A/N: This story takes place two years after the events of F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon, and purposely ignores the crappy Extraction Point expansion. I don't own F.E.A.R., just my characters and this story.
The darkness was as smothering as the dust in her lungs, but still she felt exhilarated by it's sting. This was the first time she saw for seven years, the first time the world opened itself to her eyes. Her first act had been fuelled by pure visceral hatred, an act of carnage and death. The death of her father. She had relished at the sight of his naked bones crumbling to the ground without resistance, his body and spirit completely annihilated by her fury.
With the death of her family the solid core of her hatred had been broken, and all that she could think of now was to let the remainder wash over the entire world. Her family had paid to the greatest extent they could, but the wrongs done to her went far beyond. There would be hell to pay, and everyone was going to join in. Crouched beneath four hundred meters of rubble, the young girl smiled at last.
--
Papers and dust blew down the streets as a calm wind caressed the empty city. Ethan knelt in closer to the crackling fire as the breeze picked up again. For a lone man sleeping outside, Auburn could become a cold place at night.
Before him stood what was left of the Auburn Memorial Hospital. The building, which was located close to the Armacham facility, had been almost completely blown away by the explosion. Only a couple of stories were left protruding from the rubble-covered ground.
Ethan was the only one here. He always was. No one else was crazy enough to stay within a block of the hospital. Rumors went that it was there that the worst "anomalies" happened. Too many people had disappeared in its vicinity since the explosion for the fact to be left unnoticed, and now the hospital was treated like a haunted mansion within a ghost town. But he didn't mind; to him the hospital was no worse than any other place in this godforsaken city. He slept there because he was shunned, and because he slept there he was shunned even more.
It all went back to that day he had been pulled right through the floor in the old apartment complex on 4th avenue. He had been rummaging through the rooms with a couple of fellow tramps, in search of any valuables, when he had felt something cold and powerful clutch his ankle. He had yelped, and the others had barged into the room just in time to see him get sucked right through the floor. No hole, no blood, nothing. It could have been a clean hallucination on their part, except that the man they had been with moments before had disappeared. Ethan had turned up six hours later, claiming he had woken up in the basement completely unaware of what had happened, but his case had been sealed. His friends would wither away whenever he came near, and he would find himself alone in a matter of minutes, with no further explanation. For having unwillingly taken part in an anomaly, he had become as wicked as the whole place itself was. He had become a part of the unknowable scheme ruling this city.
A dog barked somewhere in the distance but Ethan had ceased to take notice. Over the months he had become used to some of the recurrent and anodyne hallucinations, and he knew that dog sounds were not to be feared. It was not of course an actual canine he was hearing; there were none left for miles around. It was in his head, like most of the noise around here. All that was truly real was the wind and the dust in one's eyes.
The sound that got him on his toes, whether he was eating or in deep sleep, were the giggles. He had learned the hard way to flee them as if his life depended on it, which it often did. The first time he had heard the shrill laugh he had also seen her, the little girl in the red dress which he had heard so many talk about. She had been standing alone on a street corner and had seemed so mournful and lonely that he had begun moving towards her to check if she was all right. A kid, here? He hadn't seen a child in eight months.
But as he approached, the delicate figure turned to him and smiled, and his eyes crossed the raging stare behind her fringe. He staggered back in horror as an unimaginably strong feeling of hatred literally hit him on the chest. Doubled over on the pavement, he looked up to see the little girl standing over him giggling, only to slowly dissolve into a swirl of ashes. Seconds later, the air began to shimmer where the girl had just stood and a shadow began to form out of nowhere, an almost tangible fear radiating out from the spot.
Without waiting to catch his breath Ethan had gotten up and run like hell, not a clue in head as to where he was going. He had never actually seen those things that came out of the shadows, but others said they had taken more people than any other anomaly since the Incident. He didn't stop running until the sun began to set and he had almost reached the other side of town.
Catching his breath as his mind released the memory, Ethan shivered and realized that his fire had almost petered out. He hesitated to put in some more fuel but decided to keep it in reserve. Instead, he grabbed his gun and his blanket and crawled into the lopsided trash bin that had been serving as his home for the past two weeks. Inside, he did his best to find some tormented sleep.
.
.
.
His dreams were as always, filled with savage visions of violence and bloodshed. He trashed in his bin, cursing this world that held him mercilessly in its cold grip. His eyes rolled beneath their lids, staring out in horror into the very depths of his soul, where something alien had lodged itself. Something hostile.
He could see her again through the flames, the infant in the red dress. She strode towards him from across the street, oblivious to the halo of carnage that followed her like a divine aura. The flames licked at her legs and sides but she seemed to feel no pain. She was beyond that. When one has singly endured the greatest torment the world can devise, one's notion of pain relaxes and becomes very vague, sometimes even nonexistent.
Ethan though, could feel the heat. It scorched his eyes and made sweat run down his back. The air was thick with it, and he began panting to keep his breath. The world swirled around him as the burning air poured into him from every orifice, burning him to an extent he had never thought possible. His insides were turned to ashes before he even came apart, but far worse was the damage done to his soul…something full of hatred was tearing at it with wild teeth! The cavernous eyes appeared right before him one last time before his conscience exploded into a million fragments.
He suddenly woke up with a yelp, covered in sweat and clutching his rifle with white knuckles. Again, it had happened again. It was the ninth such dream he had had this week. They were always unique, and yet so similar. They all featured the girl as their main character, but she was always cast in a different light. Sometimes she was a heroin, a sort of fallen angel; sometimes she was the devil itself, come from the deepest and most perverted recesses of his mind to harass him. Another feature these dreams all had in common was that they invariably ended in a violent and painful death, as if some part of him wanted to focus especially on that pain. Yet that will seemed so alien to him, he couldn't imagine it was his at all. But if it wasn't his, then whose was it?
He exhaled slowly as he tried to force his mind to settle and his pulse to slow. The dreams and waking hallucinations were becoming more frequent and he was worried. He was afraid that after almost two years, his sanity was finally slipping away. They had been through so much together, it would feel like treason for it to leave him now. He slapped himself and laid down again, ready to attempt a new expedition into the netherworld. He closed his eyes and let it all consume him again.
--
As he continued to muse over his feelings and feel sorry for himself a few blocks away, something stirred beneath Armacham. The time for complete revenge had come. Now. With a thrust, the infant burst forth from the rubble into the open and frail world.