by S. A. Lusher
“Let's go regroup with the others and figure out our next move,” Greg replied.
Greg made sure to go back to Thompson's corpse and scavenge his extra ammo and the two copies of the data he had, then they left the labs, tracing the escape route Kyra and the others had taken. They found them securing a long corridor just outside the labs.
“What the hell happened in there?” Carter asked.
“Lots of fun,” Greg replied. “Now we get to figure out what to do next.”
He took a moment to take in the environment. The mining headquarters were nearly as bad as the Anubis had been during his very last trip to the ship. The walls, floor, and ceiling were battered, burnt, blood-splattered, and dented. Several bodies occupied the floor, which gave Greg a slight relief, as it meant Erebus and his Augmented had yet to reach this area and begin their eerie 'harvest'. The lights were low and dim, they flickered occasionally.
Greg activated his radio. “Lynch, we've got copies of the data. Lots of nasty research files and plenty of dirt on Dark Ops for when we get the hell out of this place.”
“Good. Now you need to go get that device for the bomb. You remember where it is?” Lynch replied. Greg could hear gunfire in the background.
“Yeah, I remember the way.”
“Good. Get to it.”
Lynch cut the line. As Greg and the others set off down the corridor, a tremendous, marrow-freezing roar suddenly loosed across the base. It was so loud and powerful that it froze everyone in their tracks and cracked several nearby windows.
“What the fucking hell was that?” Carter whispered, the terror obvious in his voice.
“I heard something like that...back on Dis. Only it wasn't that powerful...I'd always thought it was a Berserker, but maybe it's something more powerful.” Greg murmured.
“More powerful than a Berserker?” Campbell cried.
“Yes...let's get the fuck out of here and hope we never have to find out.”
They set off again. Greg made sure to memorize the route through the headquarters and the actual layout of the place to the best of his ability, though he'd snagged an infopad with a map of the base just in case. The squad was silent as they traversed the ruined, derelict corridors of the building, listening to the haunting sounds of its new tenants. Greg tried not to think of whatever might be big enough to roar like that, but the notion wouldn't leave his mind and ideas of its size, shape, and lethality kept forming.
He tried to focus on the mission instead. The part they were looking for was in a storage bay in the first floor of the mining headquarters. The corridors would take them most of the way there, just a few twists and turns, but they had to pass through another warehouse to get to the room they wanted to be in, then they'd have to perform the now familiar process of hunting down a single piece of equipment amidst a field of crates.
Greg studied the others as they kept going. Kyra and Campbell looked solid, though tense, but the others looked shaken up. Even after all they had been through, Greg wasn't sure how much actual combat experience with the Undead Carter or Reed had seen. Thompson's death must be weighing heavily on them.
He understood. Death was pretty terrifying when it was so immediately obvious. It seemed way too easy to die in the situation they were in. One minute, Thompson had been alive, aware and fully functional. The next, he was dead. Just like that. And there was no coming back, no hope of saving him. He was wholly, absolutely gone.
And it could happen to any of them just like that.
Greg was still wrestling with this notion himself. He'd just had a lot more time and practice at keeping it off his mind.
As they navigated the corridors and came to the end of their journey, a new sound came to Greg. It was a curious, wet clicking, almost like some kind of overgrown insect. Greg shuddered at the noise.
“What is that?” Kyra whispered.
“I have no idea, I've never heard anything like it,” Greg replied softly.
“Great, another new one? Is that it?” Campbell asked.
“Possibly. Everyone be ready. God alone knows what the fuck we might be facing this time around,” Greg replied.
They came to the end of the corridor they were in and halted before a large pair of doors that stood between them and the warehouses they needed to be in. Reed knelt by a battered, bloodied control panel and worked at getting the doors opened. Greg felt tense apprehension doing a slow creep up his body.
He studied the corridor they stood in, but it was vacant save for the others and the lonely solitude of corpses.
“Got it,” Reed murmured.
The doors opened. Greg kept his shotgun tucked up tight against his shoulder, finger inside the trigger guard, ready for anything, as he stepped into the storage bay beyond. The room was a titanic area where every sound echoed and towering stacks of huge, rectangular, gunmetal gray crates hung over them.
There didn't seem to be anything unusual about the bay, and yet...that familiar sense of subtle wrongness of things hiding just of out of sight, lying in wait. The lights weren't that good, little more than distant bulbs high overhead. The dim luminosity created deep nests of shadows around the edges of the room, where anything might lurk.
“Okay,” Greg murmured. “Come on, let's go. Nice and easy.”
They entered the bay. It felt like stepping into a slaughter house. Slowly, easing their way into the bay, they began navigating the alcoves created by the stacks of crates. The clicking sound came to them once more, much closer this time. Greg swallowed, his muscles tightening in anticipation of some unforeseen attack.
What could possibly be making those noises?
They came out of the alcoves about halfway across the bay, into a makeshift courtyard that housed a few mobile platforms obviously meant for use by the base personnel in reaching the higher-up crates if they needed something. There was a great deal of blood on the floor, though only a handful of body parts.
“Something's wrong...” Campbell murmured.
“This feels like an ambush,” Greg looked around for just such an event.
Abruptly, the wet clicking noises, which had become a background murmur by then, cut off dramatically. It became eerily silent.
“Get ready,” Greg whispered.
Something moved in the shadows of an unlit alcove in between a pair of crate stacks. Greg trained his shotgun on it and began to let out a warning when it launched itself from its hiding place, directly at him.
It was new, he realized as he squeezed the trigger and lit the place up in a flashing freeze-frame of muzzle flare. Greg caught a glimpse of it before its head vanished in a thin, black vapor of blood and brains.
It had once been a man, but the Undead infection had taken that man and worked him over into something downright wretched. The torso had become hunched over and the arms and legs were longer than was natural. The skin was pallid, almost a perfect titanium white, and the veins stood out more than ever, like a wicked, all-too-detailed road map to hell. What was different, and most terrifying of all, was its hands.
It didn't so much have fingers as it did giant black claws that looked like industrial-strength, razor-sharp hooks meant for little more than rending and tearing. Even as this one fell, more of them emerged from the shadows, from around and over the stacks of crates, all of them making for the survivors in the open area.
Around Greg, guns spoke. Shotguns, pistols, and rifles, lighting the environment up. The squeals of these new things fought for auditory dominance over the gunfire. There was no time to think, merely to act.
Black blood flew on the air, razor claws sought to rend flesh and snap bone. Greg sighted up another terrifying face and let loose, blowing the thing's head clean off. He turned, barely had time to aim, and tore away half the skull of a third. He heard a sound above him, swung his gun up and saw one leaping down at him from overhead. He fired, punching a fist-sized hole in its chest and sending it flying wildly off course.
Greg emptied his shotgun and bar
ely had time to bring his pistol into play as even more of them rushed him and the others. He heard them fighting at his back, doing everything they could to stem the abrupt tide of undeath that had ensnared them. He emptied his pistol, slapped a fresh magazine in and emptied it again.
The bullets went in and the black blood came out. Finally, there was a break in the tide. He emptied a third magazine and was reloading when two things happened. The first was that he had no more targets. The second was a loud screaming.
Greg spun and saw one of them had leaped onto Reed and was now tearing the man into pieces. Blood gushed in every direction. Mike put the barrel of his rifle to the thing's head and fired, the force of the three-round burst picking the latest monstrosity up and tossing it aside. Greg moved forward, but it was already painfully obvious that there was no helping Reed. His face, neck and chest had been literally shredded.
“Good God.” Mike stared at the corpse.
“This just keeps getting better.” Greg wiped some blood off himself.
“Come on, we're almost there,” Kyra said.
They lingered for a few moments, unable to tear their eyes from the torn and bloodied thing that had once been a living man named Reed, and finally, Carter knelt and frisked him, retrieving his infoclips and spare ammo.
They moved swiftly through the remainder of the bay, hoping to avoid any more of the things that might remain, and came to the next door. Mike opened it up and they moved cautiously in the primary storage warehouse.
“We should name the new ones,” Greg murmured.
“I've got a goddamn good name for them,” Kyra replied.
“What?”
“Ripper.”
“Yeah...that's a good one. Carter, will you report this to Lynch?” Greg asked.
Carter nodded, pale and shaken, and made the report to the woman in charge. Greg turned to Mike, who eyed a nearby terminal.
“Can you find the part we're looking for?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Mike replied. “I just need a minute. I'm used to navigating these things. Did it all the time when I used to pull storage duty.”
He went to the terminal and booted it up. Greg moved closer to Kyra, who was looking grim, staring out across the stacks of crates.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah...well, not really, I guess. This is all getting pretty bad, isn't it?”
“Yes, it is. Very, very bad. Two new kinds in an hour, both of them downright deadly, and then that thing that roared. God, this place is hell. Sometimes I really wonder if I'm dead, and this is some kind of hell environment. I mean, we keep getting closer and closer to escape...but then something else goes wrong. It's like two steps forward and eight steps back. And my friends keep dying. Everything just keeps getting worse.”
“You've still got me,” Kyra said.
Greg chuckled bitterly. “Yeah, they'll take you away later, because you mean the most to me.”
“Oh, stop it. You aren't in Hell, for fuck's sake. We're just in a really, really shitty situation. We'll make it out, I promise...okay?”
Greg stared at her for a long moment. She was focusing wholly on him now, no longer paying attention to anything else.
He nodded uncomfortably. “Yeah, okay.”
After a moment, she smiled. “I matter most to you, huh?”
“Yep, I'm afraid so. No other pretty girls around.” He chuckled.
“Well, I dunno, Linda was pretty nice to look at...”
“Oh my God...are you jealous?” Greg asked, disbelief obvious in his voice.
“No,” Kyra snapped, hitting in him the shoulder. “I most certainly am not. Maybe I just like to appreciate women, too.”
“I will definitely have to remember that.”
“Oh, lord,” Kyra muttered.
“Found it!” Mike called. “Come on, let's grab it and get the hell out of here.”
They followed him deeper into the warehouse, coming to another courtyard-like area that sported three of the mobile platforms. Mike climbed up onto one and began to manipulate the controls so that it rolled along the floor.
“Just cover me, I can find the part,” he said.
Greg replied affirmatively and rounded up the others. They followed him out of the courtyard and into one of the alcoves. They moved along as quickly as they could comfortably manage, eying the lingering shadows.
“Okay, almost there,” Mike called down.
Greg glanced up. He'd pushed the platform up nearly twenty feet and was perusing the ranked crates. After a moment, he finally stopped, selected one, and opened it up. Greg returned his attention to the ground floor. Kyra, Campbell, and Carter were all on edge, their uniforms covered with fresh blood, red and black.
“Okay, here I come,” Mike said.
He lowered the platform and hopped off it. As he opened up his radio to report the update and they made their way back out to the main corridor, their radios all suddenly squealed to life in a burst of static.
“Mike! Get your squad up to the armory. Half my men are down and the bastards just keep coming. We're getting overrun!” Lynch called.
“We're coming. Just hold on,” Mike replied.
They bolted through the pair of warehouses, coming back out into the main corridor. Greg had a vague idea where the armory was but Mike knew exactly where he was going, so they let him lead the way. The handful of survivors ran full tilt down the flickering, bloodied corridors, much too quickly for cautions sake.
A Ripper leaped out at Greg and nearly tore his face off before he blew its head clean away with a quick shotgun blast. They pounded down the hallway, listening to the chaotic sounds of battle grow in volume as they approached. Mike skidded to a halt outside a large hole in the left wall and all but dove through it.
Greg and the others hurried through. Inside, they found what appeared to be a processing factory that had been converted into an armory by Dark Ops when they'd ruled the area. As Greg got to work blasting away Undead, he noted that the Rippers appeared to be the dominate sub-type in the mining headquarters.
They made up more than half the monsters occupying the makeshift armory, the rest being zombies and a few Lancers. Greg shot one in the back of its head, pumped the shotgun and blew another off its feet. With the sudden infusion of a second fighting force, the Undead, who seemed to be completely surrounding Lynch and what remained of her squad, were now uncertain of what to do. A pack of Rippers broke away to deal with Greg and his crew, but were quickly dispatched by a combination of gunfire.
“Come on!” Lynch called. “There's more on their way and we've got the carts loaded. We just need to get the fuck out of here.”
Greg, Mike, and the others shot their way through the ever-growing crowd of Undead and joined Lynch's squad in the center. They were defending a pair of hover-dollies that were loaded down with crates of ammo and spare weapons. As Greg's squad joined theirs, Lynch pushed towards another area of the armory.
They kept up the rate of fire against a seemingly endless wave of Rippers, Lancers, and zombies. Greg soon realized they were heading for a lift.
“This leads to the tunnels.” Lynch called.
The lift was obvious just a loader, basically a flat piece of metal in the ground that would lower into the mining tunnels beneath. Greg ran forward and helped shove one of the hover-dollies into place. Once it was onboard, he turned and provided cover fire for the others who were wrestling with the second one.
Once everyone was onboard, Lynch hit the down button and the lift lowered into the ground with a horrible grinding sound. More and more Undead rushed them, a sheer wave of them being held back by brute force and lead. Greg knew it was only a matter of time before one got through, they couldn't keep this up forever. Sure enough, a Ripper leaped past their defenses and tore into one unlucky son of a bitch.
Lynch shot the thing in the head and immediately turned back to the crowd moving in around them. It seemed to take ages, but the lift finally lowered into the ground
the full length. They shoved the hover-dollies off.
Literally the second they were clear, Lynch hit the up button to seal the entrance. They kept firing at everything that poured through until the lift was fitted back into place and cut off access from above.
“Come on,” she said, out of breath. “Let's get the fuck back to base.”
As the blood-covered survivors moved the pair of hover-dollies down the lengthy rock-walled passageway they were in, their radios suddenly sprang to life.
It was Burne. “The Augmented are attacking us. They've gotten past our defenses.”
Chapter 06
–Tension–
By the time they'd finished rushing through the underground tunnel network back to headquarters, Greg had come to learn that was much worse than they thought. The Augmented hadn't just gotten past their defenses, they'd shut down their defenses, and then attacked. Suddenly, the prospect of survival seemed a lot less certain.
Greg made sure to stock up on ammo and snatch a rifle to compliment his arsenal before scurrying up a nearby ladder with Kyra and Campbell close in tow. Overhead, he heard the brutal sounds of conflict: gunfire, the screams of the dying, hysterically shouted orders, an occasional explosion.
He reached the hatch and popped it open, poking his head cautiously out when it seemed that there were no immediate threats nearby. The hatch led to a small machine shop. Greg hauled himself out, then turned and offered helping hands to Kyra and Campbell. He only caught a quick glance of tabletops scattered with spare parts and greasy, abandoned tools before making for the door and hitting the access button.
In a corridor beyond, he managed to catch sight of a trio of security officers falling back, beating a hasty retreat as they fired at whatever chased them. Greg waited for the perfect moment, then, as the first enemy came into view of the door, he leveled his shotgun and fired, blowing the thing completely off its feet.
Another one came into view and Greg blew its head clean off. From the doorway, he helped the security officers kill off another two that had given chase. They were Drones, he saw, only much more advanced than the stilted, rickety things he'd run into on the Anubis. These half-machine monstrosities were built sturdier, walked smoother, and operated on a much more competent level than their fore-bearers.