Clang. The sound reverberated across the metal bulkhead, a low ring that touched the Private's bones. Clang. It was the result of the back of his head falling against the cold metal. Clang. The pace was steady, the same as it had been for the last three hours. The entire storage room was empty, and except for the thick door across the crowded compartment, there was no way in or out.

Clang.

He could faintly hear them moving around on the other side, the things that had once been his crew. He wasn't a scientist, he didn't know exactly what had happened. Whatever it was, it spread fast. Exponentially. Each crew member who succumbed joined the ranks of those... those things. They had fought back fiercely, down to the last man. Down to himself. Now he was all that remained, refuge taken inside the sealed compartment. Unless he felt like running into their midst, he was forever entombed here, deep in the bowels of the ship.

It was probably the micrometeor that had started things. Space wasn't empty, far from it. Dangers came from everywhere; interstellar dust, flares and radiation, comets and meteors, debris from other ships. No radar could track every single one. Their luck had run out when the tiny hunk of iron ferrite, moving at God's own speed, slammed into their hull and opened them up to the vacuum for a good fifteen seconds.

No one was lost. The human body is a most remarkable machine, and one of the engineers managed to patch the hull breach before passing out. The meteor was never found: as far as they could tell, it disappeared among the endless miles of wiring and ductwork that their ship held. Whether it was truly the cause of all this or not, no one knew, and it was likely that it would never be known.

Clang. The memories flashed through his mind in an instant, a lightbulb in the darkness of his thoughts with every impact of his head. The first one to change was the engineer who had patched the hole. No one knew when he had transformed, but suddenly he was rampaging through the recreation deck, a berserking frame of flesh and carapace. The Private had been on security detail when that happened, and had been the one who finally gunned down the engineer. The twisted, deformed corpse flashed in his brain once again, and he found himself unable to rid his mind of the image.

Whatever had happened, it had turned the engineer into an abomination. His face had been peeled back from the nose downwards, and replacing his jaws were obsidian mandibles, like some giant carnivorous bug. One eyeball hung free, dangling below the empty, leaking socket. The armored growth from his forehead had forced it loose. The engineer's... the thing's chest was a mangled mass of singed meat from the weapons fire, more armored carapace and the remains of his humanity scorched and broken. The rest of him was human.

Now they were outside, the rest of the crew, all of them changed into those things. He was stuck inside of the compartment with no chance of escape. No vents to make a sneaky getaway. No way to message for help.

Clang. His pistol was heavy in his hand, a reassuring weight. It was his one escape, the thick polymer and heavy metals inside promising something better than sitting there, waiting to die. His hazel eyes gazed at it, unseeing. The suicide would be quick. The instant he pulled the trigger, a sensor would activate the power cell in the grip, and a superheated bullet would explode from the barrel to burrow it's way through all but the thickest armor plating.

Clang.

He placed the muzzle of the pistol to his temple without thinking.

Outside the confines of the ship, a nearby nebulae boiled and swirled, a veritable maelstrom on a cosmic timescale. The universe seemed to take no heed of the drifting spacecraft, and it really had no reason to. It simply tumbled in the near void, the subtle tugs of gravity taking it to realms unknown.

There were no more clangs.

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