by @Takatsu for the Zombie @SciKick anthology

When she woke up, she was alone and the bay was empty. She couldn't recall where she came from but her dream had been filled with red. Everything was burning; the sky was burning and the ground was burning. The whole time she heard her mother humming in the distance, something she heard as a child.

She could still hear it now and her eyes were wet. It smelt like smoke and old exhaust fume and the air tasted plastic. A lid or some sort of glass cover lay over her and she kicked until it came off. Her head was pounding, her lungs burning, her chest, her feet. She was on her knees, dripping wet. She wondered if she had been in a coffin, if she was dead, if she had been abandoned, but she must have been asleep for a long time.

There was the greenish glow of the lid, the mist and the gas, and then it faded into nothing. All around her was a darkness and a silence that was whole. But eventually she made out the shadows and forms of empty cryogenic pods and tubes like grey veins and graves and great arches of the ceiling like the black ribs of a whale. She had to steady on one of the pods as she got up and in the glass, she saw herself looking back: thin, pale, wet hair, white shirt, eyes black and wide and sunken and she did not know who she was. She could only stand there and shiver in the cold.

The door on the other side wouldn't open. It was solid; no one responded. She tried pounding her fists, shouting something, anything. But her voice was hoarse and fell flat. She could only hear her mother's humming somewhere, maybe behind the door.

When she managed to override the lock panel, there was a howl like that of wind and thunder, air escaping, everything escaping around her; she no longer found her feet on the ground. She tried to stop but couldn't. She couldn't until her bones and muscles crunched against a wall. But no one was there to hear her. Just a black hall, debris and broken tools and helmets and what appeared to be bullets and droplets of blood eternally rotating in place; they reflected light from emergency LEDs like moons. She was hungry, ravenous, and cold, very cold, and her body felt liquid. She crawled along the walls asking if anyone was there over and over. No one ever was. It became like a mantra and she repeated it to herself. Is anyone there, is anyone there, is anyone there.

At some point, she saw something move ahead. It drifted stiff like a log on a river but it was large, much larger than the debris she passed. It blocked out light for a moment. Darkness fell over her face. She asked again if anyone was there. This time she saw arms and legs; she was not alone.