Dead Space: Martyr

What lay beneath hardly looked human anymore. The head was still there, but was now embedded in a curtain of flesh, some deformation of what had once been the shoulders. It was animate, moving slightly, what was left of its chest heaving up and down with rapid movements. The legs had atrophied and the arms had lengthened.The body had flattened and ribs and skin seemed to have spread out to create a winglike structure between the wrist and what was left of the ankle, like the body of a manta ray. It was an unhealthy morbid color. The eyes were sunken in and had a strange gleam to them.

"Professor Field, are you seeing this?" asked Hideki.

"What is it?" said Field.

"Oh my God," said one of the other two.

There was another cracking noise, and the body changed further, what was left of the face receding, becoming lost except for the eyes and the mouth, which was now little more than a hole. It split open at the end, dissolving there into a mass of tentacles or antennae now, almost insectoid. The hands and feet shriveled, and hooks of bone sprouted in their place. It made a shrieking sound and began to struggle.

-B.K. Evenson, Dead Space: Martyr

Dead Space: Martyr is seriously a sci-fi killer. It has an epic ending and i'm saying it is only because it is apocalyptic and that can actually make people feel paranoid and scared of what's coming next.

At first the book talks about how Michael Altman had discovered a strange gravity anomaly near the center of Chicxulub crater. The government and other organizations were starting to take an interest in this and decided to look for the source of the signal, which happens to be the Black Marker- a huge alien artifact which is believed to be a man-made object, left buried under hundreds or even thousands miles of rocks. It was proven that the Marker is a potentially dangerous object as Hendricks killed Dantec under the influence of hallucinations conjured by the Marker itself.

In the novel, nearly everyone started to worship the Black Marker for almost immediately after it was brought up from below as they were being influenced by it mentally, and then the scientists and everyone in the facility started to behave in abnormal ways; some stabbed the others and painted sets of weird symbols on walls with blood or shit, some attempted or committed suicides for almost no reason at all; people were having trouble sleeping and had headaches, and most of them had hallucinations seeing their dead lovers or family members who had been warning them about 'Convergence' and to stay away from the Marker.

And then it happened; a scientist had injected himself with some chemical substance for trying to keep his hallucination from disturbing his thoughts, and was then shot to death and transformed into one of those creatures. Soon, everyone except for a few, was infected and they were all almost impossible to be stopped. In the end, Michael sank the whole facility and the Black Marker deeper down the water to stop things from getting worse. But still, he didn't succeed in stopping the Marker from trying to wipe out the humanity, or preventing people from bringing it up to the surface again.

The image above is from my own flickr photostream.