Literally.
Allan knew he couldn't keep this up. Something had to give. He spied an open door to his left and decided to go for it. He leaped in through the door, saw he was in a small room and that it would have to do. He spun, closed the door and locked it. Immediately, the sound of shrieking and pounding sounded on the outside of the door. Slowly, Allan backed away from it, trembling violently from raw fear and adrenaline.
After a few terrifying seconds, he decided that the door wasn't going to break down. Either it was made of sterner stuff than his suit or they were getting in each others' way. Whatever the scenario, he couldn't stay in here forever. Allan willed himself to relax, to focus on staying alive, completing the mission. Find Hunter, find the cure, fix himself and then he could get the data to Hawkins and hopefully save some lives.
For now, that meant find something more useful than a combat knife. As luck would have it, he'd raced into a maintenance bay. Allan felt a tight grin twist into existence on his face. Two workbenches, an open crate, a pair of shelves and a collection lockers along the back. He quickly began sorting through them, looking for anything worthwhile to use against the hordes of insane, sick people who were trying to kill him. Working quickly, shoving stuff aside, he finally find another wrench, this one painted black.
He'd nearly decided it would have to do when his gaze settled on something way cooler. Slipping the wrench into his belt loop, he reached down to the workbench and grabbed the bolt gun someone had tossed there. Checking out, he found it empty of bolts, but stacked in one of the lockers, he found a few magazines of bolts.
Just like a real gun.
“Finally!” he whispered, loading the gun up, aiming it and squeezing the trigger. A bolt launched across the room and buried itself in the nearest wall.
Allan chuckled, feeling suddenly intoxicated with power. Grinning wickedly, he turned and unlocked the door. Opening it up, he aimed the bolt gun and fired, putting a bolt through the skull of the nearest crewman trying to get in. The second was a woman in a ripped orange jumpsuit with an awful sneer and missing teeth from fighting, he imagined. She took a bolt through the right eye and collapsed immediately. The third one to go down was a black security officer. After that, Allan lost track, and emptied the full magazine, reloaded and emptied half of another one. When he was finished, there was a pile of corpses outside the door.
He waited for more to come, but found none. As the malignant glee faded, an uncomfortable fear settled over him. He'd enjoyed that murder way too much. Not a good sign. At least he knew why now. Just another symptom. Allan scoured the bay again and managed to find a few more magazines. Stowing them in his various pockets along his suit, he made his way out of the bay, stepping over the corpses, and set off again.
* * * * *
When he arrived in the corridor that led to the main lab, he spied a tall, armored figure standing by the door, facing away from him. He swallowed, raising his bolt gun, preparing himself to face a truly difficult enemy. But he made a noise, his boot scraped on the deckplates, and the figured turned around. It was Hunter.
“Finally,” she said.
“Yeah, hello to you, too,” Allan replied unhappily, lowering the gun and hurried down the length of the corridor to join her.
“We've got a problem,” she said, turning back to the control panel next to the door. “It's locked down and it's reinforced and, as far as I can tell, there's no other way in. It's basically a sealed safe room. It's on lockdown. The only way to open it is to find someone's security card. I imagine the security chief.”
“Fantastic. So how do we find that?” Allan asked.
Hunter shrugged. “I don't know.”
Allan sighed. He stopped and thought for a moment, then something flickered in his mind. A memory. After a moment, it came to him. Keycards were usually tagged. So all he had to do was get to a security center.
He quickly explained this to Hunter, and the pair of them set off down the corridor. Allan remembered from the map that there was a security center not far away. Two turns and a corridor later, they were opening the security center door. Allan stepped in, cleared it with his bolt gun and then immediately crossed to the workstation. He sat and booted it up while Hunter watched the door. While he was running through the list of functions on the workstation, trying to figure out how to track the damned card, he had to turn up his internal air conditioning again. He was boiling alive in his suit. It wouldn't go up much higher than this.
“You okay?” Hunter asked suddenly.
Allan jumped slightly, looking over at her. “What?”
“You're hot, you boiling in that suit,” she replied, staring at him with a deadly calm.
Allan frowned, his vision going blurry and swimmy for a second. He squeezed his eyes, wishing he could rub them, but his visor prevented that. “How did you know that?” he replied slowly, finding it hard to think.
Hunter said nothing.
Allan began to press the issue further, but something chimed, indicating that the workstation had done as he'd asked. He let his gaze linger on her for a moment longer, then turned away and stared at the screen.
“It's in the observation deck, overhead,” he said.
“Then we should go get it,” Hunter replied. “Come on. We're running out of time.”
* * * * *
They made their way out of the science wing and up two flights of stairs before really running into any kind of problem. Allan was first out of the stairwell, into the corridor. He stepped out and was immediately thrown off his feet as someone slammed into him full force. Landing on his back, grunting in pain, he found himself staring up at yet another malignant human being. He was about to respond with violence when powerful, gloved hands abruptly appeared on either side of the crewman's head. With a sharp twist, Hunter broke the man's neck.
She threw him off of Allan and then turned to face another unseen assailant. Allan saw another appear from behind him, overhead. He brought the bolt gun up and fired, managing to get the shot through the bottom of his jaw. It exploded out of the top of his head and pinged off the ceiling. Allan rolled to the side to avoid being fallen on, scrambled to his feet and finding another two coming for him. He aimed, fired, aimed fired.
Two more corpses hit the floor.
Turning, he heard a vicious fight behind him. Hunter had found a length of pipe for herself and was presently beating four men to death with it. He raised his bolt gun and took aim, but hesitated. Hunter seemed to be able to handle herself. He watched her move in between the insane crewmen and saw it was almost like some kind of deadly but incredibly beautiful and graceful dance. She narrowly dodged a pair of grabbing hands while slamming her elbow into the open, screaming mouth of a security officer, took a step back and then brought the pipe around in a tight arc, utterly smashing the jaw of a medical technician intent on her death. She brought one boot up, planted it firmly on the chest of a technician and shoved back. Coming off of that, she delivered a solid punch to another crewman, sending him stumbling backwards.
She had them all finished in under sixty seconds.
“Shall we?” she asked after flicking the blood off her pipe.
“Uh...yeah.”
Hunter still scared the crap out of him, but there was something extremely impressive about her abilities. Allan followed her down another nameless corridor, took another two turns, passed through a storage bay and...found himself at a welded shut door.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he moaned.
“That's the way to the observation deck, isn't it?” Hunter asked.
“Yes. And it's the only door in...” He paused for a second, finding it more and more difficult to think as time went on. He could either cut through the door or... “Vents,” he said. “We can go through the ventilation system. It'd be faster...I think.”
“Fine,” Hunter replied.
He moved to a general access terminal and opened up the ventilation system layout. After a few minutes, he real
ized the only way he was getting in was to go down to the end of the corridor and enter one of the vent shafts through there. Of course, it couldn't be easy. He sighed, pointed this out to Hunter and then set off down the corridor. She was silent as she followed him. Of all the people to survive, she had to be the last one. It wasn't that he wasn't appreciative for the support of another survivor, especially one so effective, it was just that...she was scary, and she turned his stomach. She actually respected him for Lindholm.
He found the room they were supposed to go to, a poorly-lit storage bay, and cleared it. Nothing but shelves and crates. He stepped into the room, then hesitated. His vision was going tunnel again and he suddenly found it hard to breathe. Allan stopped, closed his eyes, tried to force his pulse to calm down, his breathing to come normal.
“Come on,” he muttered, opening his eyes.
“I'll go first,” Hunter said. “Your PTSD is flaring up.”
Allan focused his gaze on her back as she crossed to the ladder in the far corner of the room that led to the vent shaft. “I don't have PTSD.”
“Um, yeah, you do.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Tunnel vision? Trouble breathing? Survivors guilt?” she asked as she climbed up the ladder. Allan came to the base of it and looked up after her.
“How could you possibly know-”
“I had a friend who had it. Now will you come on?”
Allan hesitated further, unsatisfied with the answer. He climbed up after her, pulling himself into the vent shaft. He began crawling after her on his hands and knees, banging along through the vent shaft. She was right...how was she right? How did she know? At least the confusion was putting off his symptoms for the moment, or, at least his awareness of them. Did he have post traumatic stress disorder? It was possible, probable even.
What was the cure? Lots of therapy. Allan didn't want therapy. He didn't know why, but he wanted to reject the idea immediately. Why? He had no rational reason. He just didn't want to do it. The sound of stressed metal, a metallic groan, shook him out of his thoughts. Up ahead, Hunter had paused. She began to say something when, abruptly, the vent beneath her gave out. She let out a short cry of surprise as she plummeted into the room below.
“Hunter!” Allan cried, shuffling forward.
He looked down through the hole and saw that she'd fallen right into the midst of half a dozen crewman. She was already fighting them.
“I'm coming!” he shouted.
“No!” Hunter snapped. “Keep going! Get the damned keycard!”
“Hunter-”
“GO!”
Allan hesitated, but only for a second, he could get the card, then come back and help her. She seemed to be handling herself...Moving very carefully, thinking that it wouldn't matter if the rest of the vent gave up, he cautiously moved over the hole and got to the other side. Not an easy task, but his strength-enhancements in the suit managed to give him the leverage he needed to get to the other side. He kept going, and the vent didn't collapse. The sounds of Hunter battling the psychotic crew disappeared into the distance.
The appropriate vent grate came up. Allan opened it up and peered inside from overhead. Nothing and no one, (alive at least), in the observation deck. He descended the ladder and spent a few minutes hunting through the dead bodies until he came up with the security card he needed. Stowing it in his pocket, he climbed back up the ladder and hurried through the vents. He came to the hole and stopped, realizing he could hear nothing.
Peering down through the opening, he saw that the room Hunter had fallen into was empty. He frowned, looking around the storage bay. There was nothing. Just a single corpse. Allan frowned, lingering, trying to reason this out.
“What the fuck?” he whispered. “Hunter?”
Nothing. Allan lingered a bit longer, then lowered himself through the hole. He landed with a thud and moved to the only door in the room, which was closed. Allan opened it and poked his head out. No one in the corridor.
“Hunter?!” he called.
His voice echoed down the passageway, dismal and lonely. Allan activated his radio. “Hunter? Where are you? Can you hear me?”
Dead silence. Allan began making his way down the corridor, opening all the doors he passed, calling out to her on the radio, his pulse picking up, going faster and faster as fear flooded his system. He kept looking, poking his head into bathrooms, storage bays, a break room, working his way slowly back to the main lab.
But Hunter was gone.
There was no sign of her.
Allan's tension kept ratcheting up, slamming him closer and closer to having some kind of attack. He tried to make himself calm down, force himself to relax, as he came to stand before the main lab. Allan swiped the card, heard a chime and stepped through the doors as soon as they were open. Allan stopped dead in the doorway, but only for a second. The lab was utterly destroyed. It looked like a dozen men with pipes and wrenches and a lot of enthusiasm had been given the task of utterly destroying everything in the room.
Workstations were smashed, cabinets ripped open, supplies and blood spilled across the deckplates, medical cabinets toppled, sparking equipment...and a series of cold storage cabinets across the room had been ripped open, a collection of glass vials shattered in the floor, thousands of bits of glass mingling with a lot of blue liquid.
The cure. It had to be the cure.
It was gone, destroyed, useless.
Allan's pulse kicked up another notch, then another. His vision grew more narrow, darkness boiling around the edges, his limbs going numb, chest hitching.
Allan collapsed, the darkness consuming him.
Chapter 09
–Perception Is Reality–
Once more, Allan found himself washing up on the shores of consciousness. They weren't particularly nice shores, nothing like the sandy beaches he'd heard Mezzanine had. These were cold, rocky and painful. He opened his eyes and found himself staring up at a stained ceiling, cast in flickering light. His head was spinning, vision blurred, his equilibrium shot. His whole body seemed to ache and his throat was dry.
Something shifted nearby.
A low mutter sounded.
Allan closed his eyes, opened them, tried to clear the blurring. His pulse was rapid, his chest hurt. Slowly, he sat up. Something about this was familiar. It took him a moment to put the pieces together as he finished sitting up and began looking around. Then he had it: his first time waking up on the Stygian, in that locker room. Allan felt something in his hand. He looked down. The bolt gun. At least this time he had an upgrade arsenal. His company came in the form of a female scientist walking around across the room.
“Hey,” he said, raising the bolt gun. “Can you hear me?”
She spun around at the sound of his voice, and as soon as he had a sight on her face, he squeezed the trigger. The first bolt went wide, his aim thrown off. The woman screamed and began rushing towards him. He fired again, missed. Third time was the charm and the bolt went through her right eye, exploding out of the back of her head in a plume of red gore. She toppled forward and landed at his feet, immobile now.
“Shit,” Allan muttered, slowly getting to his feet.
It felt as if his brain was wrapped in cotton, or he was trying to think through a haze. Several thoughts were trying to come to him at once. Finally, the first one was that he was fucked. He was double-fucked, possibly even triple. The cure wasn't here. Or was it? What if he had just missed it? What if there was one vial left? One would be enough, at least for him. What about Hunter? Was she dead? Where had she gone?
A wave of hot agony surged through him and he felt like vomiting. Thankful, there wasn't enough left in his stomach and he dry-heaved for a second. First things first, he needed to mitigate his symptoms. There was no way he was going to be able to think like this. Allan raised his visor and stumbled over to the nearest sink. He grabbed his empty canteen and turned on the water, but paused as he started to fill it up.
What if it was in the water?
No...it was airborne, he was infected...was he getting stupider? Groaning, Allan filled it up and then drained it, drinking greedily from the canteen until it was gone. He drained two more fillings, then filled it up a fourth time and set it down on the counter. Next, he stumbled over to an intact medical kit attached to the wall. Tearing it off, he made his way back to the canteen, set the kit down and opened it up. Pawing through it, he found a bottle of painkillers, rattled out four of the extra-strength blue pills and knocked them back with some more water. From there, he injected himself with some more painkillers and another antibiotic/anti-viral syringe.
It would have to do, for now.
Feeling slightly better, Allan replaced his visor and began a more thorough search of the room. He wasted ten minutes hunting through every container, every cabinet, every cubbyhole, turning up nothing but a lot of useless medical supplies. By the time he sat down at the only remaining workstation in the room, he was feeling a bit better. His throat wasn't so dry and inflamed and the pain wracking his entire body was approaching something like tolerable.
Allan booted up the workstation and began hunting through lab reports. Several more minutes passed. The sounds of the lab filtered into his perception: the hum of power, the whisper of respiration, the sound of his breathing.
Allan paused. His breathing? It didn't sound sound right. It sounded like...an echo. Or like it was doubled somehow. Like something breathing almost but not quite in sync with him. Allan turned around cautiously.
Hunter was standing right behind him.
He screamed in surprise. Her hands shot out and wrapped around his helmet. Her face was hidden behind an almost opaque visor, only her eyes visible. Wide and white and staring. She began to undo the latches on his helmet.
“Hunter! What are you doing!? What are you doing!?” Allan heard himself shriek. He grabbed her hands but her grip was unbreakable. He began struggling violently, trying to get of her off as she worked the latches of the helmet.
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