Deck One - Hallway.

I strapped the dead man's data pad to my wrist and traced a path from my current location to the hangar. The station was a mess, but there had to be something left, there were more than enough ships docked for all the researchers and one of them had to be in working order. It was just math. Simple odds, that even if most of them were gone or destroyed there would be something serviceable left behind.

Or maybe that was just a lie I desperately wanted to believe. Either way, it was enough to get me up and moving.

I rose and an icy chill blew down the back of my neck. There was always some airflow on the station, but wind was a bad sign. A seal had blown out or an airlock had failed. I froze. The shadows pulled tighter around me and I stared down at the corpse at my feet. I could strip the dead man out of his environment suit, but I could barely stomach the idea of wearing a dead man's clothes. Plus, the suit clearly hadn't done him any good. Probably broken.

The temperature dropped and the horrible darkness pulled close again, blocking out my peripheral vision. The world narrowed to what was directly in front of me and I ran, hurtling half blind through the dark with only the blue green glow of the data pad to guide me. There should be an airlock around the next bend. There would be a fresh suit there. There had to be.

My ears popped and the darkness pooled around my legs like an icy fog. My feet went numb. A series of images flashed through my mind. Blood. Emergency lights and sirens. The hiss of air escaping the station. Containment warnings. The pop of explosive bolts ripping the station apart. The soundless screams of people drifting in the void. Death.

None of it made sense.

“Open your eyes, Sam,” said the darkness in the soft hiss of a million whispers speaking at once. “You know the truth.”

I took a step backwards. Freeing my foot was like pulling it clear of thick, half frozen mud. I struggled back another step and pulled my other foot clear of the cloying dark. I turned and ran as fast as I could away from the darkness, but it was everywhere. My feet hammered the deck as I sprinted down the deserted main corridor. Dark pushed in all around. Overwhelming. Inescapable. Ahead of me, darkness, to my left and right, void, behind me, oblivion. The only patch of safety was the thin glow coming off my datapad.

“Stop, Sam,” the Darkness whispered. “Stop. You know you want to.”

I checked my position on the datapad. It said I wasn’t moving at all. I wasn’t making a single meter of progress towards the hangar. I slowed to a stop and traced a new path to the nearest airlock. I needed that suit before the air ran out.

“That’s better, isn’t it, Sam?” the Darkness asked.

Light abandoned the station and the datapad on my wrist flickered and failed. I was alone with the darkness, gasping for breath, shivering as the icy wind tore at my skin.

I shook my head. “No. Not better at all.”

“Don’t lie, Sam,” the Darkness whispered. “You know all you want to do is give in. Lie down. Rest. Die.”

A deluge of images ran through my mind, visions, or memories, I couldn’t be sure. I saw myself shuffling through the station alone. Physically, I looked fine, but I walked like I was in terrible pain. In the vision, my eyes were hollow, my cheeks sunken. I busied myself with research for days at a time, barely eating, never sleeping, doing everything I could to escape the black pit of torment that churned in my chest, so cold it burned. The pain was inescapable, unbearable. It haunted my waking hours and loomed over me in dreams.

The cold drove me to my knees. I couldn’t bear it anymore. Teeth chattering, I collapsed in the freezing wind and curled into a ball as the Darkness drove deeper and deeper into my mind. It was beyond images now, beyond words and cogent thought. The Darkness drove into me with sharp, blinding pain that brought me to tears. Claws of ice scraped across my ribs from the inside out and left a dull, persistent ache behind them. It kept pushing, leaving me gutted, hollow, bleeding to death on the cold steel of the deck but there wasn’t any blood at all. There wasn’t a mark on me. I was dying, but wouldn’t die. It wasn’t possible to hurt this much and still be alive, yet here I was, somehow still breathing.

“So close now, Sam,” the Darkness called. “Let yourself slip over the edge, you know you want to.”

I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I wanted to. It would have been easier to let go and slide forever into the black, but something kept me here. There was an anchor holding me in place. I wouldn’t let go. I wouldn’t let the Darkness take me.

Not yet.

Every nerve was on fire. My bones felt like ground glass carving into my muscles from the inside. It wasn’t possible to get up. I did it anyway. And then.

Light.

A door hissed open, flooding the corridor with harsh white fluorescence and someone clamped an oxygen mask over my mouth. I blinked the tears away and the figure came into a focus. A woman leaned over me. She was tall with dark brown hair pulled into a ponytail and kind brown eyes. She … she looked a lot like me. We could have been siblings. We even had the same small scar running through our left eyebrow.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Sam,” she said. “I was a scientist here before everything went to hell.”