Chapter 31- Alone in the Shadow Realm
Flynn readied his 203 and walked out the door. There was no one there.
"By the way…" Drake said. "How much ammo do you guys have left? I've only got about a clip and a half left."
"Hmm…" Keith checked his pockets. "I've got two boxes, but they're both used, so I would estimate that I have about 140 rounds left. Which, with a SAW, is pretty small. And…" Keith checked Julie's pockets. He was carrying her with him again. "…I'd think that she's got about three clips left."
"No grenades, and about two clips left." Flynn said. "It looks like we're running a little short on ammo right now."
"What are we going to do about that?" Drake asked. "Obviously that's not enough to get us out of here."
"We could always pick up the weapons and ammo the fiends drop." Keith suggested. "We should start doing that now."
"Yeah." Agreed Flynn. "Without ammo, we're sitting ducks in here. The only one who showed any aptitude at hand-to-hand combat was Matt. And even he was little match for the fiends." He crouched and nailed a fiend who had just turned the corner. "Let's go the other way." They began to walk in the other direction. Three fiends carrying assault rifles greeted them. Drake and Flynn returned the greeting with a couple of head shots and a three-round burst to the stomach.
"I think I'll take this." Drake said, retrieving an AK-74 SU from the dead hands of a fiend. "And these, too." He snagged the clips from the fiend's vest. Flynn had grabbed what looked like an AK-47, but it seemed the have a grenade attachment duck taped to the bottom.
"No reason to change what kind of weapon we're using now." He said. He pulled a few clips out of the fiend's vest and pocketed them. "Let's go." They continued to walk down the hall. After about 400 meters it branched off into three paths. "Oh, which to take?"
"I would like to follow the right path." Keith said. "There's no blood there."
"Wouldn't that mean that less has been killed there already?" Drake asked.
"Yes, and that makes it even more likely that we have not been there."
"Ah. I see your point." Someone whispered something in Drake's ear. "What was that?" Drake whispered back.
"Who are you talking to, Drake?" Flynn asked. Drake turned around. There was no one there.
"Someone said something in my ear… I could have sworn…There it is again!" Drake looked frantically around.
"I think our buddy Drake has lost it." Keith said to Flynn, quietly, but not quietly enough to prevent Drake from hearing it.
"I have not!"
"You're hearing voices from nowhere."
"It said to go straight…"
"Huh? Why would we go there? There's blood everywhere. We've probably already been there."
"No, seriously, we need to go straight! I'll bet you anything that that is where Matt is!"
"Matt's dead, we've already established that." Keith said.
"He can't be…"
"It's too late to be sentimental. We need to go."
"Go that way if you like. I'm going this way." And with that, Drake began walking down the path, following the voice from nowhere.
"Oh that little…" He heard Flynn say. He ignored it and went on. The hall way was indeed coated with blood, you could have sworn that it was actually made of blood. Drake ignored that disturbing thought and pressed onwards. He came to a small room filled with some fiends and ducked back around the corner. Without the others he was now in a much more vulnerable position. He had one weapon to the fiend's eight. He had to be stealthy if he had any hope of surviving. He reached around the corner with his M-24 and shot one in the head. Its head exploded and it died. Then something strange happened.
The fiend next to the dead one growled at the one on the other side. The one on the other side growled back. Then, to Drake's surprise, the first fiend leveled his AK-47 on the second and shot him in the head. This triggered a chain reaction in which all the other fiends began to shoot each other. Before long only one remained. Drake effortlessly shot him in the head.
"That was weird…" he muttered, collecting the unexpended clips of ammo from the fiend's corpses. "Why would they shoot each other…?" Without pausing to consider this question, he turned down the next hallway and pressed even farther in. He encountered no more fiends for another half hour, then found a long hallway littered with them. More metal doors lined the sides. "Maybe…" He reached around the corner and shot a fiend in the head. Unlike before, the fiends acted rationally. One of them growled. Three fiends carrying AK-74 SUs came down the hall, scanning in all directions for the shooter.
Drake clicked his M-24 into auto and popped out around the corner, catching the three fiends by surprise. He was able to mow them down before they could react. As the last fiend went down, Drake heard the clicking sound of an empty clip. He had run out of M-24 ammo, and all the other fiends had noticed him. He whipped back around the corner, unslung his AK-74 SU, and threw the empty M-24 around the corner. The fiends paused, believing that he had surrendered. Drake whipped around the corner again and opened fire on the fiend horde. He cut down about half of them before the clip ran dry. He ducked back around the corner as the remaining fiends began shooting at him.
The fiends began lumbering down the hall. Drake pulled the clip out and replaced it, then ran farther down the hallway. The fiends came, but only one by one, so Drake was able to kill them without much difficulty.
This is sickening. Drake thought. There has to be a better way than this. Despite this thought, Drake collected all the ammo he could before moving on down the hall. He checked inside each of the cells, but there was nothing in them. The hall ended in a dead end.
Why would the voice take me down here? There's no where to go. Unless… Keith must have been right. I'm losing it. Drake leaned up against the wall at the end of the hall. He almost fell over as it swung back to admit him. Of course! A secret passage! He unslung his AK rifle and began walking down this new hall.
It too was lined with metal doors. Every cell in this hallway was occupied, however. Well, not really occupied, as all the people in them had to be dead. Several of them had been hung upside down by their one remaining leg, their stomachs torn open, their guts slowly spilling out onto the floor. Others had been thrown onto tables that had retractable spikes; Drake assumed that the fiends had slowly pushed the spikes through the tortured person with the little wheel on the side of he table. Some of the rooms only had bones in them, bones that looked curiously like they had been chewed on. Perhaps most horrible of all was the largest room near the end of the hall. It looked like a surgery ward in a hospital, but Drake guessed that it wasn't for helpful surgery, judging from the empty shell laying on the table and the internal organs that had been scattered all about the room. Unable to keep his stomach calm in the face of such disturbing images, Drake turned and threw up all over the floor.
Ugh… these guys are worse than I thought. Maybe I shouldn't have gone this way… at least by myself… why is it so cold? For some strange reason, the temperature seemed to have fallen. It had felt relatively pleasant when they had entered, not really warm, but it couldn't have been below 65. And… is it getting darker? Suddenly, everything began fading into darkness, until Drake could barely see three feet in front of him. He sat down, back against the door to the surgery room, shivering. What's going on?
The game of the Shadow Realm, came an ethereal voice.
"Huh? Who's there? Show yourself!" Drake said.
I cannot… not yet anyhow. I am losing the strength that gives me physical form…I need to leave. But first I need to tell you something. As long as you are alone in the Shadow Realm, it will do things like this to make your life more miserable. Remember, cold and dark invoke feelings of despair. This is the power of the Shadow Realm- it will make you feel despair like you have never felt it before. However, when you are in a group, the power of the Shadow Realm cannot touch you. You need to find the others. Until then, take this. A white cloak appeared at Drake's feet. Farewell…
Drake stood up and wrapped the cloak around him. It was incredibly warm inside. Shouldering his rifle, Drake began to walk back toward the way he had come, in search of his friends.