F.E.A.R: Origins
By Genoscythe
Chapter 8: The Big Jankowski
AN: Yes, there's more. The main storyline is just about over, but after getting so attached to these characters over the course of writing this (and pretty much giving them life since most didn't have any personality to begin with) I felt like there was more to be said on the fate of Jankowski. Be warned, this section is even more improbable than the rest...
The reporter sat, dumbfounded, in his chair. The interview was over. The biggest scoop of his career turned out to be worse than Al Capone's Vault. At least Geraldo Rivera still managed to recover with his career and his mustache still intact. After the promise he had made to the editor about a mind-blowing exposition for the crisis in Auburn, it was doubtful that he could return empty-handed to anything less than a big stack of walkin' papers.
"That's not enough for a full story…" he murmured lazily. "All you know about him is that he's a good shot and he doesn't talk?"
"Well, he was only here for a fucking week until this whole Origin mess," Betters returned.
"But from the looks of it, you do nothing all day. Why couldn't you – "
"Exactly. I'm practically booked solid."
"Oh, lord…"
"The bastard never said a word. It's not my fault."
The reporter sighed heavily and leaned back. "Maybe I can put this whole thing into the newspaper. I could get a blurb at the most, and that's if I stretch out the exorcism part."
"Hey…" the cameraman began. "I'm picking up a weird noise. Come over here." While Betters Jr. moved to the camera, the F.E.A.R. Commissioner turned back to his monitoring equipment. On the video screen, a blinking 'audio only' label dominated the blue backdrop. However, underneath it were the words 'incoming signal: unknown origin.'
"Turn it up," the reporter commanded. After Rob the cameraman complied, a series of clicks and less identifiable noises rose from the camera. "That's odd…" he remarked. "It's only coming from the camera."
"Bad news," Betters interrupted, and his son could swear there was emotion coloring his voice. "That flatline earlier…it was Jin."
The reporter didn't know what to say. He had never met her, and now he never would. Still, he felt like he had gotten to know her through Betters's stories. It was a very delicate moral situation. Should he feel sad for the loss of someone who seemed to, by and large, hold the F.E.A.R. team together, or should he be indifferent – as usual – at the death of a stranger?
"Now…what I don't get is…" Betters continued on, muscling past his welling grief and getting back on task to distract his mind. "How come Jankowski's vitals are still okay? I thought the machine was just on the fritz, but…"
Less than 24 hours earlier
Spen Jankowski couldn't remember the last time he had fought against a human enemy. This was because that time had been never. After training, he had been sent straight to F.E.A.R, and that was the last Jankowski had ever known of a normal military unit. Now here he was, riding in a Black Hawk with men who could have easily been his comrades if he had decided not to flush a grenade down that possessed toilet.
He had just chased down a psychic army commander in charge of an entire battalion of super soldiers, only to find a half-eaten corpse and the knowledge that Jin thought the new guy was "pretty cute."
He was currently being shipped off to fight a splinter group that had taken control of a water treatment plant upriver of the Auburn district. A battalion of super soldiers. Super soldiers.
What was almost more unnerving than anything else was the lack of respect Delta had shown him.
"Hey, Ghostbuster…" one of the Delta soldiers beckoned. "What's the best way to kill a giant marshmallow man?" The others in the helicopter chuckled.
"Don't cross the streams," a soldier next to him whispered, causing more snickering.
"Fuck you," was the best thing Jankowski could come up with. He would have felt a lot better – and a lot wittier – if Jin were around. Unfortunately, she had opted to stay behind and investigate the body left by Fettel. "You know, I was training to be in Delta. I coulda been your commanding officer by now."
"What happened, did you decide to take over the family business instead?" The lamer the joke, the funnier it will be to a helicopter full of adrenaline junkies. As they all burst into laughter, Jankowski checked his SMG uncomfortably. The Point Man had only brought a pistol and a sub-machinegun with him, and Jankowski didn't want to look like he was overcompensating, so he took the same thing. Now, he regretted missing the chance to show off his hi-tech weaponry to the non-believers.
"Cut the grab-assing, we're almost there," Douglas Holiday, the Delta unit leader, spoke over the comm. link. He sat in the front of the helicopter, coordinating with Betters and the rest of Delta. "Once you secure the LZ, meet up with the other team. Remember, their leader takes priority. Do not engage unless necessary."
The helicopter jerked to a stop over a cargo storage area. "We'll be taking fire if we get any closer," the pilot explained.
"Let's fuck shit up," the other team leader suggested through the comm. link. Jankowski was all too ready to comply.
The LZ wasn't nearly as hot as advertised. It wasn't even lukewarm, but it was saved from being completely frigid when Jankowski blew up a rat. The squad leader motioned toward the front door of the water treatment plant, after having swept the entire storage area. Jankowski was the first to break down the door, as all the other soldiers were proceeding with caution.
He had long ago forgotten what things like 'suppressing fire' and 'incoming hostiles' meant. If one of the Delta soldiers had shouted it while he led the charge into the treatment plant, he probably would have treated it like a MHR (F.E.A.R. terminology for Mad Hobo Ranting, which they dealt with often).
The front door opened into a hallway that turned and shot off to the right. Jankowski followed it warily, looking into the offices on either side of the hall. Large windows afforded views into each, showcasing the carnage and discarded bodies that had taken up permanent residence inside. Jankowski ignored the bodies, and instead concentrated on the furniture.
A crackling filled the air, and Jankowski snapped his head to an office on the corner. A desk wiggled. Wiggled, and faintly glowed with blue light. Jankowski unhooked a grenade from his belt and hurled it with mindless abandon through the window, sending glass shards in a downward spiral that would had undoubtedly looked cool in slow motion.
Jankowski ducked, and the office exploded outward. Bits of the table flew through the open window, and the door tumbled off its hinges. The SFOD-D squad nearly jumped out of their combat boots.
"Who the hell did that?" their squad leader barked, eventually working his way up to Jankowski. "Ghostbuster! What is your major malfunction, besides the obvious?"
"Uh…" Jankowski was at a loss for words. This was the kind of work Betters would congratulate him on, albeit from the safety of F.E.A.R. HQ. "Being too good at my job?"
"Too good…sweet Jesus, if you were in my squad I'd have your balls for target practice. What the fuck was that for?"
"Possessed table, man. It's my specialty."
"A possessed…"
"Yeah. That's why I'm here."
"You're…" The squad leader had to pace back and forth before his thoughts could organize. "You're gonna watch our six from now on. Watch our six for…"
"Malignant furniture."
"That. Just, for the love of God, don't take point anymore."
Jankowski nodded, patting the grizzled man on the back as he walked to the rear of the group. They moved on, and after they rounded the next corner, a Replica in a stealth suit peeled off the ceiling of the decimated office and flopped onto an upturned chair.
The bald F.E.A.R. operative sat glumly behind a pumping station as the sounds of battle raged down the corridor. SFOD-D had forbidden him to be anywhere near allied soldiers in combat. Which was just as well, because the realist in Jankowski told him that he would have been the first to die. He would have been that guy that forgets to duck, or the one who miraculously survives a shot only to be picked off while celebrating.
Jankowski didn't want to be either of those guys.
"Flanking!" one of the Replicas shouted over the gunshots.
"I'm out of ammo!" another one cried in an identical voice. Even Jankowski knew not to yell out what you were doing in the middle of a gunfight.
"We need backup!"
"Grenade out!"
Boom
"Shut the fuck up!"
More gunshots, then silence. More silence, then giggling that sounded suspiciously like it belonged to a little girl. Jankowski stood up guardedly, strolling out from behind a water tank. There was no word from his comm. link, but the Replicas had stopped yammering as well. He stepped cautiously into the hallway ahead, looking around for any sign of his comrades.
Another giggle, and the fleeting image of something red skipping around the corner.
"…is someone there?" Jankowski hazarded. If it was just a little girl, then what could he possibly lose?
His skin, he found out, as well as his muscles and his organs. Just around the bend, in a blood-spattered clearing, lay a twisted, gooey pile. Jankowski bent down and grabbed a piece of it, pulling out first an ankle, then a leg, then the rest of a gore-encrusted skeleton. He let it drop back into the pile.
"I ain't afraid of no ghosts…" he murmured to himself, not sure if they were the remains of Delta or the Replicas. He decided that he would have to kick some ass either way, and drew his SMG. The bald F.E.A.R. operative snuck past the corpses and approached the next corner. Before he had made it to cover, the report of slow footsteps reached his ears. No spirit he encountered before ever made footsteps, with the exception of one – and this didn't sound the same as that walking hat rack.
Feeling that he wasn't up to the task of fighting an enemy with legs, Jankowski set down a proximity mine and ran back in the other direction. He slipped on the blood pooling from the skeleton pile, careening into someone hiding around the last corner and smacking his head against theirs. Both fell to the floor, Jankowski lying on his back with the corpses and the stranger staggering forward before landing on top of him.
Paxton Fettel was the first to reawaken, five minutes later. Still sprawled on top of the bald man, he licked his lips tentatively. Sometimes, he tended to black out during a feeding frenzy. While he didn't remember exactly what happened after he had tried to lure the soldier away with psychically-projected footsteps, it was so very hard to remember anything these days. Are the memories mine, or hers? So very hard to tell…he mused.
However, in tasting the blood on his lips, he gained a glimpse into the man's mind. It was definitely the blood of Spen Jankowski. Fettel noticed that the crimson substance was coating his eye sockets.
Interesting…so I've eaten his eyes, he thought. Ah, Paxton, you wonderfully melodramatic bastard! This will certainly torment my brother. At length, he got to his feet, but once he tried to take a step, he stumbled sideways. Fettel clutched his temple, wondering why his head hurt so much. Shaking off the dull ache, he melted into the shadows in search of aspirin.
Several minutes after Fettel's disappearance, Jankowski's body pushed itself up and shambled away, unconsciously in search of anything that might cure a concussion.
Around 24 hours later
Jankowski jolted awake, and promptly screamed. He screamed first because his eyelids were stuck together by what he assumed was blood. Then he screamed because he realized that he was dangling upside-down. Madly, he scrambled to wipe the goo from his eyes so he could open them. Once he had done so, a beautiful and startlingly close view of the harbor greeted him. Jankowski strained to see what he was hanging from, and discovered that his foot was caught on a spare anchor dangling off the edge of the docks.
His first reaction was to jerk free, but he stopped himself from taking a trip into the brackish water below by employing seldom-used common sense. Now suspended above the ocean by an anchor, without a clue or even a sense of direction, Jankowski began working his way back to the assault on the water treatment plant.
It was all going fine, until the fighting started. He remembered finding a bunch of skeletons, and running away from…someone. He felt a gash along his forehead, which had dripped blood into his eye sockets. Whatever he ran into in the hallway would have hurt a lot less if he had a full head of hair to absorb the shock.
He must have been unconscious for almost an entire day, because it now looked earlier than it did when the attack began. Jankowski didn't rule out the possibility of time travel, but he put that one on the back burner until he could exhaust the better explanations first.
So he ran into something, and wandered around the docks in a state of delirium for almost twenty-four hours? It won out against time travel, and he decided to hoist himself up the anchor chain and call Betters.
The ground under Jankowski's feet crunched the crunch of ashen debris. He didn't have to look far to find out why. Spreading out in front of him, stopping almost exactly at the edge of the docks, was a massive crater that used to be Auburn. Jankowski's first instinct was to call Jin and ask if she was alright, but her comm. line was dead.
He tried Betters instead, and came up with static again. Someone was screwing with him. The Big Jankowski didn't like being screwed with, not after all he'd been through. He felt he had earned some degree of immunity to screwing. Trial by sewage, and all that.
Jankowski sighed in front of the burning city, and plotted his course back home. He knew the way by now.
End
AN: Just for the record, I am not cool with Timegate for killing off Jin in Extraction Point. Hell, I practically made her my own character. However, I hate messing with canon, so dead she stays. I can do the things I'm doing with Jankowski because Monolith left his death so delightfully open-ended. Unfortunately, there's only one chapter left, so my time in the F.E.A.R. section is almost up. I'm trying to cut down on fanfics, so I won't write a follow-up unless I feel like I absolutely have to. That's all, until next time. Thanks for reading so far.