F.E.A.R: Origins
By Genoscythe
Chapter 2: Trial by Sewage
"Let's, uh…let's go back to the veteran point man," the reporter suggested. "Give me some details." The cameraman next to him was making an odd hand gesture at a file cabinet on the far wall, but the reporter was more interested in the story.
"Well, if you gotta know…" the Team Coordinator began. The following mental image unfolded in the journalist's head with Betters's higher-than-TV-14 brand of guidance.
F.E.A.R. tactical officer Jin Sun-Kwon shut the door behind her in such a gentle, practiced motion that one would think she spent all her spare time learning how to gracefully shut doors. The claustrophobic steel room held only a table and a chair attached to a man.
"Spen Jankowski," Jin began, dropping a hefty folder onto the table. The man started, then cautiously reached into the dim lighting to pick up the folder. Jin slid it away from him. "I didn't say you could read it."
"Apologies, ma'am," the soldier clipped, returning the hand.
"I can tell there's one thing you're really going to like about F.E.A.R," Jin said with a smile. "We don't stand on ceremony, because officially we don't exist. We don't have a public image to uphold, and so far we haven't had a problem with discipline." Jin's tone suggested that this was going to remain so, whether Jankowski cooperated or not.
"Understood, ma'am."
"You'll get used to it." Jin flipped open the folder and bent over the first page. "Delta force, started in the Green Berets…you were chosen for Delta because you have 'an uncanny ability to ignore the idea of consequence and personal endangerment'." Jin smiled at this, but Jankowski couldn't figure out why. She turned to the next page. "Never left Fort Bragg…it says you were recommended for F.E.A.R. by Major Dennison after repairing – uh..."
Jin faltered, and it was Jankowksi's turn to smile. "He called it a supernatural leak in the john."
"Yes, that's actually what it says on the report…"
"Flooded the whole damn base, and I don't mean just the Delta part."
"What exactly made this leak supernatural?"
"It talked," Jankowski replied knowingly.
"What?"
"The crapper."
"Really?"
"Hell, I thought if anyone would believe it, it would be you people."
"I believe you, I just don't think I'll ever get used to this job…" Jin began pacing the length of the room. This shortly hypnotized Jankowksi because the room was no more than four paces wide and she had to repeatedly go back and forth. "So, how did you fix it?"
"I flushed a grenade down its throat."
Jin stopped pacing. "That worked?"
"It blew the ever-loving fuck out of that toilet…ma'am."
Jin leaned over the table again. "That's exactly the kind of thing we're looking for. Welcome to F.E.A.R."
"Just like that?"
"Yeah. As long as you can stuff grenades into things, you'll do fine. Besides, our last operative was possessed by a toaster oven and we're a man short."
"Well…cool." Jankowski got up and moved into the light, reaching to shake Jin's hand. Immediately, she jerked back. When prompted by a raised eyebrow, she explained.
"Our last operative, had he not been possessed by a toaster oven, would have been flayed alive by a sexual harassment lawsuit. Sorry if I'm a little…jumpy."
Jankowski shakily retrieved his hand. "When do I start?"
Jin glanced at her watch. "The next time something paranormal happens."
"What do I do until then?"
Jin cracked a smile, but took several steps backward in case he happened to take it as a sexual invitation. "I don't normally tell people what to do with their free time. I'm afraid I can't help you."
"We're underground," Jankowski observed, knocking on the nearest wall. "How do I get topside?"
"Oh, I'm afraid you can't do that," Jin's smile terminated into a determined pout. "This is a secret government facility. Brass doesn't want any of their secrets getting out," she explained. "Even the worthless ones," she muttered as an afterthought.
Jankowski sighed shakily, and began pacing his half of the room. He hadn't quite mastered it like Jin had, and he found himself repeatedly bumping into the walls. "Tell me you've got, like, a bar or something down here. Right? Maybe some girls?"
"How do you think we got into the harassment suit?" Jin moaned, pinching the bridge of her nose. He was turning out to be just like the last one. Jin was sure that when her mother had said that she would be beating them away with a broom, it was meant to be a positive thing. It definitely wasn't meant to be taken literally.
"Listen…we've got a ping-pong table and a target range. Make use of them until we get a call," Jin suggested, inching toward the door.
"Ping-pong? Of all the tabletop sports, you have ping-pong?" Jankowski growled. Without making it seem too deliberate, Jin opened the door and shot through it like a lightning bolt. As the door swung back, Jankowski murmured "It's always ping-pong. Nobody likes fucking ping-pong."
Two months later, they got a call. Jin was the first to the phone. Mere moments in the future found her jogging down a hallway toward F.E.A.R.'s rec room. She had mostly gotten over her irrational fear of men, but her heart still gave a stutter as she leaned through the doorway.
"We got a call!" She shouted in triumph. Jankowski paused, holding the ping-pong table in mid-air.
"No shit. I can see the whole place is jumping."
If tumbleweeds could penetrate that far into the Earth's crust, one would have found its way through the corridor passing by the rec room.
"Look, stop benching the ping-pong table and suit up. By suit up I mean at least put a shirt on. Please." Jin shuddered and skipped quickly to the armory. Assault rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, rocket launchers, several different calibers of revolver, and some bizarre experimental weaponry all hung on the walls like trophies. F.E.A.R. got more every day. Arms manufacturing companies assumed that, with F.E.A.R.'s mostly false reputation as an elite paranormal strike force, they would be in the perfect position to test out new guns.
It was like having a celebrity sponsor a pair of sneakers. At F.E.A.R.'s inception, Betters signed off for one of Obregon's hefty repeating cannons, and corporations like Shogo and Andra took it as a sign that the group was open to promoting weapons. The Team Coordinator even had to veto a commercial from Armacham that went along the lines of 'If our Type-7 Particle Weapon is good enough for F.E.A.R. then it's good enough for you!'
As usual, Jin ignored all the weapons of mass destruction and walked straight across the room. In the corner, a rough-hewn metal box full of grenades and .40 caliber semi-automatic pistols sat glumly. While she was holstering a pistol, she heard a cry from the doorway.
"Holy shit!" Jankowski exclaimed, quoting the first man to crack open King Tut's tomb in over three thousand years. "This has all been here the whole fucking time?"
"Yes, Jankowski…" Jin answered dutifully.
"Why didn't you tell me about it? I've been working out in the rec room for two goddamn months!"
"If it makes you feel any better…pick a weapon. Any weapon."
Immediately, Jankowski grabbed the nearest gun. It was shaped something like a grenade launcher, but a wide block was attached to the top.
"What's this?" He asked. Jin inspected it closely, firing up her mental database.
"We've been calling that one the Turbo Lover," she finally answered. "It has a computer that analyzes any target's weak points and programs the slugs to home in on them."
"Oh…weak points…" Jankowski turned the oversized revolver around in his hands. "So it's got magic bullets?"
"Pretty much. They're big enough to obliterate anyone's…weak point…in a single shot."
"I like the way it thinks."
"Don't bring it!" Jin cried, running over to him, grabbing the weapon, and leaping back out of arm's reach. "That won't help you for this mission."
Where the hell are you two? Betters roared over the PA system. Jin sighed.
"Just grab something and meet us at the briefing room," she suggested, trotting briskly out of the armory. Entering the briefing room, Jin was always surprised at the amount of money somebody spent on F.E.A.R. headquarters. The screen gaping in front of her was the kind that movie stars would own in about ten years, and all it displayed was the bland F.E.A.R. logo.
The short man leaning against the wall next to it eyed her critically. "How's the new guy?" He asked casually.
"He's not much different than the last one," Jin admitted.
"Good, 'cause it was your fault we lost Hank."
"But…the toaster oven!"
"You pushed him into it."
"Oscar…it ate his clothes!"
"Jin, listen to me sweetheart. I think this place is getting' to you. First thing tomorrow, I'll hire a psychiatrist and bring him down here for you. How's that sound?" Betters normally wouldn't have given her the time of day, but at the moment he felt like he needed a psychiatrist himself.
"I'll…think about it," Jin answered shakily.
"Fine. Here's the situation." Betters clicked on a console, and several pictures popped into existence on the screen. They were all different angles of a suburban house. "Guy down there says his couch is movin' by itself. Do whatever you can to make it stop." Betters looked around the room angrily. "And where the hell is the new guy?"
"He's…preoccupied in the armory," Jin told him. "I told him not to bring the Turbo Lover."
"Good," Betters snorted. "He'll probably shoot his own johnson off – or worse, the caller's."
Jankowski took that moment to burst through the door. He would have opened it the normal way, but he had so many guns weighing him down that if he stopped moving he would fall backwards.
"Let's go, let's go!" he exclaimed, pumping a shotgun in the air with one hand and a rocket launcher with the other.
"Jesus fucking Christ…did you empty the place out?" Betters asked.
"Is that the Highlander on your back?" Jin asked.
"Hell yeah!" Jankowski replied, answering both questions at once. "Let's go!"
Jin sighed again. "Come on."
As if covering his body in deadly weapons wasn't exhilarating enough, Jankowski's adrenaline rose to new heights as the helicopter took them across the city. It was his first breath of fresh air in two months. To pass the time, he was inspecting all of the weapons he had blindly picked up.
"What's this one?" he asked Jin, holding up a tube-like gun.
"That's the Shogo Akuma, but we call it the Highlander," Jin muttered quietly. "It's a rail gun."
Jankowski looked down the barrel. Instead of a circular opening, there was only a thin slot. "What caliber?" he prodded.
Jin groaned. "Katana."
"This thing shoots swords?" Jankowski shouldered the rail gun and looked down the sight. "Kickass."
"Maybe for you." As the helicopter slowed down over a residential street, Jankowski realized for the first time that he didn't know what the mission was or where he was going.
Looking up and down the street, he spotted a manhole near the LZ. There must be something in the sewers…he thought to himself. Ghost crocodiles, or ghost sewer pirates, or ghost hobos, or aliens. The helicopter lowered itself to the pavement, and Jankowski leapt off one side while Jin slid off the other. The former Delta soldier rolled behind a trash can, aiming the Highlander at the sewer opening. Jin calmly strode across the sidewalk, obscured by the waiting helicopter.
Jankowski ran, hunched forward, to the manhole. Pulling off the cover, he shone his flashlight into the smelly darkness. Jin absent-mindedly kicked a lawn gnome. Flashing a complicated hand signal out of habit, Jankowski gripped the ladder below and slid down into the sewer.
Jin rang the doorbell.
"Are you the police?" The caller asked, ushering Jin into the house.
"Yeah. Furniture division," Jin grumbled. "I'm just here with my partner to…" She looked back as the man closed the door. "Wasn't there someone behind me?"
"I don't think so."
Jin threw the door open to the sound of a grenade exploding under a pile of sewage. Moments later, she heard a twang and half of a broken katana spun out of the open manhole.
Jankowski didn't really know what he was shooting at, but it was big and gooey and coming straight toward him. His first Highlander shot went wide, bouncing off the wall and nearly stabbing him in the face. It was an experimental weapon for a reason.
Throwing the rail gun aside, he pulled out a shotgun. Bits of the oozing monster flew off, splattering on the walls, but it kept going. He emptied the shotgun, and instead of reloading he threw it next to the Highlander and pulled out another weapon. This one just happened to be a sniper rifle. With a snort, he threw it with the other guns. Sniper rifles were for little girls.
Finally, his hands clamped around the repeating cannon strapped to his back. By the time he had it ready, the ooze monster was right in front of him. Jankowski fired blindly, and before he could tell what exactly happened, he was thrown back against the ladder. Brownish goo rained down on him and the scattered weaponry.
"Jankowski! What the hell?" Jin hissed. Jankowski looked up to see her face silhouetted by a streetlamp. "What are you shooting at?"
"I…I think it was a pile of shit," Jankowski murmured, still shell-shocked.
"Get up here! Nevermind why you were in the sewer in the first place."
Jankowski clawed his way up the ladder, and Jin slammed the manhole cover shut.
"You smell terrible," she pointed out.
"Big surprise…" Jankowski snapped. The two of them approached the house with the possessed couch inside. Immediately, the homeowner stopped Jankowski.
"He's not getting inside," the man informed them, as if it were already written in stone. "Not on my new carpet."
"Wait out here," Jin told her partner.
"But I'm the point man."
"Here I thought you were the demolitions expert."
Once inside, Jin took a look at the couch. It was moving, all right. It did, however, lack most of the characteristics of a possessed object.
"How do you feel about Jesus?" she asked the couch.
"Christ!" The caller cried.
"If it's demonically possessed, I'm pretty sure it knows what Jesus I'm talking about."
"No, I just can't believe I called 911 and I got you two."
The couch just sat there. Occasionally, a seat cushion would wobble, but it didn't seem to have a beef with Christianity. It didn't seem to have a beef with anything.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with your couch, sir."
"Then how come it ate my cat?" The caller yelled.
"It did?"
"I would know!"
"Well…it is moving…" Jin turned around. "Jankowski, do you have any guns left?" She called through the open doorway. Jankowski stood right outside it like a wet dog.
"Just the repeating cannon. I dropped the rest."
"Okay." She turned back to the caller. "Sir? We'll get you a new couch. First, let us deal with this one." The two of them carried the possessed furniture outside, where Jankowski leveled the repeating cannon at it. He fired, and a deafening boom raced down the street in both directions. A slug the size of Jin's head slammed into the couch, and the resulting shockwave blew it in half.
A fine mist of couch stuffing, blood, and fur coated the atmosphere for a moment. The two F.E.A.R. operatives swore under their breaths.
"My cat! That was my cat in there!"
Jin and Jankowski looked at each other. "To Ikea?" she asked.
"To Ikea," Jankowski confirmed glumly.
"And a pet shop!" The caller screamed as they boarded the helicopter. "I want another damn cat!"
End