When Claudia's 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.
"Hello?? J-Jericho??"
Being sent into panic without a response, Claudia looks around for an answer to the audio she had heard that she would not find.
The boy next to her however, has his heart racing only due to one thing. He catches his breath, eyes wide open looking at Claudia.
"What - what was that?! Why's there a monster in my building?"
"I need you to relax, okay? I'm gonna get you out of here."
"That was a genuine monster…"
Claudia pulls down her facemasks to speak more clearly - she had kept it on when entering the building as had the other soldiers, but now there was no real use for it.
"You're a girl?" The boy asks with genuine surprise.
"Uh, yeah."
"I guess I just didn't look close, I didn't know the military hired women like that."
"This isn't the military that's here. These people that I worked for - if they found out about you seeing all this… You have to promise me you'll forget about everything you saw today, you'll act as if you got out during the evacuation, okay?"
"Wha- how can I ever forget what I just saw?"
"You need to. It's for your sake."
Seeing the sincere worry on the young woman's face - the woman who put her own life on the line just to save him - the boy couldn't bring himself to argue.
"Y-yeah, okay, okay. I'll do as you say."
"Thank you. Now, let's get out of here before it comes back."
The two of them make their way down the emergency stairs, having to sneak past some of the soldiers stationed on each floor, but ultimately managing to exit the apartment complex without anyone - or anything - spotting them. Claudia helps the boy to the back of the building where a back alley would lead him out to the main street.
They both breathe a sigh of relief.
"Thank you… seriously." The boy adjusts himself with his crutches to be able to walk by himself.
Claudia simply nods before turning back. "Remember what I said to you."
"You're going back in?"
"Yeah, that thing's still in there."
"Wait! I think someone else might have been unable to evacuate too."
She stops to listen. "Who?"
"Uhh, the old Chinese lady on eighth floor. She's got walking problems too."
"Do you know her apartment number?"
"No, sorry. I only know her 'coz she likes talking to me when we see each other in the elevator."
"Alright, I'll go look for her."
And with that, Claudia runs back into the apartment complex. She heads back up the stairs, barely maintaining consciousness from exhaustion. In an attempt to regroup with Jericho, she scours the floors past the one which they parted ways at.
He said the cryptid moves through the elevator shaft, so the floor with an opened elevator door should be the one it's currently on.
Then, upon reaching the seventh floor, Claudia hears nearby gunfire. Entering the hallway, she then spots it. The Layer-Mesh, the same clump of limbs and muscle, held up by two leg-like attachments dragging the rest of its large body down the hall. Further down at the end of the hall - was none other than Jericho, with a limp body of an unknown soldier by his side.
She runs to him, however, the Layer-Mesh detects her footsteps behind it and turns around at an unnatural speed considering its size.
As it hurls its mass at her, Claudia slides through the small gap between the wall and the hall-enveloping Mesh to get around it.
Jericho starts running, seeing that Claudia has now made it around the entity. Though, to his surprise, she stops to pick up the man that had been laying nearby. Finding an unlocked apartment nearby, Jericho attempts to hurry Claudia in to evade the Mesh. Even though it has now regained its lock onto them, Claudia doesn't leave the unconscious man behind, so Jericho grabs the man's other arm and helps her drag him to the door in spite of the near-approaching cryptid in front of them.
As they make a break for the apartment and simultaneously slam the door shut once they are inside, the Layer-Mesh thuds its pulpy appendages at the door before continuing down the hallway.
Once inside, Claudia places the wounded soldier on the floor and checks his neck for a pulse.
"He's still alive."
"He's just knocked out, he'll wake up eventually." Jericho adds.
He sets himself down on the living room couch and begins to reload his gun and switch the muzzle of his rifle.
As Claudia sees Jericho set up in the empty apartment , she asks, "Shouldn't we get back out there? It sounds like that thing's left this floor."
"Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't. Either way, I'm not risking it again. We'll stay put until Sawyer gets here, I already contacted him once I engaged with the Mesh."
Several minutes pass as Jericho and Claudia idly wait. The other units stay busy keeping the Layer-Mesh from moving substantially either upwards or downwards the building, and the both of them knew that at any given moment, the Mesh could burst through that door if it so pleased. Then, their silent wait was broken by a knock on the door.
They look at each other with distinct confusion. Why would anyone knock on the door?Especially the door of the apartment that they were hiding out at. Nobody else knew which door they were stationed behind.
"Get ready." Jericho whispered to Claudia as they both aimed their guns at the door. Turning the door handle but making sure he isn't in front of the doorway so as to not expose himself to whatever may be waiting in the hall, Jericho opened the door.
Their guns were now pointed at a man with gray hair and a splat-like scar on his forehead.
"Do not shoot." He casually speaks before walking into the apartment.
Now seeing that the one knocking on the door was just one of the other unit's soldiers, Claudia and Jericho lower their weapons.
"What're you doing here? Jericho rightfully questions the older man's actions as he walks into the other room.
The man pushes a chair to the corner in the bedroom and uses it as a stepping stool.
"Here it is."
Jericho and Claudia watch this guy find a sizable hole in the ceiling and crawl through it to the room above. He then reaches out his hand to them.
Seeing this unexpected action, Jericho takes his hand reluctantly and follows him up - with Claudia too making her way up through the hole in the ceiling.
"Hey, what unit did you say you were with?" He hadn't, but Jericho thought to ask the man anyway as they crawled into the apartment which the hole had led to.
"Unit 12. My name is Micheal."
"Alright, Micheal. We're with unit 24, mind telling us-"
As Jericho stood up, he had slowly taken in the abnormality of the room they had entered. Furniture was shattered and pushed to the walls seemingly by something large that had made way through the living apartment. And of course, what caught their eyes, were unmoving severed chunks of the amalgamation. The grimy atmosphere of the room made it apparent that something peculiar had occurred here.
The grotesque pieces were scattered around the room, some bigger than others and some resembling arms.
"I had been following the holes the cryptid had been making. It's most likely been coming here to discard excess pieces of itself." Micheal monotonously explained.
The discarded pieces irk Claudia as she carefully walks around them to follow the other two around the room.
"How'd it get in here? It's pretty damn big as far as I could tell, and the front door's still intact."
"Right. I do not know." Micheal admits, poking at one of the chunks with a coat hanger that he had snatched off the door handle. Discarding the coat hanger, he turns back to Jericho as they continue conversing.
"It's like some kind of 'shedding' room. But why's it need to shed?" Jericho wonders as he walks past Micheal.
"Or - it is a trap."
"Why would it be?"
Micheal kicks at one of the arm-like chunks, sending it splatting towards the wall. The unit 24 members snap their attention to the Mesh's pieces as they notice that the one Micheal had kicked was now squirming, and was trying to reach out and grab Jericho's torso before it had been booted away.
It wasn't just that one piece that had tried to latch onto Jericho that had been active - all of them had begun moving like some vicious muscle memory. Despite his increased alertness, Jericho was caught off guard by another lump that had been latched onto the wall that had extended itself to loop around his arm. He tries to rip herself free but to no avail.
Taking his handgun out of his holster, he fires at the forward-growing lump several times - the expand-on-impact bullets that are issued to each field operator tearing away at its fleshy substance and eventually freeing his arm from its grasp.
"What's going on?!" Claudia shouts.
"Come on!"
As the three of them rush to the door, the chunks on the floor gather to combine and make larger pieces that writhe towards them as they run past. Seeing a large piece attempting to fling itself at her, Claudia turns back to aim her gun and unloads a magazine onto the chunks to keep them back. Then, the front door is opened by Jericho and the other two dash through into the hallway. Jericho slams the door, leaving the spasmic discarded pieces of the entity behind, locked in the apartment.
After taking a short breather, Jericho and Claudia are accompanied by Micheal back to the staircase and up to the next floor. There, they see that the elevator door of this specific floor is - unlike the others - wide open. They gather at the door-less elevator entrance and gaze down the shaft.
"Anyone got a flashlight?"
Micheal reaches for his belt and unclips a flashlight, handing it to Jericho.
"Any signs of a large creature travelling up and down it?"
"I'm looking." Flashing the torch down the passageway, Jericho's ears then picks up a faint 'woosh' further down. The sound of something being flung is then immediately followed by the body of a facility field operator - evident by the black clothes and gear - being thrown into the shaft and his body dropping straight down.
"What the hell?..."
Jericho's reasonable confusion was then abruptly truncated by the loud noise of something banging on the elevator shaft's metal sides as a shape moved up it. As soon as Jericho had seen the shape, he recognised it by its characteristic limbs reaching out and allowing it to climb up the elevator shaft - the Mesh was rapidly climbing up the empty elevator shaft, heading straight towards them.
Claudia is the first to back up before Jericho announces the severity of the situation.
"It's coming right for us! Run, go!!"
The Layer-Mesh wastes no time speeding up its advance climbing upwards in a frenzy, each grapple of its limbs sending a loud echo from the impact on the metal sides.
The three soldiers sprint down the hallway, however before they can make any significant distance, the Mesh had already crawled through the space opened by the elevator doors and was pursuing them down the hall with all its mismatched mass and various twitching limbs.
As they turn a corner at the outer hallway of the building, they're forced to slow their run - giving the Mesh just enough time to hurl itself at full speed at them. Micheal - being the one closest to the entity at that moment, was grasped with one of its twisted appendages and lifted into the air. This did not decelerate the Mesh's approach to Claudia and Jericho, as only one part of it was preoccupied with slamming Micheal through the glass panes on the side of the apartment complex and hurling him out of the building.