The scene was one from the Underworld. Flames wrapped themselves around ancient trees, bringing them to the ground in minutes. Hunks of smouldering metal rained down from the sky, lodging themselves into the moist earth. Men and women screamed as they scrambled to drag themselves free from a horrifying death. The ever present shrieks of plaguers mingled with those of their victims, even as fire consumed their flesh.
Dr. Kyle Jackson cradled his head, and rocked violently from side to side. Within the Sky Ship's medical bay, he and a few others had managed to use the room's hardened steel walls to cushion the worst of the impact. Not all of them had survived though; Dr. Julie Blair-Park's limp and lifeless corpse hung from the iron rafters - she had ignored Kyle's advice to secure herself to something solid. He looked up at her through the cracked lenses of his glasses, unable to conform to what he was seeing. Such a beautiful creature. Such a promising student. Evolution marches on. Evolution waits for no man, he heard the voice in his head say with cold authority.
Waits for no man.
Snapping out of his enhanced state of shock, he gasped for air. His lungs felt as if they were made from iron, and barely shifted. Were he a lesser man, uneducated and irrational, he'd of suffocated there and then. He was Doctor Kyle Jackson, however - a figure of great renown in the field of Advanced Medicine and Biological Theory. His name was scattered across several revolutionary papers on the origins of mankind, on viral analysis and bacterial prognosis. It would take more than shock to push him from the gene pool.
Holding up his hand, he focused on the blurry image of his finger and followed it as he moved it from side to side. Within seconds, his breathing eased, and sanity slowly started to move back into his rattled brain.
"What do we do, doctor?" Asked Matron Jenny Smith. She was dishevelled, wearing the bloodied overalls of her field.
"Yeah, Kyle, you're in charge man. You're the brainiac, get us out of here, man!" Chimed in Doctor Laurence Clearwater, of Portside University.
"What do we do? We leave before we become part of the fire triangle, of course," shot back Dr. Kyle as he clambered to his feet. "Is that difficult?"
Jenny pointed at the medical bay's jarred door. Flames licked around the edges, and a thick diesel tasting smoke was accumulating up by Julie's lifeless corpse. Kyle looked around for a window - but there wasn't one. He'd herded them in here for that reason. Curse my genius!
This is not how I die.
Looking around, Kyle racked the deepest recesses of his brain for knowledge of a Sky Ship's anatomy. The medical bay was located near the bottom of them, this he knew; he was sitting upright, so the ship must have come down upright. An explosion sounded from beyond the door, and it shuddered on its crippled hinges. If he didn't think of something soon, they were all carrion.
"We go up," he said suddenly; everyone looked at him quizzically. "Julie's death was not in vain. Look, the impact of her body against the rafters has caused one of the steel plates to buckle. With enough force, we could dislodge it."
They looked up, and saw he was right. The poor woman's back must have completely shattered with that impact, but in doing so, she may well have saved them. The bolts, perhaps rusted with age, had given way. Quickly, Doctor Laurence clambered on top of a surgical bed and poked up at the panel with an IV pole. Surely enough, it moved, and then the group shuddered - the women screamed, as it fell down and crushed Laurence's skull.
"Oh my!" Jenny was screaming repeatedly. The sound drove nails into Kyle's aching brain.
"Shut up!" He snapped, slapping her across the face. "Up we go; forget him. He died so that we all may live, and he was careless to have prodded the panel from that angle!"
"Oh you cold so-"
"Not cold, Jenny," he said with a sneer, "practical, and logical. If this displeases you, then stay and play nice with the fire. The rest of you, let's go."
A male nurse, dark skinned and with a foreign accent, raised a hand. Kyle nodded at him.
"Shouldn't we take some of this stuff with us?" The nurse asked, almost embarrassed, as he pointed to stacks of medical and surgical equipment.
Kyle slapped himself this time, "of course, of course! All of you grab something, who knows what we'll need - OH, oh and Jenny, the vaccine! If we leave that behind, everything has been for nothing!"
This seemed to snap Jenny out of her despair, and she quickly ran over to a secure lock box and opened it with her key. Inside were two boxes of phials containing a purple liquid. Three hundred of them in all. They were to be the final testament of Kyle's great scientific mind - it was he, not his predecessor, who had isolated that virus and discovered its horrifying secrets. With such knowledge, he was able to use blood from captured infected to create a vaccine - untested sure, but in theory it would work.
With a grunt, Kyle shoved some tables together, and then placed a chair on top. With a box of syringes and empty bloodbags stuffed under his arm, he heaved himself up through the hole. The Sky Ship had lost its hull above the medical bay, and he was greeted by a clear blue sky. He looked around and saw other survivors down below, fleeing the wreckage in all directions towards the jungle that encompassed the crash site. Glancing back down at his colleagues, he waved a hand.
"Come on, evolution demands you get up here ASAP!"
