Dee Dee had always thought of herself as being a tough survivor. Now she knew she had only been kidding herself. She was nothing more than a glorified maintenance worker. Nothing special, and certainly not so tough.
Perhaps a moronic, egotistical, arrogant idiot was a better description. Who did she think she was? Superman? A soft, hysterical giggle escaped her lips before she could seal them. Had she really thought she would be able to just sneak back into the Alpha-Omega labs, grab her friend Trish and get the hell out?
What an insane fool she had been.
Rolling her head from side to side against the cold metal of the walls she knew was going to die. She knew the truth. She had seen it.
A biohazard? Is that what they were calling it? A biohazard was supposed to be a microorganism. A bacteria or a virus. Certainly not a monster of mythic proportions. A mutant dragon that could rip open walls; a deviant lizard that could walk like a man or crawl across the ceiling; a freakish monstrosity, as tall as two men, but with claws for fingers and as many eyes as a spider. Those were things of nightmares. Things like that should not exist.
But they did.
Dee gritted her teeth and fought back the hysteria that threatened to take over her mind and body. She rocked back and forth as she physically fought to maintain control of herself. A part of her wanted nothing more than to find some small, tight, dark corner to curl up in and wait for it all to be over. Surely security and those newly arrived Marines would be coming soon. They would charge in, kill the monsters and she would be safe again. She wanted to believe that. Desperately.
She sobbed quietly as the scream of another human victim forced her to face that lie for what it was. No-one was coming. There would be no rescue.
Dee stared upwards at nothing. Then she closed her eyes. She fought back the panic that gripped her. Her grandfather had taught her that to survive you had to think. You had to be as calm as possible. It did not mean she could not feel fear, it just meant she could not allow it to overrule her rational mind and the gut instinct that guided it. Quietly she breathed in through her nose, then softly breathed out through her mouth. She must not think about what she had seen. The blood, the gore, the monsters, the demons. She must push it away. Lock it into her memories. She would have to deal with it later.
She must focus now. Focus on surviving. On finding her best friend. On getting them both out alive. No rescue was coming. She could count on no-one else to come to her aid. To survive meant she had to be smart, silent and cunning. These monsters were not going to get her without a mean fight. If it was her time to go she was taking some of them with her.
Silently Dee took a deep breath and then very cautiously she peered around the local generator she had hidden behind. Each sector had its own generator and every lab that contained unstable alien artifacts had a secondary generator installed. She had hidden in one of those labs. As a Senior Operations Manager she had been entrusted with a master set of keys that would open almost any doors, except those to the most top secret areas. For those sectors only a color coded pass key would open the doors.
Through the triple sealed Plexiglas window Dee watched for any sign of movement, but, at the moment saw none. Whatever had been out there in the halls had moved on, for now.
Glancing around she took a quick inventory of what was in the room. Much of it was broken or in shambles. Either by the hysteria of the lab workers as they tried to escape or by the beasts themselves as they had pursued their hapless victims. There was broken glass by the bucket loads, notebooks, pencils, pens, pieces of scanners, computers and printers, perhaps a hundred bottles of powdered and liquid chemicals that meant nothing to her, chairs, small instruments and lab tools, but not a damn thing that looked remotely like a decent weapon. The last object her eyes rested upon was one of the largest solid objects in the room, but it had hardly been created as an offensive weapon. Still, it looked like her only option at the moment and at least it required very little skill to use and had some range to it.
Dee glanced again towards the window to assure herself that nothing was there before she began to very slowly and painstakingly make her way through the rubble to the other side of the lab. Once there, making as little noise as possible, she unlatched the fire extinguisher and removed it from the wall.
It wasn't a very big fire extinguisher and on the scale of weaponry it barely rated above a sharp stick, but in some way it made her feel better. At least now she had a little bit more than just harsh language to defend herself with.
Turning around again she made her way back to the doorway. For the moment she did not need her master key. One of the mammoth dragon monsters had ripped this door open. She tried not to think about how much power it would take for anything to rip open a solid steel door like tin foil, or how little something like that would care about her lame wanna-be weapon. She forced herself to focus on watching the hallway for any sign of movement as she reluctantly made her way deeper into the lab complex.
There were only two places anyone could hope to hold out in for an extended period of time. One was the so-called "panic room" that had been built into the Primary Observation Area of the Omega lab and the other was the storage warehouse that had been originally designed to house the first engineers assigned to begin constructing the base. It had been built to withstand all the intense forces of nature and matter that Mars threw at unwanted guests. In one of those places Dee prayed she would find her friend. She couldn't turn back now even if she wanted to. The obsolete air shaft she had used to gain entrance to the labs had been torn apart by an explosion in the one of the many coolant compressors found throughout the base. She knew her best, and only, bet was to make it to one of these safe havens and get herself inside. If they would let her in. If there were any survivors.
