Split-Face: the compound Necromorph of the Chicxulub facility

The Split-Face was a compound Necromorph form encountered by the geophysicist Michael Altman during the outbreak that destroyed the research facility above the Chicxulub crater. It grew out of the earliest Necromorph event in the human record, the one seeded by the Black Marker after the artifact was raised from the seabed off the Yucatán Peninsula, and it was assembled the way the largest recombinant forms are assembled, from many bodies rather than one. Its anatomy carried the offensive equipment of several separate strains at once, so that a single animal could throw a head like a Divider, fire spikes like a Lurker and detonate its own tumor like an Exploder.

A body assembled from many#

Most Necromorph strains are worked out of a single host. A Slasher is one corpse rebuilt around a pair of bone blades, a Lurker is one small body dissolved into a lump of usable biomass. The Split-Face belonged to the other class entirely. Its trunk was a mass of human torsos joined into one animal, the same construction principle that produced the Brute and, three centuries later, the Tripod on Titan Station.

Seven blade-like legs carried that trunk. Two heads sat fused at the front of the creature, which gave the form its name and gave every account of it the same disquieting quality, since a viewer could not settle on where the animal was looking. Slung underneath the body was a tumor, pustule-like and marked in yellow and black, unprotected by any of the plating or bone that shielded the rest of the mass. It was the one soft thing on an otherwise armed and armored creature, and it was the only part of it that mattered.

The arsenal of several strains at once#

What separated the Split-Face from other compound forms was not its size but its repertoire. Individual Necromorph strains tend to specialize. The Divider dismembers itself and sends its own parts scuttling after prey. The Lurker sits back and fires barbs from three ropy tentacles. The Exploder walks a sac of volatile tissue into a crowd and ruptures it. The Split-Face did all three.

It could launch its head at a target, the same trick a Divider performs with the pieces of its own body. It could fire the spikes off its back across a room the way a Lurker fires barbs. And it could rupture the yellow and black tumor beneath it in the manner of an Exploder's pustule, turning its own weak point into a weapon when it chose to. A creature that carried the habits of three specialized strains at once was almost certainly a compound of several of them, recombinant tissue folded together from more than one finished form rather than grown fresh from raw corpses.

Changed between sightings#

Altman did not meet the Split-Face once. On the first encounter it had two heads and no spikes. When he met it again it had gained a third head, and its body had grown over with the spikes it later threw at him.

That change is the most useful thing the record preserves about it. Necromorph tissue is not a finished product. The infection reworks its hosts continuously wherever the Marker signal reaches, and a compound form standing in a compound that was still full of corpses had every raw material it needed to keep adding to itself. The Split-Face of the second encounter was not a different creature. It was the same one, further along.

The outbreak above the crater#

The Split-Face belonged to the first Necromorph outbreak humanity ever brought on itself. In 2214 the Black Marker was found in the Chicxulub impact crater off the coast of the Yucatán, and an operation to raise it was mounted by the Sovereign Colonies military alongside the mining concern DredgerCorp. The artifact was brought up to a floating research facility above the crater and placed under the supervision of Craig Markoff.

Nobody working on it understood at the time that the symbols cut into the Marker were genetic instructions, or that its signal broadcast them continuously into anything dead within reach. Altman went public with the discovery against the wishes of the government, was apprehended and returned to the facility, and was still there when the compound turned. The outbreak killed most of the staff. Accounts of the disaster record its first infected man as a doctor named Grote Guthe, and record another compound form rising at the end of it, a Brute grown around the body of Markoff's enforcer Krax. Altman escaped both the creatures and the sinking of the facility itself, only to be murdered afterward by Markoff and Stevens, who used his death to found the Church of Unitology.

The pustule beneath it#

The Split-Face was vulnerable to dismemberment in the ordinary way. Its legs and heads could be taken off it, and taking them off hurt it. None of that killed it. A form carrying seven legs has redundancy that a Slasher does not, and losing a head cost a creature with two or three of them very little.

The kill came from underneath. Altman put a shot into the yellow and black tumor slung below the body, and the tumor did exactly what an Exploder's pustule does when it is punctured. The detonation destroyed the creature from within. It is a pattern that repeats across the compound forms: the more corpses the infection folds into a single animal, the more it concentrates the animal's failure point into one exposed sac of volatile tissue, and the more thoroughly that sac ends the creature when it goes.

Where it sits among the compound forms#

Nothing matching the Split-Face was recorded again. The forms the infection produces are not a fixed catalogue but a function of what the Marker signal has to work with, and the Chicxulub facility offered a set of raw materials that no later outbreak repeated: a small enclosed compound, a research staff, and the Black Marker itself broadcasting at close range rather than one of the reverse-engineered copies made from it.

What the Split-Face demonstrated, long before anyone had a vocabulary for it, was that the infection scales by combination. It does not stop at rebuilding one body into one weapon. Given enough dead tissue in one place it will build a single creature out of many, and it will keep adding to that creature for as long as the signal holds and the corpses last. Every later compound form, from the Brute to the Tripod, was the same lesson repeated in a different outbreak.