"Alright, what about you?"
"What about me?"
"How'd you end up at the facility?" As Richard follows Sawyer up the stairs of the apartment complex, he rekindles their prior conversation.
"No need for us to share life stories."
"Come on…"
"Former US military. A lot of guys at the facility are too - marines, special ops and all that."
"Why'd you leave? I mean, who the fuck would wanna do this?"
After a short silence, Sawyer answers. "I guess that this felt more fulfilling. It's not that anyone wants to do this job, but someone has to."
Suddenly, a rumbling noise coming from above alerts the two of them.
"Sawyer, this is Jericho - come in." Jericho's distressed voice calls out to Sawyer over the radio.
"What is it?
"Did you hear that too?"
"Hear what?"
…
No response.
"Jericho? Jericho, come in… hello?"
"What's going on?" Richard asks as he grips his axe tight.
"Seems they found it first. Come on."
Meanwhile - on the other side of that very same floor - an older man walks from apartment to apartment looking for something. A familiar figure with short messy gray hair, wearing the standard facility protective vest over a dress shirt, with a gun holstered to his belt. The man searches an apartment, then moves on to the next - picking the lock of the ones who were locked by the residents with a lock-pick and casually strolling into those which were left open in the evacuee's haste.
"I'm saying I don't like this, Micheal. We should be picking back up the Moth-man case like we discussed."
"And we will." Micheal Roth answers his unit's - or, what's left of it - manager on his radio mic.
"Why waste your time on this? I know you said you wanted to get back into the game - but come on! This isn't a special mission or anything, plus, unit 24 is on this. I'm sure it's handled."
"I know, I'm sorry. After my injury - and all those deaths… I needed this."
He refers to the star-like scar on Micheal's forehead as the 'injury'.
"You know how much it took to convince 19th to let you tag along? They're worried if you're even right in the head after being the only survivor, and I am too. Look, they respect you - you've been serving here for almost 20 years, but we're just not made for this anymore. Leave these jobs to the young guys so we can get back to finding the moth."
Micheal listens but doesn't respond, instead he enters the next apartment and looks around. Casually creeping around, he enters the bathroom. In the corner of the backroom, was a strange limb-like entanglement of flesh and muscle sprawling down a crack in the ceiling.
"There it is."
As he approaches it, it squirms and sprawls back up through the hole in the ceiling. Micheal curiously looks up before standing on the toilet seat and climbing up to the ceiling in pursuit of this peculiar thing that had left in such a hurry.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Dyrral?"
Dawn Hill, who had been listening in on standby, now tried to contact Lex after hearing he had vanished from the others.
Now with confirmation that something had occurred on the fourth floor - the wall collapse that had separated Lex from them - Jericho and Claudia hurry back up the stairs in an attempt to see what had caused it. They go past the next and see it to be empty, so they go up one more and go down the hallway to search. Claudia once again attempts to call out for any stranglers.
"Hello? Anybody in here?"
Jericho wants to tell her to quit it, but at that moment he hears several pairs of footsteps approaching. His distress signal sent out to Sawyer had reached the other units, and they were now filling the hall. Turning the corner, he sees several soldiers scour the floor on high alert.
Just then, a long clump of mashed-together fleshy bits and bobs bursts out of the wall. It curls around one of the soldiers and digs its finger-like appendages into him. The clump then violently pulls back, smashing him against the wall with a force that knocks the life out of him.
The men behind him witnessed this scene unfold in mere seconds, and without a moment to react, two more clusters descended down from the ceiling onto them. Two more soldiers were lifted up into the air, frantically struggling to get loose as they're dragged against the ceiling and they're spines crushed.
As this happens, Jericho flinches backwards, but as he does so he feels the swarm of appendages lock in on him and Claudia - who, after covering her mouth with her hands and eyes wide open seeing the men get crushed, now tries to steady her gun at anything that comes at them.
"Go! Go up!" Jericho hurries her to go up the stairs to the next floor where he believes the true body - the one which was shown on the photos they viewed earlier - is currently.
They turn away from the soldiers fighting the grasping clumps and rush up the stairs to the next floor. However, they find nothing. Despite their haste, they were too late and the entity had now moved down to the level lower than the previous one - apparent from the newly-heard voices and gunshots below them.
"Alright, listen - that thing was clearly above us a moment ago and those things were reaching down from the main body, breaking through the ceiling. It looks like it's doing this to avoid being ganged up on and letting us damage the main body, but that was insanely fast…"
Claudia nods in agreement, catching her breath.
"It's not using the stairs, so it might be using the empty space in the elevator shaft." Jericho continues. "I'm gonna go up to see if any of the elevator doors are open. You stay here and wait for the others."
After saying that, he disappears around the corner as he makes his way to the stairs. Though, at the moment that Claudia is left alone, she hears a voice crying out at the end of the hallway. Somebody hadn't managed to leave the building during the evacuation. She rushes over to the apartment which is the source of the noise, although upon reaching it and trying to open the door, she realises that it's locked. However, the cry for help doesn't cease.
She now hears a voice just on the other side of the door.
"Hello? Please! Is somebody there?"
"I'm here! Open the door!"
"I can't!" The voice - a young man's - shouts. "I can't walk! I can't reach the door handle!"
"A-alright, alright, crawl back. Get away from the door."
She hears some shuffling in the apartment before a reply.
"I'm away from the door now."
Upon hearing the confirmation, Claudia shoots the key-hole a few times before it seems to fall out of place. She then bashes at the door with her shoulder, gritting her teeth while putting all her power into it remembering that even if she breaks some bones while doing this, they'll be healed back to normal in a flash.
The door eventually bursts open, revealing the boy laying on the ground with a cast around his leg. Claudia immediately walks in and helps him up to his feet.
The young man's expression upon seeing her, a soldier in all black and a full set of gear on her, was one of great surprise.
"You're a soldier?"
"Uh, yeah. Is it just you living here?"
"Yeah." He gestures to his crutches laying in the bedroom. She helps him sit down on a chair before retrieving them.
"Thanks." He takes them and props himself up, hopping on one foot as they leave the apartment.
"Who're you? I thought the evacuation was because of a gas leak."
Claudia thinks for a moment, she wishes to help the boy leave the building without the others noticing but telling him the truth could erupt panic in him.
Seeing the soldier remain quiet, the boy speaks up. "Earlier, I heard something heavy moving through the halls. Like a car or something."
"There's no gas leak." She admits. "There's something here that shouldn't be. That's why we're here."
"Like a monster??" And what do you mean 'we'?"
"There are others here, but I can't let them see you. Just stick close to me and I'll get you out." In a way, she feels herself sounding a bit like Sawyer now with all this empty assurance.
As they descend down the stairs, something suddenly startles the boy.
"Hey!! What the fuck is that!?"
Claudia flicks her head to the hallway to see something so odd that a regular person could only describe it as something from their fever dream.
A thin layer of muscle rapidly approaches them. Using her arms as barricades, Claudia keeps the piece of the entity away from the boy. Strange finger-like bulges protrude out of the layer. They dig into her arms and tear away bits of her flesh as she fights back, having pulled out her knife and slashing at the thing.
"Go! Go!" Claudia urges him to continue going down the stairs as she fights off this sector of the cryptid.
She eventually catches up with him, only to see that the way down was blocked with fallen rubble. She may have been able to get across and past it, but with the boy in his current condition she worried that the Layer-Mesh would find them soon.
"This way, come on!"
She hurried him into the hallway of the current floor, using her arm to prop him up as he hopped with due haste.
They have little time to try to reach the other end of the hallway before hearing a loud squelching noise, as if a giant with heavy boots on was stomping towards them on a moist carpet. Claudia looked down the hallway to see a large shape closing in on them.
As it neared, its features became clear - baggy chunks of muscle and flesh made up the main body. The limbs protruded out of it in several directions and a main face with a few eyes resided at the front with two other smaller faces on the upper region of its body.
Seeing the gruesome entity known as the Layer-Mesh advance to them at such a fast pace, Claudia can only desperately hurry the young man around the corner to hide. She hides too, hugging the wall with her gun at the ready, but can only pray that the cryptid hasn't spotted them. The boy next to her holds his hands over his mouth so as to not make a sound after having briefly seen the monster at the other end of the hallway.
Soon, the sound of the Mesh's approach ceases, and all that's heard is the noise of something banging against metal. Claudia reluctantly peaks around the corner to make sure that it has truly left, and as she breathes a sigh of relief, she silently acknowledges that Jericho's theory was correct - the Mesh had been moving up and down floors via the elevator shaft.
She looks back at the boy, who is visibly shaking in fear, as she tries to continue with helping him walk. When she has a steady arm around his back, she calls in to speak to Jericho through the radio.
When her radio mic connects, she gives a simple "Hello?", but is met with nothing in that instant. A moment later, however, a gut wrenching scream of a man echoes through her ear piece.