I crumpled to the floor, and he put another hand down on me, melting me down to the bone. "G-get... off of me!" I sent a worm out through the back of my neck, and turned my head around to watch as it launched into his mouth, melting away with a loud screech, but not before digging its razor sharp teeth into him, and giving me enough time to crawl away while the parasites worked their way at repairing me.

"Come back here and I'll finish you!" A long stream of acidic vomit lurched in my direction, barely flying past me and melting down the metal wall with a deafening hiss. A handful of worms trickled out of my palm, and I threw them in his eyes, then pulling a massive one as tall as I am, striking him with it at full force and using his body's momentum to slam open the now unlocked door. Looking down, that one had already melted from contact with him, and now there was a gaping wound in my stomach from where it grew. "I can't let you end this!" As I walked over his body, he grabbed my ankle, liquefying it almost instantly. "Aaagh!" I fell down the floor, and he did the same with the other before I could army crawl my way to the captain's desk, searching it for a gun from where I was on the floor.

"You'll have to try harder than that if you want to stop me." He started getting up to come in my direction, and I finally found one in the last drawer left, shooting his arms and legs to end his efforts. Now to do what I came here for. I searched all the other desks, drawers, and ledges, but found no map. No! That's why I came here in the first place! This place is way too big to just blindly search!

"Hehe..." I looked down, and a grin glowed through his deteriorated, rotten teeth. "You'll never escape! There's reinforcements on the way from the nearest station now! I won't have tested a meta pill for...

n-n-aught!"

"Tell me where to find the escape pods," I said pointing it at his face, "or I'll pull the trigger."

"I'd never-" I pushed the barrel into his face. "You better."

After a little while of thinking, he drew a crude map of the ship into the floor by melting it with his finger. "The escape pods," he said pointing down, "are a little ways d-down this hall and to the l-l-left... y-you aren't gonna kill me, right?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Oh, thank g-" I fired off the rest of the clip into his head, and walked back into the hall, avoiding the puddles of acid that were spread along the floor. Walking down the path he drew out, I walked in and found the escape pods, just as he said they would be. I crawled into one of them, shutting the door behind me.

Paul

I woke up to the light tap tap tap of roaches' feet hitting the creaky wooden floor. The morning sunlight is dimmed out by the baby puke green clouds above, but still manages to come through the basement window and into my eyes. Carefully grabbing my boots from the floor and putting them on, killing the overgrown insects before I can get bitten. I left that room, heading up the stairs and exploring the house now that it's well lit enough. "And behind door number one is..." Opening the closet, nothing was inside except for a skeleton hanging off the clothes rack by a noose with a bloodstained They Live T-shirt on and a pair of pants that had fallen off when their body became too small to hold them up. "Dangit. Nothing." I move on to the kitchen, opening the cupboards and finding a box of Honey Smacks, dirty bread crumbs, and a can of baked beans. "Bingo." Every year, it gets more and more to find food left behind from before the war.

After searching the rest of the house with no success, I moved on to the stretch of desert highway next to it, hoping to find another house or form of shelter before nightfall. A few long hours later, I spotted a small home on the horizon in the distance, and eventually got there just as the sun began to come down. Its walls had a lot of holes, and the roof was missing, but I guess it might be worth it to search the house anyway, and maybe set up a makeshift hiding place inside for the night.

Walking inside, I first found a small kitchen, and was slapped in the face by a stench that nearly made me vomit. On the floor was a rotting corpse of a raider, currently being eaten by three roaches, all of them feeding so intensely that they didn't notice as I stomped my steel toe boot down on each of their heads, splattering their gooey contents across the shattered tile floor.

"Ugh, God..." I want to search the kitchen, but the smells were too intense and so I opted to move on to the rest of the house. Opening the wood kitchen door, I found a flight of stairs that led down to a windowless basement that could only be lit by the sunlight that came through the door.

I look down at the brittle wooden stairs, and notice a flashlight, pleasantly surprised that it still works. I turn it on, pointing it down the stairs and into the basement below, illuminating a large array of buttons, switches , displays, and...

"What the..."