Tenebra Zeta #9: Mouth of the Abyss

By Justin Bedard

The end of the road leads to the edge of the world. Following all the clues uncovered thus far, Tenebra Zeta tracks the Brotherhood of Blood to Bezdna, a remote island in the Arctic Circle that you won't find on any map nor hear discussed in any tongue. Upon this island is an abandoned medical facility, the Infection spilling from its depths and seeping into the walls until the entire place comes alive.

The team presses on regardless, met with their own unique terrors as the evil power toys with and threatens to consume their minds. The dead sacrificed in the name of an insidious and horrific experiment return to life as deformed mutants. The walls have voices. The ceiling has eyes. The floor breaches with oily black tentacles to rip and tear any poor souls careless enough to walk upon it.

Yet somewhere within this maze of eldritch abomination lies Cain, and that’s enough for Lance to keep going until his last breath. Will he finally seize the revenge he’s waited all his life for, or will the mastermind of blood and chaos finish what he started?

And will the team be ready for whatever darkness lurks within their own hearts?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Justin Bedard
• Release date: Dec 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005996475

Justin Bedard

Justin Bedard (born September 11th, 1995) is a Canadian author that has lived in southern Ontario most of his life. To talk broad strokes, he's your average geek and has a very strange and slightly immature sense of humor that may be the result of insanity. He currently resides in Kemptville with his parents and two siblings.

Book preview

The following contains strong language, sexual content, and scenes of violence. Reader discretion is advised.

The characters and scenarios depicted in this work are either fictional or derived from mythology. Any resemblances to any person living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Some dialogue appears enclosed in angle brackets (< and >). These indicate that the character is speaking a non-English language.

©Justin Bedard, 2020. All rights reserved.

Cover provided by Ranshin06. Support her on DeviantArt at deviantart.com/ranshin06

TENEBRA ZETA

ISSUE #9

MOUTH OF THE ABYSS

CHAPTER ONE

December 20th, 2198

Bezdna, Arctic Circle

*******

<Go home,> the locals told us before we set off across the water. <It’s bad enough you came here in the dead of winter. Nobody who goes to that place ever comes back.>

As the five of us marched across the ice with our parkas weighing our bodies down, pound after pound of snow gusting against us, and the cold biting all the way to our cores, we started to think they’d been right.

But we had no choice. We’d come too far and braved too much of Europe and Asia to give up now, striking out for every spot where a Cradle was rumoured to be. Some we found intact and untouched. Others we found withered and ruined, completely drained of aether and now no more than twigs littering the ground they once provided for. Those few Brotherhood grunts we found along directed us well enough after a little convincing that thankfully never reached the heights of Dubai, and once we caught onto the pattern, we arrived at the northernmost corner of Russia and went further beyond to a single island that didn’t show up on any map.

We used to think Earth was flat, and I liked to imagine that if it was, this place would be at the very end. There were even rowboats frozen to the shore, warning us to leave before we joined the lost souls forever roaming this place. This final gateway to Hell, not much more than a plateau of ice and snow but seeming to stretch on forever when you could barely see a few feet in front of you. We had to tilt our heads down to keep the brutal wind out of our faces, and it was still so cold and so dry that it was hard just to breathe.

But we trudged on, Monica leading the way with her flaming swords as the only source of light. A light just strong enough for us to make out the hundreds of boot prints pointing further north. The Brotherhood. They were here. Somewhere...perhaps even everywhere. An ambush would be too easy in weather like this. Barely any way to see, too much interference for us to radio for help.

We were on our own.

The white monotony was broken by a wide and ominous black. A facility laid in front of us, as frost-laden and abandoned as everything else we’d seen. Two floors with more likely hidden beneath the surface, precariously and fittingly perched at the island’s very edge. No lights and deathly quiet aside from the wind howling past it. The same held true when we wrenched open the door, piled inside, then shut it behind us. No signs of life, nor the black sludge trying to devour it.

BANG!

Resident EVIL!

Yes.

You do realize you’re gonna get shot one of these days, I seethed once our pulses came back down from heart attack levels.

One of these days? she snickered. Try August, buckaroo!

Yeah, well, you stabbed me in the shoulder, and that’s equally unattractive.

Hey now, scars are sexy.

I had neither the patience nor stamina for my sister’s antics. We just trekked through the worst blizzard I bet any of us had ever experienced, and now we were here in this enormous facility that made our skin crawl. Not because it was just as cold on the inside. It was in its architecture. Linoleum floors polished despite years of neglect. Aluminum stairs leading up to the dark second floor halls. Steel doors like vaults. An elevator in the wall behind the large desk before us, with the desk itself filled with nothing but an ancient intercom system and a few loose forms typed up in Russian.

Refer Worker #32 to Emergency Ward for surgery... Jack read. It’s a hospital.

An emergency facility for miners back during the Cold War, I said, reading off what little info I had about the area in Anam’s notes, not wondering what they’d been mining for so much as worrying about what they’d ended up mining. It connects right to the shafts underneath, but the whole place has been abandoned since 2090.

<The year the Extinction War began...> Akumi mused. <...this has to be it.>

I was never one to approve baseless assumptions, but I agreed. Mostly because I was sick of looking for this place and secretly wishing I’d kept my mouth shut in Kenya so we could’ve all just gone home. Running on only two or three hours of sleep a night was bad enough at the best of times. I was so tired by then that I could barely remember what day it was, and while I should’ve been happy that we were finally at the end of this long and gruelling road, I was too busy praying said end wasn’t a damn roundabout.

Good Lord, I needed a smoke...

Gods... Rayyah wheezed, who even under three thick layers was still shivering.

Told ya it was gonna be cold, said Jack.

It’s not that...can you feel it?

It was hard to feel anything save frostbite starting to set in, but now that she mentioned it, my body measured a thousand times heavier than all the layers combined. Like there was a black hole beneath the floor threatening to suck us through. I couldn’t sense it nearly as intensely as Rayyah, though, and we all rushed to steady her as she winced and cried out.

It’s beneath us, she said when she caught her breath. ...fluctuating...it’s getting stronger by the minute.

Jack had already been fiddling with the elevator’s call button and the nearby box we assumed was a light switch, that tiny nugget of distressing information kicking him into high gear. High gear wasn’t enough to fix Problem Number Two as he flicked switch after switch and pressed button after button with no results whatsoever.

Power’s out, he growled, giving the box a good smack. Course it is. Stairs, anyone?

There aren’t any.

On the back of one of the forms was a hastily drawn map of the whole facility, already hard to read with the steady buildup of frost and time but just solid enough to see there were four floors in total: the two we could see in front of us that made up the actual hospital, a maze-like sub-level, and the mine. There were stairs from the first floor to the second and stairs from the sub-level to the mine, but the only thing connecting the two halves was the elevator in front of us. The elevator we’d already established was out of commission and wouldn’t be moving unless we found and reactivated the breaker that controlled it, the lights and (most crucially) the temperature, which there was naturally no mention of on the map itself. As if the Soviets back when Nixon was in office knew the capitalist American swine would come snooping around at one point or another and decided to make a game out of it.

So we either look all over the place for some little switchbox... Monica started once I’d finished relaying all that info.

Or we stay up here and get slowly and quite agonizingly killed by the laws of thermodynamics, I finished, ever the source of positivity in our merry little band. So unless anyone’s got a better plan...

I mean, I’m all for setting the place on fire if the rest of y’all are down.

You know you’ve said something stupid when even Akumi is mean-mugging you.

Okay, serious girl hat on ‘cause apparently we’ve all lost our sense of humour, Monica sighed. "Let’s split into teams and search each wing. Both floors. You three take the west. Me and Lance will take the