"So do you even have a guess as to what we're walking into?" Eric asked as they all waited for the elevator to finish coming down. They'd finally tracked it down, and had only run into a handful of zombies and headcrabs on the way over.
"I give fifty-fifty odds that it's either some abandoned warehouse that they forgot to label when they updated the maps...or a top secret laboratory doing some kind of crazy ass research," Laidlaw replied.
"That's...there is such a wide difference between those two things," Maria said.
"Yep," Laidlaw agreed grimly.
Eric sighed heavily. The elevator abruptly settled into place. After a second, the doors slid open. And revealed a nightmarish interior.
"That's a bad sign," Li said softly.
There was a lot of blood on the walls, and several Black Ops corpses.
"Great," Eric muttered, then stepped inside. "Let's do this if we're gonna do it."
The others followed him aboard the lift. He quickly began patting down the Black Ops soldiers, managing to appropriate a new sidearm: another .357 six-shooter Magnum revolver. Despite everything, it oddly made him feel better to have it, especially because he managed to find about half a dozen quick-loads. They gathered whatever guns and ammo they could scrounge as the elevator ascended, then Eric had them get up against the walls. Tense silence passed as the lift ascended ever upwards.
Abruptly, it settled into place.
"Carefully," Eric whispered, and then the doors opened.
He peered out and bore witness to a visage of bloody carnage. Whatever the room beyond might once have been, it was now a necropolis. White tiles and high-tech machinery was covered in blood, and he immediately caught sight of over a dozen corpses spread out in random poses, broken by death. There was a mix of Marines, Black Ops, and shock troopers and pit drones. They had had one hell of a shootout, it seemed.
Somewhere ahead, he could hear some more fighting.
Slowly, Eric moved out, clearing the room with a sweep of his rifle. Nothing lived in the immediate vicinity. There were three doors, one in each wall besides the back wall they'd come out of. Two looked smaller and less important, the one dead ahead seemed like the main entrance. It was closed and that's where the sounds were coming from.
"Maria, check the left door. Li, stand guard. Laidlaw, find us a map," Eric said.
They all responded tightly and headed out to complete their tasks. He broke right and checked out whatever lay beyond that door, finding only a simple break room that was also trashed. It looked like a shock trooper had gotten into a brutal, close-quarters fight with several zombies. Once that and the other room (a small bathroom) were clear, he moved over to the main door. It was a pair of metal doors, the kind that slid into the walls, with small windows built into them. Peering cautiously through one, he caught sight of several shock troopers moving around, and a lot of dead Black Ops. Well, great. The troopers didn't seem to realize they had company.
Eric moved away from the door to join the others. He wanted to lock it down, but he also didn't want to accidentally open it, so he just left it as it was for the moment. "We've got about half a dozen shock troopers in the next lab," he reported.
"Great," Maria muttered.
"I have a way out," Laidlaw said. They gathered around at the workstation he was working at, studying the screen. "It's pretty straightforward, surprisingly. So, there are three more rooms in this laboratory, which appears to be some kind of advanced weapons testing lab."
"That has my attention," Eric replied immediately. "Anything useful?"
"Maybe. The actual weapons will be two rooms ahead of us. The rooms are laid out in a straight line. We need to get through all of them to another elevator, take it to the surface to a Security HQ. From there, we have to cross a small valley, and at the end of that valley should be a parking garage. And then, well...ideally, that's it," he explained.
"God, I hope so," Li muttered.
"All right. Gather up as much ammo as you can from these corpses. This is going to be the final push...hopefully. Everybody, take it slow, take it steady. I want every one of us focused and in the moment. Don't even bother thinking about the parking garage. I'm not tripping at the goddamned finish line. We kill everything between us and there, room by room, battle by battle. No unnecessary risks, no BS. Understood?"
They all responded affirmatively, a look of grim determination settling onto their haggard, dirty faces. He was sure he looked exactly the same.
"Then let's do this."
They set to work. He stood guard by the door while the others searched the corpses, just to make sure none of the troopers wandered over and got the door open. A few minutes passed as the other three searched the corpses. When they were finished, Maria passed him some supplies: some more ammo for his assault rifle, a pair of grenades for his underslung tube, which he immediately loaded, and a fragmentation grenade.
It was going to have to be enough.
"Okay, everyone get ready. Maria, opposite me on the door, Laidlaw and Li, further back in the lab, behind that central workstation there," he said, pointing to a large, circular, and heavy desk that took up the center of the room.
They all got into place. He waited, double-checked that all of them were ready, including a weapons check, and then he found and thumbed the open button. Eric got things started off with a bang, leaning out, targeting the nearest shock trooper and firing off one of the grenades from his rifle's launcher. It was a perfect shot, nailing the big bastard right in the face and detonating it in a spray of alien blood and gore.
And then the battle was on.
Bullets and bolts of energy flew as the humans opened fire from their entrenched position, and the shock troopers scrambled to retaliate. Despite his initial luck and kill, the others turned out to be extremely resilient. They were fast, and dodged with a startling efficiency, and seemed to be able to take a lot of punishment. He managed to catch one in the open before it got to cover and pumped a dozen rounds into it. The creature staggered, losing a fair amount of blood, but then immediately turned around and returned fire.
Eric cried out as one of the shocks hit him right in the arm, sending an extremely painful jolt all up and down his musculature and nearly making him drop his rifle. He pulled back, waiting for the worst of the pain to pass, then leaned back around and opened fire again. Between these bastards and the damned alien slaves, he was going to wind up with nerve damage if he made it out of here alive. He burned through the rest of his magazine before managing to put down another one of the troopers, popping its huge eye and killing it.
The battle raged on for several minutes, going back and forth, with him rattling through several magazines, ducking and pulling back and returning fire. Another shock trooper went down. Then another, and then one of them attempted to rush their position and came damned close to killing Maria. As it was, the thing made it into the lab and opened fire right at her, punching her in her PCV several times with shocks. Eric had just finished reloading and managed to snap his rifle up and empty half the magazine into the thing's back, staggering it, and then Li put two rounds into its head from her Eagle and that killed it.
"You all right!?" he called as he leaned back around and opened fire again, trying to dissuade any of the others from doing the same.
"Just fine!" Maria managed as she slowly got back to her feet.
A few moments later, the last of the shock troopers fell, and all was silent. Which lasted for about five seconds before the far door across the next room opened up and a squad of Black Ops charged through.
"Oh come on!" Eric snapped.
Unwilling to deal with another sustained firefight so quickly, he aimed his rifle and fired off the second grenade from the launcher. It hit the center of the squad and blew them straight to hell. They mopped up the survivors in record time.
"Wow," Laidlaw said. "That was...wow."
"Let's go," Eric replied, reloading his rifle.
They moved into the next room and cleared it quickly, salvaging whatever ammo they could find from the corpses they'd made. Eric felt pretty in the zone right now, focused wholly on clearing the rooms, eliminating hostiles, and gathering resources. They cleared the room and moved on to the third section, finding the remnants of the battle the Black Ops had just come from. There were a lot of dead alien grunts and slaves.
The survivors silently spread out, first securing and then searching the area. Laidlaw moved between terminals, looking for anything worthwhile. Eric found himself hoping for some kind of awesome, experimental super-weapon. The rifle was nice, but something with a little more kick would be helpful against the legion of inter-dimension and government killers that no doubt stood between them and their (hopefully) eventual extraction point. The lab was taken up by more consoles and workstations, but the left wall was taken up by what definitely appeared to be a shooting gallery. There were lengthy stalls with targets at their ends, and some of them were pretty charred. He wondered what kind of weapon they might've been developing here.
He hoped it was some kind of laser beam.
Lasers were supposed to be the future of warfare. Or that's what all the sci-fi authors and game developers kept insisting, anyway. By the time he'd wrapped up his own search and checked the final room ahead, (it appeared empty), Laidlaw had something.
"Here, come here!" he called, sounding eager.
They gathered around the scientist, who was standing before a workstation next to a metal plate in the wall. It was a rectangle about two feet long by one tall and stuck into the wall at chest height. Abruptly, he stepped up to it and punched a few keys on the pad next to it. The plate disappeared up into the wall, revealing a small niche beyond.
And in that niche…
"Whoa, what is this?" Maria murmured.
Laidlaw reached in and carefully extracted the strange-looking gun. Eric studied it. The thing did genuinely look like something out of an insane '50s sci-fi serial. The core of it was an odd gunmetal gray construction that basically looked like a rectangular slab of technology stuck between a pair of metallic hexagons, vaguely resembling a dumbbell. Looking ridiculous, a metal rifle stock was attached to its rear. The main firing mechanism seemed to be a polished golden cylinder. It was attached to the dumbbell via a similar golden tube, with a pair of even thinner golden tubes that ran from its top back to a duo of small blue containers tucked behind one side of the dumbbell. Finally, there was a black hose that ran from the front of the dumbbell to the bottom of the golden cylinder. To top it all off, another golden tube, the gun barrel, sprouted from the front of the cylinder.
"This is, according to the document I managed to scrounge up, the Tau Cannon," Laidlaw replied.
"What the hell does it do?" Eric muttered.
"Apparently, it fires a 'focused particle beam'. I'm not entirely sure what that means, though," he admitted.
"So let's test it...who gets it?" Maria asked.
"Not me, I don't want it," Laidlaw said.
"Why? Is it dangerous?" Eric asked.
Laidlaw shrugged. "It says it's been tested and works fine, but given our track record..."
"You two are better shots than I am," Li said.
Eric looked at Maria. She stared back at him. "Anyone got a coin?" she asked finally.
"You wanna flip for it?" he asked.
"Can you think of a better way? Obviously we both want to use it."
"I've got a quarter," Laidlaw said, setting the thing gently back down in its metal cradle inside the niche, then fishing a faded quarter out of his pocket. "Call it," he said, then flicked it into the air with his thumb.
"Heads," Eric said.
"Tails then," Maria said.
They watched it flip rapidly through the air, up and then down, and Laidlaw caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand. After a second, he lifted his hand.
"Dammit!" Maria snapped.
Eric laughed. "Perfect. Let's see what we've got here." He grabbed the Tau Cannon back out of its niche and checked it over. There were a lot of lights and readouts built into the dumbbell part, but it felt surprisingly like a gun and fit with an odd comfort into his grasp. He stepped away from the group and took aim at a dead alien slave.
Pausing for just a second, he then squeezed the trigger.
There was a bright yellow flash and a needle-thin bolt of pure energy shot forth out of the front of the weapon and hit the corpse almost before he'd finished squeezing the trigger. There was a powerful spray of charred alien gore.
"Holy crap!" Maria cried.
"Very nice," Eric murmured. He checked it over again and was extremely glad to see that it actually had places for a strap. He recovered one from a discarded assault rifle and affixed it to his strange new weapon, then hung it around his neck. "This is so awesome."
"You're a lucky bastard," Maria said.
"Yep," he agreed, grinning broadly. "Now, is there anything else in here we need? Because I am very eager to get a move on."
"I don't think so," Laidlaw replied.
"Well, let's do one more sweep, then get out of here."
The next fifteen minutes went pretty smoothly, all things considered.
They finished clearing the weapons testing laboratory, found the elevator, and rode it up to the Security HQ without a problem. From there, they cleared out the derelict structure, which wasn't all that big. There were a handful of zombies and headcrabs milling around, and they managed to put them all down. There were no survivors around, no one holed up in any of the side rooms or closets or anywhere else someone might hide. But it became extremely obvious rather quickly that there was a lot of fighting going on outside.
The entire time they were searching, there was a constant staccato chatter of machine gun fire, punctuated by the occasional explosion, overlayed by the distant shouts of agony and hysterically screamed orders. And that didn't let up even a little as they worked their way through the structure. It was still happening even as they finally reached the main entrance to the building and began to really scope out the situation.
"Holy crap," Li whispered softly.
It was an out-all war out there. He saw three sides battling it out in the valley ahead of them. Black Ops had set up a command post outside one of the warehouse structures that lined the right side of the valley in the form of several canvas tents and sandbag walls. There were a few dozen of them currently fighting for their lives. The rest of the space was taken up by an army of shock troopers and pit drones battling it out with a legion of alien grunts and slaves. For good measure, there were a good few dozen zombies thrown into the mix, attacking everyone and everything they saw. It was all out, chaotic warfare out there.
"Maybe we should wait for it to die down a little," Laidlaw murmured.
"Maybe...although maybe we should use the cover of chaos to slip past...I can see the parking garage from here," Eric replied.
Sure enough, at the other end of the valley, which was roughly the length of a football field, there was the parking garage. Suddenly, a huge explosion from deeper in the valley briefly consumed his vision, and Eric winced.
"Okay, maybe we wait a little bit," he said.
They all agreed, and the quartet settled in for the duration. Eric sat watch while the other three moved back to a safer distance, just in case anything went wrong. As the minutes started to drag on, he found himself staring at individual skirmishes. There were a few dozen of them going on as all the various factions fought each other. It was completely surreal, in a way. Watching all those moving bodies, the various individual conflicts, combined with the fact that most of them were literal aliens. Or monsters. Inter-dimensional terrors.
Blood and bullets flew everywhere. The body count rose as aliens and humans alike were slaughtered. Eric lost track of time, ducking occasionally whenever a bullet came close to his position inside the front lobby of the HQ. Minutes passed, each one feeling like it was an eternity, and still the battle raged on. It seemed to take ages and eras, but finally the Black Ops position was overrun by some bad luck when a squad of four shock troopers managed to flank them as the survivors were distracted by an encroaching army of alien grunts, and then that was the end of the humans on the battlefield.
And then the two alien forces tore into each other with a renewed strength.
After another ten minutes, finally, at long last, Eric felt like enough of them had been killed off to make it worth leaving. He called the others up while keeping an eye on the battlefield. All that was left were a handful of alien grunts and slaves.
"Let's hit them now and get out of here," he said once the others had joined him. "Before anything else shows up."
They all agreed and readied themselves. As soon as everyone had performed a weapons check, they hit the front door and headed out into the valley. Eric didn't give the alien grunts a chance. He sighted the nearest one and cut loose with the Tau Cannon. It was far more impressive when firing on a live target. The needle-thin laser beam chopped right through its head and sent up a tremendous spray of pulpy alien gore. Eric let out a sound of pure marvel as he watched the body topple. He quickly shifted targets and fired again, punching a fist-sized hole through the broad chest of a second alien grunt and killing it instantly.
A knife through butter didn't even do this justice.
The others began picking off targets with their own weaponry, and within half a minute, the battlefield had, as far as he could tell, been completely cleared of opponents.
"All right, let's move!" he called.
They got to it, jogging quickly across the corpse-strewn battlefield. The valley walls rose to either side of them, and the harsh New Mexico sun bore down on them. The stink of spilled guts and blood from humans and aliens and gunsmoke all mixed together to create a potent reek that was difficult to breathe through.
Eric just wanted it to be over.
He could see the parking garage, growing closer. There didn't seem to be anyone or anything moving in it, and although it was impossible to tell for sure yet, he thought he could see at least a few shapes inside of it. Vehicles. He found himself desperately praying that they worked, and that no one would stop them, and they could escape.
About halfway there, not far from the Black Ops former encampment, it all fell apart.
Opposite the row of warehouses where Black Ops had set up shop was a door built into the side of the valley. It was a large door, the kind that parted down the middle to open, the kind you could drive a dump truck through. It had been firmly closed the whole way there, but abruptly, it began to open. And as it parted, he immediately caught sight of a fresh contingent of shock troopers.
"Get to cover!" he screamed as he shouldered the cannon and opened fire.
The first shock trooper took the laser beam right in its big hideous eye and its head popped like a balloon filled with blood and splattered the others around it. He began backing up as they returned fire, and the others opened fire along with him. He put down two more, then a third, then a fourth and a fifth. And then he hit the sandbags and fell over them backwards. Grunting as he fell on his ass, he caught sight of something to his immediate right.
It was a perfect solution for their problem.
He looked around. Li and Laidlaw had ended up farther to the right, both of them ducked down behind a line of sandbags. Maria was to his left, not far away. She was looking at her rifle and gritting her teeth.
"Maria!" he snapped. She looked over. "Here!" He tossed her the Tau Cannon.
She dropped her rifle and caught it easily, then grinned viciously and opened fire. He left her to it, then settled in behind the .50 caliber machine gun emplacement he'd spotted. Whoever had been using it had just managed to hook up a fresh box of ammo before dying. Eric took full advantage of this fact as he gripped the machine gun, took aim at the small army of shock troopers now pouring in through the mostly-open doors, and opened fire.
It made him feel like an angel of death.
Eric unloaded an unstoppable barrage of .50 caliber death directly into the advancing army of shock troopers and pit drones. He immediately stopped hearing anything but the gun that was rattling violently in his grasp. His whole body shook with the force of it. He hosed them all down, bringing the gun back and forth in wide, sweeping arcs. Honestly, he hardly had to aim at all. Even a single shot blew the bastards off their feet.
And there were a lot of them.
Eric had no idea where they were coming from, or why they had chosen to come here, he only knew that he had to kill every last one of them or they were going to kill him and his friends. So he intended to keep firing until this thing ran out of ammo or they ran out of soldiers. In the end, it was a near thing. By the time the last one fell, the turret was almost totally depleted, and his arms had gone numb from the effort.
Slowly, he released his grip as he realized they were all dead, and no more were showing up. "Holy crap," he muttered, though he could hardly hear himself. Maria approached him. He glanced over at her. "What happened to the Cannon?" he asked, realizing she wasn't holding it any longer, nor was it slung.
"It crapped out on me," she replied. "Went totally dead."
"Great," he muttered.
"Can we go? Please?" Laidlaw asked.
"We really should get out of here before even more of them show up," Li said.
Eric nodded. "Let's get the hell out of here."
They left the Black Ops encampment and then jogged across the final stretch of the corpse-littered valley. Eric tensed up, waiting for some new catastrophe to fall into their lap, some new personal apocalypse to smash into them, but they reached the garage without further incident. And they found an intact black SUV waiting for them.
There were even keys in the ignition.
Eric got into the driver's seat after they cleared the area and the car, and turned the key. The vehicle started up without a problem. The gas tank was nearly full.
"Holy crap," he muttered as the others got in.
"So, I mean...is this it? Are we really getting out of here?" Li asked quietly.
"Only one way to find out."
He pulled out of the parking spot and drove through the garage, to the opposite side, and out through the exit there. A long, lonely stretch of desert road awaited them. There were a few corpses out here, but no fighting, nothing alive.
A feeling of total unreality, like he was completely detached from his body, fell over Eric as he began driving down the road. It was a sense of utter dislocation, like some strange combination of being wildly dizzy and having a dream at the same time. None of this felt real. After everything that had happened, all the killing, the death, the murder, the blood and guts and dead bodies, the close calls and near misses…
To finally be here just didn't feel like it was actually happening.
Eric tightened his grip on the steering wheel and sped up. He glanced in the rearview, at the retreating structure of the parking garage.
"I think we made it," he said.
And that was when a tremendous flash of light burst into being, and the car rocked violently, and he heard the others screaming.
And then…
He felt like he was floating, and he screamed along with them.
And then-