Saeko sat up, rubbing her eyes with one hand. She had been having a very nice dream, and her body still tingled underneath her bikini from the amorous fantasy. With an uncompromising gaze, she looked around the room in confusion. "When did we get off the beach?"
She lay on a bed in some bedroom, quite large by Japanese standards, though utterly devoid of any kind of personal markings. The sheets she had been laying on were plain and white, somewhat smudged from her sweat. With sudden purpose, she rose up off the bed, and began searching the room, closet, drawers, until she finally faced the truth – her sword, that exquisite katana, wasn't here with her. And the door looked like something from Star Trek and didn't have a handle on it, though when she stepped up in front of it, a green light hovered an inch off the surface.
Did we find some kind of secret government laboratory? She wondered as she opened the door. For a moment, the sight of the hallway held her attention, but she'd been surviving for a week in the don't-call-them-zombies apocalypse. What did hold her eyes for so long was the sight of this dead body, a blue-skinned woman with tentacles for hair. At least, Saeko thought it was a woman, though since most of the body between the ribs and the knees was splattered against the opposite door, she couldn't be a hundred percent sure.
From appearances, she was in a hotel of some kind, not one super high class from the décor. Most annoying was the signs, which were in English and two other languages she didn't recognize. Despite classes in school, she was at least able to make out which way lay the stairs and elevator. Aliens, super-high tech, and signs in English. Am I in that super-secret American base somehow? A short distance before the elevator, she paused, seeing one of the doors light up as green instead of red. Glancing around, she touched the hologram, the door swishing open.
Inside was a trio of different aliens, these ones looking like some kind of deformed bird-lizard-man with exposed skull faces, all of them dead from gunshots to the head, self-inflicted she thought. Two of them still held some kind of pistol, the third one what looked like a submachine gun, though most of his head was missing. What interested her more was a bayonet attachment, though it looked rather silly attached to so small a gun.
Picking it up, Saeko almost dropped it again when the gun suddenly shifted in her grasp, growing larger until it more closely resembled the shotgun Kohta had found. Still not ideal, but if she could hold it the right way it would give her more reach. She had picked up a little bit from listening to Kohta instruct the others on gun usage, enough to turn it over and look for where the ammunition would be loaded, popping open a slot and seeing a bright red cylinder drop out. Doing so also made a tiny display on the gun go dark, so she carefully inserted it back in. "Zero," she whispered to herself, then popped it back out.
With the practice gained from looting the medical clinic, mall, and numerous houses, she searched the hotel room, finding two more cylinders, these ones dark red, and her display lit up with a less-than-comforting "5". Still, it would work until she could find a real melee weapon.
Opening the door, she went back out, down an incongruously spotless elevator, and outside a shot-up lobby. There she stopped again, only now seeing what had left her with that subtle sense of wrongness (more than could be accounted for by aliens). The floor circled up around her into the distance, and she could see stars and clouds through the center of the circle. Not too far away was a long bridge extending out to the center of the ring, with a tower sticking off of it.
So entranced with the view, Saeko almost missed noticing the bullet that zipped past her face. Throwing herself back into the thin cover of the hotel doors, she peeked out, almost wincing as another bullet struck the wall above her. The shooter was another one of the blue tentacle-head women, only this one had half of her body replaced by mechanical parts, including one of her breasts turned into what looked like a pistol barrel.
It was too far away for her to shoot with the shotgun, at least reliably, so Saeko looked for another avenue of escape. The street outside had a rather sharp drop-off into an artificial lake, and it wasn't wide enough for the machine-alien to flank her, but jumping into unknown water didn't seem smart. There was a vehicle about ten feet past the doors, but it was probably locked, not to mention how would she drive it? But it might serve for better cover than the narrow doorway.
She swung out from the doorway, ignoring the shot that sparked off the street between her feet, and let loose with a shot. The kick from the shotgun was enough to send her tumbling onto her ass, which she turned into a backwards roll, then turned to sprint the last few steps and slide over the hood of the car. The far side was more bleak than the one she'd just left, soot-outlines of at least two people stark against the red paint.
She risked a glance, hearing the shot from her pursuer smash into one of the windows. As she thought, her blast had done little damage, only two tiny trickles of blood showing. Looking around for another weapon, she settled on picking up what looked like a soda can that had rolled slightly under the vehicle, then twisting and hurling it. Disappointingly, it bounced off the alien's face to no apparent effect. Undaunted, she picked up a second one, and hurled it also.
This one passed right in front of the gun barrel in the instant it went off, and the resulting explosion was quite a shock to Saeko. Even though she had no idea what a grenade looked like, especially an alien grenade, she still felt miffed at herself for not figuring it out sooner. But importantly, the alien was down for the count, and fearing what else would be drawn to the sound, she took the opportunity to make a quick exit.
As she trotted along the broken street, she paused frequently to check for pursuers, survivors, or simply any sign of movement beyond rising trickles of smoke. Unfortunately, the only beings she ever saw were other machine-alien or machine-human hybrids, or some strange green bug things that completely ignored any attempt to communicate with her. After the second time of trying to talk to one, and shortly thereafter getting attacked by a trio of cyborgs, she drew the obvious conclusion and avoided them too. After killing one and liberating the welding torch it was using to dismantle a crashed car.
After she'd traversed what felt like a mile, she paused next to a large elevator, looking at the signs near it. Most of them were in alien script, but a few were in English, and the one that caught her eye was something in large flaming letters. "What the hell," she muttered, and pushed the button for the elevator.
With a soft chime, the doors swung open onto a yawning elevator shaft. Saeko slowly stepped up near the doorway and peeked in, both up and down, listening to the wind whistling through it. Smoke came drifting up from somewhere below her, and shaking her head, she took a closer look at the doorway off to the side of the elevator. Obviously, this station wasn't a human construction, but still, maybe emergency stairs were universal?
The door was jammed, and it took her several minutes and two different pieces of scrap metal to force the door open all the way. It wasn't stairs inside, but a set of what looked like service tunnels, none of them lit beyond the natural light spilling in from the forced door. Fury etched on her face, Saeko whirled around and hurled the piece of scrap metal into the open elevator shaft, listening to it clatter and bang all the way to the bottom.
Unhappily, she hefted her liberated weapons, and continued moving around the ring. No telling who else might be around, but she'd better find somebody soon.