Gunner, and a dozen other shooters are hanging out in the room. David, Mike and Jen had gone home for the break, leaving Gunner alone with the room. While home on break after completing his first year, Gunner had used a thermite grenade to light a barbeque grill, and after that had been told by his parents not to come back until he understood what he did wrong and was sorry; neither of which Gunner had done yet. Instead of spending the time alone, Gunner invited several of his friends over to hang-out. The majority of the night had been spent watching a zombie movie marathon (Boomer's idea), including 'Dawn of the Dead' and all three Resident Evil movies.
"Did you guys hear that?!" Pyro yelled suddenly.
"I heard you scream like a little girl." Athena said.
"Dude, I swear, I heard moaning!"
"Like the way I made your mom moan?" Gunner said.
"You guys are dicks. I know what I heard."
"Fine, everyone grab your shit. Let's fan out and look for Pyro's 'zombie'. It's probably just someone gettin' their groove on anyway." Gunner said.
"Getting ideas, Gunner?" Athena asked hopefully.
"No." Gunner said, oblivious to her.
"Anyone sees anything, give a shout over the radio. Boomer, Tracker, and.....I guess Athena are with me; we're team 1. Pryo, Scud, Bushwacker and Coaxial, you're team 2. Sarge, Scopes, Doc, Raven and Clutch are 3. Roll out." Gunner said, handing out team assignments.
After a quick argument which was settled by a game of rock-paper-scissors, it was decided that team one would search the dorm, team two would search the grounds, and team three would search the nearby 'Hall of Magic'. The shooters ran a quick radio check, and then dispersed. To tell the truth, Gunner was happy to be doing something militant again; he hadn't done any training in the last three days (and his ass had fallen asleep from watching movies all night.
Team one began searching every room in the dorm, an effort that was aided by Boomer's skill with lockpicks. About a half-hour later, Gunner and his team were close to finishing up the last floor of the dorms. Several other shooters had joined the search by now (many of them after having team 1 break-in and rush their rooms), and two more teams had been formed by shooters who either thought it was a sound theory, or were also bored out of their skulls.
"1, this 3. The hall is locked-down. We checked all the doors and windows on the first two floors, but they're locked up tight. We're gonna try to gain entry through the sewers, over."
"3, this 1. Roger that, over."
"Right. We'll probably loose reception once we get far enough into the sewers, our next transmission will be from inside the hall."
"Understood. Good luck and happy hunting. 1 out."
"You know, if this was a zombie movie, the sewers would be a REALLY bad place to go." Boomer said.
"Shut up. You're retarded." Gunner replied succinctly.
Gunner's team finished searching their dorm building and went outside to sit on the front steps. Just as they stepped outside, Gunner got a transmission on the radio.
"One, this is two. We're hearin' gunfire from the direction of the Hall of Magic. Please advise." the radio said.
"Roger that. Return to the dorms. Team 3 should be able to handle themselves. We'll stand-by until they call in. One out."
"I told you it was a bad idea." Boomer said.
"Shut-up." Gunner replied.
"One to all units, return to the dorms."
The other teams chirped their replies. Just as the first members of team four began to filter in, Gunner finally heard back from team three.
"3 to any recieving! We just fought our way out of the sewers! They were everwhere! We're pinned-down in the magic hall!" Scope's voice said.
"Calm down three. This is Gunner. What's going on? Who's got you cut-off?"
"Zombies! They just keep coming!"
"Roger that. We're comin' to get you. Which end of the building are you at?"
"We're in the east end! Hurry up!"
"Roger. Gunner out."
By now all the other teams had arrived.
"Alright, here's the situation. There's a zombie outbreak on campus. Team two, grab duffels, get to the armoury and pull all the ammo you can. Four, start fortifying the dorm building. concentrate on the first floor. barricade all the doors except the back entrance. That's where we'll bring in team three. Team five, grab everyone not on one of our teams and get them to the roof to cover us and team two. Break!"
Gunner and his team took off towards the hall.
"I told you it was zombies." Boomer said.
"Not a good time, Boomer." Gunner replied.
They were about three-quarters of the way to the hall when Gunner spoke again.
"Boomer, you got any explosives?"
"Of course. I got about a kilo of PE-4 in my pack."
Good. I want you to blast through the door when we get there." Gunner said.
Gunner put his radio to his mouth.
"Three, this is one. We're about one mike out. Get away from the door, we're blastin' it. Out."
Gunner turned suddenly and blasted a zombie coming up out of a manhole.
"They've broken containment!" he yelled, headshotting the first zombie.
"Boomer! We'll cover you, get that wall down!" Gunner yelled.
Gunner quickly arranged himself, Tracker and Athena to pull security as Boomer set his explosives.
"We're good! Everybody get low!" Boomer yelled, running for cover as he trailed a length of shock-tube behind him. The others took off hot on his heels.
"On my mark!" Gunner yelled to Boomer.
"On your what?!" Boomer replied.
"Mark!" Gunner yelled.
Boomer detonated the explosives, the blast wave of which threw Gunner several feet through the air.
Gunner picked himself up, dusted himself off, and turned around to look at Boomer.
"You're a dick." he said.
Gunner turned around and saw the damage to the building for the first time. Instead of blowing a hole in the wall, Boomer had actually set his explosives on a load-bearing beam and brought down that whole section of the wall from the ground to the roof. Gunner shrugged and stormed over the rubble, coming face to face with an undead creature. The zombie screeched at him, and Gunner screamed back before he buttstroked the creature with his G-36. The force of the blow knocked the creature back and Gunner finished it with a quick headshot.
"Three, let's go!" Gunner yelled, firing a quick burst into the face of a particularly fat zombie.
"Let's go let's go let's go!" Boomer told the members of the other team.
Gunner, Boomer, Tracker and Athena laid down cover fire as the five members of team three ran out of the remains of the building.
"Head for the dorm and don't look back! Go in the back door!" Gunner yelled as he began directing his team in a bounding retreat. Gunner and Boomer, the last two left in the building, finally broke off and headed for the back door.
As they fell back, several of the zombies took off after them in a dead sprint.
"Gunner?! Why are they running?!" Boomer yelled at him.
"Fucked if I know! Run faster!" Gunner replied.
The pair ran at full speed across the campus, jumping benches and dodging between trash cans and stanchions. The shooters on the rooftop opened up on the mob chasing them as they got chose to the dorm, although several of the shots were closer to the pair than Gunner would have liked. The door opened just in time and Gunner and Boomer piled in, followed by a zombie. Gunner and Boomer had both dived in the doorway, leaving both of them tangled on the floor in a heap, defenseless against the undead creature. Gunner rolled over, realizing he was about to take a hit, when suddenly the zombie's head was pinned to the wall with a longsword. Gunner untangled himself, stood, and looked up to see who was responsible, where he saw a familiar face.
"Blades!" Gunner yelled, giving a complicated handshake to the shooter.
"I haven't seen you since....." Gunner trailed off.
The two thought for a minute.
"Dungeon Crawling 101, freshman year!" Blades yelled suddenly.
"Yeah, that was with.....Ms. Hernandez, right?" Gunner said.
"Gunner, who's he?" Boomer asked.
"This.....is Blades. You know how Doc is a cross-class; a shooter and a white mage? Well, Blades is a shooter and a swordsman."
Blades waved to Boomer.
"Anyway, I think we should try and get back in there and determine the source of the undead." Gunner said.
"You want to go back in there?!" Boomer asked.
"Yep. You in?"
"Hell yeah."
"Alright. Boomer, Tracker, Athena, Pyro, Doc, Blades and Raven! Grab more ammo and form up. We're goin' back in."
The shooters Gunner had assigned for the mission nodded and grabbed extra ammo from the duffel bags team two had just brought back from the armory. Boomer and Athena, his second and third respectively, were in the team, along with his buddies Tracker and Pryo, and cross-classes Doc and Pyro. Also included was the first year student Raven, whom Gunner brought because Boomer was trying to get into her pants. Gunner left Boomer in charge of the party's preparations while he journeyed to the roof to get a better handle on the situation.
He liked what he saw. Empty shell casings, power cells and energy packs were littered sparsely across the rooftop, showing him that his shooters were picking their shots and conserving their ammo. Their was little danger of the mob breaking in downstairs due to efficient fortifying efforts of the shooters down there, and the students on the roof had all the time in the world and a clear line of fire. Gunner walked around the roof for a few minutes, inspecting the positions and taking a few shots himself. The most important thing he noticed was that the vast majority of the horde had, in their single-minded instinct for meat, congregated around the front of the building, the side nearest to their point of origin. Gunner walked the perimeter of the roof, planning their route to the Hall of Magic.
From what he was seeing, they could exit the dorms from the rear where there were maybe a dozen undead milling about, hook left, and cut through the Alchemy Building, whose long, thin structure would take them with a few dozen meters of the destroyed wall of the Hall of Magic. The Alchemy Building was built like a fortress, more though to protect those outside from hazards inside that vice-versa. Unfortunately, this fact would work both and against the shooters. While it meant that it was unlikely that the zombies had infiltrated the building, it also meant that they would have holy Hell getting in.
Determining that it was a better plan than none, he pulled a few shooters off the front wall, stationing them to thin out the zombies at the rear of the building and provide covering fire for the party once they sortied. Vaguely satisfied, he grunted and returned to the bottom floor where Boomer was finishing up his inspection of the troops.
"They good Boomer?"
"Hell yeah they're good. Let's get this ball rollin'." he replied.
Gunner motioned to the rear door.
"Let's do it then. Double column, staggered, on me." he said, giving the associated hand gesture.
And with that, Gunner and his team were out the rear door. Sporadic fire popped from the roof, targeting any of the zombies that turned towards the team as the eight shooters ran for the door of the Alchemy Building. The building was, of course, locked up. The door was several inches of steel, secured by an internal deadbolt.
"Boomer, blow it." Gunner said as he directed the others into a semi-circle around the door.
"With what dude? I'm black on bang." he said, inspecting the lock.
"Can you pick it?"
Boomer looked at him funny.
"Gunner, this thing has like 18 tumblers. It would take me HOURS."
"Fuck me." Gunner muttered before turning back to the others.
"Ideas?!" he yelled out to the team.
Tracker came up, Boomer taking his place in the formation. He pulled his sidearm, a Texas Instruments 401k laser pistol and began fiddling with it.
"What're ya doin'?" Gunner asked, popping off a few shots.
"Unless I misread the TM for this thing-"
"A distinct possibility you illiterate bastard." Boomer interupted.
"-I can reset it to fire a high power, penetrating, short range beam, basically turning it into a laser torch." Tracker continued, ignoring the peanut gallery.
"Well, get on it then." Gunner said unnecessarily.
Tracker giggled to himself as he finished reconfiguring the pistol and pressed it to the door, triggering it's now four inch, brilliant blue beam and going to work on the door.
"Sooner's better than later." Gunner urged as a 'small' mob of zombies began to shamble through the gap between the dorms and the Alchemy Building.
"Patience is a virtue."
"No, it's not." Gunner replied, firing into the mob.
They could hold the mob at bay for now, since it was channeled between the buildings and caught in a crossfire between Gunner's own force and the shooters on the rooftop. But it wouldn't last forever, and neither would their ammunition supply.
"We're in!" Tracker yelled. suiting actions to words as he kicked open the door.
The eight shooters hussled into the doorway, closing it behind themselves, after which Tracker promptly welded it shut again.
The Alchemy Building was a cavernous structure, constructed of bare concrete and divided into equally sized labs and storage areas. The building smelled strongly of ozone, sulphur, and burnt metal; a smell Gunner approved of. They had entered through a side door, and Gunner led them down the small corridor to the main hallway, which they followed down to the main entrance at the north side of the building. The group's trigger fingers were twitchy, but it appeared that Gunner had been correct in his assessment that the building would be clear. They reached the end of the hallway without incident and stacked up as Gunner unbarred and opened the door.
The shooters crossed the open ground from the doorway into the Hall of Magic at full speed racing across as a group. They stormed up the ramp of debris that had once been the east wall of the hall, and ran into a horde of undead. Pyro's flamthrower and Boomer's shotgun cleared a swath through the zombies while the others followed and kept them from entering the formation's sides and rear, but ammunition would be out soon if they didn't find a way to stop them. But the force was already committed, so Gunner did the only thing he could; he ordered his team to continue pushing forward, deeper into the building.
The eight shooters ammunition supply slwoly dwindled as they pushed their way farther into the building's dark and gothic interior. It wasn't very hard to determine where they were spawning from; it was move difficult to actually move in that direction, but they managed. And suddenly, they were in there. 'There' was the Special Projects room in the basement of the Hall of Magic; a room reserved for particularly large or time-consuming projects that wouldn't be feasible in a regular magic lab. The room was dominated by a gigantic rock ring almost twenty meters in diameter, covered in glowing runes in a language Gunner couldn't even begin to comprehend. The room was packed, almost wall-to-wall with zombies, and every few seconds another one materialized from the portal with a 'ziff'.
"We need to close that. Any ideas?" Gunner yelled as he fired off a burst at head height, almost every round dropping a zombie.
"Yeah, just gimme a minute to pull a micro-nuke outta my bung-hole!" Tracker yelled.
"Plasma!" Pyro yelled as he fried a half-dozen undead with a burst from his flamethrower.
"What?!" Boomer and Athena yelled simultaneously.
Gunner nodded, instantly understanding what he was getting at. Pyro's General Dynamics Odin Mark IV plasma pistol contained a phase chamber that, when charged, became highly volatile; an explosive reaction who's power was directly related to the force with detonated it.
"Good call! Athena! Can you hit it in midair?!" Gunner shouted.
"HELL YEAH!" Athena yelled, firing her laser rifle into the mob.
"Let's do it to it! Cover down on Pryo and Athena's sector peoples!" Gunner yelled.
They would only get one shot at this. Pyro would ahve to throw the weapon at the portal, and if Athena missed her shot, it would sail on and into the portal, gone to God only knew where. Pyro unholstered his pistol, drew back his arm, and let it fly. Athena brought her rifle up, tracked the pistol for a fraction of a second, and fired a single, high-power shot. The whole room held their breath (atleast those still breathing did) as the bolt soared through the air. It finally connected with the spinning pistol, and released first a blinding flash, then a tremendous blast wave, which threw the shooters around the basement, covering them in pulverized zombie. When their vision finally cleared several seconds later, the gateway was gone; scattered in pieces around the room, much like the surrounding zombies.
"Ug. It's GOOEY." Athena said, trying unsuccessfully to wipe off the chunky zombie goo that currently had the viscosity of crude oil.
"Eww! It's in my mouth! It tastes like hagis and pennies!" Boomer yelled.
"This is worse than the time I swam through sewage." Gunner added, clearing what he could from the moving parts of his rifle.
"Dude, I'm never gonna get this outta my hair."
This was a statement that caused a blanket of silence; mainly because it had not come from Raven or Athena, but rather from Tracker. Everyone stopped and looked at him.
"Just sayin', cuz, you know....." he muttered.
"Yeah, anyway, we need to get back to the barracks so we can organize some killteams to mop up the grounds. And so we can shower. Definately so we can shower." Gunner said, the last part met by murmurs of agreement.
Boomer turned to Raven, both of them covered in zombie goo.
"So, you doin' anything later?"
"Nothing involving you."
"HA!" Gunner yelled.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Roof of Dorm Building 3, Several Hours Later ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gunner, showered and free of most of the gunk, surveyed the school grounds from his vantage point. Other than structural damage, craters, expended shells, magazines and powercells littering the grounds, and roving, heavily armed groups of shooters, the campus had returned to normal. Gunner dusted his hands.
"Well, it looks like my work here is done." Gunner said to no one in particular.