Note: This is a one shot and that's about it.

Not Done Yet

He imagined that there was no place throughout the facility that was not untouched by blood. Every room, every stretch of hall must have some crimson stain. Whether it was full out gore or small specks scattered by a patients minor injury, there was evidence in the furthest corners of the building to indicate the untold nightmare.

There was little Rudolf Wernicke could do as the Murkoff Hardline Security was slaughtered. It was eerily reminiscent of his younger days, when he spent time on his grandparent's farm. In the early dawn before the sun had risen fully, he had witnessed a fox creep into the chicken yard. He watched from the side yard fascinated as the creature tore apart the panicked hens, killing as many as it could carry before disappearing into the fog creeping around the nearby woods. Even to this day his mind was sharp and he could clearly recall the fear he felt, when his grandfather exploded from the farmhouse shouting profanities, a large shotgun clutched in his fist. Rudolf had hid in the woodpile beside the barn for the better part of that morning and afternoon.

The unrestrained chaos that erupted before him in this place and time was morbid, one of the more unsettling scenes he had witnessed in his long and traumatic life. Of course, he made some effort to get out of the way. The nearest soldier to him was thrown down, muscle splint skin and blood gushed forth due to undisclosed trauma. Another man swung his gun out in wild arks as he struggled to see what the enemy was, and failed. In his last moments his vision might have caught a glimpse of the dark shape the instant before he was torn in two like a paper doll, guts spilling down his dark pants like red water. One of the last standing turned on Wernicke in a crazed storm between supplicant relief, or flat out threatening to kill the doctor for no other drive but to quench the terror the militant had no hope to pacify. He erupted in a cascade of entrails and blood, bits of his skeleton speckled the wall. They rolled down in thick chucks as Wernicke watched, his passive poise a cheap façade of the inner turmoil puncturing his heart.

He could have a heart attack and die. That would be a good death, he reflected.

Unlike the soldiers, unlike the doomed man, unlike many of the scientist that had begun work through Mount Massive. Dr. Rudolf Wernicke could see glimpses of the Walrider. Not completely, but enough to know its business. He had seen the things that drove men to kill children.

Billy had kept him alive for ten plus years. Billy was damaged and selfish, the mind of a child he had called it. What could he call this? What was it?

His respirator kicked into second gear. Death could be a blessing, but in its final moments it could be worse than the respite that waited. Pain alone could destroy a body, before the will alone gave out. He had seen it a hundred times over, men and women alike, enduring the sadists retreat while their caregivers watched callously and wrote down notes as though pollinating flowers to see the crossbred results. Bodies clinging to life before death, until neglect allowed them to perish by unchecked infection.

Wernicke was assured his body had little left to offer, but there was no way of predicting how far the Walrider could go. Billy HAD taken care of him. If not for him he could have died at the beginning of this nightmare.

Yet here he was, upon the figurative square one—denied the obligations to resume his research, restricted from cleaning up the disaster that followed. He watched the Walrider approach him, or in a guise of approach for an entity that had no mass, no physical form to speak of. Was this the man, or was this… something else?

It flashed into existence beneath the orange caution strobes, and then blinked out as they faded, but it was still there. He could feel it. It felt hostile.

"Well?" he rasped. He blinked and it was there and gone, all at once. "What are you waiting for? You have plans for me?" He paused to catch his breath, let the respirator work for him. "I know you feel spiteful for what I have done to you, but I assure you, it was," He paused, feeling the approach of that thing he had created. Oh gott…. "Necessary. I told you, you could not be allowed leave here. And here you are, without the strength to die."

He glanced down at the bloody form of the gunned down man. Was he dead or not yet? The swarm would only disperse without a host. He could be insane and talking to open air. Where were the Nanos? For a long time he waited, the sounds of wet organs settling in gelatinous pools.

"If there is anything human left in you," he paused. He didn't know the man's name, his knowledge steamed solely that he arrived and had been running all over the asylum for the entire night. "You must complete your mission. Destroy the lab, destroy everything we had done here. Let our crimes against humanity rot and be forgotten. Please." He tried to lift his hand, but much of the mobility in his limbs had been lost two decades prior. "Let it end."

It rippled briefly, no more than a foot from where he sat. Wernicke felt a chill run down his neck and shoulders. There was something cruel in its aura, that hostility he felt as it watched him and waited, biding its time. He felt sweat roll down his forehead, the feeling dispersed and he felt alone and isolated as before. "What are you waiting for? Do it!"

There was not a sound but for the distant hound of the sirens, the bubble of coagulating blood. There was nothing there. But he observed movement, then, a glimmer of a dark shape as the man that had been gunned down was lifted a bit by the collar of his coat. "What are you doing?" It sounded wet and reminiscent to his old field work as the body was dragged away. "Where are you going? Wait! Stop! Come back!"

A long red streak was left in its absence as the Walrider left him alone, abandoning him to amend its own devices whatever they may be. Wernicke was still calling even as the man's body was dragged back to where the nightmare had taken root. The Morphogenic chamber.

Rudolf Wernicke wanted to follow, he could go as far as the fresh corpses but his wheels were not designed for slick and uneven terrain. He could fall here and wallow in the pools of blood to die in the most gruesome and pathetic way imaginable. Drowned in an inch of blood. Or he could return to his quarters and wait, and begin to understand what it was he would be waiting for.

As he guided his chair out of the Morphogenic wing, the incessant howl of the sirens ceased all at once. His fears were to be confirmed, but he had no further predictions to his fate. It had been a mistake, he reflected, to put faith in one lone survivor. He should have treaded carefully across the boundaries of limitation, those laws of nature broken again and again by patients unwilling to let death snuff out their souls. He should never have underestimated one man's desperation to outlast the nightmares that science had sculpted from the broken minds of Mount Massive Asylum.