A flickering and sick white light illuminated a disturbing scene in the middle of the hallway. From afar, he thought it was just some zombie feasting on a few corpses until it began to move with grace not proper for an undead.
Max saw a woman wearing a bloody lab coat crouched over three bodies. The lady's arms were moving with some uncanny precision and grace.
The man gasped at the scene, making a sliver of noise and alerting this thing.
As she slowly got up, he could recognize some disturbing details on that abomination, but also some sick beauty on that creature's body.
She was indeed a woman with platinum blonde straight hair cascading from her head as a river of mercury, even if it was soaked in the fresh blood of the dead bodies. Those deep golden eyes stunned him as if the irises inside them were the black of the barrel of a gun.
Parts of the monster's body were crudely stitched together, massive cuts fixed with just strands of hair, tape, and staples. The detail that most took him by surprise was the four extra arms holding tape, a needle made out of bone, a stapler, and a box cutter. Parts of the skin did not match the pale color of the main body, but they did match the armless corpses on the ground.
This ungodly abomination twisted her neck to the side as those wide-open eyes looked at the young man. She reeked; it was the smell of spoiled meat and freshly poured bleach.
"Hi! I am Angela . . . Ange for short. What is your name?" The monster asked with a cheerful tone as she finished sewing another arm to her body using hair strings from a corpse. Her mouth twisted into a smile from ear to ear.
"Max Power . . . a pleasure to meet you, Ange," he said after letting out a relieved sigh, even if thick drops of cold sweat were pouring down his forehead.
There was a clear lack of the girl jumping at him and trying to bite off his head, so, as far as Max knew, she was not hostile and, most importantly, she was another survivor. He knew perfectly from the evidence coating her body that she was a dangerous psycho, but it was not like the man had any tools to kill her yet.
"Nice to meet you too," she answered, closing the fingers of that muscular black limb, making sure that the nerve connections were good enough.
Ange then stretched her six arms to make sure that everything was in order and nothing would fall when least expected.
"So. . . are you fine?" Max asked, not having the guts to take a step back or forward. There was something familiar about that woman, but he could not figure out what.
"Yep," Ange said with a chill and relaxed tone as the girl grabbed a bloody femur and made a few swings with it.
Now that he could get a better look at her, the woman was a little bit taller than him but with a disturbingly thin torso.
Max made a small pause, trying to find a source of conversation to break the uncomfortable silence. "Hey, sorry for asking, but . . . are you not afraid to get infected with the zombie plague?" he asked, knowing that something was wrong with her. It was clear that she was a super, but her power seemed to give her some immunity to the virus that his own Guideline could not deal with.
"How cute, you are worried about me?" She asked with a pleased smile; there was not a single trace of sarcasm or teasing in the short giggle she let out after finishing that sentence.
Ange looked at him in the eyes, peeling him layer by layer inside her mind. "Yes, I was worried until I analyzed it . . . " the woman muttered and used one of her extra limbs to pull a small electric device from her pocket. It was a combination of a smartphone, a dismantled rat, and other electronic scraps attached together.
"I am immune to it," Ange said with a calm tone and a soft grin.
"Why?" Max asked.
"Because I made it, you silly billy," the girl answered with a joking tone and stuck out her tongue.
The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place as Max's face went even paler for a second. A chill ran down the man's spine as a drop of almost frozen water. Before he could even process this information, Ange stabbed him again with another piece of cursed knowledge directly into his brain.
"Well, when I was Anathema, I got bored one summer and decided to create a zombie virus," she added, her words casual and even a little bit anxious, holding herself from talking too fast.
"However, it was kind of frustrating that a super was always healing my stuff. What is the point of a zombie plague if they could bunker down, create a cure, and not interact with the critter, am I right?" Ange said it as a woman trying to make casual talk at the water cooler with another office worker.
"So I took a small part of Lamarck's Compass, used a Black Goat experiment that was a sentient cold disease, and a few tweaks with the help of other powers," Ange spewed, each word getting faster and faster as she smiled. She seemed too eager to talk about this plague.
It was bad, worse than anything Max could think about. Especially since the villain Lamarck could adapt and survive all physical phenomena, from a bullet to getting thrown into a volcano. However, somehow, Anathema managed to get a chunk of his brain.
"And done! A zombie plague that cannot be cured by healers!" She finally added, waiting for a reaction from Max, who was frozen in place.
Seeing the lack of words, she kept talking. "Then I kind of got bored with it and left the vial in a random postal office," Ange said, her smile twisting into a nervous expression as the lack of sound was getting uncomfortable, and then she shrugged.
"It seems that it ended in this place. . . I am curious to see how it evolved," she muttered, mostly talking to herself for a second as one finger got under her chin.
The girl seemed to have noticed an expression of pure fear on Max's face since she quickly changed her tone.
Ange quickly raised her six arms in the air, showing their palms to the man and letting her tools fall to the ground as a gesture of surrender. "Ok, ok, ok, before you say something, I will admit. . . It was kind of a mean move on my part, and I am sorry," the plague bringer apologized with what seemed like an honest tone.
"It was just a crazy part of my life! I am trying to do better now," the monster exclaimed and gave him a last smile.
The only reason why Max didn't run away was that the idea of giving his back to Ange was just more terrifying than facing her.
Max just nodded and made a forced laugh, as if he was talking with a random crackhead outside a gas station at 3 AM. "Well, at least you are trying to do better," he said and let out a sigh.
Trying to scrape something good out of this situation, Anathema was the best person to have on your side during the situation. There was a reason why she could pull this kind of stuff, like just some casual pastime.
Ange took a deep breath and relaxed her body. "Thanks for understanding," she added with a nervous smile and nodded a few times.
"Hey, wait a second. If this thing cannot be healed, how are you . . . immune?" Max asked, trying to get into a discussion topic that both had in common.
"Well, it is easy. I have a counter-virus inside me that detects the other one and kills all the cells infected with it. Like cutting your arm where the zombie bit you, but on a cellular level," she explained, getting to the same conclusion as Max.
(Her solution was cellular destruction, and an organ needed cells to work, then . . . why were they moving?) Max thought.
"How can you use the extra body parts attached to your body?" He asked, a little bit confused.
"Oh, those weren't zombies! Other survivors tried to attack me the second they saw me!" Ange exclaimed with a cheerful and matter-of-fact tone, showing some happiness that someone was worried about her.
Each semblance of confidence that Max had on his face after recovering from the initial shock was cracked like the windshield of a car after crashing into an overweight person.
"It was self-defense, I swear!" Ange yelled; the rise in her voice almost made Max empty his bowels.
Max used his power to calm himself, slowing his heart, stopping his kidneys from releasing more adrenaline, and kicking his brain from giving it a panic response. He could believe that attacking Anathema at first sight was not only a good idea but a reasonable thing to do in 99% of the cases.
"Ok . . ." he mumbled while air left his lungs as if he was giving his last breath.
In that second, Ange's eyes beamed with happiness, seeing such a dangerous monster acting so cheerfully; that smile and those golden rings inside her eyes were doing something to the man. Taking out the gore and the limbs that did not match her body, he found Ange attractive.
(Now I know why chicks are into serial killers . . .) The mixture of physical attraction and sense of impending danger was a noxious but addictive drug.