-Advance Wars 2
--Death Array
---Chapter 2: The Deep Freeze
The minute the elevator door opened up, I was blasted with air that was colder than the winds outside. I was caught so completely off guard that I nearly dropped my gun. There was a heavy mist in the air, and when I took a step forward, I nearly slipped on the floor. It was covered with a layer of ice.
"What the hell is going on down here?" I wondered aloud.
The hallway had some pipes running along the walls and I was forced to use them for support as I slipped and slid across the floor. It was like someone set the air conditioner on high for ten years left the faucet running. This was intentional, I'll give you that much.
I steadied myself on the pipes and looked down the hall. It wasn't a very long hall, and there was two sets of doors before it curved left and out of my view.
"Whoa... whoa... holy hell... Whoa!"
I couldn't help but shout in surprise as I barely made it ten feet before slipping and falling to the ground. My gun went flying from my grip. My mouth dropped open in agony as it bounced off of the walls and was turning the corner. It probably would have slid out of sight... if it wasn't for the big black boot that stepped on it and crushed it.
Some of the bullets went off due to the pressure put on them and the person that the leg belonged to yelled out in surprise. I noticed some cleats or ice shoes they were wearing and suddenly wanted a pair of my own. But my priorities changed as a big angry alien soldier finally rounded the corner, his boot all mangled from the bullets that tore into it. He looked at me for a second before raising his gun.
Instantly, I pushed my self back and slid across the ice right back into the elevator that was closing. The metallic plinks soon began to echo out when his bullets began to slam into the metal doors. I punched a button, any button, so long as it moved away from the alien soldier.
When the elevator doors opened up again, I was hit with the most extreme burst of heat I had felt in a long time. The lights were also pretty dim and made the area covered with shadows. What in the hell was going on in this place? Did someone forget to set the thermostat before running after the approaching Green Earth forces? Jeez... I looked around to note a hallway in front of me and another heading right.
"Damn!" I remembered losing my weapon.
Maybe a bit too angrily, I set my radio to Sonja's frequency and called her up.
"I need to find a gun." I almost yelled.
"Why, aren't you rather unpleasant right now. You should know that I'm a CO-"
"Sonja, I need to find a gun now!"
I think at that point she finally caught my drift and got serious. There was some clicking on her end, she was getting her Intel from a computer.
"Got it. There should be an armory on the second basement of the motor pool. You could look there. Where are you?"
"Oh, I'm there."
I ran through the little lobby area and went down a narrow hallway to discover a small room with a trio of doors. Two of them were locked, while the third was wide open. I could only assume in their rush to load up for a confrontation with Green Earth, they had forgot to close the door behind them. You can imagine that I didn't waste anytime ripping open boxes and throwing open lockers.
Finally I found a gun that I was acquainted enough to run through an enemy base with. A Five-seveN with a flashlight attached. I suppose if I ran out of bullets, I could blind the enemy to death. It was always wishful thinking, but I didn't really have time or cared enough to break it down and take it off. Yeah, I admit, I smiled when I saw it was loaded with a full clip.
I usually don't get all that emotional over guns... but I did need a weapon badly.
When I started to head back toward the elevator, I could hear it ding and the doors slide open. I cursed upon seeing three alien grunts with their gun arms ready. There wasn't really anywhere I could hide since I was in the middle of the hallway. All three spotted me and one of them pointed out, the guy who crushed my gun before.
"There he is! Gun the worm down!" He yelled in this guttural tone. "He's after that woman in the cell!"
"Holy hell..." I sprinted back towards the opposite end of the hall as they began to spray the area with lead.
I turned the corner and put my back up against the wall. I was going to have to shoot it out with them, there was nowhere I could run. Before I darted out into the fray, I switched the gun's light on and got ready to fire. Hopefully the bright light at the end of the hall would throw off their accuracy somehow.
When I popped out to fire back, I could see their beady red eyes on their end of the hall and fired back one or two shots. If I took anymore time firing back I would have become a pincushion. I had forgotten how fast the alien gun arms were, they were spitfires with a high pitched whine to add to the chaos. Finally I took another moment to shoot back.
One of them had begun to make his way down the hall, and I promptly tagged him in all the right places. He went down as the other two began to scream in anger... or however an alien sounds like when they're ticked off. It ain't pretty, let me tell you. Another took too many steps forward and I cracked his helmet right between the eyes. In his painful moment of dying, he flopped around the floor and shot up his partner on accident.
I didn't stick around to gloat over beating them. Truth was... a part of me was hurting from taking them down. Maybe Lash's therapy wasn't as reversed as I thought it was.
Something caught my eye before I got back onto the lift, their shoes. Their nice spiked shoes that I wanted before. I grimaced as yanked off the spiked boots from one of them and their suit depressurized. Oh god... that smell... urg... I leapt into that elevator faster than a man set on fire. Now all I had to do was put them on somehow...
At least fifteen minutes of debating with myself later... I was back on the first basement floor, now able to take the ice with relative ease. You don't know what I saw when I put my feet into them but it was worth it. Anyway... I took the first door on the left and entered a long room with cell doors and a desk at the end of the block. I was at the right place, and by the sound of the grunts I took on downstairs... Jess was somewhere in here.
All of the door's windows were all fogged up from the cold temperature, and they were locked as well. I was tempted to shoot out the lock, cause you know... that's the most high tech way to open a locked door nowadays. But I had the feeling was more than capable to thwart my high-tech lock picking.
I was getting frustrated, and then I found the desk at the end of the hall, with a key card on it. Either these alien soldiers were really forgetful, or someone was playing with me. Quickly I went about opening them up with my gun ready, just in case, you know. The first three were empty, and I was sure this last one would be it...
But it was empty just like the other three...
"Gwa ha ha!" A voice cackled from the door to the hall. "Looking for someone? Maybe I can help."
A man walked in, he was really short and his hair was a freaky neon green color. It reminded me of Adder's hairdo in a way. The next thing I noticed was the weapon he carried, a grenade launcher with an ammo drum built like a revolver. And despite his small stature, he must have been wearing ten pounds of gear on his suit. Hell if I know what it did.
I got my gun ready, and pointed it at him.
"Who are you?"
"Me? I am Winchester. Black Hole Environmental expert."
I had thought as much... maybe his suit was all about resisting the elements. He paused for a second and cocked his head to the side as if sizing me up. A wicked grin began to spread across his face.
"Hey, hey, hey. You're the Crazy Wolf aren't you?" Winchester sneered.
"What? How do you know..."
He raised his grenade launcher and laughed this high pitched squeal. I swear the look of madness was written all over his face. The green hair, the short stature, he was a nutcase- easy.
"You've made quite a name for yourself 'Wolf'. Lash never did forget about you."
"Where's Jess? I know she's down here!" I yelled at him.
"Oh... her..." He seemed to struggle to remember, then I could tell something clicked as the maniacal grin returned to his face. "I put her on ice."
"You what?" I gasped, then I realized something. "Yeah right, where would your hostage go?"
"Surely you've heard of Green Earth's little rescue attempt. It's... a retaliation for their stupidity."
I didn't say anything, I hadn't thought of that.
"You must be Orange Star right? Well, after I'm done taking care of you, Flak will dispose of the little runt Andy. Then, we'll wipe a major city off the map. No one messes with us!"
He fired off a round of his grenade launcher and I desperately dove into the jail cell to escape the blast. I don't know what the hell he was packing those grenades with, but the explosion was devastating. The whole room shook, and the lights cut out for a second before shutting off completely. I turned on the flashlight on my gun... I sure was getting my money's worth out of it.
"You dead yet Wolf?" Winchester squealed giddily.
I don't know how I let him get under my skin like that, but I popped out to fire a couple rounds into him. The metallic plink and some sparks shooting off of his suit told me they didn't do squat. He had flipped down some night vision goggles and raised his grenade launcher again.
"Die worm!"
It was back into the jail cell, except this time the grenade round didn't explode. It simply spewed forth a wall of flame and began to pour smoke into my little 8x9 area. I covered my mouth and desperately looked for a way out.
"How do you like my Incendiary round huh? Pretty snazzy!"
The vent above beckoned as I flipped up the cot and stood on it while beating out the cover with the butt of my gun. It popped up and I was in there as fast as I could go. To my dismay, the vents were even more frozen than the rooms themselves. Icicles acted as icy bars in my way and I had to break them down with my gun. I kept crawling as Winchester's voice began to get fainter.
That crazy son of a...
The next time I jumped down from the vent, I was back out in the main hallway that led to the elevator. I hand landed around the corner and soon Winchester appeared with his grenade launcher cocked and ready.
"Where do you think you are going?" He grinned.
I pointed my flashlight directly into his eyes and overloaded his NVG for a time. His head began to shake as if someone had smacked him and I could hear him howl in pain.
"My eyes! You clever little worm!"
Thank god there was another door at the end of the hallway and I soon found myself running into a generator room. The loud electric hum of the equipment droned out any chance I had of listening for Winchester to enter. I flipped the light on my gun off and simply waited in the darkness. I was going to ambush his crazy ass.
The two generators were in the center making it so I could only dance around these things if I had to run from the green haired lunatic again. I had my finger on the trigger ready, and I strained to hear something other than the electric hum of the generators. I thought I heard some kind of heavy footsteps when another deafening explosion rang out behind me.
It was my turn to be blinded as it was some kind of flash-bang grenade. My senses were thrown into dissolution, I struggled to get them back in order as I spied a dark shadow moving toward me. Blindly, I began to fire out lighting up the area with my muzzle flash. Somehow I stumbled into another area, it was really narrow and a chain link fence blocked off some kind of device, probably the heating and air-conditioning system. When I had finally recovered from Winchester's flash-bang, I could see it was hooked up to some strange device as big as a household furnace or something.
"You like it Heckler?" I heard Winchester call out. "That little doohickey enables me to turn even the most blazing inferno into a freezing white death!"
He rushed in with his grenade launcher pointed toward me and pulled the trigger. I raised my gun and shot the grenade halfway in-between us. This one was a live grenade and tossed us both backwards when it blew up. I could hear a wall crumble as another chamber opened up. God... we were just moving all about this B1 section of the motor pool...
I sprinted through to a huge room with pillars shooting up almost everywhere. It was cover heaven. One wrong shot from Winchester's grenade launcher, and he could bury us both. It figured it didn't stop the little psycho from shooting off more of his grenades. The room lit up as it was another Incendiary round, fire began to spread everywhere. I looked up through some grating to see we were right under the tank and the jeep.
The oil and leaky fuel from the parked vehicles above probably drained into this area, I had just walked into a greased up frying pan.
"Blam! Blam! Blam!" Winchester sang while shooting out more Incendiary rounds. "You don't have to go to hell to fry, you can fry right here!"
"Shut up!" I finally yelled back and opened up on him.
My bullets once again didn't do squat. The gear he wore protected his body too well, and his head was a little small to do a one-hit kill. Not to mention the little weasel never stopped moving! I sprinted away as he fired a live round at me and launched some more metal in all directions. It was then I realized how short of breath I was. He was turning the temperature in this room to suffocating degrees.
My moment came, I could hear him snap open his launcher to reload. I had been waiting for this and ran out. Frantically, he pushed his grenade rounds into the chamber and snapped it shut. We began to wrestle with his weapon and pointed it straight up. Somehow he pulled the trigger and a round went right up to explode below the recon vehicle.
The ground gave out, and the recon jeep came sliding down into our area. We flew away from each other as metal came down in between us. I could hear Winchester yell out in pain as a rather large piece of metal came slamming down on his leg.
"Damn!" He cursed. "My leg! You lucky punk!"
I pointed my gun through the metal and fired on him angrily. I didn't care if I wasn't aiming, maybe I would get lucky on a ricochet.
"It's no use! You can't do squat to me!" He laughed. "You should feel lucky... I won't be killing you today."
I watched as he left his grenade launcher behind and limped off. He was a tough little sucker, it must have been broken. Once I was done watching him leave, I was out of there. I was short of breath and it was so hot I could hardly breathe. There was a grate on the floor and I quickly kicked it out. Damn, I must have been through every vent in the motor pool.
When I jumped down, I fell right into one of the B2 armory rooms that had been locked. My landing was less than perfect, I had tumbled across boxes and rifles knocking them to the floor. I stood up to brush myself off and holster my gun. Then I could feel something, there was someone else in the room. I looked to see a woman tied up and gagged on the opposite wall from the door.
"Jess?" I exclaimed.
-To be Continued...
--Next Chapter: The Crossing Guard
----------------------------------------------
"Worm!" Flak roared out. "Why don't you come out so I can go to work on you with Big Bertha! I heard what you did to Winchester!"
The massive Neotank, which he must have been referring to by Big Bertha, was probably their latest model. I don't know how they got it on the island, but it was bigger than most I've seen. It's shiny shell made it clear to me how recently it had been made, it hadn't even seen combat yet.
"What are you waitin' for worm?" He started again. "Get over here!"
Flak was nuts. There was no way I was going to be caught dead a hundred feet from that thing. All I had was a lousy pistol and an assault rifle. It was impossible to take out Big Bertha with the kind of weapons I had. I needed a damn nuclear missile.
"That's it! Jus' crush him!" Flak ordered.
Running away was out. When that Neotank's main cannon opened fire, it seemed like the whole world stopped turning.
----------------------------------------------
--Death Array
---Chapter 2: The Deep Freeze
The minute the elevator door opened up, I was blasted with air that was colder than the winds outside. I was caught so completely off guard that I nearly dropped my gun. There was a heavy mist in the air, and when I took a step forward, I nearly slipped on the floor. It was covered with a layer of ice.
"What the hell is going on down here?" I wondered aloud.
The hallway had some pipes running along the walls and I was forced to use them for support as I slipped and slid across the floor. It was like someone set the air conditioner on high for ten years left the faucet running. This was intentional, I'll give you that much.
I steadied myself on the pipes and looked down the hall. It wasn't a very long hall, and there was two sets of doors before it curved left and out of my view.
"Whoa... whoa... holy hell... Whoa!"
I couldn't help but shout in surprise as I barely made it ten feet before slipping and falling to the ground. My gun went flying from my grip. My mouth dropped open in agony as it bounced off of the walls and was turning the corner. It probably would have slid out of sight... if it wasn't for the big black boot that stepped on it and crushed it.
Some of the bullets went off due to the pressure put on them and the person that the leg belonged to yelled out in surprise. I noticed some cleats or ice shoes they were wearing and suddenly wanted a pair of my own. But my priorities changed as a big angry alien soldier finally rounded the corner, his boot all mangled from the bullets that tore into it. He looked at me for a second before raising his gun.
Instantly, I pushed my self back and slid across the ice right back into the elevator that was closing. The metallic plinks soon began to echo out when his bullets began to slam into the metal doors. I punched a button, any button, so long as it moved away from the alien soldier.
When the elevator doors opened up again, I was hit with the most extreme burst of heat I had felt in a long time. The lights were also pretty dim and made the area covered with shadows. What in the hell was going on in this place? Did someone forget to set the thermostat before running after the approaching Green Earth forces? Jeez... I looked around to note a hallway in front of me and another heading right.
"Damn!" I remembered losing my weapon.
Maybe a bit too angrily, I set my radio to Sonja's frequency and called her up.
"I need to find a gun." I almost yelled.
"Why, aren't you rather unpleasant right now. You should know that I'm a CO-"
"Sonja, I need to find a gun now!"
I think at that point she finally caught my drift and got serious. There was some clicking on her end, she was getting her Intel from a computer.
"Got it. There should be an armory on the second basement of the motor pool. You could look there. Where are you?"
"Oh, I'm there."
I ran through the little lobby area and went down a narrow hallway to discover a small room with a trio of doors. Two of them were locked, while the third was wide open. I could only assume in their rush to load up for a confrontation with Green Earth, they had forgot to close the door behind them. You can imagine that I didn't waste anytime ripping open boxes and throwing open lockers.
Finally I found a gun that I was acquainted enough to run through an enemy base with. A Five-seveN with a flashlight attached. I suppose if I ran out of bullets, I could blind the enemy to death. It was always wishful thinking, but I didn't really have time or cared enough to break it down and take it off. Yeah, I admit, I smiled when I saw it was loaded with a full clip.
I usually don't get all that emotional over guns... but I did need a weapon badly.
When I started to head back toward the elevator, I could hear it ding and the doors slide open. I cursed upon seeing three alien grunts with their gun arms ready. There wasn't really anywhere I could hide since I was in the middle of the hallway. All three spotted me and one of them pointed out, the guy who crushed my gun before.
"There he is! Gun the worm down!" He yelled in this guttural tone. "He's after that woman in the cell!"
"Holy hell..." I sprinted back towards the opposite end of the hall as they began to spray the area with lead.
I turned the corner and put my back up against the wall. I was going to have to shoot it out with them, there was nowhere I could run. Before I darted out into the fray, I switched the gun's light on and got ready to fire. Hopefully the bright light at the end of the hall would throw off their accuracy somehow.
When I popped out to fire back, I could see their beady red eyes on their end of the hall and fired back one or two shots. If I took anymore time firing back I would have become a pincushion. I had forgotten how fast the alien gun arms were, they were spitfires with a high pitched whine to add to the chaos. Finally I took another moment to shoot back.
One of them had begun to make his way down the hall, and I promptly tagged him in all the right places. He went down as the other two began to scream in anger... or however an alien sounds like when they're ticked off. It ain't pretty, let me tell you. Another took too many steps forward and I cracked his helmet right between the eyes. In his painful moment of dying, he flopped around the floor and shot up his partner on accident.
I didn't stick around to gloat over beating them. Truth was... a part of me was hurting from taking them down. Maybe Lash's therapy wasn't as reversed as I thought it was.
Something caught my eye before I got back onto the lift, their shoes. Their nice spiked shoes that I wanted before. I grimaced as yanked off the spiked boots from one of them and their suit depressurized. Oh god... that smell... urg... I leapt into that elevator faster than a man set on fire. Now all I had to do was put them on somehow...
At least fifteen minutes of debating with myself later... I was back on the first basement floor, now able to take the ice with relative ease. You don't know what I saw when I put my feet into them but it was worth it. Anyway... I took the first door on the left and entered a long room with cell doors and a desk at the end of the block. I was at the right place, and by the sound of the grunts I took on downstairs... Jess was somewhere in here.
All of the door's windows were all fogged up from the cold temperature, and they were locked as well. I was tempted to shoot out the lock, cause you know... that's the most high tech way to open a locked door nowadays. But I had the feeling was more than capable to thwart my high-tech lock picking.
I was getting frustrated, and then I found the desk at the end of the hall, with a key card on it. Either these alien soldiers were really forgetful, or someone was playing with me. Quickly I went about opening them up with my gun ready, just in case, you know. The first three were empty, and I was sure this last one would be it...
But it was empty just like the other three...
"Gwa ha ha!" A voice cackled from the door to the hall. "Looking for someone? Maybe I can help."
A man walked in, he was really short and his hair was a freaky neon green color. It reminded me of Adder's hairdo in a way. The next thing I noticed was the weapon he carried, a grenade launcher with an ammo drum built like a revolver. And despite his small stature, he must have been wearing ten pounds of gear on his suit. Hell if I know what it did.
I got my gun ready, and pointed it at him.
"Who are you?"
"Me? I am Winchester. Black Hole Environmental expert."
I had thought as much... maybe his suit was all about resisting the elements. He paused for a second and cocked his head to the side as if sizing me up. A wicked grin began to spread across his face.
"Hey, hey, hey. You're the Crazy Wolf aren't you?" Winchester sneered.
"What? How do you know..."
He raised his grenade launcher and laughed this high pitched squeal. I swear the look of madness was written all over his face. The green hair, the short stature, he was a nutcase- easy.
"You've made quite a name for yourself 'Wolf'. Lash never did forget about you."
"Where's Jess? I know she's down here!" I yelled at him.
"Oh... her..." He seemed to struggle to remember, then I could tell something clicked as the maniacal grin returned to his face. "I put her on ice."
"You what?" I gasped, then I realized something. "Yeah right, where would your hostage go?"
"Surely you've heard of Green Earth's little rescue attempt. It's... a retaliation for their stupidity."
I didn't say anything, I hadn't thought of that.
"You must be Orange Star right? Well, after I'm done taking care of you, Flak will dispose of the little runt Andy. Then, we'll wipe a major city off the map. No one messes with us!"
He fired off a round of his grenade launcher and I desperately dove into the jail cell to escape the blast. I don't know what the hell he was packing those grenades with, but the explosion was devastating. The whole room shook, and the lights cut out for a second before shutting off completely. I turned on the flashlight on my gun... I sure was getting my money's worth out of it.
"You dead yet Wolf?" Winchester squealed giddily.
I don't know how I let him get under my skin like that, but I popped out to fire a couple rounds into him. The metallic plink and some sparks shooting off of his suit told me they didn't do squat. He had flipped down some night vision goggles and raised his grenade launcher again.
"Die worm!"
It was back into the jail cell, except this time the grenade round didn't explode. It simply spewed forth a wall of flame and began to pour smoke into my little 8x9 area. I covered my mouth and desperately looked for a way out.
"How do you like my Incendiary round huh? Pretty snazzy!"
The vent above beckoned as I flipped up the cot and stood on it while beating out the cover with the butt of my gun. It popped up and I was in there as fast as I could go. To my dismay, the vents were even more frozen than the rooms themselves. Icicles acted as icy bars in my way and I had to break them down with my gun. I kept crawling as Winchester's voice began to get fainter.
That crazy son of a...
The next time I jumped down from the vent, I was back out in the main hallway that led to the elevator. I hand landed around the corner and soon Winchester appeared with his grenade launcher cocked and ready.
"Where do you think you are going?" He grinned.
I pointed my flashlight directly into his eyes and overloaded his NVG for a time. His head began to shake as if someone had smacked him and I could hear him howl in pain.
"My eyes! You clever little worm!"
Thank god there was another door at the end of the hallway and I soon found myself running into a generator room. The loud electric hum of the equipment droned out any chance I had of listening for Winchester to enter. I flipped the light on my gun off and simply waited in the darkness. I was going to ambush his crazy ass.
The two generators were in the center making it so I could only dance around these things if I had to run from the green haired lunatic again. I had my finger on the trigger ready, and I strained to hear something other than the electric hum of the generators. I thought I heard some kind of heavy footsteps when another deafening explosion rang out behind me.
It was my turn to be blinded as it was some kind of flash-bang grenade. My senses were thrown into dissolution, I struggled to get them back in order as I spied a dark shadow moving toward me. Blindly, I began to fire out lighting up the area with my muzzle flash. Somehow I stumbled into another area, it was really narrow and a chain link fence blocked off some kind of device, probably the heating and air-conditioning system. When I had finally recovered from Winchester's flash-bang, I could see it was hooked up to some strange device as big as a household furnace or something.
"You like it Heckler?" I heard Winchester call out. "That little doohickey enables me to turn even the most blazing inferno into a freezing white death!"
He rushed in with his grenade launcher pointed toward me and pulled the trigger. I raised my gun and shot the grenade halfway in-between us. This one was a live grenade and tossed us both backwards when it blew up. I could hear a wall crumble as another chamber opened up. God... we were just moving all about this B1 section of the motor pool...
I sprinted through to a huge room with pillars shooting up almost everywhere. It was cover heaven. One wrong shot from Winchester's grenade launcher, and he could bury us both. It figured it didn't stop the little psycho from shooting off more of his grenades. The room lit up as it was another Incendiary round, fire began to spread everywhere. I looked up through some grating to see we were right under the tank and the jeep.
The oil and leaky fuel from the parked vehicles above probably drained into this area, I had just walked into a greased up frying pan.
"Blam! Blam! Blam!" Winchester sang while shooting out more Incendiary rounds. "You don't have to go to hell to fry, you can fry right here!"
"Shut up!" I finally yelled back and opened up on him.
My bullets once again didn't do squat. The gear he wore protected his body too well, and his head was a little small to do a one-hit kill. Not to mention the little weasel never stopped moving! I sprinted away as he fired a live round at me and launched some more metal in all directions. It was then I realized how short of breath I was. He was turning the temperature in this room to suffocating degrees.
My moment came, I could hear him snap open his launcher to reload. I had been waiting for this and ran out. Frantically, he pushed his grenade rounds into the chamber and snapped it shut. We began to wrestle with his weapon and pointed it straight up. Somehow he pulled the trigger and a round went right up to explode below the recon vehicle.
The ground gave out, and the recon jeep came sliding down into our area. We flew away from each other as metal came down in between us. I could hear Winchester yell out in pain as a rather large piece of metal came slamming down on his leg.
"Damn!" He cursed. "My leg! You lucky punk!"
I pointed my gun through the metal and fired on him angrily. I didn't care if I wasn't aiming, maybe I would get lucky on a ricochet.
"It's no use! You can't do squat to me!" He laughed. "You should feel lucky... I won't be killing you today."
I watched as he left his grenade launcher behind and limped off. He was a tough little sucker, it must have been broken. Once I was done watching him leave, I was out of there. I was short of breath and it was so hot I could hardly breathe. There was a grate on the floor and I quickly kicked it out. Damn, I must have been through every vent in the motor pool.
When I jumped down, I fell right into one of the B2 armory rooms that had been locked. My landing was less than perfect, I had tumbled across boxes and rifles knocking them to the floor. I stood up to brush myself off and holster my gun. Then I could feel something, there was someone else in the room. I looked to see a woman tied up and gagged on the opposite wall from the door.
"Jess?" I exclaimed.
-To be Continued...
--Next Chapter: The Crossing Guard
----------------------------------------------
"Worm!" Flak roared out. "Why don't you come out so I can go to work on you with Big Bertha! I heard what you did to Winchester!"
The massive Neotank, which he must have been referring to by Big Bertha, was probably their latest model. I don't know how they got it on the island, but it was bigger than most I've seen. It's shiny shell made it clear to me how recently it had been made, it hadn't even seen combat yet.
"What are you waitin' for worm?" He started again. "Get over here!"
Flak was nuts. There was no way I was going to be caught dead a hundred feet from that thing. All I had was a lousy pistol and an assault rifle. It was impossible to take out Big Bertha with the kind of weapons I had. I needed a damn nuclear missile.
"That's it! Jus' crush him!" Flak ordered.
Running away was out. When that Neotank's main cannon opened fire, it seemed like the whole world stopped turning.
----------------------------------------------