Looks like we both decided to stop hidin', then," he said, giving me a once-over.

"Are you ready?" I asked him.

He nodded, and we headed out.

We sloshed through the sewers, making no conversations but keeping close by and finding solace in the sounds of our own heavy breathing. I kept my medigun locked on him. The glowing, free-flowing arm of blue light gave off a comforting warmth between us.

When went to turn round the corner, but he stopped short, motioning for me to keep quiet and turn off my medigun. I obliged, and we both peeked our heads around to finally see the beast that had been terrorizing our team.

The upper body of the creature was oddly human and unsettlingly familiar. Its flesh was greenish pale and cracked all over, like the scales of a fish. Save for the cracked skin and talon-like fingernails, its right arm was almost quite normal. On the other hand, its left had bloated into a heavy tumor, suffering from a fungus on its side that had eaten a hole through it.

The creature's mouth appeared to be afflicted with eclabium, with red lips pulled back into a gaping fish-like grimace that encased its yellowed teeth. The eyes had been glazed over by some sort of a raw, red membrane, and all that remained of the nose and ears were two lopsided holes.

Below its emaciated torso was a horrid, writhing mass of tentacles. They appeared to possess a mind of their own, curling and unfurling about each other like a writhing rat king. There were many of them, many more than that of a squid or octopus, and they varied in size, ranging from a four foot long monstrosity to five and a half inches squirming off the side of its hip. Some of them had purplish suckers, whereas others were merely smooth, rubbery appendages that caressed themselves with the lust of a Roman orgy, lubricated by the occasional squirt of glistening mucus from somewhere deep within. The two largest tendrils moved slowly and gingerly, like old blind sheepdogs. Protruding from them at varied points were bits of snapped bone, crusted around the edge of the base with black blood and beginning to acquire yellow fungus. At the base of one of these large tentacles I noted what was unmistakably the remaining semblance of what had most certainly been a human foot, the calloused black heel and ragged big toe protruding out, whilst the other four toes were slight bumps that had already sunken into the appendage.

One of the creature's tendrils was not wriggling fervently like the other, but rather sat quite limp. It took me a moment of observation to realize that it had once been a human phallus. Inflated and distended beyond any initial recognition, it was a crude mockery of its former self reminiscent of a pagan god of fertility in its size and absurdity. From its swollen tip it oozed a sickeningly colored substance that I could not place. It was too thick to be urine and too yellow to be semen. The entire appendage was a painful blue, with inflated black veins straining against the surface in agony.

The heinous being had buried itself in a nest of bloody, severed body parts. An uncharacteristic wave of weak-kneed nausea passed over me when I recognized the largest of the arms at the base of the nest, its thumb chewed off but the black, fingerless glove still intact.

"No," I had whispered thoughtlessly. The Demoman whipped his head towards me in horror, but it was too late.

The beast had heard me.

It snapped its head towards our direction, letting the intestines in its hand slip into the water. It emitted a gurgled hiss that escalated into a scream that made the backs of my eyeballs hurt. The mass of hideous tendrils overlapped one another as it quickly descended upon us, good arm outstretched and strained.

The Demoman dropped his sticky bomb launcher and swiftly unsheathed the sword at his hip. With a passionate cry of "FREEDOM!" he swung it over his head and struck it down on the beast before it reached us, managing to slice off a substantial chunk from one of its many tentacles.

The horror screeched and fell back. Its thick blood sprayed us as the stump wriggled desperately, and for a brief moment I had this idiotic hope that we might possibly defeat the creature. But the raw, severed stump began to bubble with gooey flesh, and in its place it grew two more tentacles, like a twisted Hydra.

Taking advantage of our stunned terror, it swung its tumor-ridden arm in my direction like a club, hurling me back with a force that toppled me against the wall and knocked my breath out. As I lay face down, it ripped my medigun backpack off of me with a swift tentacle and smashed it against the wall. For a moment my vision went static as I heaved for breath, but past the ringing in my ears I could feel the vibrations of their spar.

I raised my head and adjusted my skewed glasses to see creature's clawed hand shoot out and pierce the Demoman's good eye. My teammate opened his mouth to scream but made no sound. The beast twisted its fingers about in the eye socket as blood trickled down the man's cheek. It pulled its hand back out to show the gouged out eyeball skewered on its claw, gloating this silent victory to only me now.

My comrade collapsed back on to me, and with a surge of superhuman adrenaline, I grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him away, tripping and splashing through the shallow sewer water. I kept my eyes on the creature as I hastily retreated. It did not make any attempt to pursue me, but watched as I went. It cocked its head in a teasing manner and shoved the eyeball in its mouth, its own red sockets staring, unblinking, as we disappeared around the corner.

I heaved the Demoman back towards the direction of stairs. I figured there was no option but to return to the base. There, at least, the creature had no physical grip on us, and I could tend to the Demoman's wounds and attempt to restore his sight.

I backed into a spongy, wet wall. I jerked my head around to find that the entrance to the stairs had been completely barricaded by a fleshy, organic substance. I rested my unconscious friend against the cement wall and withdrew my bonesaw, wherein I then attempted to hack the webbed, red residue away. It proved to be far more resilient than it looked, as I made not so much as a scratch.

With a desperate, exhausted cry, I again hefted the Demoman up and dragged him in the opposite direction, towards a different corridor in the spacious, maze-like sewer. My mind was quite blank. Any plan of action I had outlined had been shattered, and at that moment my only focus was to find an escape.

I didn't.

I finally grew too tired to continue and rested the two of us in a nook with a large valve that could keep us slightly hidden. Not that it mattered, as the creature seemed to be borderline omnipotent and would eventually find us, but it at least might buy us a bit of time.

I could not aid him to my fullest extent without my medigun. I tore a strip of somewhat unsoiled fabric from my lab coat and dressed my remaining teammate's wound. He awoke as I did this.

"Christ," he groaned softly, licking his lips. "I could use a damn drink." He slapped his hand against his face and felt the bandaging. "What?" he felt about his head, trying to pull at it. "No… no…" His voice shook and he began to make awful throaty sobs. "My eye… that bloody bastard took m'last fuckin' eye…"

He wept into my chest and I held him, stroking his head. I wasn't even trying to comfort him. There was just something about the rhythmic motion that hypnotized me into a state of numbness as I stared blankly into the dark. Every so often my heart hiccupped when I thought I saw something writhing in the black unknown, but when I blinked and shook myself, I realized it was just my subconscious taunting me with shadows.

In my reckoning, I was allowed one small mercy from the God whose name I had cursed with my actions. A soft coo and the flutter of feathers snapped me out of my hypnotized state. Archimedes landed on the soiled toe of my shoe and cocked his head inquisitively. His plumage, pristinely white and remarkably spotless, almost seemed to glow. The sight of him made my eyes damp. As I look at him now I still question both his existence and my sanity. At this point I do not think I can trust either to truly be there.

I smiled weakly. "I should probably be surprised to see you here, little bird, but I am not." I held out my finger and he nuzzled it affectionately. He is the last warmth I would know. I felt heaviness in my chest as I realized I would not be with him for long. He could fly free as he pleased.

At that moment, I had one last idea. From the pocket of my tattered lab coat I withdrew my medical journal and the pen I kept tucked inside it. Archimedes could act as a carrier pigeon. I look at these pages now, and they are numerous, but I think he just might have strength enough to do it. Even though I am doomed to die, I can try to warn the rest of the world of the horrors I had unwittingly unleashed onto humanity.

It is my attempt at redemption, since I cannot earn forgiveness from dead men.