"Ugh."

"Tell me about it."

"Frag grenade maybe?"

The other soldier shook his head, "No blast pattern, besides, where's the mess? I can guarantee you the amount of explosive they cram into one of those things; there should be body parts everywhere, not a skeleton."

There was the clomp of combat boots and then a third man appeared, one with a Sergeant's chevron pinned on his vest, "What's the hold-up ladies? Never seen a dead-" he finally caught sight of what they were looking at, "…shit."

"Poor bastard." The other one agreed philosophically.

There was blood everywhere in the hallway, soaking on the tiled floors, splattered across the walls, dripping from the ceiling. Except it wasn't exactly blood, blood didn't have the consistency of jelly, it didn't have black chunks floating in it, and it wasn't buoyant enough to have a charred black skeleton swaying gently on top of it.

"One of ours?" One of the ATC asked.

"I don't know, why don't you find out?" The sergeant asked.

The soldier glanced at the red-black mess, "What's to find?"

"Check for dog tags, Numb-nuts."

The Black Ops grunt grimaced and holstered his submachine gun. "How come I get stuck with the crappy jobs?" He added as he waded through the ankle deep gore.

"'Cause you're the rookie," the other two soldiers chorused.

Rookie paused at the corpse and gingerly dipped his hand into the viscous goo, blindly feeling around for two tiny pieces of metal, "So what do you think killed this guy?"

"Hey Rookie," the sergeant glared, "We don't want to know what killed this fucker."

"Although, that reminds me, anyone hear from Bravo Team?" the other soldier asked.

"You mean the prima doma team?" Sergeant shook his head, "Nope, and can't say I care either."

The other soldier grinned slyly, "Well rumor has it that Bravo Team got creamed."

"What, the whole team?" Sergeant asked.

"Yep, the Colonel sent them after Genevieve Aristide and some Delta Force chick in the T.A.C. Lab, and they all wound up KIA."

"Bullshit," Sergeant snorted, "Taylors is an asshole, but he's a competent asshole, no way one Delta Op knocked him out."

The soldier grinned, "Didn't say it was Delta Op."

"What do you mean?" Rookie asked, now up to his elbow in goo.

"I got a friend up in Ops, he was monitoring Bravo Team's comms. He said they went in guns blazing, and then something happened. There was static on the radio and Colonel Vanek wanted a progress update from Taylor…and you know how Taylor answered him?"

The Sergeant snorted, recognizing a scare tale when he heard it, but Rookie was oblivious, "What?"

"Screams." The solider leaned forward with relish, "He just screamed and screamed and screamed, like his heart was being ripped out of his fucking chest and then…nothing. Ops lost all contact with Bravo Team."

"I don't get it." Rookie admitted.

"Well it's like Sarge said, Taylors is an asshole, but this wasn't his first waltz, same with the rest of Bravo Team. Now something wiped out all of Bravo Team in an instant, and it sure as hell wasn't a lone Delta Force op. Makes you wonder just what kind of creepy bullshit ATC put us in."

"Hey, they don't pay us to think, they pay us to clean shit up." Sergeant growled, "Now put a lid on your ghost stories before Rook shits himself."

The other soldier sniggered to himself.

"Hey! I think I found something!" Rookie finally pulled his now crimson arm out of the sludge and opened his hand. He held one of the tarnished tags up to his face, "Anyone know a J. Fox?"

"Not one of ours." Sergeant grunted, "Must be one of the Delta Force Ops." He rested a hand on his helmet radio, "Hey Ops, we got a confirmed KIA on one of the Delta Force."

"Understood," a voice crackled back, "You said confirmed?"

"Confirmed as it can get without doing dental identification."

"Understood, Oscar Team has a possible fix on another Delta Force Op, rendezvous at their location."

"Understood Ops." Sergeant keyed off the radio, "Let's go ladies."

"What about the tags?"

"Toss it."

The dog tags flashed through the air, disappearing back into the pool of blood. The mercs moved on, the clomps of their boots fading away, moving towards their next assignment.

Then silence.

In the blood-drenched room, a dark, callused hand reached into the pool of gore and came back with the bloodied tags clenched in a fist. Sergeant Griffin stared at them heavily for a moment, registering the bitter fact that he had just lost another soldier under his command.

It never got any easier.

He wiped the tags off and reverently slipped them in an inside pocket. Then he picked his assault rifle back up. He had a team of mercs to follow, and if he was lucky, they'd lead him straight to one of his other teammates, and he'd be one step closer to getting out of this little shop of horrors.


Something was wrong, he felt wrong.

Everything around him was painted in sprays of lovely red, but nothing was solid, like reality had taken two steps sideways and gravity had twisted into a knot. There was a rushing noise in the air, thick banks of angry red clouds or fog rushed by overhead, under head everywhere.

The Voice had brought him here.

At that thought the entire landscape seemed to shudder and twist. The fog cleared and somehow he found himself at the bottom of a hill covered in long dead grass.

At the top of the hill stood the tall, decayed corpse of a once-proud tree. From its skeletal limbs hung a thin roped swing, creaking sickly in the breeze like a hangman.

His skin prickled like it'd been brushed with razor-wire. He knew what was at the top of that hill. He was not scared of the Voice, not yet, but he had no wish to face it either. So he turned, and ran.

Into the blood-crimson fog.

Away from the hill.

He ran long and hard, breathing steadily and his feet beat a steady rhythm against the hard, cracked earth. He ran for days, or was it seconds? Time passed strangely here with only the thick fog brushing past his face. He ran until even his enhanced body began to quake, until his legs began to burn, but he could see the fog lightening ahead, fading away. He put on a fresh surge of energy, a last sprint, and he burst through that crimson fog.

Back at the hill.

Disbelief filled him as he panted quietly. He thought he'd been running away, he knew he'd been running in the opposite direction, but if anything the hill seemed closer now.

He could plunge back into that fog a hundred times and it would not matter.

For the first time in his life, he felt fear.

It was an odd sensation, sharp and cold, growing and twisting in his mind, his body, threatening to root him to the ground and render him helpless.

But he would not, he could not. He was an elite killing machine, bred from the best genetic stock, enhanced to be above and beyond mere humans. He was a Grim Reaper of men.

He feared nothing.

He started up the hill. First walking but slowly going faster until he was hunkered down low with his arms swinging loosely at his sides, his legs blurring up that hill, but not making a sound at all. His body shimmered and disappeared from view, a ghost rippling through the grass.

Now he was nearing the top and now he could see someone, a little girl. She looked frail and weak, her tattered dress and skinny limbs would rip and break under his blade. He had hurt her before, he could hurt her again.

He leaped.

There was a flash of raven locks and a glare of ochre eyes as the little girl turned her head around. Faster than thought, the world rippled and then something slammed into the assassin. .

A huge rotted tendril of energy struck from the hill to transfix him in midair. Thick red blood, his blood, flowed around the gnarled root that had pierced his chest. The pain continued to radiate, he could feel smaller and smaller roots sprouting from the tendril, boring into enhanced flesh, wrapping around synthetic bones, crushing and sapping the life from him.

As a pair of tendrils slowly lifted up to his eyes, as the pain continued to poison his body, the assassin finally realized.

In this world, in this dimension, he was not the predator.

He was prey.

There was a flash of pain and the world went black.


Pain.

That was the first thing to return to Unit 237, the simple, clean sensation of pain. It radiated from his left hand, a sensation of jagged pins and rusted needles heated to a hellish inferno. That was okay, he knew how to deal with pain, pain was a constant in his life and after a while, it was easy to ignore.

He was alive, physically at least. His heart was racing, pumping endorphin infused blood through his veins, eyes dilated, muscles contracted, ready to fight, to kill the Voice. He had hurt it once, in the blood-drenched room. He'd had surprise on his side that time, but all he'd done was surprise the Voice. Once that had worn off, the Voice had crushed him just as he'd crushed the soldiers in the facility.

No the truth was simple, ugly, but simple.

The Voice could not die

It was a foe he could not touch, whose skin he could not truly slice, whose blood he could not spill. How did one fight something so elemental, so far removed from the physical limits of the world? How could he kill that which was already dead?

Something touched him.

His arm was lifted, rested against something soft. Something else…a hand, snaked around his back to press against his side. Gravity shifted as someone pulled him up.

Motion.

The feeling of feet lifting against the floor.

The movement was staggered, forced, not at all like the fluid graceful action it should be, and there was someone else, another person, body pressed against his.

Someone else, carrying him.

His eyes opened.

Her face was inches from his, a side profile as she stared straight ahead. She had one of his arms slung over her shoulder and was half-carrying him. Light brown hair drifted down where it had escaped the strict pony-tail. Deep blue eyes smudged with soot and blood, warm skin pale with exhaustion. She reeked of smoke and blood and sweat.

She smelled good.

He stirred and she stopped. She turned and let go of him, blue eyes warily watching him as the assassin finally came to. He shook his head woozily and tried to climb to his feet. The world spun around him and suddenly strong hands caught him.

"Easy," her voice said, not shouting or harsh, the way she talked when she was in a fight, but different, softer, melodious.

Unit 237 decided she had a nice voice.

"You okay to walk?" she asked, "We need to get out of here, this entire facility's rigged to blow, and soon."

Rigged to blow?

Sounded like fun.

"C'mon," she said, placing his arm around her neck and supporting his lower back with her other hand, "let's get going."

The assassin passively allowed her to carry him down the dark hallway, content to stumble along beside her, to hear her quiet breathing and the loud thunder of her heart.

For however long that would last.


A/N: It's been a while since I've updated this story and I apologize. I know a lot of you guys enjoy my humble craft and I really appreciate it. I'm trying to get the story moving past the hospital part of the game, get to the bigger stuff, so to speak. As always let me know how this chapter is. I can't say enough how valuable reader feedback is.

P.S: As a side note, I finished playing F3Er and realized there is not a single Replica Assassin in the game, what's up with that? I mean, it's like making a Bioshock game that's not under the sea…oh wait ;)