by S. A. Lusher
“Let's go,” he growled.
They set off, Eric leading the way now. They were almost to the site.
CHAPTER 13
–One Bill Years in the Making–
There was the research site.
It was like a shining beacon of perfection amidst a hellish malevolent storm. Eric felt an overwhelming wave of hope and joy as he spied the ripped up chainlink fence that served as the perimeter of the research site.
“We're almost there,” he said.
Drake just grunted something in response. He was walking without support now, but it seemed like he was constantly biting back sounds of pain. It seemed like a god-given blessing that they hadn't run into anything after that armored...thing. Not that he believed in god. As they started the final approach to their destination, he glanced at Parker. She was stony and silent, had been since Drake had gotten ripped open.
He found himself wondering if you had to be critically injured to be driven insane, or if maybe it was something that just happened if you spent long enough on this fucked up planet. Both seemed possible, especially considering he wasn't feeling all that sane himself. Seeing Autumn...that had hit something dark and deep, something he'd been burying over the past few weeks. It had struck a painful, malignant chord that was still resonating within him. It was making his thoughts slippery and now it felt like he was walking around in a daze.
His attention kept drifting. Not a good thing in a combat zone, especially one like this. They hit the edge of the research site. The awful green gravel went right up to concrete edge. The fence itself was a solidly built thing, ten feet tall and topped with razorwire. Despite this, huge gashes had been forcibly ripped open along the length of the fence. It was through one of these gashes that Eric let himself in. He held it open for Drake, who was having a hard enough time just walking. Parker brought up the rear, coming in after him.
“Now what?” Drake grunted through gritted teeth.
“Now we find a way in,” Eric replied. “I wonder how close the others are.”
“I'll try them on my radio,” Parker replied. “This is Parker to Bishop, do you copy?”
“Affirmative, I'm here. We're at the base, where are you?”
“We're at the base as well, just got past the perimeter fence.”
“We must be at opposite sides. You head left, we'll head right. Meet at the front.”
“On the way. Out.”
They began making their way along the concrete pathway between the edge of the site and the boundary of the fence. It didn't seem like a particularly big building, just a two-story, long, rectangular structure of steel and glass that stood out in stark contrast to the madness around it and the black and red skies above it. It was obvious that the base had been ground zero. Several of the windows were broken out and the exterior walls were dented, smeared with blood and peppered with bullet holes. Eric was just grateful they were still alone.
They reached the edge of the building and came around to the front of it. Greg and Jennifer were there, looking horrible, covered in blood, their armor battered. But still alive, still whole. They met in the middle, in front of a great pair of double doors.
“What happened?” Greg asked, noticing Drake's pained demeanor.
“Got gutted,” Drake replied curtly. “Let's get a move on. Hurts like fuck.”
“God, uh...Eric, you're the tech here,” Greg said.
“On it,” Eric replied, looking at the door. He approached it and hit the open button, going for the most obvious solution. No luck. Of course not. Sighing, he knelt and grabbed his toolkit, glad he still had it on him.
“Watch my back,” he said, and set to work.
* * * * *
Greg was seriously beginning to worry.
Keron was down and now Drake was in really shit shape. They were here at the research site, so the hardest part of the journey was over...or was it? Rarely was anything in his life easy, especially during a mission like this. He kept watch with Jennifer, Drake and Parker while Eric crouched in front of the exposed panel, trying to get the damn doors open. This was practically tradition at this point, because why not?
He tried not to focus on the negatives, but it wasn't like there were a lot of positives to focus on. Greg grunted and shook his head. He needed to be focusing on his fucking environment. This place...it was screwing with his head.
“Base is in lockdown...need to cut through security,” Eric muttered.
“How long?” Greg asked.
“Dunno...maybe a few minutes.”
A piercing shriek cut loose from somewhere nearby. “Fast as you can,” Greg said.
“Here,” Drake said, offering Greg something. “Take this. I can't use it anymore, it'll help stop them,” he explained.
Greg studied the pistol-shaped object he'd been given. It was an industrial strength bolt gun. A really great idea.
“Thanks,” he said.
No sooner had the word left his mouth than they started arriving. Shambling shapes appeared, crawling or limping or lurching.
“Go for the legs,” Parker said coldly.
These colonists seemed to be in pretty bad shape, reminding Greg more of the shambling horrors he'd encountered at first on Dis than the running, screaming, dangerous psychopaths they'd fought so far. As he sighted the ones that could still walk and began blowing off their legs at the knees, regret filling him with each pull of the trigger, he supposed it made enough sense. This is where it had begun, this had probably seen the heaviest fighting. But then, as they continued putting the poor psychotic colonists down, a fresh wave of them appeared from the right side of the base. These ones were more dangerous, running, sprinting.
“Fuck! Right side!” he screamed, hitting the zoom feature and firing off rounds as quickly as he could line them up.
There were a dozen of them...no, two dozen. As he, Parker, Drake and Jennifer turned their attention to the horde that was rapidly advancing on them, they started knee-capping the psychotics. They would suddenly have nothing left to run with or support themselves with and would pitch forward, hitting the ground and rolling. Then, with the same relentless determination, they would start crawling, scrabbling across the green gravel. They managed to bring down perhaps a dozen of them before the wave hit the fence and ripped through it.
“We've got incoming! How long, Eric!?” Greg called.
“Almost there!” Eric replied.
“Fuck,” Greg hissed. His magazine was empty. He ejected the spent mag and slapped a fresh one in, but not quick enough. Two of the things were bearing down on him and there was no time to bring his rifle back up. Instead, he dropped it and moved into the fray, relying on his dexterity or instincts to keep him alive. He bashed his shoulder into the chest of the nearest psychotic, a man with a torn black jumpsuit with blood all over his face and neck. They both went down onto the concrete and Greg felt something snap inside of the guy.
It didn't seem to deter the man in the slightest. Without hesitation, he brought the bolt gun down on one of the man's wrists, punching it into place. Then he grabbed the man's other wrist and did the same, bolting him to the ground. It wasn't a perfect job but it would do. He rolled off the psycho and into the legs of two more of them, who had been bearing down on him, preparing to rip him limb from limb. Knocking them to the ground, he bolted them to the concrete as quickly as he could. As he scrambled to his feet, Eric called that the door was open. Turning, he saw the others heading inside, laying down cover fire.
Greg ran, snatching his rifle back up and rushing in through the door. He saw an empty room beyond, so he whirled back around and began laying down covering fire for the others. Drake stumbled in, followed shortly by Jennifer and then Parker.
“Close it!” Jennifer snapped.
Eric was already on the case. As soon as Parker cleared the door, he hit the close button and then locked it firmly. They listened to the muted banging sounds as the raving crazies tried to get in, but they were stuck out there
for the time being.
“Okay...okay...” Greg muttered, getting his breath back. “Now what?” he asked, his brain feeling like scattered shotgun shells that kept rolling away as he attempted to collect them.
“Find a map, find the control room,” Parker replied.
“Of course,” Greg replied. Was he getting stupider? No...it was just the planet fucking with him, clouding his thoughts. He looked around the room they stood in. It was an entrance lobby with a security checkpoint tucked away into the right corner. The left side of the room was dominated by a large, circular desk on an upraised platform, where you were supposed to check in or out. The security room, three walls of reinforced steel and bulletproof glass that was fogged with cracks from someone sure as hell testing its effectiveness and smeared with blood. Greg made his way over to the raised platform, walked around to the back and entered the circular desk, finding a relatively intact workstation within.
He righted the toppled computer chair, sat down and set to work. At least the internal network was still intact...for the most part. He wasted a few minutes attempting to try and get into more sensitive parts of the internal network, but was met with dead-ends, either from lockouts or simply from malfunctioning equipment elsewhere in the base. In the end, he called up a map of the facility, something he was sure he'd studied at some point, wasn't that something Hawkins had supplied?...but he couldn't be sure at all.
His memory was getting fuzzy.
What a cruel joke, considering his other problems with memory.
“Okay,” he said, and didn't like the way his voice shook. He cleared his throat. “It should be a relatively straight shot to the command room. Beyond that door over there is a large, central corridor that leads to the core of the base, where the command room is.”
“That seems easy,” Jennifer murmured.
“It's never easy,” Drake growled in reply, one hand over his gut, his face sweaty and pale, his eyes not focusing properly. Greg wanted to say something, maybe have him wait here but...that just wasn't an option.
Besides, it'd be an insult.
“Nothing to do but to do it,” Greg said, grabbing his rifle and standing back up.
They gathered at the exit next to the security center. It was a big, ugly, dented metal door with a white paint job that had become lost beneath the streaks of gore. Eric hit the access button. The door slowly ground open.
Drake was right. It was never easy.
Greg wasn't sure how long he stood there, staring at the horror before him. The corridor, which was both broad and tall, seemed to stretch out into eternity before them. It was if they were gazing straight into a nightmare, something torn straight from another realm of pure suffering, pure pain. The walls were covered with people who had been bolted to the steel surfaces, but it was worse than that. They weren't simply crucified.
Many of them were flayed.
They were glistening, skinless, shrieking horrors.
Foamy, red-and-purple intestines spilled out of slit open stomachs and piled on the floor. Fingers, toes, hands and random chunks of flesh and gore created an unnatural red carpet on the floor. Some of the people had broken free of their bonds somehow and were crawling around among the gore, wailing like freshly damned souls. Lidless eyes bugged out of skulls, looking everywhere, flashing in all directions. Naked, grinning mouths worked furiously, giving voice to the impossible pain and suffering of their situation.
Some of them only issued awful choking sounds, as they had bitten their tongues off...or had them ripped out.
Greg wasn't sure how, but he took the first step.
This seemed to break the paralysis of the others and they did as well, forming up into a single file line, as far away from either wall as possible, not wanting to be near the suffering souls. Greg led the way, taking one step after the other. He focused his attention dead ahead, about fifty meters away, on the closed door to the core of the facility, where he would find the command room and, hopefully, some answers to this godforsaken situation.
Greg kept walking.
One foot in front of the other.
That was all he could do. He ignored the awful, wretched squishing sounds beneath his boots or the moaning and wailing of the tormented surrounding him. He tried to keep staring ahead, but as he reached the halfway mark, something drew his eye to the right. Glancing over, he stopped abruptly, gaping in unfiltered horror as he saw Campbell, pinned up against one wall, all of his skin flayed off saved for his face, which remained obscenely intact, staring at him with accusing, morose eyes. Eyes that wanted to know: why?
“Greg...why have you stopped?” Parker asked softly.
He jerked, blinked, and suddenly Campbell was gone.
“Uh...sorry,” he replied, not having the mental capacity to come up with some kind of lie at the moment. Nobody seemed to want to press the issue.
Maybe they were having their own problems.
They'd made it another quarter of the way there when one of the fallen crawled into Greg's path. It seemed to notice him. Greg couldn't tell anything about this awful thing before him, no details, just the red meat of exposed muscle. It looked up at him with bright blue eyes. This was different than the others...there was no attacking here. Only an infinite pity. If Greg could, he would mercy killed this poor soul, but there was no death on Ash.
He kept walking, moving carefully around the thing before him.
Somehow, someway, he made it to the door. Looking behind him was hard, but he made himself do it, to ensure that the others were still with him. They were. Drake had quieted. Maybe he'd realized that it could be worse.
This time, the door opened without trouble. They passed through another wrecked security center and came at last to the command area.
“Lock us down,” Greg said as he moved to secure the area. It was a large, circular room, the peripheral of it stuffed with all manner of workstations and equipment, tracking gear and scanners and monitoring stations. In the center was a circular workstation, resembling the desk from the entrance room. Parker and Drake locked down the doors, while Eric moved to the central workstation. He settled in and set to work.
Greg spent the next interval of time trying to get his head back in order. He wasn't sure how much more of this he could take.
This time, Eric wasn't the first one to break the silence.
None of them were.
“Hello? Is someone there?” It was unfamiliar voice, coming from one of the peripheral consoles. Greg hurried over to it.
“This is Specialist Greg Bishop with Spec Ops, identify yourself.”
“Christ, it's been a long time. I'm Doctor Samuel Kruger.”
Greg felt relief flood through him. Finally, someone who might know what the fuck was going on and, more importantly, how to fix it.
“I'm very glad to hear from you,” Kruger added. He sounded exhausted.
“We've been ordered to make contact with you, Doctor. Technically speaking, we're not authorized to learn any special secrets of Ash but, considering the circumstances, I was thinking of saying 'fuck that, tell me anyway'. How do you feel about this?”
“Considering you're going to have to be my hands out there, and you're the only ones who are going to be able to stop this madness, I'd say that we are in hearty agreement. How many of you are there? What's your situation?”
“There's five of us now, all from Spec Ops, though one of us is badly wounded. We're a, uh, special sub-division of Spec Ops, meant to deal with weird shit. And I'm pretty sure this qualifies. We've managed to piece together a tiny bit since we landed about...” Greg checked his chronometer. Had it only been six hours? It felt like days. Years. “...six hours ago. We checked out the colony and the military base, and now there's some kind of...maze around the research site, made out of flesh and bone. Care to update to us on any of that?”
Kruger was silent for a moment. “I wasn't aware it had gotten that bad out there. I knew about the Deathless from the security cameras and rep
orts I'd gotten back when there were still some sane people on this planet, I'd also seen the sky but...skin maze...Jesus.” He took a deep breath. “Where to start?” he mumbled.
“You could start by telling us where you're at,” Eric replied.
“Oh. I'm in a bunker beneath the facility right now. Locked in, very firmly, I might add. And I'm not coming out until this situation is taken care of. I want that to be clear.”
“I don't blame you,” Drake growled, he had both hands on his stomach now and was sitting down, eyes squeezed shut.
“I'm very glad you've arrived. I was beginning to think I'd be trapped here forever...an unfortunately real possibility. I don't know if I'm capable of starving to death anymore...”
“Answers, Doctor Kruger,” Greg said.
“Sorry, my mind is...not what it once was. I've been locked in here for three days, alone, watching the world outside consume itself. I've been here since the beginning. They found the device quite by accident, a space probe that came out this way a year ago. When we found it and the initial dig teams discovered it in the catacombs below us, they hopped on it, thinking it was Cyr tech at first. But it became quite obvious that it isn't.”
“How could you tell?”
“Well, first of all, I'm an expert in my field. They haven't quite come up with a name for it yet, but, essentially, I'm a specialist in ancient technology that doesn't belong to the Cyr. It's rare but it's out there. All the stuff I've worked on before this though...whew, this thing blew it out of the water. Carbon dating put it at roughly one billion years old. The oldest artificial device in known existence. We spent a month establishing the research site, the base and the colony, then got in on the testing. But it wouldn't budge...Here, I'm sending up some visuals on it,” he said.
As he said this, a screen on the workstation cleared and then showed a tall cylindrical device made of a dull, gray material woven into a latticework. Measurements came up, giving it scale. It was a good twenty feet tall and six wide. The surface was covered in irregular holes that made Greg sick to look at. It looked like it was in a cavern of some kind, the walls made of black rock. Human tech, mostly work-lights, looked very out of place.