The elevator came to a halt on the lower levels of the labs of the Mars Base, taking its occupant deeper into the abyss of darkness. As the thick doors opened, Private First Class Zuckerman immediately leveled his shotgun to the blackness that he was exposed.
Nothing came of it. No growls, no moaning. No sounds that could indicate that more of the enemy were about to assault his cornered position, huddled to the side of the elevator, half in fear and half in tactical thinking.
Slowly, the man lifting himself to a half crouch and began to walk forward, reaching for the flashlight he had taped to the lower portion of his gun, just along the barrel and outside the reach of the pumping action. His issued black pants seemed to stifle his movements only slightly as he dragged the further end of his gun against the shadows.
No living thing was there to cause him concern. The room was filled with archive shelves containing networking servers that the lab linked too for the distribution of data and information through the Delta Labs and the marine barracks. A few consoles blinked of lights and monitors, including one that suggested an incoming transmission set to a base-wide broadcast.
Zuckerman turned himself to his right and held the flashlight against the wall, tracing streaks of red until they ended on the body of a fellow marine. The man's armor was ripped from his chest though the shoulder pads still remained. Pieces of wire hung over his abdomen as did the ruined and peeled mass of flesh that was his face. What remained of his head was a mass of muscle and bone. One of his eyes was removed from the darkened socket, while the other was blue and left staring at the ground.
Paul Zuckerman felt a little more confident that he was alone and with caution, approached the corpse that was tucked, seated in the corner. Reaching out with his gloved hand, he pressed a small switch on the side of the door that cast light from an emergency lamp only about waist high. The corpse created a shadow with its head next to the lamp post, the dried blood on the glass giving a small degree of red light.
Kneeling down, the Private took a moment to examine the PDA of the Marine. Within moments, the screen of the small device gave away all relevant details. His name was Gregory Thomas, a Sergeant before his laceration based demise. The man's service record indicated that he had been stationed on the UAC Mars Research Base for some six months where he was actually raised from Corporal to Sergeant about two weeks prior to the incidents that left Zuckerman's squad dead and him very much alone in a base devoid of the majority of human life.
Private Zuckerman's mind was a blur of all the events that had led up to this moment. He had finished using a urinal in the men's room near the main hall when everything went wrong. An explosion rattled him as he was washing his hands, a quake powerful enough to knock down the mirror and shattered it before the marine. Shards splintered and flew through the air, cutting his arm lightly. Within moments, Zuckerman was up and rushing towards the exit while reaching for his pistol.
As he exited the bathroom, he found the greeting's desk was unattended while sounds of gunfire shocked the air around him. Zuckerman rushed to the kitchenette to his right to find the situation had already collapsed into anarchy with one of the marines dead over the tables in the back, his killer standing there with his hands over the man's neck.
Zuckerman wasted no time in raising his side arm to place two shots in the back of the murderer's head. But as the man absorbed the bullets, he spun around with the front portion of his head in pieces. Despite missing the crown right down to his right eye, the man began a staggering walk towards Zuckerman. Paul froze as he watched this man move like some drunk, in the confusion of how he could move despite missing most of his brain mass.
Against the backdrop of the massive windows depicting Mars' surface, Zuckerman fired another couple of rounds into the silhouette, and then another pair. At last the man slumped forward and fell against the step down, sprawling before the armed marine.
From what Paul saw, the skin of the dead man was clammy and grayed from decay while his eye was a blank white, as though without pupils. He had seen eyes like those before, from a man who failed to come back from Mars' surface. Without shielding to his eyes, the rust and sand dried up his pupils and left him blind before death. Crimson spread along the metal flooring of the creature's exposed brain case.
After examining the dead, Zuckerman took a look at the dead marine. The combat helmet masked his face and left the private with no interest of knowing what a choked man would look like after his death. Grabbing his shotgun, Zuckerman turned away from the kitchen and began to move, his priority to reach the checkpoint of the Delta Labs.
But all this was over one hour again. Since then, Zuckerman had been involved in combat with perhaps a dozen of these creatures. His progress had been slow, methodical and as prudent as possible. He checked all potential entry points of rooms he had cleared, gathered up all ammunition he could carry, taking his time and moving with slow, steady progress towards the Delta Labs.
His attention focused again on the dead Sergeant Thomas, and reached down into the man's ammo belts. Unbuttoning the pouches, Zuckerman grabbed a pair of machine gun clips from the man's possession. The ammunition was of little use to Zuckerman now, as he had smashed his previous SMG against the head of one of those monsters. Yet he had little doubt that he would soon find another weapon that could use them.
Zuckerman glanced up as he worked and saw something that made him immediately turn cold.
A pair of ruby eyes watched him from across the body of Thomas. With Zuckerman's shadow to the lamp post, he could not see just what it was. When a second pair of eyes joined the first, it attacked.
Zuckerman's head reeled with a sharp pain as the back of it was slammed to the metal wall behind him, the creature's leap putting him carefully underneath the beast. Throwing his eyes away from the monster, he reached for his shotgun that still rested in his hands. Quickly angling it up, he depressed the trigger as fast as possible and heard three screams from the blast.
The first two came from the monster as it was flung back in the darkness behind Thomas' body. But the third came from Zuckerman himself. The shotgun's angle rested the butt of it against his right bicep, slamming the weapon into his exposed muscle. With a cringed look on his features, Zuckerman flexed his muscles as if to stop his arm from cramping. The shotgun clattered to his side as he rubbed the arm, trying to stop the pain that swelled from the kickback of the gun.
A moment of enduring the pain occurred before Zuckerman sat up and glanced at the being he had just killed. Where there were once four eyes, there were only three now. But before the Private First Class could examine his kill, the creature seemed to ignite with fire around its carcass, turning red light a cigarette drawing flame towards its butt. Within a second it was gone, leaving nothing but a few flickering orange cinders that danced in the air before going out.
Zuckerman watched it happen in silence, waiting for something more to happen. He held his breath as to not make a sound, not even to think. But soon he had to breathe again, and his mind started to work while he watched the darkness surrounding him.
There was that feeling again of how things could come to this. Three weeks before, Zuckerman was considering how he would propose to Laura back on Earth. Then during his shift standing guard at the barracks, he received an email from her, asking if perhaps they could end their relationship. Zuckerman thought of his friend who had been stationed in the same department as Laura was, and everyday until now he had been fighting the suspicions that maybe he had something to do with her abandonment. Perhaps this was the borderline schizophrenia that the other marines felt after coming back from the Alpha Lab experiments. Suddenly believing things that simply were not true, that could not be real. Every now and then, Zuckerman believed he had heard a voice, telling him that it wasn't his fault, that his friend Eric Hammer made Laura leave him. That it was Hammer's fault. That he had took Laura away from Zuckerman.
That Eric had to die for what he did to Paul.
"Private First Class Paul Zuckerman," he whispered aloud to the darkness. "Get the fuck a hold of yourself."
Zuckerman sat there and rested a moment, watching where the monster was until his eyes felt dry. He blinked several times to moisten them, but as he began to collect his stamina again, one of the doors to the other side of the room opened. A familiar clicking sound emitted from the shadow that stood there...