by S. A. Lusher
“We've been busy, Greg. Did you think the Augmented were the only ones who could control them?” Williams asked happily.
With one earth-quaking footfall, the Berserker took a step out. Then another. The titan opened its mouth and loosed a roar that froze Greg's marrow.
“Goodbye,” Williams said smoothly.
Panic ignited Greg’s mind. He didn't even bother to open fire. He screamed when the Berserker raised one hand and opened fire with a barrage of red hot lead that chewing up bodies and the floor alike. Even as he moved, he heard a scream cut off abruptly.
Even in his terror he glanced back to see who had gone down. He felt relief, and guilt, when he saw that it was Linda who had taken the shot. Her body had been picked up and thrown across the room, back out into the hallway they had come in through. Kyra had gone the other way. Greg sprinted for cover, hiding behind a pile of crates.
He heard the thunder of its footsteps.
Greg's mind reeled, working furiously. How the fuck was he going to get out of this one? It seemed impossible. The Berserker was much bigger than normal, easily reaching ten or twelve feet in height. Its head was armored. Its body made of what looked like pure, solid muscle...just what the hell was he going to do?
It was close now.
Greg prepared to move, realizing it chose him. Then he heard gunfire. Greg peered cautiously around the far side of the crates he'd hid behind. The Berserker was facing towards Kyra now. He saw something, but then his mind became overwhelmed with pure terror as the rocket launcher mounted on its shoulder fired towards Kyra. He heard her shout, then an explosion. The Berserker turned back to him.
Greg screamed and ran, flames licked out after him as it fired what he realized was a flamethrower. He felt an immense heat at his back, but the suit did its job. For now. He continued running and barely managed to get his ass behind a large, bulky piece of machinery as he heard the sound of the minigun firing again.
What had he seen?
It had been something, something deeply important, when he'd looked at its back.
But what?
It would come to him, when his mind wasn't so full of terror. Greg peered from around the machinery and took a few potshots at the Berserker. The bullets struck true, hitting its broad chest. They drew blood, but seemed to have no other effect. The titan opened fire again and Greg went back behind the machinery.
Was Kyra still alive?
He couldn't imagine what his life would be like if she was suddenly subtracted from it. He made himself focus. If he didn't get his shit together, he wouldn't be alive to comprehend it. The Berserker made its way around the machinery, trying to get a better angle. Greg took the time to bolt. He needed to think.
The minigun started up again, chewing up the deckplates behind him as he sprinted towards a huge earth-mover. He heard Williams laughing in the background. Greg tripped over something as he made it behind the vehicle. He grunted as he slammed into the ground, then twisted back around to see what it was.
“Oh my luck,” he whispered.
A rocket launcher, same model as the one he'd used on Cage. He turned, snatched it up and stood. Checking it, he found a pair of rockets had been loaded into it. Greg shouldered the launcher, not giving himself time to think, stepped out and fired literally the second the sights lined up on the broad chest of the modified Berserker.
The rocket sailed through the air and crossed the distance in less than half a second. The force of the blast picked up Greg and threw him back several feet. He hurriedly stood back up and went to see if he'd done it.
The Berserker was down for the count...and then it moved.
Greg's jaw dropped. He raised the launcher again, but hesitated. He only had the one rocket left. The Berserker continued to get back up. What had he seen? As the Berserker hunched forward, getting back to its feet, he caught a glimpse of metal on its back.
Then he had it.
As the terror fully cleared from his mind, Greg knew what he had seen. A fuel canister, for the flamethrower. A no doubt volatile fuel canister. He looked down at the rocket launcher and grinned. Okay, he could do this.
“Come and get it!” he screamed.
The Berserker let out a roar and charged towards him, firing its minigun as it did. He turned and hurried back behind the earth-mover. He moved to the far edge of it, waiting for the Berserker to come around. As it did, he kept moving around the big vehicle, ultimately circling around behind the Berserker.
He didn't hesitate. Greg shouldered the launcher and fired his last missile. As he was picked up and thrown across the room by the force of the blast, he saw the Berserker disappear in a great plume of flame. Greg let out a shout of pain as he hit the ground and rolled several feet.
Again, the suit took the brunt of the hit, but he didn't know how much more it could take. Slowly, painfully, he pulled himself to his feet.
He noticed a figure coming for him.
Greg raised his rifle, still attached to his suit via the shoulder strap.
“Greg, wait.”
Relief flooded him. It was Kyra.
“Oh, thank God,” he groaned, lowering the rifle and walking towards her. They met halfway through the ruined hangar and embraced briefly, then turned their attention to Williams, who was still locked away in his control room.
Without a word, Greg and Kyra walked towards the control room.
Williams clicked on the intercom again. “I don't suppose there's a chance we could come to some sort of agreement?”
Greg responded by shooting the control panel next to the door. It sparked and died. The door slid open. Greg and Kyra walked in. Williams raised a pistol. Greg shot it out of his hand, and then put a bullet in his neck.
Williams screamed as blood sprayed across the wall. He collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath, his hands at his neck. Blood pumped steadily between his fingers. Greg walked forward and crouched in front of him.
“You've had this a long time coming,” he growled, his voice low and dangerous.
Williams laughed, a wet sound. “It doesn't matter,” he wheezed.
Greg frowned. “What?”
“Kill me...there's a dozen other cells out there working on a dozen other projects. The Undead were just one silver bullet. We will triumph...”
“Tell me where they are! What other cells?” Greg screamed, grabbing Williams.
He was dead. His last breath left him in a long, slow exhale and the light from his eyes faded. They became still and dead like doll's eyes.
Greg sighed, disgusted, and shoved the body back. He stood, hesitated, then pulled out his pistol and put two more bullets into Williams' narrow, pale face.
“Bastard,” he muttered, and then spat on the corpse.
Greg's radio suddenly flared to life.
It was Campbell. “Greg. Kyra. We've managed to plant the bomb but the Undead overran our position. We had to fall back. We didn't get a chance to activate it. Everyone needs to regroup at the bomb site and make one final push.”
Greg activated his radio. “We're on our way.”
Chapter 18
–The Fall–
Greg pulled the part out of his protected pocket and passed it to Kyra's hand.
“Take it and go back to camp. No arguing this time. One of us needs to get that part back. Setting this bomb off is just gravy, honestly. The EMP bomb is what really matters,” he said firmly. Kyra stared at him for a long moment.
Finally, she nodded. “Okay...I love you, Greg. Please come back to me safe.”
Greg managed a small smile. “I always have so far. And I love you, too.”
They kissed, and then she turned and left him standing alone in a bloody, smoke-filled, flickering corridor. Greg relished the taste of her while it lasted, then cleared his head. He'd taken a look over the map of the area and knew where Campbell, Mike, and anyone else who might be left alive and on his side were massing.
It shouldn't be far. Despite the adrenaline, Greg felt a wave of exhaustion sh
udder through him. It felt like he'd been fighting a million year war. Rest was a memory, sleep was a myth. A good meal was something he'd had in another life time. He started out with one step, then another, putting his feet in front of each other.
The exhaustion lifted, but left him feeling hollow. His head throbbed dully. Everything seemed to ache. Greg pushed himself further, down the corridor, around a corner. A pair of zombies entered his field of vision. He raised his rifle and put them down without even stopping. He didn't really have time for zombies anymore.
Up ahead, the sounds of conflict came to him. Greg came around another corner and spied a handful of security personnel and miners battling a squad of Drones. He hurried down the hallway and joined them, adding his own bullets to the fray. Several moments and many dozen bullets later, the last of the Augmented fell.
“Greg, you finally made it,” Campbell said as he spied Greg.
“Yeah. Come on, let's get this with over with,” Greg replied.
They kept going, pushing through the corridors, through Augmented and Undead. The place was packed. For this, Greg was vaguely grateful. It meant that when they activated the bomb, at least a hell of a lot of bad guys would go down with it. His motions became automatic, his body a machine designed solely for killing.
He emptied magazine after magazine, salvaging spare ammo from the fallen. His gun heated up and eventually he swapped for another one, not putting much thought into the process. He and the others painted the walls with black and red blood and littered the floors with corpses and spent shell casings.
Before he knew it, they had arrived at the location where Campbell and Mike had set up the bomb. It was a messhall, awash in a sea of pale flesh and black blood. Greg finished reloading. He was down to his last two magazines and he'd already gone through nearly a dozen. Besides himself, Campbell and Mike, there were about a dozen security personnel and miners left. Once more, it astounded Greg how many had died in this conflict.
He cleared his head. They were gathered outside a pair of large, open doors. Greg peered into the messhall and considered the situation. There were a great deal of Undead and Augmented battling it out. It seemed like the Augmented were trying to get to the bomb, but the Undead were keeping them from it through sheer numbers.
“All right, everyone cover me, shoot anything that gets too close but pay special attention to any Drones. We can't let them reach the bomb. How do I activate it?” Greg asked.
“We'd just finish setting it up. All you have to do is press the big red button on the control panel. It'll activate a three minute countdown, and then this place will go up in smoke,” Mike replied.
“Wait, cover you, what are you doing?” Campbell asked.
“Something stupid,” Greg replied, and then ran into the messhall.
It was hell. There was so much blood in the air that it seemed like a mist. Greg pushed and dodged through a shifting mass of limbs and heaving bodies. He could see the bomb maybe five meters ahead of him. He heard the others covering him, and occasionally noticed the effect when a Drone or Undead horror came too close to him and was suddenly missing a portion of its skull or dropped dead with a hole in its face.
He kept pushing. The path he took cleared and blocked randomly as things stumbled across it, often grappling with other awful things. He ignored them, focusing on keeping limber, his movements dexterous and rapid.
Then he was there, the bomb in front of him, a squat square of metal and technology. Greg dropped to his knees, found the control panel, spied the big, red button and punched it. The screen next to the button, previously clear, flickered to life. 03:00 appeared, then it shifted to 02:59, and began falling.
Greg activated his radio. “The bomb is set! Three minutes! Pull out!”
Then he ran. Blindly, he shoved his way through the crowd. He was vaguely aware that there was a stairwell at the back of the messhall that led down into the earth. He wasn't quite sure where it let out, only that it would be away from here.
He heard a confusing babble of voices on his radio, but ignored it. The Augmented seemed to be pulling out, or trying to. The Undead made it difficult, as they had no idea what a bomb was or how it would affect them.
Greg pushed through the last of them, ducked beneath the swing of a zombie and went through a door at the back. He closed it behind him, and then sprinted down the three sets of stairs as quickly as he could. How long did he have? It didn't matter, a part of him said. He'd either make it or he wouldn't. At least Kyra had gotten out with the part.
Emerging in a mostly empty warehouse, Greg sprinted the length of the huge room and moved through a door at the back of it. The area became a blur of crates and dull metal walls. For now, he was simply running. That was the only thing that mattered. He had to run. There was nothing else to do, nothing else worth considering.
He'd made it to a disused storage room when the bomb went off.
* * * * *
“Holy shit, finally,” Greg growled, his frustration finally being relieved.
He'd been trapped in the storage room for almost forty minutes now. When the bomb went off, it collapsed the two corridors that led into and out of the storage room. As it was, Greg still felt lucky. Huge cracks had run along the roof of the room and it still groaned occasionally. He'd been searching for an alternate way out ever since.
What made matters worse was that he couldn't seem to get anyone on his radio, in fact, there was nothing on his radio, not even static. He suspected it might be damaged, but could think of no way it could have incurred that damage, which left an even more ominous prospect: the comms themselves were down, all across the area.
Now, he had his way out: a larger ventilation grate hidden in the ground beneath a pile of crates. He'd spent the last ten minutes shoving them aside because he'd caught sight of a small irregularity in the ground, poking up from beneath the pile. Greg hit the activation button. The grate groaned open, sliding slowly into its niches in the ground.
Greg stared down the narrow shaft. No ladder. He frowned, but decided it would be fine. It was just an eight, maybe a nine foot drop. He tried his radio one more time, received no response and dropped down into the hole.
Landing with a grunt, his suit absorbing the brunt of the impact, Greg lowered himself carefully into the ventilation network. On his hands and knees, barely able to move with his suit on, he began crawling as quickly as he could. All he needed to do was get back to the main tunnel. At this point, everyone who made it out should have made it back to the headquarters by now. Greg felt a brief swell of joy as he thought about it.
The bomb should be built.
The ship should be repaired.
They could get the fuck out of this godforsaken solar system and somewhere else. Somewhere sane and safe. His desire to escape was so powerful that when he thought about it now, the fact that Dark Ops would be on his ass didn't even bother him so much now. But he frowned as he thought about it, remembering Williams' words.
A dozen other cells.
A dozen other projects.
Each as powerful or lethal as what they were doing out here? It seemed impossible. This situation seemed crazy enough that nothing like it could possibly happen anywhere else in the galaxy. But what was their goal? Just what the hell was Dark Ops doing? Part of Greg simply couldn't imagine this whole thing being government approved. It just seemed unrealistic. There was another part of him that was aware of the fact that governments were, by their very nature, shady. At the end of the day, if you were on top, you'd fight to stay on top.
Greg's head cleared as he came to another ventilation grate in the ceiling. He looked up through the slits and saw a ceiling overhead. He decided to try his luck. Still no ladder, so he was going to have to do this the hard way. The shaft was narrow enough that he could put his back to one wall and his legs and arms to the other.
Doing just that, Greg shimmied his way up the shaft. By the time he got to the top, his legs and back ached worse than they had in
a while. He slapped the open button, grabbed the lip of the floor above him and hauled himself up and out. When nothing came and attacked him, he allowed himself to lay there for a moment and get his breath back. As he did, the sound of gunfire came to him. Greg stood up.
He was in another small storage room, though this one was little more than shelves along the wall and a work bench of some kind along the back wall. He ignored it all and moved to the only door in the room. He opened it and found himself staring into one of the main tunnels that connected the facilities.
First he looked left. The tunnel extended for several dozen meters before ending abruptly in a ruin of collapsed rock. To his right, he spied the flaring of gunfire. Greg rushed down the corridor. Somehow, he'd managed to hang onto his rifle. He checked the ammo count and found it somewhat acceptable.
As he drew closer, he saw it was one person fighting off a handful of Rippers. The moment he was in range, Greg put a round through the head of one. Whoever was fighting them off tossed a glance his way, then kept firing. Between the two of them, they put the rest of the Rippers down. Greg quickly reloaded.
“Holy shit, I was wondering where you'd gotten to.” It was Campbell.
“Where is everyone? What happened?” Greg asked.
“You tell me your story first,” Campbell replied.
Greg ran through a quick version of the events that he'd gone through while they started walking back to HQ.
“Sounds fun,” Campbell said when Greg had finished. “I got the shit knocked out of my head while I was escaping. I was dizzier than hell and I got separated from everyone else. I hid out in one of the rooms down here and waited for the dizziness to subside. I'd just stepped out to get back when these assholes rushed me.”
“Have you heard from anyone on the radio?”
“No.”
Greg sighed, but froze as he heard a crackle on his radio. He listened for a moment, and thought he heard a voice in the static.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“I do...but it sounds like it's coming in on short-wave. Which means that the long-range comms transceiver must be down. Our radios can still link with other radios in the area, but the range is pretty shit. Whoever it is, they've got to be within a dozen meters,” Campbell replied.